Thanks to everyone who read and reviewed, and thanks to homeric for doing a read-through for me and making some suggestions.

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Sam nodded at the boulder just off the edge of the trail, marked off by crime scene tape on plastic pickets. "Well, that was difficult."

"It was not," Cas disagreed, and Sam bit back a sigh. There were certainly angels that could detect, and hell, even use, sarcasm, but he doubted very much that Cas would ever be one of them.

As it happened, the closest thing to 'trouble' that they'd encountered on their hike, aside from Dean's intermittent bitching about the terrain, was maneuvering around the squad car parked at the trail head. It had obviously been intended to discourage anyone from taking the trail, but given that the officer in the squad car had been asleep, it hadn't provided much more than a moment of amusement. He shook his head and ducked under the line of tape, considering the rock. It was maybe seven or eight feet high and had to be a good twenty feet wide, as much a plateau as a boulder . "Let's just check it out." At least up there they'd be out of this damn brush...he didn't know how many burrs his jeans had picked up as they'd walked. And his jacket wasn't looking much better.

Dean made it to the top first, standing and immediately grimacing and scrubbing his hands against his jeans. "Oh, gross,"

"No joke." The flat top was covered with a fine brownish dust that most definitely wasn't sand, and Sam mimicked Dean's actions. "Hasn't been any rain here the last couple days, I guess."

"Not much wind either," Dean agreed. "Not down in this little valley, anyway."

"This is not correct," Cas said, apparently unconcerned by the dried blood the climb up the rock had deposited on his hands. Sam found it a little odd that he'd actually climbed, but…well, he did say he needed to regain his strength.

"No kidding," Dean returned, crouching and using his knife to scrape away some of the dust from the rock. "Human sacrifice is kind of low on the 'good way to spend a Saturday night' scale."

Cas frowned. "That is not what I meant. It is not…." He trailed off, shaking his head. "I have some…sense…of death."

"What, like 'I feel dead people'?"

Sam rolled his eyes, and Dean grinned in return.

"Well, it can't be 'I see dead people'—we do that all the time."

Cas' frown deepened. "English is not…precise. I have no true term for this sense."

"Can you describe it?" Sam asked.

"All death has a…feel."

Judging by his expression, Sam suspected that he would have preferred another term, but after a moment he continued.

"A murder, however…there is a sense of wrongness that accompanies it. It is…a loss. An emptiness. The life that should have been." He shook his head again. "It is difficult to explain, but there were not five people killed here."

Dean's eyes narrowed, and he straightened. "Are you sure?"

Cas cocked his head slightly. "That five people were never killed here, no. But there were no murders here within the last two weeks."

He said that with absolute certainty, and Sam took another look around. The entire top of the boulder was covered with dried blood, except where the chalk outlines of five bodies had rubbed it away, and he very much doubted that the police could have mistaken ketchup and mannequins for blood and human remains. "Well, someone—or something—was here. Any ideas? Changelings?" They definitely had nonhuman characteristics, but maybe skinned it wasn't so obvious. And if they were Changelings, that might explain why they hadn't been identified yet.

"What if the bodies were human, but they were killed somewhere else and then brought here," Dean suggested. "Would you be able to tell that?"

"No," Cas said after a moment. "I would only sense the death around the actual murder site."

"It would kind of ruin the whole idea of a sacrifice to move the bodies to the sacrificial ground after they were dead, though," Sam said. "I mean, the freshly-spilled blood is generally the point of the whole thing." Well, that or the still-beating heart, or the unspoiled liver, or something equally nasty, but the principle still held: a live sacrifice meant a live sacrifice.

Dean shrugged and then indicated what looked like painted symbols on the rock, all muted by the layer of dried blood on top of them. "You recognize any of those? Maybe there's some obscure ritual that requires a dumping ground."

"Well, they're primarily pagan, or at least pagan in origin," Sam said after a minute. "Except for the peace symbol; that's just weird." There were only half-a-dozen symbols in total, but they'd been repeated multiple times, apparently once for each body. None of them pointed to anything immediately recognizable, but he pulled out his phone and snapped a couple pictures for Bobby anyway. Maybe he'd know something.

"You know, it would be kind of hard to haul five bodies down this trail," Dean said, looking over the edge of the boulder. "I mean, there were more than a couple spots back there where we had to walk single file. There's no way a four-wheeler or anything like that came through. And we've got to be five, maybe even six miles from town by now. At least."

Sam nodded absently. "They could have been killed closer than that though, out in the brush somewhere." He kind of doubted that the police had bothered to bring in dogs, not with the bodies all set out neatly here. If Cas wasn't insisting that the people weren't killed on the top of that rock, it wouldn't have occurred to him either. "Or whoever it was could have brought them in from Cold Oak. I don't think we're more than a mile or so away."

From Dean's grimace, that idea had occurred to him as well. "And it could have been more than one person, too. You find yourself a group of crazies, and hauling five bodies gets way easier."

"Nor would it be difficult for a demon to create such an arrangement," Cas pointed out.

"How close will you have to be to the murder site to know that it's there?" Dean asked. "I mean, could we use you a sort of an angelic bloodhound?"

Judging by Cas' expression, he didn't find that comparison particularly flattering, but he didn't actively object. "My range is not what it should be at the moment…perhaps twenty yards. At most; as time passes the feeling lessens, and if these murders happened several days ago as you say, it could be as little as five."

Dean frowned. "And if we waited a couple more days for you to regain your strength?"

"At full strength, as much a hundred yards for a recent murder, but again the feeling lessens with time. I doubt that the increase in my range would provide any advantage given the decrease in strength at the murder site."

"You didn't feel anything as we were walking?" Sam checked. "Maybe something that you weren't thinking about at the time?"

"No."

"Damn." He'd figured that it was a long shot, but it would have made life much easier.

"Circle around here a few times and see if we can pick up a trail, or head down into Cold Oak?" Dean asked.

Sam looked around for a minute. "I vote circle. I'm still hoping we're talking about one person—or thing—in which case I think we're better off looking closer." And despite having made the suggestion, he wasn't any more interested in going back there than Dean was.