"You sent the Devil to the bottom of the ocean?" Crowley asked in disbelief, helping Grace take off the witchcatcher that had bound her to Lucifer. "You could have at least locked him away. We have things that can do that."
"Just a temporary fix, Fergus," Rowena reminded him. "But a bloody good one. We're going to assemble the witches should you need any more help with him. Do be more careful next time, won't you? Don't let your little pets out, they tend to run away. And it's not a mess I want to keep cleaning up after."
"Mother," Crowley warned. "Grace, dear, do tell the boys I say hello. Don't trust my mother. And congratulations on the engagement." He sent her away, Grace suddenly appearing in the bunker.
She wouldn't be there for long. Knowing that Lucifer would be after her, she packed a bag and took off for a hotel. There weren't many places she could go to hide out where Lucifer couldn't find her, but she knew that if she stayed in the bunker and Lucifer went after her, it was better that she was away from the boys. She texted them to let them know where she had been and where she was going, deciding she ought to settle in. As she laid in bed, flipping through channels, something caught her attention.
"... potential presidential assassins apprehended…"
"... facing attempted murder and treason charges…"
"... being held in a maximum security facility…"
It was on every channel, Sam and Dean's faces plastered everywhere. "Oh my god, what have you done?" Grace mumbled, sitting up and staring at the TV. Lucifer's been possessing people. He's been climbing the ladder. If he went for the president, the boys would have gone after him. Shit.
Her phone rang, Grace assuming it was one of their friends who had seen the story. Sure enough, she was right. "Hey, Gen, sorry, I've been busy. How's the kid with the chupacabra bite?"
"Patched up and home. Haven't seen any more cases, so I think it was a lone one that got carried up here. We don't normally see them this far east." Gen was a hunter who had recently become a nurse, dealing with all of the weird cases in the local E.R. and covering for them. She's seen shtrigas, a couple of demons, and now a little kid with a chupacabra bite coming through the door. Since she was so close, she and Grace would meet up at times, hunting together if Gen needed backup. "But that's not why I called. You've got to tell me what's going on. First you disappear, then the Winchesters are arrested for trying to assassinate the president. They're on every channel. What the hell's going on, Grace?"
"I don't know," she confessed, getting up to double check that her door was locked. "Some big things are going on, Heaven and Hell kinds of things. Lucifer's out. Rowena and I sunk him to the bottom of the ocean, but it looks like he's out already. He must've been what the boys were after, otherwise… I have no idea. I don't know what they're up to, but I know I can't go break them out. I'm on the run."
"Where?"
"Starlight Motel, outside of town. It's not far, but it's something. Now that I know they're in federal prison… shit, I don't know what I'm going to do."
"Well maybe you're not the only one who's qualified to break them out of there. I'll make some calls and see if I can get some people on our side. You know the hunter community is pretty polarized over them right now."
"Mary," Grace realized.
"Who?"
"Uh, she's a hunter. A friend of ours. I've got to track her down. She might be able to help, or she might know someone who could help us out. Problem is, I have no clue where she is or what she's doing. Last I heard she was working with some people who really aren't friends of ours."
They spent the next half hour or so catching up before Grace gave Mary a call. Of course, she didn't answer. She'd been doing that a lot lately, so it didn't come as much of a surprise. So she did the only thing she could think of: shower, change, and get back to work. There was no way she'd be able to go anywhere close to the bunker. No, Lucifer would be watching. But she could figure out where the boys were being held and head that way, even if she couldn't break into the facility on her own.
Hacking into the government databases wasn't that difficult. Charlie had taught her a think or two long ago when she'd been working on translating the Book of the Damned. It came in handy now, Grace staying up late into the night typing away. With the help of a little magic, she made fast progress. The sun was rising when she cracked into the Department of Justice's servers, a sudden flood of messages about the would-be assassins hitting her computer.
Instantly she could see everything - emails, phone records, prisoner files, memoranda that had never and would never be released. It was a lot more than she needed, but she was able to wade her way through it all to find the files on the boys. Rocky Mountain in Colorado. Having found what she needed, she closed her computer and grabbed her things. It was time to take off.
Six and a half hours later, she checked in at a hotel right outside of Rocky Mountain National Park, which covered the blacksite the boys were being interrogated in. She couldn't just rush into the facility. It was crawling with guards, and any cover she had would be checked within a matter of hours. So she had to bide her time, try to come up with a plan to break them out. Some sort of spell work would have to hold the guards off, but the only books she had access to were the ones she had digitized, and none of them said anything about breaking out of federal prison.
She spent the next month in different hotels around the area, plotting a break-in with Rowena's help. Rowena would ferry books back and forth, bringing what little surveillance knowledge she could glean. Grace kept the news on all day as she worked, trying to see if there was anything new on the boys or on Lucifer's progress. Rowena kept her up-to-date on Hell too, on everything she, Crowley, and Cas were doing to keep Lucifer at bay. She would order takeout, only occasionally risking a sit-down restaurant. She paid for everything with a new card scam, using names that none of them had been linked with before. Living on the fringes of society, she did everything she could to conceal her movements.
It wasn't enough. It would never be enough. It wasn't the government she was running from, or some private detective. It was Lucifer himself, so it was only a matter of time before he turned up.
The night before she had planned on going into the government site, she heard a rustling in her room. Grace bolted up in bed, reaching for the gun on her nightstand. "Now I don't think that's quite necessary. Remember what happened last time?" Lucifer was perched next to the TV, watching as she slept. "Good job running away, but you can't outrun me. Sure, you can get away for a little while, but I'll always catch you."
"What, have you come to kill me?"
"No. That would be too easy. I just dropped in to tell you that your pretty little boy and his idiot brother are dead. Go on, check the prison network. They're all yelling about it now. No hope for the world, but those pesky flies are out of my way now." He watched her eagerly, but Grace didn't react, staring him down instead. "C'mon, give me some emotion! The love of your life is lying dead on the cold floor of his prison cell, and his soul is going to be mine soon. The thing you always wanted, you're never getting. No happy little life for you."
Grace stood, looking him up and down. "Oh, I believe you. But something's different." She paced over, cautiously staring him down.
"Umm…"
"Ssh." She stared for another minute, Lucifer trying to figure out what she was doing. "Oh my god…"
"Kinda the opposite. Are you okay, or have you been going all Yellow Wallpaper in here?"
"I might not be able to read your mind, but I was the vessel for your only friend for millennia. She knows you. She left me with more magic than I'd ever had before, and I guess she left me with - I can hear demons sometimes, the powerful ones, anyway," she explained. "Kind of like how the angels have their own way of communicating, the demons have it too, right? But on a different radio frequency. I assume you can hear both, but I only get a sliver of what goes on. You, she knew your voice. She knew your thoughts for ages," Grace realized. "That's why I can read you, and why you believed me right away when Rowena and I said we'd gotten the spell ready. Why I could work through the witchcatcher. I could tap into you, get in your head. I can't make you hear things, but…"
Lucifer just stared, convinced she was going insane. "Okayyy, why don't I let you out for some fresh air?"
"No, I get it now. You're looking for someone, and you need help. A woman. Her name's Kelly."
Taken aback, he had to ask, "How could you possibly know?"
"I just explained it to you," Grace told him in a tone that no mortal who feared for their life would ever take up with the Devil. "Miczael was your only friend for practically forever, since you got locked away. She would leave for a while, but she'd come back and tell you stories about how the world was evolving, stories about battle and bloodshed and all of that. She understood you as much as a demon could understand an angel, probably better. She's back in Hell, but she left me with a lot. So I know you're looking for Kelly because," she paused, trying to get a read on him. It wasn't too difficult now that he'd been thrown off. "Because she's pregnant with a nephilim. She's pregnant with a nephilim, really pregnant. And she's running from you. You need my help finding her."
"Guilty."
Now Grace had room to bargain. She crossed her arms, saying, "I'll do it, but first I need you to make sure my boys aren't dead. I'll help you, but I need proof that they're alive first."
"Look at you," Lucifer marveled. "You've come a long way from Dean helping you kill your first vampire to making deals with the Devil. Fiddle of gold against your soul still says I'm better than you."
"Shut up." She grabbed the ice bucket, starting to assemble materials for a tracking spell. "She's heavily warded, I assume, so I'm going to need a few things. We can start with a sunflower, a ram's horn that's been blessed, an image or something of her that I can fix the spell on, and an angel feather. Get me the stuff, prove the boys are alive and out of that facility, and I'll help you."