Changing air pressure and the sudden absence of conversation let Julia know that she had arrived. Somewhere.
Had it worked? She'd latched on to the buzzing waves coming off the wristband, and when they'd reversed direction, let them pull her, like lassoing a riptide, to the source. To Marr. Or so she thought. Julia glanced around uneasily. It was still night. She could smell diesel exhaust, maybe from a generator, and pine trees. She was alone. Maybe she'd zapped herself to some random place?
Julia bit her lips. Well, whether it had worked or not didn't matter in the long run. She couldn't stay here forever. Big things afoot and all. Besides, she could still sense the bloodied wristband back in Aya's apartment, almost but not quite visible as a colored line in her perception like the route highlighted in bold red by MapQuest, so she could get back to safety if she needed it.
Feeling a bit like a kid playing a game of hide and seek, Julia looked both ways before she tiptoed into a dark hallway. She turned right, away from the stream of moonlight to the left, and toward a door, ajar, at the other end. She couldn't hear anything at all, not even her footsteps. She frowned down at her turquoise wedges. Because she wasn't making any footsteps. Ugh, she was never going to get used to being dead! No matter how well she understood it, she didn't know it. Not really.
Best just to get on with it. Julia slipped through the door, less than a whisper. The main part of the building stretched out before her, long and skinny. Disintegrating fiberglass insulation drooped from exposed ceiling beams like hanging moss from trees in a swamp. Scuffed plastic sheeting, haphazardly nailed across the glassless windows, diffused the moonlight. Dust swirled in the uncertain illumination.
However, the building was not empty. Chain-link cages, the kind used for large dogs at the pound, stood sentry in two rows like beds in a barracks building. At first, she thought that there were dogs in the cages. She crouched by the nearest one, feeling sorry for the animal because it wasn't moving. None of them were. Was it alive? Julia tried to lift the heavy-duty padlock keeping the cage door shut, but, of course, she couldn't.
Then the bundle of what was not a dog shifted with a low groan. The unfocused moonlight picked out sparkly tasseled sandals, as elusive as fish scales in murky water.
Julia rocked back on her heels. Holey sheets, the wristband had worked! She'd found them!
"Marr!" she cried. Then, louder, "Marr! Marr, wake up!" When nothing in the whole creepy building responded, she slapped her thighs in frustration. "Marr!"
Still no response. Duh, Julia! You're dead! No one could hear her except Aya. She twisted her hair into a ponytail to get it out of the way, but then she had to let it go because she hadn't died with a scrunchie on her person. Could this being earthbound thing get any more inconvenient?
Probably not. But, maybe it could be convenient in other ways.
Tentatively, Julia crawled through the cage, ignoring the disturbed-water feeling. Marr lay curled on her side on a rubber pad, her legs tucked in so that her long body would fit, one of her arms kinked into an awkward L-shape. Though she was unconscious, her eyes were partly open, moist, and unseeing.
Well. That wasn't upsetting at all. Feeling sick to her stomach, Julia traced the needle sticking out of the soft flesh of Marr's inner elbow, up the tube, and to a bag of solution depending from the cage's top.
Julia passed a hand across her friend's sweaty forehead, wishing Marr could feel her. Wishing she could do something more. Marr's eyelids didn't twitch. Julia could hear the soft, irregular sound of her breathing. Drugged. They probably all were. She surveyed the rows of cages. Twenty-two occupied, plus two more empty and waiting. So many. "Don't worry, Marr. I'm going to get help. Just as soon as I figure out where we are."
She backed out of the cage and then froze. Were those voices? She listened. Yep, definitely voices. Shoot! The thing inside Vahe had been able to see her. Chances were, whoever was coming now could, too.
Thinking fast – stay and be caught here, or run and risk getting caught by whatever might be out there? – Julia jumped at the dark slab of wall between Marr's cage and the next one. Despite everything, she expected to crash into it.
She went sailing through it. Then she squealed, for the ground on this side of the building dropped sharply away. She was four feet in the air, the hillside that unrolled below her bristling with thick clumps of scrub oak, blue spruce, cottonwood, and exposed red sandstone. She squeezed her eyes shut as she fell.
She never landed. Julia cracked one eye, then the other. She stood, unharmed, in the shadows of a gully. She looked up. The moonlight couldn't penetrate the black tangle of branches and needles.
Wow. If she could just figure out how to do that teleporting thing on purpose. . . .
Julia passed through the scrub, disturbing nothing. She crouched behind a rough red boulder. The barracks building stood on top of its little hill, its roof sharply slanted. She frowned. This place seemed familiar, like a summer camp she might have visited as a child, though she was sure she'd never been here before. Besides, it looked as though it had been standing unoccupied for at least fifty years, all alone on the slopes of the foothills. Not many places around the Denver area were this isolated.
It wasn't deserted, though. People passed in pairs under dim lamps on posts, the light nearly orange, the people unspeaking, moving in a strangely preprogrammed way. Not people, then. Black-eyes, like Vahe.
The scratch of a shoe through gravel, near at hand. Julia ducked. Two black-eyes ambled by her, one of them carrying cans of paint, the other several cloth grocery bags. Julia crept along the gully, following them, but when the scrub oak became too dense, she risked climbing onto the path.
One of the black-eyes suddenly came to life. "Did you hear something?"
Julia froze, holding the breath that she didn't need, anyway. She bit her lips as he turned, his black eyes and brown skin shining in the orange lamplight, and stared straight at her.
The other one gave the area a cursory sweep. She frowned, her wrinkles standing out like granite in bas-relief. "I don't see anything."
Julia couldn't help the sting of fear that pierced her insides at the sight of the gun in the black-eyes' hand. She couldn't be shot, could she? Still, the fear took her back to a time when fear had been part of a game. While playing hide and seek, she used to repeat words in her head: Don't see me. Over and over, squashed into the cupboard under the sink. Don't see me. Don't see me.
She repeated the words now. It seemed to work. Like a magic spell. The two black-eyes surveyed the area in silence for a few moments, but they didn't see her standing right there. She was calm, like water on a breathless day. So still, the reflections looked as solid as the real thing. I'm a ghost. You can't see me.
"Come on," the grandmother with the freaky black eyes said. She returned her gun to its holster. "We shouldn't keep Lilith waiting."
The first black-eyes looked startled. "Lilith? She's here?"
"Not for long," the other said in a voice too flat to be reassuring. "I heard the Winchester boy resisted her, that he's immune to her power, so she's not eager to meet him again. Not yet."
"Not until the final seal," the first one said with relish.
Julia perked up. That sounded promising! With more confidence than she'd commanded since she'd been alive, she allowed the two black-eyes to lead her to what she assumed was the compound's mess hall. They went in the back, the door taking its sweet time to come to rest against the latch, leaving a sliver open to the night. Hugging the black-eyes' heels, Julia moved past a tiny, rounded fridge and matching stove, its paint chipped and chrome tarnished, an enameled sink on four legs, and then a washer-dryer set that could have popped right off the pages of a nineteen-forties Sears, Roebuck and Co. catalog. She glided into the mess hall proper and then dove sideways behind a pile of shattered wood that had probably been a table and benches. More broken furniture dotted the room like enormous dust piles waiting to be swept away. A few incandescent work lights lay on the floor, their thick black cords snaking into careless loops, their beams shining across the floor, up the walls, tickling the ceiling.
The one nearest the door lay in such a way that it illuminated part of the wall. Julia covered her mouth to keep a gasp inside. White painted markings flowed unbroken from the ceiling to the floor. She didn't recognize any of the signs at first, although she thought she spied a few upside-down crosses, and maybe a Star of David, though twisted, somehow. It hurt her eyes to look at it. Interspersed with the graffiti, a sequence of red numbers repeated themselves, now three feet tall, now only six inches. Again, and again, the same numbers, the same order, carefully painted.
4144171
She had no idea what they could mean, but it had to be important. It just had to. Four one four four one seven one. She had to remember.
One of the black-eyes cast a suspicious look over his shoulder as he deposited his paint cans on the floor. Julia wondered if he'd felt something as she whooshed by him, like a rush of cold air. She crouched as low as she could and still see over the pile of broken wood, saying her magic spell in her head over and over. After a few repetitions, he turned back around.
"Did you have any trouble?" Kittney asked, all business.
Next to her, looking cool in a long white dress, a tall blonde woman smiled in satisfaction, seductively chewing on her nail.
"No," the black-eyes said. He produced a screwdriver from one of the grocery bags and pried the lid off a paint can. The underside of the lid glinted syrupy red. "Cattle blood, fresh off the farm. We were in and out, as instructed."
"Good," Kittney said after inspecting the contents of the can. "This will finish it. You two, go complete the sigils in the northwestern corner. It is nearly time to begin the summoning."
The two black-eyes went to do her bidding with as much emotion as dead squids. They parted around a painted pentagram. Black candles burned at each of the star's points, and red candles burned in each of the corners.
The sensation of needle-sharp kitten claws crawled up Julia's arms and her back, digging in under her jaw so that she shivered. Whatever was going on there felt wrong, like cutting into a pastel-frosted birthday cake to find bloody giblets in the middle. Twisted. Gross.
Kittney approached the pentagram and ran her fingers along a painted line. Her face shone as though she beheld a masterpiece. "See, Master? We have everything under control. The angels can't find us, the reapers are impotent. We will command hundreds of souls at the moment of the summoning."
Rage swelled within Julia. Command hundreds of souls? As though she, and Luka, and everybody else, were nothing more than tools? That little brat had killed her. She could make her pay. She would.
Julia dug her fingers into a table leg as though it were made of clay. The wood sizzled and sank beneath her fingertips.
As soon as she realized what she was doing, she snatched her hands away, frightened. The rage dropped away like cold ash.
The holes accused her, looking as though someone had stuck a sizzling soldering iron into the wood. How had she done that? Julia examined her fingers, the tips, the nails. No change. They looked exactly as they should. She tried to grab the table leg again, but her hand passed through it.
Enough. The blonde woman, her arms crossed, was examining the room with a critical eye, and, if Julia wasn't mistaken, was particularly interested in the corner where she crouched. So, enough freaking out about things she could neither control nor understand. She needed to find out where she was so she could report back to Aya.
"I trust you can complete the rest of the ritual without me?" the blonde woman asked, as though she'd just remembered an important appointment and was in a hurry.
Kittney looked up at her with sickening adoration. "They won't find us here, Master. I made sure of it. The stage is set. It is a perfect amplifier, a convergence of ley lines. I will perform the ritual here and begin the process of converting the lines."
"Color me reassured," purred the taller woman. She rolled her eyes – and then kept rolling them until they gleamed smoky white like two blank marbles.
Julia couldn't hold in a gasp, for the woman smiled like it was nothing, her pretty face ruined by her corpselike eyes. That time, Kittney definitely looked in her direction. Her black eyes burned with animosity.
Julia didn't want to stick around any longer. She closed her eyes, hoping she'd memorized the sequence of numbers right, and imagined herself outside the barracks building.
When she opened her eyes, that was exactly where she was. Except this time, she was facing a different direction.
Rising against the sky, a rugged, unmistakable shape blocked some of the stars. She knew that shape! She knew its name, too. Ship Rock, the southern arm of Red Rocks Park and Amphitheatre.
Julia wanted to laugh out loud. Oh! Kittney had meant the actual stage nestled between the acoustic rock formations, first discovered and used by the Ute tribe way back when. No wonder she hadn't recognized where she was. She'd had no idea this campground existed, and it didn't seem to be open to the public. It had probably been built for the original workers who had turned the natural sandstone formation into an entertainment venue in the earliest years of the nineteen-hundreds. She turned around, wanting to confirm that Ship Rock had been behind her the whole time.
The white-eyed woman stood on the path, her golden hair and white dress shining ghostlike in the moonlight, smiling like a head cheerleader who had just caught the one girl on her squad that she hated breaking a rule.
"Seems we have a spy," she said in mock disappointment. "I was so sure my demons had ghost-proofed our operation here, but you obviously found a way to slip past that."
Julia couldn't think of a thing to say. How did she get out here so fast?
The woman held up a single finger. "I don't know who you are and I don't really care, because you're rude and I don't like you. Bye-bye!"
"No, please!" Julia couldn't afford to disappear again. Not now. It had taken hours to wake up after Vahe had blasted her apart. She needed to tell Aya what she'd learned as soon as possible. Marr and the others were counting on her!
She latched onto the buzzing that would take her back.
Then, for the second time, her awareness scattered like sand blown off a dune.
..::~*~::..
Black water. White floodlights.
Castiel watched as a team of humans wearing reflective vests and hard hats extracted the body of the young woman, the believer, the one with faith, from the tumbleweed and the river. They had already bagged the young man and carted him away.
He should have answered her prayers. He knew that now. It was what Dean would have done.
The toes of Castiel's shoes rested close to the edge of the light but did not touch it. He chose to remain in the dark. After receiving revelation – after being chastised and threatened with a demotion – he felt the same way about Heaven as he did about the light at the moment. Shut out of it, metaphorically speaking.
"We feel you have begun to express emotion, Castiel. Emotions are doorways to doubt. Your judgment may be impaired."
He squinted while the rescuers laid the young woman on a gurney. One of them zipped closed the big black bag, hiding her from view. He could not deny that his current vessel – a vessel with which he could fully integrate, that he had taken great care to test beforehand – possessed emotions. Some very strong emotions, as a matter of fact, able to reshape his millennia-old way of thinking. However, he did not believe that the emotions were leading him wrong, as his superiors did. He believed the opposite.
Dean and Sam Winchester. The brothers, infants in an angel's eyes, were ruled by their emotions. And, as Castiel had had ample opportunity to observe, their emotions did not often lead them wrong. Their actions were, for the most part, just. He was growing fond of them and their blatant irreverence, fleeting though their existence was. They possessed a purity that he'd found lacking lately.
They would have saved his Father's children if they could have. As he would any of his brothers or sisters. They were not so different from him. So, why had he been ordered to sit out of this fight just because they had become involved?
As though summoned, Uriel flapped down through the dimensions and coalesced at Castiel's side. The moment his beefy vessel could breathe, he wrinkled its nose.
"There they are," he said in his vessel's soft, deep drawl. "Crawling through the filth to collect the trash."
"They show respect for their dead," Castiel quietly disagreed. He and his brother were vibrating on a slightly higher plane, and the human rescue crew would neither see nor hear them. The ducks did, though they would not tell. "Their work here tonight is an acknowledgment of their mortality. I admire that about them."
Unaware of their celestial visitors, mortal men and women called out to each other. Vehicle doors slammed, the river gurgled and plashed, and Castiel drew his wings in tight. This whole situation unsettled him, though he could not pinpoint why.
Uriel twitched his shaved head as though irritated by the shirt collar buttoned against his thick neck. As a specialist, he was allowed a small range of emotion, enough to ensure that he followed through on his orders, no matter how abhorrent they may be. None of them would forget the orders that Uriel had carried out one night on the banks of a massive north-flowing river, alone, to punish a stubborn and petty pharaoh, without the support of the garrison.
"That is exactly your problem," Uriel said, his dark eyes simmering with contempt as he watched the crews cleaning up their equipment. "You're attributing Divine intent to the mud monkeys again. Did you know that they will eat each other if given the chance? They are revolting little savages who can barely speak."
"They are our Father's beloved creations. He formed them in His image and gave them free will," Castiel said. He turned to face Uriel, whose true form was as awesome as a storm on Jupiter but was not the image of God. "A gift He did not see fit to bestow upon us. They may help or hinder as their nature dictates. It is not our place to judge them. We are all what we have been made."
It was as close as he dared come to expressing what was chiefly troubling him: that he must have been made differently for a purpose that none of them could yet see. Else why would he constantly be reprimanded for deviancy?
"We were made to follow orders," Uriel shot back, possibly in response to Castiel's unspoken thoughts, for Castiel had not wished to guard them. The floodlight nearest them blew out, the energy flow reacting to his display of temper.
The sound of breaking glass and the sudden return of darkness caused a few shouts of surprise, and then a smattering of tired laughter.
"Are you saying our Father was mistaken?" Castiel asked. It might have been a challenge, but he had never had a reason to pick a fight with his brother.
As quickly as he had flared up, Uriel settled back down and clasped his thick-fingered hands. "No. I am saying you should forget about them. They are beneath you, my brother. They are where they belong."
"One of them isn't," Castiel said. Sorrow. That was the emotion washing through his vessel. Sorrow and . . . regret? The violence perpetrated here had stained the air with a different kind of darkness. "I heard her prayers. As did you."
"I heard them." Uriel gave what would have been, for a human, a shrug. The ambient light slid over the shiny material of his suit jacket like water. "I didn't care. She was too stupid to know what was good for her. She should not have dodged her reaper. It is her own doing."
"There was no reaper here to meet her," Castiel said. He tilted his head, puzzled by the fact that Uriel did not seem to know this already. "The psychic fog has blocked them as well, slowing them down. There are far more souls here than there should be. Is that not why I was ordered to save the human named Aya Nakano? So she could guide the souls to Heaven?"
"It is no longer your concern," Uriel said. Then, seeming to realize that he was being too brusque, he lowered his voice and his curly eyelashes. "Trust in us, Castiel. We will not allow this seal to be broken."
Wearied by his brother's clumsy attempt to soothe him, Castiel unfurled his wings and caught a ley line the way a sail captured the wind. He shot along the Earth's telluric current. This time, he was careful to guard his thoughts, to keep his growing doubts hidden. He did not wish for Uriel, or any angel, to follow. There was something he needed to do, even if it meant going against the mandate of Heaven.
Hm. He liked the emotion that welled up in his vessel at the thought: Amusement. Because this would not be the first time he had deviated from the plan, nor would it be the last. It was just the way he had been made.
A/N: It's been a while, hasn't it? I am so sorry this update took so long! For lots of reasons, of course, boring real-life stuff but also, I was convinced that Julia's scene needed to be half a page, a page at most, because it was time to bring Cass in. BUT NO. Stick to your outline, Anne. Julia's scene was very important. I hope you all think so, too! Rest assured that Cass does have more to say. Next chapter. :3
Reviewer Thanks! jenwincart, Topkicker26, happyperson42, Darwin, MiMiMargot, salice89, and Momochan77. Welcome, you new reviewers! Thank you all so, so much! X3
I want to hear it: Do you like the way I've portrayed Cass, or no? Is he OOC to you at all? This is important to me! X3 Also, putting this out there, I've just finished happyperson42's Exogenesis Trilogy, and let me tell you, it was AMAZING. Go give it some love too, will you? The first part is called "Overture," and while it starts out with a certain tone, it gets deep fast. DEEP.
Until next time!
~ Anne