Rowena draws in a deep gasp, the stabbing pain in her gut greeting her enthusiastically, though it quickly fades into a bad memory as her body reconstructs itself.
She's lying painfully on her side, body pointing downhill, on the stone steps leading down into the crypt. It all seems familiar, though it takes her a few seconds to remember why.
Emery. Emery killed her.
She doesn't know why. She gave him what he wanted. She did everything right.
But maybe she didn't. Maybe she made a terrible mistake, dabbling in forces she truly didn't understand, and unleashed something on the world she has no hope of controlling.
For a long, long time, she lies still. The sky above her is gray, as if shortly after dawn. Usually the resurrection spell works within an hour. But it doesn't sound like dawn—there is no din of early morning traffic, no sound of birdsong.
A few seconds after she starts listening, a distant scream rises, and is cut short.
She shivers involuntarily. Something is very, very wrong.
Deeming it easier than trying to climb to her feet on the steps, she pulls herself the short distance to the bottom, struggling to a standing position once there, and finds herself stood directly in front of the final resting place of Isa Taisacan—at least until her son apparently replaced her bones with his own.
Rowena steps forward hesitantly, peering into the crypt, squinting in the dim light.
The bones are still there.
The bones, which are all Emery has wanted, all he's worked for, for months.
Another scream, this one sustained for the duration, rises somewhere far off.
Rowena stands still in the crypt, her feet suddenly like blocks of cement. She dares not move, and can barely breathe, finding a sudden weight on her chest.
Emery was her ride out of here, back to hell. She never thought she'd yearn to be in that place again, but at least she was left alone there. At least she could count on a bit of peace and plenty of reading material. Here? Here who knows what might happen to her.
She never should have formed an alliance with that monster.
She breathes slowly, closing her eyes, trying to take a critical look at her options. Her son can't know that she was here. She'd put money on the guess that Emery, whether officially or not, has just left his employ, and he'll be finding out soon enough. She can't be within a thousand miles of here. But she has no supplies for a teleportation spell…
Well. There is one way.
But who knows where it will land her, and it's going to cost a lot of blood.
Rowena's always hated that spell. She learned it fairly early on, and she's used it three times in her life to get out of unsavory situations when she had no access to any materials. Each time, she bled for so long she thought she would die, and she was thrown across the world. The only guarantee is that of ending up on solid ground, because you always land over a marked grave. That's part of it. But it could be any marked grave, anywhere in the world.
Doesn't really matter. It's her only option.
But first, she needs a way to draw blood.
Ascending the six steps between her and the surface is a slow business. Each step is a trial on its own. On the second, her head rises above the ground, granting her a limited view of the cemetery.
At first glance, it looks normal. One more step, and her eyes land on the front gate. Torn asunder. Between her and it, several gravestones have been obliterated, fragments strewn across several meters of ground. She notices smoke rising from a few points beyond the walls of the cemetery, some a little too close for comfort.
She sees no evidence of anyone else present. For some reason, that serves only to make her more nervous. Like she can only wait for the other shoe to drop. She wastes no more time in hurrying over to the nearest destroyed gravestone, sifting through its remains, and picking out the sharpest shard she can find.
She rolls her sleeve up, and for a long moment stays still, the shard of stone poised above her pale forearm, as she stares down at the huge, bloody tear in the fabric of her dress over her stomach.
Closing her eyes, gritting her teeth, she swiftly jams the stone into her arm, and begins to chant.
For the first half hour after Crowley finds out, he does not even begin to register it on an emotional level.
He just sits around his throne room, idly waiting to burn up into nonexistence.
But he never does.
A couple of times demons wander in to give him updates on the situation. He never responds in the slightest. Eventually they stop coming.
Did he know something like this would happen? It feels like he did—or, perhaps, like he should have, but they're very different.
It feels strange to have so little of an emotional reaction.
But then, the alternative would be to have an emotional reaction.
He doesn't know how De—Emery could have acquired the location of the Blade. He doesn't even bother to wonder. It's done now. Their partnership has clearly ended, if it could be said that it even really began. The only place left to move is forward.
He just… has no idea what that even looks like. And he can find no reason to attempt to figure it out.
He still hasn't even moved when Guthrie appears and tells him, "Sire, one of our crossroads demons was summoned by… well, by your mother. She was on King William Island and not in the best of shape."
This ought to be good, is all he thinks. And thinking it doesn't even feel active—it's just a phrase that runs through his head, but which he finds he doesn't really feel. He gives the tiniest twitch of his hand to indicate Guthrie should send her in.
And then she's striding in, makeup running down her face, and she looks absolutely frightful, pale as death, with a bloody hole in the fabric of her dress over her abdomen and snow covering her head and shoulders. He surveys her silently, impassively, as she blubbers, "King William Island. Canada! That's what your exceptionally brusque underling told me. Where is Emery? What has he done?"
He doesn't react. Perhaps he could find the energy to do so if he tried, but, well, he can't find a reason to try. He just watches her.
Clearly she's uncomfortable, bordering on angry. "Fergus! You must tell me! You placed your trust in him, but now he's gone off, I know he has! He deposited me in the middle of bloody nowhere, and then ran me through! Of course I had a resurrection spell prepared, and I wake up an hour later frozen stiff, with bloody caribou sniffing at my carcass—and then trekking across the tundra trying to find a crossroads, oh my darlin', it was a nightmare."
She's sure giving a lot of unsolicited information. One corner of his mouth turns ever so slightly upwards in the barest hint of a pleasant smile. "Why would he do that?" he inquires, with the tone of someone who knows he's expected to ask but otherwise wouldn't care to.
"Well no doubt to separate us, even he can see we're stronger when we're together," she responds, clearly encouraged by finally being acknowledged. "Can't you see it, Fergus? All this time I've been trying to be there for you, to tell you what a danger he was, and you wouldn't listen! And yes, I'm disappointed, but I'm still your mother, and—"
"Shut up, you whore." He wasn't expecting the words to come from his mouth, but he's not surprised when they do. They're long overdue.
She clearly doesn't feel the same, and appears stunned. "What?"
He leans forward, a motion that represents the most he's moved in the few hours that have passed since he received the news. "I'm nobody's bitch. Not Dean's, and certainly not yours. I'm Crowley. I'm the bloody king of hell. You want on this bandwagon? Fine. You're powerful, there's no denying that. But I run things. You decide nothing. And don't think for a moment I actually trust you. That's a mistake I'll never make again."
She blinks at him, open-mouthed. "I… If that's what you want," she stammers, finally, though it certainly seems she still hasn't figured out how she feels about this development.
He stands, brushing his suit off, turns, and heads towards the door, brushing past her without giving her a second glance. "Come on. We've got a lot of meetings to schedule and conduct, and we're doing it all up in the cells."