Anna

She doesn't even remember screaming. Power flooded through Anna, and she ripped herself away from the angel, collapsing when her body refused to support her. It was like being doused in the fires of the Phlegethon, like burning motor oil and hot sauce were forcibly injected into her veins. Like a thousand suns burned under her skin. Like her bones were disintegrating into ash. Like wood splinters danced under her skin, like a thousand lashes healed with careless nectar, like glass striping skin from bone, like a wildfire burning so hot it seared her skin from fifty feet away while a friend died in agony.

She collapsed to the floor, landing on her bad shoulder, a strangles scream tearing out of her throat, the noise scraping against her vocal cords, stripping them bare. She curled into a ball, her whole body convulsing in pain.

"ANNA!"

"CAS WHAT DID YOU DO?"

"I do not know!"

"ANNA!" She couldn't even lift her head to acknowledge Dean's desperate voice. The foreign wrongness of Castiel's healing scorched through her. Following behind the burning pain was something almost worse; a skin crawling intimacy, settling inside her brain and squeezing tightly inside her skull. It was cold and numb and carried with it a tidal wave of nightmares. She twitched feebly on the floor, tears streaming down her face. Rough hands encircled her shoulders, pulling her up into an approximation of a seated position.

"Cas, whatever you did FIX IT!"

"I do not know how!" The angel sounded frantic. She pried her eyes open, tears clinging to her eyelashes as she tried to peer around the room.

She choked on the air as she tried to speak, pained whimpers slipping out of her mouth with every movement she made. Castiel was standing in awkward horror in a corner, while both Dean and Sam hovered over her. Dean squeezed her gently every time her body shook. Grounding her, trying to tether her to a world outside of the pain.

Anna's useless if she can't think.

She spots the half open door of the room, and the worn leather corner of her trunk sitting on the concrete outside the room. An idea flashed into her tortured brain.

Artemis did say it was fully stocked for a quest.

"Trunk!" She gasped out, air hissing through her teeth. Sam lunged across the floor. She jerked in Dean's arms, and let out a hoarse cry. She shoved a shaking hand into her pocket, fingers curling around the key. Sam came sprinting back across the room, dragging the trunk with him.

For a brief moment she hesitated. That trunk had once been her entire life in a box. Weapons, journals, magic ingredients and tools, letters of recommendation, pictures of her friends, of her siblings. Could she trust the boys with its contents?

Then another painful spasm wracked her body and she dropped the key to the floor with a quiet clunk. Sam snatched it up, trying to shove it into the paddock keeping the contents of the trunk safe and secret. His hands were shaking so badly he missed the lock twice before he managed to open the trunk.

"Anna, what do you need?"

"Thermos." She whispered. She could only pray that there was a thermos of nectar inside. Without it, she's as good as dead. If she tried to eat any ambrosia now, she'd probably bite her own tongue off or choke. A cold numb feeling began to creep up through her limbs; combating the fiery pain that had been racing through her veins. It felt a little like standing on the precipice between Tartarus and the realm of Chaos, near Nyx's palace. She felt tired, like she could be unmade in the eternity of Chaos and be at peace with it.

At least she got to see the sun again one more time.

Sam tossed a silver thermos to Dean who caught it with one hand. He unscrewed the top carefully, sniffing the contents. He glanced at the container dubiously, and glanced down at her. Dean tilted the edge towards his mouth.

"NO!" She shrieked, energy surging back into her as she panicked. He froze at her voice. He glanced down at her, his eyebrows drawn low on his face.

"Anna is this dangerous?" He asked warningly. She shifted in his lap, her eyelids dragging lower and lower by the second.

"Not to me." She admitted, her words slurring together. She felt a soft pressure under her neck. Her eyes flicked up to see a worried looking Sam, carefully timing her pulse. Castiel had also moved closer, surprise and understanding dawning on his face. Somewhere very far away, deep down in the darkest recesses of her mind, a klaxon alarm was blaring, warning her of danger. Anna blinke slowly, wondering why she was trying so hard to stay awake anymore. The pain had faded, leaving very little behind. Anna's not entirely sure what they're even doing. Why is she laying on the floor?

Her eyes drifted closed. She's tired. So very tired.

"Dean give to her now." The angel warned. "She is dying." Anna's head dropped lazily to the side, her eyes half closed.

Peace flooded her.

At least this way she has a shot at Asphodel, or maybe Elysium if she was really lucky. She can die free, and not eternally trapped in horrors of Tartarus. She felt like she was floating. Her world narrowed to the warm yellow light slowly filtering into the room through the grimy window as the world finally broke into day, and silence descended over her, echoing oddly in her ears.

It was almost peaceful.

A warm hand cupped her cheek. Rough gun callouses scratched at her skin. Cold metal touched her lips, and someone coaxed her into drinking. The warm salty flavor of soup filled her mouth, and candlelight and quiet blessings flickered in the back of her mind. An overwhelming sense of security enveloped her, and Anna's tense body relaxed a fraction.

The warmth and energy from the nectar rushed through her, burning away the cold numb disinterest that had flooded her body. But the near painful heat from before was back. Fire burning through her cells, flooding her body with adrenaline. Anna was suddenly, and viscerally aware, of every tense fiber in her body, of the itch in the healing cells in her feet, her knee, across her skin, as injuries knit themselves closed, and combated the damage of hybrid magic and mixed blessings. The chaos of Castiel's healing and Artemis's blessing settled, her system resetting back to demigod normal with the healing factor of the nectar.

Her eyes snapped open just as Castiel snatched the thermos away from Dean's hand. She coughed, inhaling some of the godly drink down the wrong pipe. The angel screwed the cap of the thermos back on tightly before tossing it back into the trunk, eyeing the container with mistrust. Dean helped her sit up, rubbing her back soothingly as she continued to cough, gasping for breath.

"Anna?" She waved a hand to the side, indicating that she was fine. Sam slumped to the floor, sighing heavily. Dean kept one arm wrapped around her as Anna finally managed to catch her breath.

She finally pushed herself into a seated position, her knee bouncing on place with excess energy. Looking around she saw caught the worried expressions of all three men. She managed a weak smile, ignoring how feverish she was feeling. If Castiel hadn't snatched the nectar away when he did, she probably would have overdosed on the stuff.

"I'm fine." She reassured them weakly. A laugh huffs through her aching chest when all three men scoff. Anna tried to push herself to her feet, determined to prove it, but a wave of vertigo sent her careening to the side. Dean catches her, carefully propping her up as she blinked, trying to reorient her world so that up and down stayed where they belonged.

"Anna, you're not fine. What the hell was that?" Dean asked her. She didn't turn her head to meet his eyes. Her world was still spinning.

"Just need everything to stop spinning. Then I'll be fine." She deflects, patting absently at Dean's arm where it was wrapped around her waist. He shifts beside her, the back of his hand pressed against her forehead.

"Jesus, she's burning up." Anna batted his hand away. It would go away. She'd had the wrong kind of divinity try to heal her, then nearly OD'd on the correct type of divine healing. Side affects were most definitely included. Honestly, they were lucky that all she was currently experiencing was vertigo and a smallish fever.

"It'll pass. There's a good reason why that stuff's only for emergencies." She muttered, one hand pressed hard against her temples. There was movement somewhere in the room, but Anna ignored it. For right now, one of the boys, or their resident angel could handle any potential threats. She's busy trying to keep the contents of her stomach on the inside of her body.

Sam appeared in the corner of her eyes, a glass of water in his hand. She smiled weakly at him, and accepted the cup. She sipped slowly, swallowing hard against the rising bile twice. It took her nearly five minutes to finish the whole cup, but by the end of it, the feverish feeling in her body had dissipated, and the spinning in her head had mostly stopped.

"Di immortales. Let's never do that again." She groaned, lifting her head back up to face the room. Outside the window, she could see that sunrise had come and gone, Apollo's chariot fully in the morning sky.

"What the hell happened Anna? Who the hell was that woman? Cas couldn't even sense where in the world you were until you reappeared in the parking lot. And what the hell was that in that thermos? How did yo-" Anna cut off Dean's barrage of questions.

"One at a time Dean." She practically begged. She also became suddenly aware of how close he was sitting to her. She pressed her lips tightly together, repressing the embarrassment that briefly flicked through her as she realized exactly how vulnerable she'd been with Dean; and the others, but mostly with Dean, last night.

For Zeus's sake, she'd asked him for a hug!

Anna carefully shifted on the bed, breaking contact with Dean and leaning back against her hands. She refused to acknowledge the regret she felt at the loss of his body against hers. Once, she might have leaned into it - Anna hadn't been oblivious to Dean's attraction to her before she'd jumped through the Devil's Gate, and she'd caught him staring often enough since she's gotten back - but really nothing had changed since the night she'd kicked his ass sneaking into Sam's Stanford apartment.

The stakes are too high to allow anything to happen. Dean is a dangerous distraction for her. She'd be the same for him; a one night stand who follows him around on hunts.

It's safer this way; for both of them. She's already attached to the boys as it is.

"Anna, why did Cas's mojo do, whatever the hell-" Anna tried not to flinch at the word, but Sam caught it anyways, "that was. It's never hurt me or Dean before." She sighed, and stared at her hands.

She can't tell them the real reason. Mixing pantheons was always dangerous; it was why after Cater, Sadie, Percy, and Annabeth had their little Greco-Egyptian adventure, Anna and the gods of both pantheons worked doubly hard to separate the two worlds. It's why after Percy and Annabeth discovered the existence of the aesir and vanir pantheons; she'd forced them to swear on the Styx to never tell the rest of the demigods about their existence.

The Grace of Castiel's God was dangerous when mixed with her demigodly heritage.

The weird part is; that the Ventura blood should have helped her. But she had a feeling that the nephilim ancestry was equally at fault with whatever it was that Castiel's attempt at healing had done to her. But that would be a mystery for another day.

"Honestly? I don't know. I have a few ideas, but nothing concrete." Sam and Dean both kept looking at her pointedly, but Anna didn't volunteer any additional information.

Castiel shot her a hard look, but Anna ignored him entirely. She's played this game before; under higher and more dangerous stakes. At least if the Winchesters figure out she's not fully human, they'll kill her. Unlike some of the other groups she's had to infiltrate, Sam and Dean won't torture her if she's caught. They'll just shoot her.

And while she doesn't want to die, she's not particularly afraid of death.

"What I want to know more about is the apocalypse." She didn't bother to look up at the effect her verbal nuclear bomb had on the three men. Even if Artemis hadn't told her about it, she'd already known that the boys had been hiding something big from her. And then Castiel - a freaking angel - had shown up in the parking lot

"How-" Anna shook her head lightly.

"It was rather obvious, considering the drama happening in, uh, in H-" she stumbled over the word, hating herself for the terror the very mention of the place infused in herself.

"Anna…" Her lips thinned into a smile. Sam didn't look like he bought it, but didn't say anything more. She took a deep breath, shoving away the anxiety thinking of Tartarus always brought her. Behind Castiel's left shoulder, the motel wall flickered. For a moment the harsh smell of brimstone and sulfur filled her nose, and craggy cliffs appeared behind the angel.

Anna fisted her hands into the motel sheets behind her, silently reminding herself of Artemis's blessing. She is out. She's free. Anna took another deep breath, working to stay calm.

"Demons and monsters were all riled up dow- down there. I heard plenty of hints and taunts about the destruction of seals before I got out. And Castiel told me about it in the parking lot before he attacked me."

"I did not attac-" Anna ignored the outraged angel.

"So what are we doing about the end of the world?" Her heart sinks as she watches all three men exchange hopeless looks.

"We have no idea." Sam admitted quietly. Anna huffed a laugh.

"Well that's just great."