The television show "Supernatural" is copyrighted by Warner Brothers Entertainment, Inc. This chapter contains dialogue excerpts from the episode, "It's the Great Pumpkin, Sam Winchester."
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The pretty 19-year-old waitress with an alluring swing to her walk hesitated on the sidewalk. She and her best friend had just parted ways at her friend's apartment, and she herself only had a few more blocks to walk, but something about a rustle in the bushes or the fact that a street lamp was out seemed to give her pause.
She looked around, down, up. Even with the streetlight out, she could see how the branches of a tree ten feet up had been miraculously bent and curled, woven into the shape of a pentacle with figures around and in the center of the star.
She gestured. A rush of wind went through the tree, snapping and popping the branches back into place.
"Oh, please," she said aloud. "Is that the best – "
Castiel was in front of her, seized her with one arm and slammed the other hand to her forehead.
She gasped as her eyes sparked. She tried to break his grip and couldn't. Reddish light was shooting from her head, making her horrific true face visible through Katie's as though by lightning flashes. This much contact for this long should have destroyed her ten seconds ago.
Then she collapsed. He wasn't prepared for the sudden weight on his arm, but managed to keep hold of her as they both fell. In the fall she got her hands free, used them to force his hand away from her head. He lifted his other hand, but with both arms in the air he could be flipped over, and she did, rolling and vanishing the instant she was free of his grip.
Castiel sat up on the sidewalk with a disgusted look.
"Mm, that was fun," Katie's voice giggled, her voice rich with sensual promise. "That's as close as anyone's come in a long time."
Castiel looked up. Lilith was perched with superhuman ease on one of the tree's branches.
"You don't think I can get up there?" he asked.
"I do. I also think I can go to the very top of this tree and jump. I think poor Katie might land on her head on the sidewalk."
"There's no need for that." Castiel stood, brushing the palms of his hands against each other. "Your plot here is done, Lilith. The seal is safe, and I've sent for reinforcements."
"You have? I wonder where they are?"
Castiel wondered that too. He was not eager to get into it with Lilith one-on-one again. She was a demon as old as humanity and had gained strength every year of her life; he was lucky even to have laid hands on her.
"We've almost finished the counter for your spear," he told her. "No more angels will be dying of despair."
She flipped a hand. "Yeah, I figured that one wouldn't last forever. Sure was fun, though. Watching your brothers kill themselves."
"We'll have a counter to the knife soon, too. Your soldiers will be weaponless."
A slight hesitation; then, "Go for it."
"I know why you came to the meeting tonight. At first I couldn't understand it. You were well hidden, you could have simply skipped the meeting and I wouldn't have known where you were. But you were hoping that I would make a scene or attack you. You know that Lorraine's very fragile, and if you could have caused me to do something like attacking her best friend, screaming that she's possessed by a demon, it would have pushed Lorraine further in – whatever direction you want her to go."
"Aren't you the clever one?" Lilith sat up a little straighter and her tone went from mocking to businesslike. "Actually, you are, aren't you? You're Castiel."
Personal attention from a demon. Never a good thing. But the longer she talked, the better chance this his help would arrive. "Ah – yes, I'm Castiel. But I'm not especially clever."
"You're not? Let's see. One of the leaders of your battalion or outpost or whatever you call it. You figured out where a seal was all by your little self and came here to protect it. That performance tonight, just by itself, that was amazing. You sat in a church six feet from me and talked about sacrifice, kept shoring up Lorraine's shaky little base in reality, even got in a shot at the minister about sinners eventually paying for their sins. All the time looking like butter wouldn't melt in your mouth. Would it? By the way?"
"I've never tried."
"It seems like there was one more thing – Oh. Yes. Pulled Dean Winchester out of Hell right under Alastair's nose." She gave a sensual chuckle, Katie's eyes going opaque white for a moment. "You can't imagine the things he's done to human souls since then, pretending they were you."
It was like she was trying to stall him while he stalled her. He stretched out his senses – Lorraine was asleep at her apartment, Mahon watching TV at his home, all quiet at the church –
"That was entirely a group effort. If it hadn't been for my brethren finding the right place and constructing a passageway – "
"Right, right. Blah, blah. Do you think I don't know? Don't let this girlish face fool you, I've been around for awhile and I know exceptional when I see it. Most of your sibs would've taken one step into Alastair's workroom and run screaming. They'd still be playing ring-around-the-rosy down there, and Dean would be about two years from going to Earth and eviscerating his friends, if they hadn't had you to send down."
He understood suddenly. She wasn't trying to stall him. She was trying to turn him. "I'm afraid I can't acknowledge the truth of your flattery. Or return it."
"So tell me, Castiel, what does someone exceptional like you deserve, where Heaven's concerned? What rewards do you get?"
"Our rewards are in currency you couldn't possibly understand."
"Probably not. I'm a simple girl, I like simple pleasures. The wind in my hair, absolute power, being able to take a meatsuit out for a really good run – "
"The last – " He swallowed, controlled his voice. "The last vessel you took was a nine-year-old girl who's now in an insane asylum."
"Yes." Then, seductively, "Well. I can enjoy adult pleasures, too."
He went from indignation to near-laughter in an instant, dangerously uncontrolled. "Do you forget that I can see how vile you really are?"
She braced one claw on the tree trunk, leaned forward a little, and their gazes locked. "Do you know how compelling vileness can be? Mothers call mud vile while their toddlers roll around in it. Politicians call sex vile right before they rut with whores. Bureaucrats call fascist power vile right before they submit to it completely. Everything in creation reaches toward the base, because when there's nothing you won't do, there's nothing you can't do."
They looked at each other for a long moment.
Then Castiel said, "Get out of that poor girl and go back to Hell where you belong."
Katie made a disgusted little moue, which on Lilith's real face defied description. "May as well. I've already wound up the little toys and put them on the floor. They're going to smash into the nearest wall whether I'm there or not. You think about what I said, Castiel. Do you know what Hell's rewards are for its winners? Anything. Anything we want. You think about that when they're torturing you in some Heavenly re-education camp because your abilities scare them. You know you're not suited to bending over for winged egomaniacs. You know you're much better suited to cracking the whip in Hell." She shrugged. "Metaphorically or literally."
Katie's head slammed back, her jaw gaped, and she screamed as a funnel of black smoke erupted from her mouth.
She collapsed, unconscious. Castiel had her before she could fall off the branch, and brought her gently to the ground.
She woke up on the sidewalk at night with a strange man hovering over her. She gasped, choked, struck out with one hand. "It's all right," Castiel said, letting a calming energy flow from him. "I'm not going to hurt you. You fainted."
She coughed, tried to sit up. "Where is this? What happened?"
"You're by Kensington Park. Are you all right?"
"My throat hurts."
A sustained scream and microscopic traces of sulfur will do that to you. He used his thumb and two fingers to touch either side of her throat gently. "Better?"
"Yeah. Much." She tried to sit up again and made it this time. "God, what's going on? I'm not even drunk."
"What's the last thing you remember?"
"Leaving work. But it's dark. That must have been hours ago."
Probably days, maybe even weeks. Lilith had wiped Katie's memory, and Katie wouldn't be able to tell him anything about Lilith's plans to break the seal. But it was just as well. If she hadn't been able to give the girl amnesia, Lilith would have simply killed her.
Castiel helped Katie up and walked her the rest of the way home. He'd let her parents break it to her that she'd been walking around for days and apparently had no memory of it. He went back to Athens Declaration Church, just to keep an eye on things.
Zachariah had told him that if he had incontrovertible proof that the church was the site of a seal, he could send for assistance. You don't get more incontrovertible than Lilith sauntering around in a church, and he had sent for assistance, and it still wasn't here.
It bothered him. It bothered him that both Amenerat and Lilith had called him special, exceptional. The temptation to pride was enormous, and pride was the father of all other sins.
Why had Lilith thought she could induce pride in him, buy him with promises of degrading power? His emotionalism, of course. He must have looked like a kaleidoscope to Lilith: twist him and see a whole new pattern of light and color each time.
As it turned out, there were good reasons why Castiel's reinforcements had never arrived. Another seal had been broken. Two more angels were found dead on two different continents, far from any battles, both killed by a knife to the base of the throat. And in a small town in North America, a powerful and well-hidden witch was preparing to raise the demon god Samhain.
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"Destroying the entire town," Castiel said carefully, "seems an overreaction."
"An overreaction?" Uriel looked like Castiel had proposed debating whether two and two equaled four. "We know the witch is in the town, but we cannot find her. Or him. We have six hours before Samhain rises. When he rises, he will raise untold monsters and demons from Hell. Before we can kill all of them, they will have killed thousands. And we will be one seal closer to Lucifer destroying millions. And you think the destruction of one small town is an overreaction?"
Castiel faced Zachariah. "Humans aren't as likely to write this off as God's wrath or unexplained tribulation now, you know. They will require an explanation, and the search for that explanation may cause – "
"Oh, they'll have an explanation," Zachariah said casually. "Gas lines. A meteor. A meteor into gas lines. We won't give them a reason to think that Heaven is capriciously violent."
"The Winchesters are already there. It's very possible that they may be able to find this witch and stop her."
"In six hours?" Uriel scoffed. "Castiel, your fondness for humans may be useful, but it blinds you sometimes."
Castiel resisted the temptation to pull rank – especially since Zachariah could pull rank on both of them. "It simply seems more efficient to ask the Winchesters how close they are to destroying the witch before we destroy the entire town. And we'd have to see them anyway, to be sure they leave town in time."
"To be sure Dean leaves town in time," Uriel said. "The other is just baggage, isn't he?"
But Zachariah was looking at Castiel. "Wait. I like that idea," he said. "Ask the Winchesters what we should do."
Uriel exploded, "God's warriors should ask mud monkeys – "
"OK, OK, no need to get hysterical," Zachariah said. "Just – just present it to them. We're going to destroy the town to kill a witch who's raising Samhain – you two get out now. And then do what they say. Specifically, what Dean says." Zachariah nodded and smiled. "Yes, the more that I think about this, the better I like it. If they refuse to let you destroy the town, and they stop the summoning, all's well that ends well. If they refuse to let you destroy the town, they fail, and thousands of people die – maybe that'll teach Dean who knows best about these things in the future. And if they don't refuse and simply ask for enough time to get out of town before it's destroyed, that'll tell us how compliant Dean will be when we're ready for him to play his part."
"What does that part consist of?" Castiel asked.
Zachariah turned a gaze on him as hard as blue diamonds.
"I beg your pardon, sir," Castiel said.
Zachariah let a moment pass before he smiled again. "The hard part for you two is going to be letting Dean learn a lesson, which means no swooping in at the last moment to save the day. If the Winchesters let the seal get broken, and we're one step closer to Hell on Earth, maybe that will teach them to listen to their betters next time."
"But – " from Castiel and Uriel both.
"You have your orders. Which are, follow Dean Winchester's orders and let him live with the consequences. And I mean that, Uriel," he said, shaking a finger gently as at a naughty child. "None of your 'What Zach doesn't know won't hurt him.' If a thousand people suddenly vacate the Earth all at once, I'll know. Dump it on Winchester's shoulders. See what he does with it."
What he did with it, little to Castiel's surprise, was get angry. He was rather accustomed to Dean's being angry with him by now. What took Castiel by surprise was Sam.
It was the first time he'd met in person the boy with demon blood, the demon whore's consort, and Castiel had been unprepared for the open pleasure Sam showed on meeting a real angel, or for the horrified disillusionment that flooded Sam when Castiel told the Winchesters why he and Uriel were here.
"Look, even if you can't understand it, have faith," Castiel told them. "The plan is just."
Sam's voice was shocked into quiet. "How can you even say that?"
"Because it comes from Heaven. That makes it just."
With a sudden shock he realized: I don't even believe that myself.
He scrambled to hide that self-hating shiver from Uriel, while continuing to present Heaven's case to Dean, while continuing a small rebellious prayer he'd been holding in his head since the meeting with Zachariah: Please, God, let it not be necessary. Please, God, let Winchester decide to take the risk.
Prayers to God didn't have to be hidden from other angels. They were always safely private.
In fact, as it turned out, Winchester didn't even consider it a decision.
"If you're gonna smite this whole town," he said, moving to within a foot of Uriel, "then you're gonna have to smite us with it, because we are not leaving."
Startled, Castiel checked Sam's energy. It was angry, resolute, and humming in perfect resonance with Dean's. Dean hadn't even had to glance at Sam to see how his brother felt about this sacrifice. Both of them had the same values and knew each other in a way that reminded Castiel of the connection he had with other angels.
"You went to the trouble of bustin' me out of Hell," Dean continued, "I figure I'm worth something to the man upstairs. So you want to waste me? Go ahead. See how He digs that."
Castiel's energy leaped, a wide bright generous flare that he suppressed fast for later examination. Fortunately, Uriel was so irate at not being able to pinch the offensive mud monkey into a lifeless mass that he wasn't noticing Castiel.
"Castiel, I will not let these – "
"Enough!" he said sharply to Uriel, and to the Winchesters, "I suggest you work quickly," before the two angels absented themselves.
They stayed in town, but stayed away from the Winchesters, suppressed the energy that would let them follow what was happening, bickered with each other, and prayed.
Castiel had a lot to pray about, evils and weaknesses he didn't dare let Uriel see. That stab of doubt he'd felt when he'd told Sam that if the plan came from Heaven, that automatically made the plan just. He tried saying it to himself with conviction, over and over, but the conviction simply wasn't there. He couldn't make himself believe it, which was horrific. Every other angel he knew would have accepted that without question. Except Anaciel, of course.
That was twice that he'd compared himself to Anaciel, which showed what a damned road he was traveling. He somehow had to accept what his angelic family told him, because he certainly wasn't going to sever himself from them. It would be traitorous, and justice would require that they kill him. If he were severed from his angelic family, he wasn't sure he'd want to exist anyway.
Even if he wanted to, how? Gabriel had somehow disappeared without punishment, but Gabriel had an archangel's powers. Anaciel had apparently disappeared by falling to Earth as the surge of life force in a human woman's womb, and if they ever found which 20-year-old human was actually an angel wrapped in a mortal body, she'd be killed.
He simply wanted to understand and be at peace with Heaven's decisions. He had no desire to be an isolated fugitive, a traitor, a powerless human infant.
Particularly because, if he became the latter, he would never see Dean Winchester again.
He had figured it out, that flare of feeling when Dean had stood in front of a creature a thousand times more powerful than he in utter defiance. It was admiration.
He admired Dean Winchester. Or, as Uriel would have put it, an angel admired a mud monkey.
He knew that was wrong, but he didn't know why. Even when he tried to bar all emotion and simply understand it intellectually, he couldn't understand why it was wrong for him to admire a human being.
True, he had seen Dean when the man was less than subhuman, a blood-splattered mutilated sadist that even now it turned his vessel's stomach to think about. But didn't that make it all the more admirable that he had risen above that murderous rage when he got his life back?
But he knew what they would all say, Uriel and Zachariah and Raphael himself: An angel can't admire a human because humans aren't admirable because an angel can't admire them. If a plan comes from Heaven it's just because it comes from Heaven, therefore it's just.
He desperately needed someone to talk to. Oh, he could talk to God, but he needed a reaction, another point of view. There were mentors and advisors in Heaven, and some of the younger angels even had friends. But he certainly couldn't trust any angel with the knowledge of his doubt. Actually, he knew of only one being in Heaven or Earth he would trust –
There was an upsurge in demonic influence so strong and malevolent that it blasted even into his and Uriel's suppressed energy fields, and they both knew instantly that Samhain had risen. Another seal on Lucifer's cage had been broken.
Uriel gave Castiel the I-told-you-so look of all time, and Castiel bowed his head.
"Well?" Uriel's tone was far from respectful. "How many monsters do we let rise, how many people do we let them kill, before we start smiting the creatures and Samhain?"
Castiel swallowed.
"Six hundred. Six hundred human deaths before we take a hand."
Uriel shrugged agreement.
That will surely be enough to teach Dean his lesson, Castiel thought, and at the same time, half of the town will have survived, so he'll know his decision saved six hundred.
There had been one death immediately after Samhain's rise, and Castiel began his count. The two angels let their energy stretch out so they could follow what was happening. Samhain was on the move, in a human vessel, on foot, slowly. He probably wasn't accustomed to being in a physical form yet, but that would come fast. At least there were no more deaths yet, but there would be, and the waiting was horrible.
He was at a cemetery. His mere presence was raising zombies, tiny bubbles of demonic energy floating along on Samhain's tidal wave. There were living people there.
"Why are there living people in a mausoleum at midnight?" Uriel demanded.
"Hallowe'en," Castiel said. "Probably young people on a dare."
He buried his face in his hands. Two deaths.
Suddenly the energy of the zombies began disappearing. Someone was fighting them, and Castiel would have recognized that energy on the other side of the planet. Dean was destroying zombies and saving lives, and Castiel would have smiled, except that Samhain was moving someplace hallowed, probably a chapel on the cemetery grounds to complete a blasphemous rite, and now the real horror would begin –
And then there was another violent upsurge of energy, a wild blend of demonic power and human determination, and the tidal wave was halted, hanging, straining to overcome the human-demon blend, and while Castiel had felt that blended power before he was sure Uriel never had.
"To Hell with this waiting," Uriel said crisply, and vanished.
Castiel followed him to the chapel. He was glad Uriel had decided to arrive invisible, as he did himself, but the unprecedented look of petrified astonishment on Uriel's face probably meant that even if he'd been visible, he couldn't have moved.
Sam Winchester stood with one arm extended, shaking as though he were bracing a wall against a hurricane. His eyes were narrowed until almost only his pupils were visible, he was sweating and his nose was bleeding. But he was holding a demon god at bay with superhuman power.
Samhain strained to get at the human. He was trying to lift his arms, shoot energy from his eyes, even take a step, but he could do none of it. What he could do was cough up black smoke. With furious resistance, but surely, the demon was leaving its vessel.
The dam burst, black smoke gushed from the vessel's mouth, and Dean made it to the chapel door just as Sam returned Samhain to Hell with one extended, shaking arm.
Samhain's vessel fell dead. Dean stared at Sam with a look comically like Uriel's.
Then Sam saw his brother. "Do you need – " he began, gagged and collapsed.
The two angels watched as Dean helped Sam out of the chapel.
"Did you see that boy's soul?" Uriel asked.
Castiel had. It had already been spotted with small red droplets, but as they had watched the struggle with Samhain a new stain had bled onto Sam's soul, larger than the others, pride and lust for power that the boy himself probably only felt subconsciously.
"No human being can handle demonic power. I don't care where it's coming from or how good he thinks his intentions are. I'm going to – "
"How do you know," Castiel interrupted, "that Zachariah isn't planning to make use of the boy's ability?"
He didn't know, of course. After a moment, Uriel shook his head. "Very well. I'll take no action. But I'm going to talk to that Earthworm. If Zachariah wants to use him, he can come over and tell Sam himself."
"Not tonight, though," Castiel said. "He's physically exhausted, and you may as well lecture a felled tree. Tomorrow morning you can put the fear of God into him."
Although actually, Castiel thought wryly, Uriel would probably be putting the fear of Uriel into him.
Uriel got his chance the next day, when Dean took a walk to a park and sat watching children play while Sam finished cleaning up and packing.
Castiel appeared on the bench next to Dean's. He expected more anger when Castiel told him that their threat to level the town – genuine as it had been – had basically been a test. But Dean that morning was calm, relaxed, and as close to philosophical as he got. His joy in protecting life was so profound, so deeply rooted in the four-year-old who'd carried his infant brother out of a burning building, that it could have almost lit the park with additional sunshine – if it hadn't been for the shadow what would now always be on his soul. Castiel had been in Dean's dreams, had seen him when he woke, and he knew Dean remembered what he had become in Hell.
Castiel spoke a little of his fondness for humans, how they seemed to him like God's works of art, although it might in the future be necessary to destroy some of them in order to save all of the rest from the Apocalypse. He hated to throw that additional shadow onto Dean, but it was important that he understand. There was a twitch at the corner of Dean's eyes, and Castiel heard himself saying, "Can I tell you something, if you promise not to tell another soul?"
"OK."
"I'm not a – hammer, as you say. I have questions, I have – I have doubts. I don't know what is right and what is wrong anymore, whether you passed or failed here."
He was ashamed of himself suddenly. An angel of the Lord was going to burden a human with his spiritual struggles? He'd seen human parents who leaned on their children for emotional support, and this was a hundred times more embarrassing – especially given that this human had some kind of role to play, whatever it was, in preventing the Apocalypse.
"But in the coming months you will have more decisions to make," he said, changing the subject back to Dean himself. "I don't envy the weight that's on your shoulders, Dean. I truly don't."
He went back to Zachariah to report, but Uriel had already made the report. Again, Zachariah seemed strangely calm about the breaking of another seal, but agreed readily when Castiel said he wanted to go back to La Lluvia to check on the situation there.
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Lilith's influence couldn't be felt anywhere, but that didn't mean some plot of hers wasn't still unwinding. There was a reason why she'd chosen to take over the confidante of an emotionally unstable woman, and short of making every knife in town disappear, keeping a close watch on Lorraine seemed to Castiel the best way to guard the seal.
He found her sitting on a bench in the same park where Lilith had left Katie just a few days before. She was hunched intently over the same large Bible, highlighting passages again.
"It's Lorraine, isn't it?" he asked quietly.
She started, looked up. Then she pushed her hair back from her eyes and smiled quickly. "Yeah, hi. I'm sorry, I don't remember your name."
"It's Cass. You have a good view of the park from here."
She moved over and gathered up some of her papers to make room for him. "Katie told me you helped her last week, when she fainted. She was sorry she was so out of it that night. She said she must've acted like a zombie."
The faintest hint of a smile touched his face. "Not in the least. How is she doing?"
"OK, considering. You know she lost her memory?"
"She doesn't know who she is?"
"Oh, no, she knows that. But when you walked her home that night she was thinking it was October 4th."
"That must have been a shock."
"No kidding. Her parents have been having a bunch of tests done, but no one can figure it out yet. Anyway, they know it's not brain cancer."
"Well, that's a blessing."
"It is. I've been praying for her." She looked down at the open Bible. "So weird. She gave me back a jacket today that she found in her closet, and she didn't remember she borrowed it from me two weeks ago. She didn't even remember a really intense conversation we had last week."
A really intense conversation with Lilith. Castiel scanned Lorraine's spirit quickly. There was a memory of her saying "The church needs him. And he needs me," with a mixture of joy, tension and defiance. And there was a very vivid picture of Katie leaning forward, her eyes sympathetic, saying, "I just don't want you to get hurt." Lilith was very good; there wasn't even a flicker, not so much as a gleam in the eye, indicating that that was exactly what she wanted.
Castiel realized that a grown man and virtual stranger wouldn't ask a 20-year-old girl about an intense conversation with her best friend. But if he kept her talking, she might tell him more. He glanced down at her open Bible.
"It appears you're studying hard for the next class," he said.
She looked down also, her fingers moving a bit as if she'd cover both large pages with one little hand. About half of the verses were highlighted, some in yellow, some in blue. Some other passages were also heavily underlined. "Ask S" she'd written in one margin, and on top of one page, the word "No!" underlined twice.
"I'm trying to understand," she said. "People don't take their Bibles seriously enough."
"That may be true."
She looked up at him directly. "It is true! They don't even care! And if you do care, they act like you're crazy."
"Does studying the Bible give you joy?" he asked quietly.
Her gaze went back down again. "It used to. It used to – "
She smiled at him. "It used to speak to me. I'd pick it up and I could understand it so easily, like angels were singing it to me."
He could feel her memory of it: elation and enlightenment, a sense of having been specially selected.
"But now – the last couple of years – I try to understand and it's all closed. It's like one of those seashells curling in and in on itself. I don't know what I did wrong."
"I doubt if you did anything wrong. The Bible reveals more, becomes more complex, as you read it. What seems simple and straightforward to a child may actually be very complex to an adult."
"But it's the truth!" There was even more agitation in her soul than her pinched face showed. "How are you – how are you supposed to know what the truth is, what to do, if you can't understand it?"
"There are two things we know without question. We are to love God. And we are to love our neighbors as we love ourselves. It seems to me that it is as much as a person can do just to follow both of those commands."
She was looking back at her Bible, running a fingertip over one of the highlighted passages. "Maybe."
"Of course, for some people, the difficulty is in loving themselves as much as they love others."
"That's bull. People say that all the time. 'If you just learn to love yourself, everything else is easy.' That's just vainglory. Vainglorious people don't love other people, and they don't lead righteous lives."
"True. The difficulty is with the word 'love.' It can mean so many things. But if you think of love in its best possible sense – understanding without judgment, compassion without weakness, caring without fear – that seems more than vainglory."
"Maybe."
"Katie seems a little different from you. Not so – devoted to the Bible. The night that I found her, she told me she was surprised that she wasn't drunk."
Lorraine smiled. "Yeah, that sounds like her. She likes to pretend that she's a complete wild child."
"She's wilder than you, though."
"Well, yes. But don't judge her. She's very sweet, and she cares about people. I worry when she goes out with her drinking buddies, but you know she'd never hurt anyone but herself. When I talk about God, or the Bible, she's about the only one who doesn't look at me like I'm insane. She's helped me a lot over the last year."
"She feels a little like an outsider too."
"Yeah." She smiled a little. "She calls us 'the geeks of Athens.' You know, because of the church name."
"So if you were to love yourself as you love Katie, with the same depth of understanding, would that be vainglorious?"
He'd thought it was obvious where he was leading her, but it caught her by surprise. "I never – Easy to say, though."
"I know that consideration of a possibility is frequently easier than its accomplishment."
She giggled, and her energy warmed. "Do you mind – This is a personal question, but do you mind if I ask where you come from?"
"It's far away. You may not have heard of it."
She waited for a little more information, then shifted her gaze. "I'm sorry if that was too personal. I just like the way you talk. Do you get homesick?"
"Sometimes, yes."
"I'm glad you found the church. We – they – we try to be welcoming to strangers." Her energy was warmer still, and her heart was beating faster.
He'd have felt worse if he hadn't known that his brothers and sisters were making the same mistake all over the planet at that moment. When you haven't mingled personally with humans in hundreds or thousands of years, it's easy to forget that an angel's certainty and knowledge can be very attractive to humans. But it couldn't have been further from the goal he was trying to reach. He wanted Lorraine to start finding joy within herself, not in another man.
Jimmy, his vessel, got him out of it. Had this been something he'd used once, as a married man, to shut down a girlish crush? Castiel didn't know. He just knew that his stomach flexed, and suddenly he emitted a long, loud belch.
Lorraine flinched, looked away with a cross between displeasure and amusement. She was still smiling, but the idolatry was gone from her energy in a moment.
"I beg your pardon," he said. "I had a Mexican for lunch."
She looked confused, then amused, but his attention was suddenly gone, focused on a message only he could hear:
Anaciel is found. Report.
"I must take something for stomach distress," he told Lorraine, standing. "Consider whether wanting the best for oneself is necessarily vainglorious."
He walked quickly toward the parking lot by the park, stepped behind a delivery van, and was gone.