The next morning, Roy brought backup.
Professor Eleanor Reed stood at the edge of the tunnel entrance, squinting into the dark like she was trying to read it. Adam hadn't told her everything yet—but she knew enough.
She had insisted on coming.
"An old Men of Letters site," she said, stepping past the warded threshold. "You really don't do anything halfway, do you?"
"Not anymore," Adam replied.
They descended together.
Reed had come prepared, dressed in practical hiking clothes, a leather satchel filled with notebooks and reference materials hanging at her side. When Adam had called her the previous night, explaining what they'd found, she hadn't hesitated.
"The Men of Letters," she'd whispered over the phone, her academic excitement barely contained. "I always suspected they were real. The academic community dismissed them as a scholarly myth, but the references were too consistent, too detailed."
Now, as she stepped into the outpost's entrance chamber for the first time, her eyes widened with the wonder of a scholar discovering a lost civilization.
"This changes everything," she murmured, running her fingers reverently over a dusty filing cabinet. "Decades of supernatural research, cataloged and preserved. A systematic approach to the paranormal when most hunters were still operating on folklore and superstition."
"Been nice if they'd shared with the class," Roy grumbled, checking his shotgun. "Might've saved some lives."
"That wasn't their way," Reed replied, examining the maps on the wall. "They were observers, recorders. The elite who believed knowledge itself was the greatest weapon."
Adam listened to their conversation with half an ear, his attention drawn to the pendant in his hand. Since entering the outpost, it had grown warmer, the symbols etched on its surface occasionally flaring with a faint blue light that faded almost as soon as it appeared.
Inside the outpost, the air was cold and dry, untouched for decades. The initial chamber they'd discovered—lined with files and maps—was just the surface.
"There has to be more," Adam said, studying Elizabeth's journal again. The entries referenced experiments, observations, materials that weren't present in this first room. "This is just an entry point. The real facility would be deeper."
Roy nodded toward a corridor they hadn't explored the previous day. "Only one way to find out."
Down a side corridor, past rusted piping and stone stairs, they found the real heart of the place.
A second level.
Deeper. Older. Still sealed.
The stairs descended in a tight spiral, the walls narrowing as they went deeper. Unlike the upper level with its 1950s utilitarian design, these lower sections showed signs of much older construction—stone blocks fitted without mortar, surfaces worn smooth by time and use.
"This predates the Men of Letters," Reed observed, touching the ancient stonework. "They built on top of something that was already here."
The door here was heavier, reinforced with a mechanical lock and another faded sigil that Roy didn't recognize. It took all three of them to muscle it open.
As the door swung inward, stale air rushed out, carrying the scent of old paper and something else—something herbal and sharp that made Adam's nose tingle.
What they stepped into felt like a library and a war room combined.
Dust-covered cabinets. Steel racks filled with leather-bound volumes. A wall of faded chalkboards, scribbled with Latin, Aramaic, and symbols no one had seen in centuries. A worktable sat in the middle, ringed with wax remnants and dried herbs.
Reed moved immediately to the chalkboards, her fingers tracing the ancient scripts with reverent caution. "Some of these mathematical sequences... they're not just formulas. They're binding equations. Ways to calculate the exact moment a specific entity might manifest."
"Whoever worked here wasn't just cataloging," Reed said, running her fingers over the grooves of a ritual circle etched into the metal table. "They were experimenting."
Adam approached a glass-fronted cabinet where small objects sat on velvet-lined shelves—crystals of unusual colors, fragments of bone etched with symbols, a small wooden box containing what looked like seeds but gleamed metallically in the beam of his flashlight.
"Magical components," Roy said, looking over Adam's shoulder. "High-grade stuff. Things you don't find at your average hunter's garage sale."
They found dozens of records—training guides, exorcism protocol manuals, cursed object inventories.
Adam pulled a leather-bound volume from one of the shelves, coughing as dust billowed around him. The cover bore no title, just a simple embossed symbol—the same circular marking that appeared on Elizabeth's pendant.
Inside were detailed genealogies—family trees stretching back centuries, with notes in the margins referencing "lineage potential" and "bloodline traits." Some names were circled in red ink, others crossed out entirely.
And there, on page 94, a familiar name jumped out at him: Milligan.
The entry was brief but telling: "Germanic origin. Black Forest lineage. Potential dormant but significant. Monitor for manifestation."
Adam's heart raced. More confirmation that whatever made him different—whatever gave him his enhanced abilities—came from his mother's side. From Elizabeth. From the "Old Blood" she'd referenced.
One locked cabinet revealed a collection of supernatural incident maps—dated from 1903 to 1957.
Roy had to break the lock with the butt of his shotgun, the metal giving way with a reluctant groan. Inside were rolled maps, carefully preserved in protective tubes.
They spread them across the worktable, weighing down the corners with books.
Color-coded pins tracked activity across North America. Red for demonic activity. Blue for celestial interference. Yellow for "unclassified manifestations."
"Look at the patterns," Reed said, fingers tracing the clusters of pins. "They're not random. They form lines, nexus points."
"Ley lines," Roy muttered. "Old magic pathways. Some hunters swear by 'em."
"More than that," Reed replied. "These are tracking something specific. Something cyclical."
Roy pointed at the cluster forming in southern Wyoming.
"That's a hot zone. And it lines up with Azazel's movements."
Adam leaned closer. The Wyoming cluster centered around what he knew from his "memories" to be a devil's gate—a doorway to Hell that Samuel Colt had locked with a special gun.
The same gun the yellow-eyed demon was hunting. The same gun John Winchester would eventually find.
It was all connected. All part of the larger pattern he was trying to disrupt.
Adam pulled another file from a weathered folder nearby—and froze.
A case report, faded and stamped with a half-burned sigil. Azazel's symbol.
But the document was heavily redacted.
Entire paragraphs blacked out. Names removed. One fragment was still legible:
"Entity exhibits interest in children born under ritual conditions. Pattern consistent across decades. Attempts to intercept failed. Recommend escalation to Primary Repository."
Adam's hands trembled slightly as he held the document. This was it—proof that the Men of Letters had been tracking Azazel long before the demon turned his attention to the Winchesters. Before Sam and Dean were even born.
Roy leaned in, frowning. "Primary repository?"
Reed already had an answer. "The Lebanon facility. The main Men of Letters bunker. Kansas."
Adam's pulse picked up.
He knew what that was—from memory, from canon. But now it was real. Tangible. And somehow, it connected to him more than he realized.
"They knew," he whispered. "They were tracking him, studying his patterns, trying to figure out what he was planning."
"And then they were wiped out," Roy added grimly. "Convenient timing."
Reed nodded. "If they were getting close to understanding Azazel's endgame, it would explain why the organization was targeted. Knowledge is power—and a threat."
Adam thought about what he knew from his "memories"—that the Men of Letters had been destroyed by Abaddon, a Knight of Hell. Had she been working with Azazel? Or had she simply taken advantage of the chaos to eliminate a threat to demonkind?
One final cabinet sat half-buried in the back, partially collapsed under debris.
It took all three of them to clear away the fallen ceiling beams and shift the heavy metal cabinet upright. The lock had been crushed in the collapse, allowing them to pry the dented doors open.
Inside, Adam found:
A rolled blueprint of the Lebanon bunker's outer schematic.
An incomplete file labeled: "Project Null Index"
A partially torn page from Elizabeth Milligan's own journal.
The blueprint showed only the outer portions of the Kansas bunker—entrance points, emergency exits, and what appeared to be power conduits. Enough information to locate it, but not enough to understand its full layout or capabilities.
The "Project Null Index" file contained mostly blank pages, as if someone had removed most of its contents. The remaining fragments referenced something called "The Concordance" and "bloodline stabilization protocols," but offered no explanation of what these terms meant.
Adam unfolded the torn journal page carefully, the paper brittle with age.
Her handwriting was still sharp:
"If what we've seen is true, the Old Blood isn't gone. It's sleeping. Azazel is just a symptom. The root runs deeper. We must not let them wake it."
Below these words was a hastily drawn symbol—similar to the one on the pendant, but more complex, with additional elements woven into its circular pattern.
He folded the paper and looked to Roy and Reed.
"This wasn't just research," he said. "She was tracking him—before he had a name. Before the Winchesters. Before Sam. She knew something else was behind him."
Roy rubbed his jaw. "So she left us the breadcrumbs."
Adam nodded. "I think when I interfered with Azazel's plan, I triggered something. Something that was already in my blood. And that's when the dreams started."
Reed looked back at the chalkboard wall, the old warnings scrawled in red ink and forgotten languages.
"Then I think it's time we followed them."
She gestured to a phrase written in Latin near the bottom of one board: "Sanguis vocat sanguinem."
"Blood calls to blood," Adam translated.
"Your grandmother left this knowledge for whoever in her lineage might need it," Reed said. "That's you, Adam. And whatever this 'Old Blood' is, whatever capabilities it gives you—it might be exactly what we need to stop Azazel."
Adam closed his eyes briefly, feeling the weight of it all settling on his shoulders. He'd started this journey thinking he was just a Winchester by-blow, a forgotten son trying to prevent a terrible future.
"We need to find out what Project Null Index was," he said finally. "And what Elizabeth meant by 'the root runs deeper.'"
Roy nodded toward the door they'd entered through. "Daylight's burning. We should head back, process what we've found, come back better prepared."
"Agreed," Reed said. "I need time to translate some of these texts. And we should digitize as much as we can—preserve this knowledge before it deteriorates further."
Adam took one last look around the room—at the accumulated knowledge of generations, at the fragments of a war that had been fought in secret for centuries.
"We'll be back," he promised quietly, to the room, to Elizabeth's memory, to whatever part of her blood ran in his veins.
As they climbed the spiral stairs back toward the surface, Adam felt the pendant warm against his skin again.
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