Dean closes the bathroom door behind him. 3AM and Sam is finally snoring softly. He flips open and closes his cell phone at least five times before he finally dials. Her voice is groggy when she answers the phone and his heart beats harder, worried he's making a mistake.
"Rayne." She clears her throat of sleep.
"Hey." Dean concentrates to keep the waver from his voice.
"Dean." He can hear she's snapped awake, alert. "Is everything alright?"
"Uh, yeah. No. Um," It infuriates him, this stammer, tremor, inability to be his cocksure self when he's speaking to her. Not that he does, speak to her. Not that he's spoken to her since he and Sam left San Francisco three months ago. Sam speaks to her all the time, of course. "We're in Seattle. Can you come?"
"Are you hurt? Sam?"
"No. Not really. Nothing serious. Why? Does it matter?" He can't help it, the challenge creeps into his voice whenever he so much as thinks about her.
Silence. Just for a beat. He almost smiles thinking maybe he's thrown her off balance for a change. He half hopes that maybe she's searching for a reason to back out, not come. That would be something he could hold against her. The other half hopes she won't.
"Of course not. Do I need to cancel my surgeries today or can I come out tonight?" He can hear her moving around now. Getting out of bed.
"Tonight's fine." He's relieved and annoyed and unsettled in a way that he's been for weeks now.
She must have woken her husband up because he hears Nick's voice, tiredly mumbling about plane tickets and packing. "I'll be there tonight. Where are you staying?"
He gives her the information and hangs up, looks at himself in the bathroom mirror again. Sam did a reasonably good job of patching him up after the Daevas, but the wounds aren't even three days old and they still hurt like a bitch. Everything just hurts like a bitch since Chicago. Since he'd sent his Dad off. Since he'd incurred the wrath of sullen-not-quite-silent-treatment Sam for sending Dad off.
Calling Lilly, summoning her, is the last thing Dean wants to do. As a general rule. But it's been three days and Sam is still brooding and hasn't even called her himself, which up to now had been his brother's new favourite hobby. He thinks he knows why. Sam's probably feeling guilty. They hadn't confronted John about her. Their sister. Their mother's long lost, long abandoned, daughter. The one that John had clearly known about for years but kept secret, along with all the crazy details about her life and Mary's. But what could they have said in that tiny space of time they'd finally had with their father? Uh, yeah Dad, we know you've got to run before the shadow thing comes down and kills us all, but uh, how do we say this?...we have a sister? What's up with that?
Dean figures, tells himself anyway, that they could kill two birds with one stone this way. Sammy would get to see Lilly again and maybe snap out of it. And more importantly, if John Winchester had shown his face again, maybe her father, the one equally as guilty of keeping the secret, the one who had also suddenly disappeared into thin air, would too. And they could finally start getting some answers. That's what he tells himself, anyway.