Jo wakes to rain-scented air and a distant crash reminiscent of boulders cracking against one another. Muzzy and disconcerted, she wrinkles her nose, prying her eyelids open. The motel room is exactly the same as it was when she fell asleep a few hours earlier (bland gray-green walls; cheap sheets on a creaky king-sized bed; bleach-scented bathroom; Walmart-brand coffee maker), twenty hours of driving and more than a thousand miles behind her to get clear of the reach of an exceedingly-well-entrenched vampire coven who'd been three steps ahead of her for the entire time she thought she was hunting them.
When she'd staggered to the bed and passed out at ten in the morning, she'd just been happy to be alive.
Something shifts behind her, and Jo is snapping into a sitting position and grabbing for the knife under her pillow before she even has time to fully process the movement.
Balthazar flips the blade into his far hand and winks. "Beat you to it, darling."
"Don't call me that." She holds out an expectant hand. "Give it."
A heavy sigh lurches from Balthazar's chest, but he sets the leather handle back in her palm, watches without comment as she places it on the bedside table. He's sitting on top of the sheets next to her, same old jeans and black jacket as ever, arms folded across his chest now that there's no knife to toy with.
Jo has a disconcerting thought: "How long have you been there?" She's not exactly exposed, dresses in sweats and a loose T-shirt, and she'd been under the blankets, but the thought of him watching her sleep is nothing short of disturbing. She's heard all about those creepy Twilight kids.
Balthazar quirks one eyebrow. "You were awake within seconds of my arrival."
"Oh." That says something gratifying about her instincts. But then she blinks a few times, and another question comes to mind. "Why are you even here?" It's been weeks since she last saw him, and she's not entirely sure as to how he could have rooted out her location when she'd just arrived this morning.
His mouth does that thing where it thins out to almost nothing just before he speaks; repressing anger, she always thinks. "Roughly a dozen women matching your description – all of them rough-and-tumble sorts with weapon collections and rather ugly vehicles – have gone missing in the last day in the greater Appalachian area." He lets that sink in for a moment. "And here I find you, a thousand miles west, asleep and unguarded, after having brought down several members of the most powerful collection of vampires left on the continent. It's -" the sentence is cut off almost before it's begun, but the unfinished thought hangs in the air between them: It's a bleeding miracle you've survived this long.
Jo resists the urge to avert her gaze. Her hands clench in the ugly green blankets as she stares down Balthazar's sparking gray eyes. "I don't appear to be dying."
The angel blinks first. "You humans are always dying." He turns to study the mirror hanging on the opposite wall.
Jo looks too, catches sight of herself properly for the first time in days. Her skin seems ridiculously pale, but that's just the dark room and the wounds – bruises marked under her eyes by exhaustion, all the way down to manacle-shaped ones on her wrists and lacerations everywhere from her cheekbone to the outside of her right shin because, whaddaya know, vampires don't just lie down and let you kill them. She looks like the zombie of a domestic abuse victim. Feels like one too, she realizes, when she goes to stretch and feels the tendons creak and muscles groan; rusty pieces of a machine well on its way to breaking down. On top of everything else, she's also got bones bruises on her hips and ribs and shoulders that will take weeks to clear up, if not months. Fuckin' splendid.
For all of a second, she considers asking Balthazar to heal her, before she remembers that that particular ability hasn't been in his repertoire since he left Heaven. Good old-fashioned time it is, then.
The first droplets spatter against the motel windows, startling her from her reverie. Balthazar slips off the bed in one easy movement, rolling his shoulders as he heads towards the door. After the – should she call it paranoia? Yeah she is; she's perfectly capable of looking after herself against a bunch of vampires – paranoia of earlier, Jo finds that a little odd. "Abandoning me so soon?" she cracks, hitching her eyebrows upward when he pauses at the door to look back.
Balthazar glances back at her for a fraction of a moment. "No," is all he says as he steps out into the rain.
The door doesn't close behind him, so Jo scrambles from her bed, grumbling a rush of quasi-words under her breath, has her fingers wrapped around the handle before she pauses to take stock of the situation.
She's never seen the sky so dark during the daytime. Black clouds roil overhead, and it doesn't seem possible to have rain bucketing down this hard, this quickly. The mountain ranges on the western horizon are buried in the deluge; hell, the neon sign of the diner across the street marks the far edge of her vision, but only because it burns like a beacon. Water cracks against the eaves of the motel, ricochets from the body of her truck; stinging droplets shower down on where she stands in her doorway, making her flinch. There are already puddles forming anywhere there's a dip in a horizontal plane.
Only a few paces away, Balthazar stands exposed beside her truck, jacket stripped off and clenched to one fist, chin tilted up towards the thunderheads. Tiny rivulets snake their way down his neck; his shirt and jeans are welded to his skin by moisture. Jo can't even see if he's bothering to breathe.
Once, months ago, during a lull between hunts, they whittled away the better part of a night with words and a bottle of Jack, and Jo learned great deal of relatively useless information on the topic of angels and their wings. She's always been an inquisitive drunk; Balthazar, in return, waxed eloquent either due to the effects of the alcohol, or because he didn't care and expected her to forget everything the next morning anyway. Bits and pieces have clouded over, but a sizable chunk of the evening remained lucid in her memory.
She knows that every angel is an angel of something, represented in the substance of their wings when they're in Heaven. There's even an angel of eyeballs – the name escapes her now. She knows that, on Earth, the wings are all the same to human eyes – great, shining windows to that higher plane, and death to perceive. She knows that a single angel's wing is the size of the horizon. She knows that when angels war in Heaven, something that human scientists would identify as antimatter bubbles from reality's wounds. She knows that many of the angels – Balthazar included – don't believe God is ever coming back. She also knows, however, that angels feel closest to the remnants of His Grace when in close contact with their material manifestation.
She knows that Balthazar is the angel of storms.
Watching from the doorway, therefore, feels like intruding on a private moment. Balthazar's eyes have slipped shut, jaw loosening enough for his lips to part ever so slightly, sucking in the breath of the storm while his fingers flex and uncurl continuously, letting his jacket drop to the ground. She can all but see the line between vessel and angel, thinner than paper as the coalesced power contained within scrabbles frantically at its bindings, reaching for a connection – an escape.
Lightning cracks a whip against one of the buildings in town, wrapping jagged fingers around the grounding rod. Jo flinches at the sharp immediateness of the boom, clutching at the door reflexively.
"Balth," she calls. "Balthazar?" Another snap of lightning cracks her tone into borderline hysteria. She knows storms, and this is no natural creation, to descend with such speed and intensity upon a relatively placid area.
Demon activity had been her first thought, but with Balthazar in the vicinity and a clan of powerful vampires on her tail, there's no way of knowing. All that Jo knows is that she's still bone-tired and in no condition to fight, so if she could get confirmation that it's the angel causing this storm, and not some supernatural monster with filet de hunter at the top of its ideal menu, that'd be… really, really great.
Funnily enough, Jo gets so caught up in these musings that she doesn't hook up with reality until Balthazar is nudging her aside and pulling the door closed behind him. Small streams are still trickling down the sides of his face and dripping from various hemlines. His eyes, when they meet Jo's, are unfocused and brooding.
Jo is having none of it. She grabs his arm when he starts to turn away, wrenches him back around to face her. "You wanna tell me what that was out there?"
With a single bat of eyelids, Balthazar comes back to life, arching one eyebrow and hooking the opposite corner of his mouth into a smile. "I believe you've been present for everything, darling."
The need to slap him is so sudden and urgent that Balthazar's head is twisted to the side, cheek flaring red, before Jo is even aware of the impulse. Her palm stings from the force of the blow. She can't stop herself from following through to grab his chin and yank him down, trying to force him to meet her eyes. He complies, gaze flat and seemingly uninterested.
"I don't know if you've noticed," she starts, "but over the last three days, I've killed half a dozen vampires singlehandedly, had the crap beaten out of me in the process, driven over a thousand miles, and slept for all of about twelve hours, which I know sounds perfectly alright to you, but I am tired and I am sore and you literally came out of nowhere to fuckin' wake me up for no reason and now you're running around in this freak thunderstorm without explaining why and I would just really, really like to know what's going on." Spiel completed, she releases her grip on Balthazar's chin, rocking back on her heels and finally taking a moment to breathe.
Therein passes a long moment of Jo watching Balthazar expectantly and Balthazar merely studying Jo in return. When he does move, it is not to speak, but instead to extend one arm, slow, careful, waiting. She eyes it warily – what the hell? offers itself as an exceptionally prevalent thought – before being correspondingly slow and careful when she steps inside his reach.
The arm curls inward, pulling her snug against his chest, and it's been a good, long time since anyone's touched her beyond the greeting of a handshake or intrusion of a grope in a crowded bar. Balthazar is still soaking wet, smelling strongly of ozone, like he brought the storm inside with him, but the separation of angel and vessel has ended, and there is a reassuringly human pull in the flex of muscle in that arm, the rasp of his stubble against her cheek. It takes a minute before Jo collects herself enough to slip both of her arms around Balthazar's waist and hug him back.
It seems almost ridiculous to attach so much significance and intimacy to this one gesture of familiarity, but, well, most of the physical contact she's had in the last couple months has been more on the 'violent' side of the line. She finds the company of non-hunters exasperating, and most hunters are men at least twice her age who wouldn't know compassion if it sat up and bit them. Figures that an angel with a penchant for cynicism towards all of reality would be the one to reach out and hug her.
Jo's fingers dig into the muscles in Balthazar's upper back when she sighs and turns her face into his neck. Something weirdly wispy and insubstantial shifts under her grip, but she brushes it off as her sleep-deprived brain misinterpreting the fabric of Balthazar's waterlogged shirt. That is, until the actual deltoid twitches and he murmurs "watch the wings, darling."
Startled, Jo starts to withdraw, only to have one of his hands curl around the back of her neck and hold her in place, forehead pressed against his collarbone. "Don't call me that," she mutters on instinct, then pauses when she registers that he is trembling against her. "You okay?"
Balthazar doesn't laugh so much as release a huff of air, but his tone is light, conversational: "There's no way for you to comprehend such things, but a rather substantial amount of concentration is required to keep a massive ethereal form such as myself stuffed into this little vault of skin. With the storm I… well, let's just say that I let myself get a little carried away while I was reacquainting myself with the memory of my Father's presence. If you hadn't said something, I may full well have slipped out of the vessel and killed everyone who happened to be glancing in our direction for miles around. Good on you for opening your mouth, darling. In any event, this is right now, um… somewhat akin to stretching muscles. Interdimensional storage is a tad hard on the system, you see. So just, ah…" his hand flexes in her hair, clenching in a fistful of the greasy strands. "Give me a moment to fold them back up again."
Jo doesn't say anything back, content to let her head loll against Balthazar's shoulder while he crams his wings back into another dimension. Her eyes slip shut as she finally lets herself relax enough to enjoy the sense of security provided by the presence of a warm body so close against her own.
She wakes to feel herself being settled back onto that creaky mattress, those ugly blankets being tugged up to cover her once more. Reaching one hand out, she catches Balthazar's wrist when he starts to withdraw. "Stay."
This time his chuckle is for real. "I thought you had an issue with being watched while you slept, darling."
"Don't call me that." Jo blinks muzzily and yanks on the arm she's holding. "Stay," she orders. "And I want a big thing of chicken fried rice and wonton soup waiting for me when I get up."
There's a pause, broken by a dramatic sigh. "I am yours to command." His hand tugs free, skimming up to brush across the cut on her cheek. "Darling."
"Balth," she groans, squeezing her eyes shut.
He laughs louder at that, then vanishes from her field of perception for a few moments, reentering it when he tugs back the sheets on the other side of the bed and slips underneath them. Sometime in the last few minutes he must have magicked his clothes dry, because there is no trace of dampness when Jo rolls over and buries her face in his chest – only the faint, lingering scent of ozone.
Fingers thread themselves into her hair and a soft kiss is pressed against the top of her head. "See you on the other side, darling."
She kicks him, then passes out while he's still halfway through a startled yelp.