"Hello!" Julia called. She turned in a slow circle, straining her eyes to make out anything besides foggy gray. "Hello? Can anybody hear me?"

Her footsteps echoed eerily, sounding as though she had entered an abandoned gymnasium. She could hear people talking, though, even louder here – in the Veil – than in the car. Sobbing, wailing, shouting, whispering, praying. In English, Spanish, Vietnamese, Arabic, and more. "Hello? Please! I need to talk to you! Can you understand me?"

She'd been saying that so much lately. Julia raked her hands through her tangled hair. Enough. She'd had enough of this. "Everybody shut up and listen! I need your help!"

A hush blew through the mist like wind, setting the featureless gray aswirl. She waited, shivering with the chill. The voices, silenced, seemed to be waiting for something, too.

Julia fiddled with her hair, trying to convince herself that she wasn't scared, but debating whether to stay or to flee. Had she angered them? Could they hurt her? This was a stupid idea. Nothing was going to happen. They were just people, like Sam said.

Dead people.

Who could be thugs or mentally ill or –

Before she'd made up her mind, a dark shape coalesced out of the mist, making her jump.

Oh – sweet – cheese – and – crackers!

It was a man. Just some guy.

Just some guy. Just . . . or . . . not.

The guy looked like a range rider, dusty black from the Stetson on his head to the heeled boots on his feet.

Oh, yeah. People had been dying for a long, long time, not just in the last few days.

He stopped a polite distance from her and, in an accent that had roots in England and matched the pinstriped three-piece suit he wore under his duster, he said, "All right. You have our attention. Maybe you can explain what we're doing here."

..::~*~::..

Vahe didn't see anyone as he staggered into the barracks building. Aya's dead weight dragged at his tired, aching arms. He sighed in relief when he finally put her down in an unoccupied cage.

As he swung the cage door shut, slipping the bolt of the padlock home, the door to the long room opened and a demon walked in. Vahe recognized the thatch of pale hair, the braided leather swinging from a black vest, the chains on the black boots. Tom.

"You're back," Tom drawled. He jingled with every step.

"Yeah." Vahe didn't have the energy to say much else. He stood. "Where's the boss?"

"On her way." Tom set a square LED work light down by the cage. He eyed Vahe up and down. "Heard you had an angel up your ass. Didn't think you were gonna make it."

"Two," Vahe muttered. "It was two."

Tom nodded speculatively, and then his gaze slid down to the girl. In the work light's beam, she looked worse than ever, face pale, lips blue, hair matted with blood. "Angels do that?" he asked. Then one corner of his mouth hitched up in a knowing sort of grin. "Or did you?"

Vahe blinked. Black flooded his eyes.

Tom blinked. Black flooded his eyes.

They stared at each other as, outside, the storm and the angel-fire continued the fireworks display.

Tom, who hadn't lost his grin, ran a hand meditatively across his clean-shaven jaw and glanced down at the girl again. "Hey, not that I blame you, brother," he said. "It's about time we got to have a little fun. All work and no play, am I right?"

"Yeah," Vahe said again. He blinked, flick, forcing himself to step down, away from Tom. This was why demons didn't generally work together.

"Hold up." Tom frowned. "Weren't you supposed to bring two sacrifices? I only see one, and that one's half dead. Boss-lady ain't gonna like that, you get what I'm sayin'?"

"That one is special," Vahe grudgingly said. He would rather tell this to Kittney directly, but if this got Tom off his case faster, then so be it. "She talks to spirits. She can bring more here once the thing has been summoned."

"You shittin' me?" Tom crouched to peer at Aya through the chain-link. "We got ourselves a little bruja to work her magic?" He looked up. "A little M. Night Shyamalan? But what about the other one?"

Vahe gestured at himself. At Paulie. "This is the other one. I had to improvise. I'll just leave this one here and pick up another –"

A fist rammed into Vahe's kidney so hard he could have sworn it bounced off his ribs in the front. He broke off mid-sentence and gasped, his legs buckling. A thick, hairy arm, sleeved with ink, wrapped around his neck.

Betrayal and excruciating pain seared through him. He scratched and yanked at the thick arm. His feet scrabbled for purchase. He shoved back, seeking that small opening to get free.

The demon behind him chuckled. "You even trying, cupcake?"

Vahe wanted to snarl. Carmelo. Two hundred ninety pounds of muscle, fat, ink, crinkly reflective construction vest, and scraggly black beard. Vahe might as well have been shoving against a boulder.

"Sorry, brother," Tom said with another snaggle-toothed grin. He started to slip a stiff leather mask over the lower half of Vahe's face.

Vahe struggled harder with the arm constricting his airways, tried to block Tom's hands. Shit, he still wasn't back to one hundred percent! He wasn't any stronger than the human body he was inhabiting. Easily, Tom grabbed a fistful of Vahe's hair, pulling his head back, and Carmelo tightened his stranglehold. Vahe gurgled.

"No smoking out. Boss-lady's orders." Tom buckled the mask around the back of Vahe's head, tightening the straps viciously so that they cut into his cheeks.

Carmelo kicked Vahe's knees from behind with a cement-flecked work boot, and Vahe crashed to the floor. As his former partners trussed him hand and foot, he screamed unintelligible obscenities into damp leather. Tom held him down with one chain-bedecked boot on the side of his head.

Why was this happening? Vahe bucked, and Tom leaned harder on his temple, pressing his face to the floor. Vahe howled. He'd done as he was told! He was giving up the girl to this stupid ritual! He'd brought her here to die. For Kittney, for Lilith, for Lucifer's Apocalypse. He'd outsmarted two seraphim and the Winchester boy to do it! He'd gone through hell for them! So why –?

Tom twisted his foot, making Vahe fear that it was going to smash right through his skull. His back burned like fire from the kidney punch. The mask molded to his mouth, his chin, and his jaw. By the taste of the spellwork, he could tell that it was one of Alastair's. Portable devil's trap. The opposite of an exorcism.

He ceased struggling, breathing hard through his nose. In the relative quiet, he heard footsteps.

"You got him!" Kittney said, clapping her hands like the little girl she wasn't. "Good job! Let me see him."

Mercifully, the pressure of Tom's jingling boot disappeared. Kittney toed Vahe's head until he turned his face up to her. He did, glaring.

He wanted her to see that it wasn't tears in his eyes, it was dirt.

She smiled, violet lips spreading over small white teeth. "There. That's much better. You can't cause any more trouble for me like that!"

"I'll kill you!" he tried to say, but it came out as a series of grunts.

"See, your job was to bring me two sacrifices," she said, as calmly as a high-level manager explaining why she just had to let her fuck-up line-level employee go. She turned away and spent a few seconds gazing down into the cage at Aya. "Two sacrifices. Unharmed. And, I would have thought was obvious, not possessed."

The angel chose that moment to renew its assault on the wards. Kittney gave an aggravated sigh. "See what you've brought on us? I can heal this one, but you are an absolute moron. I think sacrificing you along with that human soul in there will make up for this mess you've put us in."

She blinked. Flick. "Prepare him for the ritual," she said to Tom and Carmelo.

Vahe screamed into the spelled leather mask.

..::~*~::..

The snow stopped so abruptly that Sam leaned forward to stare upward through the windshield, wondering if they had driven under an overhang.

"Whoa. That was weird," Deputy Girard said, checking her mirrors. "Look, it's barely even wet here."

"Yeah," he said with a glance at Dean, who wisely stayed silent. "It is weird."

"Spring weather in the Rockies, I guess," she said with a shrug.

Sam nodded in agreement, privately marveling at the way people could dismiss the supernatural as easily as breathing. He watched the numbers of the digital odometer tick upward, too slowly. This wasn't a run-of-the-mill hunt. This was end-of-the-world or save-the-world.

Hurry, he kept thinking. Hurry, hurry.

Girard seemed to have absorbed some of his urgency. She increased pressure on the accelerator, and the Tahoe jumped to obey as she drove it up a curvy, single-lane road. A pile of boulders, held together by the roots of a network of skeletal aspens, careened past in the headlights. Then a crash rail, its green paint peeling, so close Sam could have touched it. She took a sharp left turn at a cool sixty miles an hour, the headlights sweeping in a wide arc.

The beams picked out a familiar figure standing in the middle of the road.

"Look out!" Sam shouted.

Girard stomped on the brakes so hard she locked the wheels and Dean, from the backseat, almost pitched headfirst into her lap. He stopped himself by hugging the headrest of Sam's seat with one arm and slapping the other hand against the dash. The Tahoe rocked to a stop.

"Jeez!" he gasped.

Girard shot him a dirty look. "Seatbelt, Abbot."

"Not you," he said. He pointed.

Castiel was still standing there, squinting. Sam could see the angel's battered face now, his stoic expression, his ruined shirt, and the blood. Behind him, bodies littered the road, which gleamed in the dull light of a car-shaped fire. Thick rivulets of red ran into the dirt at the sides of the road.

"What in the world –?" Girard kicked her door open. She unsnapped her holster, preparing to draw her firearm. "You! Freeze!"

"No, Deputy, wait –" Sam cried.

"Cass!" Dean cried at the same time.

After an awkward scramble, Sam and his brother spilled out of the vehicle into the drifting clouds of its exhaust.

"Hands where I can see them!"Girard yelled, her breath puffing out steamily.

Castiel tilted his head at her, his arms hanging by his sides.

"Hands, buster!" She raised her gun in a steady grip.

Over Girard's yelling, Sam ran to get between them and started yelling, too.

"No no no, stop, he's a friend of ours, he's our friend!" Sam backed toward Castiel, aiming one hand at him as though to push him out of sight, but Castiel didn't budge.

Dean got right in front of the deputy, both hands up. "Felicia! Felicia, listen to me – he's our friend. Don't shoot him."

Cussing, she jerked her gun off Dean but kept trying to get a clear shot at Castiel around him. Dean shifted with her, blocking her like a defenseman, prompting a look of angry disbelief.

"Get out of the way, Abbot!" she snapped.

"No!" he snapped back. "I know this looks bad –"

"Bad? It looks like a slaughter!"

"– but I swear, he's one of the good guys."

"You have two seconds to explain this!"

"Sure thing, sure thing. Just put the gun down, okay?"

"Let me see some ID, then!"

Castiel rolled his eyes. Sort of. It was more of a quick skyward appeal. Girard and Dean were too busy with each other to notice. He brushed past Sam, shouldered Dean out of his way, grabbed Girard's firearm, pushed it aside – making her gasp from the way he bent her wrist – and touched her forehead with two fingers.

Deputy Girard's eyes rolled up in her head and she dropped her gun. Dean lunged to catch her before she struck the pavement. Luckily, the firearm did not go off.

"Jeez!" Dean said again, going down partway with her. Her hat fell off. He struggled to get a better grip on her and looked up at Castiel. "What the hell, Cass?"

"What happened here?" Sam asked. "Why did you take off like that?"

"Do you know how much we had to go through to get here?" Dean demanded.

Castiel opened his mouth to answer, but swung around at the last second and deflected a blow from a black-eyed demon meant to take Sam's head off at the shoulders. Sam stumbled back, shocked that he hadn't noticed the demon sneaking up on them from the trees. Castiel buried a fist in the demon's gut. The demon slugged him in the face, spinning him around and sending him to one knee.

Sam, unwilling to try an exorcism in front of Castiel or, more importantly, Dean, whipped the demon-killing knife from the sheath on his belt, grasped the tip, aimed, and threw.

"No, Sam!" Castiel barked.

It was a good throw, Sam knew. The knife should have clipped the demon's jugular. Castiel, however, caught it and chucked it at the ground. He stepped into the demon's reach again and put it to sleep. It toppled.

"We can't kill them," Castiel said in his low, rough voice, after checking the demon for a pulse. He sounded exhausted.

"Why not?" Dean asked.

With Sam's help, he managed to haul Deputy Girard to her Tahoe and shut her inside with the motor still running. Then, he fetched her Glock and checked it over.

"There are too many souls here already," Castiel explained, watching him open the slide and then click the safety on before tucking it in the waistband of his jeans. "They will serve to feed and strengthen the Void. We can't risk giving it more. Not even one."

Dean looked back and forth between them as Castiel picked up the demon-killing knife and returned it to Sam. "You mean we're up here to fight demons but we can't kill them? But they can still kill us. That's awesome."

Castiel head-tilted him. "I fail to see how this fills you with awe," he said.

"We can't do Jedi mind tricks!"

Castiel appeared to be thinking hard, and then to dismiss what he obviously did not understand. "Sam. Dean. I am glad you're here," he said.

Sam grinned at that. He gave the angel a little bump with his elbow. "Dean's just crabby because he had to hitch a ride with a girl. Next time, wait for us, okay?"

Castiel looked up at him, his face drawn and his eyes tired. "Okay."

..::~*~::..

Waking up hurt. Just like last time.

Lemara groaned. Her mouth felt like dirty socks and tasted worse. She rubbed her head, half expecting to find tire tracks embedded in her skull. A giant bruise had taken over the inside of her elbow, and old, dried blood from her nose had formed a crust on her upper lip.

She groaned again and sat up. Or tried to. She explored her too-small cage with shaking hands, walking them up the chain-link sides to the top. When she got to the IV bag and the tube, she let out a cry that released the lump in her throat and brought trembling heat to her eyes. She ripped the IV down and kicked it into a leaky mess in the corner of the cage.

Blearily, she blinked at a strong light that, strangely, sat on the floor – until she realized it was a box light. A moldy smell drifted down from exposed, sagging insulation in the ceiling. The quality of the light from the windows made it impossible to tell whether it was morning or night. Where was she? It felt like it had been dark for days.

Days. How many days had it been since she'd woken up in that warehouse?

Oh, Des. I was just starting to wonder what we could be like together. Lemara put her face in her hands and tried a few deep breaths. Not just Desmond, but Julia and her boyfriend, too. Lemara had never actually seen someone die before. The memory churned inside her something awful, like a queasy stomach. And that poor guy Vahe, whatever crazy trip had happened to him. Too much horror, too much grief. She didn't want to open her eyes again.

But was Desmond okay? How about all those other people in the warehouse? And what about Aya, left alone? What about all the other people in her life? Did anyone know what had happened to her?

Her fingers clenched on chain-link. "Hello?" she called, wanting to connect to somebody. Anybody. "Is anyone here? Des? Hello!"

Holding her breath, she waited, her fingers icy. Nothing responded. At first.

Across from her, and a couple of cages down, someone rolled over and sat up. The work light burned between them, making it hard to see past it.

"Marr?"

OH, MY GOD.

Even faint and kind of raspy, she'd know that voice anywhere.

"Aya!" Lemara shrieked. "What are you doing here? Aya – oh, my God, Aya! Never mind, never mind that, are you okay?"

"I'm . . . fine . . ." A bit of shuffling, and then Aya's pale face came into clearer focus. She looked eagerly for Lemara. A flash of something – lightning, maybe? – shone through the windows, brightening the whole room. As their eyes met, Aya's got really big and shiny. Then the flash of light outside faded, leaving colorful afterimages against the electric light that blurred Lemara's vision.

Aya leaned her forehead against the chain-link of her cage. "Marr . . ."

Lemara giggled shakily. "Would it be super inappropriate to say I'm glad to see you?"

A/N: Through much hauling around of characters running off every which way, I think we're back on track! So, I got a question for ya. This chapter - did it give you what you'd expect for a chapter titled "Reunion"? Or is it lacking somehow? I've been staring at it for three days straight and I can't tell LOL.

Reviewer Thanks! IHeartSPN (your reviews have made me cry many happy tears!), Darwin, Momochan77, St4r Hunter (twice!), MiMiMargot, and allurasgrace (three times! Welcome, friend!). This is the best I can do right now, shouting out your awesomeness to everyone who comes through. THANK YOU!

Next chapter coming soon! I think we'll hit twenty-two of them! O_o But will I hit the deadline?

~ Anne