Bela stood outside of Pamela's hospital room, solemnly trying to stop staring at the bandages wrapped around the resting woman's eyes. She had been out of ICU for almost an hour now, but a largely selfish part of Bela didn't want to even think about what it looked like under the gauze secured around her head. After all, Bela was an ample reason why Pamela was even laying in that hospital bed in the first place, right?

Out of the corner of her eye, Bela could see Dean approaching her, his hands in his pockets and his expression tense. He had just gotten done speaking to the police, having given them a fabricated story that Bela couldn't bring herself to hear the details of, though it seemed to be believable enough, as the cops weren't pushing the subject much further.

"Hey," Dean greeted quietly, glancing briefly—guiltily—through the window into Pamela's room before setting his eyes on Bela's exhausted-looking frame. "What did the doctors say?"

"Nothing we didn't already suspect," she replied quietly, tearing her eyes away from Pamela's sleeping form but not being able to look at Dean just yet. "She's permanently blind."

Bela could see Dean's fists ball at his sides and she winced as his body tensed beside her. "God damn it," he growled out the words through clenched teeth, as if it was taking all of the effort in his body to not shout. "I should have thought of another way to find some answers. I shouldn't have let Bobby call her."

A shaky hand being raised to the mark on Dean's shoulder instantly made him tense up, though he relaxed once he realized it was only Bela trying to calm him down. He glanced at her briefly out of the corner of his eye before honing in on an invisible spot on the ground above his feet.

"This is not just on you," Bela said sympathetically, although her voice didn't lack any edge. "Don't put all the blame on yourself, Dean."

"But—"

"Pamela knew what she was getting into," Bela said, and although she felt disgusted with herself as the words crept past her lips, she knew that what she was saying was completely right. By the way Dean's jaw clenched, he knew she was right, too. "Bobby and Sam tried to stop her. She wanted to keep going. This is not your fault, Dean. If anything, it's what did this to her who should be blamed."

Dean was quiet for a moment before he sucked in a shaky breath. Bela had since dropped her hand from his shoulder, but he could still feel the mark underneath his shirt coursing with dull heat.

Wanting to change the subject, Dean swallowed. "Where are Bobby and Sam, anyway?"

"Bobby's talking to the doctors. He told them that he's Pamela's father, so they've been asking him a bunch of questions. For the meantime, he's gonna stay here and watch over her," Bela explained, running a hand through her honeyed locks. "Sam disappeared a while ago. Said he needed to get some fresh air."

Dean nodded, gritting his teeth. "He probably went to go find anything related to this 'Castiel' bastard. I don't blame him."

"Do you want to go find him?"

The older Winchester sighed before shaking his head. "No, it's…uh, it's best to just leave him alone when he's doing research. If he really wanted me to come along, he would've asked. Anyway, I think I'm going to go for a drive. Being here is making me…."

Bela glanced at him in understanding. "Anxious. I know the feeling."

Dean chewed his lip thoughtfully. "Do you want to come?" he was probably going to regret it later, but if Bela was feeling anything like he was at the moment, she could probably use a break. It was selfish of both of them, leaving Pamela just like that, but like Bela said, Bobby would still be with her, and Dean was beginning to feel as if the hospital walls were closing in on him.

"Yeah. Sure." Bela sniffed, turning and walking side-by-side Dean as they left the hospital and approached the Impala. Once inside, Dean flicked on the music to give them an excuse to not talk to one another, much to Bela's gratitude, and she leaned her head against the doorframe as Dean pulled out of the hospital's parking lot and back onto the street.

Bela felt a bit hypocritical for the speech she had told Dean outside of Pamela's room; she knew that she had been right, but that didn't mean she didn't feel the guilt bearing down on her shoulders anyway. Any of the four of them could have stopped Pamela if they absolutely wanted to, but their own curiosity and desperation for some truth about Bela and Dean's uprising from hell proved to be more of an important factor to them than general safety, if Pamela's own sacrifice was any indication. Pamela herself wanted answers just as badly, but still, that wasn't an excuse for the rest of them not stopping the psychic from going too far.

Dean suddenly pulled the Impala into a parking lot belonging to a quaint-looking diner, not saying a word to Bela as he put the car in park and clambered out, shutting the door behind him. She followed him quietly inside, an overhead bell jingling as they pushed the front door open and stepped inside the diner, signaling their arrival.

A waitress greeted them, her smile tight, before Dean and Bela followed her to a table in the center of the restaurant. They sat down and studied the menus, and after the waitress came back to take their orders, she tucked the order ticket into the front pocket of her apron and sat down at the table with them, crossing her legs at the knee.

"I didn't know this was a lunch for three," Bela hummed, despite all of her senses going off in full alert as the waitress looked at her, unamused.

Dean frowned at the woman suspiciously. "What the hell is going on?"

The waitress tsked under her breath, her eyes suddenly going black as she blinked. "For someone who's actually been to hell, I would have expected you to take to using the term more lightly."

Dean was just about to pull out a bottle of holy water from his back pocket when the waitress held up a hand and signaled for the two humans to look around the room. When they did, they were greeted with dozens of pairs of black eyes watching them as every other "person" in the room glared threateningly at the two humans sitting at the table.

"Don't act so surprised," the waitress continued, lowering her head. "You were looking for us, after all, weren't you?"

Dean gritted his teeth. "That'd be my brother. But, what the hell, I'm up to offing a couple demon a-holes today. What about you, Bela?"

"Cute," the demon narrowed her eyes at him and put on a fake smile. "Dean Winchester and Bela Talbot, plucked from hell like feathers from a rotting chicken. Tell me. How does it feel to be tossed back into the frying pan?"

"Is that a diner pun? If so, I think you need to switch up your sense of humor. I didn't realize demons were so corny—" Dean was interrupted as the demon-waitress snapped her fingers in the air, bringing his attention to her as she stared at him menacingly.

"Enough. Who dragged you out of the pit?"

Dean smiled smugly at the demon questioning them. "Above your pay grade, is it?"

Bela looked apprehensively at Dean. Was he trying to get them killed?

"Watch your tone, boy, or I'll send you back down myself—"

Dean laughed. Actually laughed. If they survived this ordeal, Bela was going to murder him herself. "Nah, I don't think so," he taunted, leaning forward to look the demon in the eye. "I don't think you've got the juice to do all that."

"Excuse me?" the waitress seethed, though Bela could see traces of hesitation in her eyes. Bela sat straighter and tilted her chin up towards the demon.

"He's right, isn't he? Of course, if he's wrong, you could just send us back to hell now; save you the headache of listening to him taunt you any longer." Bela smirked as the demon grit her teeth angrily, her fingers tightening on the edge of the table, though she didn't do anything else but that.

"Thought so," Dean scoffed, scooping up his car keys from the table. "Before you try to threaten us again, I suggest you work on practicing your poker face."

As Bela and Dean stood up, the demon had no choice but to watch them walk out the diner's door, the bell jingling above their heads as they left.

Outside, once she was sure that none of the demons were following them, Bela let out a shaky breath. "Are you suicidal?"

As they got inside of the Impala, Dean frowned. "What're you talking about?"

"I'm talking about in there. How were you so sure that they wouldn't attack us?"

Dean turned the key in the ignition and backed out of the diner, focusing on putting as much space between them and the demons as quickly as possible. "I wasn't."

"What?"

"I've played enough hands of Texas Hold 'Em to know when someone's bluffing, human or otherwise," Dean replied calmly, ignoring the fact that Bela was currently glaring at the side of his head in disbelief.

Bela sighed angrily and twisted her body forward, folding her hands over her chest and working her jaw. "You are unbelievable."

"Well, what did you want me to do? We were unarmed and very well outnumbered. We could have squirted holy water in their faces all we wanted, but that wouldn't have gotten us anywhere but surrounded by a mass of pissed-off demons."

Bela was quiet. She knew he was right.

"We need to get back to the hospital," Dean continued once he realized that Bela wasn't going to argue anything further, "Something tells me that demons might have had squat to do with us coming back, after all."

She turned her head to look at him wearily. "What do you have planned?"

"Just trust me."

How could he ask her that, after he just gambled with their lives only minutes before?

Looking back on their track record, Bela had no idea why she was putting so much faith in Dean and his so-called plan.

When they got back to the hospital, Sam was still nowhere to be seen and although Dean was initially worried, his troubles were laid to rest once the younger Winchester had called and informed them that he had, in fact, been researching about Castiel for the past few hours. After informing them that he might've found something relevant but wanted to dig a little deeper to make sure, Dean told him to keep up the good work and check in once he had something useful before hanging up, leaving out the fact that he had a plan of his own brewing in his head; a plan that had Bela feeling very anxious.

She was especially feeling anxious as she stood in the middle of an abandoned warehouse, watching Dean and Bobby draw up the last of their summoning symbols on the warehouse's walls. As Dean turned around to set down a paint can, he glared at Bela impatiently.

"Would it kill you to help?"

Bela narrowed her eyes at him in return. "It just might, considering we don't know what the hell we'll be facing once we summon it."

"And that's if this ritual actually works, anyways," Bobby reminded, picking up a shotgun that had been leaning against a crate.

"Yeah, well, here goes," Dean said, adding the finishing touches to a symbol on the ground before bracing himself for whatever was to come next. When nothing happened, he turned and glanced at Bobby confusedly. "Are you sure you chose the right ritual?"

"Of course I'm sure," Bobby scolded. "Don't question me, boy—"

He was cut off as the sound of the wind picking up against the warehouse became apparent; whistling through the broken windows and sending dust clouding around the room. Bela shielded an arm before her eyes as the light bulbs overhead suddenly shattered and glass rained down above them, while using her other hand to blindly find a weapon to defend herself with. On the other side of the warehouse, Dean and Bobby readied their shotguns toward the front door just as they blew open with a forceful bang.

The two men hesitated to start firing as they watched a middle-aged man calmly step inside, his face void of any emotion and, in fact, looking more unaffected by the scene before him than anything. Bela raised an eyebrow at the simplicity of the man's appearance; he was clean-shaven and dressed in a cheap-looking trench coat and casual suit, standing at an average height with an equally average build. She narrowed her eyes at him confusedly as he looked calmly between the three humans staring at him down the barrels of their guns.

It wasn't until the man began to take a step forward that Dean shot at him, followed by Bobby and, more hesitantly, Bela. The man calmly stepped through all of the devil's traps they had painted on the concrete floor, getting neon paint on his casual loafers, yet remaining unaffected as bullets tore through his clothes and bounced off of the walls behind him.

The man didn't stop until he was standing at least a few feet before Bela, where she raised her gun and fired a shot off at the ground in front of his feet. He seemed not to notice the act as he bowed his head awkwardly in greeting in Bela's direction, his arms stiff at his sides.

Dean came up quickly behind the man and embedded a serrated knife into his shoulder, but the man didn't show any indication of pain, only acute interest in the fact that Dean actually thought the sneak attack would have hurt him.

"Who are you?" Dean barked, stepping back and raising his weapon again as the man turned and blinked back at him tranquilly.

"I am the one who gripped you tight and raised you from perdition," he replied matter-of-factly, watching as Bobby advanced towards him with his own shotgun at the ready.

"Big whoop for you," Dean said, indicating for Bobby to step forward and check the man for any weapons, although all three of the humans knew that it would be a useless act anyway.

The man allowed Bobby to pat him down, though he looked confused as to what the older man was doing, and when Bobby stood up and indicated to Dean that the stranger was clean, the man calmly raised two fingers up to Bobby's forehead and sent him collapsing to the ground.

"What the hell—?" Dean yanked the man by the collar of his coat as Bela bent down to check Bobby's pulse. Once she confirmed that he was still alive, only unconscious, she nodded at Dean, who turned his attention on the being—who looked completely non-threatened—in his grip. "What did you do?"

"The three of us needed to talk," he explained, looking between Dean and Bela before glancing briefly down at Bobby's unconscious form. "Alone."

Dean growled. "Who are you?"

"I am Castiel."

"I figured as much," Dean spat, pressing the barrel of his shotgun firmly against Castiel's abdomen. "Now, what are you?"

"I am an angel of the Lord."

As Bela's eyes widened in disbelief, Dean's fist tightened around Castiel's collar before he roughly pushed him away. "You're lying. Angels are myths."

Castiel bowed his head, not bothering to fix his now-disheveled clothing. "You lack faith, Dean," he turned to look at Bela. "She has more, if only a little."

"You know my name?" Dean asked, apprehensive.

Castiel nodded in confirmation, gesturing between the three other forms in the room. "I know all your names."

Dean shook his head, still disbelieving. "I don't believe you. Prove it. Prove you're an 'angel of the Lord,'"

Wordlessly, Castiel moved to the center of the warehouse, where two large, translucent wings became illuminated as a large clap of lightning and thunder sounded from outside. As soon as the acts of nature subsided, the wings were gone.

At the sight, both Bela and Dean's marks glowed white with dim light, though they couldn't feel anything there except for a low pulse of dull heat.

"Yeah, well, some angel you are," Dean chided, lowering his gun ever-so-slightly. "You burned out that poor woman's eyes."

Images of Pamela lying in her hospital bed began to cloud in Bela's mind, but she quickly pushed them away as she watched Castiel bob his head in acknowledgment.

"I warned her not to spy on my true form," he said, surprisingly sounding the slightest bit apologetic. "It can be…overwhelming to humans. So can my real voice, but you already knew that."

"You're referring to the gas station," Bela asked incredulously. "That was you talking?"

Dean scoffed. "Buddy, next time, lower the volume."

"That was my mistake," Castiel replied, "Certain people, special people, can perceive my true visage. I thought you two would be among the few. I was wrong."

Dean tipped his chin towards the angel. "Oh yeah? And what 'visage' are you in now?"

Castiel bent his head down to look at his body in acknowledgment, seemingly still unaffected by the multiple tears and creases in his clothing. "This? This is a vessel."

"What, you're possessing someone?" Dean asked disbelievingly, suddenly hesitant again.

"He's a devout man," Castiel responded, as if it was the only explanation needed. "He actually prayed for this."

"And that's supposed to make it okay?" Bela frowned, coming up to observe the angel closer. "You do know what else possesses humans, don't you?"

"Demons do not answer to prayer," Castiel said straightforwardly, though he didn't seem the least bit offended that she was comparing him to servants of the devil.

"You know, it might've saved us a hell of a lot of time if you would have just approached us in a human body in the first place," Dean pointed out, finally lowering his gun completely.

Castiel sighed, as if he was trying to understand where Dean was coming from. "There were multiple things preventing me from taking over my vessel right away. Angels need consent to enter their vessel's bodies…but before that, I needed to recover from the time I spent in hell saving you two."

"About that, not that I'm not grateful or anything, but why save us, out of all people? I mean, what do we have to offer to this world?" Dean asked.

"I was acting on orders from God," Castiel answered, looking between the two humans as they watched him expectantly. "And a lot. You have a lot to offer. You have your destinies to offer."

Dean frowned. "Right, and what the hell is that supposed to mean?"

"I will inform you later, when there is enough time," The angel turned and calmly began to walk out of the warehouse, as if leaving on a cliffhanger wasn't a rude thing to do to two heavily confused souls.

Bela began to follow Castiel out the door. "Wait—"

Before she could stop him, another flash of lightning and thunder grumbled overhead, and Castiel was gone.

"So, I did some more digging into this Castiel…and Dean, a lot of what I've found is weird. It's saying that Castiel is an—"

"An 'angel of the Lord'? Yeah, man, we know. We just had a run-in with the holy bastard himself." Dean said into the receiver, cutting Sam abruptly off as he paced around the front of the warehouse. Behind him, Bela had just managed to wake Bobby up, and was helping the old man back to his feet.

"What? What do you mean?"

Dean sighed. "I mean, while you were off playing librarian, Bela, Bobby and I decided to summon the guy here."

Bela came up behind Dean, her hands on her hips. "For the record, you decided to summon him here, and I got roped in along with it. And now, poor Bobby has got a concussion, so we should get him somewhere safe, fast."

Dean shot her a glare but nodded anyways, turning as she walked away from him. "Look, man, I gotta go. Meet us back at the hospital. We'll find ourselves a motel near there and fill you in on the details."

"Dean, I—"

Before Sam could argue, Dean snapped his phone shut and slid it into his jeans pocket. He then walked over to Bobby and Bela and filled them in on their new plans before scrambling to help the former, who nearly toppled over as he pushed off of the crate he had been leaning against.

Bobby swatted Dean's hand away in annoyance. "Don't fuss over me, boy. I may be concussed, but I didn't forget how to walk."

Dean backed off, though he gave the old man a doubtful look.

A few hours later and Dean, Bela and Sam had gathered at a motel down the street from the hospital, deciding that it'd be best to leave Bobby in the care of the doctors after telling them that the old man had collapsed and hit his head from the stress of his "daughter's" condition. Now the three of them were gathered inside a motel room; Dean and Sam seated at a table and Bela leaning against a short counter a few feet away from them as they filled in the younger Winchester on the day's events.

"I can't believe it," Sam was saying, eyebrows raised in half-doubt, and half-hope. "Angels are real?"

Dean scoffed. "Of course they aren't."

Bela frowned at him from where she was posted. "Dean—"

"You're not honestly telling me you believed him, are you Bela?" Dean snapped, looking at her incredulously. "I mean, I expected this from Sam, but I would have thought you would have been just as skeptical of this entire thing as I am."

"We saw his wings, Dean. Are we just supposed to ignore that?"

"Have you never heard of an illusion before? Or maybe a deception? Because a lot of the supernatural crap we deal with on our hunts are pretty specialized in those two categories, so excuse me if I'm a little less than believing when—"

"Enough, you two!" Sam started, standing up to look between Bela and his brother in exasperation. "You can argue, or flirt, or whatever later. But I've got books, some biblical, pre-biblical, hell, even in cuneiform, saying that an angel can pull a soul from hell."

Dean opened his mouth to argue but Sam simply pointed a finger and gave him a look that told him to shut up.

"And you read of nothing else that might be capable of doing it? Nothing at all, you're sure?" Bela waited for Sam to nod in response, before pointedly looking at Dean. "How is this not enough evidence to get you at least the slightest bit hopeful?"

Dean shrugged, though he knew the real reason.

Why was he worth saving, when there was probably a hell of a lot more innocent people worth pulling out? Why save Bela, who deliberately sold her soul to kill her own parents, when Castiel could have used his powers for something more meaningful?

Why them?

Sam's voice brought his brother out of his thoughts. "Dean. This is good news."

The older brother scoffed. "How so?"

"Because for once, we aren't being buried underneath a mass of demon crap," Sam replied, causing Dean to make a face, which he deftly ignored. "I mean, maybe you and Bela were saved by one of the good guys?"

Dean sighed. "Okay. Say they're not myths. Angels are very much real and very much capable of doing the standard crap they're known for," he looked pensively between Bela and his brother. "So…what? That mean there's a God, too?"

Bela tipped her head in thought. "It wouldn't be much a stretch to assume so, yeah."

Dean abruptly got up and sighed, turning his back on the other two in the room as he ran a hand down his face. He stared out the window in thought, wanting nothing more than to stop the conversation entirely and burrow himself in one of the nearby beds.

"Christ, this is all screwed."

Bela's nose wrinkled as Dean took His name in vain—there was a possibility that He could be listening right now, after all—as she watched his shoulders lift and fall with a deep breath.

"Look, Dean," Sam began, voice quiet, "I know. I know, okay? You don't think you're worth saving. Hell, if I was in your situation, I'd probably be thinking the same thing you are now. And Bela's, well…we all know what she was capable of before, so God wanting her saved specifically is questionable...but you two are here now. You have to face the realities that angels and heaven and God are—can—be very much real."

Sam shot Bela a look of apology, but she waved her hand dismissively. He had a point, after all.

"For right now, all we know for sure is that angels definitely are real. How about we keep that as our middle ground and everything else is fair game?" Sam, who had lifted his arms at his sides to motion between Dean and Bela, waited for them to acknowledge his proposal. When they both gave their own quiet nods, Sam sunk down in his seat tiredly. "Good. Because arguing isn't going to get us anywhere; not when we're already so deep in the dark."

A week later, after Pamela had been deemed healthy enough—as healthy as one could get after just having their eyes disintegrated in their skull—and Bobby had recovered from the minor injuries he had received during his brief encounter with Castiel, he, Bela and the brothers relocated back to the old man's home in the heart of a fortress of rusted and run-down cars that was Singer's Salvage.

Sam and Bobby were sitting at a small table perusing through a hefty stack of thick, dusty books, while Dean and Bela, who would have preferred to be doing other things than spend their time researching, reluctantly flipped through online articles on angels and anything holy-related in Bobby's living area. After a fruitless search, Bela closed the lid of her laptop with a frustrated sigh, getting up from the couch she had been sitting on and announcing that she was going to go get herself something to drink.

She felt Dean's eyes hover suspiciously on her back as she made her way into Bobby's kitchen but didn't bother catching him over her shoulder; if he still wasn't going to allow himself to completely trust her, then there was nothing she could do about it. Instead, she grabbed a clean glass from the rack besides the sink and turned on the faucet, holding the cup beneath the stream of cold water and letting out a patient breath of air.

She heard a small, disapproving tsk behind her and opened her mouth to follow with some witty one-liner, presuming she would be talking to Dean, when she shut off the faucet and turned around to face someone that was very much not the notorious hunter she had been brought back from hell with. In fact, this person wasn't even supposed to be alive, let alone standing in the kitchen of some man whom she had no connection to back before she died.

"Abby, Abby, Abby..." The woman shook her head derisively, tapping a skinny finger on her jawbone. "No, wait, it's Bela now, isn't it?"

The glass slipped from Bela's fingers and shattered against the kitchen tile, the water sloshing against her boots as the woman before her frowned disdainfully at the mess on the floor.

"Hmph. Too bad there isn't a maid around here to clean this up…."

The woman disappeared as Dean came quickly into the kitchen, his gun already cocked and at the ready. If they had been in any other situation Bela might've chastised him for being so paranoid, but this problem was very much appropriate for the use of guns.

Bela opened her mouth to warn Dean but instead she let out a surprised scream as the woman who had once been her mother suddenly reappeared and shoved him into a nearby cabinet full of dusty china. He fell against the cabinet with a loud thud and ignored the sounds of the old plates clattering to the ground around him as he lifted his gun in the air and sent two bullets flying in the dead woman's direction, temporarily dissolving her image as she disappeared with a taunting laugh.

"Who the hell was that?" Dean asked, panting heavily, as Sam and Bobby stumbled into the kitchen with salt guns of their own, looking as uneasy as ever.

"That was my mother," Bela breathed, running a shaky hand through her hair as she accepted the pistol Bobby had handed her.

Dean frowned, incredulous. "You're what?"

Before Bela could answer, however, a bald, African-American man appeared behind Sam and tapped him on the shoulder. "Hey, Winchester. Been a while."

"Henriksen?" The younger brother whirled around, providing Dean with just enough time to squeeze off a single blast from his shotgun.

The man, Henriksen, reappeared at another doorway and waited for them to notice him. "Now, what'd you do that for? For all you knew, I could've still been alive."

Sam looked at the man apologetically. "I'm sorry. If we'd known Lilith was coming, we would have—"

"You wouldn't have left a dozen innocent people to die in your place, I know," Henriksen retorted, nodding as he stepped forward. "You did this to me. You and your brother here. Lilith killed me, and it's all—your—fault!" The man took deep, ragged breaths as he shouted the last three words and before Sam could say anything further, Bobby dissipated him in a blast of salt rounds.

"We need to get to safety," the old man stated, indicating for the other three to follow him as he jogged down a nearby hallway.

"We don't even know what we're dealing with," Bela shouted as she ran, following despite her doubts.

Dean was the one to reply to her. "They look like ghosts, they act like ghosts, they're dead like ghosts; I'm pretty sure they're ghosts!"

The four of them rounded a corner, only to be greeted by an overweight man in a puffy vest and T-shirt. His eyes immediately locked on Dean's, though he did pause to glare fleetingly at Sam as well.

"Ronald! Hey, bud," Dean greeted, putting on a fake smile as the four of them stopped in their tracks.

"You know I'm dead, because of you? You were supposed to help—"

The fat man was cut off as Bela squeezed off a single shot at his head. "I think it's best if we don't stop to have a talk with the ghosts that are trying to harm us."

Dean glared at her but the group continued running anyways, following Bobby down a flight of stairs and into a sizable round room guarded by a heavy iron door. Neither of them had a chance to close it as a skinny girl with blonde hair appeared at the doorway, though a line of salt that had been painted across the entrance prevented her from coming inside.

Sam narrowed his eyes at the girl. "Meg?"

The blonde girl raised her hand in a sinister wave and Bela immediately caught sight of a black tattoo staining the skin of her inner wrist.

"Meg's a demon," Dean reminded, "So, are we not dealing with ghosts?"

"Oh no, I'm a ghost," Meg nodded in confirmation, her lips pressed into a small pout. "My name is actually Meg. That monster living inside of me all those months just liked it, so she decided to take it for herself."

Sam looked at her. "Why are you here?"

"The bigger question is, 'why didn't you save me?' I watched as you conversed with me, the demon possessing me, and I screamed and begged for you to help but you just didn't hear me. You could have if you used those demon blood powers of yours, but I guess you just didn't try hard enough."

Bela paused at the mention of "demon-blood powers" but felt that now wasn't the best time to bring it up. Instead, she watched as her mother reappeared behind Meg, her arms folded across her flat chest as she looked scornfully into the room. Just below her wrist bone, Bela noticed the same tattoo.

Her mom definitely didn't have a tattoo at the time of her car accident.

"Abigail," Bela's mother said warningly, "Who are these strange men you've been accompanying yourselves with?"

Dean furrowed his brows. "Her name's Bela, you bitch."

Bela's mother blanched at Dean's language. "And manner less men, at that."

When Henriksen appeared just beside Bela's mother, she immediately found the tattoo on his own wrist, though it had been partially covered by the sleeve of his shirt.

"All right, that's enough!" Bobby shouted, standing just before the doorway and sending a blast of shotgun shells flying down the hall. The ghosts disappeared and the old man turned to close the door behind him, slumping against the iron as the overweight man, Ronald, appeared through a small window on the other side of the door.

"Don't worry, the room's soundproof," Bobby assured, setting his shotgun on a nearby table momentarily. "For now, I got some books in here. We need to figure out what the hell's going on."

"I noticed identical tattoos on Henriksen, Meg, and my mother's wrists," Bela noted. "I don't know about the other two, but my mother sure as hell didn't have one before she died."

"Neither did Henriksen or Meg," Sam confirmed, frowning in thought. "It's probably safe to assume that Ronald has one now, too. Do you think you could draw the design of the tattoo?"

Bela nodded and accepted the pencil and pad of paper Sam handed to her, quickly and roughly sketching the round symbol she had spotted on each of the ghosts' wrists. When she gave the pad back to Sam, he frowned and scratched at the back of his head.

"I've seen this before," Sam said before handing the paper to Bobby, who had come up to observe the drawing for himself.

Bobby studied the drawing for a brief moment before humming something incomprehensible under his breath and crossing over to a bookshelf, picking out a navy tome and flipping through a few pages before he settled on one. He dragged his finger across the dusty paper before letting out a noise that sounded distinctively like "a-ha!" and handed the book over for Bela to observe.

"This it?"

Bela nodded as she studied the black symbol printed on the paper, reading the title written just beneath it. "'Mark of the Witness.'" She frowned.

"Witness to what? Witness to people indirectly getting others killed?" Dean asked, impatient.

"Witness to the unnatural," Bobby explained, passing the book over to Sam to read over. "None of them died what you'd call ordinary deaths. These ghosts…they were forced to rise. They woke up in agony, they were like rabid dogs. It ain't their fault. Someone raised them…on purpose."

Bela scowled. "I don't know about the others, but my mother definitely wasn't one you would exactly call 'innocent.' If she rose in agony, the bitch very well deserved it."

Dean looked over at her, wondering what she meant, but decided that they should deal with the problem at hand before they started delving into any personal, deep and dark secrets.

"Okay, well, who raised them?"

Bobby shook his head. "Do I look like I know?" he paused briefly to glance back down at the book, which Sam had given back to him. "But whoever it was has some big ideas planned. They used a spell so powerful it left a mark, a brand on their souls. It's called the 'Rising of the Witnesses.' Fits into some kind of prophecy."

Dean, growing increasingly impatient with the build-up, motioned his hand in the air for Bobby to get on with it. "Prophecy? Prophecy of what?"

Sam, already a step ahead of his brother, pressed his lips into a thin line. "You're talking about Revelations, aren't you?"

"Doesn't that warn about—?" Bela began, only to stop short once Bobby nodded grimly at her.

"Sure does," he said, closing the book with a thud. "The goddamn Apocalypse."

AN: WHAT? Two updates in one day?

God, I enjoy writing this fic so much. I hope you guys enjoy. Please review!