"I don't think we can save the guy, from what we've got he's probably been furry for, like, a year," Dean said. "Makes you wonder why he waited so long to go after the girl of his dreams, huh?" He pursed his lips. "It'd be nice if you knew the chick's last name, Cas."

"Dean, it doesn't matter," Sam said before I could repeat that he'd never told me, so how was I supposed to know? "If we keep her from getting bitten we'll never even have to talk to her."

"Be good to know, just in case," Dean said stubbornly.

Sam sighed. "I'll look into it," he said.

I had never been to San Francisco as a mortal, and my one brief visit during my search for God had involved almost nothing in the way of interaction with the human population. I thought it was a lovely city, and though the weather was mild compared to areas further from the coast it was still cool enough that I could wear my long coat.

Sam had found the same pattern of attacks that had led the brothers here the first time around, but there was no report of a lawyer found dead in his office. Since I didn't know when exactly Madison had been turned, we had made sure to arrive several days before the dangerous period began for the month. We got a room in a hotel on the edge of Hunter's Point, the area where the attacks had happened.

The first night, Sam stayed in doing research while Dean and I went out to bulk up the cash reserves. He hesitated over it, but then Sam rolled his eyes and said, "Dude, my idea we're here in the first place, OK? I'll still be here when you get back." Dean flipped him off, and Sam smirked as we headed out the door.

We discussed strategy as we walked. Dean agreed to be the drunk one again, on the condition that I not make it quite as blatant that we had been playing our mark all along as I had with Cliff. "Not that the look on his face wasn't hilarious, but I'm not in the mood for a bar fight tonight, OK?" I shrugged and agreed. I'd mostly done it to demonstrate to him that I knew what I was doing anyway.

We had a bit of a problem finding a bar that met Dean's criteria; the neighborhood was run-down and most of the establishments we passed were the kind of place, he said, where no one would play pool with a stranger anyway. But eventually we found one that suited him, and spent a pleasant few hours relieving a pair of athletic young men of their extra cash. I didn't like either of them much more than I'd liked Cliff, honestly, but I could see the wisdom of not starting a fight and carefully appeared to win my game with luck rather than skill. The marks weren't happy, but they weren't suspicious enough to make an issue of it either. Once I had the money I helped Dean, who was still pretending to be drunk, out of the bar. He leaned on me until we were outside and around the corner, and I tried not to show how much I enjoyed it. My Dean never touched me casually anymore; unless one of us was hurt or we were actively having sex we were rarely even close enough to touch. This Dean didn't hold himself away from me as if he was afraid I'd distract him just by existing.

We were most of the way back to the hotel when Dean slowed a little, looking across the street at a young woman who was standing under a light. She wasn't wearing nearly enough clothing for the weather.

"You know," he said, "seems like our werewolf's been hitting the working girls. Maybe we should do a little research of our own while we're out."

"Working girls?"

Dean gave me one of the looks of mild surprise that meant I'd missed a reference again. "Yeah, Cas. Working girls. Ladies of the evening, women of negotiable virtue. Hookers?"

"Oh. You mean she's a prostitute."

"Yes, I mean she's a prostitute," Dean said. "Unless you can think of another reason she's out here in that outfit when it's fifty degrees max. Come on." He crossed the street; I trailed him.

Even under the chancy light from the streetlamp I could tell that the smile the girl assumed as we neared was more calculated than heartfelt. "Hey, sugar, lookin' for someone?" she asked.

Dean grinned at her in return and said, "Think we're looking for you." He slipped his wallet out of his pocket for a second.

She gave him a once-over that was frankly assessing, then did the same to me. I nodded at her, but said nothing. "I don't do group discounts," she said.

"Wouldn't ask you to. What I would like is this: I'm gonna pay you your usual, and in return you're gonna come sit in a diner or something with us and answer a few questions about the girls who've gone missing the last couple months while you eat. That sound fair?"

Her professional flirtatiousness dropped like a stone and she glanced over her shoulder, looking for an escape route or an associate or both. "You cops or something?"

"Do I look like a cop? No strings attached here. You don't want to talk to me, you don't have to, I can go ask someone else." He left unsaid And pay them instead, but I could tell she heard it anyway. Dean took a deliberate step back from her, making it clear that he wasn't going to stop her if she walked away. She studied him for a few seconds.

"Yeah, sure," she said. "Cash up front, though."

She said we could call her Sherry—I very much doubted it was her real name, any more than Lauren's had been Chastity—and led us to a dingy, neon-lit all night diner. The sole waitress inside eyed our little party with skepticism, but made no comment. Dean and I ended up sitting together across the booth from Sherry.

Once we had ordered, Sherry put her hands on the table. "So what do you want to know?" she asked. In the diner's light she looked tired and her makeup garish, but I thought perhaps Dean had gotten lucky with his choice of informant; she didn't appear to be on any mind-altering substances. I was pretty sure I'd be able to tell. I know the signs.

Dean was all business as he questioned her; Sherry replied with answers that matched well to the information we already had, adding details we hadn't been able to gather from a distance. She knew which corners the victims had favored for their work, and mentioned that no one else had taken over any of the vacated spots yet. When Dean asked why she shrugged and said, "Most of 'em weren't good spots anyway, and would you wanna go stand where a girl was when she got eaten?"

"Eaten?" Dean asked.

"Yeah, that's what's been going around anyway. Parts of 'em have been missing when the cops find 'em, with teeth marks. Eaten. Kinda creepy. One guy's saying it was coyote, but I'll tell you what, coyotes don't go after people like that unless they're sick. I think it's a wolf."

"In the city?" Dean said, glancing at me.

"All kinds of stuff lives in the city if you know where to look," Sherry said. "Plus…OK, you're gonna say I'm crazy, but you notice when it's been happening?"

"Every month or so," Dean said.

"Yeah, but when?" She looked back and forth between us.

"I give up," I said, and Dean nodded.

"Full moon," Sherry said. "Earliest one was like four days before the full moon."

"So you don't mean a wolf-wolf," Dean said. He was very carefully not looking surprised.

Sherry picked up one of her French fries and gestured with it. "Told you it sounded crazy," she said.

"Not as much as you might think," Dean said seriously. "And you know, in a couple days it's gonna be that time again. You might want to think about staying in."

Sherry made a sour face. "I have been. But I'm not the only one who gets a vote, so you know how it goes."

"Yeah," Dean said.

Not long after that we finished our food; Dean paid the bill and we left. Outside the door we said perfunctory goodbyes. Sherry gave Dean a slow smile and said, "You want to do any more business, you know where I am."

"I'll keep it in mind," Dean said. We watched for a few seconds as she walked off.

"You could, uh," I began. Dean punched me in the arm.

"Come on. I don't pay for it. Besides, she was looking at you too." I eyed him sideways and he grinned at me. "Seriously, she was."

"Sure she was, Dean," I said.


When we got to the room, Sam was in the shower. His computer sat open on the bed he'd claimed.

"Sam, we're back," Dean called.

"Be done in a second," Sam replied, muffled by the water and the bathroom door. "Found some stuff."

Sam emerged a few minutes later, rubbing his hair with one of the motel towels. (I had real towels in my cabin, huge fluffy things I liberated from a home supply store. There was never enough hot water, but at least I could have towels that weren't totally inadequate. Dean rolled his eyes every time he saw them.) "I think I found Madison," Sam said.

"Great," Dean said, taking over the bathroom with his sleeping clothes under his arm. He left the door half-open so he could hear.

Sam settled against the wall at the head of his bed and pulled his computer onto his lap. "She got turned by her neighbor, or will get turned—we better hope it hasn't happened yet, since there's no cure. Either way that means she probably lives near here, since the neighbor wouldn't want to go very far to hunt. There are a couple of better neighborhoods that border on this one, the kind of place where a person on a single income could find affordable rent. And you said she works in a lawyer's office." He typed for a second, then swiveled the laptop around on his knees so I could see the screen.

On it was a picture of a pretty brown-haired young woman. She was smiling, though it looked like the kind of smile people come up with for official photographers.

"Madison Ledoux," Sam said. "She lives in a duplex converted from a Victorian house, and works at a small legal firm."

"OK," I said. "Well, she's pretty, and when Dean told me about her he made a point of mentioning she was…I think the phrase he used was 'seriously hot'."

"I can hear you, Cas," Dean called from the bathroom.


Madison Ledoux's home was on the ground floor of a building that had probably been grand when originally built. Her neighborhood looked better off than Hunter's Point, more houses with tiny yards than apartment blocks, and Dean theorized that that was why the werewolf was hunting further from home. "Easier to find people on the streets late at night in a sketchy area," he said. "Not just the hookers, either, but they'd be easy marks."

We parked at the curb outside the house and regarded it in silence for a while. Finally Dean sighed and said, "Well, at least a stakeout's easier with three guys than two. We can trade shifts."

Sam made a noise of unhappy agreement.

The first night was unutterably boring. Madison got home while Sam and I were watching; her neighbor, our prime werewolf suspect, had been out precisely once that day, perfectly human the whole time—Sam insisted we had to see him transform because "neighbor" could have meant any of several people in the area. Dean wasn't pleased about it and neither was I, but I had to admit I wasn't sure. We kept lookout until after her light went off near midnight, and then returned to the motel to get some rest.

Afterward I realized I must have fallen asleep almost immediately, but at the time it felt like lying awake for hours, so long that I expected dawn. Noises kept intruding on my consciousness-real noises, probably, filtered through my sleeping mind until they sounded sinister and stealthy, and I wanted to get up and check but I couldn't move. Dread crept up and down my spine like spiders' legs. When the door swung silently open, it was almost a relief.

All I could see was a man-sized shape, dark-on-dark, even as Dean and Sam's sleeping forms were perfectly clear. It drifted across the room, moving with the faintest shush of feet on cheap carpet. I tried to get up, to get between the shape and Dean, to even call a warning, but nothing worked. Until the shape reached Dean's bedside and leaned over him like a lover preparing to wake the beloved, and then I could see it—Alastair, out of any stolen human body, as he appeared in Hell when I swept him aside to seize Dean and carry him away, and the demon turned his misshapen head to meet my eyes and smiled and placed one hand tenderly on the side of Dean's neck, and Dean's eyes flew open and he had just enough time to draw a startled breath before Alastair tore his throat out—

"Cas!"

I jolted awake, choking on a shout and swinging at the shadow looming over me; fortunately I was too caught in the dream to aim right and Dean dodged it enough that I barely grazed him, though he had to take a clumsy step back to catch his balance. Meanwhile I lost mine and flailed, missing falling off the couch by inches. I was still breathing hard, trying to put my thoughts back in order, when Sam clicked the light on. We all blinked in the sudden brightness. Dean was rubbing at the spot I'd hit, more from habit than need.

"You were shouting," he said after a second.

I sat up and scraped my hands back through my hair. "Yeah. Sorry." It had been a while since anyone woke me from one of the really bad dreams; I had learned early that decking bed partners made them less likely to have sex with me again so I mostly didn't let them sleep in my bed. Dean had been able to do it safely, before we settled in different cabins. (There're plenty of empties, Cas, pick one. You can set it up however you want. But you're not bringing your girls back here. After that we rarely spent the whole night together.) But this Dean, of course, didn't know how.

There was another pause, during which I fought my way out of my blankets till I was sitting on the couch the right way. I wanted to hide my face from the way Dean was looking at me, full of worry; he was already half frantic about Sam and here I was adding to his burdens.

"Was it…just a bad dream?" Sam asked, oddly tentative.

I climbed to my feet, ignoring the way Dean put a hand out as if to catch me when I swayed, and bent over my bag where it sat on the low table between couch and television. "It was only a dream," I said, pawing through my clothes and sundries with no regard for how they ended up. "I'm not actually psychic, remember? I'm just from the future." I pulled the box out, spilling a few rolled pairs of socks, and flipped the lid open to survey the contents. They weren't encouraging, almost everything I had a straight painkiller and the one exception would leave me out of commission for far too long; we had a hunt. "Screw it," I muttered, and extracted the Vicodin bottle.

"Cas," Dean said, suddenly irritated; I ignored him and tapped two pills into my palm, hesitated and added a third. I dry-swallowed them as I stuffed the cotton back in, trapping the remaining pills against the bottom so they wouldn't rattle.

"I need the sleep," I said, trying not to sound pissed off, and shoved the box back into my bag. Dean wouldn't touch it there; he and Sam had a couple of rules that were basically inviolate, and one of them was that you didn't go into anyone else's personal bag.

"You need to be on the ball, we have a werewolf to track tomorrow night."

"I'll be fine by tomorrow night," I said shortly, and went about rearranging myself on the couch with more concentration than was strictly necessary. When I pulled a fold of the blanket over my head Dean said, "Fine, whatever," and I heard him moving. A few seconds later Sam turned the light off again.

The Vicodin made me warm enough to go back to sleep.


I dragged myself out of my blankets in late morning to find the room empty. There was a cup of coffee on the table; it was pointedly cold. They hadn't left a note.I sighed and went to take a shower.

Dean returned as I was rummaging in my bag for my toiletries, shirtless. He was wearing his suit and a sour expression, and he closed the door without waiting for Sam. He said nothing until I straightened and turned towards the bathroom.

"You take too many pills," he said.

"Hello to you too, Dean," I replied. He hiked an eyebrow and I sighed. "The last time we had this conversation there was a lot of shouting, and cracked ribs. I'd rather skip that this time."

Dean still didn't reply until I glanced at him; his angry expression was changing to something more complex and finally he said, "You mean I cracked your ribs."

"Yes," I said. He didn't quite flinch. "In your defense, I was trying to break one of your fingers at the time."

"Jesus," Dean said, and started to loosen his tie. "It's like pulling teeth. Why were you trying to break my finger?"

"So you'd let go of my box," I said, jerking my chin at my bag in illustration. "Look, I need to shave if you want me to look respectable."

"It messes you up," Dean said.

I set my bag down on the free inches of counter space and said, "I make sure I'm straight enough to be effective. I'm not an idiot, Dean." There was a long pause, which I took advantage of to pull out my razor and shaving cream. (Once I lost control of my vessel's, my body's, baser functions, it took a few weeks for Dean to realize I wasn't letting my beard grow because I wanted to, but because I didn't really understand how to stop it; fortunately the physical operation was easy, once he explained its purpose.)

"OK, that's great, but what I meant was that it's bad for you," Dean said at last. When I looked at him in surprise he shrugged. "Your liver, your kidneys, all sorts of stuff. You can screw yourself up. I stopped reading when I got to the part about destroying the body's ability to regulate temperature." He said the last part like a quote, no doubt from whatever website Sam had helped him find.

I turned back to the mirror and reached for the taps, because I couldn't watch his face. "I told you I have chronic pain," I said, as the water ran over my hand.

"Yeah," Dean said slowly. "Do you have, I don't know, shrapnel or something? Like in your chest?"

I realized I was rubbing at my breastbone with the hand that held the safety razor and took it away, trying not to let the motion look hasty. "Part of me...got torn out," I said, watching the water run. "It hurts."

"What part, Cas?" He sounded closer and I glanced at him just long enough to realize that he was leaning in the bathroom door now, his suit jacket discarded.

"Not a physical part." The water was warming up, finally. "It's not important. It hurts, and it's why I have bad dreams." True, that, in the sense that losing my Grace was what caused me to dream at all. "And I've tried a lot of things, Dean, and I know what works, and I know how to handle it, OK? I'm not trying to tell you I'm not messed up. This isn't denial. But I function. And I will keep functioning just as long as you need me." I'd have done better if I were getting laid; endorphins are wonderful things. But artificial replacements would do.

For another long moment neither of us spoke. Dean stood in the arch of the door like a statue and I leaned over the sink, clutching the razor and staring at the hot water, pretending fascination with the curl of the wispy steam.

"Fine," Dean said at last, and to my immense surprise he didn't spit the word at me. "Just...I'm gonna be pissed if we have to haul you in for an OD, got it?"

"You won't," I said. In my peripheral vision Dean nodded.

"Should we try'n wake you up, next time?"

"If it's bothering you, sure," I said, and scooped water into my palm to splash it onto my chin. "But it's not a good idea to be in the line of fire while you do it."

"Yeah, I figured that one out," Dean said with a sigh. Then he straightened, and his tone got brisk, dropping the subject with an almost-audible thud. "Sam should be back soon. Three of us gotta make plans, because tonight's the night."


The early winter twilight was well over when Madison stepped out the door of her house and turned to lock it. She paused on the steps, scanning the street, but her eyes passed over the Impala without catching on it; Dean had parked a careful half-block away.

"Looks like you're up, Sammy," Dean said, and Sam sighed. We'd drawn straws for who watched Madison while the other two stayed on Glen, and Sam had lost; he wasn't complaining, but only because he'd held the straws. Sam waited until Madison was most of the way to the corner before he climbed out of the car and set out to follow her. She had a car of her own, but from what we could tell rarely used it. I moved into the passenger seat as Sam turned the corner in pursuit.

From where we'd parked we could see both the front door of the duplex and Glen's private rear entrance, but the latter was dark, lacking a light of its own. Sam's slouched form had barely vanished when Dean said, "OK, let's go in."

I turned my head and he shrugged. "Too easy to miss him if we stay out here. Inside we can tie him to a chair till he changes," he said.

"I wasn't arguing," I said mildly, and Dean rolled his eyes.

"We'll see if we can get a good look from the porch," he said.

It turned out we could; the apartment was small and the curtains not quite properly closed. Dean had to lean against the wall to see inside. "Dude, I think he's drunk," he said after a second, very quietly. "That'd make this easier."

"Not really, it'll burn right out once he changes," I said.

Dean made a face that was disgusted but not surprised, and nodded. "OK, go around to the back door."

I spent the next two hours or so being very bored and a little uncomfortable; my feet didn't ache, thanks to the pill I'd taken, but it was a chilly evening. The tiny sliver of Glen's living room I could see didn't include wherever he was sitting, so I had to assume Dean had eyes on him. The monotony was broken only once, when Glen wavered into the small kitchen to pull a white can of soda from his fridge. He took several tries to get it open. I watched, frowning, as he drank it; his movements were uncoordinated and loose, but for some reason he didn't look drunk to me. I hadn't yet put my finger on the difference when he left the kitchen, one hand on the wall for balance.

I wasn't dozing, but my phone vibrating in my pocket made me twitch anyway; I pulled it out and flipped it open. "Cas," Dean said, barely loud enough for his phone to register it. "He's been out of sight for five minutes, I think it's time to go in."

"Right," I replied, just as quietly, and slipped my hand into my pocket for the little folder of lock-picks. I never got to use them.

The bang from my left startled me badly and I spun, reaching into my coat for my gun. My eyes had mostly adjusted to the dark, so the dark shape crouched on the ground had enough detail for me to see that he'd changed. Glen didn't look much different, but his eyes glinted in what little light there was and when his lips drew back in a snarl I could see the fangs. We shared a moment of mutual surprise, me with my hand on the butt of my Beretta and him catching his balance from his fall—or jump, possibly; he'd come out of a window that was hinged at the top, and from the looks of it he hadn't expected the crash of it hitting the frame in his wake any more than I had.

"Cas!" Dean exclaimed from my phone. The sound of his voice broke the spell. Even as I drew my gun Glen leapt for me. He bulled into me, and I felt a flash of panic as we tumbled; I didn't actually know for sure that I was immune to a werewolf's contagion, and regardless his teeth, grown long and sharp, could do plenty of damage on their own. I chose to drop the phone rather than the gun as we fell, but it did me little good to remain armed. Glen's weight fouled my aim for a long second—and then was gone, and he bounded away from me.

Dean burst around the corner of the house, his gun out and aimed. Glen glanced back to growl as he ran, and Dean shot after him; if it hit Glen made no sound, and a blink later he was gone. Dean hurried over to me as I pushed myself up.

"Cas," Dean said, his voice hard and so very familiar. I half expected him to ask if I knew where Risa was. He glanced down at me, just enough to make sure I was moving before returning his attention to the dark where Glen might be lurking.

"I'm fine," I said quickly. "Go, I'll catch up."

Dean hesitated for only a beat before he nodded and jogged in the direction Glen had gone.

It was the work of moments to find my phone, which was thankfully undamaged; I shoved it in my pocket again as I got to my feet and followed the sound of Dean running. I caught up to him a block and a half later, standing at a corner and looking over his shoulder for me anxiously. "Dunno which way from here," he said as soon as I was within earshot.

"I think we should stick together," I said.

Dean looked torn for a moment but reluctantly nodded. He said, "We could cover more ground apart but he knows us now. Why'd he run, anyway? He had you down."

"He wants to lead us away from his home," I said. "He's running on instinct right now and he didn't want to risk going up against two of us at once."

"I guess that's good," Dean said grimly. "Means he might circle back around so we can spot him."

And he did. Over the course of the next hour or so we got repeated glimpses, always at distances that made it impractical to take a shot, wandering back and forth across the streets in no particular pattern. I got the feeling he was trying to separate us, but we were both used to keeping track of a partner in hostile territory; the fact that I wasn't Sam didn't dim Dean's awareness of me, and for me, well, it was just like old times. Though at least there was only one thing lurking in the dark that could infect us with something, rather than hordes.

We were halfway down an alley that would have felt even more familiar without the struggling streetlight at the end of it when Dean held up a hand to stop me and pulled his phone from his pocket.

"What, Sam?" He listened to Sam's reply, his lips thinning. "Well, that's not good because Wolf Boy is out here too. Yeah. Because we're on it, and you're on her, that's why. Where are you?" The pause was brief, and Dean's expression went even more unhappy as I watched. "I'm pretty sure we're not far from there," he said. "Keep your eyes peeled, Sammy, this might get even more interesting. Call me when she gets home, OK?" After another beat, he said, "Yeah, you too," and hung up. As he pocketed his phone, Dean said, "Sam says Madison's on her way home, walking. You did say she got turned on her way home from a friend's place, right?"

I nodded, and he sighed, "We have got to catch this asshole."

A few minutes later, we caught another sight of Glen—but this one was different. It started out the kind of tease we'd been getting since he fled his house, but as he was bounding back into cover Glen froze and turned his head, like someone trying to pin down a sound.

Or like a dog, tracking a scent.

He pivoted where he stood and began to run in earnest, back towards his and Madison's house this time. Dean and I ran after him, Dean cursing in a steady undertone, and that at least was unfamiliar because my Dean never wasted his breath like that anymore, not when there was a chase on. Glen tried to lose us, but was hampered by an obvious unwillingness to deviate from his goal; still, he was enough faster that we fell behind, slowly. When Glen turned a corner a block ahead, Dean broke stride enough to get his phone out again and flipped it open, stabbing the speed dial without looking. We ran as it rang, and Dean started talking right over Sam's greeting when he answered. "Heads up, Sammy, Wolf Boy is comin' in hot. Get her under cover if you can."

Two blocks later we sprinted around another corner to see Sam and Madison at the other end of the block. Sam had his hand under his coat as if he were resting it on his gun, and Madison's posture was tense; I didn't know her well enough to judge whether she was afraid of Sam or of something he'd told her. There was no sign of Glen, at first, but then Sam and Madison both turned at the sound of boots on the sidewalk, and that was when Glen leaped. He burst from a narrow breezeway between two buildings, just out of Sam's peripheral vision.

But just barely in Madison's, which saved her from the first rush; she caught the motion out of the corner of her eye and jerked away from it on instinct; instead of bowling her over flat Glen only caught her shoulder and she staggered and twisted with the impact but kept her feet. "Oh fuck this," Dean groaned beside me, reaching for his gun as we crossed the last few feet.

Madison shrieked as Glen spun and lunged for her again; with less distance to cover her reflexes couldn't beat his and they went down together in a tangle. She managed to turn enough that he wasn't right on top of her, but that wasn't going to help for long. Sam had had to jump out of the way to avoid falling too and ended up across from us, his gun out, staring at Glen's back.

None of us could get a clean shot, but it was clear that Madison wasn't going to be able to hold Glen off for long, though she was giving it a valiant effort, her forearm wedged under his chin to keep his teeth away from her face and throat. She was panting with exertion and fear, her eyes wide and dark and her face bloodlessly pale.

Beside me Dean flicked the safety back on and shoved his gun away with hasty hands and barked, "Cas, on three, you get him!"

"Dean—" Sam began, but Dean said, "One. Two. Three!" and we both moved. I took two long strides and twisted one hand in the fabric of Glen's shirt, using my momentum to wrench him up and away from Madison; Dean dove for her and knocked her to the side, hunching over her. That was all I had time to notice as Glen twisted in my grip, swinging for my eyes with short, brutal claws. I got my arm up just in time and the claws caught briefly in the fabric of my coat sleeve. My other hand slipped, but I didn't have time to panic because just as my fingers loosened and came free there was the sound of a shot and Glen yelped. His head turned to Sam but the movement was jerky and slow.

Sam fired again. Glen gasped and collapsed where he stood. By the time he hit the sidewalk he looked fully human again.

"Oh God," Madison moaned, the first coherent words I'd heard her speak. "What the hell was that? What the hell?"

"It's OK," Sam said, his voice low and soothing. He crouched to be closer to her level as Dean shifted to let her sit up and get her bearings.

"Are you kidding?" Madison demanded. "That...that guy was trying to—I don't know, eat me!"

Sam nodded and said, "But you're all right now. You should probably call the police—" Dean made a face, which fortunately Madison didn't see "—but would you like us to take you home first?"

Madison pulled in a deep breath, held it for a second, and then let it out in a gust. "No," she said steadily. I was impressed. "No, I should stay here. Just maybe not...right here." She pushed herself up, ignoring Sam's offered hand, and turned. Neither Dean nor I got in her line of sight in time and her eyes widened.

"Holy fuck," she said. "I know that guy. That's Glen." She thought it over for a second and then said, "But he was...he was..."

"Yeah, he was," Dean said. "But you can't tell the cops that, OK? They'll think you're nuts."

"What do I tell them, then?" she asked, her voice getting higher with every word. She clutched her arms to her chest like she was trying to keep warm.

"Tell them he attacked you," Sam said. "Just don't mention what he looked like when he did it."

"You're not really from the FBI," Madison said, and Sam offered her a sheepish smile.

"I...no. I'm sorry."

"It's fine," Madison replied, her gaze wandering back towards Glen.

We all heard it at about the same time: sirens, coming fast. Dean caught his brother's eye and Sam shrugged. Dean nodded and said, "Look, we're gonna go, you'll be fine, OK? Just tell the cops everything except what he looked like—don't try to lie to them. It'll be fine."

"But—wait, no, what about you?" Madison protested.

"We can't stay," Sam said.

Madison looked like she wanted to argue, but knew it wouldn't help. We cut down the breezeway Glen had been lurking in as the first flashing lights turned onto the block. I glanced over my shoulder, and the last I saw of Madison was her silhouette under the streetlight as she waited for the officers.

Halfway back to the Impala, Dean said, "So first time around, Sam hit that?"

"Dean," Sam said, pained.

Dean grinned and nudged him with an elbow. "Sorry you missed it."

"Since she was turned into a werewolf the first time, I'll deal," Sam said dryly. We walked a few more steps before he went on, "We should probably check out first thing in the morning in case the cops start asking around."


We spent two nights in a small town in Colorado before Sam found another case, a haunting in Connecticut which took less time to resolve than it might have otherwise because I remembered a few useful details. (She thought we were boyfriends. She was hot, too. Anyway it turned out her mom had been keeping the ghost locked down for, like, fifty years, but then she had a stroke.) Dean made me some badges and an Iowa driver's license claiming I was James Kirk—Sam rolled his eyes at that, for some reason, but I kind of liked sharing a name, at least, with Jimmy.

I mentioned, casually, that the anti-possession charms they wore could be tattooed instead. To my mild surprise Dean did not bodily drag Sam into the nearest tattoo parlor, but a week or so later they both went. I claimed to have mine somewhere unmentionable. "We should wear the charms anyway," Sam said thoughtfully. "Double layer of defense."


"OK, so, checking Milwaukee paid off," Sam announced. He dropped a sheet of paper on the table. "Bank robbery. Longtime employee, never-in-a-million-years type. He beat the security guard unconscious, pulled all the cash he could get his hands on, and then went home and killed himself. They haven't recovered the cash, though."

"Sounds hopeful," Dean said, pulling the paper around so he could see it. It was a printout of a newspaper article.

"Yeah, and get this: the security guard swears that the guy who robbed the bank? Wasn't himself." Sam leaned over to tap a line in the story and quoted, "'It wasn't Juan. Juan Morales was a good guy. Whoever robbed that bank, it just looked like Juan.'"

Dean smiled. "Sounds like a shapeshifter to me."


It ended up being amazingly easy; the bank that had been robbed sat on the same branch of the sewer system as two other banks and a jewelry store. Sam went into the store with his camera phone and got shots of all the employees under pretext of asking for advice on which ring to buy, and then we followed the shapeshifter back to Helena William's home. It wasn't watching for us, having no reason to expect it had been noticed. Sam ended up on the wrong end of a chokehold, briefly, but Helena herself, an older lady who was probably quite pleasant when she wasn't scared out of her mind, was able to call the police and report she'd accidentally killed a burglar.


"Because it's impossible," I said, too loud, and wrenched my bag open with unnecessary force.

"You don't actually know that," Sam said. He sounded a little frustrated, which I felt was only fair.

"As a matter of fact, I do," I retorted. "There is no way. I don't know what visited that woman, but it was not an angel."

"Cas, come on. She's living in a locked ward and she's totally at peace."

"Because that sounds completely sane," Dean put in. We both turned to look at him and he held up his hands defensively. "Never mind."

Sam turned back to me. "Blinding light, feelings of spiritual ecstasy, the works."

I paused with one hand on my toiletries bag. "Wait, she was blinded?" My stomach turned over. I couldn't have changed things that much, could I?

"No," Sam said, sounding puzzled. "Bright white light, that's what she saw, but she's fine now except for being locked away."

"Oh." I straightened. "Did she tell you the angel's name?"

"No," said Sam again. "Apparently he didn't mention it."

I shook my head. Sam sighed and said, "Cas, there's ten times as much lore about angels as about anything else we've ever hunted."

Dean said, "Yeah, and there's a ton of lore on unicorns too. In fact I hear that they ride on silver moonbeams and shoot rainbows out of their ass."

Sam sat down on his bed. "You mean there's no such thing as unicorns?" he said, deadpan.

"What about the man she stabbed?" I asked, just to change the subject.

"Name was Carl Gully. She said she stabbed him because the angel told her he was evil."

"Was he?" Dean asked.

"Not that I could find," Sam replied. "He didn't have a criminal record, he worked at the campus library, had lots of friends, was a churchgoer."

"Sounds to me like Gloria's your standard-issue whacko," Dean said. "She wouldn't exactly be the first nutjob in history to get stabby in the name of religion."

"She wouldn't even be the first in this town, and that's kind of my point," Sam said. "This is the second case. Little odd, don't you think?"

"Of course it's odd, and probably supernatural," I said. "But it can't be an angel."

"Why not?" Sam asked, sounding only mildly curious.

"Because there's no such thing, Sam," Dean said, which was helpful; I wasn't sure I could flat-out deny the existence of angels and have it look convincing.

"How do you know that?"

Dean shrugged. "Because I've never seen one?"

"Dean," Sam huffed, "the three of us have seen things most people couldn't even dream about."

"Exactly. With our own eyes, that's hard proof, okay?" Dean waved his hands in illustration. "But in all this time I have never seen anything that looks like an angel. And don't you think that if they existed that we would have crossed paths with them? Or at least know someone that crossed paths with them? No. This is a demon, or a spirit, you know, they find people a few fries short of a happy meal, and they trick them into killing someone."

"Look," I said. "What did you find when you checked Gloria's apartment?"

"Well, it's more what I didn't find—no sulfur, no EMF," Sam replied.

"No fluffy white wing feathers?" Dean asked innocently.

Sam gave him a halfhearted glare. "She did say the angel gave her a sign, next to Gully's door."

"Great," Dean said. "Let's go check it out."


Dean thought it was funny that the dead man hadn't taken down his Christmas decorations. He kept chuckling about it as Sam picked the lock on the cellar door.

When we found the first body, he stopped.

There were at least six skulls.

"So much for the innocent church-going librarian," Sam said, grim.

Dean nodded and said, "Whatever told Gloria about this, it knew what it was talking about."


"Three college students have disappeared from campus in the last year," Sam announced when he and Dean returned. "All of them were last seen at the library."

"Where Gully worked," I said, and Dean nodded. "I have news, too. Whatever it is, it's struck again. It was on the police radio. I wrote down the victim's address—the killer walked up to the door and knocked, and when the victim answered just stabbed him."

"And then went to the police station and confessed?" Sam asked.

"Yup."

"Roma Downey made him do it?" said Dean. I had never managed to get him to explain why he thought there was an angel named Roma Downey, but I nodded anyway.

"Great," Dean said, sighing. "Let's go."


Frank Halloway had also lived alone, and hadn't been in the habit of locking his windows; it took all of fifteen seconds to get one open far enough that we could get through. The crime scene team had come and gone; with a confession on their hands they'd made quick work of it. We didn't go near the front door, where the crime scene tape was. Sam sat down at Frank's computer while Dean and I looked through the rest of the house. We found nothing particularly interesting, so after twenty minutes or so we drifted back to where Sam sat.

"You guys find anything?" he asked, most of his attention still on the screen.

"Frank liked his catalogue shopping, but that's about all we got," Dean said. "You?"

"Nothing much, unless I can get this encrypted file…aha, there!" He stabbed at the keyboard and grinned. "Not encrypted anymore…God."

"What?" Dean demanded.

"Well, he's got all these emails, hundreds of them, to this lady named Jennifer," Sam said slowly. Dean and I exchanged looks. "This lady who's thirteen years old."

I grimaced. "Oh, I don't want to hear this," Dean protested.

"Looks like they met in a chat room," Sam continued. "These emails are pretty personal. Look at that." He tapped the screen. "Setting up a time and place to meet." He twisted to look at us. "They were going to meet today."

"Well, I guess if you're gonna stab someone, good timing," Dean said. "This is weird. It's like it's a do-gooder."

"He's right," I said reluctantly. "Most spirits just want revenge, but this one, it's almost like…"

"Like an avenging angel?" Sam asked, with a pointed look. I made an unhappy face and he pressed, "How else do you explain this? Three guys, not connected to each other, stabbed through the heart? Two of them were world-class pervs, and I'll bet if you dug deep enough into the other one—" Dean turned away from the conversation, his attention apparently caught by something.

"Sam, do you really think an angel needs to ask a human being for help? If an angel wanted these men dead, I'm pretty sure it'd be capable of killing them itself." Assuming one was allowed, or cared, at least. I wouldn't even have had to take a vessel, much less incite humans to murder.

"God works in mysterious ways," Sam said.

"Hey," Dean said, looking down at the piece of paper he'd picked up. Sam and I turned to him. "You said Carl Gully was a churchgoer." Sam nodded. "What was the name of the church?"

"Our Lady of the Angels," Sam said promptly.

Dean rolled his eyes and replied, "Of course it was." He held up the flier. "Looks like Frank went to the same one."


The priest was a pleasant man called Father Reynolds. He was delighted at the prospect of three new parishioners, and I felt a little bad for deceiving him; if he were one of the occasional priests who knew about the supernatural, he showed no sign of it. I contributed little, since Dean and Sam were quite capable of turning the discussion to the murders without my help, though I had to restrain the urge to look disgusted when the priest said that he believed in angels and Sam threw me a meaningful look. Sam waved at a painting on the wall and said, "Father, that's Michael, right?"

"That's right," Father Reynolds said. The painting was a reproduction; it showed Michael standing above a prostrate Lucifer, preparing to drive a spear into his back. Aside from the fact that Michael's vessel did not actually resemble any he had ever taken—and the confrontation hadn't happened while they were in vessels anyway—it was not a bad depiction of that last fight. "The archangel Michael, with the flaming sword. The fighter against demons, holy force against evil." He said it with no small amount of relish.

"Angels aren't…the Hallmark card version, like everybody thinks? They're fierce. Vigilant," Sam said. I watched him sideways in growing annoyance, but he ignored me.

The priest shrugged. "Well, personally I like to think of them as more loving than wrathful, but yes, a lot of Scripture paints angels as God's warriors. An angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord—"

"—shone round about them," I continued for him. "And they were sore afraid."

"A King James man," Reynolds said mildly. "Luke two-nine." He turned towards the door and we followed. "All I know is, there's probably a reason the first thing an angel always says is Fear not." I hadn't. It had hardly seemed necessary; they'd been shooting at me, after all.

"So angels aren't...cuddly," Sam persisted.

"Of course not," the priest answered. Sam looked triumphant for a second. "I'm pretty sure they aren't down here talking to us either. We don't live in that kind of age."

Nor would we, for at least another few years. Or, preferably, never.

We came out onto the steps of the church, Dean turning his collar up against the chill. It wasn't quite cold enough to snow in Providence, but our breath steamed in the air.

"Well, thank you for speaking with us, Father," Sam said.

"It's my pleasure," Father Reynolds replied. "I hope to see you again." I doubted he'd be terribly surprised if he didn't, but he struck me as willing to consider the possibility.

The steps were broad and we had come up one side; descending, we had a different angle. There was a pile of items on the parapet near the bottom: flowers drooping sadly in the chilly damp, and tall candles in glass to protect their tiny flames from the breeze.

"Hey, Father, what's all that for?" Dean asked, waving his hand at the collection. A crucifix stood guard over the whole thing.

"Oh, that's for Father Gregory," the priest replied. He sighed. "He was a priest here."

"Was," Dean said, not so much a question.

"He passed away right on these steps," said Reynolds.


Father Gregory had been shot for the keys to the middle-aged station wagon he and Reynolds shared for running errands and visiting their parishioners. Reynolds was clearly pained by the memory. Once he'd gone back into the church, we stood contemplating the offerings.

"This is starting to make sense," Dean said, picking up the little picture that I assumed showed Gregory. "Devoted priest dies a violent death, that's vengeful spirit right there." Sam looked unhappy, but Dean didn't appear to notice, warming to his theme. "And he was the stiffs' priest, he knew things about them that nobody else knew, right?"

"Then again," Sam said, "Father Reynolds started praying for help about two months ago. Just about when things started happening." He took the picture from Dean and leaned it back against the candle.

"Maybe we should just go look at Gregory's grave," I said. I really wasn't in the mood for another round of the discussion, but I might have known Dean wasn't going to let it go.

"Seriously, Sam, what's your deal?" he asked, as we turned to reenter the church.

"What do you mean?" Sam asked in return.

"Well I'll admit I'm a bit of a skeptic, and clearly Cas is too." They both glanced at me; I shrugged. I didn't feel like getting into that argument. "But since when are you all Mr. 700 Club? From the get-go you've been all over this angel crap, and I mean, what's next? Are you going to start praying or something?"

"I do," Sam said. Dean didn't stop walking, but the look he gave his brother was sharp and surprised. "I pray every day. I have for a long time."

Dean mulled that over for a few steps. "Huh," he said at last. "The things you learn about a guy."

We didn't speak again until we'd found the entrance to the crypt where Father Gregory was buried; it seemed Reynolds had had other business to occupy him, as he was nowhere in evidence. There were high, narrow windows along one side of the hallway that led to the crypt proper, plenty of light to see the many angel statues that stood in niches along the walls.

Dean and I went into the crypt proper; the first I realized that Sam had lingered in the hallway was the quiet, distinctive thump of a body hitting the floor.

"Sam?" Dean said sharply. I turned in time to see him vanish back out into the hall. "Sammy? Sammy, hey!"

He was reaching for Sam's shoulder when Sam jerked awake, suddenly wide-eyed.

"Sam, you OK?" Dean asked, his voice full of forced calm.

"Yeah," Sam said. He was staring at one of the angel statues. "Yeah, I'm OK."

"Uh-huh," Dean replied, fishing in his pocket. He pulled out his flask. "You saw it, didn't you?"

"Yeah. Yeah. Dean, I saw an angel."

Oh fuck, I thought, as Dean unscrewed the cap. He offered the flask to Sam, saying, "All right. Here."

"I don't want a drink," Sam said. Dean studied him for a second and then shrugged and took a swig himself.

"Give me that," I said. Dean hesitated for only a second before he held the flask up over his shoulder without looking away from Sam. I took it and swallowed a mouthful as Dean said, "OK, come on, up, we're not talking about this out here." He helped Sam up—more because it made him feel better than because Sam seemed to need the assistance—and we retreated into the crypt. I swung the door closed as Dean situated Sam on one of the stone benches and sat beside him.

"Right," Dean said. "What'd you see?"

"It just…appeared before me. And this feeling washed over me, like…like, peace. Like grace."

It made no sense at all. No angel but Lucifer should have been able to talk to Sam without harming him—even Michael was out of the question, bloodline or no, because of Azazel's meddling. And Lucifer would not have been calling down revenge on random criminals, even if he'd been able to communicate with Sam in the first place. And if it had been Lucifer, Dean and I wouldn't have been able to stand it. Or at least I wouldn't have; Jimmy's body was not intended to withstand the archangels. Dean might have had better luck.

Dean rolled his eyes. "OK, Ecstasy Boy, we'll get you some glowsticks and a nice Doctor Seuss hat, whaddya say?"

"Dean, I'm serious. It spoke to me. It knew who I was."

"And it told you to kill someone," I said. They both startled a little and looked up at me as if they'd forgotten I was there.

"Yes," Sam said. He sounded defensive.

"You're supposed to wait for the divine bat signal," Dean said, "so did you ask what this alleged bad guy did?"

"Of course I did," Sam said. "It told me. He hasn't done anything—yet."

"Oh, this is just great," Dean said, and got to his feet. "I don't believe this crap."

"The angel hasn't been wrong so far," Sam insisted. "Somebody's going to do something awful, Dean, and I can stop it!"

"Damnit, Sam," Dean began.

"This would hardly be the first time a spirit could read minds, intentions," I said, trying to cover how unnerved I was.

Sam started to snap, caught himself, and took a moment before he said evenly, "I do not understand why you won't even consider the possibility that we are hunting an angel here, and maybe we should stop."

"You can't honestly think it's God's will that you murder a human being in cold blood," I said.

"Who says I have to murder him?" Sam demanded.

"What else are you going to do?" I asked. "If it's someone that terrible, he won't stop just because he's thwarted once, and you can't exactly get someone arrested on your report of an angel's say-so."

"Cas," Sam said hotly, "You expect us to take your say-so at face value, and I'm—"

"OK!" Dean said, loud enough to override his brother. He stopped pacing and turned. "You know what? I get it. You've got faith, and that's great. I'm sure it makes things easier." He dropped back onto the bench. "You know who else had faith like that? Mom." Sam let out a breath, and Dean smiled tightly. "She used to tell me when she was tucking me in that angels were watching over us. In fact it was the last thing she ever said to me."

"You never told me that," Sam said, in the quiet tone of voice he usually used for speaking of the mother he didn't remember.

"Yeah, well, what's to tell?" Dean said, sounding tired. "She was wrong. There was nothing protecting her. There's no higher power, there's no God." I shifted, but fortunately neither of them noticed. "There's just chaos, and violence, and…and random unpredictable evil that comes out of nowhere and rips you to shreds. You want me to believe in this stuff, I'm gonna need some hard proof. So you got any?" He waited. Sam just looked at him. "Yeah. Well I do. Proof that we're dealing with a spirit."


We had to go shopping for some of the supplies; the trip was uneventful until the moment Sam stopped dead on the sidewalk, staring across the street at a young man. "That's it," Sam said, urgently.

"That's what?" Dean said, peering in the same direction. The man looked completely normal to me, standing on the corner with a bouquet of flowers sticking out of his grocery bag. He was, at the very least, not possessed.

"That's the sign," Sam said. "Right there, right behind that guy. That's him. Dean, we have to stop him!" Sam started to move but Dean grabbed him. "What are you doing, let me go."

"No. No, if you're sure that's your guy, fine, but I will keep an eye on him," Dean said grimly. "You are gonna go do the séance, I am not letting you get a murder rap for a goddamn spirit." I moved to break the line of sight from Sam to his target, in case the man looked our way. Fortunately he seemed to be oblivious, putting his bag into his car without so much as a glance around.

"Dean—"

"Sam, he's leaving," Dean said. "Séance. I'll make sure he doesn't hurt anybody."

Sam wavered as the young man got into his car, and then closed his eyes for a second and nodded. "Good," Dean said. "Cas, go with him."

"Dean," I began to protest, but he spoke over me.

"I must've lived through this the first time," he said. "We don't have time to argue."

That assumed that this had happened the first time, and if it had, why had Dean never mentioned it to me? He'd have loved it, I was sure, shoving it in my face that angels had never helped him. "Fine," I said, "Just don't get killed."

"Oh ye of little faith," Dean said with a twisted grin, and dashed for the Impala.


The church was still open, a few tired people quietly in the pews, when Sam and I walked in. No one seemed to take any notice of us. As we walked down the hall towards the crypt, I said, "I can do it."

Sam sighed. "I'm not going to cheat, Cas, OK? I'll do it right."

"I didn't think you were," I said. "I just thought you might rather not."

"No," Sam said. "Can you watch the door? If someone walks in on this it might be…"

"Awkward?"

"I was gonna say bad, but yeah."

I swung the door shut and leaned on it as Sam took out his supplies. He arranged the candles and lit them, then picked up his father's book and read the Latin carefully. As he dropped the last ingredient onto the central candle, making it flare like fireworks, the door shuddered against my back as someone shoved at it.

"What's going on in there?" Father Reynolds asked. Sam looked over his shoulder at me and grimaced. I bit my lip.

"Open the door," the priest ordered. Sam shrugged and did not protest when I took my weight off the panel so that Reynolds could push it open. He stepped through and took in the scene. "What are you doing?" He looked from me to Sam and back. "What is this?"

"It won't do anything," Sam said. "It's a séance."

"A séance? Young man, you are in the House of God," Reynolds said.

"Just give it a second," I said. Sam gave me a wounded look.

"I most certainly will not. You are both coming with…"

That was as far as he got before the light began to grow. It was pure white and beautiful, I had to give it that; beautiful enough that I felt my eyes start to prickle with tears.

But it was not Grace, and I had not expected the stab of disappointment. I had known it couldn't be an angel—for that matter, it would have been very, very bad for me if it was and we'd still summoned it somehow.

"My God," Reynolds said into the sudden silence. "Is that…is that an angel?"

Quietly, Sam replied, "No. It's just Father Gregory." The glow faded and coalesced into the man from the picture at the memorial. He wore his black suit, rather than robes or whatever else human might imagine an angel wears, and it made me feel sad for him; even as a spirit he was bound to his self-image.

"Thomas?" Father Reynolds said.

The spirit smiled gently. "I've come in answer to your prayers."

Sam took a cautious step towards the spirit. Gregory said, "Sam, I thought I'd set you on your path. You should hurry."

"You aren't an angel," I said.

"Of course I am," Gregory said.

"No," Sam said. "You're a man, you're a spirit. And now you need to rest."

"I was a man," Gregory said. He didn't sound angry, or even disappointed. "But now I'm an angel."

"This isn't It's a Wonderful Life," I said. "You're a spirit, Father."

"You're wrong," the spirit said, still calm. "I was on the steps of the church. I felt the bullet pierce right through me, but there was no pain. And suddenly I could see…everything. Father Reynolds, I saw you, crying and praying. I came to help you."

"Help me how?" Reynolds asked, his voice rough with grief. "By inciting innocent people to murder? Thomas, tell me that wasn't you."

"I received the Word of God," Gregory insisted. "He spoke to me, told me to smite the wicked. I'm carrying out his will. Those innocent people are being offered redemption. Some people need redemption. Don't they, Sam." Sam's expression wavered, but he didn't have to answer.

"How can you call this redemption?" Father Reynolds asked, a little stronger.

"You can't understand it now, but the rules of man and the rules of God are two very different things."

"You're not—probably not wrong," I said. "But what you're missing is: Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord." Gregory frowned, just a little. "Thomas, this goes against everything you believe," Father Reynolds said. "You're lost. Misguided."

"The people you sent, they're locked up," Sam said, pressing the advantage.

"No, they're happy," the spirit insisted. "They've found peace, beaten their demons. And I have given them the keys to Heaven."

I itched to point out that angels couldn't do that, but it seemed like it would undermine the point. Father Reynolds said, "You are not an angel, Thomas. Men cannot be angels."

"But…I don't understand. You prayed for me to come."

"I prayed for God's help, not this," Reynolds said. "What you're doing is not God's will. Thou shalt not kill, Thomas. That's the word of God."

It was a fairly poor translation, really, but I was not going to be the one to break the flow.

"Let us help you," Sam said.

Gregory shook his head. He looked frightened and confused, and I felt sorry for him. "No," he said.

"It's time to rest, Thomas. Be at peace. Let me give you Last Rites."

The moment drew out. I held my breath. Finally, Gregory nodded. I couldn't read him well enough to know if he was willing to accept that he was a spirit, or if he intended to go through with it as Sam had the séance, believing that it simply wouldn't work.

"Oh Holy Host," Father Reynolds said. His voice firmed as he continued, "I call upon thee as a servant of Christ to sanctify our actions this day, in fulfillment of the Will of God."

Gregory flicked where he stood like a bad image on a television, and Reynolds paused to regroup as the spirit looked down at himself in confusion. "Father?" he asked. Reynolds dredged a shaky smile out of somewhere. "Rest," he said, and after another long moment Gregory knelt. Father Reynolds went on, "I call upon Raphael, Master of the Air, to make open the way. Let the fire of the Holy Spirit now descend, that this being might be awakened to the world beyond." The glow built again, wrapping itself around Gregory, bright enough that I closed my eyes; when I opened them, he was gone.

Father Reynolds turned to the bench next to the door and dropped onto it, clasping his hands and leaning his forehead into them. His lips moved in silent prayer. Sam just stood and watched him.

I snuffed the candles.


Sam didn't turn when Dean unlocked the motel room door. I was staring at a page of my book, failing to make myself concentrate enough to read. Dean took in the scene and said heavily, "How was your day?"

"You were right," Sam said to the bag he was packing. I put my bookmark back in place and stood. "It wasn't an angel. It was Gregory."

"I'll be outside," I said. Dean glanced at me and nodded. Sam kept staring at his hands.

There was no convenient place to sit, so I leaned on the Impala's trunk and tipped my head back to look at the sky. It was a clear night, but in the parking lot there was too much light to see the stars. Some minutes later the room door opened and closed behind me, and I heard Dean's familiar tread cross the short stretch of pavement. He leaned next to me.

"The spirit was right, he was a bad guy," Dean said conversationally. "Sam needs a few minutes to deal, but I'll tell you what, man, so do I."

"What happened?"

Dean leaned back in his turn. "Pipe or something, came off of a truck. It bounced once and went through his windshield." He paused and blew out a breath. "Went right through him, and the car seat too. It was sticking out maybe a foot, Cas. You know how much force that must've taken? It wasn't heavy enough. Not enough momentum on its own. So I gotta wonder."

"Father Gregory wasn't an angel," I said. I sounded more solemn than I meant to.

"Of course not," Dean said. "But still. If that wasn't the will of God, I don't know what is." I glanced at him, but he was still staring up at the invisible stars.


"Springfield, Ohio. The university," I said. Sam nodded. "I remember this. This is the Trickster."

Sam twisted in his seat so he could talk to me a little more easily. "You were along for this?"

"No, Dean told me about it." (First time we met him he screwed with my baby, that was not long before all the crap with Azazel and Cold Oak. Second time he screwed with me—killed me like a hundred times, Sam said, but I don't remember it. Was a couple of months before the deal came due.) He'd made sure to emphasize, however, that they hadn't actually managed to kill the creature. "Tricksters are pagan gods. Coyote, Loki, Anansi, most cultures have one. The modern American version is Bugs Bunny."

"Bugs isn't a god," Dean protested, glancing at me in the mirror.

"No, but he has many of the same properties. Foremost among them is that he only plays tricks on those who deserve it. A perfectly innocent person would have nothing to fear from the Trickster."

Dean thought that over, but only for a second; it wasn't the kind of question that would hold his interest for long. "So how do we kill it?"

Sam's eyes met mine and we shared a moment of amusement. "Pretty easy," I said. "Wooden stake. But he's tricky."

"Hence the name," Dean said with a flash of a grin. Sam groaned in a way that implied the quip was shaky, but he didn't expect much better of his brother's sense of humor.

"As I understand it, the first time around you thought you'd killed him, but encountered him again later." It occurred to me that my voice had fallen almost entirely back into what I'd sounded like when I was first on Earth—a little slower, a little lower, a lot more formal. I wasn't sure if I cared. "He can make constructs that look and act real; it seems likely you actually staked one of those."

"OK," Sam said. "So we'll keep an eye out for a bait-and-switch. Anything else?"

"Two things. One: apparently he knew you were after him from pretty early on, and played harmless tricks on you to set you at each other's throats. And two…" I smiled. "He'll have no idea who the hell I am."


I ended up in a motel a few blocks from the one the brothers were in; its sole charm was its location right next to an Internet cafe that was accustomed to people coming in and setting up shop.

Sam wandered in after I was already there, his laptop under his arm, and bought the first of the endless cups of coffee that would be his rent for a table and network cable. I didn't look up from the computer I was already at, being enmeshed in trying to bend the machine to my will. I'm roughly familiar with how to use a computer; there was enough time between the beginning of my fall and the end of the Internet for that. But I'm not particularly good at it.

Fortunately, I was there mostly for show. Sam was doing the real research, and it didn't take long for him to come up with the first place to check: Crawford Hall. I finished my coffee and left.

The campus wasn't exactly deserted, but it was a weekend so there weren't students rushing back and forth. The building was quiet as I made my way to the fourth floor, where the dead professor's office was located.

The elevator doors slid open to reveal a long hallway lined with doors. Halfway down it, a man in a gray coverall swiped a mop back and forth. He glanced at me and froze, still bent over his work.

I had begun to smile in greeting, but I felt myself falter at his reaction and paused. After a second of mutual staring, the janitor shook his head and straightened up, a grin spreading over his face. "Wow, sorry," he said genially. "You look just like my brother, caught me off guard for a second. Something I can help you with?"

"Oh. Uh, yes," I said, scrabbling for my cover story. "You can point me at Professor Cox's office?"

"Suuure," the janitor said, looking me up and down. "You, uh, know he kinda took a header, right?"

"Yeah, that's kind of why I'm here," I said. I lowered my voice and glanced around as if there were any chance anyone had snuck up on us. "I'm doing a study of supposedly-haunted places, and I hear that this building has a ghost story that might involve the professor. I'd just like to take a look at his office."

"Pretty sure I'm not supposed to let you do that," the janitor said.

"Look, I just need a minute. You can watch me, make sure I don't even touch anything." I paused. "I'll make it worth your while."

The janitor sucked air through his teeth, his fingers tapping on the handle of his mop. I tried to look trustworthy. After a second he said, "Ah, screw it. Sure." He leaned his mop against the wall and headed down the hall, gesturing me to follow him. "I mean, I don't want to cast aspersions on a dead guy, but Mister Morality? He brought a lot of girls up here, if you know what I mean. Guy was getting more ass than a toilet seat." He threw me a meaningful glance and I huffed a laugh because it seemed to be expected. We stopped in front of a door labeled A. Cox and the janitor pulled out keys.

"So, did you see him jump?" I asked as he unlocked the door.

"Nah, I just saw him on his way up with his young lady. I told the cops about her but I guess they never found her." The janitor swung the door open and stepped back to let me through, waving a hand. "He went out that window right there."

I pulled Dean's EMF reader from my pocket and turned it on. "What the heck's that for?" the janitor asked.

"Guy who got it for me says it detects the energy signatures of ghosts," I said, and shrugged. "Got me, but it might detect something. Anyway, the girl, you saw her come up here with him. Did you see her go back out?" I waved the EMF reader around but, as expected, it remained silent.

"Now that you mention it, no."

"And did you know her at all?"

The janitor shrugged. "No, but like I said, not a big surprise. I've been pushing a mop here for six years, never saw him with the same one twice. Maybe there is a haunting. I mean, there's the story about the girl who jumped off the building; that's probably the one you heard."

"Oh?"

"Yeah. They say she was having an affair with a professor, he broke it off, and she jumped. From, get this, room six-six-nine. Which is bull because the place only has four floors, but you know kids, they never let reality get in the way of a good story."

"Six-six-nine?" I said.

The janitor rolled his eyes. "Yeah, turn the nine upside down and you get six-six-six. Spooky, right?" He made a vague gesture. "Still, getting the wrong room doesn't mean there wasn't a jumper. Maybe she didn't like it that the prof here was taking advantage of girls the way she got taken advantage of. Serve him right, too."

He said the last few words with a seriousness I wouldn't have expected, and I thought, Gotcha. I did my best to keep it off my face.


I went back to the Internet café and logged in to the email account Sam had created. It's the janitor in Crawford Hall, as I remembered, I wrote. He tried to put me off with a story about a suicide in the building that could have created a haunting, but the reader didn't pick up any EMF at all. He probably suspects I'm a hunter, but I imagine he'll want to watch and see what else I find out before he moves against me. I'll check for updates in the morning. I saved the message as a draft and logged out of the account.

I spent some time and more cups of coffee doing desultory research that would look like I was investigating the spurious haunting if anyone peered over my shoulder. The campus did have suicides, but none of them involved a student leaping from Crawford Hall, at least not as far back as I checked.

After a while I ran out of obvious ways to pretend to look into it, and sat there for a while with my fingers on the keys and my latest drink cooling at my elbow until inspiration struck. I opened a new browser window and typed "supernatural carver edlund" into the search box.

The list of results surprised me; for a book series with such a small following, there certainly seemed to be a lot of fans. And it appeared that Chuck's publisher had given up on production quality in exchange for speed—Croatoan was due out in less than a week. I had very little idea of how long it normally took a book to go from author to shelves, but I assumed it was longer than two and a half months.

The series had an official website with summaries and excerpts from the books. I clicked on Croatoan's with some trepidation. If Chuck had seen me and written me down, Heaven would know I was there—more importantly, they would know who I was. The fact that I hadn't yet awakened to find myself bodily back in Heaven implied that I wasn't in the book, or at least that I wasn't well-described, but either way I needed to know. (This is for your own good, Castiel. You know where disobedience leads. What kind of brother would I be if I let you continue on that path? And I screamed, and begged, and promised, promised to be good, to obey, and when they finally believed me I was so grateful I'd have wept if I could have.)

The summary mentioned only Sam and Dean, which was a relief. There were two snippets of text, one of which was set in the medical clinic where we'd holed up; it contained Sam, Dean, Dr. Lee, Pam, Duane (with no indication that he was possessed, which I found interesting) and Mark, but not me. I let a relieved sigh slip out as I moved around the site to look at the forums.

"I love those books," a voice said from next to me. I turned my head, startled, to find that the young woman at the next computer was looking at my screen. She met my eyes and made a slightly embarrassed face. "I mean, I wasn't trying to pry, but I caught the cover images. They're kind of...distinctive."

"If you mean horrible, then yes," I said, but I smiled. She was really, really cute, smooth dark skin and her hair in hundreds of tiny braids, wearing an electric blue t-shirt with the white outlines of a pair of crows bracketing her torso. "But the books are compelling, even with the awful art." The Croatoan cover was particularly egregious, featuring two overly-muscled shirtless men I assumed were meant to be Sam and Dean facing off against a horde of half-rotted pseudo-croats.

"Well, I mean, there are some issues. I'm not crazy about how they treat women, for one thing." She shrugged. "But you know. Spank bank, am I right?" She grinned at me.

"If you like that kind of thing," I said, and returned the expression.

"Hah, I knew it! So, you a Sam girl or a Dean girl?"

"Dean," I said promptly. "You?"

"Oh, give me Sammy any day. He's, what, six foot twenty? Which I like."

"Hey, to each their own," I said.

"I'm Malika," she said, and held out a hand. I shook it. "Cas," I replied.

"Nice to meet a guy with good taste in literature," she said.

"Then why are you talking to me?"

Malika laughed and said, "Careful, you're gonna insult me. I read 'em too."

"Sorry," I said. "So can I buy you a cup of coffee?"

"Oh, really? Well I would say yes, but I already have one to go." She lifted a disposable cup that smelled strongly of caramel. "You gonna be around for a few days?"

"Probably," I said.

"Great. Seeya around, then, Cas." She smiled again and stood, stretching, which gave me a great view since she was short enough that her collarbone was just about at my eye level. She swung a coat around her shoulders and hoisted a backpack and was gone. I watched until she was out the door.

It occurred to me that I should have been much more interested in flirting with her.

By then it was late enough that I just poked around Chuck's forum for a few more minutes before logging off and heading for my room with a handful of haunting-related printouts. I took a long shower—all my showers were long, now that I had access to hot water again—and didn't bother getting dressed again afterward. I wrapped myself in all the blankets and watched meaningless television until I fell asleep. I slept badly, with no one else in the room; I had managed to reaccustom myself to hearing Dean's breathing. My dreams were too incoherent to be disturbing, though, which I counted as a win. I woke reasonably rested and took a few minutes to shave before I left again.

When I got back to the cafe, there was a new draft email waiting for me in the shared account. We've found another possible victim, Sam had written. He's not hurt, but from his story it sounds like a classic alien abduction, complete with embarrassing medical experiments. Aliens are a little weird even for us, so we're assuming this is still the Trickster. We're going to go check out the place the guy says he was grabbed from today. In the meantime, we should probably risk an in-person meetup to make plans to take the Trickster down. There's directions at the bottom to a Denny's a couple of miles from campus; we'll meet you there at 3. Dean says to tell you to watch your back.

I smiled a little at the last line as I typed in an acknowledgment. That done, I was left with some time to kill, so I returned to the Supernatural website. I thought it might be useful to look at speculation about the future direction of the series, or maybe Chuck himself wrote about where the books might be going.

Two hours later I had found my way into the wilds of something called "LiveJournal". I clicked from page to page, unable to decide if I was vastly amused or deeply disturbed. For one thing, many of the fans of the book series appeared to be convinced that Dean and Sam were sleeping together; at first I thought it might be helpful to correct their misapprehension, but it soon became clear there were too many people holding the opinion for my efforts to make a dent. (Chuck asked me once if I was angry that the books I appeared in were never published. I told him it didn't matter to me; the gospels were the gospels, whether they were published or not. He'd given me a pained smile, passed me the bottle of whiskey, and gone back to his game of solitaire.)

What confused me was the number of stories I found that Chuck hadn't written. They contained hunts I'd never heard so much as an inkling of—many of which got the monsters extremely wrong—plus a great deal of sex between the brothers that I was sure had never happened. Eventually it dawned on me that people were writing their own stories about Sam and Dean.

I had to stop and think about that for a while.

I spent the early part of the afternoon on more of the smokescreen ghost hunt, trying to find more people who'd heard the story about the supposed suicide. I didn't find many before it was time to head for the rendezvous, but that hardly mattered.

I walked to the restaurant, musing on the phenomenon of "fan fiction" as I went. It struck me as bizarre in the extreme, and I wasn't sure how much of that was because of who I used to be. Angels aren't creative, as a rule; fiction in itself is something they have a hard time understanding. It seems pointless to them to create stories about things that don't exist.

As for myself, though I hadn't had many opportunities to read fiction, Dean had liked to show me movies—at least, until he stopped liking anything. I enjoyed them, even before my fall was complete, but I'd never had the slightest urge to write anything myself. Regardless, it seemed strange to write stories about characters someone else had created, though of course Chuck had not, technically, created Sam or Dean at all. But the readers didn't know that, and honestly the idea of writing fictional stories about real people was even stranger.

I hadn't managed to wrap my mind around it by the time I got to the Denny's.


The lock on the side door was almost insultingly easy to pick. Crawford Hall didn't seem ominous, only dark; there weren't any croats lurking in these shadows. But there were noises, like someone trying to walk carefully. It seemed clear I was supposed to follow them, so I did, up a flight of broad, curving stairs to a lobby and through the double doors on the other side of it.

The steps in front of me led down between rows of seats to a small stage. On the stage was a large, round bed under a canopy. Throbbing music played and a ball, covered in bits of mirror, hung from the canopy.

The two girls on the bed weren't wearing much at all.

As I walked down the steps they crawled towards me, smiling. "We've been waiting for you, Cas," the brunette one said.

"I'm pretty sure you two aren't real," I said. They swung their legs over the edge of the bed to sit, and I watched in appreciation—they weren't real, but that didn't mean they weren't worth looking at.

"Trust me, sugar, it's gonna feel real."

"Come on," the blonde one purred. "Let us give you a massage."

"Normally I'd take you up on that," I said, and raised my voice to address the room more generally. "But I think you know I can't."

"They're a peace offering," the janitor's voice said from behind me. I turned. He was sitting at the end of one of the rows I'd passed, his feet up on the seat in front of him. He gestured with the bright red candy in his hand and continued, "I know what you are. I've been around a while, run into your kind before."

"You have no idea what I am," I said easily, boosting myself up to sit on the edge of the stage.

"You'd be surprised, bucko," the Trickster said.

"I guess it doesn't matter. The important thing is that I can't let you keep hurting people."

"Oh, come on! Those people got what was coming to them. Hoisted on their own petards. But I like you, I do. So treat yourself, long as you want. Just make sure it's long enough for me to move on to the next town." He stood and sauntered down the steps as he spoke.

"I really can't," I said, and leaned back on my hands. My jacket fell open a bit with the movement. "Dead people. It's kind of a thing."

"I don't want to hurt you," the Trickster said, sounding unexpectedly serious for a moment. "And you know that I can."

"I can't let you go."

The Trickster sucked air through his teeth and said, "Too bad. Like I said, I like you. But Cas—you shouldn't have come alone."

"I'll agree with you there," Dean said from halfway down the steps. "Told him it was a stupid plan, but did he listen?"

The Trickster's head jerked around. As soon as his attention was off of me, I jumped for him, pulling the stake out of my jacket as I went. I hit him off-balance and we tumbled to the floor together. I managed to stay on top the whole way down, ending up straddling him.

"I knew I liked you," he said, as I settled the point of the stake in the middle of his back.

"Sorry," I said sincerely, and threw my weight onto the stake. It made a sickening crunch as it penetrated; the Trickster choked, twitched, and went limp. The music cut off and the flecks of light from the mirror-ball vanished.

"That feel a little too easy to you?" Dean asked, offering me the hand not holding his stake. I took it and stood, turning to check the stage; there were no girls, no bed.

"Yeah," I said.

Dean looked around the theater, suspicion clear in his posture. "I think we should stick around for a few more days, just to make sure," he said.

"Good idea." I looked back down at the floor and was just noticing that the Trickster's body was gone when something soft landed on me.

It didn't take long to identify it as a blanket—from the feel of it, the faux-velvet one that had been on the bed—but that didn't help me find the edge of the damned thing. I could hear Dean's surprised shout, and then a mechanical roar that sounded like a small engine.

I gave up on trying to claw my way to the edge of the blanket and drew my knife instead, stomping on the fabric near my feet to draw it taut enough to stab. The knife-point went through easily and I yanked, slicing about a foot down before my leverage failed. I sheathed the knife as quickly as I could and grabbed the sides of the tear. There was a thud and Dean grunted as if he'd hit something.

Damn it, where was Sam?

The fabric parted easily and I shoved my way through the rip to find Dean sprawled in one of the theater seats. Above him stood a man in a coverall and face-concealing mask, holding a small chainsaw as if he was about to bring it down like an axe. The Trickster stood on the stage, his arms crossed over his chest, grinning—and there was movement behind him that I was going to have to hope was Sam, because I didn't have time to deal with him; Dean didn't appear to be in any condition to dodge a blow. I lunged and hit the chainsaw man hard in the side; he was big enough that he didn't fall, but he staggered and his chainsaw fell out of line.

I drew back before he'd quite recovered his balance and kicked him in the side of the knee; he made a furious noise, but no words. I kicked him again.

"Cas, come on!" the Trickster said. "It doesn't have to be like this, we can—"

"No," Sam said, "we can't." And then there was that horrible noise again.

The chainsaw man vanished, just as silently as the other constructs had, but this time the Trickster didn't just tremble and die; I turned in time to see glowing golden tendrils crawling over his skin as Sam let him fall. He crumpled, the tendrils spreading and merging until his entire body was covered in light. It exploded out, bright enough that I winced and turned away for a second; when I looked back the Trickster's body was gone, replaced by a scorched mark on the wooden floor. I stared at it.

"Cas?" Dean said.

The mark was roundish, not flared out to either side of an empty vessel. I shook myself. "That was less easy," I said, forcing my voice to stay even.

"It worked, though," Dean said. "He was expecting one surprise, but two was too much for him."

"You can't really expect a surprise, Dean," Sam said.

"You know what I mean," Dean said. "Now let's get the hell out of Dodge before someone finds us. Like the real janitor, maybe."

As we climbed the steps I couldn't help looking back at the burn on the stage floor.


I was on my second beer and Dean his third when he said, into companionable silence, "So you and me." I looked up from the patterns of condensation on my bottle.

"What about us?"

"We were...together. In the future."

"In a manner of speaking," I said slowly. "We weren't exclusive, if that's what you mean." There had been a time when we were, in practice if not formally, but then Sam said yes.

"Oh," Dean said. He picked at the label on his beer for a few seconds, and then I saw a decision in the set of his shoulders. "I can work with that." He set the bottle down with the air of a man who, having made his choice, intends to act on it promptly, and shoved his chair back.

"Dean," I said as he circled the table.

"Yeah?" he said, and grinned at me. "Sam's got his research bug up his ass, won't be back for hours. We might as well have a good time." He wrapped his hand in the front of my shirt and pulled. I resisted out of sheer surprise, and Dean's grin faltered. "Cas—if you don't want to, just say the word. I can take no for an answer. But I thought—"

"No, it's not that," I said, scrambling to my feet. Dear God was it not that. We were close enough that I could see his faint freckles, nose-to-nose in the old familiar way that had started because of my ignorance of human social norms and continued because I liked being close to Dean. "I just didn't think you wanted to."

Dean raised a skeptical eyebrow and made a show of looking me up and down. "Dude, have you seen yourself? I think Sam has the hots for you and that kid's straighter than Gene Simmons." His grip on my shirt tightened again. "So. You good?"

"I am fantastic," I murmured, and leaned in to kiss him.

He tasted like beer at first, so I ran my tongue over his until the taste wore away. Until I could taste him. It had been a long time since Dean let me kiss him, but this was just like I remembered. He hummed into my mouth as I slid my left hand into his hair, cradling the curve of his skull in my fingers.

I could have stayed just like that for hours, but Dean had other ideas; he let go of my shirt to wrap one arm around my back and the other around my hips, dragging us together. He was half-hard already and I felt my cock twitch in response. I could smell him, gunpowder and gasoline and leather and Dean, just Dean, and suddenly I was hard and I moaned against his lips.

"You make pretty noises," he said, his voice full of fond amusement. Some lingering thread of rationality kept me from replying So you've always said; instead I wormed my free hand between us to work at his belt buckle as well as I could. "Good idea," he said, and took his arms away to shed his shirts. We had to stop kissing anyway to drag his tee over his head, so I stripped my shirt off as well. Dean took me by the upper arms and walked us the few steps to his bed; he sat and I frankly tried to crawl into his lap.

"Hang on, hang on, I gotta take my shoes off," he protested, laughing when I huffed in disappointment. I backed off enough for him to bend and untie his boots, but as soon as he loosened them enough to toe them off I crowded back into his space, one hand under his chin so I could tilt his head back and kiss him again. He got his belt unbuckled and popped the button on his jeans, but before he could get any further I batted his hands away to pull the zipper down myself. He was hot and fully hard now under the thin cotton of his briefs, and I closed my hand around him. "Ah, Cas," he said, sounding ever-so-slightly choked.

"Stand up for a second," I said.

"What for?"

I smiled and mouthed along the line of his jaw. "I guess we can do this with your pants on," I said into his ear. "But if you really want the up-against-the-wall feel, there's a wall right over there. So stand up and let me get these off you." He didn't stand so much as lean on his hands to take his weight off his hips, but it was good enough and I slid his jeans and briefs down. He kicked them off and shoved up onto the bed.

For a second I just looked at him. It hit me all over again, looking at him naked, that this was not my Dean; he had scars in the wrong places and he was clearly better fed—not exactly soft around the middle, but his abs had less definition and I couldn't easily count his ribs. This was not a man who'd been living on canned peaches and beef jerky. But his eyes were lust-dark in just the same way.

I shoved my pants down, unable to remember when they'd gotten unfastened, and stepped out of them and my boxers on my way to crawling up next to him. He rolled onto his side and wrapped his hand around the back of my neck. "Gonna have to tell me what you like," he said, and kissed me again.

"I'm easy," I said. I caught his lower lip between my teeth and bit gently. Dean shuddered. "Talk to me, that's all." After Sam said yes, Dean stopped talking—when we were having sex, but also just...in general. It was what I'd missed most about him. (Classy, and I laughed more in surprise than anything else, because when was the last time I heard Dean say anything that wasn't planning or strategy or explaining someone's failures? And when my Dean glared at me I tried to cover it with sarcasm—I like past you—but I could almost remember what he was supposed to be, and I could see him watching me remember.)

"You like it when I talk?" Dean asked, a little skeptical. I nodded, and he shrugged. "Good thing runnin' my mouth is one of my talents."

"Your mouth is very talented," I agreed. Dean groaned and said, "Dude. That line work on a lot of people?" But he was smiling, so I shrugged and said, "It's a new one, you'll have to let me know."

"Tellya what, I'm easy too," Dean said against my lips, with an air of confiding a great secret. He slipped his hand to my shoulder and pressed until I rolled onto my back, following me so he was pinning me down with his body. It was so familiar I shivered, and Dean's brow furrowed. "Something wrong?"

"No, nothing," I said, though I wasn't sure it was entirely true. Regardless, I didn't want this to stop. "Just a chill."

"Huh, well, I'll have to make sure you stay hot then," Dean said, suggestion lacing his voice like a tree's roots twining through the earth. He sat up and I whined in disappointment at the loss of his heat, the feel of him against me. But he shuffled down the bed and rested one hand on my thigh, and I realized what he was doing just as he bent and closed his lips around my cock. (For fuck's sake, Cas, no one calls it a penis, OK? Not in bed.)

Dean told me once that he'd never been taught how to give a blowjob—that he worked it out by applying what he liked to other people. Whether that was true or not, he was very good at it, and I have a pretty broad basis for comparison. And this was good, if a little generic, which puzzled me—in the very small part of my brain that was available for such pointless things as puzzlement—until I remembered that this Dean had not spent two solid weeks of motel-room evenings systematically working out exactly what it took to make me fall apart. The thought that I might get to repeat that particular experience made me twist my hands into the blanket.

Even without that specialized knowledge, it didn't take him long. Dean, my Dean, hadn't done this in so long I couldn't remember the last time with certainty; not long before I broke my foot, and that was as specific as mortal memory got. It was probably less than ten minutes before I was panting his name, trying to come up with words to warn him. My Dean would have known, just from the way I was breathing; I was less sure of this one.

"Dean," I gasped. "Dean, I…I, oh please—"

Dean made a satisfied noise and something about it was the last tiny push I needed. I tried to say something—I don't actually know what, and it didn't matter anyway because all I managed was a strangled shout as the orgasm tore through me. (I understand why people used to call it "the little death". It scared me, that first time, and Dean had been almost comically confused by my reaction—not that I'd been in any condition to appreciate the humor. But he'd rallied admirably, let me cling to him and shake until I calmed. And then he'd set about doing it again, to prove that it wasn't really going to kill me.)

I made my way hazily back to noticing the world again as Dean crawled up my body, stopping to nip along the line of my collarbone. I could feel his erection against my thigh, hot as blood. "Told you it was one of my talents," he said in my ear, sounding thoroughly pleased with himself.

"Yeah, I actually knew that," I said, forcing my voice not to shake. He froze for the briefest of moments, and I started to curse myself for a fool before he said, "I keep forgetting you know me better than I know you." He moved back enough that he could look at me, and I tried not to visibly sigh in relief that he was smiling. "So I guess you already know what I like, huh Cas?"

I dredged up a smile of my own and was encouraged by how genuine it felt. "Yeah," I said. I ran my hand down his side, feeling the skin shiver under my touch, and wrapped my fingers around his cock. His breath hitched as I stroked up slowly. "I know exactly what you like. So the question is, what do you want?"

"God, you want me to make a decision here?" Dean said raggedly. "I don't care, Cas, just...oh yeah. Oh yeah. Oh fuck, Cas..."

"Is that what you want?" I murmured as my hand kept up its steady motion. "You can fuck me, Dean." He twitched harder. "Or I can just keep doing this. Or I can suck you off, if that's what you want. Just tell me." It wasn't, perhaps, fair of me, but this was a game Dean had liked to play, and by the time I was confident enough to reciprocate the rules had changed and there was no more talking, only fumbling with each other to get off as quickly as possible. There was always something else that needed to be done, and no time for slow, leisurely sex. "Come on, Dean, tell me what you want."

"I want to get off, Jesus," Dean said, too languid to be as sharp as he wanted.

"Got that," I said, not trying to hide my amusement.

"Fine," Dean said. He had to pause to catch his breath before he repeated, "Fine, then you figure it out. Cas—"

I was tempted, but the way his eyes were half-lidded just undid me. So I pushed him in my turn, my right hand on the unmarked skin of his left shoulder, until I was hovering over him; I kissed down the line of his throat, over his collarbone, down to one nipple and bit it till he hissed. By then he seemed to have caught on where I was going with this, and one of his hands came to rest on the side of my neck as I worked my way down.

I settled myself between Dean's legs and slid my hand back down to the base of his cock; he groaned and hitched his hips and I smiled, but I had no urge at all to make him wait. It had been too long, for me at least, and it wouldn't have been polite.

Most of my post-angelic quirks are useful in combat. But if there's a combat use for being able to easily suppress the gag reflex, I have never discovered it. Dean, of course, didn't know about that particular party trick; he was entirely surprised when I took his cock into my mouth and kept taking it until my lips met the ring of my fingers. "Holy fuck," he squeezed past gritted teeth. I would have laughed, but I didn't have the concentration to spare for it.

I don't actually know if any given man would think I'm good at giving blowjobs; I have a sample size of exactly one. About that one, however, I am an expert. I know every sensitive spot, the ones to avoid as well as the ones to concentrate on. I knew how Dean would writhe and moan if I trailed my fingers over the junction between his leg and his body, if I took him deep and swallowed around him. He tangled his hands in my hair, which made me shiver though he didn't try to hold me down; even towards the end, he mostly seemed to just like to have his hands on me.

Through the whole thing he kept up a steady stream of encouragement and praise—not very coherent, but gratifying all the same, even when the pulses of his hips lost their steady rhythm and the only words he seemed able to manage were Oh fuck Cas yes, and only more so when he lost most of those too and panted Cas over and over.

I think he tried to warn me before he came. I didn't pull away.

Eventually he tugged on my hair, gently but with purpose, and I went with it until I was propped on one elbow with the other arm folded on his chest. Dean grinned at me.

"OK, you do know what I like," he said. I rolled my eyes and slumped to the side.

"I think it would be in poor taste to say 'I told you so'," I replied.

Dean snorted and said, "We're gonna have to take a shower before Sam gets back."

I turned my head enough to catch his eyes and he shrugged. "No, it's not that, I'm pretty sure he thinks we've been doin' it for weeks. But you know, I have some class." He paused and thought it over theatrically. "Besides. In the shower we don't have to worry about cleanup, right?"


When Sam got back we were clean and fully clothed, but he stopped two steps inside the door anyway and looked back and forth between us with narrowed eyes. "I can go get pizza or something, if you need a little more alone time," he said after a second. I smiled and looked down at my beer while Dean grinned.

"Think we're good for now, Sammy," he said. "Real good, actually."

"Didn't need to know that, Dean."

"Yeah, yeah. Whatcha got?"

Sam hesitated for a pointed moment longer before putting his laptop bag down on the table. "Last year in late February, a guy on 41 in Nevada had to swerve to avoid hitting a woman who ran out into the road in front of him. He ran off the road—shaken up, but not hurt. When he got out, the woman said she and her husband had been in an accident too. She refused to leave without him, so the guy helped her look. They didn't find anything before something knocked out the Good Samaritan, and when he came to there was no sign of the woman or her car. Only thing he found was an abandoned hunting cabin."

"OK," Dean said.

"This or something like it has happened twelve times in the past fifteen years, always on the same date, on the same stretch of road. Five of the accidents were fatal, but all the surviving witnesses describe the same woman."

"Hah. Good job, Sammy, you found us a haunting!"

"I think I found two," Sam said.


After that, it was pretty easy; this was one of the stories Dean had been happy to tell, at least until he stopped telling stories entirely, because it had nothing to do with Azazel. I didn't remember the names of the people involved, but there were newspaper articles about the original accident and from there Sam extracted the names and found property records. We were, refreshingly, able to do the salt-and-burn of Jonah Greeley's bones in broad daylight, since the cabin he'd been buried near was well out of sight of any prying eyes.

That being done, we had several days to argue about the best way to approach Molly Macnamara, the other ghost. As I'd remembered from Dean's story, her body had been cremated. Finally we decided to go with the plan Dean and Sam had had the first time around, that being offering to take her to the police to get a hunt for her husband underway. Without Greeley's interference, she could leave her stretch of highway easily.

Thus it was that the night of February 22nd found us driving along Route 41. The weather had been both warm and dry enough that there were no patches of ice on the pavement, but Dean drove slower than he otherwise might have to lower the risk of missing Molly. We were on our fifth pass along the critical stretch, and all of us were beginning to worry, when the radio crackled into static and suddenly there she was, standing in the glare of the headlights and holding her hands out defensively. Dean stopped just fast enough to avoid hitting her—not that it would have mattered, but we didn't want to disrupt her illusion just yet.

"Stop, stop!" she yelled. "You've got to help me!" She ran to the passenger side and made to pound on the window, but Sam rolled it down. "Please!"

"All right," Sam said, and opened the door. "All right, calm down. Are you OK?"

"No," Molly said, sounding utterly miserable. "We were, we were driving along and there was a man, crossing the road, I didn't even see him until it was too late! I swerved, and we crashed, and when I came to the car was wrecked and my husband was missing. Please, you've got to help me find him."

"OK, all right," Sam repeated. "We can—"

Dean got out of the car and leaned on the roof. "Sam, we're not equipped for this kind of thing." Molly was far too upset to notice the lie. "Ma'am, maybe we can take you into town? It's only half an hour. You can tell the cops, they can get some guys up here with flashlights and stuff. Dogs, maybe." David Macnamara no longer lived in the house he and Molly had shared, but he hadn't moved far.

Molly bit her lip and Sam said, "He's right. You won't do your husband any good if you freeze out here. We can get help."

Even from my position still in the back seat I could see her wavering. "They can look for the man who caused the crash, too," Sam said persuasively. "Make sure he's OK."

"OK," Molly said finally. "But we have to hurry, David could be in real trouble."

Sam opened the back door for her and introduced us all as she got in. She gave her name and her husband's, and volunteered that it was their anniversary. We all made suitably sympathetic noises and then let the conversation lapse.

Molly didn't appear to notice that she wasn't actually chilly, which didn't surprise me; spirits can be remarkably narrow-sighted about anything that doesn't fit their worldview. I wasn't sure if she was convinced enough of her own reality to be solid to the touch, so I made sure not to bump into her...or the space she appeared to occupy.

Dean drove with his usual panache now that we had Molly in the car, and it didn't take long before we were approaching the outskirts of the town. As we passed a shopping center I saw Molly's forehead furrow in puzzlement. "When did they put that in?" she asked.

"Dunno, we're not from around here," Dean said.

"Neither are David and I. We only moved in six months ago," she said. "We shouldn't even have been coming along here, we were lost. Oh God, David." She put a hand over her eyes. I saw Sam and Dean exchange a glance.

"I'm sure he's fine," I said. If she'd been anyone else, I would have patted her comfortingly, but that seemed like a bad idea.

"He is fine," Dean said. Molly sat up straighter and uncovered her face, looking even more confused by the certainty in his voice.

"Wait, what? How do you know?"

We were only a few minutes away from David's home now. Sam said, "Molly...it wasn't a coincidence that we found you tonight."

Her eyes widened, then went to suspicious slits. "What are you talking about?"

"Look, what's the date?"

"The 22nd. February 22nd," she said, bewildered.

"1992?" Sam prompted.

"Yes."

Sam pulled out his cell phone and flipped it open, holding it up for her inspection.

"What's—is that a mobile phone?" Molly asked. She leaned forward to get a better look, and the little screen wavered.

"Molly, it's 2007," Dean said calmly.

"What? No!" Molly said. "No, it's our fifth anniversary." Her face hardened from confusion into anger and she demanded, "Stop the car."

"We're almost there," Dean said.

"No we're not!" she snapped. "This doesn't look right."

"That's because it's been fifteen years since you saw it," Sam said.

"Oh God, you're crazy. You're all crazy. Stop the car right now."

"Molly," I said, and she turned to face me. "Can you just trust us for another minute? It'll all make sense, OK? I promise."

"It has not been fifteen years!" she yelled. The screen of Sam's cell phone fuzzed out for a second and she stared at it. Very quietly, she said, "What just happened?"

"You're angry," Sam said. "You affected it."

"But I—what? How?"

"Save the long explanations, we're here," Dean said, pulling the Impala over to the curb.

"I don't understand," Molly wailed. I didn't blame her.

"You will," Sam said. "Come on." He got out and opened the door for her when she showed no sign of doing it herself. Dean and I got out as well. I leaned against the car while Dean went to join Sam and house was lit, the people inside still awake. Molly approached the window, looking through the open curtains at David. He was sitting on the couch with a mug of something in his hand, with a woman leaning into his side in a way that spoke of long familiarity.

"That's not...it can't be," Molly said. "What's happening? Who is that?"

"That's David's wife," Sam said gently. "I'm sorry, Molly. Fifteen years ago, you and your husband hit a man named Jonah Greeley with your car. Of the three of you...David survived."

"No, this isn't right. This can't be right."

"Then explain why David looks fifteen years older than the last time you saw him," Dean said.

"It's not possible," Molly said, but she didn't sound as sure. I was certain she could feel it, that something was wrong; it was just a matter of getting her to acknowledge it.

"You've been haunting that stretch of 41 for the past fifteen years, one night a year," Sam said. "You just don't remember. I'm sorry."

"Oh God, I killed him," Molly moaned. "I killed us both."

"It was an accident, but yeah," Dean said. She shut her eyes.

"Greeley moved on," Sam said gently. "You should too. You have to let go."

Molly sank down where she stood. "Why didn't you tell me when you first saw me? Why bring me here?"

"Would you have believed us without some kind of proof?" Dean asked. "You needed to see..." He trailed off and waved a hand at the house; Molly turned to look and muttered, "David." She started to her feet and Sam moved to stop her and then remembered.

"Molly, we brought you here so you could move on."

"But I have to tell him," she said.

"Tell him what? That you love him? That you're sorry? He already knows that." Sam paused, and sighed. "Look, if you really want to go in there, we're not going to stop you."

"But?" she said.

"But you're gonna freak him right out. For life," Dean said. He sounded frank, though not unsympathetic. "You're a ghost."

Sam gave his brother a slightly exasperated look, which Molly didn't notice; she was too busy staring at the house with an expression of longing that I could sympathize with. "David's already said his goodbyes, Molly. Now it's your turn."

"What am I supposed to do?"

"Just let go," Sam said. "Of David, of everything. Do that, and you'll move on."

"Move on to what?"

"We don't know," Sam said, with an air of admitting something. Her whole body wavered for a second, and out of the corner of my eye I saw Dean tense up.

"Heaven," I said. All three of them turned to me, and I shrugged. "I know, it sounds cheesy, but really...Heaven. Everyone worries, I guess, but you have to be a pretty terrible person to go to Hell when you die." Or you have to have made a deal, but if that were an issue the hounds would have taken her already.

"How do you know?" Molly asked, her voice unsteady.

"It would take too long to explain," I said, pushing off the car to walk over to her. "But I promise you, Molly. Spirits are held here by unfinished business. Yours is finished now. Let go. You don't belong here anymore. You've been suffering the consequences of one mistake for fifteen years, and that's enough."

She swallowed. "You promise?"

"Yes," I said. It wasn't hard to sound sincere. I didn't know her, but it seemed unlikely that she could have been the kind of human monster whose soul would already be black enough for Hell. She studied my face, searching, and she must have been satisfied with what she found because after a moment she nodded and closed her eyes.

It wasn't really light, but it felt like light as she dissolved into the night air. Dean and Sam and I watched the place for several seconds, until Dean shook himself and said, "I guess she wasn't so bad, for a ghost." He rocked up on his toes and then back, and glanced at me. "Nice save, there. I think we were losing her, but you sold it."

"It's true," I said, trying to sound offhand. Sam's eyebrows were raised, but he didn't say anything as we got back in the car.


It was Dean's turn to fetch dinner. As soon as the sound of the engine faded, Sam said, "From the way you were talking back in Providence, you didn't strike me as the believing type."

I looked up from my book. Sam was studying me like I was a new and interesting puzzle, his laptop open but shoved to the side. I marked my place and set the book beside me. "I said it wasn't an angel," I said carefully. "And it wasn't."

"You said it wasn't an angel like it was preposterous that angels even existed," Sam said. His fingers tapped slowly on the tabletop, the kind of restless movement that signified thought rather than irritation. "But you told Molly Heaven exists like you'd been there."

"Heaven doesn't have to imply angels," I said, trying to keep my expression appropriate for a mildly entertaining philosophical debate; Sam made a face at me. Which was fair. "OK, yes, the concepts go together."

"Do you believe in God?" Sam asked bluntly.

"Yes," I said. At first I thought to qualify the answer, but I had never met my Father; I had had to take the archangels' word for it just like everyone else. I was stuck with mere belief just as much as any other human.

"Do you pray?"

"No." I had gotten out of the habit, once the other angels left and it became clear to me that God wasn't going to save us. I had no reason to think He would respond any better this time around. "I…had a crisis of faith, you could say. I believe in God, but I don't think He gives a damn what happens to us." If He had, wouldn't He have stopped it?

Sam nodded, considering for a moment. He asked, "Do you believe in angels?"

"Yes," I said, somehow caught completely by surprise. Sam nodded again.

After a minute he pulled his laptop back around. I picked up my book again and tried to pay attention to the trials of Bilbo Baggins.


After that Dean declared a desire for warmer weather and Sam found us an odd little haunting on a movie set in Los Angeles. It turned out the ghosts were being controlled by a writer with a grudge against the production company; he thought his original script had been ruined by outside interference.

For all that he had done some very impressive research, he'd missed a crucial point: never destroy the artifact you're using to control summoned creatures. It only frees them—and no one likes being controlled. The best that could be said for his death was that it was quick.


"I don't like this plan," I said. Again.

"Yeah, Cas, we got that the first ten times you said it," Dean said.

"I'm with him," Sam said.

"And yet we're doing it anyway," Dean replied cheerfully, ducking out of the circle of his necklace.

"Yeah, why is that?" Sam grumbled.

"Because I'm the oldest, and I said so."

"I'm older than you are," I said dryly.

"Older than him, prettier than you, Cas," Dean said, and turned to wiggle his eyebrows at me blatantly. "And that is sayin' something." He slid his ring off as Sam made the face that meant he was trying not to think about his brother having sex.

"I don't think being the prettiest means you're in charge," Sam said.

"Sam," Dean said with a sigh. "We're committed, OK? Deacon needs help."

"This is going to prison. On purpose."

"Yeah, well, I'd take Cas with me so we could be cellmates but he's not one of the ten most wanted." Sam made the face again, but after a second he sighed and nodded.

"OK, you know where to meet us?" Dean asked me as he wrapped his amulet and ring in a bandana and tucked the packet into a corner of the trunk.

"Yes. Dean, this is a bad idea."

"It's what we got." Dean picked up his flashlight and tossed the other to Sam. "You remember to swap out your good lockpicks?"

"Yes," Sam said tightly. "Let's just...get this over with."

"Deacon will call you when it's time," Dean told me, slamming the trunk closed. "Seeya."

"Good luck," I said. The two of them walked down the alley we were parked in and turned the corner in the direction of the Museum of Anthropology.

I waited. The seconds crawled over me, interminable.

Thirty-three minutes later, the first police car drove past the alley and I sighed. There wasn't any backing out now. I got into the car, pulling Dean's keys from my pocket.

The seat felt weirdly familiar. It was the first time I'd been behind the Impala's wheel since that last drive from picking up Chuck on the way to camp. I'd driven other vehicles since, out of our motley fleet of scavenged trucks and SUVs, but Dean had taught me to drive in the Impala.

I put in a tape so that I could pretend the nervous tapping of my fingers was matching the beat of the music, and worried. This hunt must have happened the first time around; there was no way I'd changed things enough for John Winchester's former comrade-in-arms to have been affected. And I did vaguely remember being told about a haunting that took them to a prison, but I'd had the idea that it had been an abandoned prison, not one that was still in use, and I didn't remember anything like a coherent narrative. Those bits I did recall were even hazier than usual for mortal memories; far too much experience told me that I had heard the story while I was drunk, or more likely high. When I first discovered that intoxicants had begun to affect me, I spent as much of our downtime as I could arrange for stoned.

Still, they'd gotten through it the first time, so obviously they'd be fine this time as well. They were together, and their father's friend was there to watch over them. It just bothered me.

Watching over Dean was my job.

I made a sour face at myself as I pulled into the parking lot of the motel. It wasn't as if I'd always acquitted myself perfectly on that particular task. I had been the one to convince Dean to take up the knife again with Alastair; I had let him be taken by Zachariah's angels and crippled my Grace getting him out again. I hadn't been enough after his brother said yes. And now I was human, only human, and this Dean still had Sam to rely on; what did he need me for?

"Fuck," I said aloud, and put the Impala into park.

Come to think of it, there was at least fucking, right? Sam really, really couldn't provide that.

I sat in the car for most of an hour, until I was chilly and stiff.


I spent the next three days doing, essentially, nothing. We had stocked up on food before Sam and Dean left, so I didn't have to go out to eat if I didn't feel like it—which I didn't. I slept as much as I could, but there's only so much sleep the human body will accept, and anyway my dreams were bad. Similarly I couldn't just stay in the shower, for all that I was still reveling in unlimited hot water. I played pointless games on Sam's computer, and spent time on Chuck's website amusing myself with people's wildly inaccurate predictions about where the books were heading. There was still no sign of me in any of the hints Chuck dropped during his infrequent visits, a fact which I found both immensely comforting and very confusing.

The third night I went out and found a veterinary clinic.

Not all of the drugs that vets use are suitable for humans, but there's quite a lot of overlap. We always checked for vets when we were on supply runs. In my future I could have gone to a hospital, but here human hospitals were still staffed around the clock; vets rarely were.

The clinic was dark when I picked its rear door, and quiet even after I slipped inside; if there were animals being kept for the night, they were asleep or couldn't hear me. The place had an alarm system, but fortunately the lock on the drugs cabinet was extremely simple and I was through it by the time the desk phone rang.

I picked out painkillers and amphetamines, some shelf-stable antibiotics to restock the first aid kit, and two of the four vials of morphine. I carefully didn't take all of anything—the clinic's patients weren't human, but that didn't mean they deserved to be in pain. I wiped down everything I'd touched and was back out in minutes, making sure the door locked behind me. If anyone was sent to investigate the alarm, I didn't see them.

Back in the room I refilled my bottles, put the remainder in the first aid kit, and pulled out the disposable syringe I had picked up at the vet's.

Morphine is warm. Almost warm enough to be painful, when it first goes in, but very shortly you don't care anymore. It had been a while since I'd had access to any, so even the small amount I'd drawn hit me like a punch. The next time I noticed the world in any detail, it was ten in the morning. I wasn't hungry—opiates will do that, a very handy side effect—but I knew I should eat so I made a sandwich and went through the motions of chewing and swallowing it. I drank a couple of glasses of water, checked Chuck's website again, and took more morphine. My fourth day in the motel room passed very pleasantly that way, and I didn't even have to worry about Dean showing up to tell me to get my ass in gear, Cas, we need another gun on the supply run. (You deliberately wait till I'm hung over for these things, don't you? I asked, slinging my bag into the truck, and Dean threw me a sideways glance that was answer enough.)

I woke up at dawn on the fifth day with a dehydration headache but otherwise feeling fine and decided regretfully that I couldn't afford another day of indulgence. I wasn't really clear on how fast the investigation of the haunting would be moving, given the severe restraints they'd be working under, so I had to be ready to go meet them.

That day dragged. I finally went on a run, hoping to tire myself out, and ended up lightheaded because I'd forgotten to eat. Fortunately I had money with me, so I stopped for food on the way back. I was most of the way through my meal when my temporary phone rang. I nearly dropped it in my haste to get it open, but the voice that answered my greeting wasn't Dean.

"Is this Cas?" the woman asked. She sounded tense; I couldn't tell if it was excitement, fear, anger or something else entirely.

"Yes," I confirmed cautiously.

"First off, this is a disposable cell so I won't be reachable again once we hang up," she said. "A...mutual friend asked me to call you. He told me he needs you to look up a nurse who used to work at Green River County Detention Center. Her name was Glockner, she died during a prison riot in 1976. You need to find out where she's buried."

It was just a ghost, then, but more importantly Dean and Sam were all right. "Thank you," I said. "You can throw the disposable phone away."

"Wait!" she said before I could hang up. "You're their friend."

"Yes." I stood, piling the remnants of my food back onto the tray.

"They aren't what Henricksen thinks they are. They aren't killers."

I thought that over for a moment, trying to place the name—an FBI agent? That seemed right. "I can't say they have never broken the law," I said. "But they, he, did not hurt those women in Saint Louis. They aren't murderers."

She was quiet for long enough that I wondered if she was going to speak again before she said, "I defended a woman once. Looked guilty as hell, but it was the same pattern—when she got to town, the dying stopped. She said there were things...things most people don't believe in. Should I—God, I don't even know. Stock up on silver bullets or something?"

I repressed a chuckle, because it was a fair question. "Silver isn't a bad idea. Salt, holy water, iron. A lot of the things people used to use to protect themselves."

"I don't know why I believe this," she muttered, almost too quiet for the phone's speaker to pick it up.

"Because you talked to them, and you can see they aren't guilty of the things Agent Henricksen accuses them of," I said. I dumped the tray into the trash bin.

She laughed, more out of nervousness than humor, and said, "Yeah, I guess so. Look, do you have the name?"

"Glockner," I said, "Died 1976."

"Yeah." There was silence on the line for a long moment. "I'm going to help them if I can," she said.

"Thank you," I said sincerely, and hung up.


Seven and a half hours later I sat in the Impala, watching as Dean and Sam jogged across the grass towards me. They were both wearing orange prison jumpsuits.

"Heya, Cas," Dean said as he opened the driver's door. "You get the message?"

"Green Valley Cemetery," I said. "Even got the plot number."

"Awesome," Dean said. Sam climbed into the back seat. "But before we go digging I think I wanna get changed."

Sam sighed. "I'm a little worried about this Henricksen guy," he said. "I mean, I get what he thinks but it's like he's got a vendetta."

"Oh mama, I'm in fear for my life from the long arm of the law," Dean quoted. He turned the key and patted the dashboard as the Impala came to life. "Aw, baby, did you miss me?"

"The way you treat this car is creepy," Sam said. "This is the FBI, Dean, we should think about keeping our heads down for a while."

"No argument here, but right now we've got a ghost to gank." Dean tapped his fingers on the wheel for a second. "OK, Cas, where to?"


I drifted in and out of consciousness, aware of little beyond an ache in my side to match my chest. After a while it occurred to me that I didn't know where I was, and I probably ought to remedy that, so I dragged my eyes open.

The room was large, and had an institutional feel to it: cheap linoleum, dirty walls, and the door I could see had a crash bar rather than a knob. My gun lay on the floor not far from me, as if I'd dropped it. It took me a moment to realize that the piles of dirty fabric were bodies, but once I did the scene snapped into coherence.

I was back in the sanitarium. I was back in 2014. I would have laughed—started to laugh, but moving the muscles turned the pain in my side from aching to stabbing and I made myself stop. I wrapped my arm tight around the wound and closed my eyes again.

It might have been hours later, or days, or minutes, when I heard the footsteps. I didn't look; even a croat might notice that my eyes were moving, and I vastly preferred to finish bleeding out in peace rather than being eaten. That lasted until Dean said quietly, "Cas, look at me."

I wondered if I was imagining it, and laboriously opened my eyes to check. Dean looked terrible; the whole side of his face was purpling into a spectacular bruise that had his left eye swelled nearly shut and he was cradling one arm in the crook of the other, but he was alive, at least, and I smiled. "Sorry, oh Fearless Leader, but I think I'm out of time," I said, as loudly as I could manage.

"Not an option, Cas," he said, almost gentle, a tone of voice I'd forgotten he knew.

"It's all right," I said, and it really was. "It was never going to work if you didn't have—oh, fuck that hurts."

"Can you walk if I help you?"

I laughed at him until it hurt too much. He just crouched there, watching me steadily, and I said, "You're serious."

"Do I look like I'm joking?"

I stared at him for a few seconds. Dean never looked like he was joking any more. "OK," I said. "Grab my gun, would you?"

He nodded.

The walk to the vehicles was slow and excruciating. I had to stop halfway down the stairs because I couldn't face taking another step. Dean let me lean on him with no comment, which was odd enough that I noticed it even through the fog of shock, and eventually I managed to make myself move again.

As we were stumbling out the gate, I blinked and for a second I could have sworn I was back inside, somewhere cavernous and much darker than the wan sunlight. I shook my head—a mistake, it made me dizzier—and Dean said, "What?"

"Nothing," I mumbled, unable to make the word clearer.

Dean said, "Just a few more feet, and then you can sit down. Think I'm driving."

Dean had to prop me against the side of the Jeep to get the door open, and he surveyed the interior with a disapproving expression. "No good way for you to lie down," he said. "We'll strap you in so you can sleep."

"That might not be a good idea," I wheezed. He frowned some more.

"You need the rest."

"I need a lot of things. You can't get me any of them." Dean made a face of reluctant agreement that stunned me. The past-Dean I'd been interacting with in…my dream, it must have been a dream…would have made that face, but this version? It was so wrong that I didn't register Dean searching my pockets until he'd extracted my pill bottle.

He held it up and shook it. The empty bottle made no sound and he looked at me quizzically. I managed a shrug. "I finished up what I brought on the way here. The rest's back in my cabin for Chuck."

Dean's grip on the bottle tightened and for a second I thought he was going to shout at me, but then he sighed. "Shoulda known you figured it out."

"Dean," I said, and faltered. I hadn't called him by his name in a long time. He looked away and I tried to grin. I was sure it looked hideous. "Even your plans aren't usually that reckless," I said.

"Insouciant," he replied, mispronouncing the word. He just stood there for a second before saying, "OK. In the truck, we've gotta get on the road if we want to be back by dark."

Dean gave me a lone, lint-covered Tylenol he'd had in his pocket. It did precisely nothing to help, but I appreciated the gesture. I spent most of the trip in a daze of pain and exhaustion, livened up by two more of the flashes of somewhere else I'd experienced at the gate. During the second one I realized that in the flashes I wasn't hurt—at least not as badly, though I still felt drained—and it felt like my hands were tied over my head. It was disturbingly reminiscent of something, but I couldn't work out what. I resolved to think about it later; assuming I didn't actually die, I'd have plenty of time for it.

I couldn't rest properly, but Dean went out of his way to make the ride as smooth as it could be. He checked that I was still alive a few times, but otherwise he drove in silence, his lips thin and his eyes huge in his pale face. It was drawing close to dusk when I opened my eyes to find we were inside the gate, people gathering around. I assumed I had a few new scratches from checking for shapeshifting, but I hurt so much I couldn't detect them. Dean climbed out of the driver's seat and came around to my side, still not speaking. By the time he had my belt unbuckled, everyone who was left had shown up. They were all quiet too, taking their cue from him.

"Do you want to hear this, or go to the infirmary?" Dean asked me quietly.

I shrugged. "Make it quick."

He nodded, and drew a deep breath, and turned to face the solemn crowd.

"Lucifer's dead," he said, in a voice that wasn't loud but carried. A few people gasped and I saw Zoe at the back of the crowd put her hand over her mouth, but no one spoke. "Everyone else who went with us...we'll need to send people to bury them. Them and my brother." He paused. It was so quiet I could hear the dead leaves being blown over the roof of the mess hall by the breeze. "I don't know if it's going to get better, but I hope it'll stop getting worse." He stopped talking and I watched his shoulders slump a little.

"Dean," Chuck said, taking a step forward. "Do you want a hand getting...getting Cas to the clinic?"

I could tell Dean had heard the edit too, but he didn't call Chuck on it.


I don't know how long I spent in the infirmary, but every time I broke the surface of consciousness Dean was there, sitting or sleeping on one of the cots or talking to someone, low-voiced. It couldn't have been too long, because his bruise hadn't healed much by the time I realized I'd been staring at the ceiling, reasonably alert, for at least ten minutes. I turned my head and there he was, sitting in one of the uncomfortable folding chairs with a battered paperback in one hand. His right arm was in a sling.

"Tell me what happened," I said quietly.

Dean's lips tightened and I expected him to snap, or just stand and walk out, but he didn't. Instead he put his book down on the floor, open in the way Chuck always scolded people for, and shifted until his good elbow was resting on his knee. "You guys went in," he said. "I went around back. I knew he'd be out there. Dunno how I knew." His lips twisted into an approximation of a smile; it had to hurt, with that kind of bruising. "He was wearing a white suit. Looked like a revival tent preacher, Cas, it was bad. None of you have any style." I nodded to fill the space while he stopped to collect himself.

"I had the Colt in my jacket, and I shoulda just...but I was dumb. I said—I said his name." He didn't mean Lucifer. "He turned around and said, 'Hello, Dean,' and for a second I just couldn't move, you know? But I guess he could read my face or something because he got this look, like, I'm not mad, I'm just disappointed, and he said 'I hope you didn't think you could get close enough to try anything,' and I said, 'I dunno, is this close enough?' because I knew I was only gonna get one shot, but I didn't even have time to pull out the gun, they're so fast, I forgot how fast they can be." Dean stopped talking again and looked away from me. I could see the way his eyes were shining in the light of the Coleman lamp. "He was right in front of me before I could do anything. Got me a good one right across the face, and then he picked me up and threw me, actually threw me. I came down bad because I was still trying to draw on him, landed on my trick shoulder."

I missed the next few words to another flash. This one lasted a little longer, and seemed a little clearer; it was indoors, and the space was large and shadowed, maybe one of the derelict warehouses that supernatural creatures seemed to love to lair in. I could feel a hard wall at my back. That was all I got before my consciousness snapped back, to Dean watching me carefully. "If you're not up for this," he started, but I shook my head.

"I'm all right. I just greyed out for a second." Dean eyed me for a moment longer before shrugging.

"I was out of it from the throw, so I didn't get up before he got to me. He put his foot on my neck and said, 'I didn't want to have to do this, but you're very persistent.' And he smiled at me, fucker smiled at me, and it was so wrong, Cas, he couldn't even run Sam's face right, he looked like he was stoned or something. I think he was gonna break my neck."

"But he didn't," I said. I could picture it, the garden behind the asylum brown with neglect and autumn, Lucifer standing in the middle in his clean white suit, smiling down at his vessel's beloved brother.

Dean leaned back in his chair and said, "No, he didn't, and you know why?" I shook my head.

"Because of me," Dean said. "Me from five years ago. I sucker punched him to keep him out of it, but you know I always did have a hard head." Astonishingly, he smiled. It was a very small thing and didn't last more than a second, but it was real. "He came running up and Lucifer turned to look at him and said, 'Oh. Hello, Dean,' again, just like he said it to me and while he was distracted I pulled the Colt and he turned back around to me and I said, I said, 'Sammy, I'm sorry,' and I..." He choked on the next word and a tear slid from his eye. I couldn't think of anything to say. It had been years since I'd seen Dean cry. "I don't know what happened after that," he said. "I must've blacked out or something. When I woke up, young me was gone and Lucifer...well it was a bitch hauling his gigantic ass into the building but I knew I wasn't gonna be doing any grave-digging with my arm all jacked up. And then I came and found you."

He was still crying, slowly and quietly. He seemed to be ignoring it. I pushed myself closer to the wall and held out my hand in invitation. Held my breath. Dean stared at me in silence for a long time before he lurched to his feet. He took a step away, and I could have sobbed in frustration but I didn't dare make a sound.

"I killed my brother, Cas," Dean said, his back to me, staring at the curtain that covered the doorway to the rest of the clinic.

"I'm so sorry, Dean," I said. Dean stiffened, and for a second I thought I'd said the wrong thing.

But he turned and came over to my cot and sat on the edge of it. I was quiet while he unlaced his boots. We were both quiet, as he shrugged out of his jacket and swung his legs up onto the bed with me; it was a tight fit for two grown men but we'd managed worse, and we were careful with my side and his arm, and he turned and said, into the side of my neck, very softly, "I killed my brother."

"I know," I said, just as soft, and wrapped my arm around his shoulders, and let him cry.


In the morning Dean was gone. I spent the day not moving more than I could help; you don't realize until it's too late how many movements involve the muscles in your sides. I was idly attempting to put the events of my dream in order—it seemed like there should have been something after the Winchesters broke out of prison, but I could not for the life of me remember what it was—when someone pushed aside the curtain that turned my tiny alcove into a semi-private space.

"Cas!" Becky chirped. She had a tray balanced on one hip.


I was sitting at the table when Dean came in; I hadn't dared attempt the ladder to his bedroom. Breaking my neck would have made things extremely awkward.

"Cas?" he said. "What're you doing out of bed?" Then he focused on the table in front of me. "And not that I'm objecting to people being armed, but what're you planning to shoot in here?"

"That depends," I said, as calmly as I could manage. He was so much like…like he used to be, like the Dean in my dream. Except it hadn't been a dream.

"OK," Dean said slowly. He pulled out the chair at the other end and sat in it. "You're not going out until you're healed up, just so you know."

"I wasn't…Becky brought my dinner."

"OK," he said again. "What, did she talk your ear off? She's good for that."

"She always was," I agreed. "Until a year and a half ago."

Dean looked puzzled. It made me hurt, for all kinds of reasons. "I don't remember her changing a year and a half ago."

"That was when the Black Dog got past the fence," I prompted him.

"That kind of thing happens, Cas," Dean said.

"Yeah. We lost some people that time, though." Silence fell between us. "We lost Tasha, and Drew. And Becky. Chuck was broken up about it for…well, honestly, I think he still is. Or would be, if he were real." I paused, but Dean said nothing, just watched me. "The djinn. It was a djinn, I remember now. We went into the factory while Sam was back at the room. The last thing I remember is seeing your back. It must've gotten behind us—knew the ground better than we did." I realized I was babbling and made myself stop.

"We haven't seen a djinn in years," Dean said. "There was that time Sam and I went after one, but—"

"Please, just drop it," I said tightly. "This isn't…Dean, I can imagine all sorts of ways for you to react to killing Lucifer, but being able to casually say Sam's name less than two days later isn't one of them. I wished for this."

"You wished to be living through the end of the world?" Dean asked. "Sucky wish."

"I wished for it to be over," I snarled at him. I couldn't manage standing, or I would have leaned on the table for emphasis. "I wished for people to stop dying for my mistake. I wished for you—" But this wasn't really Dean and it wasn't going to do any good to argue with a figment of my imagination, and I picked up my Beretta. Dean's eyes widened in not-quite-enough alarm.

"Cas, I think you're a little out of it from whatever Terry has you on," he said. "Why don't you give me that and you can get some sleep, and we'll talk about it in the morning." He stood up and took a step towards me. I lifted the gun to my temple. Dean stopped short.

"This isn't real," I said.

"Of course it's real," Dean said, and shrugged. "It's exactly as real as you want it to be, Cas."

It was an acknowledgement, and I shuddered. Dean smiled, but it wasn't mocking; it was compassionate. "Stay," he said, softly. "Stay with me, Cas."

"It isn't real," I insisted.

"Why does that matter? You can stay, and have this. We'll rebuild, we'll heal the damage. You can belong here again." He was inching towards me.

I winced. Of course this Dean knew what I wanted. "The djinn will kill me."

"It'll be years. You'll go out a hero, we can make sure of that."

"Dean," I said, and it was very hard to keep my voice steady. "Do you love me?"

"'Course I love you, Cas," he said, casually. He was almost close enough to grab the gun.

"That's what I thought," I said, and pulled the trigger.


I struggled to open my eyes, thinking irritably that I was getting very tired of waking up in unknown but dangerous circumstances. My arms were tied over my head and my chest ached, though at least the wound I'd had in the dream was gone. At last I managed to get a look around. The space was only dimly lit, but my eyes had had plenty of time to adjust and when I rolled my head to the side I discovered I wasn't alone; there was a young woman next to me, tied up the same way. She had an IV needle in the side of her neck and she seemed to be crying in her sleep.

It took me half an hour and a fair bit of the skin on my wrists to work my hands free of the rope that bound them. Then there was the needle in my neck; pulling it out made me so dizzy I had to sit down to complete the job. I leaned against the wall for a few minutes, breathing hard until I could manage to get to my feet again. I staggered over to the girl.

She slumped against her ropes and whimpered when I withdrew her needle, but I had a feeling it was going to be a while before she even approached coherency; she was far too pale and I didn't think she'd have lasted much longer—no doubt why the djinn had taken me. My knife was still on me, though; either the djinn hadn't found it or it hadn't bothered to search. I sawed away at the ropes, having to stop frequently to rest and chase off dizziness. Eventually the ropes broke and I had to drop the knife to catch the girl as she collapsed.

As I was easing her to the floor, I heard a soft sound behind me. I got her down and turned just in time to meet the djinn's rush. Its outstretched hand and the markings on its face glowed blue; I had a flash of that hand coming around from behind me and smashing into my face, and shook it off just in time to catch the real hand and divert it from my skin. The djinn stumbled as I redirected its momentum, but recovered quickly.

The fight should have been short; djinn aren't much stronger than normal humans, and they don't tend to be good fighters, relying on their mind-bending powers for most of their defense. But I was shaky and sick, and my knife got kicked out of range early. I was reduced to trying to dodge its hands, and though we weren't in the factory I'd been taken from it still knew the ground better than I did; it backed me up over and over until I tripped over something and went down. I landed with a slam on my back and the djinn followed me, a little more gracefully. I grabbed for its wrists and got them, barely, which left me with the djinn hovering over me, using its weight to help its glowing hand bear down on my face.

I wondered distantly how long it would take for me to realize it was a dream the second time; if I'd have enough strength to try to break out once I woke up. And then, a breath before the hand would have touched my skin, the djinn made a choking noise and stiffened. The glow flickered and faded out as the djinn fell bonelessly against me. I rolled the body away, panting.

"Cas, are you OK?" Sam asked, kneeling. Behind him, Dean was scanning the rest of the room, a blood-covered knife in his hand.

"I've been better," I said, and Sam laughed.


It didn't take as long as I might have expected to recover; a solid night's sleep and one long day of lying around, getting up only to go to the bathroom, cured most of the fatigue. The djinn had only had me for about ten hours, as far as we could figure. My fellow captive was a different story, though the hospital reported that she would probably pull through.

Dean informed me seriously that, as the one whose ass had to be pulled out of the fire, it was my job to fetch dinner; Sam rolled his eyes and protested that that wasn't really a rule. Whether it was or not, I didn't mind, and ended up dispatched to a nearby diner, cash in my pocket and orders in mind. The place wasn't terribly busy, so I once I'd ordered I took a stool at the counter to wait for our food. I leaned my head on my folded hands and tried not to think about the djinn's dream. It shouldn't have been that seductive; even assuming that the Apocalypse had been completely halted by Lucifer's death, that life would have been dangerous and difficult, no matter what the false Dean had said about rebuilding.

But that Dean had been my Dean, the one I'd lived and bled through five mortal years with. And the real Dean was not him, and no matter how much time I spent here I would never have him back. I drew a deep breath and tried not to sigh too loudly.

"I was going to tell you you're in my spot, but from the sound of it you need it more than I do," someone said. I jerked in surprise and turned to find the next stool occupied by a middle-aged man, short but powerfully built, his dark hair going grey at the temples. He raised one eyebrow at me.

"My apologies," I said. "I can move, I'm just waiting-"

"Nah, it's fine," he said, waving a hand in dismissal. "I like to pretend I'm a regular around here but it's not like I have a reservation or anything." He continued to watch me, even when the waitress came over to take his order of a hot fudge sundae. I began to wonder if I might be missing some social cue that should have been obvious-even now, that happened, especially when dealing with someone I didn't know well.

Finally, he said, "So not to sound like your shrink or anything, but you look like a man with something on his mind."

"In a manner of speaking," I said.

"Go on."

I sighed again, shorter this time, but there wasn't any reason not to, was there? "I was...reminded recently of someone I used to know. It's uncomfortable."

"Looks to me like there's more to it than that," he said.

"Isn't there always?"

"Point," he conceded easily, and held out his hand. "Nunzio," he said. "You can call me that, I don't use my first name."

"Cas," I replied. We shook.

"Well, Cas, here's some free advice, worth exactly what you're paying for it: focus on what you've got and don't settle for dreams."

I blinked at him and he shrugged. "What? I thought it sounded profound."

I was saved from answering by the waitress, who piled my take-out boxes on the counter with a practiced flourish. "It was nice to meet you," I said, extracting a tip from my money to give her.

"You too. Hey, honey, can I get a slice of pie to go with my ice cream?"

I smiled and said, "I have a friend who's very fond of pie."

"Your friend clearly has good taste. Look out for him...or her, I don't like to assume."

"I'm trying to," I said, and Nunzio glanced at me, a strange smile on his lips.

"I can see that," he said, as the waitress set his sundae down.