Fic: Temper or Consume (Montreal is Burning) - Supernatural
Title: Temper or Consume (Montreal is Burning)
Rating: PG (language and violence)
Pairing/Warnings: None
Notes: For spn_north, location: the Vieux-Port, Montreal, Quebec. A million thanks to listersgirl for the beta; any remaining mistakes are mine. Further notes at the end.
Disclaimer: Ghosts and Winchesters used without permission.
Sam dreamed of fire often enough that he dismissed this dream as an ordinary nightmare for almost a month. He probably should have known better, but there wasn’t much he could have done with the fragmentary sensations anyway: flickering light against his closed eyelids, the smell of smoke, the taste of blood, the clamor of an angry crowd.
Tonight, there was more. Pain, terrible crushing pain in his legs, near to the point of passing out. There was someone yelling, and Sam had to struggle to understand, … your accomplice! Who helped you? Where… but there was another blow just below his knees, and the pain overwhelmed everything else.
Gasping, Sam sat up, resting his head in his hands. He sat still as pain and sleep receded, listening for Dean, who shifted in the other bed but didn’t wake up, his breathing blending with the sounds of trucks on the highway next to the motel. It was morning-dark, not midnight-dark, even though the clock radio flashed a persistent 12:00-12:00-12:00. Sam groaned quietly to himself, and slid out of bed to the bathroom, powering up the laptop on his way by. It wasn’t much to go on, but it was something - the interrogator in his dream had been speaking French.
*
By the time Dean woke up, Sam had a lead.
“We have to go to Montreal.”
“G’morning to you, too. We have to do what now?” Dean sat up in bed, rubbing his hands over his face.
“There’s been a string of deaths over the last month. Looks like heatstroke, but- ”
“Heatstroke? I hate to break it to you, man, but they’ve been getting this heat wave up in Canada, too. Why do you think this is our kind of problem?” He dropped his hands from his face and pinned Sam with a look. “Did you have a dream? A crazy psychic-dream about heatstroke?”
Sam held Dean’s gaze for a moment, but then dropped his eyes back to the computer screen. “Not… exactly? I just.” He rolled his eyes at himself, “I just have a feeling.”
Dean snorted and leaned back against the headboard. He snagged his cellphone off the nightstand, and started checking his messages. “Oh, you have a feeling. Well, do you have a feeling about getting me some coffee- ”
Sam looked over at his brother when he broke off. “What?”
Dean held up a hand, listening to the end of the message. He disconnected and tossed the phone disgustedly back on the nightstand. “That was Father Richard. Old contact of Pastor Jim’s, apparently. He’s got a job for us.” He got up and headed for the bathroom.
“Dean.”
“He’s been visiting a friend at Le Grand Séminaire in Montreal.” Dean replied, slamming the bathroom door. Slightly muffled, he called, “Now go get me a fucking coffee!”
*
When they drove into Montreal, the heat wave had broken but there had been two more deaths. Father Richard’s friend, Père Jacques, had arranged for them to stay at the Seminary - Sam had joked that Dean would be struck by lightning crossing the threshold - and the two elderly men joined them for dinner in a small, private room the night they arrived.
As they settled in, Dean asked, “So, what’s going on? All we’ve been able to find in the press is heatstroke.”
The two priests exchanged a look. Père Jacques sighed. “That is all that the press knows. La tourisme…” He shrugged.
Father Richard continued, “That’s all it seemed to be, at first, just heatstroke. But as the deaths piled up, heatstroke didn’t make sense anymore.”
“Il y avait trop, there were too many. And it wasn’t catching just the elderly and the very young: there were young, healthy people who died.” Père Jacques shook his head. “So we looked for another answer, and we found a pattern.”
Leaning forward, Father Richard tapped his forefinger on the table. “All of the deaths are occurring in the Vieux-Port, the oldest part of the city, within several blocks of each other. And they started on June 21st, the day the memorial went up.”
“Memorial to what?” asked Sam.
“Who,” answered Père Jacques. “It is a memorial to a woman called Angélique. She was a black slave. She was accused of setting a fire that consumed most of the city in 1734. It was said, to cover her escape with her lover, a white servant named Claude Thibault. He escaped, supposedly died at sea. She confessed under torture.”
Sam went very still. “How was she tortured?” He could feel Dean looking at him, but didn’t look over.
“Les brodequins, the boots.” Père Jacques made a sound of disgust, “they strapped her legs between planks of wood, and then hammered iron wedges in to crush her bones.”
Dean grimaced. “So she’d be pretty pissed. Where’s she buried, at the memorial?”
“Malheuresement, non. She was hung, and then her body was burned, and the ashes cast to the wind.”
“Huh.” Dean looked over at Sam. “Something like Cleveland?” Sam considered and then nodded. It had been a memorial in Cleveland, too. Dean turned back to the priests and grinned, “Well, Fathers, how much holy water can you for get us by tomorrow?”
*
Dean refused to drive down to the Old Port. “You were there for the drive in, Sam. We almost got side-swiped five times! I am not taking my car anywhere until we are leaving.”
They took the metro instead, paying with strange coins. They probably looked like American students, in t-shirts and carrying backpacks. Even Dean couldn’t get a smile out of the grumpy woman at the ticket booth, but she told them, “You will go to Champ-de-Mars, for Place Jacques-Cartier,” where the memorial was located.
At Champ-de-Mars, they crossed by tunnel and footbridge over the highway that divided the older part of the city from downtown like a moat. They found themselves on the lawns behind the city hall and the old courthouses; the regal-looking old buildings faced away from the modern city, south towards the port. “Shit, Sam.”
“Yeah, Dean, I see ‘em.” There were people everywhere, sunbathing on the wide expanse of grass. “We’ll just have to start at the memorial, and hope the ghost does, too.” He looked at the guide-book Father Richard had given them. “This way.”
They crossed between the city hall and the courthouses, through a small courtyard with a fountain, and came out facing Place Jacques-Cartier. It was a wide plaza, formed by two pedestrian streets which lead away from them, downhill towards the river. Between the two streets was a broad sidewalk, planted with trees. At the top, there was a large column, topped with a statue. On either side were old buildings housing restaurants, patios covered with brightly colored awnings.
Sam could see people selling souvenirs on carts, and a couple of buskers: one man swallowing fire and another making animals out of balloons. Milling amongst them were tourists of every description. Along the street across the top of the plaza several cars shared the road with two horse-drawn carriages decorated with flowers, which the guide-book called calèches. Another one pulled away, a young couple in the back, laughing. Sam thought of Jess, and looked away.
The memorial was on the north-east corner of the plaza, just across the street - Rue Notre-Dame, Sam read - from the city hall. It was a small statue of a woman kneeling and weeping. She was holding a torch. Below the statue was a plaque that read, in French and English:
Marie-Joseph ANGÉLIQUE, slave and arsonist. Executed 21 June 1734 for setting a fire that started in the home of her mistress but consumed most of the city, in what was the first recorded act of resistance to slavery in North America. Memorialized that we may shine a light even onto the dark chapters of our history, 21 June 2006.
Just downhill from the memorial there was a bench on the sidewalk. Sam and Dean set their backpacks there, and Sam crouched down to unpack some supplies from his, but paused and looked up when Dean remained standing.
“You go ahead and get started here, I’m gonna go talk to those buggy drivers.” Dean jerked his thumb over his shoulder. As he turned away, he called back over his shoulder, “Just do your thing, Michelangelo,” and Sam rolled his eyes at his brother’s back.
Père Jacques had gotten them a rainbow-colored tub of sidewalk chalk and a busker’s license. Sam wasn’t a great artist, but he could draw well enough to fake it in chalk on pavement. He crouched down with a white piece of chalk, and started sketching out the view he had of the plaza, sloping towards the waterfront. When he finished the outline, he picked out a green piece of chalk for the trees. He looked up, surprised, when a young father tossed some change into the lid of the chalk tub, and nearly jumped up to give it back to him before Dean came up and said, “Hey, Sammy, you’d better not be objecting to some honestly earned cash, there.” He sat down on the bench behind Sam. “Among other things, it would blow your cover.” Sam shook his head and laughed, standing up and stepping back towards the bench.
“The buggy drivers know something weird is going on - I told them that if they found anyone with heatstroke, to bring them here. They’re down here every day, and they’re getting pretty freaked out, so I think they’ll do it.” He looked at his watch, and then back up at Sam. “One o’clock.”
All of the deaths had occurred in the afternoon, during the heat of the day. “Yeah.” Sam looked around. “I hope this works.”
Sam went back to drawing, taking long pauses to watch the people wandering through the plaza. After a while, Dean got up and started wandering around, smiling at the pretty girls and the kids in fairly equal measure. Sam laughed when a little boy with a big purple balloon-sword caromed off Dean’s hip, chased closely by his laughing mother.
She collapsed mid-step.
“Sam!” Dean caught her just before she hit the ground, kneeling and lowering her the rest of the way.
Sam snagged his backpack from behind him, and ran over, kneeling across from Dean and lifting the woman’s head. She was very still, hot to the touch but not sweating. He reached into the pack, pulled out a plastic bottle of holy water and unscrewed the cap, pouring a little into the young woman’s mouth. “Regna terrae cantate Deo…”
“Mommy?” The little boy had come up, having dropped his sword. Dean turned from watching Sam and reached out to him.
“She’s going to be alright, she just needs some water,” Dean said, low and calming, “My brother’s giving her some water.” Out of the corner of his eye, Sam saw the boy go to Dean. Sam kept trickling water into the mother’s mouth and chanting quietly.
There was a crowd gathering around them, people on their cellphones calling 9-1-1. A voice called out, “Colin, you dropped your- Oh my God, Joan!” A young man carrying the balloon-sword pushed through toward them.
Dean stood up and intercepted him, “Sir, she’s going to be fine, it’s just the heat,” and passed Colin to him. Colin’s father reached down and picked him up. “People are calling for help, it should be here soon.” He looked over his shoulder at Sam, and Sam knew they were thinking the same thing. If this doesn’t help, neither will anything you can get calling 9-1-1.
Suddenly, Joan choked and sputtered, sweat breaking out on her forehead. People knelt down from the crowd to help her sit up, and Sam passed her the water when she reached for it. He had almost finished the bottle, so he grabbed another, still chanting under his breath. He could hear sirens approaching.
Joan opened her eyes and looked around, “What- Where’s Colin?”
Sam broke off chanting, and held out the second bottle of water. “He’s just over there with his dad. You had heatstroke.”
He got up and backed away when her family rushed over, and as the paramedics arrived, Sam and Dean faded back through the crowd and away.
*
Over the rest of the afternoon and evening, Sam and Dean dealt with five more cases of ghost-induced heatstroke, using all of the water from Sam’s pack, and three-quarters of what was in Dean’s. That was the first part of the plan; there would be no more deaths on their watch.
The sun went down at about eight-thirty, and they both relaxed a little. It had been over an hour since the last victim, so the ghost had hopefully stopped trying. One of the carriage drivers came over to where they were sitting on the bench by Sam’s abandoned drawing. She handed them a couple of brown paper bags labeled Tim Hortons: doughnuts and sandwiches. She also gave them a couple of iced coffees, and waved off Sam’s attempts to pay.
Sam asked instead, “Is it going to empty out here, once it gets dark?”
She shook her head, “Non, it doesn’t really empty out until 2. Doesn’t really get dark, either.” She pointed to a small panel set into the sidewalk in front of the memorial, “The whole place is lit up. Although, tonight it will probably get a little quiet - it is the closing of the Juste Pour Rire, and there is a big outdoor show. A little quieter around nine-thirty, maybe?”
“Thanks,” Sam said, as she returned to her carriage and drove off, her horse placidly ignoring the car that honked as it pulled out to pass them. He looked at Dean, who was finishing his sandwich. Dean shrugged.
“Père Jacques warned us. We’ll just have to be quick.”
“Yeah, and hope it works.”
“We draw the circle in front of the monument, summon her, tell her she’s been a very bad girl, and send her ass to Hell. Simple.” They had almost lost someone’s grandfather today, the heat affecting him worse than the other victims, and Dean was pissed. “What makes you think it won’t work?”
Sam paused, uncomfortable. He didn’t think it wouldn’t work, exactly; it was just that as the day went on, there was something about their plan that seemed off, wrong. He just had-
“Sam, if you say you have a bad feeling about this, I will punch you in the face.”
“… nothing.”
Dean glared at him, and Sam gave him a blank look back. Dean turned to face forward again, sucking on his iced coffee. “Stupid psychic powers.”
“Shut up, Dean.”
*
They started drawing the summoning circle in front of the monument as twilight faded. They’d chosen the simplest and quickest ritual from their father’s journal; a very basic circle to contain the spirit, an exchange of four lines to summon it, and two more to banish it.
Sam stood up from the finished circle and tossed the chalk back into the tub. Dean handed him a bottle of the holy water, taking the cap off one for himself. “Chug it.”
“Why, that’s not part of the- ”
“Chug it. You were right about Montreal.” Dean turned away, and downed his bottle in several long swallows, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. Sam looked at him for a second, and then drank his own. He tossed the empty bottle back into the backpack; they had one left.
They moved to stand around of the circle, making two points of a triangle with the monument as the third. Sam took the first line of the summoning, “Come to the circle, spirit.”
“Willing or unwilling, we summon you.” The circle started to glow, blending with the spotlight illuminating the memorial.
“You will be bound here.” Something was wrong; Sam could feel it like a pressure behind his eyes.
“Come to the circle, spirit.” Dean finished the spell, and the circle flared with light that stabbed through Sam’s eyes and into his head, and he flinched, closing his eyes. He could feel himself falling…
*
They had built the gallows in an area specially cleared in the centre of the fire’s destruction. There was a pyre waiting nearby. Here and there were signs of rebuilding, but most of the buildings remained blackened and gutted, and a crowd of angry people watched the approach of the cart carrying the arsonist.
One guard took the torch she had been forced to carry as she was paraded through the streets, and two more lifted her out, carrying her up and passing her to the executioner, who had been driving the cart.
The executioner was a black slave himself, and he held her up off of her crushed legs as best he could while he tightened the noose. He noticed that she seemed to be searching the crowd.
Claude is not here, Angélique. He got away.
He did not come back?
No.
May God forgive him, then, because I do not think I can.
May God forgive you both.
Then the trap opened, and she was falling…
*
Sam opened his eyes. He could see that the flare of light from the circle was just beginning to coalesce into the shape of a man. Dean had grabbed him, so he hadn’t fallen, but he had stumbled forward…
“What the fuck, Sam?” Dean shook him a little, staring into his face, but Sam looked down.
… he had stumbled forward through the boundary of the circle. “Shit.” Sam shoved Dean away from the circle and looked up, meeting the eyes of the spirit of Claude Thibault for a second before he flared bright and surged toward Sam.
It was like walking into a furnace.
Sam fell to the ground, collapsing over the now useless circle, panting for air. Everything other than the heat felt distant, but he wasn’t unconscious, yet. Good thing Dean made me drink the water.
“Sammy, drink this,” Dean was beside him, shoving a bottle of water into his hand. “Regna terrae- ”
“No,” Sam cut him off. “Wasn’t Angelique.”
“Yeah, I noticed. Drink it! Regna- ”
“No!” Sam shook his head. It was getting harder to think, hotter. “That’ll just. Back tomorrow.”
“So we’ll deal with him tomorrow, fuck, Sam!”
“Got’n idea.” He pushed himself up, struggled to stand.
“Fuck. Fine,” Dean hauled him to his feet. “When you pass out, I’m exorcising him.”
Sam ignored him and stumbled toward the street. “Carriage.” There was one heading down the street, and Dean flagged it down. The driver saw them and cursed in a long string of French, scrambling down to help.
They heaved Sam up into the carriage, and Dean jumped in after him as the driver climbed up behind his horse, which was clopping its hooves nervously.
“Where to?”
“Sam?” Dean tilted Sam’s head up from where it had fallen to his chest. His eyes were closed and his breathing labored. “Sammy, what’s the plan?”
“That way,” he said, pointing west down the street. The driver cracked the reins, and they took off.
Dean looked up, and saw the towers of Notre-Dame ahead of them. “Holy ground?”
“No, no. Turn left!”
The carriage swung and bounced as they turned, leaving the paved street for cobblestones.
“Sam, where are we going?” Dean’s hand felt cool where it touched his temple; everything else was burning up.
“Now right!” he called to the driver, hoarsely. There was a steady murmur of cursing coming from up front, and occasional shouts as pedestrians jumped out of their way. “The gallows. To Angélique.”
Dean’s curses joined those of the driver. “And you know where that is?”
“Yeah.” Sam opened his eyes. He could feel his pulse thundering in his head, just under Dean’s hand. “Here.”
Dean yelled for the driver to stop, grabbing Sam and throwing them both out of the slowing carriage. They landed hard on the stones, Sam collapsing and dragging Dean down with him.
“Now, Dean,” Sam tried to say, but he wasn’t sure if it came out. Dean heard him anyway, racing through the Latin. Where’s the water? Sam thought through the haze. So hot.
Then he was cold, shivering even as he broke out in a sweat, as Thibault’s spirit left his body in a rush.
“Sam, Sammy?” Dean was shaking him.
“Yeah, m’alright.” Sam looked up. They were kneeling in the street, in front of a small parking lot, tucked in alongside an old brick building. Thibault’s spirit was flickering several feet ahead, but he wasn’t looking at them. “Dean, look.”
A wind had picked up, swirling in a tight circle around the parking lot, whirling tighter into an ash-grey cloud.
Tu es revenu, mon amour. Enfin.
Thibault’s spirit cried out, Angélique, and the cloud expanded violently, consuming him and then dispersing as the wind calmed.
Enfin. Merci.
“It’s over?” Dean looked at Sam.
“Yeah, I think so.” Sam’s throat was dry, and his voice rasped.
Dean leaned back on his hands and sighed. “That was a stupid idea, Sam.”
“It worked.”
“It was still stupid.” Dean stood up and dusted himself off, holding out a hand to help Sam up. “Water’s back in the buggy,” he nodded down the block to where the driver had stopped.
Sam’s head swam a little as he stood up, and he leaned an arm across Dean’s shoulders. “Why’d you go with it, then?” His head was killing him.
Dean shrugged under his arm. “I didn’t have a better idea.” He turned his head to look at Sam, and gave him a crooked smile. “You seemed to have a pretty strong feeling that it’d work.”
Sam groaned, “Shut up, Dean,” and tightened his arm around Dean’s neck, tugging them both off-balance. Laughing, they stumbled down the narrow cobbled street back to the carriage.
***
Extra notes:
I first met Claude Thibault, among others, on the Old Port Ghost Hunt. There is no memorial to Angélique in the Vieux-Port, but recently there has been a lot written about her, some of which I relied on: Afua Cooper's Hanging Angélique, the first chapter of which is available here, and the educational website Torture and the Truth: Angélique and the Burning of Montreal. All of the other location details are true to life; for more on the Vieux-Port (including a live web-cam of Place Jacques-Cartier), check out this website.
Rating: PG (language and violence)
Pairing/Warnings: None
Notes: For spn_north, location: the Vieux-Port, Montreal, Quebec. A million thanks to listersgirl for the beta; any remaining mistakes are mine. Further notes at the end.
Disclaimer: Ghosts and Winchesters used without permission.
Sam dreamed of fire often enough that he dismissed this dream as an ordinary nightmare for almost a month. He probably should have known better, but there wasn’t much he could have done with the fragmentary sensations anyway: flickering light against his closed eyelids, the smell of smoke, the taste of blood, the clamor of an angry crowd.
Tonight, there was more. Pain, terrible crushing pain in his legs, near to the point of passing out. There was someone yelling, and Sam had to struggle to understand, … your accomplice! Who helped you? Where… but there was another blow just below his knees, and the pain overwhelmed everything else.
Gasping, Sam sat up, resting his head in his hands. He sat still as pain and sleep receded, listening for Dean, who shifted in the other bed but didn’t wake up, his breathing blending with the sounds of trucks on the highway next to the motel. It was morning-dark, not midnight-dark, even though the clock radio flashed a persistent 12:00-12:00-12:00. Sam groaned quietly to himself, and slid out of bed to the bathroom, powering up the laptop on his way by. It wasn’t much to go on, but it was something - the interrogator in his dream had been speaking French.
*
By the time Dean woke up, Sam had a lead.
“We have to go to Montreal.”
“G’morning to you, too. We have to do what now?” Dean sat up in bed, rubbing his hands over his face.
“There’s been a string of deaths over the last month. Looks like heatstroke, but- ”
“Heatstroke? I hate to break it to you, man, but they’ve been getting this heat wave up in Canada, too. Why do you think this is our kind of problem?” He dropped his hands from his face and pinned Sam with a look. “Did you have a dream? A crazy psychic-dream about heatstroke?”
Sam held Dean’s gaze for a moment, but then dropped his eyes back to the computer screen. “Not… exactly? I just.” He rolled his eyes at himself, “I just have a feeling.”
Dean snorted and leaned back against the headboard. He snagged his cellphone off the nightstand, and started checking his messages. “Oh, you have a feeling. Well, do you have a feeling about getting me some coffee- ”
Sam looked over at his brother when he broke off. “What?”
Dean held up a hand, listening to the end of the message. He disconnected and tossed the phone disgustedly back on the nightstand. “That was Father Richard. Old contact of Pastor Jim’s, apparently. He’s got a job for us.” He got up and headed for the bathroom.
“Dean.”
“He’s been visiting a friend at Le Grand Séminaire in Montreal.” Dean replied, slamming the bathroom door. Slightly muffled, he called, “Now go get me a fucking coffee!”
*
When they drove into Montreal, the heat wave had broken but there had been two more deaths. Father Richard’s friend, Père Jacques, had arranged for them to stay at the Seminary - Sam had joked that Dean would be struck by lightning crossing the threshold - and the two elderly men joined them for dinner in a small, private room the night they arrived.
As they settled in, Dean asked, “So, what’s going on? All we’ve been able to find in the press is heatstroke.”
The two priests exchanged a look. Père Jacques sighed. “That is all that the press knows. La tourisme…” He shrugged.
Father Richard continued, “That’s all it seemed to be, at first, just heatstroke. But as the deaths piled up, heatstroke didn’t make sense anymore.”
“Il y avait trop, there were too many. And it wasn’t catching just the elderly and the very young: there were young, healthy people who died.” Père Jacques shook his head. “So we looked for another answer, and we found a pattern.”
Leaning forward, Father Richard tapped his forefinger on the table. “All of the deaths are occurring in the Vieux-Port, the oldest part of the city, within several blocks of each other. And they started on June 21st, the day the memorial went up.”
“Memorial to what?” asked Sam.
“Who,” answered Père Jacques. “It is a memorial to a woman called Angélique. She was a black slave. She was accused of setting a fire that consumed most of the city in 1734. It was said, to cover her escape with her lover, a white servant named Claude Thibault. He escaped, supposedly died at sea. She confessed under torture.”
Sam went very still. “How was she tortured?” He could feel Dean looking at him, but didn’t look over.
“Les brodequins, the boots.” Père Jacques made a sound of disgust, “they strapped her legs between planks of wood, and then hammered iron wedges in to crush her bones.”
Dean grimaced. “So she’d be pretty pissed. Where’s she buried, at the memorial?”
“Malheuresement, non. She was hung, and then her body was burned, and the ashes cast to the wind.”
“Huh.” Dean looked over at Sam. “Something like Cleveland?” Sam considered and then nodded. It had been a memorial in Cleveland, too. Dean turned back to the priests and grinned, “Well, Fathers, how much holy water can you for get us by tomorrow?”
*
Dean refused to drive down to the Old Port. “You were there for the drive in, Sam. We almost got side-swiped five times! I am not taking my car anywhere until we are leaving.”
They took the metro instead, paying with strange coins. They probably looked like American students, in t-shirts and carrying backpacks. Even Dean couldn’t get a smile out of the grumpy woman at the ticket booth, but she told them, “You will go to Champ-de-Mars, for Place Jacques-Cartier,” where the memorial was located.
At Champ-de-Mars, they crossed by tunnel and footbridge over the highway that divided the older part of the city from downtown like a moat. They found themselves on the lawns behind the city hall and the old courthouses; the regal-looking old buildings faced away from the modern city, south towards the port. “Shit, Sam.”
“Yeah, Dean, I see ‘em.” There were people everywhere, sunbathing on the wide expanse of grass. “We’ll just have to start at the memorial, and hope the ghost does, too.” He looked at the guide-book Father Richard had given them. “This way.”
They crossed between the city hall and the courthouses, through a small courtyard with a fountain, and came out facing Place Jacques-Cartier. It was a wide plaza, formed by two pedestrian streets which lead away from them, downhill towards the river. Between the two streets was a broad sidewalk, planted with trees. At the top, there was a large column, topped with a statue. On either side were old buildings housing restaurants, patios covered with brightly colored awnings.
Sam could see people selling souvenirs on carts, and a couple of buskers: one man swallowing fire and another making animals out of balloons. Milling amongst them were tourists of every description. Along the street across the top of the plaza several cars shared the road with two horse-drawn carriages decorated with flowers, which the guide-book called calèches. Another one pulled away, a young couple in the back, laughing. Sam thought of Jess, and looked away.
The memorial was on the north-east corner of the plaza, just across the street - Rue Notre-Dame, Sam read - from the city hall. It was a small statue of a woman kneeling and weeping. She was holding a torch. Below the statue was a plaque that read, in French and English:
Marie-Joseph ANGÉLIQUE, slave and arsonist. Executed 21 June 1734 for setting a fire that started in the home of her mistress but consumed most of the city, in what was the first recorded act of resistance to slavery in North America. Memorialized that we may shine a light even onto the dark chapters of our history, 21 June 2006.
Just downhill from the memorial there was a bench on the sidewalk. Sam and Dean set their backpacks there, and Sam crouched down to unpack some supplies from his, but paused and looked up when Dean remained standing.
“You go ahead and get started here, I’m gonna go talk to those buggy drivers.” Dean jerked his thumb over his shoulder. As he turned away, he called back over his shoulder, “Just do your thing, Michelangelo,” and Sam rolled his eyes at his brother’s back.
Père Jacques had gotten them a rainbow-colored tub of sidewalk chalk and a busker’s license. Sam wasn’t a great artist, but he could draw well enough to fake it in chalk on pavement. He crouched down with a white piece of chalk, and started sketching out the view he had of the plaza, sloping towards the waterfront. When he finished the outline, he picked out a green piece of chalk for the trees. He looked up, surprised, when a young father tossed some change into the lid of the chalk tub, and nearly jumped up to give it back to him before Dean came up and said, “Hey, Sammy, you’d better not be objecting to some honestly earned cash, there.” He sat down on the bench behind Sam. “Among other things, it would blow your cover.” Sam shook his head and laughed, standing up and stepping back towards the bench.
“The buggy drivers know something weird is going on - I told them that if they found anyone with heatstroke, to bring them here. They’re down here every day, and they’re getting pretty freaked out, so I think they’ll do it.” He looked at his watch, and then back up at Sam. “One o’clock.”
All of the deaths had occurred in the afternoon, during the heat of the day. “Yeah.” Sam looked around. “I hope this works.”
Sam went back to drawing, taking long pauses to watch the people wandering through the plaza. After a while, Dean got up and started wandering around, smiling at the pretty girls and the kids in fairly equal measure. Sam laughed when a little boy with a big purple balloon-sword caromed off Dean’s hip, chased closely by his laughing mother.
She collapsed mid-step.
“Sam!” Dean caught her just before she hit the ground, kneeling and lowering her the rest of the way.
Sam snagged his backpack from behind him, and ran over, kneeling across from Dean and lifting the woman’s head. She was very still, hot to the touch but not sweating. He reached into the pack, pulled out a plastic bottle of holy water and unscrewed the cap, pouring a little into the young woman’s mouth. “Regna terrae cantate Deo…”
“Mommy?” The little boy had come up, having dropped his sword. Dean turned from watching Sam and reached out to him.
“She’s going to be alright, she just needs some water,” Dean said, low and calming, “My brother’s giving her some water.” Out of the corner of his eye, Sam saw the boy go to Dean. Sam kept trickling water into the mother’s mouth and chanting quietly.
There was a crowd gathering around them, people on their cellphones calling 9-1-1. A voice called out, “Colin, you dropped your- Oh my God, Joan!” A young man carrying the balloon-sword pushed through toward them.
Dean stood up and intercepted him, “Sir, she’s going to be fine, it’s just the heat,” and passed Colin to him. Colin’s father reached down and picked him up. “People are calling for help, it should be here soon.” He looked over his shoulder at Sam, and Sam knew they were thinking the same thing. If this doesn’t help, neither will anything you can get calling 9-1-1.
Suddenly, Joan choked and sputtered, sweat breaking out on her forehead. People knelt down from the crowd to help her sit up, and Sam passed her the water when she reached for it. He had almost finished the bottle, so he grabbed another, still chanting under his breath. He could hear sirens approaching.
Joan opened her eyes and looked around, “What- Where’s Colin?”
Sam broke off chanting, and held out the second bottle of water. “He’s just over there with his dad. You had heatstroke.”
He got up and backed away when her family rushed over, and as the paramedics arrived, Sam and Dean faded back through the crowd and away.
*
Over the rest of the afternoon and evening, Sam and Dean dealt with five more cases of ghost-induced heatstroke, using all of the water from Sam’s pack, and three-quarters of what was in Dean’s. That was the first part of the plan; there would be no more deaths on their watch.
The sun went down at about eight-thirty, and they both relaxed a little. It had been over an hour since the last victim, so the ghost had hopefully stopped trying. One of the carriage drivers came over to where they were sitting on the bench by Sam’s abandoned drawing. She handed them a couple of brown paper bags labeled Tim Hortons: doughnuts and sandwiches. She also gave them a couple of iced coffees, and waved off Sam’s attempts to pay.
Sam asked instead, “Is it going to empty out here, once it gets dark?”
She shook her head, “Non, it doesn’t really empty out until 2. Doesn’t really get dark, either.” She pointed to a small panel set into the sidewalk in front of the memorial, “The whole place is lit up. Although, tonight it will probably get a little quiet - it is the closing of the Juste Pour Rire, and there is a big outdoor show. A little quieter around nine-thirty, maybe?”
“Thanks,” Sam said, as she returned to her carriage and drove off, her horse placidly ignoring the car that honked as it pulled out to pass them. He looked at Dean, who was finishing his sandwich. Dean shrugged.
“Père Jacques warned us. We’ll just have to be quick.”
“Yeah, and hope it works.”
“We draw the circle in front of the monument, summon her, tell her she’s been a very bad girl, and send her ass to Hell. Simple.” They had almost lost someone’s grandfather today, the heat affecting him worse than the other victims, and Dean was pissed. “What makes you think it won’t work?”
Sam paused, uncomfortable. He didn’t think it wouldn’t work, exactly; it was just that as the day went on, there was something about their plan that seemed off, wrong. He just had-
“Sam, if you say you have a bad feeling about this, I will punch you in the face.”
“… nothing.”
Dean glared at him, and Sam gave him a blank look back. Dean turned to face forward again, sucking on his iced coffee. “Stupid psychic powers.”
“Shut up, Dean.”
*
They started drawing the summoning circle in front of the monument as twilight faded. They’d chosen the simplest and quickest ritual from their father’s journal; a very basic circle to contain the spirit, an exchange of four lines to summon it, and two more to banish it.
Sam stood up from the finished circle and tossed the chalk back into the tub. Dean handed him a bottle of the holy water, taking the cap off one for himself. “Chug it.”
“Why, that’s not part of the- ”
“Chug it. You were right about Montreal.” Dean turned away, and downed his bottle in several long swallows, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. Sam looked at him for a second, and then drank his own. He tossed the empty bottle back into the backpack; they had one left.
They moved to stand around of the circle, making two points of a triangle with the monument as the third. Sam took the first line of the summoning, “Come to the circle, spirit.”
“Willing or unwilling, we summon you.” The circle started to glow, blending with the spotlight illuminating the memorial.
“You will be bound here.” Something was wrong; Sam could feel it like a pressure behind his eyes.
“Come to the circle, spirit.” Dean finished the spell, and the circle flared with light that stabbed through Sam’s eyes and into his head, and he flinched, closing his eyes. He could feel himself falling…
*
They had built the gallows in an area specially cleared in the centre of the fire’s destruction. There was a pyre waiting nearby. Here and there were signs of rebuilding, but most of the buildings remained blackened and gutted, and a crowd of angry people watched the approach of the cart carrying the arsonist.
One guard took the torch she had been forced to carry as she was paraded through the streets, and two more lifted her out, carrying her up and passing her to the executioner, who had been driving the cart.
The executioner was a black slave himself, and he held her up off of her crushed legs as best he could while he tightened the noose. He noticed that she seemed to be searching the crowd.
Claude is not here, Angélique. He got away.
He did not come back?
No.
May God forgive him, then, because I do not think I can.
May God forgive you both.
Then the trap opened, and she was falling…
*
Sam opened his eyes. He could see that the flare of light from the circle was just beginning to coalesce into the shape of a man. Dean had grabbed him, so he hadn’t fallen, but he had stumbled forward…
“What the fuck, Sam?” Dean shook him a little, staring into his face, but Sam looked down.
… he had stumbled forward through the boundary of the circle. “Shit.” Sam shoved Dean away from the circle and looked up, meeting the eyes of the spirit of Claude Thibault for a second before he flared bright and surged toward Sam.
It was like walking into a furnace.
Sam fell to the ground, collapsing over the now useless circle, panting for air. Everything other than the heat felt distant, but he wasn’t unconscious, yet. Good thing Dean made me drink the water.
“Sammy, drink this,” Dean was beside him, shoving a bottle of water into his hand. “Regna terrae- ”
“No,” Sam cut him off. “Wasn’t Angelique.”
“Yeah, I noticed. Drink it! Regna- ”
“No!” Sam shook his head. It was getting harder to think, hotter. “That’ll just. Back tomorrow.”
“So we’ll deal with him tomorrow, fuck, Sam!”
“Got’n idea.” He pushed himself up, struggled to stand.
“Fuck. Fine,” Dean hauled him to his feet. “When you pass out, I’m exorcising him.”
Sam ignored him and stumbled toward the street. “Carriage.” There was one heading down the street, and Dean flagged it down. The driver saw them and cursed in a long string of French, scrambling down to help.
They heaved Sam up into the carriage, and Dean jumped in after him as the driver climbed up behind his horse, which was clopping its hooves nervously.
“Where to?”
“Sam?” Dean tilted Sam’s head up from where it had fallen to his chest. His eyes were closed and his breathing labored. “Sammy, what’s the plan?”
“That way,” he said, pointing west down the street. The driver cracked the reins, and they took off.
Dean looked up, and saw the towers of Notre-Dame ahead of them. “Holy ground?”
“No, no. Turn left!”
The carriage swung and bounced as they turned, leaving the paved street for cobblestones.
“Sam, where are we going?” Dean’s hand felt cool where it touched his temple; everything else was burning up.
“Now right!” he called to the driver, hoarsely. There was a steady murmur of cursing coming from up front, and occasional shouts as pedestrians jumped out of their way. “The gallows. To Angélique.”
Dean’s curses joined those of the driver. “And you know where that is?”
“Yeah.” Sam opened his eyes. He could feel his pulse thundering in his head, just under Dean’s hand. “Here.”
Dean yelled for the driver to stop, grabbing Sam and throwing them both out of the slowing carriage. They landed hard on the stones, Sam collapsing and dragging Dean down with him.
“Now, Dean,” Sam tried to say, but he wasn’t sure if it came out. Dean heard him anyway, racing through the Latin. Where’s the water? Sam thought through the haze. So hot.
Then he was cold, shivering even as he broke out in a sweat, as Thibault’s spirit left his body in a rush.
“Sam, Sammy?” Dean was shaking him.
“Yeah, m’alright.” Sam looked up. They were kneeling in the street, in front of a small parking lot, tucked in alongside an old brick building. Thibault’s spirit was flickering several feet ahead, but he wasn’t looking at them. “Dean, look.”
A wind had picked up, swirling in a tight circle around the parking lot, whirling tighter into an ash-grey cloud.
Tu es revenu, mon amour. Enfin.
Thibault’s spirit cried out, Angélique, and the cloud expanded violently, consuming him and then dispersing as the wind calmed.
Enfin. Merci.
“It’s over?” Dean looked at Sam.
“Yeah, I think so.” Sam’s throat was dry, and his voice rasped.
Dean leaned back on his hands and sighed. “That was a stupid idea, Sam.”
“It worked.”
“It was still stupid.” Dean stood up and dusted himself off, holding out a hand to help Sam up. “Water’s back in the buggy,” he nodded down the block to where the driver had stopped.
Sam’s head swam a little as he stood up, and he leaned an arm across Dean’s shoulders. “Why’d you go with it, then?” His head was killing him.
Dean shrugged under his arm. “I didn’t have a better idea.” He turned his head to look at Sam, and gave him a crooked smile. “You seemed to have a pretty strong feeling that it’d work.”
Sam groaned, “Shut up, Dean,” and tightened his arm around Dean’s neck, tugging them both off-balance. Laughing, they stumbled down the narrow cobbled street back to the carriage.
***
Extra notes:
I first met Claude Thibault, among others, on the Old Port Ghost Hunt. There is no memorial to Angélique in the Vieux-Port, but recently there has been a lot written about her, some of which I relied on: Afua Cooper's Hanging Angélique, the first chapter of which is available here, and the educational website Torture and the Truth: Angélique and the Burning of Montreal. All of the other location details are true to life; for more on the Vieux-Port (including a live web-cam of Place Jacques-Cartier), check out this website.