Chapter Text
Supernatural in its entirety copyright Kripke Enterprises / Warner Bros. Entertainment / The CW
the road so far . . .
(This section is for friends and family who aren't fans ... everyone else can skip to the next section!)
Dean and Sam Winchester were trained by their father, John, to hunt all things supernatural after their mother was mysteriously killed in a fire in Sam’s nursery. However, at twenty-two years old, Sam wants a normal life. He leaves his father and brother to attend law school at Stanford while they continue the Family Business. Then, John goes missing. Dean calls on Sam to help him find their father.
Together, the brothers continue hunting in John’s wake. They come up against some awful truths amid all the monsters: A yellow-eyed demon killed their mother because she interrupted him feeding six-month-old Sam his blood. The demon later takes John’s life and soul in a deal that saves Dean from a reaper. The demon blood within Sam grants him prophetic visions, but he isn’t the only child so cursed.
Azazel, the yellow-eyed demon, abducts Sam and four others of “his children.” He leaves them in a ghost town to fight in a battle royal. Azazel explains that he needs one of them, neither human nor demon and therefore stronger than either, to lead the armies of Hell during the upcoming Apocalypse. Sam, refusing to shoulder this Fate, chooses not to fight. He is killed by another of the psychics.
Unable to accept the loss of his little brother, who, at four years old, he carried out of the nursery fire, Dean makes a deal with a crossroads demon: He gets his brother back at the cost of his own soul and one last year of life.
Meanwhile, Azazel’s plan works up to a point. A Hell Gate is opened, releasing a horde of demons on Earth. With the help of John’s spirit, Dean kills Azazel. Sam’s psychic abilities go dormant in the process.
With Azazel gone, Hell’s army sails rudderless until Lilith steps into Sam’s intended place. She is the first demon created by Lucifer, the fallen archangel. Lilith sends her hellhounds to collect on the deal the crossroads demon made with Dean. The hounds kill him and take his soul to Hell. Four months pass.
For those four months, Alastair, the Grand Torturer of Hell, rips apart Dean’s soul. At the end of each day, he offers Dean a deal: Alastair will take Dean off the rack if Dean puts another soul on it in his place. However, time runs differently in Hell. After thirty years of telling Alastair no, Dean finally agrees. At that moment, though the brothers don’t know it, he fulfills a prophecy. He becomes the “righteous man” who sheds blood in Hell. This is the breaking of the first seal.
After that, Lilith begins breaking the remaining sixty-five seals that keep Lucifer locked in his Cage. Another demon, Ruby, teams up with Sam to defeat her. Ruby says he is the only one who can prevent the Apocalypse and save the world. She feeds him her blood, a highly addictive substance, which reawakens and strengthens his latent psychic abilities.
Meanwhile, a host of angels lay siege to Hell to rescue Dean. Though they are too late to prevent the breaking of the first seal, the seraph Castiel grips Dean’s tortured soul tight and raises him from perdition, hoping that Dean, restored to his body and life, will be able to stop Sam from using his demonic powers.
Until this point, no hunter on Earth knew that angels were real.
. . . now
A/N: Hello, and thank you so much for your interest in "Among Us"! I have moved this story exclusively to Wattpad. You can find it here: https://www.wattpad.com/story/270749127-among-us-a-supernatural-novel-written-by-carver. I hope to see you there!
Yours,
Anne
Notes:
My friends! To my faithful readers, please accept my apologies for returning this story to AO3 and flooding your inboxes with alerts. None of these chapters are actually new, though they are freshly edited. I had to agree to keep the story exclusively on Wattpad until the Wattys winners were announced yesterday. Since I wasn't one of them, I'm moving it back (devil grin). I'm also preparing it for self-publishing. To my new readers, if there are any, I hope you will take this speed trip through Aya's adventures with me.
Wishing you all the best,
Anne
Chapter 2: Angel Food
Chapter Text
Aya cracked open her cookie, and then pulled the fortune free.
“Angels are among us;” she read, “when you find them, cherish their presence every day.”
Smiling to herself, she crumpled the slip of paper in one hand and popped a cookie piece into her mouth with the other. She brushed crumbs off her top. Typical trite nonsense, fortune cookie fortunes, although this one didn’t go well with the obligatory phrase her sister Mio insisted they add at the end, “between the sheets.” Too bad. Angels among them? Probably not. But souls? Well. She didn’t need a fortune cookie to tell her about those.
“Time for a refill, Latte,” she said, reaching for her glass. She munched the rest of the cookie as she got off the couch she and Lemara had salvaged from beside the dumpster out back. Nobody cared that it was a castoff, and it had cleaned up nice. Every struggling college student not privileged enough to live in the dorms went dumpster diving, often in broad daylight. The girls completed most of their homework on their apartment floor.
Latte mewed, tail straight up in the air. The little three-legged cat, coffee and cream-colored, hobbled along at Aya’s heels.
“Talking to your dead kitty again? You’re like a kid with an imaginary friend. What are you, four?”
Aya’s roommate threw a ball of dirty laundry right in front of her, causing her to pull up short or risk an infection from whatever that smell was. “Aren’t pets supposed to cross the Rainbow Bridge or something? You know, all—cats—go to Heaven?”
Aya frowned at the laundry, less than half of which had made it into the round plastic basket. Coral pink. “She’s a cat, Marr. It doesn’t seem to bother her that she hasn’t moved on. I doubt she realizes she’s dead. Besides, housecats don’t have that much to be mad about. They rarely turn into vengeful spirits.”
Onryo, her grandmother had called them. Which she had once had a nasty encounter with, a twisted man who hadn’t let death stop him from stalking the young and pretty. Lacking a body had enabled him to get into places he couldn’t while alive. That soul, she’d lost to the dark in the end, but she couldn’t bring herself to regret his passing. She still had the scars.
“Whatever,” Lemara, who hadn’t heard the story about Rapist Randy, said with a grin. She pitched a wad of panties overhand. She didn’t believe in Latte any more than she believed in the tooth fairy—which she totally should, since those sprites liked to bite and the baby teeth they collected were sharp—but Aya never tried to enlighten her about things that went bump in the night.
It hadn’t been easy, growing up with what her grandmother called reikan, uninspiringly translated as Sight, but she’d adapted. The less she said about it, the better off everyone was.
When the bundle of crumpled thongs passed right through Latte, however, she couldn’t help making a face. Though, honestly, Latte didn’t seem to care much about that, either. She meowed, her big green eyes as bright as ever, as though asking what they were going to do next. Aya smiled at her. Loving animal. Better than any boyfriend any day.
“Okay, the tiny chick is smiling at nothing. That’s creepy, Aya.” Lemara gave her an affectionate bump toward the kitchen.
“The tiny chick washes her gym socks from time to time, unlike the giant chick.” Gingerly, Aya hooked a few pieces of clothing with her toes into the basket. She hopped over the rest.
After a moment of checking her balance, Latte copied her. She mewed again, probably wondering why Aya wouldn’t scratch her ears.
“Shut up, ladies don’t stink,” Lemara said. Ignoring Aya’s shout of laughter, she scooped up the socks in question. “Hey, it’s Saturday. Don’t you have class tonight?”
Aya leaned around the refrigerator door. She peered past the translucent woman patiently waiting for Aya to help her, which she would do as soon as Lemara left the room, and checked the microwave clock. She poured herself another glass of iced green tea. “Yeah, in about an hour. Last one this semester. I doubt Landeskog is going to keep us late.”
“Well, I have a date,” Lemara said, snapping her tongue on the t. She wiggled her caterpillar eyebrows, perfectly suited to her large, dark eyes.
“With who?” Aya tried to keep her voice light.
Lemara saw right through her. “Desmond Varley. He’s on the okay list. You said so.”
“Mmm.” She sucked on her straw, not meeting Lemara’s patented Hairy Eyeball.
“Hey.” Lemara put a long, muscled arm across Aya’s shoulders and briefly squeezed. “I appreciate you looking out for me, girlfriend.”
“Thanks, Marr.” She looked up at her roommate. Not long ago, she’d begged Lemara not to go to The Church, a local nightclub, with goth-throwback Markus Rantanen, who Aya was positive was an actual vampire. Her reikan revealed everything, souls and monsters and places of magic. What had made the situation worse was that she couldn’t tell Lemara, “Hey, Markus is going to drink your blood, and it won’t be sexy because vampires have way more than two socially-acceptable fangs—they’re like piranha fangs, and they’re retractable, trust me, it’s gross—and he may even let his sisters do it to you too before they leave you dead in the alley.” Her reasons for trying to prevent the date had been lame, but her panic had been real. Lemara had given in at the last minute, though she’d been angry with Aya for weeks, and Aya hadn’t slept much until Markus and his weird family had moved on. “I want you to be safe, okay?”
“Safe and laid. You should try it sometime. Make you less tense if you know what I mean,” Lemara said, wiggling the caterpillars again.
Aya choked on her tea. “No thanks.” She coughed. “Ace, remember? I tried once. I didn’t get what the big deal was.”
She’d failed to be overcome by passion the way actors always seemed to in the movies. Like, her brain had never shut up and gone to a happy place, so she had merely waited for the ordeal to end. Too much work for very few rewards. Yes, she’d reached orgasm. No, she hadn’t felt the need to repeat the experience. She preferred food. It made her feel about the same but was much more varied and enjoyable.
Laughing, Lemara danced away. “Yes, yes. Someday, ace, you’re gonna meet that someone special and feel the spark. Mark my words!” She fished a fortune cookie out of the delivery bag for herself, ripping open the wrapper. “A’ight, I gotta shower. If I don’t see you before you go, drink lots of water and get to bed on time. I say this with love!”
“Have fun.” Aya waved her off. The way she saw it, sex influenced everything the sexually-oriented said and did. Everything. Lemara meant well, but to Aya, who identified as asexual, the world was full of adorable, non-sexually-attractive otter-people, and that was fine with her. There was never going to be a someone special just for her because a human was a human, and there was no way to change that.
Latte twined around her ankles, flooding her with simple emotions like happiness and mischief.
“Right,” Aya said to her. The sound of the shower issued from the thin wall separating the bathroom from the kitchen. She turned to her guest and smiled. “Shall we assist that grandson of yours?”
“Thank you, dear,” the dame said, her accent so much lovelier than Aya’s Californian, or Lemara’s Inland North. She was one of the more polite souls who had invaded Aya’s home over the years. She dictated, slowly and clearly, while Aya wrote her peanut butter cup banana bread recipe on a dandelion-yellow index card.
When they finished, she put the card in an envelope with a note that read, “Your mee-maw wanted you to have this in time to win the blue ribbon at the fair next week. Good luck.” Then she addressed the envelope to a small town she’d never heard of in Alabama, putting the lady’s former address in the sender section, stuck a stamp on it, and slipped it into her messenger bag.
“Good food solves every problem, doesn’t it?” she said happily. She’d have to try this recipe sometime. She dreamed of baking the kind of treats a mom-and-pop café would sell, and design cute takeout boxes for them for a living. She tilted her head at her guest. “Is there anything else I can do for you, ma’am?”
Because that was what she did. She helped souls finish their unfinished business, so they could release their earthly chains and move on into whatever afterlife awaited them. Obaa-chan had felt it a duty, and had taught her, Aya, all she knew. To be gifted with reikan was to shoulder great responsibility, she’d said. A responsibility that, generally, Aya enjoyed. Not every soul was a Rapist Randy.
“No, dear, you’ve done plenty.” The soul smiled, which softened her faded complexion and brightened her sky-blue eyes. “I’m ready now.”
“Do you see a light?” Aya asked, as she had asked many times before. Aya couldn’t see the gate or the Veil, but she could see the light as it reflected off the souls it beckoned. “If you’re ready, a gate in the Veil opens, and it appears.”
The lady lifted her eyes, which brightened more as the light of her afterlife fell full on her face. She was staring at the closed refrigerator. “I see it, child.”
“All you have to do is walk into it,” Aya urged her.
Entranced, the spirit drifted forward. The light strengthened, bringing a touch of healthy pink to her dead cheeks. Then she hesitated.
Which was all right. Most souls hesitated. Humans did not like walking headlong into the unknown. Everyone carried at least a fanny pack of baggage. And everyone, without exception, expected to be punished for it.
“I’ve never felt judgment from the light,” Aya said quietly, knowing that this was what the soul needed to hear. Besides, it was the truth. It was not her job to judge, but to guide. “I’ve only felt love and acceptance from it.”
“What’s in there?” the soul asked.
Aya shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve never died.”
The dame grinned at that. “Of course not,” she said primly. Then she grew serious. “They’re real, you know.”
“What are?”
“Angels,” the other said. “They walk among us, hidden from sight, doing God’s work.”
“Oh—sure,” Aya said, a little uncomfortable now. Why was she telling her this? For some reason, her fortune cookie fortune popped into her head. “They must work at Coal Mine Dragon. It’s my favorite restaurant. Chinese food. But if angels work there, then it’s angel food, right?”
Aya could feel herself blush and forced her mouth closed. She’d never seen an angel, but she didn’t want to be rude and say so. However, that didn’t mean she should ramble on like an idiot. Besides, she’d seen vampire families and carnivorous fairies and vengeful spirits, so who knew what else could be out there, preying upon humanity?
Recognizing the awkward stretch of silence for what it was but unable to dispel it without making a bigger fool of herself, she waited for her dearly departed guest to go.
Which she did, commanding all the etiquette expected of a Southern woman, back straight and head high, a smile of rapture gracing her previously pinched face. As soon as she passed through the Veil, the gate closed with an exhalation as pure as Rocky Mountain spring water, which stirred Aya’s hair around her shoulders. The light vanished. She sighed, feeling its loss as she did each time a soul moved on and left her behind. The world always seemed a bit darker and colder without the light.
Maybe the old woman was right. Maybe the light was Heaven, and maybe angels lived there. Maybe miracles were real. It was a nice thought. Latte, draped across her foot, started to purr.
This had been an easier task than usual. Aya absently sipped at her drink, thinking about the mail drop box on campus on the way to her class where she could send her message from beyond the grave, and the straw made the obnoxious sucking noise that Lemara hated. She hadn’t realized she’d finished her tea.
The microwave, its red digital clock changing numbers, caught her eye. She set the glass on the counter, hard.
“Oh, no! Latte, why didn’t you tell me I’m going to be late?”
“Brrt,” Latte said. She began washing her whiskers.
As expected, Lemara wasn’t out of the shower. Aya scrambled around the small apartment, grabbing up a sweatshirt and her messenger bag, her phone and her keys, her Asus Eee PC netbook and Bluetooth optical mouse. She shoved her feet into her flip-flops. Spring temperatures in Colorado could drop from seventy-five degrees to thirty-five in an afternoon; everyone wore sweatshirts and flip-flops. She barely took the time to lock the apartment door before she flew down the steps in the hall outside, her bag banging against her backside, the overhead light flickering spastically.
What didn’t occur to her was that, if there were angels, there must be demons also.
Chapter Text
From the corner of her eye, Lemara watched her lipstick inch its way off the bathroom counter, followed closely by a tube of mascara. They clattered on the warped linoleum floor.
She stared at them where they lay. If she didn't know better, she'd say both had been batted off by a territorial cat.
"Okay." She set down her heated straightening brush and bent to pick up her things. "The lipstick I get. It's round. This room tilts. Happens all the time. But the mascara?" She turned it between her fingers. It was shaped like a toothpaste tube, kind of square at one end. Warily, she studied the bathroom: The corners, the tub, the space behind the toilet, but saw nothing out of the ordinary.
"Latte?" she called hesitantly. "Is that you?"
She felt stupid even saying it.
There was no answer. Of course not. She was letting Aya's childish sense of wonder get to her. The girl believed in unicorns, but honestly, that was part of her charm. The way her smile lit up at the simplest things! Aya was a lot like a kitten. Maybe that was why she pretended her cat was still around. Haunting the bathroom.
Whatever. Lemara was done in there, anyway. She packed her cosmetics into the basket on the left side of the sink, checked her hair—no longer coarse but chin-length and sleek, perfect for a night at the club—and then rushed out of the bathroom. She didn't like to leave her dates waiting.
In a corner of the mirror, a coffee-and-cream cat lay with her single front paw hanging over the edge of the counter. She watched Lemara leave the apartment, her tail curling from side to side.
..::~*~::..
The Church looked abandoned from the weedy sidewalk. Housed in a former Episcopal church, the nightclub, like much of historic downtown Denver, was made of brownstone, pitted and crumbling. It was a small, insignificant building crouched in a small corner lot, but the music pounding from the spacious interior and cramped basement below tickled the bones in Lemara's feet. The stained-glass windows glowed with a hellish magenta light. Beckoning. Promising fun and something a little naughtier.
Hanging on Desmond's arm, she took her place at the head of the dressed-up, slicked-up, glittered-up line of partygoers. The bouncer's gaze crawled over her like a physical touch. She took his constipated deadpan as permission to enter the creaky front doors.
While he bought admission in the vestibule, Desmond's dark brown eyes stayed aimed at her face. Sweet, but she wouldn't have minded if they had strayed downward. She'd worn this tight coral pink number for just that purpose. On Aya, it was a dress. On her, well . . . she wasn't going to get carded tonight. She might not even have to pay tonight. Desmond admired her arm against his lighter one as the chick at the ticket counter wrapped their wrists with paper bracelets. The Church was printed on them in purple ink in a wicked, spiky font.
"You ready, beautiful?" he asked, loudly to be heard over the DJ's set.
"After you," Lemara said with a smirk. In flat, sparkly, tasseled sandals, she had him by two inches.
And Desmond, bless him, didn't give a hoot. His brilliant smile flashed. He strutted, preceding her into the club while she held the door. After she followed him in, laughing at the expressions of the white couple behind her, he leaned up and gave her what could only be described as a kiss of pure, hot sensuality in the dark foyer.
Okay. If he kept that up, they might not make it to Happy Hour at the sushi bar downstairs.
"Gorgeous as the evening sky, you are," he breathed against her lips.
"You're not so bad yourself," she breathed back. Then the couple entering next, and the one after, and those after them, pushed Lemara and Desmond into the nightclub proper.
The beats surged into her ribcage, thumping against her diaphragm. A sculpture of chrome spikes hanging from the vaulted ceiling emitted a rotating rainbow of lasers that lanced through the crowd, up, down, back and forth, highlighting the thick banks of fake fog that billowed to the sides of the stage. A super cute DJ wearing cat-eared LED headphones held court from up there, her mauve hair waving over her bare, inked shoulder. She lifted her tanned arm, then made a swirling motion that collected the strobing light in about thirty bangles and her paper wristband. The dancing crowd responded, a deep-throated roar, mimicking the arm swirl. The DJ answered with an impish grin and an expert crossfader.
Squealing, Lemara dragged Desmond into the center of the dance floor. She was so ready for a night of sweat and heat and lungs bursting with dry ice fog, of expensive drinks and cheap sushi and the sensation of Desmond's silk shirt sliding over taut, flat muscles. It had been an exhausting and disappointing week, what with all the overtime at work that had cost her a grade, setting her back a whole quarter. While everyone else would graduate at the end of the week, she would stay behind, all alone making up the credits over the summer. Even Aya was moving on, moving away.
Didn't matter, it didn't matter! Lemara closed her eyes and shook her head to the music. She raised her arms and led with her hips. She wasn't going to think about it tonight. It was only one class. She would survive. And this rhythm was fire.
Desmond's hands, wide and long-fingered, crept to her hips. The fingertips explored her tummy, her waist, the small of her back. He pulled her tight against him.
She allowed her arms to settle around his neck. They couldn't talk here, not with the music battering at the necessary senses, but that was all right. There were plenty of things they could say without words.
..::~*~::..
Prickly pear margaritas and Alaska rolls. Lemara let her eyes roll back in her head. Could life get any better?
"So, you two are students over at the school? University of Denver?"
"Yeah," Desmond yelled. Even downstairs it was hard to make themselves heard over the music. His arm hadn't left Lemara's waist all night. "One quarter left and then we're free. My girl, here, she's gonna open her own dance studio."
The pair of couples who had offered to share their table "oooooh"ed and smiled and raised their eyebrows at each other. Lemara couldn't remember all their names. One of the girls wasn't Brittney, she was Kittney, as she'd introduced herself, who looked like she couldn't be more than seventeen. The two guys were, Lemara thought, Luke and Vahe. Luke was the one with the glorious cloud of yellow sheep curls. Vahe had large, liquid eyes, thick eyebrows, and cropped hair, all so black against his white face that she kept thinking of vampires.
"Shut up," she playfully said to Desmond, and then she laughed when he planted a kiss behind her ear. She loved it when her dates talked her up, even if they were a whole month younger. No one could tell. Right? She picked up her disposable chopsticks and said, "Des is shooting for a technical engineering degree."
"Technical engineering?" Vahe asked. His accent sent shivers down Lemara's shoulder blades. Delicious. "That means you could design cars, yes?"
"Engines, mostly," Desmond answered. He waggled his empty beer glass at the bartender, who nodded and began filling another. "I would work with mechanical engineers to review designs and blueprints, record data from tests, that sort of thing."
"It's true that engineers only want to design," Luke's girlfriend said with a wink at him. She tossed a shiny sheet of natural red hair, if Lemara was any judge, over her shoulder. "Then they wash their hands of the mess they made and leave it to the technicians to fix all their mistakes."
"Oh, are you an engineer?" Desmond asked in a different tone of voice, sounding like he couldn't believe his luck. He held up his hands, grinning, and the server took that moment to slip his beer and a bowl of edamame onto the table and make off with the used glasses. "Man, I'd love to pick your brain."
"Sure, any time," Luke said affably enough—or maybe his name was Luka. Luka? Yeah, that was it, a little uncommon, but it suited his baby blues. "I always need someone to clean up my messes."
His girlfriend poked his kidneys. He captured both of her hands in one of his, laughing.
Desmond waited, then got Luka's attention again. "What's the market like out there?"
Before Luka could answer, Kittney, smiling blearily into the remains of her pink margarita, suddenly giggled. Then she burped.
"Uh-oh," Luka's girlfriend said. What was her name? Lemara settled for a nickname: Red dropped the edamame pod she had just picked up back into the bowl. "Marr, do you think you could help me? Someone needs a private minute."
"Quick," Lemara said while thinking, Damn. The chick knew her name. "Before she ruins her shoes."
Red tried not to laugh and failed as she hopped off her stool. She flipped her hair again so that it wasn't in the way of her hands. "Excuse us, boys. Girl time."
"Do not take too long," Vahe said. He eyed Kittney with a small amount of alarm, then got busy emptying his Coors so he wouldn't have to say anything else.
Lemara rolled her eyes. Together, she and Red steered a floppy and giggly Kittney upstairs, bumping their way through the dark. They shuffled her sideways into the whitely-lit ladies'.
When the door clicked closed behind them, the music dropped to bearable levels. Lemara breathed a noisy sigh of relief. Stark and a bit foul-smelling, the restroom nevertheless felt like a haven. Especially since there was no one else in it. She really didn't want to explain this underage disaster to some pop-veined bouncer.
"Sit her on the sink," she suggested, and Red agreed. Together, they maneuvered Kittney onto the lower and longer wheelchair-accessible basin. She lolled against the foxed mirror, singing off-key to herself.
Suddenly, Lemara became aware of another, rather urgent need. Too many prickly pears. She tilted her head toward the stalls. "Sorry, you got her for a minute?"
"Yeah, it's cool," Red said with a laugh. Heedless of her skirt, she propped Kittney upright with her knee while she pulled a bunch of paper towels from the dispenser. She wet them under the nearby faucet. "Be quick, though?"
"Sure." Lemara didn't like peeing in company, anyway. She wedged herself into a crooked stall, swore a bit at the missing lock, and decided to just go for it. She sat, keeping the door closed with her toes.
Kittney's singing tapered off.
"Hey," Red said gently. Lemara pictured her wiping the girl's face with the paper towels. "How are you feeling?"
"A little better," Kittney said. God, she sounded young. Where the hell had a guy like Vahe picked her up? He hadn't looked that stupid. Then she burped again. "I need to get down."
"Okay, slowly. Let me help you," Red said.
"Why? You think I'm pretty?"
"No, it's not—Oh, watch out!"
Shuffling. Kittney's high-pitched giggles. A noise of exasperation from Red. Trying to tune them out, Lemara squeezed her eyes shut and finished her business.
"I got you, but—why are you—hey! Stop, don't do—ow! What the ever-loving God was that for?"
Kittney grunted; it sounded like Red had shoved her. Something small and plastic clattered onto the floor, making Lemara think of her lipstick rolling off the bathroom counter.
"I . . I don't . . ." Red's voice trailed off.
From below the stall door, Lemara watched in astonishment as Red dropped to her hands and knees. Her mouth was open, and her wide eyes were horrified, as though she were about to throw up.
"Hey!" Lemara yanked open the flyer-plastered door, which swung inward, delaying her. She couldn't leave the stall without stepping on Red, who lay in a swath of her coppery hair. "What happened?" she gasped.
She looked at Kittney for an explanation. Kittney pressed herself against the stained wall between the sinks, hands behind her back like a naughty little girl. But her smile, that went beyond naughty. It was wicked.
For no reason at all, Lemara felt cold all over, cold as stone, stone-cold sober. Kittney blinked. Nothing special about that. It was a natural thing to do. Except a faint flicking sound accompanied the motion. It sounded like a grasshopper snapping its wings. When Kittney's eyes opened, they were as black as her date's. Not just the pupils and iris, though, but the sclera too. Both eyes shone sickeningly in the light, oily black from corner to corner.
"What did you do to her?" Lemara asked in a strangled whisper.
Kittney blinked, making the flicking sound again. Her eyes were a normal brown. Lemara blinked too, convinced she was seeing things. Kittney tilted her head and peeled herself off the wall. She stalked toward Lemara. Her foot came down on Red's hand.
"What I'm going to do to you," she said sweetly.
"The hell you are, you little bitch," Lemara snarled. Hanging onto the sides of the narrow stall, she kicked her long, strong dancer's leg forward. She planted her size eleven sandal in Kittney's midriff as hard as she could.
The girl jerked at the impact but didn't otherwise react. She wasn't very big. Not as small as Aya, sure, but Lemara wasn't exactly petite. Kittney should have folded. Instead, Lemara shrieked; it felt like she had kicked the cement wall. Prickles raced up her shin.
Kittney's smile slipped off her face like a loogie. Before Lemara could regain her balance, Kittney grabbed her ankle tightly enough to bruise. Her other arm swept around, hand fisted, and then she jabbed a syringe needle into Lemara's bare inner thigh. She depressed the plunger.
Lemara let loose a flood of profanities that couldn't be heard over the music in the club.
Kittney blinked her eyes black again. They were all Lemara could see in her disbelief and her shock, oily against the white overhead light.
She was still swearing when the tranq invaded her system and she plummeted, a cold stone, to the cracked floor tiles.
..::~*~::..
"Took you long enough," the demon wearing the meat suit named Luka complained when Kittney—the demon possessing the girl named Kittney—dragged the tall girl out the restroom's warped back door. The lock she had broken to get them into the club rattled like a science-lab skeleton. He held the door still to quiet it and unfeelingly watched Kittney struggle with her load. "Hurry up. I've already got the others in the truck."
"Should have given this one to you," Kittney grunted, heaving the girl another few feet.
"I wouldn't have said no." Her partner bent and lifted the unconscious human. He hugged her limp body, planted his face in the sweat-slicked bend between shoulder and neck, and inhaled mightily. "Not my fault you chose such an immature vessel. Mind if I have a taste?"
The deserted alley stank of garbage and dog shit. It had rained while they'd hunted for sacrifices inside the club and the wind coming off the foothills had an icy bite to it, cutting through Kittney's skimpy velour and sequin dress. Flesh was so cumbersome and finicky! Still, literally anywhere on Earth was a million times better than Hell.
She narrowed her eyes at her partner, letting her demon essence flood them with black. "Yes, I do mind," she hissed. "We aren't to spoil them before the ritual. Now get her in the truck before I cut your prostate out and make you eat it." There. How was that for immature?
"Fine," he whined.
His targets, the real Kittney's boy toy and the suave kid in the silk shirt, were already drugged and drooling unaware on the plastic sheet covering the truck bed, along with the redhead. This tall drink of water was the last. Like a farmer swinging a hay bale onto a pile, he dropped her on top of her horny boyfriend.
The two demons closed the stolen pickup's tailgate and camper shell, locked them, and then climbed into the cab. The demon riding the Luka meat suit stomped on the gas pedal and drove the truck onto the gleaming city street, tires squealing. Traffic lights smeared across the tinted windows, too dark to allow a glimpse of the cargo within. Once away from The Church, he eased off the accelerator to match the flow of the late-night traffic. Kittney sat back, ignoring the seat belt, confident that her master would be pleased with their work.
If all went according to plan, she would be the one to break the next seal for Lilith. Breaking all sixty-six would free Lucifer from the pit. Once that happened Earth would be all theirs, a demon's—well, not paradise, but playground. One of blood and screams and satisfying every whim, for eternity.
Then they would finally be able to kill that pretentious man-boy, Sam Winchester. Strip his skin from his body, burn holes through his organs with acid, and break his bones. All two hundred six of them. Azazel had been a fool. No mere human would ever lead the armies of Hell, and Lilith was going to make sure humankind never forgot it.
Notes:
A/N: See, a mention of the heroes finally! I promise, this really will be a Supernatural fic, not an OC-takes-the-spotlight one. X3
As always, please please leave a review before you go! Are you still enjoying the story? Are you interested in what is going to happen next? Did you like anything in particular, or see something that could use work? You can tell me. I'm very friendly. :3
Yours,
~ Anne
Chapter Text
Lemara woke feeling sick. The body aches, the bad taste in her mouth, her swollen tongue and throat, the shivering that did nothing to warm her. Plus, something was digging into her forehead. She groaned, trying to roll away from it. Then she cracked open her eyes and wished she really were sick.
It stank like an outhouse. If she could have breathed through her mouth, she would have, but something—duct tape, by the feel of it—covered her face from chin to nose.
Eyes watering, she tried to sit up but found that her ankles were bound like her mouth, her wrists behind her back. A rock, or bit of debris, chewed savagely at the skin of her forehead as she lay, holding her breath so she wouldn't have to smell human waste. Where was she?
Warehouse. That was the only word that came to mind. Besides movie set. Because that was what it looked like. She was lying in the kind of abandoned building used in so many horror flicks. Pigeons streaked beneath a ceiling two stories off the ground. Faded blue light filtered through high, filthy, broken windows, pushing the shadows to the warehouse floor. The shadows pooled like heavy gases, hiding most details from view. Chains and hooks hung in the still air over silent conveyor belts. Dirt caked tarps, canvas, and forgotten crates. The foul air nipped at her exposed skin. She wondered if it was snowing outside.
Then she made a sound of disbelief low in her sore throat as the reality of her situation finally clicked into place. Son of a bitch. She'd been abducted.
Aya. Her friend's face flashed through her mind, and tears pricked at her sinuses. Aya. I'm scared. How did this happen? Des was on the okay list.
Oh, God—Des!
Lemara managed to roll onto her stomach. She'd been aware of other muted sounds of distress for a while. Squinting, she could make out the forms of people, taped up just like her. Maybe ten of them; she couldn't tell from her position on the icy cement floor. Several pairs of frightened eyes met hers. Including those of the redheaded chick from the nightclub.
Red had been crying. Stripes of freckled skin and dark dirt streaked the tops of her pale cheeks. Lemara tried to telegraph some reassurance with her eyes, but immediate disgust flooded through her, and she ceased. What was she thinking? She was in the same situation! There was no comfort to be had.
Footsteps, loud and purposeful in the chilly air. The man who had introduced himself as Luka appeared. He bent down, preparing to lift a freshly crying Red. Shocked, Lemara watched Red struggle to evade her boyfriend's hands, whimpering and grunting through her nose, her face a mask of silver tape and terror.
"Not that one," a voice Lemara recognized as Kittney's said. The teenager in her Hot Topic ensemble appeared out of the gloom, but irritated.
Luka looked at her, his sneer ugly, and dropped Red. She squirmed like a kid zipped into a sleeping bag, inchworming closer to Lemara. At first, Lemara, though bewildered by Red's obvious fear of her boyfriend, felt relief at having a familiar person so near. Then the smell wafting off Red explained at least one thing. Like not every abductee had been lucky enough to use a toilet before getting tranqed and brought here. Wherever here was.
"Take him," Kittney went on, pointing at a lump near the stack of crates.
Luka did, scowling. He dragged the struggling abductee free and hefted him in a fireman's carry. Lemara recognized the blue silk shirt and the buzzed hair, only a shade darker than the skin. Desmond!
He saw her too and began flailing, yelling into the tape. She screamed back. Their muffled voices caused the rest of the captives to start kicking up a fuss.
That wasn't the only thing. Kittney walked over to her and very calmly kicked her in the face.
Lemara's head whipped around. After a second of stunned silence, a trickle of blood filled her left nostril. She pressed her cheek into the gritty floor and squeezed her eyes shut. She would not cry. She would not.
Shortly after that, Luka returned. He culled people as Kittney indicated them until only three of them were left. Red sniffled quietly, curled upon herself. Lemara had maneuvered into a sitting position, her hands working behind her back. She'd discovered that she could hook her middle finger under the paper bracelet she'd gotten at The Church. She yanked and twisted and worried at it, watching her abductors closely to make sure they didn't see. She pushed her broken nail into the material, swearing in her head. Come off. Come off. Come off.
If anyone was looking for them, if anyone could trace them here, then she was determined to leave something behind to be found.
"Any more?" Luka asked Kittney in a dead tone of voice.
"This one." She nudged Lemara with the toe of her thick-soled shoe. She made a face, sticking out her tongue like a petulant child. "I won't be sorry to kill this one, but the other two are useless."
"Why?" he whined. "I screened them!"
"They lied," she snapped. She nodded at Red, who cringed away. "She's never going to see twenty-two again."
"Great." He crossed his arms. "That's a whole day wasted. So, what do we do?"
"We need the full amount. Rectify your mistake."
"By myself?"
She butted up against him, chest-to-chest, but not in a seductive sort of way. More like a rottweiler squaring off with an interloper. "I must get back to the site to oversee the preparations. You're the one who messed up, you get to undo it. Or I can call Lilith if you like?"
He eyed her, obviously weighing his options. "Fine. I'll go back out, but I've been using this vessel for a while. It might be recognized."
"Then take this one. It is too young for our purpose."
Kittney kneeled by the last bundle of person. She propped him upright, turning him toward Luka, who came over to stand in front of them. Lemara recognized Vahe by the shock of dark hair and the ultra-pale face. Kittney was still freakishly strong; she cradled the terrified man in her lap, holding him still effortlessly.
"Ready?" she asked.
Luka nodded. He blinked. The grasshopper-wing sound sent a stab of fear through Lemara's belly. Guess she hadn't hallucinated that. Black eyes shone from the tanned, rugged face. Red whimpered in such a rhythmic way that Lemara wondered if she was praying.
Good. They needed some prayers.
Because Luka threw back his head and opened his mouth as wide as it would go. At the same time, Kittney ripped the tape off Vahe's mouth, probably taking a night's worth of stubble with it.
Luka and Vahe both screamed. Luka's body heaved as though he were about to vomit, and then he did: A cloud of black smoke poured from his open mouth. The smoke curled and twisted upon itself, forming a snake of darkness, which then shot straight for Vahe's open mouth and delved inside, cutting off his screams. Kittney held him steady, her black grasshopper eyes unblinking, her smile satisfied.
The last of the smoke streamed from between Luka's teeth. He collapsed.
Vahe closed his torn, bleeding lips. Flicked open eyes that were completely black. Kittney produced a box cutter and proceeded to slit the tape binding his arms and legs. She moved back as he stood up, tearing the tape from his ankles.
"Two more before Friday. Do not fail," she said.
He nodded, turned, and walked out of the warehouse.
Shakily, Luka raised his head. "Oh," he said in a voice that wobbled. "Julia! Oh, my God, Julia, are you okay? I'm sorry, babe, I'm so sorry—"
He crawled toward Red—so Julia was her name—tears welling up in his blue eyes. He reached out a hand to her.
Kittney wove her chubby fingers into his sheep curls, gripped his yellow-sprouting chin in her other hand, and then yanked in opposite directions. Luka's neck snapped with several wet, crunchy sounds. Kittney released him and he flopped to the floor.
Julia and Lemara shuffled away from his corpse. Both were crying, Lemara in total frustration because the stupid—wristband—would—not—come—off!
Kittney descended upon Julia and snatched a fistful of vivid copper hair. Julia sobbed and struggled as Kittney lifted her halfway off the floor. The pewter knife struck fast and neatly. Kittney wiped it on Julia's top, tucked it away, and then picked up a cheap-looking metal goblet, tarnished and lumpy with some sort of design. Another Hot Topic relic, no doubt. This, she held under the gash in Julia's throat, which pulsed with thick, liquid red.
Heart hammering in her ears, Lemara watched in horror as Julia died hanging by her hair, choking on her blood. Kittney dropped her as carelessly as she had dropped Luka, all her attention on the shallow-bowled goblet in her hands. She clearly said something, but in a language Lemara didn't recognize. Probably Latin, considering everything else. These people—these murderers—were crazy. Absolutely trippen buck nutty bananas. It was as though they thought they could do magic!
Then Kittney dipped two fingers in the blood and swirled them, making Lemara fight against a rebellious heave of her stomach. Ignoring her red-painted fingers, Kittney brought the goblet up to her face the way most people brought hot coffee to blow on it.
"Master," she breathed. "It's me."
Lemara watched the petulant expression overtake black-eyed Kittney's face, all the while working at the wristband, which felt less like plastic-coated paper and more like steel cabling. She almost had it.
"It wasn't my fault!" Kittney cried. She flinched as though someone had yelled at her. "But—" She deflated. "Yes, Master . . . yes . . . I understand. I'll clean up. Not a trace."
She listened once more to the goblet of blood, then turned and hurled it into the shadows. Red liquid spewed from it in an impressive arc, splashing across the floor. The potted-metal goblet landed with a clank and a skid.
Lemara wondered if it had occurred to Kittney that now she had a bigger mess to clean. Her finger poked through the wristband with a tiny snap. Progress! Just a little more . . .
Kittney stretched as though getting reacquainted with her limbs. She licked the blood from her fingers, shook out her limp brown hair, straightened her dress, and then fixed her creepily alien gaze on Lemara.
"Time to go," she said in her sweet little-girl voice.
..::~*~::..
The sound of someone's labored breathing made it through to Aya's dream. She climbed toward consciousness, though her dream stuck and stretched like pizza cheese. The breathing sound didn't make sense in the dream, but as she tossed and turned closer to wakefulness, it became clearer.
Not labored breathing. More like . . . someone crying. Someone who didn't want to be heard crying.
She opened her eyes, abruptly awake. She glanced at her phone. Four o'clock. Just a few minutes before her alarm would go off for her Sunday morning shift. No messages from Lemara. Aya wondered if she had come home yet.
As quietly as she could, she lifted herself against her pillows. Oh! She rubbed her bare arm, frowning. Was the furnace on? It was freezing.
The sniffles and muffled sobs continued from the corner of the room between her dresser and the wall, reminding her why she'd woken.
"Hello?" she softly called. "Who's there?"
The crying stopped. Aya squinted. The soul, whoever it was, was still there.
"Do you know your name?" she tried next. "Why have you come here?"
A whimper. Furtive shuffling.
Aya crawled out of her blankets and to the end of her bed. Her breath puffed out, steamy in the cold air. This soul was deeply disturbed, which frightened her a little, but since it hadn't attacked her, that most likely meant that it was just confused, not yet violent. Probably newly dead.
"It's okay," she said as gently as she could. "You're safe here."
Slowly, so as not to trigger the soul's defenses, she scooted off her bed and then parted her curtains to let in light from the streetlamp outside. She was startled to see snow falling in fat flakes. It had been such a nice day yesterday.
"Mmmphf," the soul said. A woman, not that much older than Aya. She lifted her head and leaned into the thin stream of yellowish illumination. Strands of her long, tangled hair caught the light and burned like copper wire.
Aya gasped. Silver duct tape shone from the lower half of the woman's dirty face. Below that, blood pumped from the open wound in her pale throat. Overcome by empathy, she kneeled by the frightened soul. She reached forward, thinking to remove the tape—which she couldn't actually do—and the woman threw up her arms as though to fend her off. Broken tape decorated her wrists, trailing threads. Her hair hid her face. She trembled on the floor while the temperature in Aya's bedroom plummeted. The numbness of ozone stung Aya's sinuses.
"Mmmffff!" the dead woman sobbed. "Mmbbth!"
Aya ached for the poor soul. Until she calmed herself and accepted what had happened to her, she would remain stuck the way she had been at the moment of her death. And if she didn't find peace, well . . . neither had Rapist Randy. He had not violated Aya, who had only been fourteen at the time she had caught his eye, but after haunting and harassing and harrying her for a solid week, he had managed to hurt her by flinging her through the closed door to her grandparents' basement. Her trip down the stairs and into a workbench at the bottom had granted her an extended stay at the hospital. An experience she was not eager to repeat.
"My name is Aya," she said. She shivered, but she didn't want to search for her robe and risk breaking the connection with this soul. "I can help you if you'll let me."
The soul wasn't listening. Her hands flailed in the semi-darkness like gray moths. She began to lose concentration. Her image flickered and fizzed and then froze as though she'd maxed out her bandwidth. Before she disappeared, Aya, her heart and her stomach sinking right into her toes, caught sight of the paper bracelet around her wrist, partially obscured by the tape.
The Church.
..::~*~::..
After piling in a thin, uneven layer over wet asphalt, the snow gave up. A last few grainy flakes floated earthward. Early-morning light snuck in under the dissolving clouds and made the snow sparkle like broken glass.
A sound of feathers, like pigeons taking wing, disturbed the empty parking lot. Castiel walked into the open. He did not leave footprints in the snow.
From the highway, distantly, came the low rumble of traffic. He surveyed the lot, then turned and studied the abandoned factory, its defunct water tower standing black against the clouded dawn. The giant sign circumnavigating the tower proclaimed Gates Rubber Co. Checkerboard windows, glass and plywood and empty panes, looked wearily out from red brick or gray cement walls. Cold smokestacks stood against the sky, defying the passage of years. Pipes and exhaust tubes big enough for a human to fit into wept rusty tears from their joints. Depressed, abused chain-link tried, and failed, to keep out trespassers.
He did not go inside. She was gone, the believer, the one with faith. The one who had prayed for salvation.
His job was to prevent Lucifer's escape from his Cage, and thus stop the coming Apocalypse, not to answer prayers. Every angel in his garrison was searching for the location of the next seal under his orders; every angel was needed because of the many false trails laid by their demon nemeses, trails that dead-ended at burned-out restaurants, forty-year-old shopping malls, the entrances to the subterranean train tunnels crossing beneath the runways at the airport, and about a dozen others, all plastered with Enochian warding sigils. Still, something about these prayers had disturbed him. Enough that he had felt the need to investigate, though Uriel had scoffed at him. Now that he was here, he could smell the demonic vibrations in the air, growing fainter with each passing second.
He was close to something. He would have to receive revelation from his superiors to know what he should do next.
He turned to go. Then he stopped. Knelt. Peeled something off the ground, pasted onto the asphalt and the snow by double-wheeled tire tracks.
Castiel stood looking at it for long moments.
The unseen pigeons flew by, flapping their wings noisily. The dawning sun broke through the cloud cover, lighting up the deserted parking lot.
Notes:
A/N: Funny how I ended up switching this chapter with the next, just to fix a timeline issue! It should flow better now.
What do you think? Please leave a review before you go and let me know. If you're writing your own SPN fic, let me know about that too! I am always up for a little R & R (Reading & Reviewing). XD
Cheers,
~ Anne
Chapter Text
"Hey, Dean. Look at—" Sam started to say, but that was as far as he got.
His brother, eyes closed like he was in some kind of trance, half dancing and half shadowboxing to a Steppenwolf tune, nearly punched him in the ear.
Sam ducked. "Watch it!"
They'd parked on the dirt shoulder of a back road beneath the spreading branches of an oak to stretch their legs and work the kinks out of their backs before it got too hot. For miles, there was nothing to be seen but cotton sprouting in fields.
"Oh. Sorry, Sammy," Dean said, not sounding sorry at all. He turned on his heel and plopped next to Sam against the trunk of his car, a black sixty-seven Impala. "You know what? I feel good today." He twisted the cap off a Lone Star Lager with a flourish.
The way Dean had been running them the past full month, Sam thought he'd have been happy at the chance to work another job. He repositioned his laptop so that they could view the screen without glare from the low sun, brutal even in May. He cleared his throat. "Okay, as I was saying—"
"Naw, I mean it," Dean interrupted. He tilted the bottle, taking a long pull. "I don't mean just okay. Or fine. I mean good."
"Great," Sam said, not sure how he was supposed to respond to that, "but would you look at this? I found—"
"This place is awesome," Dean went on. "Best steak in the States. Everything in Texas is huge. It was this big, Sam. This big." He measured a space between his hands about two feet apart and then began air drumming.
"Dude. I was there. You're exaggerating. Now, would you get off your food porn channel? I'm trying to—"
"You missed out, little brother. What was that rabbit nonsense you were eating? I bet I could yank up tastier stuff from the side of the road."
"Dean."
"Man, I'm getting hungry again. When's lunch?"
"Dean."
"What can I do for you, Sammich?" he asked in the most unconvincingly innocent tone imaginable.
Sam clamped his mouth shut. He glared at his older brother, working to keep his lips sealed while he waited for Dean to get the bug out of his ass.
Staring directly at him, Dean took another pull of his beer, his eyes—the same color, though not the same shape, as Sam's—catching the sunlight so that they twinkled. Daring him to say it.
"Are you done?" Sam asked quietly.
Dean grinned like a satyr. "Not even a little."
"Look, if this is about Christine—"
"This is absolutely about Christine."
"I couldn't help it! She was taking one of us home and you know it. She just preferred not to go home with a . . . shortie."
Dean leaped upright. "I am not short!"
"From up here you are," Sam said.
It was Dean's turn to scowl. He finished his beer and then stuffed the empty bottle into their dad's ancient metal cooler. The ice crunched and popped. He said something under his breath that sounded like, "Four frickin' inches."
"Still feelin' good, Dean-o?" Sam taunted.
"All right, whatever, you douche," he muttered. He locked the cooler and wiped his hands down his jeans. "Just you wait until I tell your little Hell-buddy."
Sam laughed softly through his nose. "So, you plan to inform a demon that you don't even like that I'm, what, cheating on her?" He'd already won, he didn't need to rub it in, and there was no use trying to explain Ruby when complicated didn't even come close. "No, you know what? Never mind." He shook his head, grinning, and pointed at the laptop's screen, where he'd opened three separate articles. "Colorado. There has been a string of disappearances from nightclubs in the three major college towns, all within three days of each other. Nine vanished from Fort Collins last Thursday, six from Boulder on Friday, and then five from Golden, Saturday."
Dean threw him a blank look. "And? What's to say any of these disappearances are related? People go missing all the time. College is stressful, you said it yourself. Kids go off their heads and bail. They turn into low-level managers at Biggerson's, they go full nudist commune in Key West, they commit suicide. What's to say this is our kind of deal?"
Sam gave him that one. "Maybe nothing," he admitted. He clicked the touchpad a few times and brought up a fourth article. "But on the same night the School of Mines students went missing in Golden, four more disappeared from a nightclub in Denver. Two of them were students at DU."
"I can tell you're trying to make a point, but I'm not seeing it," Dean said flatly. "Tell me why you want me to drive over nine hundred miles to Colorado."
Sam lifted his fingers from the aluminum laptop, which was growing dangerously hot under the sun, but kept it steady against his thighs with the edges of his palms. "Again, this may be nothing, but hear me out. Arithmancy, a form of divination using numbers, was practiced by the ancient Greeks, Chaldeans, and Hebrews. If we look at the numbers of those who have gone missing, nine, six, and five, plus four more on the same night, different location . . . It's written in the Book of Genesis that Methuselah lived for nine hundred sixty-nine years. Or we could look at modern numerology. It's based on the teachings of the ancient Greek philosopher, Pythagoras. He was a brilliant mathematician, but he wasn't just interested in quantitative solutions. He believed that the physical world comprises the energetic vibrations of numbers. It's why maybe you keep looking at a clock that reads eleven-eleven, for instance, or your lucky number starts showing up everywhere, or suddenly you meet a bunch of people with the same birthdate." He raised his eyebrows at his brother. "Maybe these specific numbers, these specific locations, these specific people, have something to do with one of the sixty-six seals."
"Okay, you know what I heard just now?" Dean clapped a hand on his shoulder and acted like he was going to shove him off the Impala. "Numbers blah blah some really old guy blah blah New Age crap."
Sam sighed. "According to the news reports, there are no clues. No surveillance footage. No suspects. The disappearances aren't limited to individuals; couples went missing together in most cases. All are in the same age range. Twelve women and twelve men. Someone, or something, is preying on college kids. Considering we have no idea what the seals are, or where they are, and considering there are a possible six hundred seals, I think it's worth checking out. Let's face it, we've driven farther for less."
"All right." Dean picked up the cooler. "You say there's a job in Colorado, then to Colorado we'll go. But if we're gonna go, let's go. I need a burger."
Back to the food. Sam tucked his laptop safely under his arm. "You're not going to forgive me for last night, are you?" he called after his brother's retreating back.
"Nope!" Dean buckled the cooler into the back seat, then slid into the driver's seat. He reached through the open window and slapped the roof twice. "Come on, Sammy-boy, we're wasting daylight!"
Sam chuckled. Warm prairie wind combed through his hair, flicking it into his eyes. It took him fewer steps to reach the front passenger door. It opened with the familiar loud creak. He folded his legs into the space below the front seat and then reached between them to pack his laptop in his bag.
Dean turned the key in the ignition, listened in satisfaction a moment to the deafening V-8 dual exhaust rumble, put the gearshift in reverse, and punched it. The Chevrolet big block engine growled as the vehicle lurched backward. He shifted it into drive.
Together, the Winchesters rode toward the interstate ahead of a cloud of brown Texas dust, Jimi Hendrix licks pouring from the Impala's open windows.
..::~*~::..
Dean had long since switched off the music, but the slowing of the vehicle woke his brother, anyway.
"Ooogrff," Sam said. He sat up, stretching and scrubbing the back of one hand into his eye. Under lowered brows, he blinked at the darkness outside the windshield, streaked with dust and neon. "Where are we?"
"Santa Fe," Dean said grandly, though his voice came out rougher than usual. He was feeling a little ooogrff himself. He'd made the first six hundred-something miles in one shot, and he was fried. Though Sam could drive his baby, he didn't like Sam driving his baby, especially after that iPod atrocity, so he wanted to crash for his customary four hours before heading anywhere else.
In New Mexico, if it didn't have to be paved, it wasn't. He swung the Impala wide, tires crunching through sandy gravel, and then parked with a jerk. Letting his numb hands drop from the wheel, he adopted an accent meant to be Eastwood but which came out closer to the Duke. "Welcome to the Silver Saddle Motel, cowboy."
"You need sleep. And a shower," Sam mumbled, still trying to get his bearings. Looking mildly confused, he studied a piece of wall art, the silhouette of a bull composed of scraps from barn doors, plow handles, and a broken cartwheel. It stared down at them from pale yellow adobe plaster. The doors into the ranch-style building below it stood out like bruises, turquoise and garish in the neon glow.
Neither brother said anything about it. Sam knew what the inside of this place would look like the same as Dean did, but all they asked for were beds and indoor plumbing. It wasn't like they could afford the Hilton on credit card scams and hustling bar games. Not even in New Mexico.
"Get the bags?" Dean slammed his door.
"Mrgrpf."
Dean smirked. "Aw, is it past Sammy's bedtime?"
Sam, shuffling like a ghoul through the gravel, made a gesture that wasn't ASL. He disappeared behind the Impala's trunk lid. Then his shaggy head reappeared. "Ask if they have laundry services."
"Got it." Dean was already halfway to the office, fishing his real wallet, stocked with a fake ID, from his back pocket. They'd done this so many times before that he didn't need to check this week's name on the bogus credit card he handed to the surly desk clerk.
He glanced around the office, amused by the helter-skelter décor. Red Spanish tiles underfoot, the planks of the counter branded with the word "Welcome," a dusty ristra hanging overhead, every available inch of wall plastered with rodeo posters, animal skulls, rusted saddle bits and spurs, and sombreros, and a small but shiny flatscreen propped high in a corner, playing a telenovela. When he shifted his feet, his left elbow threatened to knock over a battered postcard stand, but a folding chair overflowing with magazines on his right convinced him to stay put.
"Room twenty-two, Mr. Newhook, two singles for the night," the clerk said, handing back the card and a tiny folder containing the room keys. He then dismissed Dean from his notice, subsiding into his chair the way Jabba the Hutt oozed across his throne, his small eyes rolling toward the flatscreen. Somewhere behind him, a swamp cooler kicked on with a sad whine, doing nothing more than moving the air around.
As an afterthought, the clerk waved his hand over his shoulder. "Around back. Next to the laundry room. Quarters only. I don't have change."
"Thank you," Dean squinted at the brass-colored nametag pinned crookedly to a Hawaiian shirt, "Fabian. That's a good one," he added, indicating the TV and the lyrical Spanish emanating from it. "Leticia leaves her husband for his son. The one dating her daughter."
Fabian's focus drifted back toward Dean, who was trying not to laugh. His thick-lipped mouth hung open slightly. He didn't say anything.
Apparently, no one had a sense of humor at two a.m. Tapping the key folder on the countertop, Dean elected to make his exit.
..::~*~::..
The dream grips him in the talons of a devil.
Strobing light. Flashes of tortured sight, longer stretches of absolute darkness.
Chains and rods pierce bodies like needles sewing buttons to a coat. Bone erupts through skin. Fluids stream from damaged organs.
Screams.
Blood-smeared vision.
His screams. His blood.
Their screams. Their blood.
His soul. Shredding.
Changing. Into one of them.
Knives in his hands. Pliers. Saws. Red-hot wires. Hammers. Rasps. Razors. Meat hooks. Ice picks. Flails. Slick with thick, hot blood.
So much blood.
..::~*~::..
"Did you know dreams last anywhere from thirty seconds to forty-five minutes?" a much smaller, gawkier Sam had once asked him. His little brother, the Poindexter. "People usually have a dream every ninety minutes. Even though they feel like they last the whole night, all the dreams together add up to only about twenty percent of the time you're asleep."
Hell is like that too, Sammy. Four months up here was more like forty years down there. Forty years of souls on the rack. My soul. Other souls. The torture I endured, and the torture I gave. And every day of those forty years is still crammed in my flawed human head.
..::~*~::..
Dean sat up in the stuffy motel room, his abs and lungs as tight as sailor-tied knots. He didn't bother trying to untangle his legs from the sheets. Instead, he leaned over the side of the bed, his hand sweeping near the floor. His fingers touched a glass bottle neck.
Sam's wry voice floated to him through the blackout curtain-induced dimness. "How about some breakfast first, Dean?"
He lowered the bottle, licking whiskey off his lip. He psshhed in response to Sam's side-eye, despite the ache that stabbed his gut when the whiskey landed in the bottom of his empty stomach. "Overrated."
Sam grinned so widely his dimples appeared. "Not these. I bought them from a lady in the parking lot. Made them herself."
After digging in a wrinkled paper bag, he poured a mug of coffee from the tiny two-cup pot on the dresser, then handed over the mug and a foil-wrapped burrito.
Dean willingly switched the burn of alcohol for the burn of java. He sniffed the foil. Still warm. His stomach rumbled more happily. "Do I smell bacon?"
"You smell pork green chile."
"Even better." He took a bite. Through the steamy, spicy mouthful of eggs, potatoes, chorizo, and cheese, he asked, "Get any further on your Pythagorean problem?"
"I think so." Dressed in his last clean button-up and jeans, his wet hair curling around his ears, Sam sat at the small table near the curtained window. Dad's journal lay open at his elbow, but he spoke to the glowing laptop screen. "I've got a list of the missing persons. Twenty-two of them are twenty-two years old. In numerology, twenty-two is a Spiritual Master Builder on the material plane."
Dean lowered his coffee, incredulous. How did Sam say that kind of stuff with a straight face? "A what?"
"A Spiritual Master Builder. Just listen," Sam said with a flick of his eyebrow. He leaned closer to the screen and started reading off a website. " 'This is the God energy brought to the material plane and put into form. Because of its great power, the number twenty-two may result in outstanding ascendancy or disastrous downfall.
" 'The Master Number twenty-two symbolizes the principle of precision and balance. When it senses its full capacity as a Master Builder, it can achieve what is hardly imaginable. The twenty-two can turn the most ambitious of dreams into reality—' "
"Stop, Sam," Dean groaned. He ran his hand down his sticky face. No more night-sweats. The dream had subsided, thank—well, thank God? "Does that mumbo-jumbo actually mean anything?"
He hesitated, gathering his thoughts. "Think of it as stacking the deck in their favor. If demons or witches or djinn or whatever are responsible for these disappearances, then they're preparing to do something big. Something very, very bad. They're using these people as, I don't know, keys or ingredients of some sort. Probably sacrifices in a ritual."
"To do what?" Dean wedged the last third of his burrito into his mouth and clambered out of bed.
Sam shook his head, slowly, his eyes still aimed at the laptop. "I'll need more information to know that. I say we head for Denver, the site of the last four disappearances. Something about them doesn't seem to fit."
"You could just be making things up," Dean said, crouched by his duffel, searching for his last clean clothes. It was getting a little ripe in there. "You know, the way people fit facts into a prophecy after the fact?"
"Yeah, I know." Sam closed the laptop and sat back with a sigh. He picked up his coffee with two hands, his expression distant. "I still think we should check it out."
"Got it." Dean headed for the bathroom. "We'll go as soon as I've showered. You're on laundry duty."
"What?" Sam glared at him, indignant, but Dean, grinning, shut the door.
Notes:
A/N: Here we go, the true test. Writing in the Winchester's POV for the first time. How did I do? Does it work? Do you like it?
On your way out? Leave a comment! Won't you please? Also, I'm looking for SPN fanfic recommendations. Tell me your favorites!
Cheers,
~ Anne
Chapter Text
Voicemail. She'd reached nothing but voicemail for the past four days.
Reluctantly, Aya slid her phone closed. Then she just stood there staring at it. Blank. Black. Unlit. Silent.
Marr, where are you?
Kaladi Coffee Roasters buzzed with the beginning Wednesday breakfast rush. However, the chatter, the ding of the register, and the aroma of pastry didn't calm her the way they usually did.
The cluttered shop, squished next to an Illegal Pete's in a sixties-era, low-budget strip mall off Evans Ave., attracted young families and those thirty-somethings who worked close enough to walk or ride their bicycles. The handwritten signs, the hand-stamped to-go bags, the hand-packed tea infusers, Aya loved them all. The shop's intimate interior, warm brown wood and sagging green booth cushions, floors so scuffed and worn that "polish" wasn't in their dictionary, the magnetic strip under the counter where toddlers could play with alphabet letters while their parents waited for their orders, made people happy as soon as they walked in the door.
"Aya!" Darika yelled from up front. Though her voice was stern, her startlingly green eyes, ringed with eyeliner, were sympathetic. "Wake up, girl, you're falling behind."
"Oh. Sorry!" Aya stuck her phone in her back pocket. She grabbed the first two cups in line and then began brewing espresso shots and pouring milk into the steamer pitchers. "I didn't get much sleep last night," she called. Or the night before. Or the one before that. "I'm on it!"
Darika nodded, but the knot between her brows did not relax. She turned back to the cash register. The line of customers stretched out the door. Conversations blended into the new iHeartRadio channel playing overhead. Temps had risen; the snow was a distant memory. Flowers had bloomed and grass had greened overnight. Sunlight filled the open doorway with gold.
Behind Aya, so close that the flaps of his back pockets brushed against the tie of her apron, Paulie expertly built and grilled paninis. He shook his bleached, styled hair out of his eyes. "Have the police said anything?"
Aya, on the other hand, might have forgotten to brush her hair that morning. If the world were lucky, she'd remembered deodorant. "No, nothing," she said. As her eyes misted, she nearly neglected to spoon the foam onto a cappuccino. The customer's scowl reminded her just in time. "They said they would contact me if they learned anything new, but it's already been four days."
"Whoa." Paulie's manicured hands shot into her swimming vision. He took the used, steaming espresso grounds from her before she could spill them all over herself. "I'm sure she's fine. A fighter like Marr, she just has to be. Whatever happened, whatever's going on, the police are doing their best to bring her home safe."
While he measured the mix for two iced chai lattes, Aya took over his station, bagging the sandwiches and bagels with schmear he had prepared. She wiped her eyes on her D'espairsRay t-shirt sleeve, hoping a customer wasn't watching her. "Thanks, Paulie. I want to believe it, I really do. I'm just so worried."
The soul had followed her to work, the first time she'd shown herself since that awful morning, which wasn't helping Aya keep her composure. She stood apart from the hustle and bustle by the front windows, looking out. Her arms hung at her sides, and she'd removed the tape from her ankles. Only her hair showed any kind of color. It burned in a halo of coppery strands.
Every time Aya looked her way, her stomach cramped with anxiety. She knew that the spirit's presence here meant something bad had happened to Lemara, but she didn't know what and hadn't had time to try and find out.
"All right, talk to me," Paulie said as he tamped fresh grounds into the espresso machine trays. "What do the police know?"
"Not much," she said. Hopelessness welled up in her, threatening more tears. "Someone at The Church witnessed Marr and three other people being loaded, unconscious, into the bed of a pickup. The pickup was stolen and then abandoned. It took the police a while to find it."
"Even though you'd already gone down to the station on Sunday to talk to them and you knew exactly where Marr had been?"
"Yeah." She wiped her hands on her apron and checked under the counter for more napkins. "That's why I'm worried. It's been more than seventy-two hours."
"What does that mean?"
She pressed against her unhappy stomach, wincing. "Sgt. Kuemper told me there is a point in time when his objective switches from attempting to find a live person to trying to locate a body."
Paulie stopped what he was doing and stared at her, his pierced lips parted. In the flattest tone she'd ever heard him use, he said, "Now I get why you're so distracted."
Aya couldn't help it: She laughed. It wasn't funny, exactly, but being anxious about being anxious often made her act overcaffeinated, which tended to make her laugh more easily. With Paulie's solid presence at her back, she managed to make it through the rest of their shift with few accidents.
But not none.
"Here," Darika said. She applied the Band-Aid with a snap of the paper backing. She patted Aya's hand, mindful of the burn now coated with Neosporin. "You need anything else, you let us know. You've got our numbers. Use them."
"Thanks, Rika," Aya said ruefully. "See you tomorrow."
Darika shut the door to the small office and crowded into the narrow aisle between the counter and the booths with Aya and Paulie. There, Aya stopped to retie her sneaker.
Paulie, who stopped to wait for her, let out a low, appreciative whistle. Not for Darika, her wavy black hair bouncing against her ample bottom, but for the two men in plain dark suits, subdued ties, and shiny shoes who reached the front door at the same time she did. The taller one held it for her. She ducked under his arm, frowning up at him with her eyes while her mouth smiled a thank-you. Probably wondering, like Aya, if they were lost.
"Weird. Not our usual type of clientele," she observed upon standing. She tugged her messy night braid out of her collar so she could zip the sweatshirt closed. "A little too starched, don't you think?"
"Who cares?" Paulie said, his expression ecstatic. He stuffed his hands into his stonewashed pockets. "Look at them. Think one of 'em might swing my way?"
Amused, she watched as the pair approached Matt at the counter and flashed white and blue badges in single-fold black wallets at him. "I think they're Feds. Don't sound like a lot of fun." Not like she'd ever met any, but she watched TV.
Paulie snorted. "I don't think the government lets its employees wear their hair like that."
She opened her mouth, but then she closed it, considering. He might have a point. "Uh-oh. Check out how close they're standing to each other," she teased instead.
"Damn," he said under his breath. "Didn't anyone tell them not to fish off the company pier?"
She giggled and slung her messenger bag strap over her head. The man with the shaggy brown hair, tucking his ID back in his jacket, looked directly at her. Matt, his round face pink with excitement, had pointed her out.
"Uh-oh is right," Paulie said from the corner of his mouth, his sculpted eyebrows rising, as the Feds approached in a way that made it impossible to reach the door to the street behind them.
Through the three-inch space between two sets of broad, jacketed shoulders, Aya noticed that the soul finally moved. She took a couple of steps in the wake of the two men, then fritzed out. In the beat between heartbeats, she reappeared next to Aya. The tape constricted her lower face as before, but her eyes narrowed as she switched her gaze from one agent to the other.
"Miss Nakano?" tall-and-shaggy asked in a smooth, deep voice that practically set Paulie humming like a mouth harp. "I'm Special Agent Buchanan and this is my partner, Special Agent Abbot. We're with the FBI. I understand you're the one who filed the missing person report for Lemara Bako, is that correct?"
"I . . . Oh!" she said, because it had just occurred to her that this was really happening, that someone important was here to help. "Yes! I am. Hi."
"We'd like to ask you a few questions if that's okay with you." He bent a little to look her in the face, probably without realizing it.
"Sure," she said, surprising herself with her eagerness. She didn't generally respond to strangers this way. "I already told Sgt. Kuemper everything, but if you're here to help find Marr—Lemara—and . . ." she glanced involuntarily at the soul, "and those other people, I'll tell you whatever you want to know."
Apparently, she surprised them, too. They exchanged a glance.
"All right," gamely said the other, Abbot, the one with the cropped hair and the unshaven jaw, in a rougher voice. "You're Miss Bako's roommate, is that correct?"
"Yes, for the past two years. We're both enrolled in an evening MBA degree program at Daniels College of Business."
"And you're both twenty-two."
"Uh, huh."
Agent Buchanan checked a pocket notepad. "You're graduating this spring, correct?"
"Yeah. Friday." Aya was having a hard time concentrating on the conversation. This was all basic personal stuff, the same questions Sgt. Kuemper had asked her. Besides, Paulie was studying the full-lipped Agent Abbot with such intensity that the agent had noticed. His eyes, a pretty hazel fringed with dark lashes, kept flicking toward him, but not with returned interest. With a dawning discomfort that made Aya want to laugh out loud. Also, the soul was radiating some very strong emotions on her other side. It was starting to make her feel sick.
"That would be May twenty-second?"
"Yes."
Buchanan made a note on the pad. "And Miss Bako?"
She shook her head. "No. Marr didn't pass her Applied Financial Management class, so she's staying for the summer."
"Do you think that failing the class affected Miss Bako's state of mind?" Abbot asked, latching onto that bit of information the same as the sergeant had.
"Was she acting strangely, not like herself?" Buchanan clarified in a kinder tone.
"No. She was disappointed, of course, but not in any way that changed her attitude or behavior."
"Did you notice any strange smells around her before she left?" Abbot asked next.
Lemara's dirty socks stank, but that wasn't strange. "What do you mean?"
"Sulfur, or rotten eggs?"
"Um. No?" she offered. Was he asking if Lemara had gas?
"How about cold spots?"
"Cold . . ." She frowned at him. Yeah, she had, but that had nothing to do with Lemara and everything to do with the soul hovering at her shoulder.
"Excuse me, but what does that have to do with anything?" Paulie interrupted, speaking her thought aloud. "Why are the Feds involved in this case, anyway?"
"Who are you?" Abbot asked sharply.
Wow. He really hadn't appreciated Paulie's staring.
"This is Paulie Makar," Aya said. One of her favorite otter-people, with his gorgeous singing voice, often better than the artists on his playlists, and his dark eyes that squinched into dots whenever he laughed, and the fierce rivalry between him and Lemara that kept them on a strictly frenemy basis, but she sure as sugar wasn't going to explain all that. "He's our friend. He works here."
The soul's agitation intensified. She touched the duct tape. Her fingers tapped, then scrabbled around like gray spider legs seeking entry. Time sped up and slowed down for her, making her motions seem jerky and disconnected.
"Well, Mr. Makar," Buchanan said over whatever Abbot was about to. He shot a quelling look at his shorter partner, who subsided much like a dog that had been told to heel. "The state patrol called us in to help. We're investigating whether there is a connection between these disappearances and others across central Colorado."
The soul wrestled with the tape, tearing it from her face. The wound in her throat bubbled with blackish blood that did not fall. The lit table lamp next to Paulie flickered.
Buchanan's quick gaze zeroed in on the lamp. He cleared his throat, keeping one eye on its antics. "So, Miss Bako, she went out Saturday night with—" he checked his notes, "Desmond Varley."
The tape came away in pieces. The soul took a huge, shuddering breath that sent shivers down the back of Aya's neck. The bulb in the lamp went out for a second, then came back on full strength. Aya pretended not to see it. Flickering lights caused by soul energy interfering with electromagnetic fields were the original soundtrack of her entire existence.
"He's missing too, isn't he?" She hugged her elbows.
"Yes," Buchanan said, at the same time the soul said, "Des wanted to talk to Luka about being an engineer."
"What?" Aya asked the soul, startled.
Buchanan's long eyebrows lowered and pinched together. "Yes," he repeated, bemused. "Desmond Varley has been reported missing as well as identified by the witness."
"I met them," the soul said to Aya, her voice a raspy whisper. "At The Church, that night. Marr and Des. They were nice. It was the girl, Kittney. She was just a kid. Maybe sixteen? She was drunk, so Marr helped me take her to the restroom, and—" She winced, rubbing her temple as though she had a headache.
"Um." Aya fidgeted. She had a thousand questions for this soul, like where was Lemara, was she all right, what had happened?, but she couldn't ask without sounding like a total loon talking to thin air. "Is there a . . . a girl on the list? A teenager? Her name is Kittney."
Abbot scratched behind his ear. "Kittney what?"
She glanced at the soul, who shook her head. "I, um." She shrank upon herself, hugging her elbows tighter. "I don't know."
"No, there has been no Kittney reported missing," Buchanan said slowly, scanning his notes. "Why do you ask about her?"
"I smelled sulfur," the soul whispered. "Before she killed me."
"She's being fostered by a family friend," Aya, inventing wildly, said. "Kind of a new thing. She's, uh, she hasn't been home in a few days, either, and I thought . . ."
"Thank you, Miss Nakano, we'll check up on that," Buchanan said in the tone of voice that said no, they would not; Aya breathed a private sigh of relief that he wasn't going to ask for details because she was positive she could be arrested for lying to a federal agent. He clicked his pen and then gave his partner another of his meaningful looks as he tucked the notepad away.
"All right, I think that's all we need for now," Abbot said in a voice of authority. "If you think of anything else, you can contact us any time."
She accepted the business card he handed to her, took note of the phone number that didn't start with three-oh-three or seven-two-oh. Agent Buchanan offered her and Paulie a friendly, if distant, smile, but Agent Abbot only scowled.
After a moment, Paulie sighed longingly. "They look as good going as they do coming," he said. Then he shook himself. "You ready?"
"Um, actually, I forgot something in the office," she said, edging in that direction. "You go on ahead and I'll catch you tomorrow, okay?"
"Sure." He leaned down and pecked her cheek. "Try not to worry. The Feds are on this now. Marr's as good as home."
"Thanks. Bye, Paulie."
He waved and then left. A glance at Matt showed him busy with a group of teenagers on their way to late-starting classes.
She hurried into the back hallway, but once there, she darted past the doors to the office and the single restroom. Dodging shelves of cleaning supplies and a mop propped in a big yellow bucket on wheels, she let herself out the back door.
"Oh, good, you came," she said.
The soul, who resembled a tattered sepia-toned photograph, crossed her arms over her middle. "Why can you see me?"
"I don't know." Aya nervously surveyed the parking lot but didn't see anyone within earshot. Still, she lowered her voice, just in case. "I've always been able to see souls. It's probably how you found me in the first place. Can you tell me what your name is?"
"Julia," she whispered, her expression wistful. "Julia MacGregor. You said you could help me. Is that true?"
"I'm going to try," Aya said firmly, "but I need you to tell me everything that you know."
Notes:
A/N: Hello, hello! How are you all?
Thinking of leaving without a comment? Aw, please leave one! I'd love to hear what you think of the story so far!
Ever Yours,
~ Anne
Chapter Text
"That girl was hiding something," Sam said.
"Noticed that too, did you?" Dean's unbuttoned jacket flapped as he strode across the street. He consented to dress the part of a Fed, but he would shuck the suit in favor of his boot-legged jeans and a Henley as soon as possible.
Sam followed him to the Impala. He propped his arms on the car's roof, his fingers playing with his pen. He squinted at Kaladi Coffee Roaster's wood-sided storefront; short iron fences blocked off its two-table patio section from the narrow sidewalk. Though the lanky guyfriend exited the shop into the bright mile-high sunshine, fitting white earbuds into his ears, the skittish girl in the ripped skinny jeans did not.
"I don't know what it was," he said, "but she seemed really nervous about something."
"Maybe she thought you were a giant," Dean said.
"Dude. To her, you were a giant."
"I know." He smirked in satisfaction.
Sam repressed the urge to roll his eyes. This was still about Christine, a woman neither one of them was ever going to see again. "I'm serious," he said. "We've talked to everyone close to the missing people here in town. We spent yesterday searching the nightclub, their dorms, and their apartments for traces of hex bags, sulfur, or ectoplasm. Nothing."
"This place is entirely too clean," Dean agreed, checking the gutter as though for litter, and seeming put out when he didn't find any. "What about demon signs? Cattle deaths, freak electrical storms, temperature fluctuations, the usual."
Sam shook his head. "Not in the area. Spring weather in the Rocky Mountains is temperamental as a rule."
"Doesn't sound like we have much of a case, then."
"There's something here," he disagreed. He tapped the pen on the metal roof. "Something that I can't put my finger on. Did you see the lamp?"
Dean lifted his shoulders in a yeah, so what? kind of way. "I couldn't smell any ozone. It was coffee heaven in there."
Sam chuckled. "Yeah, it was." He refrained from mentioning either the guyfriend's interest in Dean or Dean's interest in the girl, knowing perfectly well that one would start a fight and the other would be compared to a coffee-scented scratch-n-sniff out of Busty Asian Beauties. Even though she had noticed the lamp, too.
"I dunno, Sam." Dean unlocked his door and opened it with the familiar loud creak. The one that always made people's heads turn. Sometimes twice, if they liked what they saw. "Maybe there's something here, and maybe there's not. Whaddaya wanna do?"
"Get some coffee," he said, and was rewarded with Dean's approving grin, "then head back to the motel. There's something I want to check out."
As he started back across the street, Dean yelled, "Don't forget the pie!"
He gained the curb and then threw out his hands in a universal WTF gesture. If people hadn't been looking before, they sure were now. "I never forget the pie."
"You and I have different definitions of 'never.' "
"You and I have different definitions of 'food,' too."
Dean levered himself into the Impala. Then he rolled down the window and stuck an admonishing finger out of it. "Pie."
"All right, you big jerk." Defeated, Sam offered a strained smile to a pair of attractive college girls, giggling at him, before he pushed his way into the coffee shop.
..::~*~::..
Being dead, it wasn't anything like what she'd imagined.
It also wasn't much different.
For one thing, she was still here. Still on Earth. No golden gates, no heavenly host, no cottony clouds or harp music, no Nanny or Grampy to meet her at the end of a tunnel of light. Julia walked along the red cobblestone path just as she'd always done. She didn't sink into it, but she didn't float away from it, either. The breeze did not ruffle her hair, but she could pick up scents just fine, like the coffee wafting out of Aya's unraveling braid. She could feel the hardness of the cobbles through her shoes, but the wedges didn't bother her feet. Nor did her bra pinch, or her skirt ride up. Which was nice, considering she may end up wearing the same outfit for the rest of eternity.
What a depressing thought.
College students swarmed the green. Some were enjoying the fresh grass and the sunshine unhindered by still-bare trees, tossing Frisbees or kicking hacky sacks back and forth. Others rushed between the buildings, arms full of books and folders, their expressions harried. Aya threaded her way through clumps of people, her destination clearly the historic red brick building with the white columns. She passed between two guys in bulky crimson sweatshirts who paid her as much attention as they would a Labrador, for they were comparing something on their phones, their backpacks slung over their shoulders.
They didn't move aside for Julia as she assumed they would. They passed right through her.
She stumbled to a stop, thunderstruck.
She felt the intrusion, but not as pain. More like running her fingers through water. Except her body was the water. It broke apart and then settled back into shape like waves gentling on the shore.
Why did that make sense? It shouldn't make sense!
The frat boys didn't even slow. They went right on arguing over their phones and laughing behind her. She pressed her fingers into her forehead, willing the memory of a drug-induced headache to go away. By the time she'd collected herself, Aya had moved far ahead. She thought to herself, hurry.
She expected to break into a jog to catch up. Instead, she blinked—with her whole body—and then she was walking side by side with Aya. Natural as breathing. Which she tried to steady before it could ramp up into full-blown hyperventilation. Especially since she was acutely aware of the fact that no air was entering or exiting her mouth or nose.
Aya didn't seem to notice her perplexity. "I need to pick up my cap and gown for Friday, and then we can go," she said into her powered-off cellphone so that no one would notice her talking to nothing. She jumped up the steps to the front doors.
Julia followed her down a modern hallway toward the offices. "Where do you want to go?" she asked. She touched her throat, where the knife had slit her open. Smooth skin met her fingers, and her voice came out normally, instead of that tortured whisper it had been at first. Aya had explained that as she became more accustomed to being dead and finding peace with the fact that her life was over, her soul would heal itself. Seemed like she was right. It helped that Aya was giving her something else to focus on, something to do rather than haunt strangers' bedrooms in the wee hours of the morning. "I don't know where Kittney took everyone. I don't even know what she did with my body, or Luka's."
They both winced. Aya, tucking her phone into her bag, ducked into a smaller hallway, headed for the restrooms. Julia, thinking of the site of her abduction, blinked herself into the ladies' before her. A little flustered, she waited by the mirror. Then she stood there staring at it, appalled.
Wasn't she invisible? How could she have a reflection?
Aya appeared. She checked the stalls for occupants and then joined Julia at the sinks. Her dark brown eyes nervously flicked toward the reflection's gray face. Failing to pull off nonchalant, she said, "Mirrors have always had the ability to capture a soul's reflection. That's why people used to cover them with cloths at a wake, so the souls of their dearly departed wouldn't stick around to haunt them."
Julia couldn't imagine what Aya's problem was. She wasn't the one who was dead.
"Nobody else can see it," Aya said, still in that careful tone. "It's okay, Julia."
"How is this okay?" she demanded in a voice thick with tears. The mirror, frost encroaching from the edges, framed her in a clear but diminishing oval. Next to Aya, vibrantly alive, she seemed washed-out, her hair tangled and her face dirty, her front soaked with brownish blood. It was as though she stood in a separate room, which the bright lights did not reach.
Her eyes freaked her out the most. They glared from ominous shadows, the whites almost glowing, the original blue of the irises overtaken by gray. She backed away with a cry, throwing out her hand. The report of cracking glass made Aya suck in a breath.
"Julia," she said again, louder than before. "You're right. It's not okay. Souls who suffer a violent death, they're angry, confused, scared, in grief. Sometimes they lash out."
Julia gulped down her tears. The mirror was entirely frosted over. "Lash out? You mean I'm doing that?" You mean, I could do that to you? Was that why Aya seemed so nervous?
The smaller woman nodded, her mouth sad. When she spoke, her breath came out on a wisp of white. "The souls that I see, here on Earth, are made up of memories. Your appearance is like a snapshot of what once was, but you're using emotions and electromagnetic energy to interact with me and with the material world. What happened to you, it shouldn't have. It isn't fair. However, there's something better for you. I'm sure of it. All you have to do is let go of the memory and let the light take you where you belong."
"What about Luka?" The timidity of Julia's voice surprised her. It was easy to feel like a child in Aya's comforting, knowledgeable presence.
"I haven't seen him," she answered, "so I'm assuming he moved on already. His death was quicker. He may not have had time to question it." As the frost began to recede off the mirror behind her, she moved closer, her gaze steady. "He's probably waiting for you in the light. Can you see it?"
Julia cast a guilty glance at the crack that ran across the reflection of her eyes, and then she turned resolutely from it. "I don't see a light," she said. "I don't want to see a light. I want to stop them first. That girl, and whoever she's working for."
"So do I," Aya said, both pleased and relieved, nervous and determined. "The first step is finding Marr and the others, which is something we can do. I hope. Come on."
Julia went with her, but this time, she drifted without realizing it, lost in a fog of her memories. She thought about her life, her parents, her Luka. She thought about that night in the club, about Marr, about Kittney. About Kittney's date, Vahe. About the smoke that had billowed out of Luka's body and had gone into his. How had she not noticed that Luka hadn't been Luka? How long had he been someone else?
Her thoughts darkened like storm clouds, veiling the sunshine and the green of the grass, the neon Frisbees and the ubiquitous backpacks. What had happened to Vahe? Where had he gone? What had that black smoke been?
She blinked. When had they come back outside? She made to run after Aya, who was now carrying a plastic garment bag, and came face-to-face with Vahe.
Julia goggled at him. He looked as though nothing had happened, his hair combed, his clothes clean, his cuts and bruises miraculously absent. But why—how—what was he doing here?
Then she remembered.
Two more before Friday. Do not fail.
Dear God. He was here to kidnap two more people.
He smiled, and she stumbled back, frightened. He could see her! His black, black eyes shone as he lifted a hand, palm toward her.
"Aya!" she cried.
A force—there was no other word for it—struck her squarely in the chest. Julia's awareness blew apart with a sigh.
..::~*~::..
Aya thought she heard Julia call her name.
She looked behind her, puzzled. Campus life was moving along as usual. Julia, however, wasn't there. Not unusual for a soul. No longer tied to the demands of a physical body, they came and went as their spiritual energy ebbed and their thoughts took them elsewhere.
Still, Julia was her best bet for finding Lemara. She scanned the people flocking outside to enjoy the nice weather. Students, some faculty, and a few parents who had arrived to prepare for graduation. As she stood on the path, searching for a glimpse of her friend, no one paid her the slightest bit of attention.
Except for one guy, wearing slacks and a loose polo shirt, his hair as black as hers but whose skin was whiter. He approached, calling her name. He stepped quickly, excitedly. "Aya, yes? That is you?"
She paused politely, trying to remember if she had ever met this guy before, trying to figure out how else he could know her name. She squinted. His face—not only was it not familiar, but—his face—
What was wrong with his face?
Too white. The skin looked like a Crayola crayon, waxy and shiny. The eyes, all black, lashes and lids too, blended into the thick black eyebrows like pits in which two minuscule, cold lights shone dully, as though penlights had sunken in tar. The moist lips, spreading over brassy, elongated teeth, were as black as the eyes. Patterns, like smoke curling beneath the too-white skin, rose from the corners of the mouth to the corners of the eyes, drifting across the slope of the large nose.
Aya couldn't speak. She stared at the gruesome face, throat working, her vision blurring at the edges. Monstrous. A monster beyond any she had encountered. The antipathy rolled off it in waves of sulfuric stink that made her head spin.
The thing wearing a person like a sock puppet realized at the same time as she that she was not fooled by it. The smile vanished, the smoke curled thicker and faster, and it lunged at her.
With a breathless squeak, she twisted away. She banged into others on the walk who responded in words of anger, but she couldn't hear them properly. She tripped on her old-gold graduation gown, draped in slippery plastic, and it spilled onto the cobbles. Flip-flops, Crocs, and sneakers ground it into the dirt. The thing was laughing, explaining itself and excusing her while it moved closer, and everyone was agreeing with it. Were put at ease by it. No one could see its true face. No one noticed her terror. The thing reached for her.
That time, it got a fistful of her messenger bag strap, hard fingertips digging into her breast. She immediately ducked out from under the strap, abandoning the bag and everything in it. She pushed people out of her way as she fled across the lawn, ignoring how the black-eyed thing raised a chorus of concerned shouts. It held up her bag, feigning bewilderment, really daring her to claim it. It wasn't going to chase her. Not here, not where it was so public, not in broad daylight.
Black smoke. The nose-scrunching reek of sulfur. Was this what had killed Julia? If so, what did it want with her, with Aya? Looking at it was like looking into the face of horror itself. And she was just leaving it there, with all those people. It could hurt any one of them. It could hurt all of them. There was nothing she could do about it.
She tore across the green and onto the street, nearly colliding with a pair of dog-walkers. She recovered and sprinted for the corner, focused on putting as much distance between herself and the monster as she could. She leaped across Evans, heedless of the red light and blaring horns, and gained the opposite walk.
She might have run all the way to the police station but, instead, she ran headlong into a man who appeared in front of her between one blink and the next. Pain exploded through her face, and then her backside and right elbow as she flew backward and landed hard on the sidewalk.
Another one!
Not a man. Something wearing a man. Something that burned like a candleflame around a wick, a candleflame the size of the Cash Register Building; it reduced the man to a silhouette, an anchor, small and black and featureless. The something had spread what her brain tried to classify as feathered wings when she blundered into it, but there were too many, and they were huge. They broke the sunlight into prisms and black holes as they furled and unfurled. Nested dots, like the patterns of peacock feathers, winked in the largest of them, glowing in shades of black light inks. The thing stared down at her with several sets of blazing blue eyes.
As before, no one else could see it. Oblivious shoppers crowded into restaurants and stores. Self-absorbed cyclists arrowed between parked vehicles and the traffic on the street.
She thought he—the man—spoke, but thunder boomed so closely, stereo speakers squealed in so high a pitch, and the wind shrieked so deafeningly that she thought for sure a plane had crashed right into the original Chipotle Mexican Grill.
She clapped her hands to her ears and screamed, a throat-tearing wail of confusion and terror. The scary things of the world liked the night, liked their secrets, liked to hunt and feed and breed in the shadows. Never had they shown themselves like this.
As though drawn by her fear, the black-smoke thing rounded the corner, her bag dangling from his fist. He saw the skyscraper-flaming thing and stopped dead. Loathing turned his face obsidian with seething patterns that warped and twisted his features into alligator scales—into lionfish spines—into melting flesh.
Aya tried to get up, but a zing of pain made her gasp and clutch her elbow. Blood came away on her fingers. The sleeve of her lavender sweatshirt had torn wide.
The first thing's black gaze darted from her to the winged thing of golden fire and back again in growing desperation. He shifted his feet, preparing to dash for her.
The winged thing swooped down on her. One arm—the human's arm—went around her waist. Two fingers touched her forehead, shockingly gentle. Then the sound of monstrous pigeons engulfed her.
She screamed again as they whisked her into the nothing.
Notes:
A/N: One of the things I loved about SPN was their version of angels. So this was me, taking some inspiration from the Bible . . . and inventing a demon's "true" face. We never did get to see what one looks like, did we? Was it creepy enough?
Please tell me, what do you think of this chapter? Are you looking forward to the next? Leave a comment, please!
Hoping you're all having the best of days,
~ Anne
Chapter Text
An angel.
A smite-first ask-questions-later holy memo jockey of the Big Guy Upstairs.
The demon who now thought of himself as Vahe darted through the polished wood and glass doors that led into the Tattered Cover bookstore. He lost himself among the haphazard shelving, navigating to the center of the maze of flying staircases so that he could reassemble his wits.
A fucking angel. Not a cherub either, no, not one of those simple-minded cupids, but a bleeding seraph! He'd heard the recent rumors about Alastair's run-in with one. Or had it been three? Hard to tell because no one sat down over a pint with the Grand Torturer. Alastair had been evicted from his vessel—a vessel disintegrated simply by being in the presence of one of the harp-and-halo crowd's true form—and sent hurtling back into Hell. Before that, no one had seen a seraph in over two thousand years. So, what the actual fuck was this one doing on Earth?
It couldn't know about the seal. Could it? Lilith had laid hundreds of false trails across the planet. There was no way the angels could have picked this one as the real deal, one of the sixty-six necessary to free Lucifer from his Cage.
When Vahe had seen the girl interacting with the soul of the dead redhead, he'd known she had to be one of the sacrificial keys. Right age, right gender, right place. However, the angel had taken her before Vahe could, simultaneously adjusting the memories of every human on the block to erase its presence, and hers. The damn thing hadn't shed a single feather doing it, either.
That kind of power, a grunt like him didn't stand a chance against it.
Vahe gulped a breath, staring at a row of travel photography collections featuring Australia, Italy, and Finland. The sweat continued to roll down his temples, collect in his armpits, and stick his shirt to his back. The angel had left him alive but hadn't done him any favors by doing so. When she heard what a cock-up he'd made of this simple fetch job, Lilith was going to suck his guts out of his borrowed body like a child slurping spaghetti noodles off a plate. She would make sure he couldn't smoke out before she was done, too. Let him feel every moment of exquisite agony.
Vahe began to shake. The sweat dripped off his chin like tears. He couldn't let her know. He had to fix this.
His boss, Kittney, should have arrived at the gate by now with the other keys. He considered contacting her to ask for new orders, or to request assistance, but she would turn him over to Lilith faster than he could jump ship. Anything to save her chunky ass.
Vahe swallowed the last of his cowardice with a mouthful of air that hurt his gullet on the way down. He straightened his posture and raked a hand through his hair, then smoothed his goatee.
Right, then. He was on his own.
He was still holding the girl's bag. He considered it; it looked like it had been fashioned from a cheongsam, the buttoned collar flattened to create the front flap, a motif of sinuous dragons embroidered with shiny thread. Rummaging through it, he came across her ID and a crumpled envelope containing a pay stub.
Putting those back, he dug deeper for the heavier objects, like keys. Her black myTouch Slide fit in his hand. Thumbing the smartphone so that it powered on, he smiled. Though he hadn't gotten the girl, she had handed him everything he needed to find her.
Vahe repacked the bag and swung it over his shoulder. He exited the store with a new purpose in his step.
..::~*~::..
Dean selected a bottle of Landlocked Ale from the minifridge and then flopped onto his rickety motel bed. He wiggled his denim-clad glutes into a more comfortable dent of the mattress. Then he sighed in contentment. Stupid confining monkey suit. Good riddance.
Sam was sitting at the table by the window in his sock feet, the pointed tip of his broad nose inching closer to his laptop's screen. A field of paper had taken over the tabletop. He'd taped some newspaper clippings together and printed out photos and maps on a portable printer, a pricey piece of technology that he'd argued for against risky and time-consuming trips to local copy shops, which admittedly left them open to discovery by the actual FBI. A few legal pad sheets covered in black Bic and red Sharpie scrawl dotted the paper landscape with yellow. As the field had spread, the remains of to-go coffee cups and boxes smeared with huckleberry pie filling had taken up residence in the small wastebasket by the TV.
How many times had Dean looked at this same scene in the past four years? The only things that changed were the style of the furniture, the color of the curtains, and the seasons.
That was all he was willing to change.
"What did you find?" he asked, legs crossed at the ankle, his head propped on a folded arm. He took a swig of his beer. Nice and cool, unfiltered but not too bitter. Just the way he liked it.
"Remember how I said something was bothering me about the last four disappearances? Here." Sam spent a minute shifting books and papers around until he excavated two blue file folders.
Dean took them. Dossiers, stamped with the Colorado State Police shield. He flipped through them and then looked at his brother.
"Julia MacGregor and Luka Vrban," Sam said, ready with his explanation. "Two of the people I traced to The Church here in Denver last Friday night. Julia is twenty-four, Luka twenty-seven."
"You think that's important, the age?" he asked seriously. Much as he liked to tease his little brother, Sam was as adept as John Winchester had been at connecting the dots. Research could win half the fight before it started.
"Yeah, I do," Sam answered. "Now look at these."
He proffered a manila folder full of grainy, blown-up photos of a black-haired man. Most of them seemed off-center, from the side, partially obscured, or out of focus.
Dean riffled through them. "I thought there weren't any surveillance photos." He slid one from the folder. He'd recognized the blond curls of Luka Vrban, who stood next to the black-haired man.
"There aren't," Sam said. "These are from cellphone cameras, tagged with the location and the date on Facebook and MySpace. I cropped them and then enlarged them."
"Awesome," Dean said. The things Sam could find on the internet. So much more effective than walking the beat, spending hours on the phone, or waiting days for information to arrive in the mail, like when their mother had been a hunter. "So, who is the vampire wannabe?"
Sam awarded his joke a dimpled grin. "That's Vahe Donabedian, twenty years old. In fact, he was reported missing. Luka was identified as one of the abductors. See, that was what was bothering me. In all other instances, couples were taken. Dating, engaged, or married, but Julia and Vahe weren't connected at all."
"Wait." Dean scrunched up his nose, squeezing his eyes shut so he could shuffle the faces of these people around like playing cards against the backs of the lids. He gestured with his handful of photos. "This Vah-hay guy—" he tried out the unfamiliar name— "was a victim? But he's not twenty-two, either."
"Exactly," Sam said, as though satisfied. He reclaimed the file folders and held up one of the blurrier shots. "Neither is this girl. Kittney Johnson. She's seventeen and the second abductor."
"Neither one of them was old enough to get into the club. Nice." Suddenly, Dean sat up, feeling more awake than he had been. Kittney. It wasn't a common name. "Hey, wasn't that the girl Aya Nakano was asking about?"
"Yup." Sam sat forward, propping his elbows on his thighs, his whole aspect alight with his I Figured It Out! face. "Kittney Johnson is from Duluth, Minnesota, where she attends Denfeld High School and lives with her biological parents and one baby brother."
Dean leaned back again. "Long way from home. Runaway? Or demon possession?"
"Possibly both. So how did Aya know about her? And why lie about Kittney's home situation?"
"Sounds like one of us needs to question Aya further." Dean savored his next mouthful of beer. "What the hell. I can take one for the team. I'll do it."
Sam gave him a long-suffering look, which made him grin.
"Sure," Sam said, his voice thick with insinuation. "You're going to 'interview' the chick who might be a demon. You're a saint, Dean."
"Hey," he said, grinning then for an entirely different reason. He tilted the bottle to his lips. "She's hot."
The scream ripped into him like a chainsaw in the hands of Leatherface. Piercing, loaded with pure terror, and right there, it ricocheted around the dingy motel room like a superball. He jumped several inches off the mattress, muscles as locked as though he'd drunkenly pissed on an electric fence. His beer fountained all over him.
"Jesus!" Heart pummeling a lung, he rolled off the bed. Then he realized his mistake. Not the Son of God, who may or may not exist, but— "Cass!" he roared.
The angel looked as disgruntled as Dean had ever seen him, which wasn't saying much. Castiel did his head-tilted side-eye at him. Then he addressed the groaning bundle at his feet in his customary monotone. "Was it necessary to scream at me?"
"Was it necessary to drop me?" the bundle whimpered, and Dean did a double take. It was Aya Nakano, looking distinctly the worse for wear.
"What the hell?" he said. He glanced at his little brother.
Sam was rubbing his head. The lamp hanging above the table swung in a tight, squeaking circle as though he'd cracked his skull into it by quickly unfolding to his full height. His chair lay on its side two feet away from him and papers littered the floor. Fortunately, the laptop had not fallen.
Neither the angel nor the girl paid them any attention.
"You screamed at me. That is why I dropped you." Castiel leaned down and offered her a hand to help her stand.
She eyed it as though it were a dog about to bite her. Her trembling fingers explored the curve of her forehead. "I can't see you anymore. What did you do to me?"
"I applied a filter to your reikan," he said; Dean couldn't believe how easily the foreign-sounding word popped out of the angel's mouth, especially since he had no idea what it meant. Castiel straightened, letting his arm drop to his side. "It is easier to converse with you through my vessel."
"Your what?"
"My vessel."
Her face crumpled and her little hands curled into littler fists. "Is that supposed to mean something to me?"
Dean recognized the clenched teeth, the obvious desire to either scream or to hit something. Castiel had that effect on him, too. He set his empty bottle on the nightstand between the single beds and used the bend between thumb and first finger to squeegee the beer out of his stubble. "Cass. We talked about this."
Castiel's eyes widened innocently, but he wasn't faking it. "Not about this. I saved her from a demon."
"You saved her." Dean snorted. Well, at least they knew now that Aya wasn't possessed. "Last I heard, you angels were all about the non-involvement in human affairs. You've never helped us save anyone. You and Uriel were ready to purify a town of a thousand people just to get at one little witch, remember that?"
Castiel gave him another soulful look, slightly wounded, a whole lot condescending. "Orders are orders. You understand," said the look. Dean made a noise of disgust in the back of his throat. Typical angel prick.
At least Castiel wasn't the rabid dog that Uriel seemed to be, since he preferred to put people to sleep rather than fight them. But Uriel? Dean hoped to God that junkless son of a bitch wasn't going to show up, too. The motel room was cramped enough.
"Why did you bring her here?" Sam asked, attempting to inject reason into the conversation. Tentatively, he leaned down and offered Aya his hand. That one, she took.
"Agent Buchanan?" As he levered her upright, she looked frantically around. "Why—How—Where are we? Agent Abbot?"
"Hi," Dean said. The winning smile he offered her was ruined a bit by the fact that she had, unintentionally, caught them with their pants down.
"He is Dean Winchester," Castiel said, a slight line appearing between his brows. "And that is his brother, Sam. There is no one named Agent here."
"Aw, Cass, come on," Dean groaned. "Read the room!"
"It is a sin to lie," the angel chided.
"But it makes things so much easier!"
"Wait," Aya said slowly. "You aren't FBI?"
Sam opened his mouth, but only a few half-formed letters came out. She gazed up at him, perplexed, but he seemed, for once, at a loss. He turned the full force of his lost puppy eyes on Dean, who wasn't even going to try.
"Dean," Castiel said into the awkward gap. "Remember how I told you that certain people—special people—can perceive my true visage? She is one of them, and she is being hunted."
At this alarming proclamation, Aya edged around Sam, hiding behind his arm. The top of her windblown head came nowhere near his shoulder.
Interesting that she would trust a man who had impersonated a federal agent over one who housed an angel. Then, something else occurred to Dean and he snickered.
"Come on, Cass, she's totally freaked out," he said, still chuckling. "You can't look that bad, can you?"
When no one, not even Sam, said a word, he subsided, embarrassed. "Well, do you?" he wondered in a quieter voice.
Castiel considered that. Finally, he said, "I am . . . mighty."
A beat of silence. A tick of the second hand.
"That's not the word I would have chosen," Aya said.
Ha! Girl had a spark. Dean coughed into his fist, but Sam barked a laugh before hastily turning it into a throat-clearing, which made Dean feel better.
Aya peeped around Sam's elbow, suspicion woven through her expression. "That thing, you said it was a demon. But who are you? What are you?"
"My name is Castiel. I am an angel of the Lord," Castiel said, drawing himself up proudly.
She stared at him as though he'd grown four heads. "Yeah, right."
He graced her with the condescending, pitying look.
The brothers sighed.
"Dean," Sam said, "we've gotta deal with this. What do you want to do?"
"You take this one. The last time I explained anything to a girl, she punched me," he said. He headed for the bathroom, pulling his sodden shirt over his head. His amulet slipped out of the collar and thumped him in the chest. Then he stopped and stuffed the shirt into Castiel's hands. "You. Stay. Clean up this mess you made."
The angel frowned. "It is not my job to—"
"I don't care what your job is," Dean snapped. "You brought her here, you help explain. Capisce?"
"Yes, of course," he said, though hesitantly. "Capisco. What do I do with this?"
He held up the shirt.
Dean poked his head out of the bathroom door. "Find a laundromat," he said, knowing full well that all the angel had to do was snap his fingers and poof!—shirt all clean. He slammed the door and turned on the shower.
Notes:
A/N: Please comment and tell me your thoughts!
Thank you, Dearest Readers!~ Anne
Chapter Text
Whatever Castiel had done to her reikan, it seemed to apply only to him.
Taking a bite of a sweet potato fry, Aya watched their server walk across the dining room of Spanky’s Roadhouse—and the soul trailing behind him, his small cheeks mottled with the same distinctive maroon flush. Spring evenings tended to be too cool for comfort. The little boy reached for the button that lowered the garage door wall of the diner at the same time as their server, but of course, he couldn’t manipulate it. He pouted, bottom lip pushed out, as the door rattled downward to shut out the blue-green twilight. Then he tried again at the second one with the same amount of success.
The music blaring from the ceiling-mounted speakers overlapped the rush of traffic and the first cricket songs of the year. Three flatscreens played three separate programs above the bar, while patrons clustered around the tall tables to unwind from a long day, eating, drinking, and, in the case of the many college students, flirting. Sam had assured her that talking in a place like this was more private than in a motel room; the crowd, yelling to be heard over the music, would mask anything they said if they kept their voices down.
Vengeful spirits could make themselves visible to anyone, could interact with the physical world if their anger, their grief, or their fear were strong enough. There was another word for them, poltergeist, or noisy ghost. They, Sam had explained, were what hunters like he and his older brother dealt with, forcefully sending them on their way no matter how much they didn’t want to go. A hunter’s job: To protect the living from the things that went bump in the night. Vampires. Werewolves. Djinn. Witches. Shapeshifters. Wendigos. Changelings. Curses and cursed objects. The list went on and on. But there were so many earthbound souls quietly going about their non-lives, drifting in and out of the Veil, forgotten by the world around them, hurting no one. She’d never met anyone else, besides her obaa-chan, who could see them.
Castiel could; he was watching the little soul, too. She studied him, trying not to be obvious about it and probably failing. An angel of the Lord, he’d said. She didn’t consider herself of any religion, though her family casually participated in Shinto practices brought over with her grandparents. She knew next to nothing about angels except that their flowing robes, bare feet, Caucasian faces, blond hair, and white dove wings influenced a lot of popular culture. They were supposed to be glorious. Ethereal. Otherworldly. Beatific.
Castiel’s overall appearance, though clean, was disheveled. His thick, dark brown hair was, to put it nicely, tousled. Below that, the look of a man royally hungover smudged a face that outed him on the wrong side of thirty. He wore a dark suit under a beige trench coat, the shirt collar undone. A loosened blue tie hung crookedly against the shirt like an afterthought. He sat sideways in the booth next to Dean as though he’d claimed the spot by accident, one plain-toed oxford ready to trip an unwary server, his place setting untouched.
From head to toe, he looked harmless. Vulnerable. Like a pencil-pushing amnesiac wandering the streets on the bad side of town, about to get jumped and totally unprepared for it.
Aya selected another fry, comforted by its soft texture. The unkempt clothes, the slight build, the tired face, they did not belong to Castiel, but if there was another soul in there with him, she couldn’t see it. The angel overpowered every other presence. Whatever he’d done to her reikan didn’t block it completely, either. If she held still and let her eyes lose focus, she could catch the shadows of wings rising above his shoulders like water-damaged spots on a photograph, and the white-hot gleam, like the pilot light of a gas stove, simmering in the depths of his wide-set, cobalt-blue eyes.
Eyes that turned toward her, though his head did not move.
She froze, unhappy about being caught staring. Also—Yikes. Harmless, vulnerable, unprepared? Try strike them all down with a bolt of lightning if they pissed him off. She blushed and dropped her gaze to her Irish cream milkshake. Her nerves warned her that he could go up in golden flame and fill the diner with burning eyes, prisms, and black holes at any moment.
The brothers didn’t notice.
“Look at that, Sammy,” Dean said, holding the top bun of his cheeseburger and beaming like a guy who had just won a complete home theater setup. He gestured toward his plate. “Bacon and a whole fried egg, right there.”
Sam snorted and gave the burger a suspicious once-over. “What is that called? The Heart Attack?”
Dean’s grin faltered. “Yes,” he said, defiant. He replaced the bun and picked up the sandwich, fingers spread to hold it all, grease dribbling over the heavy silver ring he wore on his right hand. He took a huge bite.
Aya giggled as he chewed in the most bovine way he could, elbows on the table, mouth open, eyelids at half-mast.
“Dude, that’s disgusting,” Sam said with an affectionate grin.
“No, it’s delicious,” Dean said out of the corner of his mouth, aiming a ketchup-covered onion ring at him as though it were a pistol.
Sam chuckled. “I’ll take your word for it.”
Aya rubbed salt off her fingers. Watching the Winchesters was like watching videos of otters playing with their favorite rocks. It made her happy. She appreciated their good Midwestern looks the way she appreciated a blooming apple tree, or the translucent aquamarine of snowmelt racing down a creek bed, or the joy that made a soul glow when it moved into the light. The brothers, tall, fit, brown-haired, hazel-eyed, tan-skinned. So alike, yet so different. Sam had brought his work to the diner. He absently left his fork lying across his cobb salad as he typed odd calculations into a spreadsheet. From her slanted view of his laptop screen, they looked like coordinates, combinations of them, but whatever he was doing with the numbers, he didn’t seem satisfied. Dean, on the other side of the booth, ate with gusto, his unshaven cheek bulging.
Back at the motel, Sam had asked her if her Sight had manifested shortly after her twenty-second birthday, and then seemed relieved when she had explained reikan was a gift within her family. It hadn’t been easy getting over their mutual surprise, but believing him, trusting him—that had been shockingly easy.
Dean had the sort of commanding, stick-with-me-and-you’ll-live presence that made her sit up and listen. He had explained to her that they were on the trail of the demons who had taken Lemara. Then, and only then, had some of her anxiety eased. Sgt. Kuemper, wrapped in departmental red tape and procedure, hadn’t instilled a lot of confidence in her; Dean, the ivory-paneled grip of a handgun peeking above the waistband of his jeans as he packed his duffel, had.
“They killed Julia,” she’d said in the voice of a mouse. “Because she was too old for their ritual.”
Though he’d been joking only moments before, a feral stillness had taken over his handsome face, transforming him into the hunter he claimed to be. “How do you know that?”
“She told me.” She had retreated into her sweatshirt as both brothers had come to attention, but neither one of them had laughed, scoffed, or shown her anything but respect. “Luka is dead, too.”
Dean had cussed with flavor. “We’re going to find them,” he’d said heatedly. “I promise you that.”
It had been easy to believe him, too.
And Castiel?
“Why did you save me?” she had asked him.
“I was ordered to,” he’d answered in his emotionless, gravelly voice. Then his focus had switched to Dean. “My superiors confirmed that the demonic activity I sensed in the area relates to one of the seals. We do not yet know which one. They have requested your assistance.”
While Sam and Castiel and Dean had argued about a lot of things that meant nothing to Aya, so angrily that even the detached angel had raised his voice, she’d tried to take stock of her current situation. Like how she’d gotten there. On the wings of an angel. Like how she couldn’t go home. There might be a demon waiting for her. Like how every minute that passed put Lemara and those other people in greater danger. There was nothing she could do. She’d sat at the motel room’s table, her mind reeling as she looked over the books and notes spread across it, struggling to fit what she knew of life into this bigger, scarier world. But now, squeezed into a diner booth with all three men . . .
A mortifying realization stole over her. She was capable of thinking someone sexually attractive. Who knew.
With a pang, she thought of Lemara. Someday, ace, you’re gonna meet that someone special and feel the spark.
Morosely, Aya ate another orange fry. Why did it have to be this someone? She couldn’t even tell which one was so attractive, the non-human entity or the borrowed body. Which, by the way, was too old for her. Who knew where it had been! This man, this stranger, could be married. He could be a father. He could be gay. He could be dead. Yet, never once in her entire life had she felt the sort of yearning toward another person as she did right at that moment, an alien desire that played havoc with her internal rhythms in an extremely unpleasant and embarrassing way.
She pushed the heel of her hand into her eye, absently trying to discourage a headache. She didn’t need this. Not today. Things were weird enough as it was.
“You’re injured,” Castiel said.
“Huh? Oh.” She bent her arm so she could examine the scrape, which she’d cleaned as best she could in Spanky’s restroom. “I got this when you knocked me down.”
Though his expression didn’t change, he nevertheless seemed upset by this news. “Let me see it.”
Without waiting for her consent, he reached between the ketchup bottle and her melting milkshake and took her hand.
His hand, she noticed, was short and broad and a lot bigger than hers, the nails neatly trimmed, the skin cool and soft. He turned her wrist and pushed her ripped sleeve out of the way so that the light above them picked out the scabs that made a scarlet mess of her forearm and elbow. She thought about pulling her hand away, but she didn’t want to make a scene. Besides, it still hurt. A lot. So, she and the Winchesters watched, unspeaking, as the white fire kindled in Castiel’s blue eyes.
A tiny, trapped star blazed in his palm. He passed it over her injury as though wiping down the table’s surface with a rag but didn’t make contact. It left unblemished skin in its wake.
He released her at the same time she drew back. Aya turtled into the upholstered bench, scratching her feverish arm. Not because she couldn’t believe what he’d done, but because she could, and it was itchy. He’d also healed the burn she’d gotten at work that morning, rendering the Band-Aid moot.
Angels are among us.
“Thank you,” she said, barely able to make her voice audible.
Gratitude tasted so inadequate. She wanted something more. She wanted him to look away and leave her in peace, but she wanted to cry at the thought that he might. She wanted to make him speak, but she couldn’t think of a thing to say. She wanted to see his true form. She wanted to believe he was as human as she was. She wanted to run home and hide her head under her pillow. She wanted to touch him again. To make sure he was real.
All her life, she’d avoided physical contact. Even a pat on the shoulder could be misconstrued as a sexual overture, and the awkward conversations that followed were too often abusive toward her. She’d learned how not to come off as flirty, though if she were enthusiastic about a topic, she got it wrong. Other people’s flirting went right over her head unless Lemara or Paulie pointed it out. She left the room if what she was watching on her TV began to steam, usually on the pretext of refreshing her drink or using the bathroom, because she couldn’t stand the sounds. Kissing noises made her feel the same as if she put her bare hand down the disposal and pulled out a wad of soggy, rotting matter.
So why, under every star in the sky, was she wondering what it would be like to kiss Castiel?
She was sure she was staring again. At his vessel’s interesting, strong-jawed face. At his mouth, the upper lip fuller than the lower. At the way his eyes drooped at the outer edges, hiding his thoughts. His gaze seemed both curious and wary. What did he see when he looked at her?
“You’re welcome,” he said, but it almost sounded like a question.
She sat there drowning in confused misery. Sam finally picked up his fork and began to eat.
Abruptly, Castiel turned to Dean and said, “I need to speak with you. Privately.”
Dean, mouth full of half-masticated cow, raised his peaked eyebrows. “Wha’, righ’ ’ow?” he asked, indignant.
“Right now,” Castiel agreed. He stood up and walked toward the door, expecting Dean to follow.
Sam’s eyebrows traveled toward his hairline, but Dean shook his head at him and stood, still chewing. After gulping half his pint of beer, he wiped his mouth and fingers but threw down his napkin as though it had offended him. Then he swaggered out of the diner, drawing more than one admiring glance after him.
For Aya, it was as though he didn’t exist. She watched Castiel through the front windows. He wended his way between parked cars, putting distance between himself and the diner. The night breeze fluttered his open trench coat. He paused under a yellowish streetlight, turning his face up the way people did to feel warm sunlight on their skin.
His leaving felt a lot like the gate closing in the Veil, when the world seemed dingier and chillier. She sat forward, tenting her forearms over her dinner, and put her face in her hands. Was this how everyone else felt all the time?
If so, the world was crazy.
Sam’s voice brought her out of her head. “So, you see ghosts.”
“Um.” She surreptitiously dried her eyes with her fingertips. “Yeah. Obaa-chan, my grandmother, called them tamashii—souls,” she added, in answer to his inquisitive look.
He seemed genuinely curious. “Are there any souls here now?”
“Yeah, a few,” she said. She picked up her neglected milkshake and stirred it to give her hands something to do.
Dean had reached Castiel, and they seemed embroiled in another argument, the angel standing wooden, the taller human gesturing angrily. Then Castiel produced something from his coat pocket and handed it over. She blinked, and just like that, he was gone as surely as though he’d never been there.
She took a sip of her shake, determined to keep it together. “There’s a toddler attached to our server. They look so much alike that I think they were twins. If his brother could still play with him after his death, that might be why he didn’t move on.”
“Yeah, I’ve heard that children can see spirits,” he said, sounding sad.
“Sometimes,” she agreed. “Lonely children, especially. Most of them grow out of it and then chalk the memories up to imaginary friends.” She paused, studying his expression. “Was that you?”
He coughed on his iced tea, surprised, but he did answer her. “I don’t know. Maybe.”
She smiled at him, feeling better with each passing second now that Castiel wasn’t there to mess with her head. “I see a middle-aged woman near that girl by the bar. I think it might be her mother.” She paused, listening hard through the general hubbub. The girl laughed at something her date said, too shrill, and listed dangerously on her stool, while the mother’s spirit pleaded with her in an unending, unheard stream. “She wants the girl to take better care of herself and not end up like her father, who died in the same car crash that killed her. He was the driver. Drunk. There is also a man sitting in the corner.”
She squinted at him where he occupied a spot somehow missed by the overhead lights, a wide-brimmed hat pushed high on his forehead. He was people-watching, just like her, his lip curled haughtily, his collar tight, his boots dusty, and holding an empty shot glass. “He looks like Val Kilmer did in Tombstone.”
“You mean as Doc Holliday?” Sam laughed, shaking back his hair.
“I don’t think it’s him, but yeah, someone from the eighteen-hundreds. A soul who has been around that long, even if he looks as normal and healthy as that, I leave alone. He’s here for his reasons and won’t be interested in anything I have to say.”
“But the others you would help?”
“If I can.” She stabbed her straw into her shake, felt it scrape the dip in the bottom of the glass. “They’re not supposed to be here. It’s sad that they still are, but people can be funny about death. What I learn from the souls is so personal. Making their loved ones believe that I’m not some delusional stalker can be . . .” She trailed off, not sure what she could say to convey how awful it felt to be accused of running a scam, called a psycho bitch, or to be threatened, sometimes with the police and sometimes with clenched fists or, once, a gun. “Other people, they’re more open to the truth. It feels so good to help heal their pain. Both of the living and the dead.”
A whiff of cool night air off a waxed cotton jacket. Sam, who had been listening avidly, looked up then, expectant. Dean had returned.
“Cass is gone,” he said unnecessarily. He plopped into the booth, sprawling across the bench, legs and arms wide. “Off to do whatever it is angels do when they’re not helping us with their problems. He gave me this, though.”
He dropped the thing he’d gotten from Castiel in the middle of the table. It was a paper wristband, The Church printed on it in purple ink. Aya picked it up, her heart breaking within her. The draggled band had been ground into asphalt. It still bore part of a tire track.
She pulled it taut between her fingers, wondering whose it had been because, along one edge, a smear of blood had dried to a dull red-brown.
Notes:
A/N: Hello, Dear Readers! Here it is - the transitory halfway point chapter! BLEH! lol. I'm not feeling super confident about this one, so I'd like to ask you all: Does it work for you? How is the flow - did I slow things down too much, ramble on too long, or perhaps did I err in the other direction and hurry things too quickly? Are you still with me? Bored? Interested? Please let me know!
~ Anne
Chapter 10: A Job to Do
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
Ow.
Julia slithered up a slope on her stomach. She dug her fingers into claylike dirt, dragging her body along. The dirt squeezed and clung. It fought her. It did not want to let her go.
The thought of being stuck in some hole underground frightened her. The fear lent her strength. Using her toes, she pushed herself forward. She cried out, half a sob and half a groan, as she struggled and strained to get free. Her upper body broke the surface into fresh air. She collapsed on the grass, gasping, exhausted, her legs trapped somewhere behind her.
After a few woozy seconds, Julia twisted so she could check on her knees, see if there was an easier way to get out of the hole.
There wasn't a hole. Her bare legs stretched out, clean and pale against a pebbly riverbank, though—she squinted. Not opaque. Transparent. She examined her hands, her tangled hair pooling around her arms. They flickered and stuttered, here one moment, gone the next, then weakly back, as though running on half power. The riverbank showed mistily through.
She had to pull herself together. Julia shut her eyes, concentrating as hard as she could on self. The wooziness and the tingling in her extremities passed. The sound of water running over rocks became clearer, as did the garbage-like mustiness hovering over everything.
She got uncertainly to her feet. Not for the first time since her death, she stood on the tumbleweed-choked shore of the South Platte River. Moonlight bounced off the water, while the headlights of passing traffic made animated shadows of everything except her.
Last she remembered, like, two minutes ago, it had been daytime on the DU campus. She turned a slow circle. The Gates Rubber Co. water tower rose to meet shredded, silver-black clouds, which, combined with the city's ever-present light pollution, prevented any glimpse of the stars above. Whatever Vahe, or the black smoke inside of him, had done to her, it had hurt like heck. Like dying all over again.
So why was she here?
Distracted, she picked her way along the deserted riverbank, wondering why she never seemed to run into other dead people. Where was everyone? Were they stuck in the hole, too? She didn't realize that something was pulling her along like an iron filing toward a magnet until she passed through a large, thorny bush and saw herself lying tangled in the base of it.
A mile wide and an inch deep. That was the Platte. Kittney must not have realized that the river, though swift in spring, was so shallow here.
Julia's shriek echoed up and down the water, startling a few ducks from the tall grass where they must have been nesting. She clapped her hands over her mouth to keep further screams inside. It wasn't like she could puke. She wished she could, though, which might relieve some of the pressure building inside her ribcage.
Dead Julia, lying half in the water, did not look good. Her blue eyes, filmed with white, stared out of a gaunt, bloodless, wrinkled face. Water filled her open mouth. Her hair flowed with the current like brown weeds, collecting bits of trash. The slit in her throat gaped wide, the skin and the stuff underneath gone translucent and slimy at the edges. Her clothes and her flesh had been rent by her body's descent from the lot above and its tumble over the rocks. One of her shoes was missing. Around her swollen wrist, the paper bracelet from the nightclub was still intact.
Julia knelt. The wristband. There was something odd about it. Like it was glowing? No, that wasn't it.
Like it was buzzing.
She reached out. Just as her fingertips would have touched it, an invisible harness clasped her like thin, iron-hard arms and yanked her backward, into the hole.
..::~*~::..
Dean plucked several folded bills from his pocket. He checked them briefly to make sure there was enough to cover the tab plus a tip, and then tossed them on the table amid their dinner dishes.
"Let's go," he said, impatient as always at sitting still. Especially after having dealt with the holy stick shoved up Castiel's ass.
"Look out for her," the angel had said. As if that wasn't what Dean had been planning to do from the moment he had dumped Aya Nakano in his lap. "The demons want her. They will be watching."
"This isn't my first day on the job," he had said aggressively, though he'd been mollified when Castiel's gaze had shifted minutely off his. "She'll be safe with us. Meanwhile, why don't you find out why the demons want her. Or better yet, where they are."
Castiel had stuck out his chin, a sure sign of offense taken. "What do you think we have been doing?"
"Sitting on your thumbs, by the look of it," Dean had said, unrepentant. "Two people have already died."
"Many more will die if this seal is broken."
"So, what's stopping you?" he had exploded. He hated that Castiel could do this to him, could bring his anxiety straight to the surface, could make him relive every frickin' mistake he had made up to this point. Show him a demon, he'd respond with a dead demon. But this need-to-know crap. It was as though the angels wanted him to fail.
Castiel had sighed. Had turned his face up in a move that was becoming annoyingly familiar, as though he sought guidance from a distant Heaven. "I don't know. We are being blocked. There is a great psychic fog thrown over this city, and my superiors have been unable to penetrate it."
Dean had breathed through his temper, uncomfortable with the reminder that Castiel, though powerful, was little more than a foot soldier, just like him. John Winchester had trained his boys the way the Marines had trained him. Dean knew all about following orders. He was damn good at it, in fact. However, orders from the top at times amounted to a heap of bullshit on the ground. In which case, the only way out was definitely not through.
Despite what he thought of angels in general, he couldn't help thinking of this one as a friend. Castiel seemed to understand what he did about orders, though it also seemed to pain him to admit it. He had shuffled his feet, taken a deep, unnecessary breath through his nose.
" 'So it is written, twenty-four is the number of souls,' " he had said, his voice more growl-like than ever. " 'Twelve shall be men, and twelve shall be women. Twenty-four is the number of hours. Twelve shall be after midnight, and twelve shall be before. When freed is the Void, neither Hell, nor Earth, nor Heaven offer sanctuary. Wail your grief, you children of the Lord, for the number of souls to sate the Void is uncountable.' "
Dean had stared at him. "What the hell does that mean?"
"It means you need to hurry." Castiel had handed something to him. "This was all I could find. Perhaps you will have better luck with it than I did."
Of course, Dean had looked down at the dirty paper bracelet, and Castiel had disappeared with the subdued flapping of his coat.
Frickin' angels.
"Well, part of that prophecy is pretty clear," Sam said, shrugging on his brown corduroy jacket. He ran a hand across the back of his neck, freeing the ends of his hair from the collar.
Dean didn't bother to respond except to flip up his collar against the night. None of it made sense to him. He'd thought the big number mojo was twenty-two, not twenty-four.
Aya, trotting next to Sam, zipped her sweatshirt closed. "What part? That whatever the—the demons—are planning, it will happen before midnight on Friday the twenty-second? Oh! Then that means that Marr is probably still alive!" She gave him a hopeful look.
They'd agreed that staying with her at her place was the best option until they could catch up to the black-eyed son of a bitch who had tried to nab her. Especially since the dead mouse that had been sharing their motel room had been the cleanest thing about it. Fishing his keys from his pocket, Dean unlocked the Impala's passenger doors and then moved around to the driver's side.
"That's what I think, yeah." Sam's door creaked loudly. "If we don't stop them, though, at midnight Friday, after all the sacrifices, the Void appears."
Dean imagined both Sam and Castiel making air quotes around the word. Pair of jackasses. His door creaked, too. "We just have to stop them, then."
Sam heard the anger in his voice, though he had spoken calmly and quietly. He tried not to let his little brother catch his eye, but he failed.
"We will," Sam said as though trying to pass conviction to him through force of will. "Stop them, I mean. If Cass is right, things aren't supposed to start until tomorrow at midnight. That gives us a little more than a day."
"To do what?" he demanded, more sharply than he should have. It wasn't Sam's fault, but he'd started and there was no stopping now. "Storm the castle? Gank some demons? We don't even know where they are. What are we supposed to do, make a wish on this?" He waved the draggled wristband. "They're playing with us. Both sides of this stupid war are playing with us, and we're the schmucks caught in between just because we happen to be human."
"Cass wouldn't do that," Sam stated, but the way he chewed on the inside of his lower lip gave him away.
"We don't know what Cass would do," Dean said, grimacing over the truth of the words. Castiel was an angel, but not the Michael Landon kind. Dean threw his arms wide, his keys jingling in his hand. "You and me, Sam, we are a couple of turds in their punchbowl. Uriel wants you dead because of what you can do. No matter what Cass says about needing us to do Heaven's work—" he spat the words as though they were the worm-riddled bite of an apple, "it's clear they don't trust us."
"Okay, maybe you're right—"
"I'm right and you know it. They're just jerking our chains!" Dean, stewing over the impossibility of their task, slumped against his baby to run his hand through his hair as though he could wipe his mind clean.
Sam gave him a look, the one that said he was starting to lose his phenomenal patience. "We have a job to do, Dean. That was why we came here. Not because of the angels, but to save people. Cass has given us something to work with. Just give me some time. Meanwhile, Aya can—wait. Aya?"
Dean's insides took a nosedive. You had one job, Winchester! "Great. Where the hell did she go?"
The brothers scouted around the car, even checking under it, the preferred ambush location of ghouls, before Sam quietly got his attention with, "Hey."
"What?"
Sam nodded toward the alley that led around the diner, past the bicycle rack. Aya, her lavender sweatshirt a pale gray in the dark, approached their server as he swung a big black trash bag into the dumpster against the building. She spoke to him but was too far away for Dean to hear what she said.
What did she think she was doing? Weren't they jumping through these hoops to keep her safe? Fuming, he started toward them, but Sam stepped in front of him, blocking his way.
"What?" he said again.
"Hang on a second," Sam said, his expression one of professional curiosity as he watched Aya and the guy converse in low voices. He smiled. "She's not a hunter."
Dean wondered how many marbles were still rattling around Sam's brainpan after his four months of tearing it up with that smarmy little demon, Ruby. "You don't say."
Sam glanced at him sidelong but then shook off the sarcasm. "She's not a hunter, but she helps people. Not because it's her job. Not because she has to. Because she can. There's a spirit attached to that kid."
"I don't see anything." He watched as the kid backed away from Aya, eyeing her as though she were dangerous, but she kept her distance and kept talking. Slowly, his defenses came down. He seemed to be listening to her. Then he seemed to lose track of his sense of balance and leaned against the dumpster.
"Not a vengeful spirit, not one strong enough to manifest." Sam sounded like he was in awe. "She helps spirits who dodge their reapers move on before it comes to that. Before it becomes necessary for a hunter to step in. Before people get hurt."
"Are you saying she's a living reaper?" He crossed his arms, frowning as he watched the poor man's drama playing out in the alley. Thousands of reapers hovered at deathbeds and scenes of accidents or crimes across the globe, but they didn't kill anyone. They waited for Death and then harvested the souls. Kind of like what Aya was doing right now, except she, having a corporeal body, couldn't personally escort the souls to the afterlife.
Sam looked fascinated. "Is that possible?"
He shrugged. Wasn't their whole schtick that anything was possible? Except unicorns. Everybody agreed that unicorns weren't real.
The flickering bulb over the diner's back door illuminated the red flush creeping up the kid's already ruddy face. Nodding like a bobblehead, he checked the pockets of his apron for his tab book, shakily wrote something on a scrap of paper, and then handed it to Aya. She bowed slightly as she took it and didn't see how the kid stared at her, as dazed as though she'd whacked him upside the head with an iron skillet. She turned and walked back toward Dean and Sam.
She stopped a few feet from them, her petite fingers pinching a fold into the scrap of paper. "Um. Sorry. We can go now."
"You don't have to apologize," Sam told her quickly, sounding as breathless as he had upon meeting real-life angels.
Dean rolled his eyes. Though Sam had been a sensitive kid who had grown into a gentle man, his big brother had managed to teach him a thing or two. Normally, the pair of them would have pulled out all the stops on their charm for a girl like Aya, with her soft pink skin, pink glossed lips, silky dark hair, slender body. A girl like that, she'd be a little slice of heaven in someone's arms. Then again, Dean wondered, not for the first time, if she even saw either one of them like that. Her eyes seemed to pierce through him, tracking ghosts that he couldn't see.
She reminded him of the psychic, Pamela Barnes, though it was hard to pinpoint why. Pamela had been confident, outgoing, flirty, naughty, and wise. Yet, look at what her recklessness had gotten her: Her eyes burned out of her skull for catching a glimpse of Castiel's true form during a séance, despite Castiel's repeated warnings for her to leave him be, back before they had known what he was, before he had taken a vessel. She had refused to back off by her own choice, but afterward, Pamela had not forgiven the brothers for getting her involved. Nor had she the day they'd gotten her killed.
Truth be told, Dean had not forgiven himself. If not for Castiel hauling his soul out of Hell and slapping it back into his body for Heaven's mysterious purposes, Pamela would still have had her eyes and that demon wouldn't have gotten the better of her in that crappy Wyoming motel room. Simple as that.
Now Castiel had given him a new job. Protecting this girl, wanted by demons, who could interact with spirits without the need for a talking board or a séance, and who may or may not be a human reaper.
So, he did what he always did. He played the funny one.
He flashed his most winsome smile. Nothing about his face or his voice or his posture hinted at the dark thoughts howling around his brain like demonic bats. "So, you're taking two guys home with you, and you went and got someone else's number?"
Aya answered him with a perfect deadpan. "Not his number, no. His mother's name and address."
He stared at her, mouth open with nothing to say. She reminded him of the clueless dick in the trench coat, too.
Now that he thought about it, hadn't he noticed some lingering looks going on between those two? He knew angels, within their vessels, were capable of affection toward a human, and attraction. Anna, who had turned out to be an angel who'd torn out her grace and had fallen from Heaven, had thought herself human at the time she'd looked at him with those starry doe eyes, but Castiel? Seriously?
Sam, who knew Dean's tastes as well as his own, smirked at his swing-and-miss. Dean chose not to respond. The three of them piled into the Impala, shutting the doors one after another. When Dean turned the key in the ignition, "Eruption" started playing at top volume, making Sam flinch and twist the stereo's power knob.
"I will need to talk to her about her sons before the little one can move on," Aya went on as though she hadn't noticed, musing to herself. Kneeling on the Impala's wide seat, she propped her elbows against the back dash and peered through the slanted window. The kid hadn't moved. She sighed, giving him a halfhearted wave that he returned like someone in a trance. "Losing a child so young is terrible. I can't imagine the pain that family has had to endure."
Nope. She didn't see him at all. She'd seen Castiel all right, so maybe humans weren't her thing.
A smile pulled at the corner of Dean's mouth. For the second time in the past few months, he didn't care that he'd struck out. First Jo Harvelle, now Aya Nakano. Which was all right. He'd be damned if he let anything happen to this girl. He wouldn't fail her the way he'd failed Pamela. Not this time.
They had a job to do.
Notes:
A/N: Woof. Looks like Dean happened. This was not in my outline. We've gone off the rails! But please don't worry. I'm putting us back on track next chapter. Lots to do yet!
Okay, all done! I hope you are still enjoying this story. Please drop me a line and let me know what you think. All thoughts are welcome here. :3
Yours,
Anne
Chapter 11: The Spy
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
Thank his dark father in the pit that he hadn't tried waiting for the girl in her apartment.
When Vahe heard the distinctive rumble of a classic muscle car, he darted into the shadowed hallway that cut the small apartment building in half. Disbelieving his rotten luck, he peered into the parking lot. A sleek black boat of a ride, coated in dust, purred into a parking place. Its Ohio plate read CNK 80Q3. The halogens shut off at the same time as the engine. The doors opened, and three figures emerged.
Damn it. Not only could that little slut see his real face, but she'd also brought the two worst possible men home with her.
He breathed a snarl that the human throat wasn't built for producing. It had been so long since he'd been sent topside on a mission. With great disappointment, he watched his hope of sneaking a taste of the girl before he delivered her going up like brimstone fumes. He was not about to get in line for a Winchester's sloppy seconds.
Hunters. The pair of them oozed arrogance. Unconcerned with what might be lurking in the dark, they ambled up the walk. Their layered clothing was loose enough to hide an arsenal apiece, but Vahe observed them with contempt. From here, they didn't look so tough.
Too bad he'd had to abandon the Luka meat suit, though. That one had been bigger.
The brothers and the girl turned into the ill-lit hallway. He put his back to the cone of yellowish light filtering through the open-faced, roughcast staircase. He pretended to unlock the door to the corner apartment as three sets of feet clad in biker boots, leather lace-ups, and lavender running shoes thudded up the steps to the third and top landing. Not one of the shoes' owners so much as looked his way.
"Does it always do that?"
"What?"
"The light."
The smallest shoes hesitated. "Yeah, um, lots of ghosts around here?"
A low-pitched chuckle.
In the unreliable cone of light, Vahe edged toward the stairs and then crouched under them, peering up. He couldn't see much up there, but he could hear just fine.
Tiny metallic scrapes floated downward. Then a hushed voice. "Are we really breaking into my apartment?"
A pssh sound. "Relax. The first time may seem a little questionable, but it gets more fun after that."
"Right, Dean. You treat all your dates to a standard B and E after dinner. Really ramps up the romance, doesn't it?"
"First of all, Sam, I wouldn't be caught dead letting my little brother tag along on a date. Second of all, how else are we going to get in? The demon stole her keys."
A click. A slight squeak as a door swung inward.
The girl made a whimpering noise. "Please don't tell me you've already broken in."
"No, of course not," said one brother, at the same time the other said, "Seriously, relax. We put everything back where we found it."
"Dude!"
"What?"
Vahe imagined the conversation switched to non-verbal at that point, for he heard nothing else as the three slowly passed across the threshold and the door clicked shut. The hunters weren't as stupid as they looked. He was sure they'd gone in with guns drawn, the traitor Ruby's Kurdish demon-killing knife at the ready.
Shut out from his target for the foreseeable future, he frowned, rethinking his plan. He needed two sacrifices. One woman. And one man.
If he couldn't get to the girl—and for all intents and purposes, she was locked up nice and tight behind the broad backs of the Winchesters—then he would have to make her come to him.
Ditching her bag had been his first order of business, but he hadn't gotten rid of everything. He jogged out to the walk, passing between straggly juniper bushes. Several identical buildings away, he slowed, stopped, and then dug her small black phone out of his pocket. Thumbing the slide, he bypassed her PIN with the barest burst of demonic energy. As he scrolled through her contacts, he paused on the thumbnail of a bottle-blond boy, who looked the right age and took up a good third of her call history.
Vahe opened their messages. He read them, smiling when he came across happy birthday wishes in February. Selecting the text box at the bottom, he began to type.
..::~*~::..
What was that noise?
Aya, her hair washed, blow-dried, and braided, and confident that this time she'd remembered deodorant, padded along in her comfiest jammies, printed with cats cavorting in bowls of ramen. Lemara had given them to her last Christmas.
Marr.
It was Wednesday. She'd last seen Lemara on Saturday.
Clasping her fist over the ache in her heart—Marr, where are you?—she followed the high-pitched chatter. It reminded her of a theremin, and it led her to her living room.
Dean had his back to the hallway, a picture frame in his hands, but Sam saw her emerge. His spine stiffened and he thrust his hand inside his coat. The lined corduroy muffled the noise but didn't prevent it. He stood there, eyes roving the walls and ceiling, as the scratchy electronic squealing continued.
The volume change got Dean's attention. He glanced at Sam's guilty expression, then at Aya, and then set the frame down on the fake wood mantel.
"Hi," he said, as he had in the motel room when she'd learned they were not, in fact, FBI, and flashed her a white-toothed smile.
"Hi," she said, smiling back. They looked so funny, like a couple of boys caught scribbling rude things on a park bench. She thought it kindest to put them at ease. They were her guests, and her self-appointed bodyguards.
Dean tilted his head toward the picture. Her and Lemara, taken at the Elitch Gardens amusement and water park last summer, both of them shiny with sunscreen and huge sunglasses, wearing bikini tops and cutoffs and brilliant smiles. Only she of the wiggling caterpillar eyebrows could make Aya feel good enough about herself to bare the scars on her belly like that. "Is this your roommate?"
"Yes, that's Marr," she said, a bit sadly. Lemara had always brought happiness and life with her. Now it felt like it was all gone, leached away by the passing days.
The thing in Sam's hand squealed again. Aya turned to him, pushing her anxiety to the side, and keenly asked, "What is that?"
"Uh," he said, and then hesitated, as though formulating and discarding several cover stories. Then, he sighed and brought his hand out of his coat. "EMF meter."
"You mean it picks up on electromagnetic frequencies?"
"Yeah. Have you seen one before?"
He showed her what looked like a deconstructed Walkman, a small, collapsible antenna rising from one corner. The row of red LEDs at the top flared brightest when the squealing reached its peak.
In other words, when he pointed the antenna at Latte, perched on the back of the couch, who laid her ears back and hissed. If she could have taken a swipe at him without tumbling off, Aya was sure she would have.
"Let me guess," she said as he frowned at the redlining meter, oblivious to Latte's growling. "Soul detector?"
"Yep. I made it myself," Dean said proudly.
"Cool. It works great," she praised him, and his smile widened. Then she pointed at what was, to them, the unoccupied space above the couch. "It found my cat."
Sam had a very expressive face, but he excelled at not blurting out everything on his mind. Hurriedly, he shut off the EMF meter and tucked it away.
Dean wasn't so good at it. He blinked. "Wait. You're saying you have a ghost kitty?"
"I do. She died last year." She moved next to him and picked up a different frame. It held several photos: Latte, her manic-eyed cat face poking out of the cuff of one of Lemara's long-legged pairs of yoga pants; Latte, dancing on her hind legs as Aya dangled a bit of rainbow yarn above her; Latte, curled up and sleeping with her paw over her eyes.
"Tripod," Dean said in a low voice to his brother, grinning, but Sam made a Shut Up Right Now face at him.
"I didn't know there were animal ghosts," the younger brother said, but not as though it were the truth. More like he was testing her.
"I've never seen one of a wild animal that wasn't bound here by a witch," she said, eliciting raised brows from them, "because they simply return to the land, but pets are different. Pets form attachments. Pets can love. They don't want to leave what they've always known. If there's no one left, they just sort of drift, lost."
"Do you help them, too?" Dean asked, trying to look serious but obviously hung up on the fact that she knew what witches could do.
"Sometimes." She wished she could pet Latte, convince her that these men were friends. "Dogs are easy. I point, and they go where I want them to, into the light. But cats? I point, and they try to sniff my finger. Not a lot I can do with that. Maybe when I die, she'll come with me."
Latte, claws extended, hunkered down and pushed herself to the edge as the brothers took seats on the couch. Her eyes gleamed in a remarkably unfriendly way.
"Why didn't we get a reading on the cat when we were here before?" Sam asked his brother, who shrugged.
"Latte doesn't like guests," she said, not believing she was having this conversation with not one, but two men she'd just met. "She used to hide inside my box spring, so she probably hid in the Veil until you left. Can I, um, can I get either of you some iced tea?"
It was a pathetic and see-through attempt to change the subject, but they let her do it.
"That would be nice, thank you," Sam said.
Dean declined. He stretched out his long legs, kicking his brother's feet out of his way. Sam kicked him right back, sprawling to take up two-thirds of the cushion real estate.
Latte growled at the back of Sam's shaggy head before diving off the couch and vanishing.
"Bitch," Dean muttered, and for a second, Aya thought he was referring to her cat. He extracted a throw pillow from under his butt.
"Jerk," Sam retorted. He snagged the pillow before Dean could hit him with it and crammed it behind his back.
Wanting to laugh but too hopped up on the weirdness of it all, Aya fled.
..::~*~::..
The college campus at night. Too motionless, too dark, and too full of whispers.
It looked deserted but for a few cars moving on the street. Paulie stayed in the circles of light under the streetlamps when he could. After what had happened to Lemara, he didn't blame Aya for texting him so late. He wished, as did Darika, that she would ask for help more often. She was always there for them; it was nice to be there for her.
He checked his messages one last time.
Hey~
Guess what I 4got to do! Need 2 get cap and gown at Admin Off build, but don't want 2 walk there aft dark.
Kubel said she'd wait 2 let me in. Meet in 10?
More like fifteen. Though he didn't live far from DU, the Administrative Offices building stood by itself in the far northeastern corner. He strode along as quickly as he could. His flips slapped the concrete, criticizing him. He should have worn shoes. The night sky had clouded over, and his feet were freezing.
Without warning, the light overhead doused itself in a shower of sparks. So did the one ahead, and the one behind.
He hesitated, staring up at them. That wasn't normal. Was it?
Oh, well. Not his problem. He hunched his shoulders, seeking the warmth of his wool-lined flannel, bunched under a denim jacket, against his neck. It was so much colder out here than he'd thought. He couldn't tell if he still had toes.
A voice floated out of the dark. "You're a pretty one."
Paulie frowned in the direction of the voice and its forced accent. Someone—a guy—lounged against the pole of one of the dark streetlamps.
He kept walking, inured to the homeless begging from every dirty nook downtown to let this one delay him. Those that came out during the day were belligerent. They demanded change, or cigarettes, or the jewelry and sunglasses people wore, or the takeout containers clutched in their hands. They'd been videoed following the ones who wouldn't acknowledge them for blocks at a time, yelling insults. The cops didn't have time to deal with them, so maybe they were getting bolder, coming out at night too.
And if this dude weren't homeless and was looking for a date, well, he'd picked the wrong faggot.
The stranger let him get halfway to the next streetlamp before he spoke again. "You have a light, yes?"
"No, sorry," Paulie said. "I don't smoke."
"I didn't think so," the other said, sounding amused. "But I do."
Paulie turned, ready to tell the creep to go screw himself, but the stranger had already thrown back his head and begun to scream. A thick scream, choked with vomit. Except there was no vomit. A cloud of black smoke burst out of him like lava. Even in the dark, Paulie could see the tendons straining against the skin of his neck as he screamed and screamed, and the smoke shot skyward.
An unnamable fear took over Paulie, like the time he and his buddy had stumbled upon a rattler on the trail behind his house, back when he'd been about eight years old. Not that he'd seen the snake. The sound was all it took. He'd found himself in his backyard before he'd decided to run. Jordan, who said that he had disappeared between one blink and the next, had made fun of him for it for years.
It happened again. He didn't realize that he'd broken into a run until one of his flip-flops flew off his frozen foot and he went crashing to the ground.
He rolled onto his back. The smoke was already upon him.
His last thought was, I should have worn shoes.
..::~*~::..
Vahe, now Paulie, stood up. Limped back to the lost flip-flop, turned it over, and scooted his foot into it. Then he stared down at his old vessel. It wasn't breathing. Its wide eyes were bloodshot, its lips bloodless. Oh, well. He'd always ridden them too hard, but there were so many to choose from. An endless supply.
Disposing of the cold slab of meat wouldn't take long. He laughed, testing the sound of Paulie's baritone against the unquiet night. He was one step closer to the girl, one step closer to proving to Lilith how useful he could be.
He slung Vahe's corpse over his shoulder. Whistling, he carried it down the sidewalk, his demonic energy blowing the bulbs in the streetlamps as he passed under them.
..::~*~::..
Aya handed Sam a glass of iced tea, turned around, and almost ran smack into Julia.
They both jumped backward.
"Oh!" Aya gasped. She'd spilled her tea.
"Sorry!" gasped Julia, looking like she'd gotten the scare of her life. "I'm sorry!"
"What's wrong?" Sam asked.
Warmth crept toward Aya's hairline. "It's, um, Julia's here," she squeaked.
Sam sat up straighter, but Dean cracked a grin. "Do you mean to tell me, Aya, that ghosts scare you?"
"When they come at me out of nowhere, they do," she said angrily. She rounded on Julia. "What are you doing here?"
"I don't know," Julia said. She wrung her hands, her eyes darting from left to right.
The distress billowing from her overruled Aya's embarrassment. "Hey," she said in concern. She set down her glass, drying her hand on her leg. "Julia, hey. It's okay. What happened?"
"The river. I was at the river," she babbled. "I mean, I was at the river. Me. My body. In the river. I tried to touch it, and then I ended up here. Like something pulled me."
Any awareness of her audience flew right out of Aya's head. "What part of your body did you try to touch?"
"Her body?" Dean demanded. He sounded furious at the mention of the murder that he hadn't been there to prevent. "She found her body? Where?"
Julia sniffled, unshed tears trembling on her lashes, but as she answered a little color came back to her face. "On the northern bank of the Platte below Gates Rubber Co. In a bush."
Aya relayed the message. Then, when Sam moved away from the couch, already dialing Sgt. Kuemper, the police officer in charge of the missing persons case, she said, "This is important, Julia. What did you try to touch?"
"This. My wristband." She held up her arm.
"Dean." Aya held out her hand. "Give me the wristband."
He did, but he couldn't seem to resist asking, "Are you going to tell us what's going on?"
"I think Julia has formed a connection with this," she said. She pulled the dirty paper strip taut, indicating the dried smear of blood. "It called her here."
Julia reached trembling fingers toward it. "Marr," she said, her voice full of tears. "That's Marr's. She got it off before Kittney got her in the trailer."
Now she wasn't the only one with wet lashes. Aya bit her lips briefly, determined to stay strong. Good girl, Marr!
Sam lowered his phone. He hadn't given his name after reporting finding a body in the Platte, nor had he said goodbye. "What are you saying? Do you think Julia could find them with that?"
Them. The demons. The missing people. A wild expression took over Julia's face. She stared at the wristband as though it had grown a mouth and was talking to her like an oracle would. "Yes," she said. "It's buzzing. Just like mine did."
Before Aya or the Winchesters could say anything else, she touched the wristband and disappeared.
Notes:
A/N2: What did you think of this chapter? This is your chance to comment and let it all out! As always, I'm most concerned with making sure it makes sense, it flows well, and you aren't bored.
Cheers!
Anne
Chapter 12: 22
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
Changing air pressure and the sudden absence of conversation let Julia know that she had arrived. Somewhere.
Had it worked? She'd latched on to the buzzing waves coming off the wristband, and when they'd reversed direction, let them pull her, like lassoing a riptide, to the source. To Marr. Or so she thought. She glanced around uneasily. It was still night. She could smell diesel exhaust, maybe from a generator, and conifers. She was alone. Had she zapped herself to some random place?
She bit her lips. Well, whether it had worked or not didn't matter in the long run. She couldn't stay here forever. Big things afoot and all. Besides, she could still sense the bloodied wristband back in Aya's apartment, not quite visible as a colored line like the route highlighted in bold red by MapQuest, so she could get back to safety if she needed it.
Feeling a bit like a kid playing a game of hide and seek, she looked both ways before she tiptoed into a dark hallway. She turned right, away from the stream of moonlight to the left, and toward a door, ajar, at the other end. She couldn't hear anything at all, not even her footsteps. She frowned down at her turquoise wedges. Because she wasn't making any footsteps. Ugh, she was never going to get used to being dead! No matter how well she understood it, she didn't know it. Not really.
Best just to get on with it. She slipped through the door, less than a whisper. The main part of the building stretched out before her, long and skinny. Disintegrating fiberglass insulation drooped from exposed ceiling beams like hanging moss from trees in a swamp. Scuffed plastic sheeting, haphazardly nailed across the glassless windows, diffused the moonlight. Dust swirled in the uncertain illumination.
However, the building was not empty. Chain-link cages, the kind used for large dogs at the pound, stood sentry in two rows like beds in a barracks building. At first, she thought that there were dogs in the cages. She crouched by the nearest one, feeling sorry for the animal because it wasn't moving. None of them were. Was it alive? She tried to lift the heavy-duty padlock keeping the cage door shut, but of course she couldn't.
The bundle of what was not a dog shifted with a low groan. The unfocused moonlight picked out sparkly tasseled sandals, as elusive as fish scales in murky water.
She rocked back on her heels. Holey sheets, the wristband had worked! She'd found them!
"Marr!" she cried. Then, louder, "Marr! Marr, wake up!"
When nothing in the whole creepy building responded, she slapped her thighs in frustration. "Marr!"
Still no response. Duh, Jules! You're dead! No one here could hear her. She twisted her hair into a ponytail to get it out of the way, but then she had to let it go because she hadn't died with a scrunchie on her person. Could this being a ghost thing get any more inconvenient?
Probably not. But maybe it could be convenient in other ways.
Tentatively, she crawled through the cage, ignoring the disturbed-water feeling. Marr lay curled on her side on a rubber pad, her legs tucked in so that her long body would fit, one of her arms kinked into an awkward L-shape. Though she was unconscious, her eyes were partly open, moist, and unseeing.
Well. That wasn't upsetting. Not at all.
Sick to her stomach, Julia traced the needle sticking out of the soft flesh of Marr's inner elbow, up the tube, and to a bag of solution depending from the cage's top.
She stroked her friend's sweaty forehead, wishing Marr could feel her. Wishing she could do something more. Marr's eyelids didn't twitch. Julia measured the soft, irregular sound of her breathing. Drugged. She surveyed the rows of cages. Twenty-two occupied, plus two more open and waiting. So many. "Don't worry, Marr. I'm going to get help. Just as soon as I figure out where we are."
She backed out of the cage and then froze. Were those voices? She listened. Yep, definitely voices. Shoot! The thing inside Vahe had been able to see her. Chances were, whoever was coming now could, too.
Thinking fast—stay and be caught here or run and risk getting caught by whatever might be out there?—she jumped at the dark slab of wall between Marr's cage and the next one. Despite everything, she expected to crash into it.
She went sailing through it. Then she squealed, for the ground on this side of the building dropped sharply away. She was four feet in the air, the hillside that unrolled below her bristling with thick clumps of scrub oak, blue spruce, cottonwood, and exposed red sandstone. She squeezed her eyes shut as she fell.
She never landed. She cracked one eye, then the other. She stood, unharmed, in the shadows of a gully. She looked up. The moonlight couldn't penetrate the black tangle of branches and needles.
Wow. If she could just figure out how to do that teleporting thing on purpose. . . .
She passed through the scrub, disturbing nothing, feeling, for the first time, like a ghost. She crouched behind a rough red boulder. The barracks building stood on top of its little hill, its roof sharply slanted. She frowned. This place seemed familiar, like a summer camp she might have visited as a child, though she was sure she'd never been there before. Besides, it looked as though it had been standing unoccupied for at least fifty years, all alone on the slopes of the foothills. Few places around the Denver area were this isolated.
It wasn't deserted, though. People strode in pairs under dim lamps on posts, the light orange, the people unspeaking, moving in a strangely preprogrammed way. Not people, then. Black-eyes, like Vahe.
The scuff of a shoe through gravel, near at hand. Julia ducked. Two black-eyes strode by her, one of them carrying cans of paint, the other several cloth grocery bags. She crept along the gully, following them, but when the scrub oak became too dense—she could move through it, not see through it—she risked climbing onto the path.
One of the black-eyes suddenly came to life. "Did you hear something?"
Julia froze, holding the breath that she didn't need, anyway. She bit her lips as he turned, his black eyes shining in the orange lamplight, and stared straight at her.
The other one gave the area a cursory sweep. She frowned, her wrinkles standing out against her face like granite carved in bas-relief. "I don't see anything."
Julia couldn't help the sting of fear that pierced her insides at the sight of the gun in the black-eyes' hand. She couldn't be shot, could she?
The fear took her back to a time when fear had been part of a game. When she used to repeat words in her head: Don't see me. Over and over, squashed into the cupboard under the sink. Don't see me. Don't see me.
She repeated the words now. It seemed to work like a magic spell. The two black-eyes scanned the area in silence for a few moments, but they didn't see her standing right there. She was calm, like water on a breathless day. So still, the reflections looked as solid as the real thing. I'm a ghost. You can't see me.
"Come on," the grandmother with the freaky black eyes said. She returned her gun to its holster. "We shouldn't keep Lilith waiting."
The first black-eyes looked startled. "Lilith? She's here?"
"Not for long," the other said in a voice too flat to reassure. "I heard the Winchester boy resisted her, that he's immune to her power, so she's not eager to meet him again. Not yet."
"Not until the final seal," the first one said with relish.
Julia perked up. That sounded promising!
With more confidence, she allowed the two black-eyes to lead her to what she assumed was the compound's mess hall. They went in the back, the door taking its sweet time to come to rest against the latch, leaving a sliver open to the night. Hugging the black-eyes' heels, she moved past a tiny, rounded fridge and matching stove, its paint chipped and its chrome tarnished, an enameled sink on four legs, and then a washer-dryer set that could have popped right off the pages of a nineteen-forties Sears, Roebuck and Co. catalog. She glided into the mess hall proper and then hustled sideways behind a pile of shattered wood that had probably been a table and benches. More broken furniture dotted the room like enormous dust piles waiting to be swept away. A few incandescent work lights lay on the floor, their thick black cords snaking into careless loops, their beams shining across the floor and up the walls, tickling the ceiling.
The one nearest the door lay in such a way that it spotlighted part of the wall. Julia covered her mouth to keep a gasp inside. White painted markings flowed unbroken from the ceiling to the floor. She didn't recognize any of the signs at first, although she thought she spied a few upside-down crosses, and a Star of David, though twisted somehow. It hurt her eyes to look at it. Interspersed with the graffiti, a sequence of red numbers repeated themselves, now three feet tall, now only six inches. Again, and again, the same numbers, the same order, carefully painted within the weird symbols like the markings on a compass.
4144171
She had no idea what they could mean, but their presence here had to be important. Four one four four one seven one. She must remember.
One of the black-eyes cast a suspicious look over his shoulder as he deposited his paint cans on the floor. She wondered if he'd felt something as she whooshed by him, like a rush of cold air. She crouched as low as she could and still see over the pile of broken wood, saying her magic spell in her head over and over. After a few repetitions, he turned back around.
"Did you have any trouble?" Kittney asked, all business.
Next to her, looking cool in a long white dress, a tall blonde woman smiled in satisfaction, seductively chewing on her nail.
"No," the black-eyes said. He produced a screwdriver from one of the grocery bags and pried the lid off a paint can. The underside of the lid glinted syrupy red. "Cattle blood, fresh off the farm. We were in and out, as instructed."
"Good," Kittney said after inspecting the contents of the can. "This will finish it. You two, go complete the sigils in the northwestern corner. It is nearly time to begin the summoning."
The two black-eyes went to do her bidding with as much emotion as dead squids. They parted around a painted pentagram on the floor. Black candles burned at each of the star's points, and red candles burned in each of the corners.
The sensation of needle-sharp kitten claws crawled up Julia's arms and her back, digging in under her jaw. She shivered. Whatever was going on there felt wrong, like cutting into a pastel-frosted birthday cake to find bloody giblets in the middle. Perverted. Gross.
Kittney approached the pentagram and ran her fingers along a painted line. Her face shone as though she beheld a masterpiece. "See, Master? We have everything under control. The angels can't find us, the reapers are impotent. We will command hundreds of souls at the moment of summoning."
Rage swelled within Julia. Command hundreds of souls? As though she, and Luka, and everybody else, were nothing more than tools? That little brat had killed her. She didn't know about Julia, how she was still here. Julia could make her pay. Right here. Right now.
She dug her fingers into a table leg as though it were made of clay. The wood crackled quietly and sank beneath her fingertips. As soon as she realized what she was doing, she snatched her hands away, frightened. The rage dropped away like cold ash.
The holes in the table leg accused her, looking as though someone had stuck four sizzling soldering irons into the wood. How had she done that? She checked her fingers, the tips, the nails. No change. She tried to grab the table leg again, but her hand passed through it.
The blonde woman, her arms crossed, was examining the room with a critical eye, and, if Julia wasn't mistaken, was particularly interested in the corner where she crouched. So, enough freaking out about things she could neither control nor understand. She needed to find out where she was so she could report back to Aya.
"I trust you can complete the rest of the ritual without me?" the blonde woman asked, as though she'd just remembered an important appointment and was in a hurry.
Kittney looked up at her with sickening adoration. "They won't find us here, Master. I made sure of it. The stage is set. It is a perfect amplifier, a convergence of ley lines. I will perform the ritual here and begin the process of severing the lines."
"Color me reassured," purred the taller woman. She rolled her eyes. And then kept rolling them until they gleamed smoky white like two blank marbles.
Julia couldn't hold in a gasp, for the woman smiled, her pretty face ruined by her corpselike eyes. That time, Kittney definitely looked in Julia's direction. Her black eyes burned with animosity.
Julia didn't want to stick around any longer. She closed her eyes, hoping she'd memorized the sequence of numbers right, and imagined herself outside the barracks building. When she opened her eyes, that was exactly where she was. Except this time, she was facing a different direction.
Rising against the sky, a rugged, unmistakable shape blocked some of the stars. She knew that shape! She knew its name, too. Ship Rock, the southern arm of Red Rocks Park and Amphitheatre.
She wanted to laugh out loud. Oh! Kittney had meant the actual stage nestled between the acoustic rock formations, first cared for by the Utes way back when. No wonder she hadn't recognized where she was. She'd had no idea this campground existed, and it didn't seem to be open to the public. It had probably been built for the workers who had turned the natural sandstone formation into an entertainment venue in the early nineteen-forties. She turned around, wanting to confirm that Ship Rock had been behind her the whole time.
The white-eyed woman stood on the path, her golden hair and white dress shining ghostly in the moonlight, smiling like a head cheerleader who had just caught the one girl on her squad that she hated breaking a rule.
"Seems we have a spy," she said in mock disappointment. "I was so sure my demons had spirit-proofed our operation here, but you obviously found a way to slip past that."
Julia couldn't think of a thing to say. How had that woman gotten out there so fast?
The woman held up a single finger. "I don't know who you are, and I don't really care. You're rude and I don't like you. Bye-bye!"
"No, please!" Julia couldn't afford to disappear again. Not now. It had taken hours to wake up after Vahe had blasted her apart. She needed to tell Aya what she'd learned as soon as possible. Marr and the others were counting on her. She latched onto the buzzing that would take her back.
Then, for the second time, her awareness scattered like sand blown off a dune.
..::~*~::..
Black water. White floodlights.
Castiel watched as a team of humans wearing reflective vests and hard hats extracted the body of the young woman, the believer, the one with faith, from the tumbleweed and the river. They had already bagged the young man and carted him away.
He should have answered her prayers. He knew that now. It was what Dean would have done.
The toes of his shoes rested close to the edge of the light but did not touch it. He chose to remain in the dark. After receiving revelation—after being chastised and threatened with a demotion—he felt the same way about Heaven as he did about the electric light at the moment. Shut out of it, metaphorically speaking.
"We feel you have begun to express emotion, Castiel. Emotions are doorways to doubt. Your judgment may be impaired."
He squinted while the rescuers laid the young woman on a gurney. One of them zipped closed the big black bag, hiding her from view. He could not deny that his current vessel—a vessel with which he could fully integrate, that he had taken great care to test beforehand—possessed emotions. Some very strong emotions, as a matter of fact, able to reshape his millennia-old way of thinking. However, he did not believe that the emotions were leading him wrong, as his superiors did. He believed the opposite.
Dean and Sam Winchester. The brothers, infants in an angel's eyes, were ruled by their emotions. As he had ample opportunity to observe, their emotions did not often lead them wrong. Their actions were, for the most part, just. He was growing fond of them and their blatant irreverence, fleeting though their existence was. They possessed a purity that he'd found lacking lately.
They would have saved his Father's creations if they could have. As he would any of his brothers or sisters. They were not so different from him. Why had he been ordered to sit out of this fight just because they had become involved?
As though summoned, Uriel flapped down through the dimensions and coalesced at Castiel's side. The moment his beefy vessel could breathe, he wrinkled its nose.
"There they are," he said in his vessel's soft, deep, careful drawl. "Crawling through the filth to collect the trash."
"They show respect for their dead," Castiel quietly disagreed. He and his brother were vibrating on a slightly higher plane, and the human rescue crew would neither see nor hear them. The ducks did, though they would not tell. "Their work here tonight is an acknowledgment of their mortality. I admire that about them."
Unaware of their celestial visitors, mortal men and women called out to each other. Vehicle doors slammed, the river gurgled and plashed, and Castiel drew his wings in tight. This whole situation unsettled him, though he could not pinpoint why.
Uriel twitched his shaved head as though irritated by the shirt collar buttoned against his thick neck. As a specialist, he was allowed a small range of emotion, enough to ensure that he followed through on his orders, no matter how abhorrent they may be. None of them would forget the orders that he had carried out one night on the banks of a massive north-flowing river, alone, to punish a stubborn and petty pharaoh, without the support of the garrison.
"That is exactly your problem," he said, his dark eyes simmering with contempt as he watched the crews clearing their equipment. "You're attributing Divine intent to the mud monkeys again. Did you know that they will eat each other if given the chance? They are revolting little savages who can barely speak."
"They are our Father's beloved creations. He formed them in His image and gave them free will," Castiel said. He faced Uriel, whose true form was as awesome as a storm on Jupiter but was not the image of God. "A gift He did not see fit to bestow upon us. They may help or hinder as their nature dictates. It is not our place to judge them. We are all what we have been made."
It was as close as he dared come to expressing what was chiefly troubling him: That he must have been made differently for a purpose that none of them could yet see. Else why would he constantly be reprimanded for deviancy?
"We were made to follow orders," Uriel shot back, possibly in response to his unspoken thoughts, for he had not wished to guard them. The floodlight nearest them blew out, the energy flow reacting to Uriel's display of temper.
The sound of breaking glass and the sudden return of darkness caused a few shouts of surprise, and then a smattering of tired laughter.
"Are you saying our Father was mistaken?" Castiel asked. It might have been a challenge, but he had never had a reason to pick a fight with his brother.
As quickly as he had flared up, Uriel settled down and clasped his thick-fingered hands. "No. I am saying you should forget about them. They are beneath you, my brother. They are where they belong."
"One of them isn't," he said. Sorrow. That was the emotion washing through his vessel. Sorrow, and . . . regret? The violence perpetrated here had stained the air with a different kind of darkness. "I heard her prayers. As did you."
"I heard them." Uriel gave what would have been, for a human, a shrug. The ambient light slid over the shiny material of his suit jacket like water. "I didn't care. She was too stupid to know what was good for her. She should not have dodged her reaper. It is her own doing."
"There was no reaper here to meet her," Castiel said. He tilted his head, puzzled by the fact that Uriel did not seem to know this already. "The psychic fog has blocked them as well, slowing them down. There are far more souls here than there should be. Is that not why I was ordered to save the human named Aya Nakano? So that she could guide the souls to Heaven?"
"It is no longer your concern," Uriel said. Then, seeming to realize that he was being too brusque, he lowered his voice and his curly eyelashes. "Trust in us, Castiel. We will not allow this seal to be broken."
Wearied by his brother's clumsy attempt to soothe him, Castiel unfurled his wings and caught a ley line the way a sail captured the wind. He shot along the Earth's telluric current. This time, he was careful to guard his thoughts, to keep his growing doubts hidden. He did not wish for Uriel, or any angel, to follow. There was something he needed to do, even if it meant going against the mandate of Heaven.
Hm. He liked the emotion that welled up in his vessel at the thought: Amusement. This would not be the first time he had deviated from the plan, nor would it be the last. It was just the way he had been made.
Notes:
A/N: I want to hear it: Do you like the way I've portrayed Cass, or no? Is he OOC to you at all? This is important to me! X3
Until next time!
~ Anne
Chapter 13: Deviating from the Plan
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
Castiel paced through Aya Nakano’s still, quiet apartment, making no noise on her carpet, though his trousers and his coat whispered against one another. He glanced down at the Winchesters sleeping in the front room, looking less than comfortable. Dean, a throw pillow folded under his ear, lay on the floor, his face relaxed in a way it never was while he was awake. Sam sprawled across the single couch, using his bent arm as a pillow, his long legs spilling off the other end.
A small cat appeared, balanced on the back of the couch. She winked her large green eyes at Castiel. As he neared her, she lifted her tail and began to purr. He offered his hand, and the animal spirit pushed her head into it.
<<What are you still doing here?>> he asked her, angelic grace to mortal soul, while he scratched her ears; the purring intensified. <<You know what awaits you on the other side of the Bridge.>>
<<All cats know,>> she answered, her speech a flood of impressions rather than words. She moved her shoulder to his scratching fingers; he was careful not to knock her over. <<I am waiting for my person.>>
He tilted his head. <<Do you delay paradise for a human?>>
<<You would too if you knew her,>> the cat said matter-of-factly, sitting back. <<She cares for us when no one else can. I will care for her until she no longer needs me.>>
<<Stewardship was given to Adam’s children,>> he reminded her.
The cat tapped her tail. <<Adam’s stupid brats. She invited this one inside. He smells bad. Don’t trust him.>>
With that, she disappeared.
As though he’d felt the breath of chilled air left by the territorial soul, Sam shifted, his eyebrows pinching together.
Castiel considered him. The boy with the demon blood. An abomination, according to Uriel. Sam did not wake, however, so Castiel passed him by. For now. A cat’s opinion was not something to dismiss out of hand.
Untroubled by the darkness, he moved down the short hallway, taking note of the pictures framed upon the walls, the narrow table supporting a lamp, several candles, fox figurines, and a pile of books. He flipped through one but, being an angel, could not read much of it without feeling sick.
The sweet scents emanating from the bathroom did not impress him. Manufactured. False. Unnecessary. Perhaps he thought so because his current vessel was male, making him, for the moment, male. Or perhaps it was because he could smell each product arguing with each other. He moved on. How human females could stand to live in a cloud of belligerent molecules was beyond his scope of understanding.
Two humans occupied this space. He followed the vibrations of a living soul into a bedroom done in cobalt blue, dove gray, and white, muted in the darkness that was interrupted by a thin finger of yellowish light from beyond the curtained window.
He paused at the foot of Aya’s bed. Not long ago, Dean had let him know, in no uncertain terms, that watching over a man while he slept was not acceptable behavior. This rule was related to the one about respecting personal space, of which Dean was fiercely protective but that Castiel could never seem to measure correctly. Multi-dimensional wavelengths of celestial intent simply did not generate “personal space.”
Dean’s warning did not seem to apply here, however. Castiel could see nothing of Aya except for a lump of blankets and a few strands of hair, leaking out over the pillow. Cold air circulated, cooler than the machine-regulated air, which at least explained why she had burrowed so deep. Quite a few souls had congregated here, drawn by the girl’s vibrations. They brushed against the Veil but didn’t pass through, invisible to his vessel. He stood still for several minutes, doing nothing, while the fake breeze ruffled his hair and the unseen souls drifted. He had been ordered to save this human. Now he wanted to know why. Uriel would not tell him. Maybe she could.
He approached the side of the bed. She slept on, her lips parted as she breathed. Her face was lovely, or so his vessel informed him with a sudden, physical interest that he dismissed. He reached out two fingers. He touched her forehead.
A spacious, undefined kitchen, gauzy with sunshine that fell in thick bars from the windows, took shape around him. The light slanted across potted plants and flowers in vases. Sheer curtains stirred in a breeze. It smelled of light and nature, of butter and sugar.
Aya stood at the counter, surrounded by three others. He hovered on the edge of her awareness, letting her knowledge flow into him. The tallest was Lemara, a beloved not-sister of acceptance and adventure; next was Paulie, a cherished not-brother of quieter camaraderie; last was Darika, a leader, an example, a solid rock on which to lean when life got difficult. They laughed together as they passed around a plate of confections. The sunlight struck the vivid, colorful frosting, which sparkled like stained glass.
After a moment, Aya seemed to notice something amiss. Her focus shifted, as it did in dreams, while she turned. Her friends, behind her, continued laughing and eating, but the sound and the color faded. Their movements slowed until they halted, frozen in place like figures in a photograph.
“Hello, Castiel,” she said.
She remembered his name, even while dreaming. A bubble of brightness burst inside him. He ignored it.
“I’m so glad you came. Would you like one? I baked them this morning.” She offered the plate of confections.
“I don’t eat,” he said, making no effort to play along. He kept his hands hanging loosely at his sides and squinted down at her, curious. “Can you see me?”
“Of course.” She set the plate aside and then raised her eyes, higher than she would if she were looking at his vessel. Her expression softened; he stilled under the butterfly-light weight of her regard, the unexpected and not entirely appreciated intimacy of the moment, unsure what to do, what not to do. She didn’t seem to notice his discomfort, however, and when she spoke, she sounded as though she were dreaming. “You look like a sunrise. Like the most glorious sunrise on the day that I know I’m going to die.”
Her language was so haphazard, cobbled together by centuries of war, invasion, eradication, immigration, and whimsy. He wasn’t sure that he understood. “Do I frighten you?”
She smiled at him, and that time, she made eye contact. “Not anymore. You’re so beautiful.”
Her answer pleased him. His pleasure confused him. Until then, he had taken it for granted that his true form would strike terror in humankind. Angels did not reveal themselves to just anyone for a reason. He was one of God’s first children, he was a representative of the Word, and he should be respected as such.
Respect, however, was not synonymous with fear, though Uriel would disagree. Castiel remembered her screams. The way she had shied away from him. He felt less than proud.
While he worked through this, she moved past him. The atmosphere of her dream changed quality and hue. The airiness closed in. Blue light danced with green shadows. He turned.
A tunnel arched overhead, a graceful, ribbed curvature of glass. It twisted away from him in both directions, creating a pocket of isolation. Sunlight poured down through several thousand gallons of water. It filled the tunnel with glimmering patterns. Beyond the glass, an ocean floor stretched into a blue-black distance. Sand, coral, kelp, and schools of fish whorled together in a wondrous celebration of his Father’s work.
Aya stood at the edge of the walkway, her face turned up as she watched a pair of sharks swim overhead. Castiel approached, and then, when she didn’t bring up personal space, he stood cautiously next to her.
“I love it here,” she said. She pointed out a sea turtle, old enough to glide, aloof, beneath the circling sharks. “My mom brought me and my sister here once when we were younger.”
“Where are we?” he asked her.
“Omaha’s Henry Doorly Zoo,” she said.
Omaha. A city in the state of Nebraska. Over five hundred miles east of their current location. “I understand,” he said. “You are small. It is too far for you to travel easily.”
She giggled. She put her back to the glass, sat on the small ledge, and stretched her legs out in front of her. “Something like that.”
Side by side, Castiel and Aya watched the fish and the sharks and the turtle. He could, if he chose, walk on the bottom of the ocean, where the animals were not captives. Yet, he had to admit, this facsimile appealed just as much to him. Peaceful. Beautiful. Shared.
“I’m dreaming, aren’t I?”
He glanced down at her head. She studied her interlaced fingers, peeking from the cuffs of her white sweatshirt, rather than the sharks, who slid by again.
He saw no reason to deceive her. “Yes.”
“Thought so,” she said ruefully. “I am never alone. People are everywhere, alive and dead, all the time. It’s so deserted in here. I would freak out if this happened while I was awake.” She hesitated. “Are you real? I mean, not part of my dream.”
“Yes.”
She raised her eyes, wise and unfettered. Met his without flinching. “Why?”
“It is safer to speak here. There are fewer chances we will be overheard.”
Her face twitched, but he did not recognize the emotion behind it. “Not none?”
He tilted his head. Humans knew so little about the way their brains worked. “No.”
“Oh,” she said in a small voice. “I would ask how you got here but I don’t think I want to know.”
He chose to remain silent. There was nothing shameful in dreamwalking. Aboriginal Australians could walk through dreams as well as angels. Yet, she was clearly uncomfortable. The light in the tunnel darkened, the blue deepening to indigo.
She took a deep, shaky breath, and then released it. “Okay. I’m asleep, you’re here, and my head isn’t as private as I thought. In which case, there’s something I’d like to know. May I ask you a question?”
“Of course,” he said.
“This . . . you.” She waved her hand up and down. “I see you, and I see him. Who is he? How does this work?”
“You’re asking about my vessel.”
She nodded. He sighed. Dean had also asked. Humans, worried about a human. He might have faulted them for not doing so.
“His name is Jimmy,” he said. “James Novak. He is here, with me. He is . . . sleeping.” Not true, but the real answer wouldn’t reassure her any. Like many of this day and age, her beliefs centered elsewhere. “He is a devout man. When I asked for his consent, he prayed for me.”
Her eyes dropped along with the subject. “Is there something you wanted to ask me?”
Though he didn’t need to, he also sat on the ledge, feet apart, elbows resting on his knees. He didn’t say anything for several shark circles. She seemed untroubled by the silence, a fact that both humbled him and put him at ease. He was an intruder in her mind, yet she had decided to patiently wait for whatever it was he had to say.
So, he said something completely different than he’d intended. “Sam has explained the situation to you.”
Even though it wasn’t a question, she nodded. “He and his brother are trying to stop a demon named Lilith from breaking the sixty-six seals that are keeping Lucifer imprisoned in Hell.” The unnamable emotion flitted across her face again, part discomfort, part humor. “Was he telling the truth?”
“Yes. If Lucifer is freed, he will begin a war from which there will be no survivors. The Apocalypse. That is why I am here. On Earth.” He rubbed the back of his neck, a gesture that felt both familiar and alien. “That is why I did not answer the prayers of a young woman when she feared for her life. As a result, she died at the hands of a demon.”
She was silent for so long that he risked a glance in her direction. Her small face was serious as she pulled her legs into her chest and hugged them. “Julia.”
“Yes. The seals are Heaven’s responsibility. My responsibility. I was ordered to find the location of the seal and to stop Lilith, and therefore I left Julia and the boy to their fates. In consequence, I have placed in greater danger twenty-four others. Twenty-four against over six billion. My superiors have assured me that my course was just.”
Though he knew without asking what Dean would say, he wanted to hear what she thought of what he had, or hadn’t, done. He had met others with Sight throughout Creation, so bound by their calling that they saw the universe in shades of black and white. He had also met others who had rebelled against their fates, choosing liberty and happiness for themselves. Which was Aya?
Which was he?
A dangerous road, that way of thinking. He was an angel of the Lord, and he was made to follow orders. He pushed the nebulous thoughts of rebellion down deep.
“I don’t know that I have anything meaningful to tell you,” she said. She put her chin on her knees. “You’re an angel. I am only human. I don’t think the rules are the same, but even if I weren’t born with reikan, I would always try to help the person right in front of me. There may be someone in greater need somewhere else, or the one in front of me can’t be helped, but that should never stop me from doing what I can, where I am, with what I have.”
A good answer, but it didn’t ease his heart any. He bowed his head, wishing that he could speak with his Father, just once. He was not ranked highly enough to be admitted into His presence, but that didn’t stop his yearning.
“Castiel?”
His introspection had been noticeable. He gave her his attention. “Aya.”
She seemed amused by his response. “The one good thing about being human, and maybe about being an angel too, is that we don’t have to do everything all by ourselves. We don’t have to have all the right answers because someone else might. You and I, we can help Julia together.”
“Help her how?” he asked roughly. “Through inaction, I let her die in fear. She will not trust me.”
“You don’t know that. Besides, we can help her by stopping the demons who killed her,” she said, as matter-of-fact as her cat. “Were you able to find the location of the seal?”
“No.” A heavy admission that dragged through his vocal cords. “Several locations could be the correct one, but they are warded against angels, and I cannot get inside to investigate.”
She thought about that. “Could a human get inside?”
“Of course,” he said without thinking. “Enochian warding sigils are only effective—” He stopped, startled, as he followed her thought like following the trail of bubbles in the water around them, arriving at the moray eel grinning out of a rock crevice.
“What if we looked inside for you?” she asked. Roseate light struck the glass and the water, the dawning of excitement. “Me, and Sam, and Dean?”
“That course of action will take time, but it is better than doing nothing,” he said, half to himself, rising to his feet. It had never occurred to him that the creatures he had been charged with observing could help in such an immediate way. His superiors had said nothing about it. “Thank you.”
“Wait! Where are you going?”
Castiel, who had stridden toward the exit, a loose stitch in the fabric of her dream that glimmered like a crack in the glass, turned around. She stood on the path, dismayed.
“It is not safe for you,” he said. She was not a hunter, her mass less than half that of Sam’s, no aura of violence detectable anywhere around her. “I must go without you.”
“I want to come, too! What about Julia? And Marr is still out there!”
The dead girl, the one with faith, and the tall girl, the beloved not-sister. “I am sorry,” he said.
Aya’s shiny black hair framed her face and tumbled around her shoulders as she angrily shook her head. She seemed so small but so vibrant. Just as she had the first time he’d seen her, really saw her, sitting across from him in a diner booth. Her eyes, capable of Seeing the celestial in its truth, seemed to flash with dark fire as she gazed up at him, reproachful. “You mean you aren’t going to let me help. You’re just going to leave me here. At home. Whatever.”
“I will return if you like,” he said, surprising himself. Proximity to the Winchesters must have transferred some of their gregariousness to him. We feel you have begun to express emotion, Castiel. He added, anxious to clarify, “To watch the sharks.”
It was not easy for someone with a calling to back down from that calling, and even harder to be commanded to do so, but he wasn’t giving her a choice. He must be, in her eyes, an obstacle. She smiled at him anyway. More bubbles of brightness burst within him.
“I would like that,” she said. “To watch the sharks with you.”
He nodded, once. Then he turned, spread his wings, and left her standing, her face thoughtful, amid her dissolving dream.
Notes:
A/N: This was SO HARD to get right! At least, I hope I got it right. I don't even know anymore. That's what took so long. LOL. Getting closer to the end though, and the sequel is starting to take some sort of lopsided shape, so yay?
Comment, please!
Lots of love to you all!
~ Anne
Chapter 14: Soul Phone
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
For the fourth time that morning, the strains of Dean's favorite heavy metal riff emanated from the pocket of his dad's old leather jacket.
He whacked the Impala's leather-wrapped steering wheel. Preoccupied, he stared out the dirty windshield as he fished his black flip phone from his pocket. It wasn't like he was going to bother getting out of the car this time, so he left the big block idling, the A/C blasting like an Arctic storm through the dashboard vents. He didn't read the incoming caller ID before answering.
"Sam," he barked into the microphone. He shot another venomous glare out the windshield. "Number twelve is a bust."
"You're not going to check?" Castiel, sitting shotgun, his hands relaxed on his trousered knees, asked.
Dean switched his glare to the angel who had first dragged him out of an extremely pleasant dream and then had teleported him to the Impala before explaining the new plan. A shaky plan, at best. There was no guarantee that any of these hidden places was going to be the right one. Angel-proofing was just one way to hide something, and not even the most effective way. "No, I'm not going to check. It's an outhouse, Cass."
Castiel squinted. What had once been a construction site seemed abandoned now, tucked between a train yard and a bank of gray warehouses. Chain-link enclosed a lot of churned-up yellow dirt, which made the spring sunshine feel like an oppressive weight. Three-quarters of a bare-bones self-storage facility presided over fallen framing, shattered windows still encased in crusty cardboard, and a dumpster bristling with broken doors and sheets of perished drywall.
The teal Port A Potty sat crookedly on a pile of rocky dirt, its door partially caved in, the whole thing decorated with faded graffiti and fresh warding sigils. Dean couldn't read Enochian, the ancient language of angels, but thanks to Anna once demonstrating an angel-banishing blood spell, he could recognize it.
"Still. We must check it to be sure," Castiel said with the utmost confidence that Dean would see it his way.
"It's an OUTHOUSE, Cass!" He rubbed his eye with a thumb, tired and hungry and sick of this mickey mouse, and already feeling guilty for his outburst. He cast a glance sidelong. At the sight of Castiel's kicked-puppy expression, he attempted to reign it in. "Trust me, we do not want to deal with any demons that might be in there."
Castiel tilted his head as he tried to puzzle through what he meant. "I suppose you're right. I do not see how twenty-four people could fit inside such a small structure, let alone however many demons Lilith has recruited."
Dean opened his mouth, and to his surprise, heard laughter gasp out of it. He leaned against the beige-lined door, covering his eyes with his hand, and laughed until he started to sniffle. Castiel sat like a trench-coated tree stump through the whole episode.
"Did I say something funny?" he stiffly asked as soon as Dean had settled down.
"Hoo!" Dean wiped his nose on the back of his hand. He clapped his friend on the shoulder with the other one. The altitude must be getting to him. He hadn't laughed like that in ages. "Never mind. Maybe we'll strike paydirt on the next one."
Castiel nodded approvingly, hinting at a smile. "That's the spirit."
A passing train sounded its horn. Hearing it, Dean realized that he was still holding the phone and that his brother had not answered. "Sam?"
Silence. He pulled the phone away from his ear and looked at it. It wasn't on. Then, just as he was about to bring up his call history, it lit up, his ringtone much louder out there in the cab. The caller ID said SAM.
Castiel watched curiously as he pressed TALK. ". . . Sam?"
"How goes it?" Sam sounded far more alert than Dean thought he had any right to be.
"There's nothing here," he said, determined to never mention this Outhouse Incident if it killed him. He wouldn't be surprised if someone had spray-painted a giant HA HA inside it. "They knew we'd do this. It's like they're not even trying."
"Hmm." A pause. "There's no point in looking into the other locations then, is there?"
"I don't think so—"
"We have to check," Castiel insisted. Damn him and his angel hearing. "Please, Dean. This is important."
"—but Cass says we have to."
"All right," Sam said thickly. Another pause. Then, clearer, "Keep us updated. We're fine here for now."
"Sam, wait." He swallowed a sudden mouthful of saliva. He spoke very low, striving to keep his voice even. "Are you eating?"
"Yeah," Sam said, unaware of any impending doom. "Aya baked these bacon cinnamon rolls with maple syrup icing. They're amazing. I think I've eaten four. Too bad you missed them."
"Yeah, too bad," he said hollowly. He snapped the phone closed and pitched it over his shoulder.
"You sound upset," Castiel ventured to say.
Dean put his baby in reverse, then lowered the A/C. It was getting downright frigid in there. "Cinnamon rolls, Cass. You wake me up at the crack of dawn, expect me to go spelunking in a portable toilet, and he's eating cinnamon rolls without me. What was the rush this morning, anyway? It was like you wanted to get away without seeing Aya."
Castiel examined something in the middle distance as Dean navigated backward out of the lot and onto a dirt road. "It's not safe for her."
Dean wasn't going to argue with that. She weighed about ninety pounds soaking wet and had almost cried when she saw the dead mouse in the motel room. They'd given the "poor thing" a burial at sea for her.
He cleared his throat. "Speaking of Aya," he began, glancing into his rearview mirror. He thought he'd seen something move, but the street was clear. His phone lay motionlessly on the black leather backseat and the mountains had dwindled to a smudge on the horizon. "What's going on between you two? Do you like, like her? She's hot. She's hot, right?"
He looked over at Castiel, but the passenger seat was empty.
"Hey!" he yelled. "You can't take off like that! This was your idea! I'm not doing this alone! Son of a bitch. Castiel!"
"Calm down, Dean," Castiel said, as monotone as ever. He was sitting shotgun as though he'd never left, a clear plastic box and a to-go cup in his hands.
Dean bit off a curse and corrected his course before the big car could swerve into the ditch. He would never get used to angels popping out and in like that.
"I have observed that humans suffer several debilitating side effects if they do not receive enough nourishment. Slowed neural responses. Hypotension. Dizziness. Short-temperedness. Dehydration. Here." Castiel passed over the box and cup.
A warm convenience-store cinnamon roll and hot black coffee. Good enough.
"Did you steal this?" Dean asked suspiciously.
Castiel head-tilted side-eyed him. It wasn't a friendly look.
"Right. Angel." He balanced the box on his thigh, braking for a stop sign. "Thanks."
"Eat. We need to head south."
..::~*~::..
Julia sat back with a sigh. She was so tired.
She gazed out the window, following the black lines of electrical wires, the peaks at the poles and the long dips in between, as Dean accelerated toward the highway. Her disappointment had about crushed her when she fought free of the hole but realized Aya was nowhere to be seen. Instead, she had ended up here in this old four-door with Dean and the strange guy named Cass.
No matter how loudly she'd shouted, snapping her fingers in their faces and kicking the backs of their seats, neither one could see, hear, or feel her. She'd been so desperate to tell Aya what she'd found after that blonde woman had blasted her apart that she'd forced her way through the misty gray fog despite the pain and the sensation of being dragged backward in an undertow. She'd been terrified the effort would kill her. Again. Instead, she hadn't materialized all the way.
She lifted her hand and pressed it against the window. She watched the electric poles zip by through what used to be flesh and bone. Dean must still have the wristband in his pocket. With it there, she couldn't find Aya the way she had before. The buzzing of Marr's blood was too strong, and she was too weak. She let her hand drop. It left a frosty print on the glass, which quickly faded.
She'd thought, for a brief, shining moment, that she could contact Dean through his phone. She'd made it ring, all right, but he hadn't heard her voice, a whisper amid waves of hushing static, over the deafening rumble of the car's engine. Worse, she'd lost most of her substance in the effort. She sank into the movement of the vehicle, her numb body barely visible even to her. It was as though she were dissolving. She was so, so tired. She wasn't going to be able to keep her eyes open much longer.
The flip phone lay beside her. Lacking anything better to do, she poked her finger into it.
As before, it responded, coming online with a glow. Then a bump in the road knocked it off the seat. It bounced open on the floor, rolling halfway under Dean, luminous in the shadows.
New Message? Y/N flashed on the screen.
She got down on all fours in the footwell, hope springing to life in her heart. She couldn't make herself heard, but there were other ways of talking, weren't there?
Trembling, Julia concentrated all her remaining energy into her fingertip, which hovered over YES.
..::~*~::..
"Was that your phone?" Aya asked. Looking toward the living room, she swiftly set down an icing-smeared baking dish and paused the music streaming from her iPod.
He'd heard the beep, too. Sam released the plate he was washing in the sink, let it disappear under the soapy water, and dried his hands on the tail of his shirt. He'd just hung up with Dean. Had something happened? Better find out quick. He strode into the living room, and then he rummaged under his jacket for his Motorola Q. He found it wedged between the cushion and the arm of the couch where he'd been sitting. It must have fallen when he'd gotten up to help clean after breakfast.
New text message—he frowned—from a number that ended in two-four-two-four. Not a number he recognized. Not a local number, either. It didn't even look like a real number at all. A spoof? Or something else?
He rolled the trackball, selected the message, hesitated, and then clicked it.
redrockssummon4144171
Aya, a dishtowel in her hands, cried, "Whoa! Did you see that? Your phone, it glowed for a second."
She didn't mean the screen. He weighed the device in his hand, thinking fast, his mind racing along and collecting points of data. Aya had seen something that he had not. Two-four-two-four, over and over. A phone number, scrambled by ghost energy? Something about a summoning, and finally a string of other numbers that added up to twenty-two—"I think Julia texted me."
"Julia?" Aya's big, dark eyes got bigger. "I didn't know a soul could do that. I know about electronic voice phenomenon—"
"EVP, yeah," he said. "The sounds of human voices found in recordings that include static or background noise—"
"Because souls often try to contact their loved ones through phones, radios, and computer monitors—"
"It's not that much of a leap to go from voice to text, it's all manipulation of energy—"
"—but why wouldn't she just talk to me?"
They looked at each other, their enthusiasm dying.
"Maybe it wasn't her," she said, fiddling with the fringe on the dishtowel. She raised her head and turned toward the back of the apartment. "Julia?" she called in an oddly formal tone of voice. "Julia! It's Aya. If you're here, I need to talk to you."
They waited, but all he could hear was the soft burble of the coffeemaker, an excited dog whiffling on the stairs, its tags jingling, and a TV turned up way too loudly in the apartment below. Aya relaxed, turning back around. They exchanged shrugs.
"Should we trust this information?" he asked.
"It's weird. It was definitely a ghost text. There's an energy unique to human souls, and that was what it looked like, in your phone. Just a flash. White but iridescent around the edges." She pondered the damp towel, then folded it into neat thirds. "I wonder if something happened to Julia when she left last night and that's why she didn't come here herself."
"I don't know," he said, already moving to pull his laptop out of his bag, "but I think we should investigate this ghost text, just in case. Besides, it's better than sitting here doing nothing. Do you have any idea what 'redrocks' means?"
She peered at his phone when he set it down on the scuffed, mismatched coffee table. "I would guess the amphitheater at Red Rocks, where they hold all the outdoor concerts and stuff. The rocks really are red, but it's a smaller venue than you'd expect, and it's been closed for some repairs." She clapped her hands. "If Julia sent the text, then that must be where the demons are! Are you going to call Dean back?"
"Not yet," he said. He was positive about that. "What if it wasn't her? If I call them now, they'll go charging in there without any idea of what's waiting for them. Just give me a bit and I'll find out what this number means."
He retrieved a battered yellow legal pad, a handful of loose Post-Its, and a black Sharpie from his bag, waiting for the laptop to finish booting.
Four one four four one seven one. A name, maybe. The true name of this Void thing in Castiel's prophecy? That would be the kind of information they'd been hoping to get from Julia. So, back to what had originally gotten his attention about this case, way back in Texas: The practice of numerology assigned a numerary value to letters, the most common being the classic A = 1, B = 2, et cetera. So, utilizing Occam's Razor, the problem-solving principle that "entities should not be multiplied without necessity," (4)D-(1)A-
Bending over the coffee table, Sam got to work.
..::~*~::..
Paulie opened his eyes.
Bewildered, he pushed into a sitting position. He swallowed against a sore throat, winced as his piercings pulled at his dry lips. He couldn't remember ever being this thirsty. Where was he?
Inside a swimming pool enclosure tucked against the clubhouse in the shade, using a coiled green hose for a pillow. The pool had been filled but the outdoor furniture hadn't yet been brought out of storage. Tomorrow, when most pools were scheduled to open for the season. It all looked exceptionally clean and expectant. The mid-morning light sparkling off the bright blue surface of the water and the sharp odor of chlorine aggravated his thirst.
He got shakily to his feet. Not only was he stiff from cold, as though he'd spent the entire night outside, but he was also sore and dirty. There were both blood and mud on his clothes and hands. He struggled with himself for a moment, torn between the desire to jump fully dressed in the pool to wash all the heebie-jeebie off and the spark of reason that told him he needed to get out of there before anybody saw him.
The reason won. A brief check of the gate proved it secure. He glanced around. This wasn't the pool near his apartment, but it was familiar anyway. It looked like the one by Aya and Lemara's place.
He grasped the bars at the top of the gate and, kicking, hauled himself over. His right ankle folded upon landing, spilling him into gravel and juniper bushes. He lay there, gasping in pain. What had happened to him? Besides his sore throat and a queasy stomach he could feel in his head, his biceps, lats, and pecs felt weak, as though he'd done too many pushups with Aya sitting on his back, laughingly losing count. Even breathing hurt.
Aya. If he could get to Aya, she would help him.
Wobbling, he set off across the parking lot. He wrapped one arm over his ribs, kept the other tucked close. He limped along, not bothering to hurry as a rattletrap Geo Metro swerved impatiently around him.
What had happened? The question pestered him like a persistent fly and refused to be shooed away. It dogged his bare heels as he staggered up the walk to Aya's building. What had happened to him last night?
The campus at night. The stranger and the streetlamps. The black smoke.
He stumbled on the roughcast staircase, scraping his knee through his relaxed jeans. He caught himself before he tumbled down the steps, but not before nearly yanking the nail clear off one of his toes. The pebbles embedded in the steps dug into his legs.
He moaned softly. The stranger under the streetlamp. The black smoke. The invasion, the throat-stretching fire that had lit up all his nerves.
He hung on to the railing as the stairwell swooped around him. He couldn't remember how to breathe without these great, hitching wheezes. Blood slipped from his big toe in scarlet streaks.
The black smoke. The invasion. The firing of nerves. The presence that had ripped control from him and had slammed him into a corner of his brain while his body went on operating without him. It had buried the stranger's corpse in a clump of trees on the border of Wash Park.
What was going to happen to him when the police found that?
He made it to Aya's door without crawling, but barely. Where had the black smoke gone? Why had it brought him here, but then abandoned him? Constantly glancing over his shoulder because he expected the smoke-presence to come zooming at him out of the sky, he pushed the doorbell.
The broken bell emitted its usual mournful clunking sound. Paulie waited, shivering as though he had a bad sunburn, trying to remind himself that boys don't cry.
Notes:
A/N: Guess what. DEAN HAPPENED. AGAIN. Apparently, I am a huge Dean fan. Did not know this. Do not mind it, either. LOL.
Did you like this chapter? I hope you did! I had so much fun with it! ^_^ Leave a comment before you skedaddle, please! I adore comments so much. I'm feeling shameless today. Hugs, you beautiful people!
~ Anne
Chapter 15: The Diviner
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
Sam lifted the Sharpie's point from the paper. He stared at what he'd written.
Could this be it? Had he figured it out?
Thank you, William of Ockham, he fervently thought.
It had turned into another beautiful sunny day, and he was determined that it wouldn't be the last. In the past hour or so, he'd filled several pages with his scrawl. At the top of the first, he'd drafted a table. Within it, he'd assigned numbers to the alphabet, like reverse-engineering a decoder ring, beginning with the most obvious:
His first try had resulted in:
4144171 = DADDAGA
According to his favorite search engine, Daddaga Hana was a location in Kawaga, Japan. An unlikely match. So, he'd tried the next most obvious variations of numbers to letters. Evens. Odds. Primes. Pi. The Fibonacci Series. However, they all seemed to trend toward numbers too high.
Then he hit on the idea that, if it was a name, it probably had a capital letter. After a few more tries, he'd come up with a larger table:
Two codes, not one, though neither was complicated. Counting by two for the capitals, counting by ones for the lower case, a repeating pattern. He was sure now that this information was from Julia, and not a trap or distraction. Lilith had obviously never considered that he would get it. Her demons hadn't been aiming for an unbreakable code; they'd applied the principles of numerology to a summoning ritual to harness the power of the twenty-two, the Master Builder on the material plane, capable of bringing about "outstanding ascendancy."
Using both of his latest tables, Sam had written a respectable list of names. Aya, whose curiosity had gotten the better of her somewhere around the Magic Square series, ran her finger down his newest list and alighted upon one name.
4144171 = Kammapa
"Kammapa. I've heard that before," she said, frowning at it. "Something Paulie told me once? He was really big on Dungeons & Dragons when he was a kid. I always thought the lore was interesting. Let me check."
The search engine was still up. She leaned over, nudged the laptop to the side so her little fingers could reach the keys, and began typing. Then she pointed, her lips thin. The secondhand couch creaked as she sat back.
Sam read the webpage's introduction, the lingering sweetness of maple syrup frosting going sour on the back of his tongue. This had to be it. A South African myth, Kammapa was also known as the Eater of the World.
What was it Castiel had said?
When freed is the Void, neither Hell, nor Earth, nor Heaven offer sanctuary. Wail your grief, you children of the Lord, for the number of souls to sate the Void is uncountable.
"If you're right, then Lilith is trying to entice Kammapa to appear," he said. "She's going to sacrifice souls to it and then set it loose in the city."
It made sense. The sacrifices, twenty-four souls, were probably scheduled to be released once an hour for one full day, acting as a trail of breadcrumbs. The psychic fog that Castiel had reported blocking both the angels and the reapers had left hundreds more souls drifting around the city than there should have been. The demon's fixation on Aya, a girl who could speak with the dead, must be connected to all of it.
Not the most ideal situation, but then, when was it ever? Chances were good they weren't going to stop the summoning in time. The next question, then, was always: How do we kill it?
"Wait, what?" Although she'd been the one to find it, Aya sounded startled. "You mean, this thing is real?"
He breathed a laugh, the sound stiff and uncomfortable even to him. That question always came up, and the answer always made him sound like a nutjob, which was why their big Family Rule Number One was, "We do what we do and we shut up about it."
"I keep thinking we've reached the end of the list," he said dryly. "Then something else happens. Someday, we're going to run into a real unicorn." With rainbows streaming out of its horse's ass and everything. He could just imagine the look on Dean's face if he saw that galloping by.
Her eyebrows tented. "O-kay," she said slowly, doubtfully.
He'd forgotten that Aya wasn't the usual deer-in-the-headlights, however. She settled closer to him, tucking her feet under her legs. "So then, how are you supposed to stop something like the Eater of the World?" She peered at the website. "Oh, wait. This says Kammapa was killed by a demigod named Ditaolane, which means 'diviner.' He did it by cutting the monster apart with a knife. Oh. Ew. From the inside."
Not an appealing mental image. Sam scrubbed his hands over his face. As far as experience went, a primordial being like Kammapa, which looked, according to one artist, like a wad of pink chewing gum sprouting four misshapen legs, couldn't be killed.
"We've run across this kind of thing before. Stories change as time goes on. I'm willing to bet this Ditaolane sealed it away instead of killing it," he said. In another dimension. Where it had been waiting, ancient, hungry, and unstoppable.
Ideally, Kammapa wouldn't make an appearance at all. He and Dean would kill Lilith now that they knew where she was and what she was up to. No Lilith, no ritual, seal saved. Except there was a problem with that logic. As of right then, their grand total of seals saved: One. Furious with their failure, the angel Uriel had made some broad and worrying threats concerning him and his brother, and Castiel's association with them.
Worst case scenario then. Lilith was going to summon Kammapa. Which brought him right back to the beginning. How do we kill it?
He eyed a drawing of Kammapa's mouth. It resembled a fleshy, tooth-lined vulva, an image he could have gone the rest of his life without beholding. If the lore were correct, the more Kammapa ate, the bigger it got, and the more it would eat. Until it ate everything. However, the lore did say that the people had been able to survive inside the monster, eating the plants and animals it swallowed along with them, until the Diviner rescued them.
He could track down the necklace of divining charms that Ditaolane had been born wearing, he mused to himself, his fingers busy on the laptop's keys, the soft tick tick tick filling the small apartment. Castiel, a being as ancient as Kammapa, could help with that. They had to be prepared to kill the monster or seal it away as Ditaolane must have. Preferably without anyone jumping in.
God, he hoped it wouldn't come to that.
Aya got up to refresh their coffees, doing that little rearranging of her waistband and the flipping out of her hem that all girls did. Brooding over the seal, and all the seals already broken—what were they up to now, forty?—Sam pressed his teeth together, the muscles in his jaw working. If he could get to Lilith and kill her, he could stop it. All of it. He could end this nightmare that had started with a fire in his nursery when he'd been six months old.
His right hand clenched into a fist and his eyes slid toward his jacket. Toward the flask in its pocket a third full of Ruby's donated blood. He allowed himself a mouthful every time he got a few seconds alone. It was enough, for now, to quiet the ever-present craving. He'd been careful to keep it out of Dean's sight as well as Aya's. She didn't need to know about that side of him. Neither one of them did. He wished he didn't.
"Time to call your brother?" she asked, bringing him out of his Ruby-red thoughts as she sank into the cushions and offered a mug of almond milk-sweetened coffee.
"Time to call my brother," he affirmed. He reached for his phone.
Dean answered on the third ring. "Sam."
"Hey," he said, setting his mug on a stained coaster featuring a hand-drawn otter clutching a bouquet of wildflowers and wearing a sunhat. He could hear the Impala's growl and knew Dean was on a highway. They'd had variations of this same conversation so many times before that he jumped right in. "The demons are trying to summon Kammapa."
"Ka-what? Wait a second." Some fumbling. A beep. "You're on speaker, Sam, go ahead."
With Aya sitting cross-legged next to him on the small couch, her knee pressing into his thigh and her mug cradled in her hands, Sam ran through everything they'd found.
"Ditaolane's divining charms," came Castiel's low-pitched, gruff voice, slightly distorted through the small speaker. "Yes. I can help with that. Give me a moment."
"A moment, he says," Dean scoffed. "We don't even know if the necklace ex-hists!"
The last word ended on a squeak. Sam grinned at Aya. Dean sounded like he'd knocked his head on the side window.
"Here," said Castiel.
A long moment crawled by. The Impala's rumble grew fainter and then ceased altogether.
"Cass," Dean said through the phone. "It's just a bunch of bones and pebbles on a string. Is this really it?"
"Yes."
"You found it? Just like that?"
"It wasn't easy," the angel said, and Sam grinned more broadly. Castiel's already low voice went lower still, as though he were imparting a great secret. "After Ditaolane saved the human race from Kammapa, the humans began to distrust him because of his powers. He used the charms to stay ahead of the hunting parties, and then turn himself into a stone. Though he did not stay a stone, his whereabouts are currently unknown. That is why it took me so long—"
Sam chuckled, muffling it with his fist, and Aya, leaning against his shoulder to listen in, mouthed, "Is he serious?"
He nodded, whispering, "Angels can bend time," but he didn't get a chance to enjoy her expression because Dean was talking again.
"All right. We've got the magic necklace. We've got a magic knife. We know where the seal is. Let's get this bitch." The big block engine roared to life. "Rendezvous back at the apartment?"
"We'll be here." Sam disconnected, but not before they heard Castiel say, "At least you won't have to go spelunking in a toilet, Dean."
The line went dead. Sam and Aya burst out laughing.
She covered her mouth. "Should I ask?"
"Best not to," he assured her. "Is there anything else your friend might have told you about the Kammapa myth that you can remember?"
She considered, tucking a lock of her hair behind her ear, revealing a small earring shaped like a white rose. "No, it was just the name that was familiar. I would call him, but—" She spread her hands.
Right. No cell. No computer. No landline, either. She probably couldn't afford it.
A pitiful sound, like a stricken cowbell, clonked out.
He snorted, holding in a snicker. "What was that?"
"My doorbell," she said, pushing away from him when he did laugh. She grinned as she headed for the door. "Shut up, it's broken!"
"Wait!" he whispered. The calm mood of the morning evaporated instantly. He tossed his marker and notepad onto the coffee table, and then tipped the laptop closed. In two long strides, he pressed himself to the wall next to the door, against the pegs from which several purses and a filmy scarf hung, opposite the tiny table that held keys and sunglasses. He slid Ruby's serrated knife from his sweatshirt.
Aya's eyes widened as she got a good look at the spellwork etched into the curved blade. She watched him toe aside a small rug, checking the devil's trap he'd spray-painted on the underside. It was still there, still intact. He kicked the rug flat, got a good grip on the knife, and nodded at her. Showtime.
A little pale, she went to the door. She unlocked the bolt but left the chain on, as he'd instructed her.
Then, "Oh, my God! Paulie!"
Ignoring his frantic hand signals, she slid the chain free of its bracket, reached out, and pulled her lanky guyfriend over the threshold. Sam backpedaled, glad that Aya's apartment was so sparsely furnished. She was supposed to keep herself out of arm's reach until Sam gave her the thumbs up, but she had forgotten entirely.
The guyfriend looked like crap. He was shivering. Sam watched for any hesitation as Paulie's feet, both of them filthy, one of them bloody, passed over the trapped rug. None. All right. One test down.
As unobtrusively as he could, he leaned down to pick up the open plastic drink bottle perched on the edge of the coffee table.
"What happened to you?" Aya exclaimed, frantic. She checked Paulie over, pushing back his hair, feeling for a fever. "You're hurt!"
His shivering abruptly ceased. Smoothly, he captured her wrists in one hand, yanking them down and to the side, which caused her to stumble. The rug caught under her socks and bunched up, the painted trap visible and now useless.
Paulie blinked. The tiny motion made a flicking noise. Alerted by the faint, odd sound, Aya looked up at him.
"No!" she shrieked, the word ripping out of her. "What have you done to him? What have you done?"
Sam dove in, the knife slashing toward the demon's all-black eyes. Paulie swung Aya around. The rug went flying. Aya banged into Sam. He lifted the knife high to avoid accidentally stabbing her. Paulie tried to drag her out of the apartment. She hooked her foot on the lower edge of the door and slammed it shut. Paulie cursed.
Holy water dashed out of the bottle in Sam's hand. It splashed all over Paulie's face and down his front. Upon contact, it hissed and steamed like acid. He let out a roar that sounded only half human, a chorus of several different voices. Teeth clenched, he scrubbed at his smoking skin and blinded eyes with his sleeve.
"No, Sam!" Aya cried. "Don't hurt him! It's Paulie!"
"It was Paulie. Now it's the demon!" he shouted back at her.
"I know!" Impending tears constricted her voice. She continued struggling, this time to put herself between Sam and her friend. "But it's Paulie, you can't hurt him, please—"
"That's right, Winchester, you can't hurt me," the demon crooned. Wisps of steam rose from his wet face. Laughing, he mimed throwing a baseball underhanded at Sam.
A hot wind grabbed him and lifted his entire six foot-five frame off the floor. While in the air, he heard Aya cry out, "Stop! Stop it!", saw her yank harder at Paulie's grip. Then he crashed into her fake fireplace. The whole thing wobbled, the plaster behind it caving. It fell on him, dropping picture frames, a potpourri dish, and a Galileo thermometer, which bounced and broke, their corners and edges hitting him hard. In the temple, in the ribs, on his ankle. He curled up under the onslaught of metal and glass and colored water mixed with alcohol.
"Bet you're wondering how I got past your little trap," the demon said conversationally as the last smashes faded away.
"Not really, no," Sam grunted. He shook dried flowers and glass out of his damp hair, brushed at his cheek, felt a small grain slice it open.
Paulie scowled at him. "It's simple," he said, apparently determined to explain his genius. "I knew she could see me, so I hid. I went to sleep. Tucked myself all nice and tidy in a corner of the brain. Gave the fag control, plus a little hypnotic suggestion. It was a gamble, but he brought me right where I wanted to be."
Aya winced at the slur, her eyes full of reproach and dark fire.
"Right where I wanted you, you mean," Sam said, not happy either. He grimaced, and the cut wept, but he didn't bother to wipe the blood away. Kerosene-like fumes from the broken thermometer stung his sinuses. He stood up, feet wide, and held out his hand. Palm out, like Ruby had taught him. "Say goodbye."
The demon saw what was coming the same time Aya did. He positioned her in front of him like a shield, his free hand scrabbling for the doorknob two feet off target.
Aya, whose eyes tracked every movement of Sam's, sucked in a quick breath. Then she screamed. At Sam. When he looked down at her, she flinched into Paulie. As if the demon cowering behind her could save her from the guy who was actually trying to.
He swallowed hard. Her Sight. It must be showing her the demon blood in him. Though possessed people looked like just that to him—people—he remembered Anna Milton's over-the-top reaction to Ruby's face. God only knew what Aya saw in his to scare her that badly.
The child inside of him who had been called "freak" huddled a little tighter around the old pain. Just moments ago, they'd been friends. Easy with each other, enjoying each other's company. But now . . . He would never be able to unsee her expression. The horror in it. The pity.
Tucking his chin, he tried to ignore the shame that threatened to crush him, because it was happening. The thing that he loved. The power from Ruby's blood flowed up like a wave of heat, flushing through his chest, his neck, his face. It burned down his arm. It set his palm ablaze.
A blaze that he aimed at the demon.
Paulie choked. He convulsed. He snarled. He threatened Sam with his black, black eyes and bared teeth.
Smirking, Sam increased the strength of his psychic assault. Ruby's blood sang within him. It felt incredible. Like he was on top of the world.
Paulie gagged. Black sludge trickled past his lips. He heaved. More sludge poured out. He sagged to his knees and his fingers loosened.
Tears streaming down her face, Aya backed away. Not toward Sam. To the side, near the crumpled rug.
"What are you doing to him?" she whispered, unable to tear her gaze away from the sight of her friend puking up sulfur-stinking smoke that stained his teeth like charcoal toothpaste.
"An exorcism," Sam said shortly, concentrating on his task. The demon vomited copious amounts of black smoke that gushed to the floor and pooled there like oil, sparking with tiny golden threads. "Sending the demon back to Hell."
"You can't get rid of me, you freak," the demon groaned, leering up at him.
"Watch me," he said. He pushed harder with the power until he could almost feel the demon's essence against his palm.
Paulie choked, spat, and coughed, the tendons in his neck straining.
Observing the body eject the demon the way distressed coral purged its symbiotic algae filled Sam with a sense of exhilaration. The knife, should he use it, would kill both the possessor and the possessed, but his exorcism would save Paulie.
That was what hunters were supposed to do. Save people. It was better this way.
Sam could save people.
A fist swung out of the air and cracked into his face.
Notes:
A/N: Please please pretty please leave a comment before you leave, and hit that cute little VOTE button! Please? I know, I'm voracious, but I just can't express how happy seeing your names makes me!
Most Humbly Yours,
~ Anne
P.S. So, weird formatting naturally doesn't translate to this site. "Among Us" is cross-posted on Wattpad, same title, same username, complete with Sam's tables.
Chapter 16: CRAP
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
Without looking, without waiting to see who had hit him, Sam lashed out with his right hand. Astonished, Aya watched the demon-killing knife sink to the hilt in a strange man's chest.
Sam let go of the knife. The sickening ocher hue and leathery shine of his skin flattened underneath its normally healthy tan like water disappearing beneath sand. The eyebrows smoothed, the nose rounded, the sharp-toothed smile shrank, the ears shortened, and the awful yellow glint in the eyes cleared. He was human again. Sam again. A Sam she'd completely lost her guard around, so comfortable in his unassuming, empathetic presence that she'd sat close enough to touch. A Sam who was breathing too fast, a welt rising across his high cheekbone.
Meanwhile, the black smoke hurriedly spiraled back into Paulie's body, sucked up as though by a vacuum. The three of them, Sam, the demon within Paulie, and Aya, stood in a breathless, weightless moment as the strange man, his thick lips pursing, calmly looked down at his torn, powder-blue dress shirt. At the aged bone handle sticking, obscenely, out of his chest.
He wrapped large fingers around the handle. He slowly, slowly pulled the knife free. The blade emerged, a cringe-worthy centimeter at a time, smeared with red blood.
Deliberately, he looked at Sam. He held the knife to the side. He opened his fingers, one by one.
The knife dropped to the carpet.
"Uriel," Sam gasped, sounding aghast, and the weight of the world crashed down.
An angel, Aya realized, feeling a bit numb. He's an angel!
Uriel smiled in apparent delight. In a deep, soft drawl, he said, "I've been waiting for this. I said I wouldn't tell you again, boy. Now you're mine."
He wasn't like Castiel, Aya thought, dazed. He wasn't like her angel, as she'd started to think of him, her dreamwalking friend. The gentle creature who wanted to watch the sharks swim. Out there on the street—had it really been only a day ago?—Castiel's true form had blazed white-gold, like an immense sword of fire, like the rays of a dawning sun as seen from Venus. Here, in her little apartment, Uriel's true form teased the edges of her filtered reikan. Wavering on the air, an insubstantial purplish halo spread around his head, absorbing the light rather than producing it. The shadows of his humongous wings, furling and unfurling with the same lazy motion as a cat displaying its claws, seemed sharper than Castiel's, as though the feathers could cut like knives.
An angel, not a demon. But absolutely terrifying.
Demon-Paulie groaned. "Aw, give me a break. Another one! Your daddy must be punting your giant feathered asses off his cloud left and right. What did you do, shit on the holy rug?"
Aya hated him. She hated the demon for stealing Paulie's voice and disfiguring Paulie's face. For making Paulie say such rotten things.
"You dare blaspheme in my presence?" Uriel said in return, the bulge of his dark eyes narrowing. He didn't acknowledge in any way that Aya stood within arms' reach. "Insignificant pustule."
"Yeah, same to you, brother—" the demon snapped, working himself up.
"I," Uriel said, his soft voice gaining volume, "am not your brother."
Aya saw it coming. She was learning how these new scary things liked to work. The angels. The demons. When Uriel threw up his hand and the demon crouched as though preparing to pounce, she launched herself at him.
At Paulie. And at the demon inside him.
Castiel was wrong. She wasn't useless. There was something she could do. To save one, she had to save both. Her arms clamped around his middle, her face barreling into his stomach.
She meant to knock him aside but had underestimated the demon's strength. He didn't budge an inch. One of his arms reflexively snaked around her shoulders. He twisted as though to shield her. A wall of icy air hit them like a sheet of steel swinging down. It shoved her forward. Her skull struck her closed front door. Her teeth slammed together, and her brain squashed into her eye sockets.
The taste of blood was the last thing she knew.
..::~*~::..
Aya and Paulie crashed through the door, tearing it and much of the jamb out of the wall. They disappeared in a flurry of echoing crashes and splinters and feet and thuds that shook the stairwell.
"Aya!" Sam cried. He leaped forward, but Uriel appeared in front of him.
The angel clasped his hands down by his belt, rolling his shoulders to settle his dark blue jacket, and eyed him like a cat salivating over a particularly fat bug. "Where do you think you're going?"
"Get out of the way!" he said desperately, calculating whether he could tackle Uriel and get past him before Uriel's solid hands could wrap around his throat. "The demon has her!"
Uriel, as wide as a new door, cast a glance over his shoulder. "Why should I care?"
"Lilith's going to summon Kammapa," he said, tossing his last hope into the ring. Surely, Uriel would care about that. He would help. His job was to stop the breaking of the seals, wasn't it? "She's going to summon the Eater of the World, and she's going to use Aya to do it."
"Got there at last, have you?" Uriel asked in his unruffled drawl, throwing Sam off balance.
"Wait," he breathed, feeling his way through his scattered thoughts. "You knew? But Cass—" Castiel didn't know.
"We knew," Uriel interrupted indifferently.
"Isn't Cass your commanding officer or whatever?"
"Not for much longer."
Uriel sounded so pleased. A nasty pause ballooned between them.
"Castiel did not need to know, though somehow, he learned which prophecy was next, and then he shared it with the two of you. Against orders. Do you know what it means when an angel disobeys orders?" Uriel advanced one slow, predatory step at a time. "It means he has been corrupted. The corruption must be cleansed."
Sam backed up warily. The demon-killing knife lay on the carpet, smeared with blood. He cast it a glance sidelong but then dismissed it. He had nothing that could hurt an angel. Nothing.
Nothing . . . except . . .
"Too bad it's not your fight anymore, boy." Uriel grinned, obviously relishing the moment. He swelled, cracking his knuckles. "You chose the wrong side, didn't you know? You went back to your demonic piece of ass. You rolled around in the scum, and now, I'm going to cleanse you. Just like I said I would."
He plowed into Sam with both fists. One caught him in the mouth, the other slammed into his gut.
He doubled over, his breath leaving his lungs in a great gust. He staggered, his foot sliding on his fallen pen. Blood drooled from his split lip, the gash in his cheek. He touched it, marveled yet again at the deep, shining color of it.
"Heaven commanded that you not use your powers," Uriel went on. He clenched a fistful of Sam's collar. Lifted him several inches off the floor. Then slammed him onto his back, onto the coffee table. The table cracked. One of the legs splintered. Paper and half-filled mugs went flying. Sam writhed, clawing at Uriel's fist, his face hot, his mouth working over yells he didn't have the air to voice. "Like a selfish child, you used them, anyway, and Castiel isn't here to stop me this time."
Uriel raised his other fist. "He's confused," he said. He drove the fist into Sam's face. Once. "He thinks you can be redeemed." Twice. "He doesn't see how dirty you are." Thrice. "But don't worry. I won't tell him about this." The fourth time, his fist came away bloody.
Uriel grimaced, inspecting his knuckles. He leaned close to Sam, who lay limp, his arms outspread. He whispered, "Your stain is never going to wash off."
Sam shifted. Just enough to relieve the pressure of the fist pinning him to the table. Uriel was going to regret his monologuing. A big, tough angel like him really should be more observant. Sam raised his chin.
"Not my problem," he managed to say, hoarsely. He gave a lopsided grin, one corner of his mouth tucking up into his bloody cheek. He held up his fingers. They glinted bright red.
Uriel grasped the significance of leaving Sam's hands free immediately. The black moles across his cheeks seemed to jump out, standing at attention.
"Shouldn't have let Anna teach us this one," Sam ground out.
"No!" Uriel bellowed. He lunged across the coffee table, his heavy vessel thudding into Sam's sore body. His blunt nails scrabbled at Sam's forearm, snagging in the thin black bracelet he wore.
Sam slapped his sticky palm directly onto the angel-banishing sigil he'd painted in his blood on one crooked couch cushion. The sigil flared to life, and an answering blaze of light poured from inside Uriel. The light surrounded him. Enveloped him. Threw the shadows of his outspread wings up the walls. Sucked him away at warp speed. He vanished into a pinprick of light, howling his fury. The pinprick winked out. Sam was alone.
"Come again when you can't stay so long!" he shouted deliriously at the empty apartment, the shattered hole where the front door used to be. Then he groaned, reeling from the beating he'd taken.
The silence in the aftermath of a fight always seemed expectant, ringing like distant, old-fashioned telephones in the back of his head. His temples throbbed. It seemed like too much work to get off the table. He had no idea where angels went when the banishing sigil blew them away, but he knew it would be hours before Uriel made his way back, roaring like a maddened bull.
Sam heard a gasp. Upside-down, he caught a glimpse of wide eyes in a frightened face and then saw the door across the hall slam shut.
"I'm calling the police!" a muffled voice called shakily from the other side.
"Crap." So nice of Aya's neighbor to see if he needed help. Frankly, he was surprised the entire building's occupants hadn't come running at all the noise. He rolled off the ruined table and slithered onto his knees and one hand. The other felt around his torso, checking for deeper injuries.
Finding nothing life-threatening, he dragged himself through the wreckage of the living room to locate his phone, once again wedged between the cushion and the arm of the couch. He scrolled through the menus and hit CALL with one thumb, exploring a line of fire under his shoulder blade.
"We gotta stop calling each other like this," Dean teased. "I'm beginning to think you want more from this relationship than I'm willing to give."
"What—Dean—no, shut up," Sam spluttered. "What is wrong with you?"
"Ah, I dunno," Dean said, which passed for an apology in his book. "Been a long morning."
Tell me about it. Sam winced, prodding his lip and battered face. His nose had not escaped Uriel's attention. It felt fevered and swollen to the touch.
"What's up?" Dean asked.
"Our friend showed up. He got Aya," Sam reported. There hadn't been a peep from the hallway for a while. He began picking up his things. "The police are on their way. I have to get out of here. You've gotta meet me somewhere."
"Wait, what? What the hell happened?"
"Uriel," Sam said with a snarl. "He pushed her into the demon's arms. Literally. Before he tried to kill me."
An indrawn breath. Dean growled, "Where is he?"
"Probably somewhere in Mongolia. Maybe Saturn? I didn't specify a destination in the banishing spell," Sam said, and Dean grunted approvingly.
Their humor didn't last long, though. Dean sighed. "So, the demon took Aya? Fan-frickin'-tastic. Time for Plan B—No, Cass, wait—"
Sam heard the flapping and looked up. "He's here, Dean."
"Frickin' angels." From the sound of it, Dean stomped the accelerator to the floor.
"The demon took Aya?" Castiel asked without preamble. He stepped closer to Sam, crouched on the floor, halfway through stuffing his Sharpies and the damaged notepad into his messenger bag. The blue tie swung into Sam's face as he leaned forward. He passed his palm over Sam's forehead.
In an instant, all the pain eased. Sam blinked. He ran the tip of his tongue over his unbroken lip.
"Thanks," he said grudgingly as Castiel straightened. An angel had hurt him, and an angel had healed him. Par for the course, these days. "Your buddy Uriel is a real piece of work, you know that?"
Castiel wasn't listening. "Where, Sam?" he asked, steel in his eye. "Where did the demon take her?"
Sam scented danger. "You can't go running off by yourself. Let's get out of here before the cops show up. We'll meet up with Dean. Then we can come up with a plan. Me and Dean, we'll help you," he said as soothingly as he could. He tried to tug his laptop into the bag without Castiel noticing.
Of course, Castiel noticed. His fingers flicked out in an open-up gesture. Sam heard the zap! before he felt it, making him gasp. His hand popped off the aluminum case. Another sweep of Castiel's arm, and the lid swung upright by itself.
Glowering, he spent all of half a second remotely blurring through every window and tab Sam had opened in the past few hours, including those on Red Rocks. Its history. A map of how to get there. Information on the renovations and current closure. Aerial views and weather updates.
"You've helped enough," Castiel said, uncharacteristically cold. Even when agreeing that angels were, in Dean's words, heartless bastards, there had always been amusement under his deadpan, faint but there. Not this time. He was gone with flaps so strong they wafted Sam's hair back and stuck his t-shirt to his sweaty skin.
In the distance, sirens began to wail.
"Sam?" Dean asked, his voice tight with stress.
Crap. "Meet me behind the coffee shop. We've gotta make tracks."
Notes:
A/N: So I look at my manuscript - the one originally planned to be 14 chapters, MAYBE 16 . . . and then I look at the most recent chapters, which seem to keep growing and expanding so I have to split them off into whole new chapters. This is going to be a bit longer yet! But I figure, of all the bad things I could do to you guys, giving you more chapters probably isn't one of them. XD
Please comment before you go! Comments are so helpful to me - sometimes, you guys connect a couple of dots I didn't even see. It's amazing!
See you next time!
~ Anne
Chapter 17: Guardian Angel
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
Vahe, who had become attached to the name of his former vessel, jumped into the nondescript Camry, and then slammed the door behind him. He leaned on his hip, shaking as he ripped open the panel under the steering column with his bare hands to get at the ignition wires inside. Glass from the broken side window crunched under him when he wriggled lower so he could see what he was doing. His longer-than-usual legs kept getting in the way.
He glanced over at the slut—Aya, Paulie snarled from the tiniest corner of their shared brain—while he stripped two wires with his fingernails and then coaxed a spark between them. She lay boneless against the passenger door, her hair plastered to her shoulder and neck. The Camry started up with a cough. He stuffed the wires back in place so he could press a couple of fingers to the dip in her throat.
Effing angel. Ugliest son of a bitch he'd seen in a while, and that included the hounds guarding the gates of Hell. That thing had been all kinds of wrong, squashed into a big blobby human body, the shadows of its wings crackling, for a split second, on the air like the Darksaber. It hadn't wanted to kill him. Not right away. All it had to do was touch him with a hand imbued with angelic grace and he'd burn out like a firecracker, leaving his empty vessel behind. Gone. Forgotten as though he'd never existed, like his original name. A demon was what was left of a human soul, corrupted and reduced, clinging to its twisted afterlife like scum on rocks. Less than dust, less than smoke. Once they used up their energy, they never came back.
Fortunately, the seraph had only wanted him out of the way so it could get at Sam Winchester. Which was fine by him. Let them kill each other. No skin off his nose.
He knew it wouldn't go down like that, though. From his awkward sprawl across the seats, he cast a worried glance out the windows. The aborted exorcism had severely drained him, and he had only managed to bring the girl—Aya! snapped Paulie—a couple of buildings down from hers. Any second now, that scary-ass soldier of God was going to come crashing onto the hood like a freaking condor and rip out his liver before frying him into an oily smear. It had almost killed the sacrifice, for crying out loud! It hadn't even cared that she'd been in the way.
If the girl—if Aya, he sneered at Paulie, who finally shut up like a good little incidental—was already dead, all this was moot. He adjusted his touch on her throat and waited, trying not to breathe.
Ah. Okay. Her pulse fluttered beneath her delicate skin. Still alive. But for how much longer? The whole side of her face and down her sweater were soaked with blood. Her chest barely flexed with her intermittent, shallow breaths. He tucked back her hair, tacky with drying blood. He let his fingers linger, light as kisses, on her jaw, down her neck, over her collarbone.
Sirens began to wail. Approaching from several directions. Fuck. He had to get out of there. Now.
Vahe reached across Aya and buckled her seatbelt for her.
He brushed glass shards off his seat and then released the lever that let it slide back. He glanced at Aya. Then he checked the pedals. The Camry's gears clashed as he struggled to shift. He swore up one side of Hell and down the other side of Heaven. What masochist still drove stick in this millennium?
At last, he managed to get the transmission in gear without stalling the engine, but barely. It lurched out of its parking spot, and he steered it toward the exit to the street.
The fire truck, its front end angled wide to make the sharp turn, reared up like a white and chrome wall, blocking the driveway. Startled, Vahe tried to brake and accelerate at the same time, his foot rapidly tapping both pedals. He hadn't noticed how loud the sirens had become. The Camry broke loose and fishtailed. It surfed closer to the truck instead of away. Inches from its bumper, the driver laid on the horn. The entire sedan vibrated with the deep, throaty, heart-stopping sound. Vahe's bones rattled. Aya slumped in her seat until the belt fetched up under her jaw. Her lips shone slickly, coated in red.
Shit shit shit shit! He crashed through the gears and found one that stuck. He hauled the wheel to the left. Revving unhappily, the Camry bounced onto the street, the undercarriage scraping against the curb. He shifted again. Tires squealed, the truck horn blared, and then, incredibly, the two vehicles squeaked past each other.
Vahe, fighting the wheel to straighten the car, drove recklessly fast past a line of black and whites that screamed by in the opposite direction, followed by a big white and orange ambulance, the whole parade heading for the apartment complex. The wind howling in the broken window scrawled icy claws around his ears, sneaking underneath his collar.
Cold. The wind was as cold as it had been that night outside The Church.
The dashboard clock read four minutes after noon. Alarmed, he checked his mirrors, noting the cloudless blue sky behind him, in the east. But ahead . . .
He shifted gears, more smoothly this time. He was getting the hang of the Camry's recalcitrant clutch. He pressed harder on the gas pedal, soaring through an intersection right after the light turned red. More horns honked, but he didn't care. Kittney must have decided to move her agenda up a day, what with the Winchesters and the angels sniffing around.
As though to prove him right, miles ahead, brilliant white thunderheads boiled above the foothills. The clouds swelled higher by the second, lifting their fluffy tops to show their dark bellies. They frothed across the sun. The sky in front of him dulled to a greenish-gray. The temperature continued to drop.
Once more, he glanced at his unconscious captive. So pretty. So helpless. She was finally his.
And he still couldn't have her.
Scowling out the windshield, Vahe drove straight at the coming storm.
..::~*~::..
Castiel tilted his head back, facing into the wind. His coat streamed out behind him, the belt flapping, then whipped forward, slapping his legs. His tie streamed sideways, a blue banner.
The ritual to summon Kammapa had already begun. Disrupting the ley lines underground exerted an equal and opposite reaction in the atmosphere, as evidenced by the approaching storm.
He stood at the base of the second ridge of foothills, which climbed in ever-higher ranks to the west. Red Rocks loomed in front of him, the layered sandstone thrusting above the surrounding trees like the twin bows of sinking ships, glowing angel wards barely visible at this distance. According to Sam's device, the park had once been named Garden of Angels, after the original caretakers had surrendered the land. A bit of human history that had interested him. This wasn't the only Garden overseen by an angel, and it was about to become a battlefield.
The wind raced high overhead, changing directions so swiftly that it began a long, slow swirl that would drag the thunderheads into a ring with the monolithic rocks at its center. Light flashed and danced within the gunmetal-gray clouds. Vegetation bowed under the punishing wind. Thunder cracked and boomed, its echoes rolling across the rugged landscape.
Without warning, a thick scud of rain hit him right in the face. It flattened the trees, pounding their new leaves into tatters. He lowered his head. Icy water sluiced from his hair, poured from his chin, and soaked his clothes in seconds.
He didn't move. The storm wasn't the problem. The angel warding wasn't the problem. The four seraphim, their wings raised in battle position, were the problem.
They'd forced him out of the telluric current early. Their true forms billowed and glowed through the dimensions like solar wind igniting. Their voices chimed, waves of empyreal radiance, a celestial choir ringing inside his vessel's head. This was what Dean had coined Angel Radio, a term so surprisingly accurate that the angels had begun using it, too. Castiel listened to the intricacies of Enochian, the native angelic language, each "channel" as unique and ethereal as the feathers of each angel. Then, though his brothers and sister greeted him, he frowned.
All four seraphim held long bands of shining quicksilver, sharpened to wicked points.
"What are you doing here, Micah?" he asked, shouting to be heard over the wind. "You are not in my garrison. You are not my commander. Why did you stop me?"
His brethren surrounded him, pressing against but not breaching the Earthly dimension where he stood in the gale.
Micah bowed his glorious heads. "We angels have been commanded to withdraw."
"By force, if necessary," said the wavelength to Micah's left.
"Zuriel," Castiel acknowledged him, blinking in the rain. "Would you use force against me?"
"If we must," Zuriel said, but his wings twitched, the eyes fluttering open and shut, broadcasting his uncertainty to all.
"We are not immune to the Void," Paschar said, all of her eyes closed. She only opened them to watch her visions. "If Kammapa is freed, it will devour angels as it devours demons and humans. We must fortify Heaven."
"Are you so sure that the Winchesters will fail?" Castiel demanded. Thunder rolled.
"They have failed before. They will fail again."
Fine. "That I will fail?"
"Alone you might, brother," said Jeremiel in his compassionate voice. "Uriel has been banished by the Winchester child, but the others of your garrison have already returned home."
"I ordered them to go," Castiel said, distracted. The wind gusted, the freezing rain misting up as it hit the warm ground. Uriel. He went after Sam, against Castiel's orders. Their superiors must have assigned them separate orders directly.
He clenched his fists. Why did this situation unsettle him so? He didn't like it at all. "However, I cannot follow them. Please let me pass."
"We cannot let you pass," said Micah. He opened his wings and swept Castiel, vessel and all, up to a higher plane.
In the sudden lack of natural noise, floating weightless in the non-matter, he shook the rain out of his hair. It spiraled in tiny glittering spheres around him like planets around a sun. When they collided, they combined, reflecting the glow of the massive angels who floated along with him. Far below, the ley lines glittered like the streets of a human city at night. A patch of them, a convergence of the currents directly underneath him, seemed darker than they should.
Micah and the others crowded close, vibrating with joy at being reunited with him on this plane. Jeremiel and Zuriel brushed their wings with his, making the feathers hum like the strummed strings of a harp. A sound that sang the praises of God and pleased Him.
Could He hear it? Castiel had never doubted it before.
With a sigh, he folded his wings back, out of reach. "I must go," he repeated. "Please let me pass."
Micah's many eyes blazed. "We angels have been ordered to withdraw."
Paschar and Jeremiel raised their bands of quicksilver. After a slight hesitation, Zuriel raised his as well. These, they aimed at Castiel.
"My orders were to save the human named Aya Nakano," he said, quiet but implacable.
Wings rustled all around him, humming as the feathers fanned in and out, sparkling as the eyes blinked open and shut.
"You have fulfilled those orders," Micah said.
"Those orders were never retracted," he returned. "She is in danger now. I must go."
He felt their shock, their doubt, heard it in the clash and clatter of voices that sent static charging through Angel Radio. He worked hard to guard his thoughts, for he knew he was pushing the limits of truth here. However, it was a truth he needed if he wanted to stop the breaking of the seal.
"I was not aware of this," Micah said.
"His course is just," Zuriel said.
"We are wrong to oppose him," Jeremiel said.
Paschar only smiled, her eyes closed in utmost serenity. Castiel side-eyed her, wondering how much she had seen of this moment, and when.
"Those orders were for you alone, brother," Micah said, worry sending threads of navy blue through the glistening pyrite wave of his words. "We cannot help you."
"I understand." Because he did, and did not resent his brother's conclusion. "You must follow your orders, and I must follow mine."
"Then take this. You will need it," Zuriel said abruptly. He proffered the band of quicksilver. It flared, flowed, and steadied.
Castiel considered it. He did not have his own, for he and Uriel had been ordered to watch, not fight. "It is yours. Are you sure you wish to give it to me?"
Zuriel's laugh pealed like wind-struck crystal bells. "Take it and then return home to us, my brother."
Castiel reached out. He closed his hand around its mercurial shine.
Gravity had hold of him. The rain returned with a rush and a roar, battering his head and shoulders. It shot past his eyes, flecked with clumpy white snowflakes. The thunder continued to grumble. Micah and the others were gone, but Castiel hefted Zuriel's gift appreciatively, reacquainting himself with its weight and substance here on the Earthly plane. The haft felt smooth and familiar in his palm. Longer than a dagger, shorter than a sword, and imbued with Heavenly power, an angel's triple-edged blade was an effective weapon against many supernatural beings.
With this, he might be able to find a way past the warding. If not, he could pave the way for his friends. For Sam and Dean.
"Thank you, Zuriel," he said, knowing that his brother would hear.
He would do this alone because he must.
The time for watching was long over.
Notes:
A/N: This is it, the time to comment! ^_^
~ Anne
Chapter 18: Thundersnow
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
Lottie had never before seen an angel, never mind an angel in action. She hung back, awed, but also resentful that she, of all demons, had been included in the command to get out here and stop it.
The angel made his way up the sloping trail, oblivious to the howling wind that tried to push him back and the darkness cast by the storm. For every demon that rushed him, he did this swift one-two move, too fast for nearsighted Lottie to follow: He deflected his attackers with one hand, and then he laid the other hand on their foreheads or wrapped it over their mouths.
The next step unfolded with a sort of inevitability. From a distance of four inches, he studied the demons under his hand with faint clinical interest, and then they began to scream. The light of burning, as fiery gold as molten glass, blazed from eyes, ears, noses, and mouths. Skeletons flickered under skin, fat, and muscle. Then he released the smoking bodies, unmarked on the outside but charcoal within.
Lottie had heard of the smite-first ask-questions-later nature of angels; what demon hadn't? However, seeing them in real-time was something else. Not one demon slowed his ascent. They shot him. They stabbed him. They struck him with bats or nightsticks packing enough demonic power to pulverize concrete. He shrugged off each blow, methodically incapacitating one demon at a time.
It took her several tense, dazzled moments to realize that the angel wasn't killing everyone. After that slightly curious look, he did one of two things: Smite or send to sleep. Most demons simply collapsed under his touch, unconscious, and he moved on.
Baffled by this behavior—what was the distinction?—she watched as the angel indifferently flung the bodies aside. To the wet trail. Over the frozen railing. Into some slushy bushes. Everywhere except in his path.
Huh. Lottie narrowed her eyes. Angels apparently were as preternaturally strong as demons. Their collective mistake, then, was trying to take him on as the slight, average-height, clean-cut human he appeared to be. Sopping wet, sure, his hair in his eyes and stubble shadowing his jaw, but the bastard wasn't even breathing hard, and he hadn't said a word the entire time.
Case in point: A demon who had gleefully taken over a bodybuilder last week went hurtling off the trail as though deboned, his eye sockets and the inside of his mouth sparking and crackling.
Stronger than a demon, Lottie amended.
Additionally, a pattern had emerged. The demons that the angel smote were inhabiting meat that was already dead. Meat like hers. It put those who had possessed occupied vessels to sleep. She didn't have a clue why, but it didn't matter. If that thing reached her, she wasn't going on a trip to dreamland.
She had a choice to make. Smoke out, or stay and fight? Die now, or suffer later when Alastair, Hell's Grand Torturer, got hold of her?
"Take him all at once!" she yelled. "Not one at a time!"
It must have been her grandmotherly voice. Her fellow demons actually listened to her. Five of them jumped the angel together. He disappeared beneath the flailing swarm. Fists and knives and insults rose and fell like pistons.
Still, Lottie held back. Her vessel wasn't suited for a brawl. She tightened her grip on her handgun. Waiting. Watching.
Feeling the inevitability close its jaws around her as burning lights and terrified screams pierced the gloom. The angel emerged from the dogpile with a silvery killing light shining deep within his pupils. A swelling cut slanted across the bridge of his nose, another sliced through an eyebrow, and the corner of his mouth was bleeding. His knuckles were red and raw. He didn't seem to care.
He looked at her with no expression at all.
Then, sorrow tightened the skin around the sickeningly soulful eyes. He knew it was just her in there. He had decided to end her.
Lottie's demonic essence flooded her eyes, an instinctive display of aggression. So, this was how the little cottontails infesting the scrub around here felt when they spotted a coyote.
This was how they felt when they knew they were going to die.
..::~*~::..
"Holy—!" Dean gasped. He rolled up the Impala's window, shutting himself in the chilly, clammy safety of the cab, staring open-mouthed at the absolute river pouring down the windshield, complete with lumps of slush. The wood-sided coffee shop disappeared beyond the curtain of rain, smearing like brown paint washing off a canvas.
The passenger door creaked open. Sam dove in headfirst, a great shaggy sheepdog flinging water everywhere.
"Watch it!"
"Sorry—ow—sorry!"
After a lot of shoving and Sam's head knocking into Dean's teeth, Sam levered himself upright, got the door closed, and they settled down. The rattle of rain on the roof drowned out even the rumble of the engine when Dean started it up. He pulled the car into traffic, peering through the half-second gaps left by the madly swinging wipers.
"You okay?" he asked his brother roughly. "You got out okay?"
"It was a little dicey, but yeah. I'm fine." Catching his breath, Sam ran a hand through his wet hair. His voice came out tight, nervous. "We should go, though. That lady got a pretty good look at me before she called the cops."
"Working on it." Traffic slowed to a crawl, and all he could see was the gray and white of water and melting slush swishing across the windshield, and the blurs of yellowish headlights and red taillights. The low-slung Impala rocked gently, like a boat on a swell. Then it rocked again.
"What is this?" The street was indistinguishable from anything else, a stretch of undulating gray. He tried to drive around the long line of vehicles in front of him before the long line coming up the next lane could reach them.
"Gully-washer," Sam said quietly.
"What?" He couldn't concentrate because he couldn't see. He flipped on the heater, hoping it would clear the fog from the windshield. Then he braked hard as the taillights in front of him swerved in his way.
"Gully-washer. A flash flood."
Sam's voice was so grim that Dean gave up and turned the wheel back the other way, half in and half out of his lane. "It was seventy-two degrees five minutes ago. There was no sign of this kind of weather. Like, one second it was clear and the next, this. It can't be natural."
"No. It's a demonic omen."
An omen? From over sixteen miles away? He threw the car in park before the rising water could push them sideways. Horns blared all around, a panicked and angry chorus; nobody was going anywhere. "That means they've started already. The sacrifices. The ritual. They started it today. They didn't wait for Friday. While we've been chasing our tails, people have been dying."
A muscle spasmed in Sam's jaw. He shared a look full of dismay with Dean. "Cass went after them—"
"Cass can't get in. You weren't there this morning. Every time he got close, he stopped like he'd walked into a screen door. The warding sort of pushed him backward." Dean's mouth had gone dry. "Why do I feel like we've forgotten how to do our damn jobs on this case? I was supposed to watch her. Not you. Cass told me to watch her, and now—"
Now she's gonna die. And it's all my fault. All my fault. All my—
They both jumped as hail clattered down, harder and louder than the rain. Golf ball-sized chunks of ice spun and bounced off the window and roof so fiercely, cracking like gunshots, that Dean, pushed to breaking over failing Pamela, failing Aya, failing Dad, failing what felt like everyone, started yelling, "No no no no no! Don't hurt my baby!"
"Dean," Sam said over the roar of wind, rain, hail, and thunder.
"Stop it, damn you!"
"Dean!"
"What?" His eyes felt hot. Were those dents? He could see dents in the long, shining hood of his one real possession. Someone was going to pay for that.
Sam swallowed, his Adam's apple bobbing. "If this keeps up, we're not going to make it in time."
Dean furiously scrubbed a sleeve across his eyes. He couldn't fool Sam, the kid brother who had looked up to him his entire life, even after he'd gotten so freakishly tall.
What a frickin' nightmare. Too bad he wasn't going to wake up from this one.
"Cass, wherever you are, I hope you're giving them hell," he muttered under his breath.
Right on top of them, thunder crashed.
..::~*~::..
". . . I hope you're giving them hell."
Dean's voice echoed in Castiel's head. Despite his grim work, his split lip twitched in amusement. Humans. As though winning a fight was something to celebrate.
The last demon raised her gun and pulled the trigger. He walked forward, unafraid. The bullet tore into his shoulder. He felt the impact, but an Earthly weapon such as that held no power to deter a celestial being. Still walking at the same speed, he raised his arm. Knocked the gun from the demon's frail-looking, aged hands like brushing lint off the sleeve of his coat.
Placed his palm to her forehead.
Felt the wisps of her white hair under his fingers.
Watched her rheumy eyes widen behind her dainty glasses and her wrinkled lips fall open.
Took note of the upwelling of black smoke in her throat.
Observed his angelic grace burning the demonic soul out from inside the expired body.
He should have felt nothing beyond the sense that he was doing what was just. This was a better death than the soul had experienced the first time. A final one. A merciful one.
It saddened him.
The body dropped, and he nudged it aside with his shoe. He raised his head. All seemed quiet, a sharp contrast to the activity and noise of seconds ago. He struggled with a vague sense of letdown. His vessel's reactions were getting to him, still unexpectedly strong. Perhaps this was what he had once heard Sam refer to as "taking a breather." He inhaled slowly, sifting through the blended scents of burned flesh, petrichor, humidity, and falling temperature.
The supernatural blizzard raged in a ring around the park and the abandoned campground, leaving this area clear. From high in the clouds above, the thunder grumbled, muted by the snow. The sky roiled, an ugly gray-green tinged with flashes of red. An indication that the ley lines under the park were absorbing the corrupted energy output of human sacrifice. They were beginning to clog and fail for miles around. An angel could not use them to travel. Not now. Not without getting stuck, not without considerable energy expenditure.
He broke into a jog, detouring off the main paved path to take smaller, muddier hiking trails around the park, seeking out demonic energy. If he could intercept the demon and his hostage before they crossed the warding sigils, which glowed ghostly blue-white in a large circle around the natural amphitheater, then he could take Aya somewhere safe.
We feel you have begun to express emotion, Castiel.
He had been assigned the duty of guardian many times in the past. Always, he had been recalled for some slip, some deviancy. For caring about his charges rather than merely observing them. It was happening again. Here, now, in this time, and in this place, these humans were his friends. Sam. Dean. Aya. He did not wish them to suffer.
Emotions are doorways to doubt.
The affection. The sorrow. The regret. The anger. Overwhelming, but his faith served as his anchor. This world, this beautiful blue planet, was not made purely for suffering.
He believed that, with every drop of his grace. He battled his way around the park, pausing for a breather whenever he could to search for his friend.
There. He surrendered a pair of demon-possessed bodies and let them slide, unconscious, down his legs. He lifted his head, quick as a snap, his focus narrowing toward the south, down the hill. Near the campground. There. A whiff of a human soul on the ozone-laced air.
He ran faster.
..::~*~::..
The heavy, wet snow fought the Camry the whole last leg of the trip to the park, dragging at the windshield wipers and the wheels like a lion tackling a zebra. Then, with startling suddenness, the Camry broke through the curtain of snow. Vahe stood on the brake. The car, flinging ice from its tire treads, skidded to a messy sideways halt on top of the stop sign it ran down.
Beyond, the road contracted into a gravel drive, leading downward through dark, dripping trees. He sat in the hiccupping, shuddering vehicle, waiting for his heart to slow and his eyes to feel less like they belonged on a crazed fish. The ice-coated wipers juddered back and forth, smacking into the thick crust of packed snow.
He peeled his numb fingers from the steering wheel. He'd made it. Despite the transmission he could barely operate, despite the traffic, despite the storm, he'd made it.
A giant, invisible fist punched the Camry so hard it rose onto two wheels. He bit his tongue as it bounced heavily back down, sending whiplash up his neck. He sat stunned, willing the stinging pain to fade so he could think again. Then the windowless driver's door, with a screech of metal, popped open on its own. Icy wind, delighted at the larger hole, howled inside and overwhelmed the keening heater.
He searched for the source of the assault. When he spied it, Paulie's bowels turned to water, but he managed, with a mighty clench, to keep things where they belonged.
Walking toward him, coat spreading on the freezing wind, one hand outstretched and fingers curled forward, was the other seraph. The one that had taken Aya from him in the first place. Even from two hundred feet away, Vahe could see the power flaming out of its eyes and the palm of its raised hand.
The angel closed the hand into a fist and made a throwing motion to the side. The Camry's door twisted right off its hinges, squealing, and then spun away like a misshapen Frisbee. It crashed somewhere in the trees, shearing branches and bark. The wounded sedan convulsed, and the sputtering engine finally died. The angel's hand came back around, preparing another blast of angelic power no doubt meant to turn Vahe into paste.
"You're gonna kill her!" he bellowed desperately, fighting with the girl's seatbelt. "She's barely breathing, man. Your wingman roughed her up real bad!"
To his amazement, the angel immediately pointed its hand at the ground. Holy shit, it had believed him? Groovy!—except, to his dismay, it leaned into a sprint. Right at him, coat flapping wildly.
With a yelp, Vahe scrambled out of the disabled car. He levered himself onto the wet roof with one frantic push of Paulie's long legs. Then, in an uncoordinated slide, he dropped off the other side. He yanked open the passenger door. Heaved the girl out of her seat and into his arms. Stood, swung her around, and then stumbled toward the line of warded trees, hollering for help.
Several demons charged out of the gloom, carrying AR-15s and Desert Eagles. They streamed around him as he hurried past, taking stances or dropping to their knees to aim. The dark afternoon shattered with the sharp, booming reports of gunfire.
He glanced back once. The onslaught of red-hot metal shredded the angel's shirt and tie, but the silvery glow in its eyes increased in intensity. Above the real thunder, above the gunfire, loud crackles rolled across the sky. Two huge shadows rose unevenly from the angel's back, lifting above the shoulders. Shadows of wings, unfolding in the strobing gloom. First the right, then the left. Huge, blurry, and impossible. From where was the light coming? On what were the shadows being cast? Were the wings there, or not?
Ignoring the blood and the bullets, the angel stretched both wing-shadows to the sides as far as they would go. The subsonic waves ripping through the dimensions reached eardrum-flexing throbbing as, one by one, the angel blasted the demons off their feet. Some merely crumpled, while others exploded and splattered against the rocky ground.
Vahe crossed the wards. Hugging Aya's limp body to his chest, he put his head down and pelted along the orange-lit drive for all he was worth.
The angel's fury made itself known as a thick, twisted bolt of lightning lanced down. It struck what was left of the Camry with a deafening boom and the rustle of rising flames.
Notes:
A/N: I could really use your honest feedback, because I want this story to be the absolute best I can offer. ^_^ Please comment.
Yours,
Anne
Chapter 19: Roadside Assistance
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
The Impala's rear wheels spun, sounding like a rope whizzing through a pulley. The back of the car jumped but the front end stayed put. The passenger door creaked.
"No good," Sam reported. He flopped into his seat, his hair and shoulders clumped with white, his hands and face red. He wrestled a moment with the grave-digging shovel before wedging it behind his seat. "We're stuck."
Dean released the gas pedal and let out the breath he'd been holding on a heartfelt, "Son of a bitch." He rested his forehead against the steering wheel. Hot air from the dash vents washed over his hands and ruffled his hair.
Think, think, think, he told himself. As if the flood hadn't been bad enough! They'd escaped that with the help of some speedy sandbagging and traffic direction by the fire department, but the snow had swooped down on them not far out of downtown. Rear-wheel drive was meant for flat stretches of blacktop, for opening the big block and letting her roar, for leaving everyone else in the dust, not this wet, sticky, slippery nonsense. The last ten miles had been a battle, and his baby had lost. So, what now?
Get out and push? He watched as Sam whipped an extra t-shirt out of his bag to dry his hair, his shins propped on the dash to get closer to the heat. Even if they could dig the Impala out, they couldn't push it all the way up to the park. The snowfall, if anything, was getting heavier.
Tire chains? They'd never needed them. An oversight he vowed to fix yesterday.
Walk? He squinted out the windshield at the wintry scene. The hills, the trees, the scrub, and the road had gone as still as a black and white photo, laden with a coating of snow. Closer, horizontal wind drove snowflakes so sharp-edged they sounded like sand as they blew against the car.
Walking was out. Two miles in that, without proper winter gear, and they'd be a pair of huntersicles.
The divining charms? He felt in his pocket for the rough little necklace. Even Sam hadn't found an instruction manual, hypothetical or otherwise, anywhere online. Worse, they'd been unable to reach their dad's old friend, Bobby Singer, who might have been able to unearth something in his library of lore. Bad weather here at the foot of the Rockies had strangled cell signal within an inch of its life. As far as the brothers were concerned, the charms were just a bunch of bones and pebbles on a string.
Dean left the necklace where it was, snugged up with Lemara's wristband, and massaged his forehead. Castiel was somewhere up there, trying to stop the breaking of the seal all by himself. It wasn't right. He and Sam should be there!
What, then? What could they do?
Think!
"Cherries," Sam said, his head pressed to the window so he could peer through the snow- and ice-flecked glass.
Dean craned around. A Chevy Tahoe, emblazoned with the Morrison County Police Department shield and splattered with snow and mud, nosed in behind the Impala. Its lightbar flashed in the gloom. No siren, which was a good sign. The driver angled the Tahoe so that its push bumper lined up with the Impala's rear bumper, but he stopped short of making contact and flipped on his hazards. After a moment of half-glimpsed activity, the driver's door swung open.
She, Dean realized, as the cop hopped over the packed ice and snow of their tire tracks, bundled in a puffy black jacket, holding a Maglite up by her shoulder. She rapped on the window with a gloved knuckle.
..::~*~::..
The dull red heating elements of old-fashioned space heaters and the dim yellow of candlelight touched upon the half-seen cords of the unplugged work lights and the piles of broken furniture. Kittney stood in a swelter of anxiety, one arm locked across her middle, the other hand at her mouth. The blend of black, red, and yellow made her think of Hell. She chewed savagely on her thumbnail until she tasted iron. A sliver of nail ripped away and stuck to her tongue. She spat it out, irritated with herself for fearing one silly angel. She should fear her master. If she failed to break this seal after all her boasting . . .
Two of her subordinates—Tom, the tall, fair one in biker's leathers, and Carmelo, the wide, dark one in construction orange and khaki Carhartt's—picked up the newest sacrifice by her ankles and strung her, upside-down, from a hook. As efficiently as a horse-rider roping a calf, one demon tied the sacrifice's arms to her sides and left her, swinging slightly, above a five-gallon bucket.
Ah. This one. Kittney had a good feeling about this one. She grabbed the drugged girl by the hair and sliced through her throat with her pewter knife.
While the better part of the body's blood supply drained from the wound, she took her place in the center of a painted pentagram marked with runes and sigils. She began the diablerie, a ritual of demonic origin, for the thirteenth time since midnight the night before. Though only one o'clock in the afternoon, darkness pressed against the windows of the mess hall. Cold wind whistled past unseen cracks in the walls. The occasional flash of lightning, dimmed by snow, did nothing to dispel the false night.
The angel-fire assaulting the warding sigils, however, lit up the west-facing windows like demented fireworks. What was that thing doing out there? She'd lost contact with everyone she'd sent out. She didn't dare send more.
Too many years past to count, a young woman, unsatisfied with her role as a sangoma—a simple village healer—and harboring no interest in giving her body or her life to a man, had sold her soul to Lilith. In return, she had gained the powers of a tagati, what her people called a witch, which she'd enjoyed for a century and a half before hunters had caught up to her. The same hunters who, to her shame, had not recognized the precious demigod Ditaolane as a stone, and had unknowingly thrown him across the river to safety. Even now, in this form, Kittney knew her business. Trees, buildings, the ground: Her special brands protected whatever surface on which they'd been painted. Besides, no matter what kind of tantrum the angel threw, Heavenly power wasn't going to get past wards that deflected Heavenly power. So, blast away, featherhead! You can't get me!
As though it could hear her, it must have decided to try smiting several wards at once. It sounded like heavy cannon fire out there. She faltered on one of the invocations. A costly mistake. She was going to have to start over.
She dug the heels of her hands into her eyes. She took deep, calming breaths.
When exactly had she lost control of the situation? She'd had it all worked out, down to the last detail; she was the one who had suggested summoning the Eater here from its prison deep beneath the African continent. Lilith herself, Lucifer's first white-eyed child—his favorite child, his most powerful child—had approved the plan. It was a good plan! Lilith had left her, Kittney, in charge. Trusted her with this job. Her, and no one else!
But then, things had started going wrong. Small, unconnected things. Like the unsuitable sacrifices her idiot partner had taken, putting her two behind right at the start, and he had apparently forgotten the ritualistic importance of the sacrifices being romantic couples, the symmetry of them, the joined energy. Or, the finding of the bodies she'd dumped in the river, alerting the humans to her activities. Not to mention the angels hot on her trail, prompting the graffiti spree across the metropolitan area. Then the Winchesters arriving and snooping around, forcing her to start the ritual a full day early.
Today was Thursday, May twenty-first. If all went according to plan, the twenty-fourth sacrifice would break the seal at midnight on Friday, May twenty-second. Acceptable. If all went according to plan.
Where was that fool with the final two sacrifices? She licked her teeth, then sucked on a cuspid meditatively. Come to think of it, this run of bad luck could be traced right back to him.
Well. If he did show his stupid face, she had just the reward for him.
Another blast of angel-fire went off like a mortar, its light strobing through the dirty windows to slap the painted walls. The white sigils, some of which were ghost-proofing to keep out busybodies, washed to invisibility, but the red numbers stood out all around.
4144171 4144171 4144171
Chanting anew, she eyed the dried cow's blood with satisfaction. Some of the numbers, in between the bursts of light, seemed to change.
4144171 Kammapa 4144171
The building shuddered a second later. She glanced warily up at the ceiling, but nothing worse happened than some dislodged dust raining down. The ancient heaters hummed, buzzed, and squealed, creating pockets of uncomfortable heat in the otherwise chilly hall.
Didn't matter. The last few drops of blood from the body disappeared soundlessly into the big orange bucket. Time for the next step. While the other demons wordlessly took down the corpse and bundled it away to dispose of it, she fetched her goblet. The knobs of the screaming human faces decorating its wide bowl provided good gription, so she dunked it in the bucket.
Number thirteen. Eleven more to go after this. Shoving her exhaustion down deep—it hadn't been the smartest decision in her long afterlife to choose a vessel this immature—she returned to the pentagram, the goblet and her fingers dripping. This blood, sanctified by her diablerie, would help remove the shackles the Diviner had fashioned to prevent the Eater of the World from reentering this dimension. Shackles that used ley lines, the electromagnetic currents of the planet, as fuel. Chanting, she tipped the goblet. A steady stream of blood poured upon the red lines of the pentagram as she paced its circumference. The blood trembled there as though sitting in a narrow, high-walled container. She made several trips until the goblet scraped the bottom of the bucket. The bloody pentagram glistened in the candlelight.
Another blinding flash strobed through the windows; the accompanying sonic boom rattled the glass. Kittney didn't care. One little angel wasn't going to stop her now. She was old enough to remember Kammapa, powerful enough to summon it. She held out her hands, palms down, and recited one last chant. Rippling as though eels swam in its depths, the pentagram absorbed the blood until not a trace remained.
Up on the hill, a massive, sleepy, grumbling growl rolled off the exposed rocks, echoed by the rumble of thunder in the clouds.
..::~*~::..
Dean rolled the window down, a plain, single-fold wallet ready in his hand. Out of the corner of his eye, he noted that Sam had his, too.
"You boys need assistance?" the cop asked, pointing her flashlight away as she leaned in the window. Whether to get a good look at them or to warm her face, Dean couldn't tell. She sniffled matter-of-factly, the tip of her nose bright pink in the cold. "You got yourselves in deep. We got over eight inches out here in the last half hour and it's still coming down. I'm impressed you made it this far in a vehicle like this. What were you thinking?"
She said it with a laugh, but as she straightened and swept her gaze along the Impala's length, the disdain in her eye annoyed him. Mountain cops and their stupid four-wheel-drive SUVs.
"Special Agent Abbot," he said brusquely, sticking his FBI badge in her face. The swirling snow nipped at the bare skin of his hand, melting on contact. "This is my partner, Special Agent Buchanan."
She took a step back, her boots crunching in the snow, to keep the badge off her nose. Eyebrows raised, she calmly aimed her Maglite beam at the ID card, then flicked it over Sam's.
"Are we glad to see you, Officer," Sam said. "We could use a push."
Dean detected a hint of that "I apologize for my brother" tone in his voice, but Sam subtly cleared his throat as he pulled back, reminding Dean to stay focused.
The cop nodded, looking first at Dean, then Sam, then back again. Appraising their expressions, their blue jeans and flannel shirts and thin jackets, the worn knees and the loose stitches and the frayed cuffs. The sweep of her gaze widened, taking in the obvious civilian air of the Impala, the lack of any kind of law enforcement equipment. She set her hand on the radio clipped to her belt. "A push? Or a ride? And it's Deputy, not Officer. Felicia Girard."
"Felicia," Dean said, tipping his wallet closed. He grinned and left his elbow out the window. "That's a beautiful name, Deputy."
A beautiful name for a beautiful woman. Her face was dramatically two-toned, a swatch of pale pink spreading diagonally across her otherwise reddish-brown skin like the edge of a torn piece of paper. She leveled an unimpressed look at him, licked her chapped lips, sniffled again, and then said, "I'd ask you to step out of the vehicle, Agent, but you're obviously not going anywhere."
That snarky little comment snapped his mouth shut. He frowned at her, and she answered with a grin that made him blink. She had a wide mouth for a woman, unevenly colored pink and brown and completely devoid of makeup, but her bold smile was nothing short of dynamite.
"All right, boys," she said briskly, hitching up her trousers. "Let's get you out of here. I can give you a tow to the station and you can tell me all about why you're out here—"
"No," Dean and Sam said at the same time, startling Girard.
"No?" she repeated. She looked left and right as if to say, This ain't exactly a nightclub, fellas. "Whaddaya want me to do, leave you here?"
The brothers exchanged a quick look: You? Or me?
You, Dean thought.
Sam knew right away what he was thinking. Burying the needle on his Soothingly Persuasive Gauge, he said, "I'm sorry, Deputy, but we're in pursuit of a perp and heading into a hostage situation. We can't afford to be held up here."
"Whoa, wait, what?" Girard switched her flashlight for her radio. The antenna wobbled as she gestured with it. "What perp? What hostage? Where are you trying to go—without any backup or gear? I haven't heard anything about this. I've gotta call it in."
"No, please, Deputy, we don't have time," Sam insisted. He reached across Dean and held out a white business card. "We're working with Sgt. James Kuemper of the DPD. Give him a call if you must, but what Agent Abbot and I need is to get out of this snow. Do you have any chains we can borrow?"
Girard took the card and said, "No," exactly like a sarcastic teenager. She peered at Kuemper's info. "Denver, huh? A bit out of his jurisdiction up here. I'll be right back. Don't you two go anywhere." She grinned again and then headed to her vehicle, her Maglite beam bobbing and her radio crackling.
It took Dean, watching the cop's slim form fade into the blowing snow, several seconds to realize that the Impala's radio was crackling too.
". . . -ea- . . . -m . . . n yo- . . . -me?"
He cranked the window up. It was a woman's voice, nearly drowned by static. The light behind the glass stuttered, and the red line of the dial meandered first one way, then cruised back the other. The radio chattered, snapped, and squealed. "Pl- . . . -se . . . y- . . . -ve . . . -ear me!"
Sam stared at the dash. "Is it just me, or is that not normal?"
"It's just you," Dean said smoothly, smirking at the exasperated scowl Sam sent his way and his rejoinder of, "Yeah, uh, what about what happened on Hwy 41, Dean? Jonah Greely kept playing that one song for us."
Ignoring him, Dean leaned over and turned the volume knob to the right.
"Dea- . . . -am! . . . C-n . . . you he- . . . me?"
Better. He fiddled with the tuner as well, listening hard.
"I- . . . me! Julia!"
Got it! He sat back, satisfied, but Sam didn't even notice.
"Julia?" he exclaimed. "Julia? Is that you?"
"Yes!" Her voice burst out of the speakers. The yellowish light stuttered with every syllable. "Oh, thank God, can you hear me now? I've been trying for so long."
"You're loud and clear," Dean said. Ghost Radio now? he mouthed at his brother, who tried to stifle a laugh and ended up snorting.
"I can see you," came Julia's voice tartly through the speakers. "I'm sitting right between you."
Sam pressed his lips together, looking abashed, but Dean cracked a full-face grin. "Sorry, but you gotta admit, this is as weird as Lady Gaga's bloody performance," he said.
A long sigh. "You have no idea."
"What are you doing here?" he asked. He couldn't resist sliding his hand through the space between him and his brother, but he didn't feel anything, and she didn't mention it.
"I've been stuck here," her disembodied voice said. She sounded eight shades of frustrated. "I've been trying for hours to contact you. Sending Sam that text almost . . ." She hesitated. "Listen, guys, there is something freaky going on up at Red Rocks. I feel like I've downed an entire bottle of NoDoz." Her voice dropped to a crackly whisper. "It's so noisy here. I can't see anyone, but I can hear them. There are so many, all talking at once, and I can't understand any of them. It's freezing. I'm so scared."
Sam sucked in a breath as though he'd just realized something. "A psychic fog, wasn't that what he said?" he mumbled. He subsided into a brow-pinched frown.
"Sam?" Dean probed after a minute of anxious static from the radio.
He came awake like a wilted plant reviving. "Cass said the reapers are being blocked. Which means a few hundred new spirits must be stranded in the Veil right now."
Julia spoke up. "The Veil?"
"It's a separate plane of existence," he explained to the radio. "Another dimension. It's where ghosts go if they stay here on Earth instead of moving on. You must have seen it. Kind of a gray, foggy place?"
"You mean the hole!" she said. "Every time I got blown apart, I went into this hole that was all full of mist. I hated it in there."
Dean knew exactly what she meant. Alastair had shot his astral body with rock salt once, blowing him apart, sending him into the gray. It had stung like a bitch, too.
Sam, however, was chugging along on a parallel track and said, "That's the Veil. What you're hearing are the voices of other souls in the Veil."
"Okay, Encyclopedia Brown, what does this have to do with anything?" Dean interjected.
"Time," Sam said, his eyes wide. "If Julia can contact some of those trapped souls, they can buy us time. One ghost can project her voice through a radio. More of them can make things difficult for our friends up there. We hitch a ride with the deputy and—"
"What, kill her?" Dean demanded, wondering what his brother could be thinking to try and drag, for lack of a better term, a civilian into this.
"Dude." Sam's glare could have fried an egg. "Ditch her. Shouldn't be too hard in weather like this. The point is, we're trying to save whoever is left and we need time to do it."
Dean raised an eyebrow. Vengeful spirits, that's what Sam was getting at. Vengeful spirits had enough energy to affect the world around them. They could slam and lock doors, flush toilets and run disposals, stomp on creaky floorboards, carve messages in solid objects, wield weapons, and throw a full-grown man up to twenty feet (he'd experienced that particular move too many times to count). Many of the souls packed into the Veil were new, not very powerful, but they would be confused, scared, and angry. Just like Julia, and look what she had done in the past few days. Twenty-five souls. Fifty of them. A hundred.
"Ghost posse!" he said enthusiastically. "What do you think, Julia? Let's Return of the King this place."
Sam breathed a laugh through his nose.
"You want me to talk to them?" she squeaked. "I-I don't know . . ."
"They're just people," Sam reminded her gently. "They deserve better than to be fed to a monster."
The dial wiggled anxiously. The radio went dark, then lit up again. "All right," she said. Her voice began to cut out. "I'll try, but—"
A muffled rapping on the window made the brothers jump.
Dean rolled down the glass. "Dep. Felicia!" he said loudly, covering up the sound of the radio chattering. It had gotten caught between an extremely patchy NPR broadcast and a staticky AM hillbilly rock station. He switched it off. "Fancy meeting you here."
Girard rolled her coppery eyes and sniffled again. "All right, Agents, Kuemper filled me in. You're coming with me. I'll give you a ride, call for backup."
"That's not necessary—" he started to say, determined to leave her out of it, but she stabbed her unlit flashlight in his face. He went cross-eyed trying to keep it in focus.
"The way I see it, you're out of luck without me. Either we all go together, or I leave you here and go myself." She didn't hesitate to grin, which she must have known was a totally unfair weapon to use against him. "I've got all day, Agent."
"Fine," he grumbled. He pulled his key from the ignition.
"Thank you for your assistance," Sam added.
We need her. Don't screw this up, his look said.
Dean flashed him a grin, zipping his jacket up to his chin. When do I ever?
Sam sighed and turned to brave the snowstorm again.
Notes:
A/N: I have NO idea where Felicia came from. It was supposed to be Sgt. Kuemper! But Felicia is right - this is out of his (yeah, he's a he now) jurisdiction. I'm not sure what her role is going to be, but we're gonna find out together!
Forever yours,
Anne
Chapter 20: Reunion
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
"Hello!" Julia called. She turned in a slow circle, straining her eyes to make out anything besides foggy gray. "Hello? Can anybody hear me?"
Her footsteps echoed eerily, sounding as though she had entered an abandoned gymnasium. She could hear people talking, though, even louder here—in the Veil—than in the car. Sobbing, wailing, shouting, whispering, praying. In English, Spanish, Vietnamese, Arabic, and more. "Hello? Please! I need to talk to you! Can anyone understand me?"
She'd been saying that so often lately. She raked her hands through her tangled hair. Enough. She'd had enough of this. She was dead. Did courtesy even apply anymore? "Everybody shut up and listen! I need your help!"
A hush blew through the featureless gray mist like wind. She waited, shivering with the chill. The voices, silenced, seemed to be waiting for something, too.
She fiddled with her hair, trying to convince herself that she wasn't scared, but debating whether to stay or to flee. This was a stupid idea.
The silence. It dragged on.
Had she offended them? Could they hurt her?
No, they weren't going to hurt her. They had no reason to. Right? They were just people, like Sam said.
Dead people.
Angry dead people.
A dark shape coalesced out of the mist, making her jump. Oh—sweet—cheese—and—crackers!
Julia suddenly felt overexposed, her panic plainly visible. What was she freaking out for? It was a man. Just some guy.
Just some guy. Just . . . or . . . not.
The guy looked like a range rider, dusty black from the Stetson on his head to the heeled boots on his feet.
Oh, yeah. She tugged on a lock of her hair, embarrassed. People had been dying for a long, long time, not just in the last few days.
He stopped a polite distance from her and, in an accent that had roots in England and matched the pinstriped, three-piece suit he wore under his duster, he said, "All right. You have our attention. Maybe you can explain what we're doing here."
..::~*~::..
Vahe didn't see anyone as he staggered into the barracks building. Aya's dead weight dragged at his tired, aching arms. He sighed in relief when he finally put her down in an unoccupied cage.
As he swung the cage door shut, slipping the bolt of the padlock home, the door to the long room opened and a demon walked in. Vahe recognized the thatch of pale hair, the braided leather swinging from a black vest, the chains on the boots. Tom.
"You're back," Tom drawled. He jingled with every step.
"Yeah." He didn't have the energy to say much else. He stood. "Where's the boss?"
"On her way." Tom set a square LED work light down by the cage. He eyed Vahe up and down. "Heard you had an angel up your ass. Didn't think you were gonna make it."
"Two," Vahe muttered. "It was two."
Tom nodded speculatively, and then his gaze slid down to the girl. In the work light's beam, she looked worse than ever, face pale, lips blue, hair matted with blood. "Angels do that?" he asked. Then one corner of his mouth hitched up in a knowing grin. "Or did you?"
Vahe blinked. Black flooded his eyes.
Tom blinked. Black flooded his eyes.
They stared at each other as, outside, the storm and the angel-fire continued the fireworks display.
Tom, who hadn't lost his grin, ran a hand meditatively across his clean-shaven jaw. "Hey, not that I blame you, brother. It's about time we got to have a little fun. All work and no play, am I right?"
"Yeah," Vahe said again. He blinked, flick, forcing himself to step down, away from Tom. This was why demons didn't generally work together.
"Hold up." Tom frowned. "Weren't you supposed to bring two sacrifices? I only see one, and that one's half dead. Boss-lady ain't gonna like that, you get what I'm sayin'?"
"That one is special," Vahe grudgingly said. He would rather tell this to Kittney directly, but if it got Tom off his case faster, then so be it. "She talks to spirits. She can bring more here once the thing has been summoned."
"You shittin' me?" Tom crouched to peer at Aya through the chain-link. "We got ourselves a little bruja to work her magic? A little M. Night Shyamalan? But what about the other one?"
Vahe gestured at himself. At Paulie. "This is the other one. I had to improvise. I'll leave this one here and pick up another—"
A fist rammed into his kidney so hard he could have sworn it bounced off his ribs in the front. He broke off mid-sentence and gasped, his legs buckling. A thick, hairy arm, sleeved with ink, wrapped around his neck. Betrayal and excruciating pain seared through him. He scratched and yanked at the thick arm. His feet scrabbled for purchase. He shoved back, seeking any small opening to get free.
The demon behind him chuckled. "You even trying, cupcake?"
Vahe wanted to snarl. Carmelo. Two hundred seventy pounds of muscle, fat, ink, crinkly reflective construction vest, and scraggly black beard. He might as well have been shoving against a boulder.
"Sorry, brother," Tom said with another snaggle-toothed grin. He started to slip a stiff leather mask over the lower half of Vahe's face.
Vahe struggled harder with the arm constricting his airways, tried to block Tom's hands. Shit, he still wasn't back to one hundred percent! He wasn't any stronger than the human body he was inhabiting. Easily, Tom grabbed a fistful of his hair, pulling his head back, and Carmelo tightened his stranglehold. Vahe gurgled.
"No smoking out. Boss-lady's orders." Tom buckled the mask around the back of Vahe's head, tightening the straps viciously so that they dug into his cheeks.
Carmelo kicked Vahe's knees from behind with a cement-splattered work boot, and Vahe crashed to the floor. As his former partners trussed him hand and foot, he screamed unintelligible obscenities into damp leather. Tom held him down with one chain-bedecked boot on the side of his head.
Why was this happening? He bucked, and Tom leaned harder on his temple, pressing his face to the floor. Vahe howled. He'd done as he was told! He was giving up the girl to this stupid ritual. He'd brought her here to die. For Kittney, for Lilith, for Lucifer's Apocalypse. He'd outsmarted two seraphim and the Winchester boy to do it. He'd gone through hell for them! So why—?
Tom twisted his foot, making Vahe fear that it was going to smash right through his skull. His back burned like fire from the kidney punch. The mask molded to his mouth, his chin, and his jaw. By the taste of the spellwork, he could tell that it was one of Alastair's. Personal devil's trap. The opposite of an exorcism.
He ceased struggling, breathing hard through his nose. In the relative quiet, he heard footsteps.
"You got him!" Kittney said, clapping her hands like the little girl she wasn't. "Good job! Let me see him."
Mercifully, the pressure of Tom's jingling boot disappeared. Kittney toed Vahe's head until he turned his face up to her. He did, glaring.
He wanted her to see that it wasn't tears in his eyes, it was dirt.
She smiled, violet lips spreading over straight white teeth. "There. That's much better. You can't cause any more trouble for me like that!"
"I'll kill you!" he tried to say, but it came out as a series of grunts.
"See, your job was to bring me two sacrifices," she said, as calmly as a high-level manager explaining why she just had to let her fuck-up line-level peon go. She spent a few seconds gazing down into the cage at Aya. "Two sacrifices. Unharmed. And, I would have thought was obvious, not possessed."
The angel chose that moment to renew its assault on the wards. She heaved an aggravated sigh. "See what you've brought on us? I can heal this one, but you are an absolute moron. I think sacrificing you along with the human soul in there will make up for this mess you've put us in."
She blinked. Flick. "Prepare him for the ritual," she said to her stooges.
Vahe screamed into the spelled leather mask.
..::~*~::..
The snow stopped so abruptly that Sam leaned forward to stare upward through the windshield, wondering if they had driven under an overhang.
"Whoa. That was weird," Dep. Girard said, checking her mirrors. "Look, it's barely even wet here."
"Yeah," he said with a glance at Dean, who wisely stayed silent. "It is weird."
"Spring weather in the Rockies, I guess," she said with a shrug.
He nodded in agreement, privately marveling at the way people could dismiss the supernatural as easily as breathing. He watched the numbers of the digital odometer tick upward, too slowly. This wasn't a run-of-the-mill hunt. This was end-of-the-world or save-the-world.
Hurry, he kept thinking. Hurry, hurry.
Girard seemed to have absorbed some of his urgency. She increased pressure on the accelerator. The Tahoe jumped to obey as she drove it up a curvy, single-lane road. A pile of boulders, held together by the roots of a network of skeletal aspens, careened past in the headlights. Then a crash rail, its green paint peeling, so close Sam could have touched it. She took a sharp right turn at a cool sixty miles an hour, the headlights sweeping in a wide arc.
The beams picked out a familiar figure standing in the middle of the road.
"Look out!" Sam shouted.
Girard stomped on the brake pedal so hard she locked the wheels and Dean almost pitched headfirst into her lap. He stopped himself by hugging the headrest of Sam's seat with one arm and slapping the other hand against the dash. The Tahoe rocked to a stop.
"Jeez!" he gasped.
Girard shot him a dirty look. "Seatbelt, Abbot."
"Not you," he said. He pointed.
Castiel was still standing there, squinting. Sam could see the angel's battered face now, his stoic expression, his ruined shirt, and the blood. Behind him, bodies littered the road, which gleamed in the dull light of a car-shaped fire. Thick rivulets of red ran into the scree on the downslope.
"What in the world?" Girard kicked her door open. She unsnapped her holster, preparing to draw her firearm. "You! Freeze!"
"No, Deputy, wait—" Sam cried.
"Cass!" Dean cried at the same time.
After an awkward scramble, Sam and his brother spilled out of the vehicle into the drifting clouds of its exhaust.
"Hands where I can see them!"Girard yelled, her breath puffing out steamily.
Castiel tilted his head at her, his arms hanging by his sides.
"Hands, buster!" She raised her gun in a steady grip.
Over Girard's yelling, Sam ran to get between them and started yelling, too.
"No no, stop, he's a friend of ours, he's our friend!" He backed toward Castiel, aiming one hand at him as though to push him out of sight, but Castiel didn't budge.
Dean got right in front of the deputy, both hands up. "Felicia! Felicia, listen to me. He's our friend. Don't shoot him."
Cussing, she jerked her gun off him but kept trying to get a clear shot at Castiel around him. He shuffled with her, blocking her like a defenseman, prompting a look of angry disbelief.
"Get out of the way, Abbot!" she snapped.
"No!" he snapped back. "I know this looks bad—"
"Bad? It looks like a slaughter!"
"—but I swear, he's one of the good guys."
"Let me see some ID, then!"
"Sure thing, sure thing. Just put the gun down, okay?"
"You have two seconds to explain this!"
Castiel rolled his eyes. Sort of. It was more of a quick skyward appeal. He brushed past Sam, shouldered Dean out of his way, grabbed Girard's firearm, pushed it aside—making her gasp from the way he bent her wrist—and touched her forehead with two fingers.
Her eyes rolled up in her head and she dropped her gun. Dean lunged to catch her before she struck the pavement. Luckily, the firearm did not go off.
"Jeez!" he said again, going down partway with her. Her hat fell off. He struggled to get a better grip on her. "What the hell, Cass?"
"What happened here?" Sam asked. "Why did you take off like that?"
"Do you know how much we had to go through to get here?" Dean demanded.
Castiel opened his mouth to answer but swung around at the last second and deflected a blow from a black-eyed demon meant to take Sam's head off at the shoulders. Sam stumbled back, shocked that he hadn't noticed the demon sneaking up on them from the trees. Castiel buried a fist in the demon's gut. The demon slugged him in the face, spinning him around and sending him to one knee.
Sam, unwilling to try an exorcism in front of Castiel or, more importantly, Dean, whipped the demon-killing knife from the sheath on his belt, grasped the tip, aimed, and threw.
"No, Sam!" Castiel barked.
It was a good throw. Castiel, however, caught it and chucked it at the ground. He stepped into the demon's reach and put it to sleep. It toppled.
"We can't kill them," Castiel said in his low, rough voice, after checking the demon for a pulse. He sounded exhausted.
"Why not?" Dean wanted to know. With Sam's help, he hauled Dep. Girard to her Tahoe and shut her inside with the motor still running. Then, he fetched her Glock and checked it over.
"There are too many souls here already," Castiel explained, watching him open the slide and then click the safety on before tucking it in the waistband of his jeans. "They will serve to feed and strengthen the Void. We can't risk giving it more. Not even one."
Dean looked back and forth between them as Castiel picked up the demon-killing knife and returned it to Sam. "You mean we're up here to fight demons, but we can't kill them? But they can still kill us. That's awesome."
Castiel head-tilted him. "I fail to see how this fills you with awe," he said.
"We can't do Jedi mind tricks!"
Castiel appeared to be thinking hard, and then to dismiss what he obviously did not understand. "Sam. Dean. I am glad you're here," he said.
Sam grinned at that. He gave the angel a little bump with his elbow. "Dean's just crabby because he had to hitch a ride with a girl. Next time, wait for us, okay?"
Castiel looked up at him, his face drawn and his eyes tired. "Okay."
..::~*~::..
Waking up hurt. Just like last time.
Lemara groaned. Her mouth felt like dirty socks and tasted worse. She rubbed her head, half expecting to find tire tracks embedded in her skull. A giant bruise had taken over the inside of her elbow, and old, dried blood from her nose had formed a crust on her upper lip.
She groaned again and sat up. Or tried to. She explored her too-small cage with shaking hands, walking them up the chain-link sides to the top. When she got to the IV bag and the tube, she let out a cry that released the lump in her throat and brought trembling heat to her eyes. She ripped the IV down and kicked it into a leaky mess in the corner of the cage.
Blearily, she blinked at a strong light that, strangely, sat on the floor. A moldy smell drifted down from exposed, sagging insulation in the ceiling. The quality of the glow from the windows made it impossible to tell whether it was morning or night. Where was she? It felt like it had been dark for days.
Days. How many days had it been since she'd woken up in that warehouse? She'd just started to wonder what she and Desmond could have been like together. She put her face in her hands and tried a few deep breaths. Why did this have to happen? Not just to Desmond, but to Julia and her boyfriend, too. Lemara had never actually seen someone die before. The memory churned inside her something awful, like an alien baby. And that poor guy Vahe, whatever crazy trip had happened to him. Too much horror, too much grief.
Was Desmond okay? How about all those other people in the warehouse? What about Aya, left alone? What about all the other people in her life? Did anyone know what had happened to her?
Her fingers clenched on chain-link. "Hello?" she called, wanting to connect to somebody. Anybody. "Is anyone here? Des? Hello!"
Holding her breath, she waited, her fingers icy. Nothing responded. At first.
Across from her and a couple of cages down, someone rolled over and sat up. The box light burned between them, making it hard to see past it.
"Marr?"
"Aya!" Lemara shrieked. Even faint and raspy, she'd know that voice anywhere. "What are you doing here? Aya—oh, my God, Aya! Never mind, never mind that, are you okay?"
"I'm . . . fine . . ."
A bit of shuffling, and then Aya's pale face came into clearer focus. She looked eagerly for Lemara. A flash of something—lightning, maybe?—shone through the windows, brightening the whole room. As their eyes met, Aya's got really big and shiny. Then the flash of outside light faded, leaving colorful afterimages against the electric light that blurred Lemara's vision.
Aya leaned her forehead against the chain-link of her cage. "Marr."
Lemara giggled shakily. "Would it be super inappropriate to say I'm glad to see you?"
Notes:
A/N: Through much hauling around of characters running off every which way, I think we're back on track! Please drop a comment. :)
~ Anne
Chapter 21: Uprising
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
Floodlights, mounted in the scaffold canopy above a small stage, stabbed through the stormy gloom. Douglas-fir trees and hawthorn shrubs quaked in the strong winds, throwing crazy shadows up the rugged sides of the towering rocks. Rows of wooden bench seats rose in steps from the foot of the stage. They gently curved to fit the wedge of sloping land between the monoliths, fading into the darkness beyond the reach of the stark white floodlights. An enormous pentagram marked with runes and sigils ran from the stage at one end to the huge rock walls on either side and then vanished in the darkness near the highest seats. From ground level, the pentagram didn't look like much more than a bunch of random, disconnected lines, but it was a masterpiece that had taken nearly a full day of precise measurements and a whole team of demons to complete.
Lightning flashed, a long, drawn-out dance across the low-hanging clouds. An answering flash of light rippled inside the pentagram's outer circle. With each twin flash, blue-white above and red below, the seats and the rock beneath them went transparent, like a skin of shellack.
Beneath the skin, something languidly stirred. Something darkly, putridly green. Something enormous. Something that probed the underside of the ground with pallid limbs.
Not yet. The path wasn't open yet.
But it was so hungry.
It could smell them. Souls. So many. Gathered. Trapped.
The thunder rolled. In eerie harmony, a growl, sounding like a pained groan from the Earth itself, rumbled through the amphitheater.
..::~*~::..
The range rider, who had introduced himself to Julia as Marshal Whitley, stepped to the edge of Red Rocks' small stage.
Standing next to him, Julia hugged her elbows. She used to love coming here for concerts, Film on the Rocks, church services, or just to spend a sunny morning participating in an outdoor yoga or step class. Now . . .
She looked down on the house from the stage, past the red-painted railing, numbly watching the thing roll around underneath the seats like a bloated, whale-sized cockroach in murky water.
Marshal shook his head. "I been around a long time. I like my privacy. A lot of us do. If I hadn't heard about you talking to that young lady who helps people like us, I wouldn't have answered you. But this . . ." He gestured with his empty shot glass at the surreal light show. "Ain't never seen nothin' like this. This feels downright evil to me. I don't like it one bit."
"Will you help?" she asked. "Can you explain this to the others trapped here?"
Even though spirits were usually tied to places or things, or, occasionally, living people, according to Marshal, they'd been called to the park from all their various haunts by an outside force. Now, they couldn't leave.
"I will. To those who still retain their senses of self, anyway. Plenty are too far gone to understand." He caught her confused look. "We call 'em death echoes. The kind of ghosts responsible for most of the hauntings in the world. They replay the moment of their deaths over and over, forever. May God have mercy on their souls."
That could have been me, she thought, feeling a little sick as she remembered that moment on Aya's bedroom floor. It would have been, if not for her.
The dual lightning flashed again.
"Folks ain't too happy about the situation," he said. "Especially since that girl has been brought into it. Few can do what she does. Reapers don't get involved, won't answer a question to save their own hides, but that girl, she takes care of the dead and the living left behind. Me, I ain't got a pony in this show. I got no one left. Lots of others do. She's needed. They'll help. What exactly do you want us to do?"
Julia tore her eyes away from the spectacle. "Come with me."
..::~*~::..
"This would be so much easier if we could see what we were doing." Dean, sweating through his layers despite the cold, leaned on the handle of the sledgehammer he'd filched from the Tahoe's breach kit. He needed to catch his breath.
"I think we have to be spirits to see the sigils. Like last time," Sam said.
The hammer wasn't even chipping the bark on any of the trees. Neither had a fire ax, nor Sam's pistol. The one weapon that Castiel had used—the deputy's rifle—had misfired. Dean had heard the breech-fired bullet hurtle between his head and Sam's, barely a foot apart at the time, with a lethal zzzzzz! Which had, obviously, put a quick end to that.
"Dean," said the angel in his gravelly voice. "Go without me."
He straightened. Castiel's tired eyes followed him up, the only part of him that moved. He stood well back from the wards, his shoulders hunched, as though distance would prevent any further near-death accidents.
Dean said, "Not a chance. If we're not allowed to kill demons, you have to come with us. Jedi mind tricks, remember?"
"But—"
"End of discussion, Cass." He turned back to the stupid tree, trying to find a hint of the wards to strike.
Sam glanced at Castiel, who was gloomily regarding his shoes. "I've never seen him this upset," he said under his breath.
"I know." Dean nodded his brother out of the way and hefted the sledgehammer. "We've gotta get him to her."
Sam's cheeks dimpled and smoothed out several times as he fought a smile. "Really? You think that's it?" he whispered.
"You didn't spend the whole morning with him. That's definitely it," Dean muttered from the corner of his mouth.
"Huh," Sam said. He got kind of a faraway look in his eye.
Dean rolled his. He swung. The hammer struck the tree. Which may as well have been made of rubber for all the damage it didn't take.
"This isn't working," Sam said.
"You think?" He threw the hammer to the ground in disgust. "Got any other bright ideas?"
The Tahoe's headlights, which had been going strong up until then, winked, buzzed, ticked, and blinked. All three men snapped to attention.
"Can we help?"
Dean turned toward the voice. There, untouched by the unstable light, stood a thin, redheaded woman, dressed for a night of clubbing. She wore a white paper bracelet around her wrist.
"Oh. Hey, Julia," Sam said.
She responded with a shy smile. "Hey, Sam. You were right. They want to help."
A cowboy—a genuine rough rider, Dean thought giddily—swaggered out of nowhere next to her.
"Huh. Doc Holliday," Sam murmured.
"Really?" Dean hissed, starting to feel starstruck. A real Old West gunslinger, here!
His little brother popped that balloon without remorse. "Aya said no. He just looks like him."
Dean scowled up at him. "Shut up, Sam. Just. Stop talking."
Sam grinned a non-apology.
An anxious-eyed, middle-aged woman in mom jeggings appeared next. A boy, maybe twelve, his teddy-patterned hospital gown too big and the skin of his head too shiny. A grizzled biker in a bandana and sunglasses, the entire right side of her body raw with road rash. A tiny elderly man, mumbling Buddhist prayers over his clasped, gnarled hands.
A whole crowd of dead people materialized on the road, flickering like an old newsreel. There had to be around sixty of them, some clearly showing how they'd died, others as solid and real as Sam or Castiel, diverse in appearance but all similarly solemn.
Their ghost posse.
"Julia, I could kiss you," Dean announced.
"I'll pass, thanks," she said, but her smile widened.
"Wait. How come we can see you now?" Sam asked.
Castiel lifted his head, peering into the dark toward the monoliths just visible above the trees. "The locks keeping the Void from entering this dimension are failing. That was what this ritual was designed to do. It appears that it has a side effect. The souls here must be able to tap into its energy discharge."
"That's a good thing for us, right?" Dean waved at the trees. "Think your Supergirl spirit mojo can do something about these wards? Nothing we do touches them."
Julia examined the trees. "Wards? You mean those glowing things?"
"Yes," Castiel said. "The drawings you see form a chain on the astral plane, and the chain forms a barrier. If you can break the chain, you can break the barrier."
"I think I understand. Will something like this work?" She cast around. Then she spotted the sledgehammer lying on the ground. She laid her fingers on the wooden handle. After a moment, the handle began to hiss. A wisp of smoke rose as her fingers sank in. When she withdrew her hand, she left four finger-shaped holes that glowed like coals. "I'm getting the hang of this being dead thing."
"That should work, yes, but you must be careful," Castiel said, serious as usual. "You will not be able to do it alone."
"Then let us assist," said the cowboy.
He and several other spirits separated themselves from the crowd. They approached the trees, the rocks, and even the asphalt of the road, and then laid their hands upon them. Their expressions ranged from fierce to hollow.
Sparks flew. The smell of burning saturated the wind. All at once, a solid line of energy detonated to the left and the right, as straight and tall as a fence of light. When the ghosts finished and the afterimages faded, Dean could finally see the sigils as blackened doodles, glowing like embers under smoking handprints of all sizes.
"That is seriously awesome," he said appreciatively.
"Did that do it?" Sam asked. "Can you get through now, Cass?"
"Yes. Thank you. All of you," he said, looking around at the crowd of spirits. Some of them showed signs of life, a rapturous light taking over their faces as though they recognized him for what he was.
"Okay, guys, this is it. Get in there and do what you can," Julia said.
One by one, the ghosts winked out.
..::~*~::..
The floorboards shivered, a tiny, rolling motion that Kittney associated with a tree swaying in the wind. It ended as quickly as it had started. She looked up from dripping wax onto the floor.
An earthquake? Not impossible in this region of the continent, though rare, but also expected, considering what was living beneath the skin of this dimension. However, uneasiness made her hesitate, hot wax dripping over her fingers unheeded. Something had happened, some kind of power discharge. A big one.
The angel could not have gotten past her wards.
Then again, it should never have found her this quickly. The storm, the angel-proofing, the wards enclosing her in this building. With that many layers of protection, she should have been safe.
"This has something to do with you, doesn't it." She directed a scowl at the demon bound and gagged on the floor. His eyes shone with unshed tears as he glared at her through the greasy strands of his unwashed hair.
She was so over his attitude. She stuck a fresh candle into the pool of wax. "You," she said, cold and commanding, to the two demons who had proven to possess a brain between them. "One of you, go check on the wards. The other, take the girl up to the gate and secure her. I may have use for her."
Wordless, obedient, and respectful, like every demon should be as far as she was concerned, Tom and Carmelo left to do her bidding. They didn't stop to ask what to do about the wards if something was hinky, or who should go get the girl. She ordered, they obeyed.
Without her helpers, however, her vessel was simply too small to lift a man a foot taller than she was, to hang him from the hook. She heaved the captive demon, still bound and kicking like a mule with both feet, to the edge of the pentagram. She laid him out so that his throat aligned with the proper runes, and then pinned him there with a spell.
She smiled at him. "Time to correct all of your mistakes."
..::~*~::..
Dean and Sam looked at Castiel. He looked back at them.
Several seconds passed.
"Uh, Cass?"
"Yes, Dean."
"The wards are down, right? Why aren't you, you know, flapping off like you always do?"
Castiel actually looked embarrassed as he said, "I can't. The locks holding the Void in its dimension are how I fly in this dimension. They're breaking down."
"So, you can't—" Then Dean's brain caught up to the times. "Wait, fly?"
"I am an angel," Castiel reminded him with a touch of asperity.
"Right—but—so . . ." And there, he stalled. He exchanged a glance with Sam, who looked as though his main operating system were in the midst of a reboot, too. "You're telling me, all those times you disappear, you're flying? Like, what, like one of those chubby diaper babies with the harps and the halos?"
"I don't have a harp." Castiel side-eyed him, making him wonder if he was about to get his happy ass smote.
"Are you really an angel?" Julia asked, her face full of hope. That was when Dean noticed that she wore a tiny gold cross on a thin gold chain around her neck.
The mood changed instantly. Castiel answered just as softly. "Yes."
"You're going to save us, right?" she asked, clasping her hands. "All of us. Right?"
After the slightest hesitation, he straightened like a soldier reminded of his orders. His chin came up. "Yes."
At that moment, Dean felt bad for teasing him. Commander Castiel, soldier of God, who always came off so confident, so knowledgeable, so tough. Untouchable. Indestructible.
This version of Castiel, tired and anxious and somehow smaller than usual, was weirding him out.
"All right, Cass, let's go get your girl," he said. Because he remembered what Dad had been like after they lost Mom. Because he remembered what Sam had been like after he lost Jess. Because if he's this bad after meeting a girl, I'd hate to see him if she's dead.
..::~*~::..
"We'll get out of here," Lemara said, for what felt like the thirtieth time.
Aya had curled into a ball, facing away from her, and she didn't respond. The only other noise in the room was that of her crying. The sound pierced Lemara's heart. Someone as compassionate and empathetic as Aya shouldn't be there. She wasn't the kind of girl who liked to get her hands dirty. She hated conflict, and she hated violence. It just wasn't right.
Some of the cages held the other people Lemara had seen in that warehouse. They must still be drugged, as she had been, because she couldn't detect any signs of consciousness from them. She also couldn't tell if Desmond was one of them.
She clenched her teeth on a curse. None of them should be here. This BS was seriously messed up.
After a while, she stopped trying to comfort her friend. It wasn't like she believed what she was saying, anyway. Julia hadn't made it. Why would they? She lay back down on her pad, her arms crossed so tightly over her face that they blocked the light.
She must have fallen asleep. She emerged from her self-imposed darkness as a tall man approached, striding between the two rows of cages with the rapping and jingling of chained, heeled boots on the floorboards.
"Hey!" she reached through the chain-link as far as her arm would go, trying to grab a fistful of his black jeans or catch his wrist. "Let me out of here!"
He didn't even look at her. He strode right on by.
Aya scrubbed tears off her cheeks. She scooted backward warily as the biker came to a stop at her cage. "Your face," she said in a quiet but surprisingly steady voice.
"Handsome devil, aren't I?" He snickered.
Aya's expression didn't change. "You're one of them, aren't you? A demon."
Black eyes, shining oily black from corner to corner. A freakishly strong girl, black smoke that seemed to have a mind of its own, a goblet of blood. Lemara forgot about breathing. Wait . . . What. What?
What was this, some kind of code? A game? A joke? Aya couldn't be serious . . . could she? She hadn't sounded like she was kidding, and Lemara couldn't get a read on the biker.
"Yeah, that's right," he said. "I'm a demon, and you're the little witch who's going to call every spirit out of the Veil to feed our pet."
"That thing you're summoning isn't a pet. It's a monster. If you let it out, it's going to eat you, too. And I'm not a witch," Aya said resentfully.
"No? Just a freak, then. The little girl who talks to ghosts." He laughed at her.
The laugh was an ugly, prolonged thing, and it obviously stung Aya. The way she shrank into her sweater, like a turtle into its shell, sent a jolt of rage through Lemara.
"Leave her alone!" she snapped. She attacked the chain-link, shaking it as hard as she could. "She's not the freak. You are!"
The chain-link rattled, loud in the room of drugged, sleeping people. The guy—the demon?—spared it about a quarter of a second of his attention, and then he proceeded to unlock Aya's cage.
Lemara snarled. She slapped the chain-link again, wishing it were his stupid face. "Look at me, you black-eyed cracker!"
That time, he did. He paused partway through unhooking the padlock. His eyes, so bug-like, seemed to bore right into her. The slur had tasted terrible as she'd said it, and, unnerved, she subsided.
He swung open the cage door. As though she weighed nothing, he hauled Aya, who kicked and struggled so that the sleeping pad came with her, out. For the first time, Lemara could see how disheveled she was. Her hair was matted, her face and cami drenched in blood. She wasn't even wearing shoes.
Her little friend. Her best friend. Her sister.
"Hey! You leave her alone!" she yelled. "Come get me, you fugly, pasty bastard. Leave her alone!"
He ignored her completely. Furious and frantic, she lunged at the door to her cage. The lock must not have been engaged. She fell out.
She didn't waste time thinking about it, either. She fully intended on tackling the creep the way her three older brothers had taught her, way back when. "Get back here!"
Her hands passed through black leather and white jersey. Right into the man's back. All the way up to the elbow. He kept walking like he'd felt nothing.
Lemara froze, staring at her hands. They looked the same as they always did.
Stunned, she glanced back at the cage. It looked exactly as she expected it to, empty, the sleeping pad rumpled. The door shut and locked.
Last summer, at Elitch's, it had felt like the safety harness on a roller coaster had come loose during the ride and she had started falling upward, out of the car. She felt like that again. Lightheaded. Dizzy.
What . . . was . . . happening . . .
"Aya?" she asked, not knowing what else to do. Her brain seemed to have stopped working. Her voice came out small and scared.
Aya couldn't help her. The demon dragged her out of the room, leaving Lemara behind.
Notes:
A/N: I'm . . . I'm so sorry.
Chapter 22: Never Say Goodbye
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
Lemara had lost everything.
Everything she'd ever worked for. Everything she'd built for herself. Everything she'd started but never got to finish.
Gone.
Desmond was still alive, thank God, but the relief settled around her like the cold, satiny walls of a coffin. When all this was over, he would go on without her. Forget her. Find someone else to love.
She'd lost it all. Her dreams. Her future. Her life.
Taken.
All that was left was a great, yawning grief. Bewilderment. Anger.
She didn't even know how she'd died. Drugged as she had been, her moment of death had been taken from her, too. So had her body because it sure wasn't here.
Sunlight. Warmth. Comfort. She would never have these things again.
It had been cold and dark forever.
Lemara miserably returned to her cage and lay down, all bent and cramped. What was the point of doing anything else?
It wasn't fair.
..::~*~::..
The air got chillier.
"Oh, look! Some of them are still here, and they're alive! Someone, go get Sam. He can help them," said a vaguely familiar voice, and then a draft swept over Lemara's bare skin.
She couldn't dredge up enough interest to bother with these small disturbances. Her thoughts kept right on circling the drain. She'd lost everything. Everything she'd ever worked for. Her dreams. Her future.
Everything. Gone.
"The little lady isn't here," said a deeper voice.
That one was unfamiliar and, therefore, had nothing to do with her. She tried to ignore it.
"Come on, we've got to find her," said the first voice.
That one was familiar. So familiar. It was starting to bother her. It brought to mind a dark nightclub, throbbing music, and rainbow lasers. Desmond kissing her. Desmond sliding his hands over her tummy. Desmond saying my girl with so much pride.
Desmond was alive, but she wasn't. God, it hurt. It hurt so damn much.
"Where could she be?"
A sensation a lot like heartburn forced her to sit up. Annoyed, she peered out of her cage. That voice. Whose was it?
A leggy redhead. She looked as good as she had that night, when she had tossed her long, shiny hair out of the way of her hands, laughing over pink margaritas.
"Julia?" Lemara mumbled. "What are you doing here?"
The redhead whirled toward her.
"Marr?" She knelt and peered through the chain-link, and her voice broke. "Oh, no, Marr. I hoped—I prayed—You can see me?"
Lemara nodded, sinking back to the pad, grateful that she'd solved the puzzle and could go back to sleep. "You died. You're dead. Me, too. Sucks, huh?"
"Oh, Marr. I'm so sorry." Julia touched her back.
"Careful," said the deeper voice. A man. He stared down at them with pity, his face shadowed by his cowboy hat. "You might not want to get that close. Friend or no, she's on the edge. She might not be able to understand you. She could lash out."
Lemara was too tired to pay attention. She closed her eyes. Julia's hand went in little circles. It felt nice. Warm, and solid.
"Marr?" Julia ventured. Her hand kept rubbing. Very warm. Very solid. "I know it's hard to concentrate right now, but can you tell me something?"
"Mmm?" Lemara asked sleepily.
"Have you seen Aya?"
"Aya?" Lemara rolled over. "How do you know Aya?"
"She helped me. Right after I died. I was in a lot of trouble. Stuck at the moment of my death, she said. If I'd stayed like that, I would have become an evil spirit. She helped me through it, and she told me about you. She tried so hard to find you." Julia paused. "Did she ever tell you she can talk to ghosts?"
Lemara careened toward wakefulness like a diver rising too fast from deep water. Reality rushed down at her like the surface, promising light and air and clarity.
"Kinda," she said, cringing as she remembered how Aya kept insisting that her dead cat was still around and how she, Lemara, always laughed it off. "I didn't believe her. I guess I have to now. She could see me. She was here, just a few minutes ago, I think, but that—guy—took her somewhere."
Julia didn't miss the way she stumbled over the word.
Neither did the cowboy. He hooked his duster aside and slipped his hands into his trouser pockets. Watching her expression, he said, "The demon, you mean."
There it was again. That word. Demon.
"Okay, somebody has got some explaining to do," she said, waving an imperious finger in the air.
The motion was so unconscious, so full of what Paulie called sass and she called say-that-again-and-I'll-put-my-foot-in-your-ass. So different than the despair that had been weighing her down. With it, she popped out of the water. Reality snapped into place, and she took in a huge breath of . . . not joy, but acceptance. She may not have been alive, but she felt like herself again.
And Lemara Bako would never, in a million years, lie here moping when Aya needed help.
She tried out a smile. "Hey. I know we're dead and all, but I'm glad you're okay."
"Me, too!" Julia actually giggled, though Lemara detected a note of hysteria in it.
They leaned right through the cage and embraced. Lemara held on tight, neither knowing nor caring how it was possible, grateful that she could touch another person like this, as though they were more than ghosts. As though they were the only things real, the world nothing more than a hologram.
"It's not over," Julia said, sounding dangerously close to tears. "There's still something we have to do."
Lemara stood up, helping Julia up with her. She checked her hair. Then, she walked out of her cage for the last time. The cowboy smiled encouragingly at her.
She lifted her chin. "Count me in. I owe someone a good kick in the face."
..::~*~::..
Kittney grabbed a fistful of bleached hair, right against the scalp where it would hurt the most. Her former partner squirmed, shouting into the spelled leather mask that kept him imprisoned in his meat. Her buffer was shrinking. She could feel it in the rush of crackling static in the air. She could hear it in the commotion outside, the shouts and the crashes.
Kammapa had to be summoned. Now.
She was safe here. Secure, and protected. The stage was set. This was her time. She was going to do it, going to call the monster forth, though without all twenty-four sacrifices it would take longer for it to cross dimensions. Not that it mattered to her. No one could stop it, and once it materialized fully, the seal would break. Whatever happened after . . . Whoever was still alive after . . .
Well. That wasn't her problem.
Holding the other demon's head still, she touched the tip of her pewter knife to the mask.
"Be grateful. Your existence is worth something after all," she whispered to him, and then she laughed at the impotent fury and terror in what she could see of his pretty, borrowed face. She trailed the knife down to the soft pink skin of his throat. She watched in delight as goosebumps rose in its wake. He whimpered and struggled, but she lifted him partway off the floor by his hair to position the knife correctly. "Your soul will let Kammapa out of its box. We will be one step closer to our promised Apocalypse." She slipped into a singsong at the end. "All. Thanks. To you!"
She closed her fist around the horizontal handle of the leaf-bladed knife so that it stuck up between her middle and ring fingers. One easy motion to the side and red blood would flow, a river of life energy.
The outer door banged against the antique refrigerator in the mudroom.
Kittney jerked. As she did, the pewter knife sliced up the other demon's neck, causing him to yell, and then the blade bit into a strap of the leather mask. Blood welled up and began to run, but not enough of it.
The inner door slammed against the wall next. Gale-force wind, shockingly cold, blew her candles down and knocked the space heaters over. She dropped both knife and demon when she threw up her arms to protect her face. The knife clattered on the floorboards. The demon landed heavily, with no way to break his fall.
Orange and white sparks and blue tongues of flame erupted from the toppled space heaters, then died. The incandescent work lights, powered off, burned so brightly that the glass of the bulbs popped with the musical sound of lake ice cracking. Half-seen figures swarmed inside on the wind, the whites of their eyes luminous, their skin gray, their hair and their clothes streaming. They attacked the walls and the ceiling like waves crashing against a cliff. Smoking, blackened handprints appeared all over her carefully painted sigils, burning them out, depowering them.
She howled in disbelief. In seconds, the spirits had disconnected her sanctified ritual space from the gate. Sacrificing anyone here now would do less than nothing!
"How did you get in here?" she raged. She began to blast the spirits apart, turning them into dust and embers. "You're not supposed to be here! I warded this building against spooks like you!"
"You did, yeah," said a woman, right behind her.
Kittney spun around. Her eyes widened. "You!"
"Me. I figured out what you were doing. And, see, you forgot about the hunters. They let us in," the spirit said. Her long red hair swirled around her like mermaid tresses. She zoomed up to Kittney and shoved her, hard.
Kittney flew across the room and crashed into a pile of broken furniture.
"That's what you get for murdering Luka!" the spirit shrieked.
"Your lives were meaningless," Kittney said, half-lying in splintered wood. It hurt, but she was a demon. Pain was no stranger to her. She threw up her hand. "Your final death will be, too. Displodo—"
"I don't think so," said another woman, her voice huskier.
A large, sparkly sandal swooped out of nowhere and cracked against Kittney's nose. She flew sideways, broken wood cascading after her. She rolled into the wall with a bruising whump.
She touched her nose. Her fingers came away slick and red. Astonished, she looked up. "You!" she said again.
The tall girl, the one she had killed an hour ago, grinned and then made a kissy face at her.
"Expellere—" she tried next, but the first spirit slapped her.
As she staggered to the right, the second spirit kicked her again with her man-sized foot. She stumbled left. It went like that for several blows, the two spirits attacking from both sides and then dematerializing faster than she could vocalize an incantation. She snarled like a wounded animal. She should have been safe here. Protected. Unreachable. Unstoppable.
"Ligare—"
"Castiel!" the first spirit cried. She and her friend vanished before Kittney could get out more than the first word of the Latin binding spell, but her ghostly voice rang out clearly from the wind. "The demon is here!"
The angel strode through the door.
There was no mistaking that aura of Heavenly power, nor the expression of righteous fury. It made Kittney feel unclean. Slimy. Dead inside. The way her people had once made her feel for being different, for being powerful, for being a witch, so long ago.
She growled at the angel. Gathering her demonic power, she called her knife back to her hand. She then slid into one of the shadowy dimensional byways the damned used to travel.
Never mind the prophecy. She would break this seal another way. She'd come too far to stop now.
..::~*~::..
Denied its prey, the angel rounded on Vahe. It twisted its fist in his shirt and lifted him off the floor. Then it ripped the damaged mask away. The ancient, shiny leather disintegrated in a puff of yellow powder, stinking of sulfur. Always quick to take advantage, Vahe huffed a few breaths of untainted air.
"Where is she?" the angel demanded, their faces about two inches apart. "Where is Aya?"
"I put her with the other sacrifices." He had no intention of lying to this thing. He had come too close to oblivion up here and wanted nothing more than to get the hell off Earth. "She should be in her cage."
"No." The angel frowned. "She's no longer there."
"Then how should I know?" he whined, squirming. It was uncomfortable to have a guy's face that close to his. Especially when that guy was eyeing him as though he were a stepped-in pile of dog shit, and was considering lighting it and the shoe and possibly the entire sidewalk on fire.
The angel, a silver-blue light in its pupils kindling, pressed its palm to his forehead.
An embarrassingly loud squeal burst out of Vahe. He tried to turn his head away but five fingers, as inflexible as iron, squeezed his skull.
"The amphitheater!" he gasped. "That's where the gate is. Someone probably took her up there because she can call the spirits!"
The angel tilted its head. Its blazing blue eyes held his in a grip as strong as that of its fingers. He couldn't look away no matter how desperately he wanted to. His demonic essence brimmed to the surface against his will.
After what felt like an age, the angel drew back a scant inch or so. The light in its pupils shrank to a pinprick. It removed its hand.
"Leave," it growled.
Vahe opened his mouth and began to scream.
..::~*~::..
Castiel relaxed his grip enough that the demon could vacate the human body and spiral, a thick black snake of smoke, toward the cracks in the floorboards. Then, before it escaped into them, he grabbed it. The smoke curled and lapped helplessly at his hand, flopping like an eel out of water.
Dean charged in, his boots thudding to a stop. His mouth dropped open.
Castiel squeezed. The fire of salvation burned along the demon's length, devouring it in seconds. He watched it go up in ashy embers, suffused with a feeling of justice and completion. It was very satisfying.
Dean grinned, pointing his handgun to the side, at the floor. "Nice trick. Why do I feel like you've been holding out on us?"
He often asked questions about angels that Castiel didn't deem appropriate to answer. "That was the demon who tried to take Aya, before," he said instead.
"Before? You mean when you brought her to the motel?"
"Yes. I was reasonably sure I could convince it to leave its host willingly. I didn't wish to harm this one." He'd recognized Paulie from Aya's dream. A friend. A beloved not-brother. He lowered the barely responsive boy to the floor.
"Hey. I know him." Dean frowned down at Paulie, at his bloodless face and unfocused, half-shuttered eyes, and then he swiftly knelt and traded his gun for a switchblade. He sliced the zip ties off Paulie's wrists and ankles.
Castiel checked the boy over, relinquishing some of his dwindling power to heal his wounds, as he had already done for the drugged victims. The wounds of the soul that had been inflicted by demonic possession, however, he did not currently have enough power to heal. That would have to be done on its own. So, he sent the boy to sleep.
Dean, who had prowled the hall but found nothing else of interest, was already on the way out the door. Wordlessly, Castiel followed, leaving Paulie on the floor, unconscious but alive.
The campground had descended into chaos. Fire had broken out in at least two green-roofed buildings, the light and vibrant color dancing against the clouds. Periodically, troops of souls charged past, wreaking havoc upon everything in sight. Debris and the bodies of those either killed by the brothers or put to sleep by him littered the gravel road. The unceasing wind fanned the fires, which belched clouds of woodsmoke. A few souls, whooping and hollering, chased the remaining demons down the hill, toward the blizzard ringing the park.
Even though the scene felt like a success, the sacrifices rescued, the demons routed, Castiel wrestled with a strong sense of foreboding. The nine people they had saved here didn't seem like enough. Too many had died, and the seal, and Aya, were still in danger.
He closed his eyes so that he could concentrate. Something hovered there, pressing against the Earthly dimension, seeking entry. The presence seemed everywhere, a swollen spider crouching in the center of its corroded web, its venom oozing down the pathways of energy. It noticed him and sent curious, hungry, tar-like tendrils in his direction. He twitched his wings but kept them furled. The last thing he wanted was for that presence to touch them. Chances were good that even if he managed to transition into a telluric current, he'd end up careening right into the Void, and into those hungry tendrils. He opened his eyes.
Smoke billowed across the campground, laced with tiny, red-hot sparks. The trees were starting to go up. Castiel waved his hand, damping the flames before they could spread farther. He did not miss the impressed look Dean flicked at him from under lowered lashes. Before Dean could comment on it, however, Sam's leggy form appeared, a couple of crowbars clutched in one hand. As always, Dean's focus narrowed to his brother, and his brother only. They met in the middle of the dark road.
"Did you find Lilith?" Dean asked.
"No," Sam said. He took a couple of deep, angry breaths through his nose, his dimples blindingly absent. "I think Lilith split when she heard we were coming."
"No loyalty among demons, huh?"
Sam gave Dean a narrow-eyed look. "Did you find Aya?"
Castiel answered. "No. A demon told me she is up at the amphitheater."
Dean snorted. "Like demons don't lie."
"I did believe him," Castiel said. "Where else would she be?"
All three of them turned to look. The tips of the towering rocks looked black against the stormy sky.
It's so far, Castiel thought unhappily. The physicality of this world could be very disorienting for an angel. It was so far, and he could not fly.
"Well, I'm not ready to throw in the towel," Dean said.
He sounded perfectly calm. As did Sam, who said, "Me, neither."
At an unspoken signal that Castiel missed entirely, the brothers proceeded to check over their weapons and other tools of the trade, squirreled away in numerous pockets and the lining of their jackets.
"Wish we could have gotten the shotgun, at least," Dean muttered, pulling out a book of matches, peering at them, and then tucking them away again.
"I think we pushed the deputy far enough without showing her the trunk. She'd have arrested us on the spot," Sam said, and they both let out a brief chuckle.
"We'll just have to go with what we have," Dean said.
Which was: The crowbars, solid iron. The police officer's matte-black Glock, regular ammunition. Dean's ivory-handled Colt and Sam's pearl-handled Taurus, silver bullets. Extra rounds. Flasks of holy water and one rosary. John Winchester's journal, leather-bound and dog-eared. Two hex bags and several small plastic canisters of rock salt. The humble necklace of divining charms that had once belonged to a demigod. A handful of blades, ranging from Dean's switchblade to the demon-killing knife.
This, Sam offered to Castiel, surprising him. "Here. You might need it."
Ah. Because the hunt wasn't over yet. For the Winchesters, even one person was enough. As long as that one person was out there, they would never stop fighting.
He considered the knife. He didn't need it, but he realized that this was the way Sam and Dean said goodbye and I love you. They never actually did say these things, as though they believed doing so meant that one of them would not survive. Instead, they tried to give each other their best chances to make it out alive.
The bond the Winchester brothers shared was uniquely beautiful. For the first time, they had included Castiel.
He accepted the knife. "Thank you, Sam."
"All right," said Dean. "Let's get this show on the road."
Notes:
A/N: *sings* THIS IS THE STORY THAT NEVER ENDS! How have you all been?
I have, just this moment, learned from our vet that my kitty of sixteen years has malignant tumors in his lungs (a mass of melanoma in his mouth is responsible) so I have completely forgotten what else I wanted to say.
I do hope you're still enjoying this story. I am going to go sit with my kitty. And then I will keep writing. And probably do nothing else because I don't want to think.
Love to you all,
~ Anne
Chapter 23: Praying for Salvation
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
Aya discovered that if she stopped running, the demon would just drag her along like a toy on a string. She stumbled, wincing, as they hurried up the sidewalk toward the amphitheater.
"Let me go!" she said. That was all she'd said since he'd come to get her. She scratched at the hand wrapped around her upper arm. She punched, she pinched, and she pushed. "Let go!"
"Shut up." That was all he'd said, too.
Such a wonderful conversationalist! So effective at keeping her mind off her problems. Like, what had happened to Sam after that awful angel Uriel had shown up? What could have caused an unpossessed human to take on a demonic face the way he had? Was Paulie okay? Did Dean and Castiel know what had happened? Why hadn't she been able to talk to Lemara, her best friend, who had been hurting, who had needed her, when she'd been talking to souls her entire life? How was it that she didn't have a single cut or bruise or a concussion after crashing through her front door?
"Ow!" she gasped. Dang it. Those cuts and bruises were sure making an appearance now, all over the bottoms of her feet. The rough path, dotted with short staircases, seemed to like the taste of her thin ankle socks.
As she fought the demon, she forgot herself and glanced up at him. Her stomach lurched.
His jaw had unhinged, kept attached to his skull by sagging corpse-like skin, gray and spotted and as wrinkled as an old paper bag. His eye sockets and his mouth gaped, sloshing with an inky blackness that simmered at the edges like dry ice fog.
She tore her gaze away. Boulders, and shrubs and trees half-clothed in spring green, passed by on their left as they climbed higher toward the amphitheater. She had been here twice before, in happier times. She had sat upon that low, sandstone retaining wall in the slanting rays of the setting sun while waiting in line for a concert. She had walked past the frightening apparition affectionately known as the Headless Hatchet Lady, who no one else could see but every teenager believed in; Mrs. Johnson, complete with her head, sat on her horse in the middle of the upper parking lot, her bloody hatchet resting across the saddlebow. She did nothing but stare as the demon towed Aya past, however, and in the next moment, she vanished.
The demon hurried between the bollards that protected the widening foot traffic-only path. Creation Rock, the northern monolith, rose in front of them like a giant bent knee. The trees growing at its base thrashed in the frigid wind. Aya whimpered as it cut right through her light camisole and sweater combo.
A new sound threaded itself with the moaning wind. High and whining, then low and grumbling, then both together. Like the eager, bone-chilling cries from a pack of coyotes. The towering rocks amplified the cries, bounced them back and forth like a hundred hacky sacks.
She began to shake, uncontrollably. Something deep and primal inside of her recognized those cries. They increased in frequency and intensity as she and the demon got closer to the source. Numbly, she let him take her past the construction zone, around the Visitor Center, and through the cluster of half-built merch stands and food kiosks. Not speaking at all anymore, they navigated the first flights of downward steps, took a sharp right, and emerged, at last, into the amphitheater itself.
She jerked so wildly against the demon's grip that she almost, almost got free. He yanked her into his chest and wrapped both arms around her, lifting her off the ground. He slung her over his shoulder and continued down the stairs. Her feet flailed in the air, trying to kick the unwanted view of the house away. The big rocks angled toward each other and the third monolith lower down, Stage Rock. Floodlights strung in the scaffold over the stage lit up the whole area. She opened her mouth, her throat full and aching as she tried to scream and sob at the same time.
The slope between the rocks, a bowl of hillside that had been smoothed and paved and installed with curving rows of bench seats, flipped between two realities like a massive thaumatrope: The stepped rows of seating, marked with incontiguous lines of fluorescent spray paint, and a pit so lightless her brain insisted that it wasn't visible, wasn't there. Within the pit, filling it, a many-lipped mouth irised open and shut. The mouth slid back and forth like that of an enormous plecostomus in a fish tank, sucking at an invisible barrier stretched across the ground. The pointed, petal-shaped lips flapped like tongues, dark pink and barbed with triangular teeth on the inside, slick and olive-green and veiny on the outside. Another eerie, haunting cry rumbled through the amphitheater.
She thought of Sam, sitting on her couch in the sunshine, a forward-falling lock of his hair curling slightly in the steam from his coffee, explaining that Ditaolane the Diviner had sealed the Eater of the World, not killed it. Looked like he was right.
Aya finally screamed, and then she started to cry.
..::~*~::..
The light show in the clouds continued unabated, thunder crashing deafeningly. Inky-Corpse carried Aya to the bottom of the steps. Neither of them looked toward the thing in the pit. Once they reached the stage, he flung her down. It hurt, but she immediately leaped up and ran, thinking she'd take one of the many paths out of the amphitheater and lose herself amid the rocks and the scrub.
A hot, powerful blast of wind swept her legs right out from under her. Her feet shot forward. She went crashing to the ground again, flat on her back.
Then she lay there, scared out of her mind because she couldn't breathe.
Two shadows fell across her. The first came from a big construction worker. His demonic red rictus of a smile, crammed with far too many teeth, split a greasy, bearded face in two. He leered down at her. And the other, a brown-haired girl, her arms crossed and her hip cocked, her sequined dress sparkling in the floodlights, who said, "You're lucky I need you alive for the moment."
Aya tried to gasp. To scream. Her lungs wouldn't loosen, and nothing came out. The girl had no face, just a revolting mass of fleshy, slightly hairy protrusions that squirmed like worms.
The other demon approached with a roll of silver duct tape.
"You're sure about this?" Wormy asked him, her impatience clear in her voice. "I can sense something off about her, but she can't be a reaper. She's a living human."
"I saw it myself," Inky-Corpse responded. Quickly, efficiently, he bound Aya's wrists and her ankles. "She talks to ghosts. They follow her everywhere. You can feel them out there."
He shivered, glancing warily around at the rocks, and then made to add a rectangle of tape to Aya's mouth. She twisted her head away, discovered that she could breathe, and promptly went into a fit of coughing.
Wormy stalled him, pushing his arm down. "I want to test something," she said.
Aya whimpered. Her lungs ached, but at least the demon did stop threatening her with the duct tape. Wormy picked up a bundle of grayish-brown fur that flopped around sadly, like a wet dishcloth. A dead cottontail. Two-handed, she squeezed the blood from it to draw something directly onto the reddish cement of the stage, something big and circular. Then she set the rabbit aside, wrung out and bloody, its fur sticking out in damp spikes. She filled in the details of her drawing with her finger.
"I'm not going to help you," Aya said boldly, from the ground.
Wormy appeared to suck her finger clean. "You will if you want to stay alive. Call them, then, girl. Call your ghostie friends."
"Why should I?" It wasn't like she called souls, whatever that meant. They always sought her out, came to her for help. That wasn't the same thing.
Wormy tilted her head down as though looking at her. She glared right back, finding it easier to stare at a mass of worms than a pair of black demon eyes.
A flicker of motion caught their attention. Mrs. Johnson, the Headless Hatchet Lady, had appeared on the stage, just as she had in the parking lot. Missing her head, she sat on her horse. Blood streaked her blouse and homespun skirts, and her chapped, yellow-nailed hands clutched the handle of her hatchet. She tended to scare the pants back on to teenagers getting a little too friendly in the shadows of the rocks.
Next to the demons, she looked positively cuddly.
Cackling under his breath, Inky-Corpse stalked toward Mrs. Johnson. He gave the apparition a wide berth, squinting at her as though he couldn't believe she was there. "It's working, Boss."
"Because one soul showed up?" Aya said scathingly. "Hate to break it to you, but she's been haunting this place for over a century. It has nothing to do with me."
"Doesn't it?" Wormy pulled a small knife from a pocket of her skirt. She set the point of the knife into the dip under Aya's collarbone.
Aya did gasp, then. It felt like a cat scratch, but Wormy twisted the knife, and the pain worsened. Then she swiped the knife to the side, and Aya yelled. Blood, too hot on her frozen skin, gushed from the cut.
Mrs. Johnson, holding her head under her arm, opened her mouth and let out a banshee screech. It sounded like a warning, a call to arms. Stuttering, fizzing, more souls materialized. They formed a broken ring of unspeaking, unsmiling people. The souls did not attack, though. They did nothing except stand there. The three demons exchanged a look that somehow seemed satisfied.
"Look at them," Wormy breathed in her face, and Aya cringed. Her breath smelled terrible, like garbage festering under a summer sun. "Still think it's not you? You're helping whether you want to or not."
Aya looked around at the souls, shocked. She recognized some of them. Like two of the regulars from Spanky's Roadhouse, the rough rider and the mother killed by a drunk driver. Then Jeanine, the trans girl with the large round glasses and the short green hair who had overdosed in her high school bathroom. She was still too ashamed to let Aya speak with her family. The man in a superhero t-shirt who liked to stand mournfully in the middle aisle of the movie theater where he had shielded his sister from a shooter. He vanished every time Aya tried to approach him. The kid who used to live next door, her cotton top and shorts streaming chlorinated water into pink Velcro sneakers. Her complexion was so zombie-like that Aya knew the poor little thing was one step away from too far gone.
They, and the others she didn't recognize, looked at her, still as photographs. Face after face. Watching. Waiting.
Why were they here? Had the demons been right? Had she had it backward all along? Did they come to her because she called them? Dear Obaa-chan, was it her fault they were here?
"Please!" she cried, without ever having meant to say a word. "All of you! It's not safe. You need to get out of here!"
Mrs. Johnson smiled, a truly ghastly sight, but she didn't leave. None of them did.
So fixated on the souls—their sadness, their grief, their confusion, their anger—Aya didn't hear Wormy tear off a piece of duct tape. "Leave them alone," she pleaded. "Don't hurt them—"
She got out one muffled squawk before the demon slapped the tape crookedly over her mouth.
This was how Julia looked when I first saw her, she thought. Tears slipped down the sides of her face and soaked into her hair.
"You're messing with the vibrations, all right," Wormy said, sounding disgruntled. "You're strong, but you aren't going to be able to stop me. I'm stronger, girl. All I need is for you to bring the souls here, and then the Eater can have you."
She lifted Aya, one-handed. She put the other hand against Aya's sternum.
"Levitas!" the demon shouted, and then she shoved Aya off the edge of the stage.
Hot wind buffeted her, strong enough to sweep her up. Terrifyingly, it carried her over the seats to the center of the house, where the wind from the ongoing storm froze her tears and whipped her hair into a tangled mess. She hung there, suspended twenty feet in the air by nothing, directly over the flower-petal mouth of the Eater of the World. Though her arms and her legs were bound, she thrashed against and screamed into the tape.
Kammapa seemed driven to a frenzy at the sight of her—or the smell, since it didn't seem to have eyes. It rammed the invisible barrier, its teeth scraping against it with the sound of a million brake pads chirping. Appendages, long and skinny and pallid, punched and clawed at it, seeking a weak spot.
From up there, and at that angle, Aya could see a lot better. The monster's size boggled her. A second drawing, like the one Wormy had painted on the stage in rabbit's blood, took up a large portion of the bowl between the rocks, spray-painted over the rows of seats and the aisles. It was a pentagram. The outer circle defined the edges of Kammapa's pit, strobing from reality to nightmare.
Except nightmare was starting to linger. Kammapa rammed into the barrier, and the pentagram flashed the kind of red that screamed danger! She squeezed her eyes shut. If these were the sorts of things her reikan wanted to show her, then she never wanted to open her eyes ever again.
Despair threatened to crush her. She wished she weren't so alone.
Help me. Please. Someone help me.
Lemara. Sam. Dean.
Castiel.
..::~*~::..
Castiel stopped so abruptly that Dean ran into him.
Sam, in the lead, turned around curiously. "Is something wrong? Cass?"
Castiel couldn't answer him. He winced, pressing his thumb into his temple. Prayers. Small, frightened, and loaded with despair. Every word stabbed at him like sharp icicles.
Aya was praying for salvation.
..::~*~::..
Kittney turned her knife on her palm. The cut was quick and clean. She closed her fingers over it before it started to bleed. She hadn't fulfilled the prophecy. Her diablerie was a day early and several sacrifices short, and now this girl—
Her aura resonated like that of a reaper, a servant of Death, capable of containing and transporting human souls, each of which was a small source of power equivalent to several nuclear reactions that, when gathered, kept the lights burning in both Hell and Heaven.
Kittney could not have prepared for this. Nothing, not a single one of her divinations, had warned her of the girl's existence.
She had set this thing in motion, and the power of the perfect number she had harnessed, the twenty-two, the principle of precision and balance, the embodiment of God-energy, was building to its inevitable conclusion. Outstanding ascendancy or disastrous downfall. Which was it going to be?
Downfall was not an option. Kittney had not prepared for the girl, but she could get rid of her after she'd gotten some use out of her. Kammapa would cross the dimensions, the seal would break. It wouldn't be very elegant, but Kittney was beyond caring. She tightened her fingers, and a drop of blood fell and spotted her velour skirt. Improvising had never appealed to her, yet it must be done from time to time. Steeling herself, she held her fist over her rabbit's blood pentagram, the key to the locks.
"Come out, come out, whoever you are!" she bellowed into the storm. "Or are you going to let your precious little reaper girl die?"
She waited. A second drop of blood fell, hissing, onto the pentagram. One of the runes began to glow. Then another. She opened her fingers, let the blood flow. All the runes lit up, wavering like underwater lights.
The locks of Kammapa's prison began to glow in response.
"Don't be shy!" she yelled at the rocks. "She won't just die, you know. She'll be eaten, soul and all. She'll disappear as though she never existed! Is that what you want?"
More spirits appeared, filling the stage, spilling into the house. As Kittney had known they would, the redhead and the tall girl joined them, fury rolling off them like heatwaves.
Giving a secret whoop of triumph, she resumed the summoning, muttering under her breath as fast as she could: "Haec sacrificia offero nomine Kammapa, comedentis Mundi. Veni ad me. Veni ad me. Veni ad me."
The spirits of the two women she'd killed rushed her. Tom raised his hand and blew them apart. They vanished with echoing screams, dusty whirls, and golden sparks. At that, the other spirits exploded into action. A cowboy and a middle-aged woman appeared next, on Kittney's other side. Carmelo blasted them apart. More screams, more smoke, more sparks.
So it went, Kittney repeating her invocation three times over and her two subordinates laughing as they took down the spirits that appeared. The spirits kept trying, coming back again and again, but not one of them reached Kittney to stop her. The headless spook on horseback, swinging her bloody hatchet, ran Carmelo down. The horse's invisible hooves pounded on flesh and rock. Carmelo rolled around, clutching his middle and bawling like a wounded cow.
He no longer mattered. "Veni ad me!" Kittney shrieked, her throat burning, victory blazing in her heart.
Her blood sank into the pentagram, powering it. A sharp report, as of glass two feet thick cracking, reverberated through the amphitheater. The buzzing floodlights intensified. They blinded her before they exploded, plunging the whole area into stormy twilight. High above Kammapa's prison, the reaper girl floated like a tiny moon. Untouched, for the moment. Kammapa could not reach her.
Bracing itself against the barrier with its six wiry arms, it twisted its lips into a funnel. Its whole body contracted and then inflated like a heart beating in slow motion as it sucked mightily at the air. Kittney and Tom threw themselves aside as a new force—not wind, not gravity—enveloped the skeletal horse and its headless rider, and Carmelo.
The two ghosts and the demon disappeared down Kammapa's gullet, woman and man and horse screaming.
Kammapa squealed and bucked. A shudder ran through the amphitheater, the earth grinding. The creature expanded, its sides bulging like bubbles blown in slime. One limb, pallid as bone, ending in a clawed, pimpled chicken's foot, rose up, up, out of the pit, past the failing, fading barrier. It looked as though it rose from water, from solid opacity to transparent otherworldliness. A second followed, then a third. Ghostly, the legs came down on some of the wooden seats and, when the monster tried to lift itself out of its prison, crushed them.
It skidded backward but sucked greedily at the air again. One after another, more souls spiraled into the darkness. The redhead's eyes, blue as the northern skies, flew wide before she vanished, pulled away like water churning down a drain.
It was working! By the time the Eater grew large enough to swallow the reaper girl, it would have gained enough power to fully enter this dimension and break the seal. She'd done it! Elated, Kittney threw back her head and howled.
..::~*~::..
Aya twisted on the air, bound by the levitation spell and the tape. She watched helplessly, hopelessly, as Lemara shot down the long tunnel of darkness after Julia. The wind wailed, the thunder crashed, Kammapa squealed, the Earth groaned, and Kittney laughed wildly.
Aya would be next. She was sure she would be next.
Oh, God. She was next.
Help us! Please! CASTIEL!
..::~*~::..
"Cass? What's wrong?" Sam asked, his deep voice frantic and cracking. "Cass? What happened?"
Dean joined in. "Cass!"
Castiel realized that he had been quiet for too long. He had fallen unknowing to his knees on the path as Aya's terrified prayers rang in his head.
"Kammapa. It's here," he mumbled, blinking the dizziness away.
The brothers bent over him and started pouring questions over his head. He couldn't understand them. All he could hear, as though he could see her, bright as a burning star, was Aya.
He had to do something. Now. Running through the Earthly dimension on puny human legs was no longer an option.
Too sick to speak, he put his hand on Dean's shoulder, grasped a fistful of soft, worn leather, then reached up and got a second fistful of Sam's denim jacket. They took hold of him, too, probably thinking he wanted help standing. He closed his eyes, concentrating. Kammapa's attention was elsewhere. Most of the ley lines were severed, sparking at either end like electrical wires. The Void yawned in the center.
What he was about to do was dangerous, but he'd agreed that he would not run off on his own. The two Winchesters were just going to have to come along, and try not to die.
Before he could rethink this plan, he flared his wings, snapping them open to their full extent, latched onto a trembling, faltering telluric current, thin as a wire, and pulled his friends in sideways with him.
Notes:
A/N: Hello friends! Been a while, but here I am, still working hard to finish this story.
Please leave a comment before you go, okay? :)
~ Anne
P.S. If anybody speaks Latin and wants to nitpick my Google translation, I am not opposed to that. LOL
Chapter 24: All In
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
The turbulence lasted only a second. Dean slammed into the ground so hard it felt like his shins telescoped right down into his boots. His knees hit the ground next. Then his hands.
He did manage to keep from kissing reddish cement, but barely. His dropped crowbar rang like a bell, quickly silenced.
"Sonofabitch," he wheezed, leaning his forehead against the cement. There was a reason he refused to fly the friendly skies! He wasn't afraid of flying, exactly. It was of not flying. Damn Sam and his statistics, planes crashed!
Nauseated, he pushed himself into a crouch on stinging palms. There would be blood, but it didn't feel like he'd broken anything. Then, he realized what had happened. It had happened a few times before, just never that violently. "Cass! I thought you said you couldn't fly. You gotta warn a guy before you do something like that, buddy. Okay? Cass?"
No answer. He spotted his friend a few feet away. Facedown and unmoving.
"Dean!" Sam hollered.
He shot to his feet. A pair of arms clamped his elbows to his sides.
The arms constricted. He grunted involuntarily as his boots left the ground. Held there for fleeting seconds, he had an excellent view of Red Rocks. Castiel had brought him right to the stage, a flat expanse of sandstone and red cement. Below—
The dream grips him in the talons of a devil.
Strobing light. Flashes of tortured sight, longer stretches of absolute darkness.
He gasped, reeling from the Hell flashback. Whatever was down there, it was bad. Really, really bad. Sort of oozing out like a slug, kind of see-through, all manner of bulging slimy convulsing horrible. Weird, high-pitched moans and deep howls ricocheted off the rocks. The wind whipped past, ghosts projected upon it like the creepy tunnel scene from the original Willy Wonka. They screamed as they disappeared into the slug's giant flapping mouth. The thing heaved its misshapen bulk a few more feet out of the pit. Though transparent like a ghost itself, wood cracked and splintered under its weight.
Sam had somehow ended up down there, right at the rim of the pit, and he'd lost his crowbar. Thank God he hadn't gone in. He dashed down the rows of seats, hair flying, stork legs carrying him over the gaps. He reached the railing that separated the house from the stage and vaulted over it.
Dean did not feel like being rescued by his baby brother.
"Let go of me, you assclown!" he ground out, kicking. His heels bashed into somebody's kneecaps.
The arms flipped him to the side. He spun all the way around before he landed and skidded over in a messy sprawl. He rocked on his back, momentarily stunned. Strength like that, it had to be a demon.
He scrambled to his feet and rushed to meet it, a stringy-looking biker. He got his arms around the guy's middle and shoved, trying to tackle him, but an elbow drove into the back of his head. A knee came up to meet his face. He staggered back. Dodged a punch. Threw one of his own. Felt his knuckles connect.
Dean and the demon traded blows for a few seconds. He scooped up his crowbar and swung. It couldn't hurt a demon—much. Biker-dude hissed as the iron contacted the bare skin of his hand and began to sizzle, but he pulled it closer and hugged Dean's arm. He twisted. Dean yelped.
Castiel grabbed the demon by the mouth, hurled him onto his back, and squeezed. Fiery light, as bright as the thick ropes of lightning whipping across the sky, strobed from the demon's eyes, nose, and ears. When Castiel wove unsteadily to his feet, the demon lay still and smoking.
Castiel opened his mouth to say something, and then sagged. Dean hurried to prop him up. It was difficult to get a good hold over the loose trench coat and slippery jacket beneath, and he didn't want to touch the torn-up mess that used to be the angel's shirtfront, but he managed.
"You okay?" he bellowed over the wind and thunder and howls.
Blood trickled from under Castiel's hair and the corner of his mouth, and he looked more than a little woozy, but he pulled away to stand on his own. He pointed. "Kammapa has come close enough to affect this dimension! It's close to breaking the seal and materializing fully. We must stop her!"
Her? Dean looked where Castiel was pointing. Oh. Her. Kittney Johnson, her hands smeared with blood to the wrist so that it looked as though she were wearing a pair of red leather gloves. She chanted unintelligibly over a pentagram painted in blood on the stage, maybe a foot and a half in diameter, her face lit from below, hands palms-down, fingers splayed.
A gunshot cracked through the wind. Sam, panting, had arrived.
Kittney choked on her spell, one of her bloody hands flying to her shoulder. The pentagram flared like a firecracker and then went dark.
The moment she stopped her chanting, something small and white fell from where it had been suspended over the slug monster. Kammapa squealed, bouncing, and opened its huge, fleshy mouth like Monstro on the rampage. It sucked at the air, making obscene slurping, gulping sounds.
Castiel's eyes widened in horror. He let out a wordless, strangled cry, thoroughly shocking Dean, who had never heard him vocalize like that, not even after he and Bobby had unloaded several shotgun blasts into him at close range. He watched, dumbfounded, as Castiel took off running and launched himself off the stage.
"CASS!" he roared.
It was an incredible jump, but Dean saw the moment that the tornado-like wind got hold of him. He went soaring over the seats, his coat flapping like a sail. The strengthening wind pulled at Dean, too, forcing him to take an unwilling step in the monster's direction. Then another.
What he was seeing finally made sense. The something small was Aya. She made no sound as she plunged into the pit like a penny tossed into a fountain. Castiel followed her a second later.
The petal-like mouth twisted closed. The monster shuddered as though swallowing. Then it opened all of its lips again, shrieking.
The angel and the girl were gone.
..::~*~::..
Sam could not believe what he had just seen. He stood staring at the spot where Aya and Castiel had vanished until he remembered Kittney; in his distraction he had let his gun droop. He brought it up, aiming for the middle of her forehead.
"Ow," she said, the picture of bored annoyance. She tilted her hand as though lifting the lid off a jar containing a large spider. She critically examined the blood gushing from her shoulder. "You like to beat up girls, doncha, Sam?"
"You're not a girl. You're a witch," Dean said coldly before Sam could reply. He clicked the safety off his gun.
"Oh, go to hell, you Hasselhoff wannabe," she said, pouting.
His lip curled. "You first."
Even from twelve feet away, Sam could see him shaking. Dean was seconds from totally losing it. Not that Sam could blame him at this point. Without needing to say a word to each other, they circled closer to the demon, fingers ready on triggers. Silver bullets weren't going to hurt her, but they'd blow her legs off at the knee if they had to. Anything to stop her from completing this ritual.
"Hands up, bitch," Dean barked.
"Okay," she said. She threw up her red-stained hands.
Hot demon-wind bowled Dean over. He went down cursing up a storm to rival the one overhead. Sam, too. He groaned, foolishly lying full-length on the ground, chin scraped and bleeding. He thought of a few choice things to say himself, like, Shoulda seen that one coming, but when he raised his head, he saw the girl running for the exit.
So, he said something else, bringing out a wood-beaded rosary and brandishing it in his fist. "Exorcizamus te, omnis immundus spiritus—"
Kittney jerked to a halt. She whirled, a snarl ripping out of her throat that sounded like she had swallowed a pit bull. She showed him her teeth and her palm, and a hot, heavy force shoved his face toward the cement. He groaned, pushing back but unable to talk.
"Omnis satanica potestas—" Dean shouted the next line hoarsely, having memorized the exorcism out of their father's journal at Sam's insistence. He got to a crouch, his free hand propped on his right knee, which bled through a hole torn in his jeans. His pronunciation was clumsy, but it would get the job done. "Omnis incursio infernalis adversarii—"
She switched her snarling face to him, blowing him over backward with a swipe of her arm. Fear mangled her expression. She tried again to run.
Sam had gotten one foot under himself. He held out his other hand as well, letting his power well up in the palm. As fast as he could, he recited, "Omnis legio, omnis congregatio et secta diabolica, ergo draco maledict—"
The demon-witch howled. She didn't let him finish. Apparently deciding that a dual exorcism was more than she could handle, or she knew what was waiting for her in Hell, she tipped back her head, and the demonic howls became the screams of a young girl. The black smoke belched from her mouth, condensing into a cloud above her.
It happened quickly, and she collapsed before Sam or Dean could get to her.
Sam grunted in frustration. The demon was out of the innocent girl's body. They'd succeeded. Yet, it wasn't enough. He wanted to stop it dead. Ruby's blood burned through his veins, demanding release—
Even he couldn't touch a demon in its non-corporeal form. The black smoke tightened into a defensive spiral, high out of reach. Vision tinged red, he watched it, wondering why it hadn't fled. The wind dragged at his hair, his shirts, roaring between the rocks.
Dean barreled into him. He dragged him to his feet and shouted in his face. "Sam! Sam! We have to go! Come on, man, snap out of it!"
He realized that, without Dean to anchor him, he would slide toward the drop at the edge of the stage, the wind was that strong. Diaphanous streamers trailed off the hovering, quivering cloud of demon-smoke.
Dean shook him, his rough voice stretching like a guitar string about to snap. "Sammy!"
He blinked, feeling drunk and numb at the same time. All that power inside him, and nowhere for it to go. "Don' call me that," he slurred. " 'm not a kid anymore."
"Then wake up, you idiot! This is not the time to go all beautiful mind on me. We have to go!"
Sam took a shuddering breath. Kammapa had risen out of its pit, its stringy, wiry limbs braced against the rocks and the wooden seats, its toothy mouth pointed right at them. Its claws left shallow scratches on the towering rock faces.
The demon-smoke couldn't escape, like a bird flying backward in a gale. It thinned into a ribbon that swirled faster and faster toward Kammapa. In it went, the monster slurping noisily.
It grew before their eyes. It raised its front end above the twin rocks, squealing. Then it lurched ineffectively toward the stage, lips flapping like tongues. It gave another, questioning squeal. It seemed confused by the fact that there weren't any more spirits, even though it could obviously smell Sam and Dean. One chicken-footed leg descended toward them.
"Eat this!" Dean yelled. He emptied the Colt's magazine into it. Then he pulled out Dep. Girard's Glock and emptied that one, too.
The leg, however, did not hesitate. It came down on the scaffolding, clawed toes exploring, grabbing, crushing. Sam pulled his brother away before a mangled floodlight crashed to the stage right where they had been standing.
"It's not manifest," he gasped. "It hasn't come through to this dimension yet."
"Then how is it eating everyone?" Dean pitched the Glock at the leg. It passed through harmlessly.
The leg turned in their direction. It started patting its way toward them, like a cat paw in a mouse hole. An enormous, skinny cat paw, moving in slow motion.
"I think Kammapa is the dimensional gate," Sam said. He'd been thinking about this ever since Castiel had almost dropped him into it, and since he'd stopped the demon-witch mid-spell. "It's pulling matter and energy from this dimension into the one it inhabits. I don't think that what we see is what's really there."
"That doesn't make any sense!"
No, it didn't, not really, but he knew he was right. He considered what they had left. A couple of flasks of holy water. Some rock salt. Useless, in this wind, against something that size. They'd never dealt with anything quite like this, and they weren't prepared to deal with it now. Then, to his horror, he saw Kittney, unconscious and bleeding, begin to slide across the stage.
Dean saw her, too. They sprinted toward her and dove. Awkwardly, they maneuvered her behind a curved brick wall to one side of the stage, out of the monster's sight. It seemed to forget about them, shrieking up at the sky. Dean produced a bandana from an inner pocket, pressing it over the gunshot wound in her shoulder.
"Are they gone?" he asked, their three heads pressed close together, his eyes fixed on his hands rather than Sam's face. "Are they dead? Dead for good, I mean."
Sam knew what he meant. Helplessly, he waved a hand as though he could scoop knowledge out of the wind. The sound that built up in his throat might have been a laugh, but most of it got stuck on the way out. "I don't know. I have no frickin' clue. I don't think interdimensional cell service is a thing."
Dean checked the wound, seeming grimly satisfied that the bullet had passed through cleanly. He frowned while he wrapped it in the bandana, a look that clearly said, Get it together, man.
Sam tried.
His brother tied off his makeshift bandage. Licked his lower lip, pulled it between his teeth. Chewed. Lifted his eyes at last. "Then what are we supposed to do?"
"Get out of here, like you said." He adjusted his hold on Kittney and managed to lift her. "There's nothing we can do from this side."
Dean shifted his frown to the pale-faced girl. "Maybe there is," he said.
Notes:
A/N: If I could get real for a sec . . . I've lost two friends and a cat this year. Every time, each death, feels like the breath gets knocked right out of me. I do apologize for slowing down so much on the updates . . . it's just . . . maybe writing about death, no matter how innocently I do it, starts to not be so much fun when I'm staring dumbfounded at a friend's obituary, wondering why - how - is this real? This can't be real. Sigh.
Please don't leave without a comment, okay? :)
With love,
~ Anne
Chapter 25: Aegis
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
Feet first, Castiel dropped through the dimensional gate. Corrosive darkness rushed upward, a tunnel that devoured all, airless, breathless. He kept falling, away from the strobing, shrinking circle of light, and past tar-like webs. They curtained a vast, incomprehensible space, squeezing the light out of existence.
While he could see, his vessel could not. It was a strange sensation, and he could feel Jimmy's growing unease, which in turn made him uneasy. Jimmy had been quiet these past months, having given himself over wholly to Heaven's will, suspended in unending prayer. It would not do to have him awake now.
Fortunately, the webs had not reacted to either him or Aya; her soul, and Jimmy's, were still enmeshed within corporeal bodies, their shine baffled. The webs contracted and expanded listlessly, tar and slime and venom as elastic as the walls of an enormous esophagus, aching with eternal emptiness. Below, balls of grayish light lay scattered like weary glow-in-the-dark toys across black velvet. The souls that had preceded them into the Void. They dimmed as he watched.
He dove forward and straightened his limbs to fall faster, to catch up to Aya. He pulled her against the pounding of the heart in his chest. He tucked his chin against her hair. She was so small but wonderfully warm. Alive and squirming, her elbows and knees jabbing at him.
His name in her mind. A prayer, though she wouldn't call it that. A source of strength for an angel.
He closed his eyes so he could concentrate. This time, he would not drop her. He was her guardian, whether his superiors liked it or not. He spread his wings to fly her out of danger.
And knew right away that something was wrong.
His wings—dear Father in Heaven his wings—failed to make the shift to a telluric current and instead burst into existence attached to his human vessel. The first instinctive down-sweep punched the breath right out of him. Worse, with his wings present, he could no longer find the exit, where the dimensional planes should lay against each other, compressed like pages in a book. The weight of a human being, so much heavier than the bare wreck of a soul he had flown out of Hell not long ago, dragged at him. They were still falling, unable to go back the way they had come.
In his current state, he could not regulate the flare of celestial power that accompanied the manifestation of his wings. Greedy, dripping, and hungry, the webs drew up and then shot outward in long, thick spikes of slime. They engulfed him like an ocean wave, clinging to his clothes, splashing into his eyes and mouth and ears, coating his wings. He cried out at pain he had not often experienced, which lanced directly through his true self, not the vessel. At the same time, Aya's whole body convulsed, and she gave a muffled shriek; she'd had no warning. She frantically scrubbed her face in his ruined shirt, skin dragging across fabric and blood and skin.
The web-stuff felt like mud against his face, hot and stinking of bile. On his wings, it felt like acid. The tarry strands tautened, and then snapped him back and up like the lash end of a whip, ripping out feathers by the roots. Though his head swam at the pain, he did not lose his hold of Aya. He folded his body around hers. Many of the strands broke and bounced away as they began, again, to fall.
Together, they crashed to the ground, which was as smooth and hard as a pane of diamond, and as lightless as the sweep of space between the arms of galaxies. The vessel took damage he no longer had the reserves of grace necessary to fully repair. Supernovas burst behind his eyes.
He lay gasping the foul air, half his face pressed to an inch of water that tasted of metal. Then the remaining strands tightened and thickened like sinews, drawing him up to his knees. They tore a choked grunt out of him and jolted Aya, as stunned as he, from his grasp. She splashed into the tepid water and then limply rolled to a stop.
He hung in the web, arms and wings wide, dizzily trying to comprehend what had happened. What had gone wrong?
He squinted, seeking Aya. She looked terrible, bloody and pale. Her hair blended into the black water. Silver tape sealed her mouth and bound her hands together in a mockery of prayer. Though tarry black streaked her skin and clothes, the strands had not latched on to her. The Void was not interested in material objects. Only soul energy.
The souls, up close, resembled the people they had been in life, though washed-out and colorless. They lay in a state similar to unconsciousness, their shine dying under root-like strands of web. Over time—how much, he did not know—the venom would consume them, feeding the monster above so it could empty the Earthly dimension of life. Then, it would have enough power to cross into either Heaven or Hell so that it could continue eating, souls, demons, and angels alike.
Aya, however, was fine, he assured himself, just dazed and in shock, her eyes half-lidded and unfocused. A blessing at this point. The venomous strands had begun eating into his feathers, eager to get to the grace which imbued them. He could hear the sizzling, feel the bite and burn on the skin beneath.
Old words floated through his mind, a mix of Enochian, Hebrew, and modern English, but always the same meaning: The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The Lord is the stronghold of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?
While part of the heavenly host, he could not come to harm, and he could not be led astray. Yet here he was. Alone, trapped in a human vessel, burdened with physical wings, in a lightless dimension beyond the Earthly one. Beyond Hell. Beyond salvation. Into the Void.
There were some places where even God did not like to tread. Castiel had jumped between the cracks in the cosmos, towing an innocent soul with him, completely cut himself off from Heaven, and he was afraid.
Head bowed, the Angel of Thursday prayed.
..::~*~::..
He had to get out of there.
Carmelo, dragging his shattered leg, tripped on something in the dark. He sprawled over whatever-it-was, his face slapping into dead, metallic water for the second time. He ended up reflexively clutching ribs that his abrupt introduction to the ground had already crushed like seashells under a boot heel. He spat and gagged, desperate to abandon this useless vessel. His demonic essence welled up, crawling and clawing at the back of its throat—
He'd seen what happened to the boss-lady though. She had arrived in her true form, an agitated streamer of sulfur and smoke. She had gone even faster than the human souls, long before she reached the ground, cocooned and devoured in one.
Not much meat left on a demon's bones, so to speak.
He swallowed himself with difficulty, grumbling at the pain. In Hell, no one was left alone, except in illusion. There were always torturers and the tortured. This was a whole new kind of hell. He was on his own. If he could smoke out, he could stream the way he had come, back to the world above, into a dimensional byway, and use it to get as far from the gate as possible. The instant he showed himself, however, the webs would devour him, too. His damaged meat suit was the only thing keeping him alive.
Using his one functioning arm, he dragged himself off the hump that had tripped him and then squinted at it through the darkness. These things were all over the place. They resembled balls of black tree roots. Their outer crusts had dried out and didn't seem to be venomous any longer. No wonder he hadn't seen this one, though. The soul inside had been completely encased, its shine reduced to a handful of specks between tarry strands. From the size, he'd say it was an animal soul. The damn horse. As he scowled at it, the cocoon gave a sort of wobble, the strands tightening convulsively like heartworms around their preferred organ, and the soulshine died.
Carmelo fought not to black out, cursing the fact that even demons had their limits. He was calculating his chances of surviving intact if he tried climbing the huge, slimy columns of web when a blaze of light, as brilliant as a golden sun, as clear-cut as swords of white fire, sent railroad spikes of pain through his eyeballs and straight into his brain.
With a scream, he fell over, grinding his fists into his eye sockets. For a long, terrible moment, as overheated fluid bubbled into the spaces between his fingers, he thought he'd been blinded.
Then the fireworks of bursting blood vessels died down. Shaking, he lowered his sticky hands. Watched, blearily, as the angel, no longer burning like debris from space but trailing feathers that glimmered with their own elusive effulgence, crashed. Ripples bounded through the water, felt rather than seen. The webs slithered onto the angel's wings and began greedily sucking the glow out of them.
Carmelo grinned, his mouth stretching from ear to ear, from nose to chin, baring all of his teeth.
Angel's wings. Wings. Like a bird.
That overgrown carrier pigeon was going to get him out of there.
..::~*~::..
Dep. Felicia Girard sat up so fast, her face smacked into the edge of the Tahoe's lowered sun visor.
She fell back against the seat, pinching the bridge of her nose to keep her eyes from watering. Then, very deliberately, she pushed the visor back into place.
She sat there for a moment more, blinking up at the lit dome light. It was dark as night outside, though only three in the afternoon. The lightning and the wind raged unabated. The Tahoe droned reassuringly around her, keeping her warm, dry, and safe, but she didn't care about that.
She'd been had.
She scowled at the dome light. She could have kept on driving after catching sight of the old Chevy in the snow, instead of stopping to help the surprisingly cute guys inside. Especially the one with the dusting of freckles and the mischievous, summer-colored eyes. She should have listened to her gut and driven them straight to the station, instead of up here. If she hadn't been so distracted, she would have arrested that psychopath in the road as soon as she laid eyes on him.
Coulda shoulda woulda! Felicia could hear her mother's criticism, loud in the back of her head, though it had been at least a week since they'd talked on the phone. Still, Mam was right. Hindsight was useless. She had to think about the now.
The fire in the road sank low, the burning car reduced to a blackened frame. Several bodies littered the asphalt, their faint shadows stretching long and flickering in the dull orange firelight. The road glistened in streaks of wet blacktop and red smears. It took her several heartbeats of bleak staring, hoping for signs of life, to realize that she was also watching a small group of people stagger out of the darkness. They crossed into the Tahoe's headlight beams like lost souls in search of an oasis.
One was the somewhat bowlegged Abbot, carrying a girl in his arms, and the other the shaggy-haired Buchanan, half-dragging a bleach-blond boy. All four were splashed with blood. Several more people stumbled along behind them, tilting into each other like drunks, their clothes—chosen for style, not the weather—torn and stained, their hair wild, their expressions slack and haunted.
Felicia pounced on the radio, calling up dispatch, requesting emergency assistance at the old CCC Campground, yelling that she didn't care about a so-called Snowpocalypse, Karrie, she was in a situation and the EMTs better get their damn asses up here PRONTO.
She dropped the radio and wrestled her door open. She fought the screaming wind and the dust it had kicked up, feeling for her gun. It wasn't in its holster. She stood, bracketed by the door and the body of her vehicle, while the freezing wind ripped locks of her hair out of its French braid.
"Hey, Abbot!" she called. The storm was painfully loud out here, reminding her of the cheesy sound effects blasting from a carnival funhouse. "Next time I see your weird friend I'm busting his ass! See what a night in lockup does for him!"
Abbot's head lifted. She thought she saw relief and wariness battle across his dirty face before he flashed her a grin. "Good thing he isn't here, then!"
And that, ladies and gentlemen, was why she had yet to keep a relationship going beyond a week. She kept falling for guys like this, the classic bad-boy type promising excitement and fun, but with an air of danger that turned out to be baggage legit big enough for him to live in. Who else could have knocked her out and stuck her in her vehicle? And who, in this case, could be anything from an annoying conspiracy theorist to a straight-up cold-blooded killer. She had already mentally ticked the vigilante box.
And the dayum, he fine! box, too.
Sighing, she stepped away from the safety of her vehicle and let the wind slam the door. Real professional, girl. Pull your head out before you have to surgically replace your belly button with glass so you can see where you're going.
"Think you could give us a little assistance?" Buchanan called. "These people could use your help."
So there had been hostages, of a sort. Victims abducted from nightclubs in the closest college towns, Sgt. Kuemper had explained, probably the work of one of the gangs in the area. Felicia dipped her gloved fingers into her empty holster, then touched the reassuringly textured face of her badge. What was the right move for her, here? She was unarmed, sans backup, and she still didn't know the whole story, or whether to believe that the two faux agents were the good guys or not.
She observed the girl curling tighter into Abbot's arms, jamming her face against his neck. He let her sob into his collar, his grin replaced by something like grief, though hollower than that. Buchanan kept up a steady stream of encouragement, voice too low for Felicia to make out, when the semi-conscious boy on his arm lost track of which foot was which and leaned, loose-jointed, into him. The other victims, eight of them, all bearing the signs of some serious mistreatment, trailed closely behind the two tall men like a flock of shivering ducklings.
Their trust in their rescuers made her decision for her. Besides, it looked as though Abbot was nearing his limit, but Felicia could tell he wasn't going to put the girl down until he was sure she was safe.
"Come on," she called. "Let's get them out of the wind."
Doors open, prisoner partitions and equipment shoved to the floor, under the seats, or relocated to the back, the Tahoe could hold nine adults if they piled in. Which included the girl, barely old enough for a license, hugging her rounded knees in the driver's seat. Tears poured down her face, but she refused to answer any of Felicia's questions. None of them would. The girl played with her hands, tacky with drying blood, mesmerized by the skin slowly zipping apart between her fingers as she flexed them.
Lights were on but weren't nobody home. There were a lot of people in desperate need of medical attention in Felicia's care all of a sudden, and this was not how she pictured her day going when she woke up that morning. She left the heater running full blast and shut the door gently but with regret, and a bit of frustration.
"When are you two going to tell me what's going on?" she asked, coming around the vehicle to plant herself in front of Buchanan and Abbot, arms crossed. "I've got Fire and Rescue on the way up here, and believe me, nobody coming is going to want to listen to what you have to say the way I am willing to right this second."
"I thought that Sgt. Kuemper filled you in on the—"
"Bzzt, wrong answer! You aren't federal agents," she said loudly, talking over Buchanan. And don't be giving me them eyes, boy, ain't gonna work on me. She didn't know how long it would take the trucks and the ambulance to make it up the hill, but she wasn't about to show weakness in front of these two potentially dangerous men. "Tick tock, fellas, and skip the bull this time."
Buchanan shut his mouth. The eyes redirected, falling on his shorter partner, who stepped unhesitatingly up to the plate. Abbot wielded charm like a magician did misdirection, obviously about to serve her a heaping scoop of shit on a shingle, thick and hard to swallow.
She talked over him, too, before he got out word one. "Please do me the courtesy of not insulting my intelligence. Again. Fool me once, that's on you. Twice, that's on me. I believed you once. Spill it before I cuff you to my trailer hitch and drag you to the station. What is going on?"
Abbot stared at her, his eyes innocently wide but their changeable color darkened by the storm. He licked his lips, slow, meditative. Then, before her reward-seeking brain could get too distracted by that, he huffed sharply.
"Fine," he said, his deep, roughened voice clipped and businesslike. He held out a hand, indicating himself and his partner. "My name is Dean Winchester, okay? This is my brother, Sam. We hunt things."
False names. False credentials. Brothers, not partners. Still hella cute. Damn.
"Hunt things? What things?" she asked because she was a mountain girl. She knew hunters and what they hunted and it did not sound like he was talking about elk.
"I'm going to tell you what kind of things, okay?" Dean Winchester, né Agent Abbot, waited until she nodded suspiciously. "You have to put aside what you think you know. I'm sorry, but we don't have time to ease you into this, and we need your help. You have to believe that we're not crazy.
"Monsters are real, and we hunt them."
Lawd, saints have mercy on her. Fanatical conspiracy theorist. "Monsters." She couldn't frame it as a question. "You hunt . . . monsters."
"Rougarou," Agent Buchanan—Sam Winchester, rather—put in unhelpfully. She wasn't even sure how to spell what he'd just said. He scrubbed the back of his head, one eye squinched up as though he could see into his mental database. "Tulpas. Devas. Rakshasas. In this case, demons. And, well—that."
He pointed with the hair-scratching hand, the other stuffed deep in his front pocket.
She didn't want to look, didn't want to take her attention off the brothers, but with the solid bulk of the Tahoe at her back, she risked it.
A familiar sight, the tips of Red Rocks peeked above the trees, two black shadows against the lightning-chained clouds. The trees thrashed in the wind, which moaned and shrieked like a tortured animal. But—
"I don't see anything," she said.
"You don't?" they chorused.
"Are you sure?" Dean asked.
"Really? Nothing?" Sam asked.
They looked at the Rocks. They looked at each other. They looked at her.
She briefly contemplated using her nightstick to knock their heads together. With admirable control, in her opinion, she managed to speak without snarling. She didn't know where the nightstick had ended up, anyway. "You think monsters are behind these kidnappings—"
"Demons," Sam said.
She shot eye-daggers at him. No. Nope. One hundred percent not guest-starring on this X-Files reboot. "You're both crazy!" she snapped. "I don't know what you're talking about. I don't even know why I'm listening to you—"
"We're telling you the truth," Dean said, face blazing and angry. "I'll show you."
He turned on his heel and marched away. She didn't get the chance to tell him exactly what she thought of his overblown self-importance because Sam leaped after his brother like a startled rabbit.
"Dean!"
"She wants proof. We can give her proof," he said, impatience clear in his bunched jaw and the tense way he moved. He knelt, checked one of the bodies in the road. "Yeah. Not unconscious. Just messing with us."
He produced a silver flask from his jacket. To Felicia, he said, while unscrewing the cap, "This is a demon. Or, a human possessed by a demon. You've seen The Exorcist, right? Well, William Peter Blatty got it right. And my friend? That one you were gonna bust? See, he's an angel, and he put them all to sleep. We need to exorcise them."
"You're friends with an angel. Of course you are," she said. Yes, she'd seen The Exorcist. It was one of her favorites. It wasn't a surprise they'd have such a huge piece of American pop culture in common. She wanted to laugh, though. Didn't she want to laugh? Or did she want to punch something? "An angel who wears a trench coat and looks miserably hungover. Yeah, sure, why not! What's he called? Constantine?"
"Castiel," Sam said in a low voice that she and his brother both ignored.
"I can prove it," Dean insisted, though she saw a flash of appreciation in his eye at her less-popular reference. "She's a demon, okay? A name of God will make her reveal herself."
"Dean." Sam grabbed his shoulder, turned him so that they were face to face. "Are you sure about this?"
Dean stepped closer to his brother, and Felicia strained to hear him. "Cass didn't want to give Kammapa the human souls. He can't separate them. Smite one, smite both. Right? This is how we can help. We get the demons out, send them back to Hell where that slug can't get them, and we keep these people alive."
"That's not going to be easy," Sam said, a crease appearing between his long brows. "They'll probably all wake up at the same time. I don't like the odds. Plus, we'll have to send them downstairs before the wind can take them."
Dean lowered his chin. He spoke to his hands. "That's what we have you for."
Sam's expression suggested that he'd bitten his tongue in surprise. "Are you sure? It's not—you know what you're saying, right?"
"Yeah, I do, and I hate it, but Cass . . . Dammit, Sam, that stupid, sorry bastard gave it all." He tossed his head, like tossing away the subject, laughing up at his brother. "When do we ever do the easy thing?"
Whoa, there was a lot there that she didn't understand. Felicia unclenched her fists, confused and wary but curious. Dean's smile was crooked and mocking and desperately failing at hiding the grief behind it. For some reason, it made her feel better. That was why she didn't interfere. Instead, she watched, and she waited.
"Wakey wakey," he said, toeing the arm of the limp body on the ground. He took two steps back. In a rough voice that nevertheless carried, he said, "Christo."
Lightning flashed. Thunder crashed. A tremor rippled through the bodies, like wind through meadow grass. Then they stilled.
Felicia frowned. "Is Christo a name of God?"
A second, more pronounced shudder took hold of the bodies, accompanied by a few hisses of displeasure. The body at Dean's feet sat up, straight from the waist. She opened her eyes.
"It's not a name, but I suppose it's close enough," she said. She smiled up at the brothers, her mouth uneven and nineteen-fifties red. Her eyes glittered, oily black from corner to corner. They didn't look like contacts.
"Hey, boys," she said.
Then she lunged, fingers clawed, inhuman growls ripping out of her throat.
Felicia shouted in surprise. No person she had ever seen moved like that, so fast, so much like a four-legged predator. She instinctively felt for her sidearm, cursing when she slapped its empty holster. Damn it, what had happened to her gun?
Dean sloshed clear liquid out of his flask. It splashed into the woman's snarling face. She dropped as though he'd shot her out of the air, her skin sizzling and steaming.
"Holy water," he said tonelessly, answering a question that nobody asked. He poured some on his fingers, and it looked like plain water, dripping off harmlessly. He then tossed more on the woman like squirting lighter fluid on the grill at a backyard barbecue, just to watch her skin bubble and burn.
"Stop it!" she howled in a hundred voices that buzzed like angry wasps.
Lips pursed, Dean glanced at Felicia through his lashes while the woman demon thing rolled around, pawing at her face. "Believe me now, Deputy?"
"I . . ." Felicia shook her head, unable to close her mouth.
He nodded as though she'd agreed, capping the flask. "Sam? You're up, bro."
After drinking from another silver flask, taking great care to keep any of its contents from showing on his lips, Sam stepped closer. He held a thick, tattered journal and a rosary in his hands.
Dean took Felicia's arm, gently, and steered her away from his brother and the cursing creature on the ground as Sam began chanting in Latin. "Don't watch. This part isn't pretty."
Notes:
A/N: Hellooooooooooo out there! How you all doin'? I've missed you all so much, I'm not even kidding. Obviously I had a two-ton writer's block on my chest. It was crazy, I tell you! But I'm back for another chapter, and I truly, desperately hope you like it.
Please leave a comment! I can't tell you how much I love to see them!
Yours,
~ Anne
Chapter 26: The Void
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
It wasn't pretty at all.
None of it. Not the bodies on the road that rose up and attacked the brothers. Not the brawl that followed, punctuated by holy water, rock salt, and chanting.
Not the way the demons inside the bodies hurled half-truths and profanities and inhuman growls. Not how they writhed, contorted, and slid uncannily around like weights on a sandy table at every push of a word in Latin. Not the way they puked up black sludge that pooled on the ground, sparking with small golden threads before vanishing. Not how they collapsed face-first to the asphalt afterward.
Not the blood that started as a trickle from one of Sam's nostrils but increased worryingly into a double stream, smeared on his sleeve. Not the way he winced and clutched his temples like someone fighting off a migraine, holding out one hand as though he could restrain the demons with an application of the Force. Not how Dean barked at him to keep going, to finish the exorcisms, and then turned his back on him, letting his control slip and naked anxiety bleed through.
And not the thing up at the Rocks.
Felicia could see it now, muzzy-edged and transparent like an image shot from an overhead projector. Could recognize the carnival funhouse screeching as coming from it. According to Sam, her absolute certainty in a mundane world had protected her. Kept her ignorant.
Saints willing, the same would protect the emergency responders coming up the winding road, lights flashing and sirens wailing.
That, and her.
She struck the end of another road flare against its cap. Then, she fitted the cap on the unlit end. When she knelt, she made sure she put the flat side of the cap on the ground to prevent the whole thing from rolling into the ditch. Each of her hissing, smoking red flares marked a body in the road.
Sam had argued that the demons wouldn't have stuck around the park once they woke, now that the ringleader was dead, but Dean had insisted they had to check. Standing so close she could have counted the freckles across his slightly crooked nose, he had pleaded with her to stall her people, keep them from getting any closer to the amphitheater, until he and his brother returned.
But for how long? Dear saints above, what did they think they were going to do against that thing?
He hadn't had an answer. She hadn't really expected one.
Felicia jogged toward the vehicles cresting the curve, waving both arms to direct them to the sides of the road. There was work to be done here, which would delay them. Then, she just needed to delay them a little more.
The monster shrieked, sounding angry. And hungry. A split second later, a blast of snowy wind nearly knocked the trees flat.
Felicia tugged loose curls out of her mouth as a pair of EMTs hopped out of an ambulance and beelined for her flares, a stretcher and numerous bags bouncing between them, and a firefighter, his helmet unbuckled, headed her way. She would keep them safe.
She had to try.
..::~*~::..
"This is just a hunt," Dean was saying. "Just another hunt. Come on, Sam, what do we do on a hunt when we know what we're facing and where it is?"
Sam stumbled along behind him, squeezing his skull with the heels of his hands to relieve the pressure inside of it. Which made no sense, but sometimes, pain transformed sense into a bird ricocheting off a car windshield at eighty miles an hour. "Rrrghh," he said.
Dean was there, his familiar solid strength propping him up. "Easy there, Jean Grey."
Hold up. Was Dean seriously comparing him to the Hyper-Powered Inept Woman? What a dick!
I'm more like Professor X, he thought, but then a return of wooziness buckled his knees, and he added, wheelchair and all. I could use one of those right now.
"All right, Samantha, just sit," Dean grunted in his ear.
Sam realized they were doing an odd shuffle of a dance as Dean struggled to keep him upright. He let go of his brother, then growled a few short "ha!"s as his backside hit the pavement.
"Glad you think this is funny." Moving like an old man, Dean bent over, hands braced on thighs, head down.
"Yeah," Sam said, grimacing as he sat up, "so funny I forgot to laugh."
He wiped his nose on his sleeve. Made a face at the drying streaks already there. He'd overdone it, using his powers like that. He was tapped out. The chill in the wind helped soothe his headache, cool his feverish face, and settle his insides.
Dean lifted his head and squinted at him. "What are we doing? There's gotta be something we can do, right? Felicia, those people down there, they're counting on us."
"Yeah, I got that part." Sam brushed wet gravel off his palms, not sure he could trust his equilibrium yet to stand. "We aren't killing that thing."
"So that's it?" Dean demanded, getting louder with each word. As far back as Sam could remember, Dean had been a master at denying any emotional weakness, but when he got angry, he could let loose with the best of them. "We call it here?"
"We can't kill it," Sam said calmly by contrast. "Dude, Ditaolane couldn't kill it, and he was a demigod."
"If this is supposed to be a pep talk, Sam, it's the suckiest one I've ever heard."
"Not a pep talk. A plan. We don't kill, we seal." He accepted Dean's helping hand. "I got a good look at it earlier. Did you see the second pentagram? The big one, across the seats? Kammapa came up right in the middle of it."
"No. I was kind of busy getting my ass handed to me by a rank Hell's Angel at the time. Stank like a landfill. I thought I was going to hurl. If Cass hadn't—" Dean stopped. A look of consternation flitted across his face.
Yeah. If Cass hadn't. Problem was, Castiel couldn't assist them this time. Sam huffed. "Okay, well, Kittney was using a pentagram in the mess hall, and then when she lost that one, she replaced it with the one she drew on the stage. They and the sacrifices were the key to the locks keeping Kammapa behind closed doors. If we shut the door by breaking the main pentagram—"
"We turn the key the other way," Dean said in a brighter voice, always quick to catch on, always oblivious to that fact. "All right, how? We don't have our ghost posse anymore."
"I also saw some construction equipment up at the top. Bet we could find something useful."
"Better than nothing," Dean said under his breath. "Let's go."
..::~*~::..
After so many days of dread and anxiety, after increasingly recurrent moments of overwhelming, suffocating terror, after the worst had happened, Aya felt like the stylus of a turntable, tracking over the dead wax of the run-out area on a vinyl record, her brain making nothing but a swishing, hushing noise.
This place came across like such an ending. There was nothing there. No monster, no storm, no demons, no ghosts, no scents, no sounds, no temperature, no nothing. Sensory deprivation was putting her to sleep. She drifted, almost starting to believe that she was floating on the blackest, most peaceful ocean in existence. There seemed nothing else to do except stay that way until the credits rolled.
Because they were going to die, weren't they? If Castiel could have gotten her out, he would have.
Castiel.
He spoke out of the dark, his disembodied voice bizarrely flattened. "Are you all right?"
"Mmf," she said. Her voice sounded weird, as though the air wasn't the same to which she was accustomed. As though she were visiting another planet.
She heard some fumbling. A tiny huff of frustration, or maybe strain. More fumbling. Silvery light appeared, as unfocused as moonlight. The stylus of her mental turntable lifted, swung, and started the record over.
More disheveled than ever, kneeling in the water, Castiel held his fist high, a string of white fairy lights wrapped around his fingers.
"Oh," he said thinly. His usual cast of indifference had cracked badly, showing something lost and lonely in its place. His eyes, the blue washed to flat gray and smudged with exhaustion, widened. "My apologies."
She stared at those eyes, caught. Just as she had been in the diner.
She'd always felt uneasy at the prevailing notion that an asexual was only asexual until the "right" person came along. Like, she was saving her sexuality, mint in box, until someone attractive and more knowledgeable came along and unwrapped it for her, showed her what she'd been missing. That was ridiculous. She was what she was. No one was going to change that, consciously or unconsciously.
Castiel, however. He wasn't human. He was a creature she had glimpsed once, in total incomprehension. He'd jumped into a monster after her. He stared at her as though all he needed was her, safe, to make what he had done worth the cost.
Did he understand what his borrowed face could say without him saying anything at all?
That feeling was coming back. The one she didn't like, didn't know what to do with. Especially here. Aya sat up, the water splashing around her. She peeled the tape from her mouth, using the pain to clear her head. The tape binding her wrists and ankles went next, balled-up bits of crumpled silver.
"Are you all right?" he asked again, breathless, insistent. Like he wasn't going to move on from this until she answered. He had not straightened, though he still held the tiny lights aloft. A string of pebbles and chips of bone, she saw, each swimming with silvery white radiance.
Still. How could she possibly be all right?
"I can stand, if that's what you mean," she said, though she couldn't stop a groan when she did. She gingerly poked at the freshly-scabbed knife cut across the top of her pectoral. It hurt. Heck, everything hurt. "You?"
"No," he said, and he winced. "I don't think I can."
He looked astonishingly vulnerable in that moment, his shirt and tie hanging off him in bloody threads and scraps, his hair a hopeless mess, his chapped lips parted, a trickle of blood running from his hairline. The angel-light spilled down his arm, illuminating his coat sleeves. Matte black streaks clung to them, curling around his wrists and elbows a lot like tree roots, or veins. More streaks reached over his shoulders. As she watched, they advanced, pulsing and thickening and digging in, crossing over each other like the strands of a web. The darkness behind him rustled, making her think of birds. Big, restless birds.
Wait. She'd heard that sound before. The flapping of monstrous pigeons.
Then it clicked. Wings! Those were his wings! Just like in her dream. Huge, as sleek and black as a crow's, shining where the light touched them and with their own mistiness, so faint she couldn't focus on it.
Castiel looked, for the first time, like an angel.
Wonder threatened to push her to her knees. She had called his name, and he had come. Castiel. An angel of the Lord, and her friend.
Aya covered her face with her hands. She loved the world and the people in it, but she couldn't allow herself to become too deeply involved with any of them. Her purpose was to help those whose lives connected, however briefly, with hers, and then to let them go. Everyone moved on, taking the paths laid out for them. There was no room for her in the hearts of those she helped.
How could she even think that there would be a place for her in the unending existence of an angel?
But she was. She was thinking it, and she was falling. Against her wishes, against her common sense, foolish and illogical, her heart went out to him, claimed his name, and held it close.
She dropped her hands. As she did, two fat, hot tears rolled down her cheeks while she struggled with the way her heart was turning itself inside-out for him. Castiel.
"I'm stuck," he said, gruff and monotone once more, in case this fact had escaped her notice. Sizzling, the tar crawled across his shiny feathers, some of them bent the wrong way, all of them trembling. It twisted the left wing behind him, stretched the right one tortuously far. He pulled against the webs, flinched, and then went limp. "I am almost out of power."
Go to him, her heart urged, but as soon as it did, her asexuality bore down on her like a speeding Peterbilt. Too much. It was too much! Aya stumbled back a step. She didn't want this! She didn't want to feel these things. Especially not for an alien and inhuman creature wearing someone else's body.
"Don't—" He lurched as though to stop her, but the webs held him fast. He hung there, panting, the sound soft and labored. "Don't go past the light. I can't keep the air breathable for you if you go too far. My grace . . . my wings—"
The trembling grew more pronounced. He could not stand. He could not protect her. He could not save her.
She gulped back the tears. Okay. Calm down. Okay.
She had been kidnapped by demons and fed to a monster not all that long ago. She was overwrought. Hysterical. Her feelings were no one's problem but hers. This wasn't the time for an existential crisis. They were trapped in a different dimension, inside a monster that was going to devour their souls, or whatever it was Castiel had.
There, she paused. What happened to an angel when it died? Would he diminish, and become something else? Would he start over as a blank slate version of himself? Or would he cease to exist, leaving his vacated vessel behind?
What an unbearably sad thought. Aya dabbed at her tear-streaked face with her damp sleeves, and then gave up. He'd promised once to return, to visit her dreams. She was going to hold him to that.
"We have to get you out of there," she said. Stating the obvious, but it didn't really matter, did it? Without him, she was dead. Without her, he was dead.
"My coat," he said. "Sam gave me—the knife—I can't reach—"
Sam's knife! No way she could forget it. She flung herself to her knees with a noisy splash, grabbing at the trench coat, searching the pockets until she found it.
It did not feel good in her hand. She pulled it out warily, testing the ridges of cracked antler bone against her palm, watching the faint light tangle in the old symbols etched into the blade. As before, they glowed red, doused in the blood of the possessed, the steel polished by the sooty souls of the damned.
She had never used a knife this big for anything but cooking. This couldn't be that different, though, could it? She got to her feet, her clothes dripping. In the uncertain light, she felt around in the space above Castiel until she found a strand that seemed thinner than the others, looped around his right elbow, rucking up his coat sleeve. She fitted the knife's little line of teeth against it and began to saw. Castiel tried to help, but the stuff was incredibly elastic. Even a demon-killing knife wasn't making much headway.
Aya kept going, determined. Just one arm, she told herself. One step at a time. Get his arm free.
What felt like a three hundred-pound black bear slammed into them both, sending her spinning to the ground with a tremendous splash. Castiel cried out, the bouncy webs yanking cruelly at his wings. A dizzying whirl of motion followed, bodies struggling, a foot coming down hard on her leg, making her yell. The angel-light jerked, dimming and brightening erratically. She tried to roll out of the way and got kicked in the head, then jabbed in the shoulder. Vaguely, she realized that things were a lot less quiescent all of a sudden. Displeased subterranean grumbles accompanied a bunching and rumpling through the ground that made her think of white water rapids under an inflatable raft.
A human voice was snarling like the bear she'd thought it was. "You're going to get me out of here! Fly me out of here now."
"Stop it!" Aya shrieked. She jumped up and grabbed the demon's arm, both fighting to restrain him and to keep her balance on the heaving, treacherous ground. "Leave him alone! He can't get you out."
The macabre grin belonged to a killer clown, but childlike terror glazed his eyes. "You don't understand! I can't stay here!"
"He can't get any of us out!"
"Then he needs the right motivation!"
The demon struck Castiel in the face, hard enough to send a spray of fresh blood into the choppy water.
Castiel sagged.
The lights went out.
Notes:
A/N: Hey, internet! How are you all? I hope you're well, and thank you so much for continuing this journey with me! One step at a time, we get closer to the end.
Please leave a comment!
I am, always,
~ Anne
Chapter 27: Epitaphs and Epiphanies
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
Hungry.
So hungry.
The pathway wasn't open yet. The ritual had not been completed.
Kammapa squealed and shrieked its mindless frustration. It rocked from side to side, banging into the rocks, snapping trees, pulverizing stone. It stomped on wood and metal, scattering the pieces as it tried to pull itself out of the pit.
Close. So close.
Freedom was only a dimension away.
The smell tantalized it. Tortured it. Human flesh, scurrying around the edges of its prison. Human souls, animating the human flesh.
It crouched and began to inhale.
Human souls, who could give it the strength to break free.
And inhaled. And inhaled.
Human souls, of which there were not enough in all the Heavens and in all the Hells of all the universes to fill the Void.
..::~*~::..
From the borders of Heaven, Micah looked down on the Earthly dimension, one of many angels who had gathered, his whole being swamped with worry. Though he tried to keep the emotion from Angel Radio, he could hear it crackling, disrupting his channel. He watched a minuscule spot to the southwest of the center of a single continent, wreathed in clouds and backed by severed ley lines, with the kind of focus that could cause a bush to burst into flames. The energies around the spot warped and shimmered, light slowly surrendering into dark. Even from his lofty position, he could hear the terrible cries of the creature.
Unsettled, he stiffly furled his wings.
"What are our orders?" Paschar asked at his side. Though she appeared just as focused as he on that deceptively insignificant speck of turmoil, her eyes remained closed.
"Do we evacuate?" Jeremiel asked from his other side.
Micah hesitated a shade too long. "Not yet. There is still time."
"Time for what?" Zuriel's colors were muted and sluggish, dimmed by something akin to shock. "I can no longer hear Castiel's song. He has failed."
"If Castiel has failed, we will not succeed," Jeremiel said, billowing verdant like the aurora borealis. "His failure is proof. We can do nothing against that."
Micah tightened his wings to hide their trembling. His superiors had not given the order to evacuate. They had not given the order to fight. Beyond the command to return and fortify Heaven, they had been silent. Their silence clogged the spaces among the cluttered voices of his brothers and sisters, impossible to ignore.
Paschar opened one eye. Just one. And it fixed right on him.
"Not yet," he repeated stubbornly. "There is still hope. We must have faith in our Father. Let us pray."
..::~*~::..
"This is our brilliant plan, huh?" Dean grunted, freeing a commercial-grade pressure washer from a jumble of equipment in a truck bed. "Cleaning paint off cement?"
"Yep." Sam, a collection of stiff-brushed brooms and cans of industrial paint stripper tucked under one arm, also grabbed a couple of scraping tools. The wind positively howled, flattening his hair to his head.
It had sounded like a good idea ten minutes ago, a result of exhaustion and desperation, but now . . . Dean flipped the pressure washer's power switch to check that the battery had juice, then off again, satisfied. "You realize we're going to have to get up next to that thing to do this. You also realize, it's not going to sit there quietly while we try to slam the door shut on it."
"Yep," Sam said again, looking anywhere but at Dean.
"Not gonna cut it, Sam," he said. He planted himself right in front of his usually loquacious little brother. "I need to know that you're in this. That we're in this."
Mouth firmly and grimly sealed shut, Sam fidgeted, then grudgingly looked down at him. They stared at each other, a wealth of speeches passing by unsaid. They had finished what Castiel had started, vanquished the demons, and sent the survivors on their way to Felicia—Win. Sam had suggested this plan of breaking the giant pentagram where Kammapa had breached, though doing so would condemn Castiel and Aya to death, if they weren't dead already—Loss. Seeing this through to the end—
Saving people, hunting things. The family business.
Dean poked Sam in the chest with the pressure washer's nozzle. "Don't fall in. For you, I'd make an exception to the whole hunters don't get graves thing. I'd hate your tombstone to have to read, 'Here Doesn't Lie A Samsquatch, Who Didn't See That Hole.' "
Sam snorted laughter, dimples in full effect. "Yeah, well, I'd hate to have to put, 'Here Doesn't Lie A Dumbass Winchester, Who Made A Tasty Snack' on yours."
Which Dean thought much less likely to happen, but he didn't quibble. He counted Sam joking around as a win, a way to psyche them up and boost his kid brother's confidence and, by proxy, Sam's chances of making it out alive. With a nod, he settled the coils of washer hose securely on his shoulder. He led the way through the abandoned construction vehicles and sawhorse-barricaded projects, towing the wheeled frame of the power washer toward the monster neither of them could kill but that maybe, just maybe, they could seal.
..::~*~::..
Aya heard the demon cry out in pain. From Castiel, she heard nothing.
In the dark, she stood paralyzed while the angel and the demon struggled. The knife seemed to drag at her hand as though begging her to use it, to stab her enemy—its enemy—with all of her strength, to wound, to kill—
A bright golden light seared her retinas. It strobed across Castiel's face. Fierce, furious, and frightening, his eyes widened to catch every millisecond as the demon screamed, his head falling back, the light burning through cracks opening in his skin, turning his eye sockets to empty, smoking pits. Castiel had gotten his right arm free, and he pushed his fist harder into the demon's solar plexus. Then the demon slumped against the angel, hands slackening, releasing the lapels of the rumpled coat. The darkness returned, somehow more absolute than before.
Aya gulped at the sound of the body hitting the water, too scared and confused to run. Silence slammed down like a trapdoor. She realized that she could no longer see the faint, not-quite-there shine of Castiel's wings.
"I didn't want to do that," he said.
As though nothing had happened, the angel-light rekindled, shining small but steady from bone chips and pebbles. It swam over the chrome-like gleam of a long knife in his right hand. In spite of the blood soaking through the burned-out husk of a body's reflective orange vest, the blade was clean.
Soft and gray, like a nightlight, the soul stood up from his body, his round, bearded face bewildered. He looked down at his corpse, thick brows beetled, and then up at Aya, mouth open to ask a question.
Tarry strands shot out of the dark and coiled around him in fast-moving loops. Aya shouted as they bore the soul to the wet ground, extinguishing his glow, which left only the angel-light.
Castiel licked his bleeding lip, and then wearily hacked at the strands holding his left arm hostage. They parted, fleeing into the dark with shudders that rippled the water, leaving behind high, pained whines and deeper growls. Aya pressed her fists to her temples, hard.
The demon-killing knife wiggled in her fist.
With a squeal, she pitched it at the ground. It splashed into the water, cartwheeled into the hump of strands slowly digesting the soul of the innocent man who had been possessed by a demon and lost his life for it. She stared at the hump, lips pursed, nostrils flared. Then, snarling a curse under her breath, in Japanese just like her grandmother used to do, she dropped and felt around for the knife.
"Aya?" Castiel asked, behind her. He sounded unsure. Though he got to his feet, dripping, it didn't sound like he was making any effort to free his wings. Maybe he couldn't reach.
She ignored him, her back to the light, her hands in the water.
"I truly did not wish to harm him," he said, his gruff voice small.
"Yeah, well, you did." Finding the knife, she snatched it up and made herself look at it one more time. Then she raised it above her head in both hands, and brought it down as swiftly as she could, plunging it into the cocoon. It sounded like thumping an overripe melon.
She said a few more choice words, in English this time. She savagely sawed, cut, and stabbed until she could see the soul within. He lay on his stomach as though sleeping, mistily gray, nailed to the ground by tendrils of black that sank into him like roots. When she called out to him, he opened his eyes.
She wrestled with the opening she had gouged in the rubbery cocoon, talking steadily to keep his attention on her and not on the thing sucking away at him. "Hey. Are you okay? Hey! Stay awake, please try to stay with me. Can you get out?"
"¿Estas loca? ¿Salir de ese pequeño agujero?" he asked groggily, his voice echoing and indistinct. He lifted a hand that stuttered and jumped, nearer, farther. The phenomenon caught his attention. He watched it with fascination, waved and wiggled the fingers in front of his face as though riding through a bad trip. "¿Qué sucedió? ¿Me caí? ¿Algo me cayó encima?"
"I'm sorry, I don't know what you're saying, but please, don't panic. I'm trying to help you." Aya forgot herself, as she did when upset, forgot that this was a soul and that she could not physically interact with him. At that moment, he was simply a person, scared and in need, and right in front of her. Holding out a hand was a universal gesture of aid. She thrust her arm into the hole.
Newly dead, he didn't think twice. He grabbed it.
The strangest thing happened, something that had never happened before. Ice water stampeded through her veins. She shuddered through several seconds, holding tight to a hand that felt like liquid, shrinking in her grip. A ball of pressure settled in her chest like inflamed bronchial tubes. The smaller the hand got, the larger the ball grew. The pressure built. And then, when the ice faded, became a warmth. A feeling of comfort, of sanctuary. A bit like she remembered feeling when very young and in her grandmother's arms.
As though infuriated that she had taken something from them, the web-things exploded into motion. They whistled as they sliced the air and splashed as they slapped the ground. A deafening, inhuman, growling shriek and a violent quaking knocked Castiel off his feet and threw Aya against the crumbling cocoon.
. . . His name was Carmelo Garcia. He was thirty-six years old and newly-wed to the love of his life, Mariana, ten years his senior but still the most stunning woman he'd ever met. Construction was a good enough job on which to raise her four babies as his own, though Rosa, rebellious and know-it-all at sixteen, disagreed. He hated leaving them, but he knew that it was his time, that his Lord Jesus Christ was calling him home. He only wanted to know that Mariana and the babies were going to be okay. She and the two eldest were working at the restaurant today . . .
Mentally wheeling around her frayed temper and the soul's peaceful acceptance, Aya hunched over the warmth in her chest, listening as Carmelo told her about his life, begged her to tell his beautiful Mariana what had happened. He deluged her with dreamlike flashes of a house, single-story and brushing shoulders with its neighbors, and a standalone café, lawn parched but rosebushes blooming like the ruffled skirts of a Jalisco dress. "What's happening to me?"
Castiel tried to say something, but then gasped, sounding like he was in horrific amounts of pain. His wings. She'd forgotten. He was still ensnared, helpless as the webs thrashed and the ground shook so hard neither one of them could keep their balance.
Carmelo whispered no culpó al ángel, that he didn't blame the angel. Her anger battered feebly against his acceptance, wanting to rage on, but it was steadily losing its lead. Aya squinted past the images of her mind's eye, fighting to focus on her friend. She crawled toward Castiel, queasy but determined to help him, too. She grabbed his arms, bunching his sleeves in her fists. Simultaneously, his big hand curled around the back of her neck, under her sodden hair, thumb sliding into the dip behind her jaw, and his other arm went around her waist. He pulled her close, wet face dropping onto her shoulder.
Fire rushed from her body through their small points of skin-to-skin contact, an actual sensation of something being drawn out of her, except it wasn't hers. It was Carmelo! Sharing his soul-energy with Castiel, like the sharing of breath through the act of cardiopulmonary resuscitation.
Electricity snapped in the dead air. Castiel lifted his head with a jerk. Angel-fire flamed out of his eyes, cobalt-blue, silver-white, and prismatic. The flames burst from his wings in a weird, slow-motion curling and drifting along the enormous black feathers. The venomous strands clinging to them caught fire, ghostly in color, giving off light but not heat. They hissed into ash while the monster above screamed and the ground convulsed, and then Castiel was free.
..::~*~::..
"Sam!"
Something sure had pissed Kammapa off, and Dean knew, from experience, that it hadn't been either him or his brother.
It loomed over them like the world's most phantasmagoric hot air balloon, throwing a colossal conniption fit. Another quake shuddered through the amphitheater, shaking debris, tools, and the Winchesters closer to the center like flour in a sieve.
Except this sieve had tall steps, a slope, and a gaping hole in the middle. Sam slid right in past the hips.
With a yawp, he dug into wrecked seating with fingernails and elbows. Kammapa bucked, its skinny legs stomping. Only the bulbous rear end of the monster was still inside the pit, but it seemed chained, its movements limited. It jerked against its invisible bonds, alternately growling, shrieking, and sucking at the air.
"SAM!" Dean bellowed, though the wind snatched his voice and whipped it away. Clutching the power washer wand, he ducked and swerved, refusing to get clotheslined by a giant see-through chicken foot, but couldn't get anywhere near his brother.
His too-smart-for-his-own-good, stubborn little brother, scraping at the enormous pentagram while he inched one leg back into the real world. Whatever spell had protected the angel warding on the outskirts of the park seemed to have been applied here as well, and he wasn't making much headway against what looked like regular spray paint.
That wasn't going to stop Sam, though, was it? The monster had already taken everyone dead, plus their friends. They had to get rid of it before more people came trotting into the amphitheater like cattle to the slaughterhouse. They couldn't waffle on this, couldn't wait for Castiel to come back to them. They had to get rid of it before it ate them, too.
Kammapa apparently had the same idea about Sam. A convulsive inch at a time, it worked to fold itself in half, its petal-lips quivering, rows of teeth grinding. Sam, so focused on his tasks, didn't see it.
"SA-!"
One of the feet smashed into Dean like a paddle into a ping pong ball, and like a ping pong ball, he went flying.
..::~*~::..
Castiel did not let her go, even after his eyes returned to normal, the fire left his wings, and the Void settled into a suspicious stillness. Aya put her palms flat to his chest, feeling the warmth of him through his thin shirt, the cool microfiber of his tie, the smoothness of his jacket. His clothes, repaired. His injuries, healed.
She asked the question, breathless in her amazement. "How?"
He bent his shining wings, arcing them forward; fully extended, they were twice as long as he was tall. They didn't really look like a part of him.
His expression softened. He seemed, in the midst of chaos, at peace.
"I understand now," he said.
Great, because she didn't. Staying within the protective curve of his wings, she pulled her hands back. She clasped them to her chest, over the place where Carmelo waited, snug and secure within her. "Understand what?"
"Why I was ordered to save you." Light as a snowflake brushing skin, he put two fingertips against her forehead, the glowing charms wrapped around his hand blinding her. Though she couldn't see it, she could feel the healing taking hold, the power flowing from the extra soul inside her, through him, and back, gentle, natural, and giving.
Tears threatened, and she took hold of his wrist. Guided it away. Released it. She didn't like the conflicting emotions that bubbled up when he touched her. Rather, she wanted answers, and she wanted them now. "Castiel, please. Why were you ordered to save me?"
"You are a psychopomp."
"Excuse me?"
He blinked at her tone. "There have been others. You may know of some of them. The Valkyries. Hermes and Charon. Anubis. Vanth. The word comes from the Greek psychopompós. It means—"
"Guide of souls," she said, calmer, remembering that the word was more innocent than it had first sounded. If she wasn't mistaken, angels also fell into that category. During a discussion of mythos with Paulie, he had told her that Methuselah, the biblical patriarch, had been transported to Heaven by one at the end of his long, long life, but— "They're not real. Anubis, Charon, they're characters in stories. They weren't real."
"You are real," he said. "I am real."
"You're an angel," she said, narrowly avoiding a sob. This whole situation was insane. She believed in an angel of Judeo-Christian tradition, but not in the ferryman of the River Acheron? What was the difference? "I'm just human."
"Just human cannot do what you can," he said. He bent closer to her, his wings rustling. "Reapers exist to guide the dead, by carrying the souls within themselves across dimensions."
"So reapers are psychopomps," Aya said, working it through, "and I have taken a soul inside myself. Am I a reaper?"
Obaa-chan had never called herself or Aya that. A creature or spirit that guided human souls to the afterlife did not exist in Buddhism or Shintoism, the two most common faith systems practiced in Japan, though Western culture had appropriated the term shinigami, literally death god, as a kind of Grim Reaper.
"No," he said, earnest, reassuring. "You are human, Aya Nakano, but you are also a guide of souls, and these souls need you.
"Come." He stooped and swept his long knife out of the water. It gleamed like chrome in the angel-light. Then he picked up the demon-killing knife and returned it to her. "The Void will not sit idly by while we take its prisoners from it."
Notes:
A/N: I don't speak Mexican dialects any more than I speak Latin. Google told me what Carmelo was saying. If it's incorrect, I apologize (and will correct it if necessary!).
Please leave a comment, won't you? I'll love you forever!
~ Anne
Chapter 28: The Light
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
Gripping his angel blade, Castiel raised his two material wings into battle position. Though he could not reestablish contact with Heaven, the soul inside of Aya had recharged his grace, a gift of energy and of trust that he was not going to squander. "Are you ready?"
At his back, Aya gripped the smaller demon-killing knife in both hands, holding it more like a shield than a weapon. "Ready," she said confidently. Then she hesitated, making an unhappy noise in her throat. "Maybe?"
He side-eyed her over his shoulder. "Is that a yes or no?"
"Both. Do I have to do this?" she whimpered. At his silence, she fidgeted, drooped, and then squared her shoulders. "Um. Sorry. Yes. Now or never, right?"
Amusement and admiration went very well together, Castiel discovered. He tensed, all senses alert for her signal and an attack he could feel waiting in the gloom, unsure from which direction it would come. The long columns of webs quivered slickly in the distance. Searching for sustenance, tongue-like strands separated from the columns, weaving and bobbing, tasting their vibrations on the non-air but stymied by their corporeal bodies. If neither of them used their powers, it would stay that way.
"There!" Aya said suddenly.
It was not going to stay that way.
She took off running, he splashing half a step behind, the divining charms lighting their way across the sheen of black water. Since the Void didn't follow the rules of Creation, they ran without encountering anything but darkness and water for several minutes, the emptiness designed to wear out and disorient living creatures. Aya, however, had her Sight to guide her, as Ditaolane once had.
The moment she began to cut into another hump-like cocoon, the elastic webs hissed to life. They sounded like a pit of alligators, tailored to immobilize prey with fear. They struck out of the dark. Castiel struck back, his blade gleaming. He moved with a swiftness that confounded the webs, though his wings often off-balanced him, incompatible as they were to his vessel. He sent the tarry strands whipping backward, spewing corrosive venom as they went.
Aya worked quickly. The exposed glow of a soul and her delighted whoop caught his attention.
"Sophie! It's me, Aya. I lived across from you and your mommy, remember?" She widened the opening she had made, yanking chunks off with her hands. She listened, and when she spoke, her voice shook. "No, Sophie, no, she's not mad at you. I promise. Give me your hand, baby. You don't have to stay in there any longer. Come with me!"
His moment of distraction lasted too long. A couple of strands got past his guard. They punched him, hard, splashing slime across his torso. He used a drop of the power the soul had given him to burn them to ash. He batted the webs away with his wings, sending sparks and small flames racing along their lengths. He cut and he slashed. Meanwhile, the soul's glow faded.
"Your mommy misses you, too," Aya murmured, hugging her arms.
When the attacks ceased, Castiel backed down. He pulled Aya to her feet, angel blade unwavering. Though the guardian only seemed to react, never to act first, they had done real damage here, and it would continue to fight them.
"She was only five," Aya told him, somewhat dizzily. "The family moved away when they lost her. Poor Sophie can't understand why her mother never came for her."
Castiel monitored her while she adjusted. There were several hundred more souls trapped in the Void. He didn't know if her body could actually handle that many passengers, or for how long, but there was no question. They were going to try. "Haste is our greatest ally."
Frightened, exhausted, young, and trusting, she swallowed, and then she tugged his coat sleeve. "This way."
..::~*~::..
Sam heard Dean yelling for him.
" 'm all right!" he shouted hoarsely, because he knew his brother needed to hear it, but he was a little busy at the moment and didn't have the breath to shout again. He heaved himself up and over the rim of Kammapa's pit. Then he was out and rolling across wood chips and gravel.
A wet, fleshy, shark-toothed mouth the size of a Ferris Wheel descended rapidly on him. This up-close and personal, the mouth resembled a ghoul's bone-studded leftovers.
"Whoa!" Stomach leaping, Sam shot upright, backpedaled, and then uncharacteristically tripped over his own shoes. He fell on his ass and Kammapa's lips whipped shut on nothing, missing him by a hair. Heedless of all else, he crab-walked backward as fast as he could. He blundered right off the seat and went crashing shoulders first down the foot and a half to the next level.
He groaned, inhaled dust, and started coughing. He could practically hear Dean now. Nice moves there, Grace.
Except he couldn't hear Dean at all anymore.
"Dean!" He beat a quick retreat from the flailing, furious monster. All thought of his brother had fled, chased away by fear and adrenaline, but guilt rapidly took their places. The ground jumped like an automated sorting conveyor as Kammapa strained and lunged against its shackles, but the shackles held.
He slipped and slid, using his hands to stay upright, abandoning the attempt to break the pentagram. "Dean!"
..::~*~::..
Aya lost track of time, if time even existed in this dead end of a dimension. The freed souls, most good people and a handful not so much, nestled together like tiny snow globes inside of her. Each one swam with memories and wishes, even those who had previously wanted nothing to do with her.
Castiel amazed her. He never once faltered, no matter how many of the web-things struck like toothless snakes, spitting venom meant for breaking down spirit energy, splashing inert over his clothes. He prevented them from getting close to her so that she could focus on the search and rescue. When she needed to stop to catch her breath, she watched him fight, shyly impressed, but she always returned to her task. She lost track of the number of cocoons. With every one she destroyed, the attacks lost strength—but so did she.
She was stumbling drunkenly by the time she cracked a cocoon open and found Jeanine, whose round glasses perched crookedly on her face.
Her vision had gone blurry by the time she rescued a soul who told her his name was Luka.
She burst into tears when she uncovered Julia. She cried for quite a while then, overwhelmed by the raptures that suffused her when Julia and Luka reunited. Castiel crouched over her protectively until she calmed.
"They're soulmates," he explained in the most benevolent voice she had yet heard from him, his blue eyes steady and wide. He hadn't needed to ask. "Rare, but special, and to be respected."
Which left her staring back at him, wondering if angels had soulmates, too. When he offered her his hand, as he had in the motel room, she accepted it.
..::~*~::..
Sam glanced at the monster, his hair in his eyes, dirt and pebbles striking his skin. The darkness pressed down. The thunder crashed.
They couldn't do it after all. They couldn't destroy the pentagram. Not with Dean out of commission somewhere in all this chaos, not without the right counter spell to break the one of protection on the painted sigils and lines. He kept hoping that Castiel would appear, handing out the secret to defeating this thing, bringing all the power of Heaven to bear, fighting at their sides. That somehow, someway, the swallowed souls would have survived as Ditaolane's people once had. That Aya had survived.
He closed his eyes, shutting out the storm, Kammapa, and the numerous entrances to the amphitheater through which first responders and police officers could come charging should Girard fail to stall them.
Fists clenched, Sam prayed. Not to God as he did every morning, who so far had been nothing more than a nebulous maybe, but to a creature he considered a friend.
Cass. If you can hear me, if you're still alive, you gotta hurry. You gotta get outta there. Sooner or later, Kammapa's gonna break out, and there's nothing we can do about it.
Castiel. Please be alive.
..::~*~::..
Castiel held his fist high, fending off a few uncoordinated attempts by the webs to ensnare him. The light of his rekindled grace, burning small but steady from the charms, caused the webs to drop limply. For a few moments, the only sounds were that of Aya breaching the final cocoon, and that of slime, dripping slow as dead man's blood, into the quiet water.
He lifted his head, a hound catching a scent. His name pulled at him from beyond the dimension in which he currently existed.
He twitched his wings higher, searching, seeking. Sam. That was Sam, praying. Faith had never been the younger Winchester's problem.
When he found the loose stitch in the fabric of the Void, through which he could feel Sam's prayer, he targeted it. He tore into the dimensions, slashing through them with the angel blade. He stabbed again, uncaring about the scar he left hanging on the air, about the wounds he inflicted on the guardian, to puncture a hole in their prison with brute force.
Far above, Kammapa stopped cold. The layer of water underfoot smoothed out, featureless as a pane of black diamond. Castiel counted his vessel's heartbeats. One . . . Two . . .
At eleven, Aya squealed.
A soul flowed out of the broken cocoon, a billowing white light that shimmered in half-seen rainbows around the edges. Castiel recognized her before she took her memory form, that of a tall girl with long limbs.
Lemara grinned when Aya, laughing and crying at the same time, sprang at her. They held on for as long as they could, whispering to each other. The love in their hushed voices made Castiel straighten and return Zuriel's angel blade to his sleeve. He cocked his head to the side, observing Aya absorb this, the final soul. When it was done, she did not move, standing with her back to him, her head bowed, her face hidden by her messy hair.
In slow motion, she fell.
..::~*~::..
Aya felt so strange. Lightheaded, and disconnected. She didn't realize she'd tipped like a solitary domino until Castiel caught her, and then lifted her. She seemed to float, weighing as little as she did underwater, and there was nothing there in his embrace to frighten her. To remind her that she shouldn't want to be this close. Sleepily, she put her arm around the back of his neck and tucked her head under his chin.
As her skin contacted his, the souls inside of her reacted. Their energy flowed between the angel and the guide of souls.
With Aya cradled against his chest, Castiel took flight.
..::~*~::..
Sam found his brother groaning under a Douglas-fir, covered in dirt from head to toe, a spectacular shiner already starting to bloom, and his lip swollen and split in three places.
"Hey," he said breathlessly. He patted Dean down, checking that he was still in one piece.
"Get off me," Dean croaked.
Sam hauled him into a sitting position, inspecting his back. "Anything broken? Anything hurting?"
"Do you really want me to list every organ and muscle grouping in my body, Sam?"
"Har, har. Is there anywhere you don't hurt, then?"
Dean glared at him, bruised jaw outthrust. Pointing at his elbow, he snapped, "Here."
With that, Sam's anxiety vanished like a shout in the wind. He clamped his mouth shut, infuriated beyond all reason that he'd relegated himself to the role of Marion Ravenwood in his Indiana Jones-loving brother's eyes, but then he realized that they could hear each other fine without the shouting.
Dean realized it at the same time. The two of them turned and looked at Kammapa.
Like confused sheep, the clouds swirled overhead, lowering but no longer playing catch with lightning. The monster keened, a long, throbbing note that sounded like a sob. It shuddered and, unbelievably, shrank. The shriveling petals of its lips opened wide and then curled backward. Kammapa turned itself inside-out like a dying flower, spewing fountains of insubstantial slime that vanished before ever reaching the ground. Then, as it collapsed, white-gold light punctured what was left of it from the inside.
Bright white-gold light.
Blinding bright white-gold light.
The Winchesters shielded their faces with their arms, ducking into each other for protection. They knew that light. Angel light. It intensified, prompting a sharp ringing in Sam's ears, and then both mercifully faded.
Castiel, as disheveled as always but otherwise unharmed, stood in the middle of what had been Kammapa's pit, Aya at his side. The giant pentagram, ruined and peeling and blackened, was unrecognizable and now meaningless. Of the pit, there was no sign. Within the circle stretched an island of intact bench seats.
Sam dragged himself to his feet, allowed Dean to use him like a ladder to get to his. A few days ago, he had observed how Tessa, the soft-spoken reaper who had once tried to reap his brother, had taken the soul of a recently deceased boy into her body. It happened again, except in reverse, when Aya opened her arms. Souls streamed out of her, orb-like at first but quickly resolving into their human personas. It went on and on, hundreds of them materializing, forming sloppy rings with Aya at the center.
He laughed, once, and then smiled up at the sky and the rapidly dispersing clouds, basking in the warm sunlight that chased away the cold and the dark.
It was over. They'd done it.
Castiel and Aya. They'd done it.
..::~*~::..
When the storm ended, it did so without warning.
It happened so abruptly that several people staggered, suddenly not needing to brace themselves against the wind. Like a giant fist unclenching, the clouds broke up and streamed away, admitting spears of unfiltered sunshine. The temperature rocketed upward. Within minutes, the chuckle of running water replaced the howling wind and the wet ground steamed as the sun went to work removing all traces of unseasonable winter.
Sitting in the open back of an ambulance, Desmond Varley blinked when a beam of sun flitted across his eyes. Next to him, Lemara's friend, Paulie, lifted his head off his bent knees. The pretty deputy, the one who had informed them she knew the score, broke off in the middle of them getting their stories straight—that they'd been taken by a neo-satanic cult, one of the few who advocated and practiced violence, for some bogus ritual that had claimed far too many lives, including his girlfriend's, and damaged a beloved historical site.
Not long ago, Kittney Johnson had been bundled off to the nearest hospital. Out of nowhere, she had started screaming, nonstop, like someone was torturing her. Paulie, on the other hand, he hadn't said a word. He'd allowed an EMT to check him over and wrap a blanket around him, as Desmond had. He hadn't stopped shivering, though, his eyes blank and staring, totally unresponsive.
Except now, he was sitting up, and life was returning to his pale face, staring as though he'd seen a ghost. He wasn't the only one. A handful of people ceased their work to stare, dumbstruck, at nothing, while the light picked them out of the crowd, made the steaming surroundings sparkle.
Man, that sun. It must be so bright because it had been dark for hours. Desmond winced, turning his head away from it.
Separate from the rescue crew activity, she stood quietly by the dripping, steamy trees, which was totally unlike her. She was always on the move, grooving to a rhythm that belonged only to her. She watched them with dark, sultry eyes.
Paulie gasped, sounding like he'd tried to laugh but someone had punched him in the gut at the same time. Desmond knew exactly how he felt. "Marr?"
Her face broke into a radiant smile. Even though he couldn't hear her, he could tell she was laughing. That she was happy.
A pair of oblivious firefighters shuffled in front of Desmond, carrying a big, black bag that he really didn't want to examine or identify. By the time they passed, Lemara was gone as completely as though she'd never been there.
Paulie gasped again, a dying fish.
"Hey, man," Desmond said to him in an undertone. "A'ight?"
Apparently not yet ready to speak, Paulie ducked and scrubbed a corner of his blanket furiously across his face.
Desmond then did something he never would have, in normal circumstances. He slung an arm companionably around Paulie's shaking shoulders.
"Yeah," he murmured, answering his own question. He raised his eyes to the light, sort of hoping it would dry them. "We gonna be a'ight."
Paying absolutely no attention to them or to her hands, falling to her sides, the deputy whispered, "Daddy?"
..::~*~::..
Full house, Sam thought. Standing room only. Person after person filled the seats, most of them shouting unintelligible questions. Eventually, the crowd hushed enough that Aya, who had been talking for the last several minutes, could be heard by all.
"What happened here, it was senseless, and it was cruel," she called. "It could happen again. You will never find peace. Not here. It's time for you to move on. To go into the light. It's there, and it's waiting for you."
Several voices spoke in low tones on the heels of her words, interpreting for others who didn't speak English rather than challenging her. Castiel stood at her shoulder, gazing at her with a reverence that made Sam avert his eyes, not wanting old memories and the pain and loss associated with them to resurface. Meanwhile, a few of the duller, more damaged souls slunk into the shadows, glaring with luminous eyes through strands of neglected hair, sores oozing through ratty clothing, their forms going dark long before the shadows claimed them. Watching them leave left a bad taste in Sam's mouth, but there was nothing he could do about it except hope that, after everything they'd just gone through, they would decide to lay low for a while.
"I know this is hard for you," Aya went on, her gaze jumping from face to face. She turned in place as she spoke, not missing a single one. "I'm here to show you the way. That's what I do. I help people who have died to move on, and to cross over into the light."
A great babble rose up.
"I'm dead? What do you mean, I'm dead?"
"Judgment is awaiting us! Punishment for our sins!"
"Am I going to Hell? Please, oh, please, God, I don't want to go to Hell!"
"I need a priest!"
"I don't see what the problem is! Why shouldn't we stay right here?"
"Some of us have been here longer than you've been alive, girl! Why should we listen to you?"
"There's no guarantee that what you're saying is true!"
"Yeah, no one knows what's in there!"
"I do!" Aya shouted over them. "I've felt it! I've seen it on the faces of those who enter it! There is no pain there. No fear, no loneliness, just love and acceptance. It's what you need now!"
"What about our families?"
"Our friends? Our homes?"
"I can't go, he doesn't know—"
"—murdered me, don't you understand?!"
"Please, I know you're hurting, and I know you're scared! But there's nothing left for you here!" Aya paused, her eyes bright with unshed tears. When next she spoke, it was in a normal tone of voice. The entire crowd strained to hear her. "Saying goodbye is never easy, but it isn't forever. For you, it won't seem like any time at all. You're going to a new life. A perfect life. You're not alone. Your suffering is over. It doesn't cost you anything, and it won't take anything away from you. It doesn't work like that. You won't be judged or punished. There's nothing you need to do to deserve forgiveness and peace."
The spirits muttered and gestured, getting more agitated. Beside Sam, Dean tensed, his mouth set in an unhappy line. Several more souls stubbornly blinked out, probably to return to their various haunts. No one moved to fill the spaces they left.
"Who are you, anyway?" a spirit yelled. "How do you know all this?"
"You're still alive," pointed out another. "How can you possibly understand what it's like for us?"
The size of the crowd and the importance of what Aya was trying to do dwarfed her, but she didn't shy away from it. Right then, Sam admired her tenacity. "I know that we're all meant to move on. I've seen that, too. Things go wrong when we stay, and more people get hurt. The way is open. All you have to do is walk into it!"
The spirits milled around, radiating distrust and doubt, until one man stepped forward, dusty black from his heeled boots to the Stetson perched on his head.
"I don't know about y'all," Marshal Whitley drawled, "but I'm damn tired of all the noise. It's time for me to put my feet up."
He turned in a flutter of his coat. Taking the uneven steps down with his head high and one thumb hooked in a belt loop, he tossed aside the shot glass he had been holding as he went. It winked in the light, then disappeared. Marshal's tall form dissolved into the brilliance that was more stunningly beautiful than anything Sam had ever seen.
"Dean," he muttered, frowning. "Do you feel that?"
Dean had to swallow a couple of times before he got out a rough, "Yeah. I do."
"That" was a nearly indescribable feeling. A mixture of love, and peace, and forgiveness. Concepts that Sam thought didn't, couldn't, apply to him. Not after all the things he had done and seen in his life. Not with demon blood running through his veins. However, as the light fell on and illuminated the faces of the gathered souls, and they listened to whatever they could hear on the other side of the Veil, Sam felt the same as when he had laid eyes on his mother for the first time. A spirit herself, but lovely, and loving, and forgiving, and so proud. Of him.
He leaned into Dean's space, as he had when he'd been a kinder-gartener who couldn't stay at the same school for more than a couple of weeks and his big brother had been the only permanent and good thing in their life of poverty and upheaval. The only one who had given a hoot about him when he was hurting. The only one who had ever stepped up and fought for him until he was big enough to do it himself.
"Time to go!" Giggling, Julia skipped after Marshal, towing her fiancé by the hand. Their heads caught the light, red and yellow, their laughter washing back over the crowd. They vanished together.
A young voice, bursting with the kind of residual terror and hysterical relief of a lost child found, shrieked, "Gramma!" Skinny legs pumping, arms outstretched, a little girl charged straight in.
The remaining souls seemed transfixed by the light that wasn't from the sun. Hesitant at first, but then with more confidence, they walked toward its source. Pointing, and waving, and laughing, and crying, adults helping children along, some stepping out of their infirmities, others stepping right back into youth. They walked faster. They broke into jogs. They ran.
A stampede of smiling, singing, jubilant people flowed toward the stage, toward the light, becoming one.
The amphitheater rang with the last echoes of laughter and songs as Sam picked his way toward Castiel and Aya, Dean limping beside him and pretending he wasn't. A bit dazzled by the light of so many spirits crossing the Veil at once, Sam didn't notice at first that one soul remained.
"Will I ever see you again?" Lemara asked.
It was the first time he had heard her speak. Her voice was pleasantly husky.
"Yours better be the first face I see when I get there," Aya said.
"You better be old when you get there," Lemara retorted.
They both laughed, and even Sam cracked a grin. He liked this girl.
She sobered too soon, glancing over her shoulder at the light. Her voice wavered. "I'm serious, girlfriend. You gotta do all the things. Everything I couldn't. Don't forget to take care of yourself. Drink lots of water and go to bed on time."
"I know you love me," Aya said as though finishing an oft-repeated conversation. "Love you too."
The light beckoned, and Lemara went. It brightened to accept her, and then both vanished. A soft breeze blew through the amphitheater, clean and fresh. It lingered in the warm air, filling Sam's lungs, brushing away the worst of his aches.
Dean, a little bloody and a lot dirty and obviously ready for a year-long nap, was the first to speak. Blunt as a baseball bat, he asked, "So, is that it? Is the seal intact?"
Castiel smiled his hint of a smile, the tiniest bit of attaboy showing in the crease of his eyes. "Yes. Thanks to all of you."
He held out his fist, but not as though expecting a knuckle bump. When Dean warily positioned his open hand under it, Castiel dropped something into his palm. After a nod at the brothers, and a distinctly longing glance at Aya, the angel disappeared with the subdued flapping of his coat.
Sam peered at the thing Castiel had given Dean. The rough little necklace of divining charms. He coughed on a snicker. "Dude, he picked your pocket, and you didn't even notice."
Dean didn't deny it. In fact, he seemed oddly pleased. "You know, Sam, there may be hope for that angel yet."
..::~*~::..
Dep. Girard took their statements in the burnished light of sunset, not as federal agents, but as civilians caught up in the mess. Rather, she took Dean's statement, trying not to laugh at his put-on, wide-eyed, country-bumpkin enthusiasm.
"Yeah, that cult trashed the place, and then they turned on each other. Yeah, it was crazy! No, I swear, God's honest truth . . ."
The ambulances pulled away, Aya riding in one of them with her guyfriend. Hands in his pockets, Sam shifted his weight, feeling the hard line of Ruby's knife under the back of his jacket. The firefighters were taking care of the demolished campground, the police had taped off the amphitheater for investigation, and he was bone-weary. Still, they'd completed the job and managed to save people along the way, so it was a good kind of weary. The kind where he wanted to go out and have a few beers for once. Besides, it was about time they hightailed it out of there before someone other than the deputy got inquisitive.
He turned to ask Dean if he was game. Dean and Felicia, grinning with a level of foolishness that Sam was fully prepared to rag Dean over later, were so absorbed in each other that he whistled instead, short and soft. Barely acknowledging him, Dean fished his keys from his pocket and tossed them. Sam caught them with a grin of his own.
He didn't mind getting those beers alone this time. Sometimes, that was just the way it went.
Notes:
A/N: That's it, folks! The final chapter! Yes, really! But don't worry, it's not the end.
~ Anne
Chapter 29: On the Road Again
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
Due to the damages done to Apt. 3-301, Aya Nakano was served eviction paperwork. The apartment manager couldn’t slap the pink slip to the missing door, so she glued it to the remains of Aya’s coffee table. At least she had requested a police presence to keep anyone from entering the apartment until Aya returned, so Aya hadn’t been robbed blind on top of everything else. That weekend, instead of attending her graduation ceremony, Darika, Paulie, and Desmond helped her pack, and to prepare Lemara’s things for shipping home to her parents in Chicago.
Aya’s diploma had arrived, and with it, her entire future. However, it was hard to think about a future right then, sitting in the middle of her bed, a small box to her right and a pile of newspaper to her left, a stack of photos in frames balanced in front of her.
Honestly, she couldn’t shake the feeling that she’d been set adrift. Lemara was gone. Paulie was trying, but it would be a long time before he would be himself again. Her home was no longer hers; she wasn’t prepared to go running back to her family. School was over, her schedule up in the air. Several things had happened in the last few days, some wonderful, some terrifying, and some flat-out bewildering. The only thing she had left to anchor her, it seemed, was that her reikan was still a part of her. She could See, and that was all she could do, just like . . . before.
A noise from the front room pulled her off her blue comforter and out of her bluer mood. She tiptoed in her fuzzy socks to investigate, a picture frame clutched in her hand and raised like a weapon.
She rounded the corner out of the hall and stopped in surprise. “Castiel?”
He turned, his hair sticking up in dark brown tufts. He stood with his arms at his sides, his jaw shadowed with stubble, his eyes tired.
“Hello, Aya,” he said.
Sheepishly lowering the heavy frame, Aya stepped around her couch, careful not to knock her knees into the old, scuffed coffee table. Latte, her tail in the air, perched on the back of the couch. “What are you doing here? I didn’t think I’d see you again.”
Castiel’s eyes dropped, and then lifted, apologetic.
Oh. Was she seeing him again? Aya took in her furnished living room, the intact door, the purses and scarf hanging next to it. She peered at the microwave in the kitchen with its red digital numbers, unreadable, then examined the picture frame in her hand, which hadn’t survived dropping like a grenade on Sam. Just that afternoon, she’d left this apartment empty and as clean as she and her friends could get it before gorging herself on pizza and Coronitas until she passed out, moderately and gratefully drunk, on Darika’s hideaway bed.
Latte let herself down to the arm of the couch in her usual sideways shuffle, claws catching in the textured fabric. She regained her balance and then looked up at Castiel with her big green eyes. She meowed imperiously. A faint smile touched his lips, and he offered the cat spirit his hand. Latte pushed her head into it.
“I wanted to find some way to thank you for what you did,” he said at last in his low, gruff voice, though he directed the words at her shameless cat. “You saved so many. Without you, they would have been lost.”
Aya spoke to her cat, too. “You don’t need to thank me.”
Castiel gave a tiny sigh. “I want you to know that I will be here. If you need me.”
Need wasn’t exactly the right word. She watched Latte fawn over him, vaguely jealous of a cat. Gradually, it dawned on her that there was one more thing that needed to be done. No matter how much it hurt. “Castiel, I . . .”
He tilted his head at her, patiently waiting.
“I can’t live here anymore, but I can’t explain that to Latte,” she said slowly, not sure she was allowed to ask this. “Will you take her with you?”
As though it were the most natural thing in the world, Castiel picked up the little coffee-and-cream cat. Latte perked her ears and her whiskers at him, so content to be held by an angel that she seemed to have forgotten all about her person. Aya tried to stand tall and unaffected when all she wanted was for him to hold her, too. To ask him to stay, rather than tell him to go.
He tucked his chin. Unsmiling, he regarded her with a singular focus that stole all the air out of the room, dream or not. She didn’t think to object when he raised his hand and touched her forehead with two fingers.
She woke with a start to Darika’s darkened apartment, her heart racing, her face hot. She rolled over on the creaky hideaway, balled herself up, and buried her head underneath her pillow. Her heart rebelled, angry and hurt and in love, demanding that she call him back, Lemara come back, Latte don’t go.
Nothing happened. No one answered. The night settled around her, dark and hot and muffling, and unbearably lonely.
..::~*~::..
A week later, blue Colorado skies smiled so warmly that the city had already forgotten about the freak blizzard of twenty-ten. Red Rocks reopened, and Aya put her career research on hold to pay a visit to a nice home in the affluent Baker neighborhood. She walked up a flagstone path, which led right from the asphalt curb to the red cement steps, through what would, in summer, be a handkerchief-sized lawn and prolific butterfly garden. A loaf of peanut butter cup banana bread, still warm in its plastic wrap and tea towel, rode nestled inside her new messenger bag because she didn’t feel right barging in on this family without some kind of gift in hand.
If this bag had two large angel wings embroidered across the front flap, well. At least it was cute.
She glanced over the home’s Red Rock Canyon stone façade, the upstairs windows and widow’s walk, the narrow verandah stuffed with large planters, several chairs, and a swing, going over in her mind what she wanted to say.
Hello, Mrs. Byram. My name is Aya Nakano. I’d like to talk to you about your son.
My son? Mrs. Byram would probably ask, and look over her shoulder as Evan, the ginger-haired server Aya had approached at Spanky’s Roadhouse, would come up behind his mother and smile crookedly at her.
Yes, she’d say to a completely bewildered Mrs. Byram. Your son, Ethan.
Yeah. That was where this conversation would go one of two ways. Taking a deep breath, she stepped onto the painted verandah. A little boy, his cheeks mottled with a distinctive maroon flush and his hair a mass of gingery curls, sat hugging his knees between two of the planters, sulking like he’d been put in time out.
“Hi,” she said. “Is your mama home?”
He blinked up at her solemnly, and then he pointed at the doorbell, almost hidden in Victorian trimming.
“Thank you.” Aya shifted her bag over her hip and put her finger on the bell. She hesitated, and then she smiled down at the boy. “Hey. Wanna help me?”
Beaming, little Ethan Byram hopped to his feet. Rising onto his toes, he stuck a chubby pink fingertip next to hers, and they pushed the bell together.
..::~*~::..
Bobby Singer, more of a father to the Winchesters than John had been capable in some respects, invited the boys to Pamela Barnes’s funeral.
Actually, what he said was, “You idjits better pay your damn respects or I’m kickin’ your asses like I shoulda done your daddy’s.”
Dean didn’t want to admit it, but Bobby was right. It was their fault his friend Pamela had died. The least they could do was show up, especially since she had been a psychic, not a hunter, and a funeral wasn’t out of place for someone like her.
Didn’t mean he had to like it.
“Come on, Sam, let’s go!” he called.
The motel’s bathroom door muffled his brother’s voice. “Just a minute, Dean!”
“Stick your head under the faucet and grab a comb, we’re gonna be late.”
Silence from the bathroom. Inured to Sam’s unhealthy obsession with his hair, Dean plopped onto his bed and pulled out his phone. Denver had long since left the rearview. The Great Plains had swallowed the mountains, and Felicia with them. He caught himself halfway through composing a text to her and sat there staring dumbly at the words.
Sentimental, at a time like this? Dean sighed. Getting older. That must be it. He deleted the unfinished text, one letter at a time, closed his phone with a snap, and shoved it into his pocket.
He ran a hand down his face. “Sam!”
The bathroom door opened, revealing his brother wearing his newest pair of jeans and nicest button-up. His collar was damp, his hair slicked back, and Dean smirked.
Sam scowled at him. “Please try to behave yourself out there.”
“Whatever.” Dean shook his head, letting it drop. Funerals were never easy. Which was why Sam was so uptight today, but Dean was positive Pamela wouldn’t even behave herself at her own funeral, so why should he?
Lost in their separate thoughts, Sam locked the scuffed motel door while Dean strode toward the Impala. The hinges creaked, and the body settled a little lower on its chassis as they got in.
Even though they were going to a funeral on an admittedly overcast and windy Cheyenne day, Dean’s phone sat in his pocket with an incoming text he’d received while driving up I-25 N, one that lightened the burden, just a little. One that he might not delete.
Thank you. Stay safe.
~ Aya
It has taken me a full year and four months to complete this book, and I amassed reams of research, background information, and anecdotes along the way. I thought I’d try sharing some of it with you!
Though I set this story in my hometown and used actual places as inspiration, I took huge liberties with them. It was my way of acknowledging that Supernatural was, like many TV shows, shot on location in Vancouver, BC, despite where Sam and Dean’s travels took them down here in the US. Also, there are a few nods to my favorite hockey team, the Colorado Avalanche, within the story; did you spot them?
One of the hardest things for me to remember while I wrote Among Us is that this story takes place in May 2010, twelve years past. Technology and pop culture changes so quickly but so seamlessly that I had to quadruple-check my references. I may have slipped up here and there. I claim supernatural occurrences (and your leniency!).
I named my main original character Aya (あや), a common, gender-neutral Japanese name. It can mean “design, colorful, beautiful.” If written like this: 理, Aya means “reason, truth, logic.” That was the idea I had in my head each time I thought about how she would interact with the other characters in the story.
I asked my friend Melia if there was a Japanese term for the supernatural ability to see ghosts, and she sent me this: “There is a word! It is reikan (Rei = spirt/ghost, Kan = feeling). Kanji: 霊感.” Though Aya is American and doesn’t speak Japanese, there are concepts she learned from her grandmother that she thinks of in her grandmother’s native language.
On the show, when Dean and Sam impersonate Federal agents, US Marshals, CDC inspectors, and the like, Dean often chooses the names of rock stars, fictional characters, and actors as aliases. In this story, Sam chose the names of real numerologists.
Angels fascinate me. They always have. So much research went into how I portrayed Cass. I wanted to keep him, as a character, true to the original, but writing prose isn’t the same as screenwriting. The SPN writers, I think, did angels justice. Their version is much closer to the Jewish portrayal, which, as my friend rachelc wrote to me, are “terrible messengers of god that you never wanted to see.” They are intelligent but innocent, created to learn and to worship God and to follow orders. They do not possess free will. Their power is awesome. Language provides no barrier for them, but they are limited creatures; for example, they actually have to travel from Point A to Point B just like we do. And, as Cass says, “We are not omniscient.” And finally, a seraph uses its six wings in God’s presence to show its humility: two cover its face, two cover its feet, and two help it to fly.
About Cass (Headcanon #1): Cass isn’t a seraph at the time of this story. On the show—S08—he reveals that he is promoted. But before his promotion? It’s not mentioned. I believe he is a Power of the Second Sphere. However, “Power” isn’t a commonly-used term for an angel, and, in my opinion, seraphim are much scarier. I wanted that element of scary to go with his naïve, innocuous exterior, because when he is introduced to the show, Cass is a frighteningly powerful creature.
About Cass (Headcanon #2): Just like a demon’s face, we never get to see an angel’s wings directly. So, I made up my own details, such as how they look different in their natural dimension (flames and eyes) from our dimension (bird feathers). I studied a lot of photos of birds in flight! I decided that I like crow wings best. Whenever I think of Cass and his wings, that’s how I picture them.
About Cass (Headcanon #3): Why, when the fandom agrees that it’s spelled “Cas,” do I insist on writing it “Cass”? I wrote this story blind, having jumped into watching the show all by myself, after it was over, without ever having seen a preview, ad, or trailer. No one else I knew ever talked about it, and I’d never caught any memes, articles, or read a single other fanfic. While watching the show, whenever I heard the boys say the nickname, I heard both s’s, so that is how I wrote it without even stopping to ask the question. I have accepted the fandom’s spelling, but my Cass had already grown his wings and taken flight.
About Cass (Headcanon #4): This is a spoilery section, but directly ties into how I tried to portray Cass. I have a theory about his origins (beyond Mr. Kripke choosing his name because SPN aired on Thursdays). Cass is so different than his brethren, and I believe he was not always as he is. I believe that he was once the archangel Qaphsiel (Hebrew: קַפְצִיאֵל, English: Cassiel). Emphasis on once. Why?
*takes a deep breath*
Cass is not an important angel. As far as he knows, he never was. However:
- The absentee God intervenes on his behalf. Several times.
- Balthazar and Gabriel seem so fond of him, a best friend and a big brother respectively, but like they pity him, like he’s a child or has been injured and needs to be treated gently. Like they know something he doesn’t. They call him Cassie. It’s hard to tell if they do it in affection or condescension. Probably both.
- At first, Lucifer tries to dismiss him, and acts like he doesn’t know him, but he clearly does. You can see that moment where it clicks and his face goes, “Oh.” Suddenly, his behavior changes, though he never says anything about it.
- The other angels flip-flop between revering him, fearing him, and hating him (much like we, as a people, can hate and abuse those we perceive as lower than us, especially if they’ve been brought lower). They keep trying to make Cass lead them, insisting, irrationally, right up to the end, that he belongs in a seat of power.
- Uriel is awful, and I get the feeling that he shouldn’t be, especially since he and Cass care about each other so much. They come as a pair, always working together, brothers and friends, and only fall out once the Apocalypse ball starts rolling.Cass does not understand the change, though it seems clear to us. Perhaps because he loves a Uriel we never got to meet. Which leads to:
- Naomi, one of Cass’s superiors and his torturer, tells him that she has frequently wiped his memories, trying to correct his deviancy (for example, implying that he helped with the slaughter of Egypt’s firstborns, which he denies in horror). I think Naomi “corrected” the two of them—Uriel and Cass—so many times, so brutally, that Uriel quite simply broke, while Cass diminished and became the awkward, quietly bamf angel that we all love. Cass would not remember being an archangel and wouldn’t properly remember his own name because of her, while Uriel—well. My theory could make us look at his character differently and find the sadness in it.
- God’s current absence deeply disturbs Cass. He becomes obsessed with finding Him, which could be because, as Qaphsiel, he was in charge of the Seventh Heaven, where he decided who was permitted before God’s Throne and who wasn’t.
- Finally, Qaphsiel was a guardian, which Cass definitely still is. He gravitates to those who see themselves as of no importance, who are not “worthy,” who fall between the cracks (the sick, the homeless, the blue collar, Meg—a demon with a little good in her—and, most of all, Dean).
And there you have it! </spoilers>
In chapter seven, Dean asks Cass what he looks like. I spent a lot of (read: too much) time wondering how an angel would describe itself. I came up with this, and it seemed to suit him: [Bless the LORD, O you His angels, you mighty ones who do His bidding, obedient to His spoken word.] (Psalm 103:20)
Also in chapter seven, the beer that Dean doesn’t get to enjoy is courtesy of Landlocked Ales (https://www.landlockedales.com/). I know the show’s producers relied on mock-ups for the booze, but I figure, nothing is better than local. Here’s to you, Nick, Tyler, and Brandy!
In chapter nine, Dean ruminates about a mouse in his motel room. I must thank Mr. Craig Dickson for a hilarious one-star review he left for a motel in Denver that I shall, in the interest of goodwill, leave unnamed. Craig, whoever you are, wherever you are, cheers!
In chapter ten, Paulie refers to himself as a faggot. I do want to put it out there that while the term carries so much negative connotation, to Paulie, it’s a term of affirmation. It’s his word. He owns it. I am not allowed to use it, ever. And neither are you, unless you are one of Paulie’s kindred spirits, you beautiful otter-person, you!
Though I made up the prophecy and the whole “4144171” thing, Kammapa is a real South African myth. Likewise, the Headless Hatchet Lady is one of our local ghost stories.
Have you ever heard the phrase, “Write what you know”? There is a wealth of meaning behind it that I don’t have the space to go into now, but I have taken that advice to heart. In this story, the setting is my hometown. The places are places I know and embellished with love. My mother gave me the story about a snake, my husband the one about a misfiring rifle. And, of the vehicles that became part of the cast list, the Camry is one that I knew personally. Its name was Bumper Car, because before we’d had it a month, before we ever made a payment on it, a powerful gust of wind bent the front passenger door the wrong way, and then the edge of the garage clipped the side mirror, taking it off completely, and then the garage door itself scraped up the back bumper. That old Camry was such a danger magnet! It did have a good, long, high-mileage life, though, before it finally gave up the ghost. It was fun to throw it back in the action.
If you’re a Supernatural fan, then this won’t need a bit of explaining, but if you aren’t, then I bet you’re wondering about the author of this book. Carver Edlund is the pseudonym of a nervous, shut-in character named Chuck Shurley, an unknowing Prophet of the Lord, who wrote the fictional but scarily accurate “Supernatural” series of books that Cass predicts will thereafter be known as the Winchester Gospel. Since the publication of the low-circulation novel series halted when Dean went to Hell, leaving its few fans on an agonizing cliffhanger, I thought it would be cute to present my fanfiction as one of Carver’s written but unpublished titles (Sam: “Oh, uh, hey, Chuck. If you really wanna publish more books, I guess that’s okay with us.” Chuck: “Wow, really?” Sam: “No, not really. We have guns and we will find you.” Chuck: “Okay! Okay. No more books.”).
I truly hope you enjoyed this one.
~ Anne
Notes:
Keep reading for four bonus short stories, featured in Edition 4887 of the SPN Newsletter! The first is an insert that takes place during the first scene of Chapter 13: Soul Phone. The second takes place simultaneously with Chapter 12: Deviating from the Plan. The third follows the sad death and afterlife of a certain demon. The last is an attempt to bind the lore in Among Us to the lore of the later seasons of Supernatural.
(https://spnnewsletter.livejournal.com/1226007.html)
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