To hear an angel voice/through the chaos and the noise/
I need a midnight clear/a little peace right here/
To end this crazy day with a silent night.
-I Need a Silent Night (Amy Grant)
They had split up and spent the rest of the day making inquiries after Lisa Harrow in their various ways. While the boys went the more professional route, Mary went talking to the neighbors, claiming to be a long-distance friend who'd stopped by unannounced on her way to visit relatives for the holidays. The tactic proved to be a largely unsuccessful one.
For example, the woman living across the street from Lisa Harrow, her hair disarranged and a pair of kids running around her house screaming, said of Harrow, "I can't believe that bitch has any friends," then she'd looked a little apologetic and added, "No offense."
"Lisa can be a bit trying at times," Mary had replied dismissively, "But she and I go so far back we might as well be family, and you don't get to choose that."
The woman had given Mary a dead-eyed look as one of the kids started to squeal at the other, "Sorry, I can't tell you where she is. I make it a point not to look over there. I don't know what's done in that house, but I've heard it sometimes, and if I didn't know better, I'd say some sort of Satanic worship was going on inside those walls. Damned creepy stuff."
"Thanks anyway," Mary had replied, stepping off the porch as the woman closed the door.
The rest of the neighbors, those of them that were at home, were no more enlightening. Lisa Harrow was not well-liked, and even the local gossips avoided talking about her, though they were happy to tell Mary about Ted Groves down the street who was probably a CIA agent, and Rhonda Barrow who was almost undoubtedly in witness protection and was also sleeping with her gardener. Mary didn't care about Groves or Barrow, would have remained stoically uninterested even if the local gossips had claimed that Groves was secretly a werewolf and Barrow's gardener was actually a ghost. Right now, the only names that interested her were Lisa Harrow and Castiel.
Quietly sending a message to her contact with the British Men of Letters, she'd gotten the text version of a shoulder shrug that she couldn't help but feel was actually the emoji of indifference. Though it was clear Angels weren't on the hit list for the Men of Letters, it was equally evident to Mary that they were not considered allies either. The only reason the Men of Letters had ever responded to Castiel at all was because he was a link to the Winchester brothers, who were legends even to them.
Now they had Mary's attention, it struck her as seemingly unlikely that they would take any further notice of Castiel, particularly as things had gotten a little strained since the job involving the Prince of Hell. Mary had not told them that the one of her boys which had been so nearly killed was not, in fact, either of her sons, but she suspected they knew anyway, and were inclined to blame the Angel for Mary being harder to get along with of late. Which really wasn't fair to Castiel, who knew nothing of the British Men of Letters' involvement in that Demon-hunting fiasco.
In any case, they were no help at all. They didn't know anything about any Lisa Harrow.
Politely, they offered to help hunt for her missing Angel, but Mary advised against it, knowing how Dean and Sam would feel if they found out she was working with the British Men of Letters. Besides, she suspected the offer had been nothing more than British etiquette. They didn't really want to expend resources hunting for a wayward Angel, they didn't see the point. They didn't understand what Castiel was to Sam and Dean... and to Mary as well. Didn't understand, and didn't care to find out. They could hardly be blamed for that, because Castiel had almost had to die in order for Mary to begin really understanding it herself.
Around dinnertime, Mary regrouped with her boys at a hamburger joint they'd taken note of earlier, and they did their collective best to ignore the obligatory crappy Christmas music, comically stupid-looking elf and reindeer garb of the staff and sickeningly cutesy holiday names for the menu items.
Sam and Dean were in their FBI suits, but looked no more cheerful than they had when Mary had split from them earlier. Dean in particular looked worn and downcast, though he was trying to conceal it.
Even if not for whatever unnatural link had given her boy access to experience the fear of the Angel, the fact would have remained that Castiel was undeniably Dean's best friend, and frequently his staunchest supporter (even when Dean didn't want him to be), though Sam might have wrestled the Angel for the title when things started getting really tense. But what could not be argued was the fact that Dean was more closely bonded to Castiel than any of them; feelings that went all the way back to his time in the literal pits of Hell and which ran almost as deep as the fires of damnation burned.
Sam and Mary relayed their mutual lack of success to each other, while Dean silently brooded.
Despite being their natural ringleader, he seemed to feel no need to participate in the conversation or to encourage them to make plans for what to do next. The only thing he suggested was a motel he and Sam had passed earlier. Mary couldn't think of any reason to object, though she almost wanted to just to get something more out of Dean than vague staring and the occasional noncommittal grunt.
Even their pretty waitress (who managed to look cute despite the idiotic light-up reindeer antlers she was presumably being forced to wear) couldn't get a smile out of him, though she tried. She clearly found him appealing. His lack of response caused concerned looks to be exchanged between Sam and Mary. It had taken no time at all for Mary to realize that there wasn't a reasonably attractive woman above the age of twenty that Dean didn't at least have eyes for, even if he was too busy on a job to do anything more than look. Yet even given what she had come to know about Dean, Mary didn't feel half so worried about his lack of response to the waitress as Sam looked.
Mary could almost feel the story Sam hadn't told her when they exchanged glances, a story that seemingly informed Sam that his brother's mental landscape was well and truly becoming a shambles.
But she didn't ask. Now wasn't the time. Later, perhaps.
For most of the night, Dean's dreams were untroubled (or as untroubled as they ever were), but his subconscious was made anxious by the quiet, especially after the several fits he'd had off and on throughout the unproductive day, and he repeatedly woke up specifically because his dreams were too peaceful and he just couldn't take it.
But one of the times he thought he woke up, Dean opened his eyes and found himself staring at a cracked and bloodstained wall. After a moment, he realized he was lying on his side on concrete.
After the passage of a few more heartbeats, Dean decided this was the self-same room he'd dreamed of the night before. Slowly, he sat up and looked around. There was blood everywhere, more blood -he knew from experience- than could be found in a single human body. The room was drenched in it, it had dried in streaks on the floor, darkened into patterns that resembled a Rorschach test on the wall.
Sensing something behind him, Dean whipped his head around and caught a glimpse of someone, he thought it was Castiel, but it was so fast he couldn't be sure. He had the impression of blue eyes, full of fear, and a bloodied countenance, but a hand came quickly to his head, touched him and sent his consciousness spinning away into a disorienting sea of unrelated images.
A ridiculously lumpy, cracked and pothole filled road. A mason jar full of blood. Small businesses whose names were written using some sort of Chinese characters Dean couldn't begin to guess the meanings of. A pair of disembodied Demon eyes. Some sort of building for dyslexics whose sign was nearly impossible to read because of the font. The silver Mazda was the first thing Dean recognized.
Sounds echoed as if in a hallow chamber. The sound of a train running on tracks. The voice of the witch reading Latin. A slamming door. A metal lid being screwed onto the top of a glass jar, but instead of being coupled with the view of the mason jar, it was paired with the Mazda. A demonic roar of rage accompanied the unrolling of the abysmally maintained road.
The images and sounds came faster, in greater variety, trying to order and make sense of themselves with what Dean could only see as frantic energy. In spite of himself, he was scared, and wanted it to stop, though he was sure the dream was Castiel's doing, that the Angel was trying his best to show Dean something important, but that either the warding or Cass's condition was making it difficult.
"Cass, slow down. You're goin' too fast," Dean called out, but he didn't hear his own voice and couldn't be sure if Castiel could hear him either, "Take a breath and slow the hell down."
Instead of slowing down, the images only became indistinct, blurry. They came just as fast, hit harder, and overlapped in ways that were increasingly difficult for the human mind to take in. In addition to buildings, streets and signage, the sky and stars began to get in on the action, looking vibrantly real and yet impossibly soaked in blood. For a moment, Dean caught a glimpse of the light that sometimes shone in the eyes of Angels when they used their abilities. Then blackness.
Silence. Stillness. Nothing.
As if all of creation had spontaneously ceased to exist.
"Cass?" Dean asked, but didn't hear himself, couldn't see himself, couldn't even sense his body, and that all kind of freaked him out, but he went on in as gentle a voice as he could summon, though he was fairly certain that he would've sounded angry if he could've heard himself, "Cass, this is not helpful, buddy. I know you're trying. But... man... you gotta try just a little harder, cause this don't make a lick of sense. You understand, Castiel? I'm tryin', man, but I don't know what you're telling me."
The nothing persisted, and Dean began to wonder if Cass had done all that he could. The chaos of imagery and sound had told Dean more than he wanted to know about Cass's mental condition. He could no longer kid himself that it was just interference from the warding. This dream had been nothing like the last one, and it spoke of rapidly failing mental processes. The information had been disjointed, the details either nonexistent or else presented with all the forceful impact of a shotgun blast at close range.
Gradually, stars appeared in the darkness. No, not stars, just points of light. One at a time, they manifested. Slowly, they became fixed points on a map. One of them flashed, and Dean realized it was the spot on I-35 where they'd picked up Castiel's truck. Another flickered, and he recognized the street Lisa Harrow's ID said she lived on. Several more points flashed, but he didn't know those locations.
Then, gradually, all the lights faded. All except one. It marked a point on a street outside the city limits to the north, a long way from Lisa Harrow's home relatively speaking, but close to where she'd found Castiel. Hell, they'd been within six miles of the place today and hadn't even known it.
Because he'd driven the area just today, Dean realized that several of the sounds and images which had come to him earlier were attempts to describe the map he'd just been shown. On the most direct route to Lisa Harrow's house was Austin's Chinatown, and there was a train track between where Cass had been taken and what he seemed to be signaling as his present location. A lot of what Dean had been shown wasn't clear to him, but he figured that he'd understood enough to get him where he needed to go.
"Okay," Dean said, once he was sure he'd memorized the street as well as was possible in a dream, "Alright. We're comin', Cass. Just... hang in there a little longer, okay? We're coming for you."
Slowly, the map faded out. After pulsing twice, the light also faded.
Darkness reigned once more.
With a gasp, Dean woke and sat up in bed. He looked over at Sam, who was still asleep. He hated to wake his brother for the second night in a row, but he sensed that Cass was running out of time. Underneath every second of the dream had run a current of exhausted terror and fevered hurt that made the impressions he'd gotten out of last night's dream seem like a dress rehearsal for the real thing.
"Sam," Dean's voice was thick with sleep, so he cleared his throat and spoke more sharply, "Sammy! Hey, wake up!"
"Uh, what?" Sam's eyes snapped open and he instinctively looked for some sort of danger in the room with them, his alarm turning to baffled annoyance when he saw nothing.
"I know where Cass is. Get dressed," Dean said, getting up and heading to the bathroom.
"What about Mom?" Sam asked blearily, rolling onto his back.
"Send her a text," Dean tossed over his shoulder.
Not awake enough to figure it out on his own, Sam called, "Wait, how do you know where Cass is?"
"He told me," Dean replied.
Sam had sat up now, but his confusion seemed to be deepened by the answer, "Why didn't he tell you before?"
"Dunno," Dean told him, adding dismissively, "When we find him, you can ask him."
A few minutes later, they had piled into the Impala, with Dean at the wheel. Mom had gotten Sam's text and had already been outside waiting by the time the brothers exited their room. Nobody spoke as they exited the parking lot, but once they were on the road, Sam and Mom had questions about what -exactly- Cass had told Dean. He relayed such images as he could recall, and both his relatives got stuck on one which was of particular note to all three of them.
"Demon eyes?" Mom said when Dean described them.
"You think we've got a Demon as well as a witch?" Sam wondered.
"You called it from the start," Dean reminded him.
"I don't like it," Sam decided with a scowl.
"Yeah, neither do I," Dean agreed rather sourly, glaring at the road ahead as though it had personally offended him, "But I'm mostly just gettin' tired of all these damn people and things tryin' to bump off Angels, especially our Angel. You think he's got a target painted on those wings of his, somethin' that says to every Hellspawn, lunatic and monster out there 'Hey, come kill me; it'll be fun, I promise?'"
"He does seem to have trouble catching a break," Sam admitted reluctantly.
"We should figure out how to send some kinda mass message to all the would-be Angel killers out there," Dean suggested, "Somethin' that says, 'Please, for the love of whatever you worship and wherever it is you go after you die, stop killing Angels. Especially ours, because we will hunt you down and burn you and everything you love to the ground if you kill him again.'"
"We could always put that up on a billboard and hope someone sees it," Sam remarked dryly, "But I don't think anyone actually reads those."
Of course, neither of them were thinking about signs and they both knew it, knew they were just clumsily trying to distract themselves from whatever was waiting for them out there in the night.
It wasn't working.