"No," Sam answered, "Not when we just got our first break on a way to fix this." He was still staring off into space, processing Nyssa's information.

"You call that a break?" Dean coughed, "A rumor about something from a bunch of killers?"

That made Sam snap back to reality and he looked down at Dean, the other presence had receded and he recognized his brother again. "A bunch of killers that recognized the Mark when there's not a useful piece of lore about it in the entire library back home! Yeah that's a break." Blood was pooling around Dean's leg and staining his shirt yet it seemed to Sam there should be a lot more and he remembered Nyssa's statement about the wounds not stopping Dean for long. Does the Mark make him heal faster? Damn it. I need him to be recovering for as long as possible, I need time to track down what ever ritual she was talking about.

Dig took a few steps closer to the both of them, he had two strips of fabric in his hands. "Here, let's slow that bleeding for now. If you're not going to try to take anyone else out we can get you to the hospital." Sam was rather shocked about how calm Dig was.

Dean didn't even reply, just looked away from all of them and Sam saw a different darkness start to take his brother over. It was a darkness he was more than familiar with, "This wasn't..."

"Shut up Sam. If you're going to move me, move me, if not put me down now."

Sam took the fabric from Dig, wrapped one piece tightly around Dean's leg and gave the other one to Dean to push against his shoulder wound. "Let's get you to the ER." Dean just nodded and tried to staunch the bleeding from his shoulder. Sam and Dig picked him up and started carrying him when he tapped Sam on the shoulder. "Wait," they stopped moving and he turned his head to stare directly at Oliver, "Go see Thea. We didn't do all this crap to have you follow me to the hospital."

"But.." Oliver started to reply.

"But nothing," Dean snapped, "She knows all your damn secrets now, at least all the ones we do. You're damn lucky she chose to help us instead of leaving your self absorbed ass to die at the hands of the League. Stop playing the hero and start being a brother, that's if you still want to have a sister

As Dean scolded him, Oliver's face went utterly cold at first but his eyes went from icebergs to guilt ridden by the time Dean was done talking. "How..."

"Just talk to her," Sam explained, "Drop the walls and let her in. She has her own pain and she needs you as much as you need her. He's right, she's home probably pacing the floor waiting for you. Get out of here."

Oliver nodded a bit stiffly, "All right, but I'll.."

"Not drop by later," Dean interrupted, "Not the first time I've been shot. Don't use me as an excuse to bail on Thea again. Spend time with her. Let's go guys."

Dig and Sam started moving, Oliver opened the door for them and he and Roy went back to the club to change while Dig and Sam took Dean to the hospital.

After they took Dean back to surgery, Sam couldn't settle down. He kept silently pacing the lobby, mind racing a million miles an hour, How do we get Cain's blood? Dean killed him. Can we modify it somehow? Why didn't Cas know about the others? How are we going to get through a ritual taking several days? What if Dean doesn't stop and kills me? I need Cas to be there if...

"Sam?" Felicity's voice came from behind him, not from the earpiece he was still wearing, bringing his thoughts to a screeching halt. He turned around just as she wrapped her arms around him. "Is he okay? Are you? What's going on?"

He was so focused on the implications of the spell that he wasn't in any way prepared for a hug or comforting from anyone. He and Dean had been dealing with the Mark for close to a year now and the only other person who knew anything about it was Charlie and she hadn't been in touch for a few months. The sheer amount of energy he'd been putting into supporting Dean, trying to keep him on an even keel, had been his entire focus for months. The sensation of Felicity's arms around him jarred his focus, her simple questions reached past the locks he'd put on his emotions and what came raging up from deep inside staggered him.

" We..," he gave up on trying to talk and just clung to her while battling with the storm that whirled in his mind and soul.

"Hey," Dig's solid, calm voice joined the reassuring hand Sam felt on his shoulder, "How about we all take a walk outside?"

He barely managed to nod, Felicity pulled away from him but kept an arm around his waist while Dig's arm rested on his shoulders. They left the lobby and found a quiet spot in one of the many courtyards that were dotted around the hospital grounds. He sat on a chair, Felicity scooted one close to him and sat down resting her hand on his leg and Dig pulled one up across from him.

"Talk?" Dig asked.

He didn't even know where to start, what to say. "It's just so..." he paused and focused on a tree in the distance, "hopeless. He'll be gone by the time I figure out how to save him. I know it. He's not even trying to fight anymore. I failed him once, I can't do it again. I can't."

Dig and Felicity kept quiet, letting him decide how much he wanted to say. He found he didn't even really want to get into details but knew that he needed to. The almost unbearable tightness in his chest accompanied by the tendrils of the stark mind numbing fear that were slowly creeping into his mind pushed the words out. "Last year, Dean, well he sort of lost his way. I was sick, in a coma actually, because of something and.." even though he had on some level forgiven Dean for it, a flash of betrayal added itself into the boiling pot of emotions he was feeling, "he lied to me, about something pretty major. We spent most of the year pissed at each other, we spent months apart, when we were hunting together we barely spoke. He got involved with the King of Hell and made a stupid choice regarding something called the First Blade, took on the Mark of Cain, died trying to kill the Scribe of God and Crowley, the King of Hell brought him back as a demon."

The memories of the months he'd spent trying to find Dean added a dash of panic onto everything else, "I knew of a ritual to cure a demon, or so I hoped. It seemed to work, at first. But the Mark...well it's something no one, not even Castiel, really knows anything about. It's destroying him...it's..."

He sunk his face into his hands and just gave up on being calm, rational. He's not here right now, I don't have to put on the act. There's no point to it now.

In between waves of complete inability to talk, Dig and Felicity coaxed more details out of him. By the end, he didn't feel any better or more able to save Dean; his hopelessness hadn't receded, it was actually worse because he'd finally admitted it out loud. He'd never felt so numb in his life, so useless.

"What Nyssa said, this is your first lead on this?" Felicity asked.

"Yeah. We looked all over the net and nothing ever popped up about a Sumerian ritual, like I said. We even asked Cas and he knew nothing either."

"Really?" There was more than a hint of a challenge being accepted in her voice and he was drawn, like a man dying of thirst when he sees a pool of water, to that vibrant energy pouring off of her. His head slowly turned towards her and everything about her stood out to him; the confident smile, the concern in her eyes and her sheer strength of will, of refusing to stop no matter what the odds. All of that reached into his memories and pulled out all the times he and Dean had looked like that, had felt that nothing could stop them. Her smile went from confident to mischievous, "So what you're saying is that when I find this spell, translate it and hand it over to you I will have pulled off something that not even angels could. Is that accurate?"

"Actually, yeah," he answered just as Dig chuckled.

She tossed her head lightly to one side, pulled out her tablet from her purse and started tapping the screen. "Well then, may as well get started. I mean, how many hackers could ever say that they know more about something then Heaven. Right?"

As much as he wanted to take the hope she offered he found himself doubting her, "We scoured the net Felicity.."

She didn't even look up from her screen, "Did you hack into the database of every Middle Eastern library along with the Vatican's?"

"Wait, the Vatican?"

"Did you borrow the processing power of the NSA's new super servers to run translation algorithms on ancient Sumerian stone tablets and scrolls?"

"Uh, no.."

She finally looked up and fixed him with an pitying look, "Then Sam, you did not, as you say, scour the internet." She sniffed a bit haughtily, "You Googled it, maybe hacked a few local databases. That is not scouring, that is searching. There is a rather large difference."

Dig's chuckle turned into a full on laugh which lasted a few moments then he grew serious, "You should have brought this to her months ago. If there's a cure for this, you know she won't stop until she finds it."

Sam just stared at her and that hopelessness started to recede, the fear unwinding it's ever encroaching vines from his mind. "I didn't even think of that. I don't know why."

"Because you're just as bad as he is about asking for help," Felicity muttered, already completely hyper focused on her screen.

He pushed her tablet to the side and nearly pulled her out of her chair to give her a hug, "Thank you, thank you..."

"No problem," she replied, "I should be thanking you, I've gotten bored hacking into the FBI,CIA and NSA databases for Oliver anyway. This will be much more challenging."

He finally managed to laugh. It was a weak, short laugh but it was a start. "Glad I could give you a new project."

She hugged him back then kissed him lightly on the cheek, "Go see how he's doing. I'll go back to the club and start running searches. Don't worry about answers right now, just be there for him."

"Can you give me a lift back?" Dig asked. "I need to get back home to Lyla, she had an appointment later today so I need to watch Sara. I'll see if she can get ARGUS looking into this for you too Sam."

"Sure," Felicity replied.

"Thanks, both of you," he said as they stood up and walked back inside.

Dig smiled, "No problem."

They split up at the lobby, he walked to the desk and was told to go back, that the doctors wanted to talk to him. As soon as he walked back into the ER proper and gave his name a doctor at the desk looked up at him. "You're Dean's brother?"

"Yes."

The doctor set down the chart he was looking at and motioned for Sam to follow him. They went into a side room and sat down. The doctor had short cropped black hair, brown eyes and a very inquisitive face. "I'm Dr. Winston, we're having to pin his leg back together, whoever shot him used a high powered rifle at close range and put a large hole into his femur. He must have some hard bones though because there should have been more damage. Those types of gunshot wounds tend to fracture the bone as well but somehow this is just a nice clean hole. His shoulder is a through and through, it barely clipped the top of his scapula. We found something in the xrays though."

Sam saw a hint of disbelief in the doctor's eyes. "What is it?"

"Well there's something caked on his ribs along with all these marks on his bones, which we're wondering you have any idea of how those got there."

"Marks on his bones?" The angel warding had gotten them more than their fair share of medical inquiries over the years. "No. What's this caking his ribs? Is it cancer?"

"Not from what we can tell, it's not spots or tumors." The Doctor just shook his head, "If I didn't know better I would say it looks like some sort of slime or oil. I don't know if it's spreading or what it's doing but we'd like to run some tests."

That was the last thing he ever expected to hear, "Can I see his xrays?"

"Sure, they're right over here," the doctor turned and flicked on a light on the light box behind him and Sam almost bolted off the stool he was sitting on. There were streaks of black along each of Dean's ribs, that wasn't the part that ratcheted his panic levels up to an all new high. The angel warding had originally covered their ribs completely, yet he saw gaps towards the edges of Dean's ribs, the black streaks seemed to moving from the outer edges of the rib cage towards the center and somehow removing the angel warding as they went. Holy shit! How? Fuck!

"Mr. Winchester? Are you all right?"

"Um...yeah. I mean no, I have to talk to him about this first," he deflected.

"Of course. It will be a few more hours until he's in recovery. I'll have them page you when he's out."

"Thank you." They both stood up, left the room and Dr. Winston disappeared down the hall leaving him with a whole new set of disturbing questions he knew he had no answers to.