Dean was barely settled under threadbare sheets, the side of his neck without a bandage resting against a lumpy pillow whose case couldn't have had a thread count over 100, when his night replayed itself in gratuitous slow motion. His evening of vamp hunting with Sammy had gone awry. The pair they'd been charming away from a potential kill had led them to a nest of over a dozen cold bodies who probably would've been bragging to their bloodsucking pals about drinking Winchester blood by now if Cas hadn't shown up; rerouting it back to a victory had required Dean to allow vampire teeth and blood-tainted breath too close to his thankfully intact carotid artery for comfort. Mondays...

With the moderately-sized nest satisfactorily ganked and Dean stitched and medicated for the night, Sam had dutifully driven from their 'affordable' (read: cheap-ass) motel to pick up the pie and beer that his older brother had demanded to make up for his role as bait. Dean could feel a pinprick where each tooth had pierced his skin, and sighed as loudly as he could in the empty motel room, wondering when Cas would be back. The angel had zapped in to the fight to impale the vampire who'd been keen on having a bite of Dean, only to poof back away from the Winchesters as soon as it was clear that Dean had things under control. He would have cursed his friend under his breath for not healing him first, but he chalked it up as his own fault for getting snippy with the winged nerd earlier that day.

"Sorry Cas, but you're not coming," Dean had announced at breakfast, his voice gravelly but level. Sam looked up from his half-eaten pancakes, raising his eyebrows at his elder brother. The motion of leaving Castiel out of the hunt hadn't been run by the more sensible Winchester, and he waited in silence for an explanation. Cas wasn't low on mojo; he wasn't injured, or human, or batshit crazy. There was no good reason to leave the able-bodied fighter out of what Dean liked to call 'the party,' and he'd saved the day more times than Sam cared to admit. At his brother's silent objection Dean snapped something about Cas being pretty much broken and stalked out of the kitchen without making so much as a dent in the sausage and eggs that the angel he was ignoring had delivered.

Dean hadn't responded to Sam's heckling about the harsh words all day, noting that Cas had disappeared before he'd returned to apologize, and he still hadn't had a chance to speak with the angel, unless a choked, "Help," from under the mass of an overweight vampire counted.

He knew he owed his life to the angel, but that didn't make it any less damned hard to say it to the man's face. Since he'd been human, Cas had shown sadness, regret, intuition, fear, restraint, courage and compassion, but it was only weakness that concerned Dean. The former demon-ganking machine had become part of the Winchester family, weighted down with all the curses and dangers that came with the name, and that scared Dean. He'd lost enough, too much, since even before he knew monsters were real, and he'd already managed to lose Sam and Cas several times. Sure, they'd made it back, safe, sound, and eventually intact again, but one day soon his luck was going to run out and he wouldn't have some angel or demon looking over his shoulder, ready to haul his brother and partner back to the world of the living.

'So you'll endanger Sammy, but not Cas?' his mind suggested when he was done rationalizing his behavior. 'No.' It wasn't endangerment with Sam; he was adjusted to Dean's cockiness, his own vices and both brothers' past mistakes. Castiel was like a third grader who'd just learned that Santa was a lie (and half the people in the world probably wanted him dead.) He was overcompensating for his former lack of empathy by being far too human.

On their last hunt three days before, Cas had been 'merciful'- not in the old, holier-than-thou, God-complex sense that Dean had come to expect from winged dirtbags but in a sincere, almost stupid way that had gotten the angel stabbed. Had the knife-of-choice been anything but a plain switchblade, Castiel could have bought the farm right then and there because a woman who happened to be a shapeshifter begged for her life before trying to gut him.

Okay, maybe Dean was a little more pissed than he had any right to be, but Cas had to grow feelings that most hunters learned to ignore or cut off entirely. The discontented hunter shifted, clenching his jaw at the unholy creaking of his bedframe, and pulled the navy bedsheets over his shoulder, finally closing his heavy eyes.

He'd barely dozed off when a loud rustling behind his back jarred him awake again. Any other sound would have had the man leaping up, the gun under his pillow in his grip, but he knew the sound of the angel's arrival. "What is it, Cas? Can't sleep?" he joked, turning his head to look over his shoulder. Blue eyes bored into him from behind a pair of hipster glasses- they were too light, not blue enough... not Cas.

In an instant Dean was on his feet, wishing Sam hadn't taken their only current angel knife on his pie run. "Who is it this time? Heaven's favorite magician?" he snapped, scanning the intruder who only frowned in return. It was very much not Cas- the woman looked to be in her 20s and was probably only 5'2. Her wrinkled white dress shirt was fully buttoned beneath a purple and black striped tuxedo vest and violet tie, and her slacks were rolled up at the ankles sloppily; Dean wasn't sure whether that was a good sign- usually women who wanted to kill him wore a lot less, but when angels dressed up they tended to be planning more along the lines of torture or erasing him from existence. Since neither one of them seemed to have a reason to attack, Dean spared a glance for her shoes. He wasn't sure what he'd been expecting, but tennis shoes with velcro had not been it. At least the outfit didn't bring back memories of any of his previous encounters with the less friendly of Cas' relatives.

He didn't recognize the vessel either; curly brown bangs swept down the left side of her face, almost grazing one blue-green eye, but everywhere else her hair was cropped short enough that it curled lazily along her head. If she'd been wearing makeup the style might have looked professional, but with her smattering of freckles, chapped lips and a slowly disappearing bruise on her left cheekbone she just seemed disheveled. Maybe it was a new vessel and she hadn't worked out the bells and whistles yet, or maybe she'd just been in a brawl, but either way Dean didn't like the way she was looking at him.

The woman had studied him silently, like she was appraising a tentative purchase, before making eye contact. Her sea-colored stare would have cowed someone less stubborn, but Dean was the crown prince of defiance and frowned right back at the angel.

When a small pair of red wings appeared in shadow behind the brunette, Dean rolled his eyes. "Want me to get a ruler?" he sighed, "Yours are bigger, I get it, what do you want?" He'd lowered his gun when nothing sharp was pointed at him, and as much as he liked not fighting to the death he was growing impatient of the staring match. The angel took off her glasses, wiping the lenses on the edge of her vest, and the projection of her wings dissolved. "I have a message for Castiel," she finally conceded. Dean's grip on his pistol tightened as he held his breath that another set of God's interns didn't have it out for Cas.

"Well he's out on business so I'll take a note," Dean replied firmly. "And if this concerns killing and/or torturing him you can hit the road before I have to flambe you with holy oil." He wasn't going to invite her to stay until the angel he'd rather be arguing with popped back up from wherever he kept going after their hunts, even if he didn't actually have any holy oil at the moment.

"You're Dean Winchester..."

The angel's blue-green eyes lit up with recognition. Something in her frown told Dean that she knew about his family's relationship with her brother, and he got the feeling he wasn't about to be praised for his looks or as a good influence on the rebellious Cas.

The angel didn't insult him, though it looked as though she was itching to. "Tell Castiel that Adriel is free," she instructed, over-enunciating the words as though she were talking to a five year old. Before Dean could ask if that was good news or another for the Cas haters club, the messenger had disappeared, leaving him alone with his itching neck and the thought that he'd made an enemy of yet another angel who might have healed him.

When Sam showed up ten minutes later with a six pack and a clamshell box of blueberry-filled goodness, Dean was affixed in front of the tv, blaring an episode of Dr. Sexy, M.D. in the background of his google hunt for information on Adriel. "There's like nothing here," Dean complained, shoveling what should have been two separate bites of pie into his mouth. When he'd swallowed and heaved a sigh at the throbbing in his throat, he repeated the fashion-inept angel's message.

"Adriel is free," Sam echoed, shaking his head as he typed a few keywords into the search bar. "As far as I know he wasn't a significant player in heaven. I mean, on wikipedia he's listed as one of the angels of destruction, but there's not exactly a lot about him to confirm that." After a pause that Dean occupied with more pie, his brother clicked on a link in the police records they'd been skimming cases from and raised his eyebrows. "Listen to this," he muttered, intrigued, "Until five days ago, no flags up about an Adriel. Sure, maybe he's the namesake for a couple of people who got into gang violence but that's years apart... But come Wednesday somebody with that name is cited in two car crashes.

" Different last names, different states, but both described as driving rental cars that got plowed. Then Friday another one. All of the reports list that he's not even the at-fault driver, but he is the only survivor in all three accidents and he disappeared less than an hour after, having given false or no insurance information."

Dean gave his brother an impressed, if confused, look and cut another chunk from his dwindling slice of pie. "So we've either got the patron saint of car crashes, the unluckiest angel in the world or a winged serial killer who likes to play hot wheels with the life-sized models," he observed, shaking his head. "I'm gonna go out on a limb and guess that the chatterbox wasn't trying to tell Cas to throw a welcome party for the guy..."