Waverly Earp was smiling from her front porch. It was hard for Nicole to drag herself away from the sight and climb into the car. As they pulled away from the Earp homestead, Wynonna a dark and brooding presence in the passenger seat, Nicole replayed the smile a dozen times in her head. She was in trouble. She wasn't supposed to think about a charge in the way she thought about Waverly Earp. She just prayed that everyone was too busy with the demonic plague descending upon the Sanctuary to be tuned into her feelings. It had been over a week since she'd had any contact with her own kind and she wasn't quite sure what she was going to tell them when they next appeared. She wasn't a good enough liar to hide the strength of attachment that was beginning to form, and she wasn't sure she entirely wanted to.

"You're awful quiet for someone who wants answers," Wynonna said suddenly, jolting Nicole out of her thoughts. Her hands tightened on the steering wheel, startled to be caught in the depth of her thoughts of Waverly. She was grateful that telepathy wasn't an Earp heir gift. Nicole cleared her throat.

"I can't make you tell me," she replied. The relief she'd felt when Wynonna had said she'd tell her the truth about Purgatory had been palpable. If she could officially know about demons and angels and curses and heirs, then she could talk so much more openly with Waverly. It was dreadful, every time she met Waverly's eyes, to know she was so deeply and awfully lying to her.

Wynonna sighed deeply. She hitched her foot up on the dashboard and leaned on one knee, staring sullenly out the window. Nicole glanced across at her and thought, not for the first time, how different she was to her sister. The sense that Nicole got from Wynonna was a confusing one. There was goodness and evil and hurt and love and madness all tangled together and Nicole had never met someone with such a complex spirit.

"I don't even know where to begin, really," Wynonna said as Nicole looked back at the road.

"How 'bout you start with your job," Nicole prodded. "What do you and Dolls really do?"

Wynonna narrowed her eyes. "I guess you could say we do the same as you but on a slightly more….supernatural level."

Nicole's heart jumped. She was getting the answers she'd been pushing and prodding for and she was so close. She took a steadying breath, wary of scaring Wynonna out of her candor by being too eager.

"Supernatural…?" she said, glancing again at Wynonna.

"Not like vampires and werewolves and crap," Wynonna said firmly and then she pulled back. "At least I don't think so. God, I hope not." She gave her head a shake. "But like…demons."

She paused and Nicole could feel her gaze keen upon her, waiting for a reaction. She wondered what an appropriate mortal reaction to this information would be. Would they be dismissive? Should she laugh? Or would they be freaked out? She recalled that the reason Wynonna had been sent to a psychiatric facility as a teenager was because of talk about demons, so clearly the average mortal wouldn't be accepting of the idea. She schooled her expression into one of mild disbelief and kept her eyes on the road.

"Demons? You mean the devil?"

Wynonna shrugged. "I don't know about the devil," she said. "But my daddy called them Revenants. They're the men and women that Wyatt Earp shot with Peacemaker, and when a witch put a curse on him and all his descendents, we ended up with them bobbing back and forth between hell and Purgatory like they're apples in a barrel."

Nicole gave a careful nod. She wondered whether Wynonna was telling her everything or if the skeleton of the story was really all she knew.

"What's that?" Wynonna said, interrupting the conversation. Nicole had spotted it too, a figure standing in the middle of the road ahead. She felt her senses prickle as the car slowed and pulled to a halt in front of the man standing firm. She glanced at Wynonna but she seemed equally unsure and edgy. Her hand went to the gun at her hip.

"Stay here," Nicole said. Naturally, Wynonna ignored her and the passenger door opened at the same time as her own. Her boots crunched on fresh snow as she stepped out into the road.

"Sir?" she called, studying the man's face for signs of allegiance. She was definitely getting a dark sense from him but with Wynonna's so close by she was struggling to read if it was demonic evil or just asshole evil. Gingerly she stepped toward the man who still hadn't moved.

"Sir, do you need help?"

"Well," he said, his voice dark and gravelly. He looked up and smiled and his eyes glowed red. "I reckon I do."

The concept of a hospital was strange to her. Before she'd been assigned to the mortal world, illness and injury had been foreign concepts and she still didn't fully understand how people could make their job out of 'fixing' other people. But for the first time she understood pain. Oh God did she understand pain.

Even with something dripping into her veins from a skinny tube that made her head feel fuzzy, the pain in her chest and her head was excruciating. And it definitely didn't help that she could also sense the pain of the patients in the surrounding rooms. Her leg ached in sympathy with the man in the room to the right and her back seared with pain from the woman on the left.

The medicine made her careless with her words but thankfully the nurses didn't seem concerned by her talk of phantom pain and evil spirits.

She'd finally been left alone and was trying to sort out reality from fantasy in her head when she became aware of voices in the corridor outside. Through the half open door she could see Nedley talking to Dolls. But it was the slight brunette with her arm in a sling that hovered in the background which really caught her attention.

"I'm good," she said, interrupting the conversation outside that was being held as if she were brain-dead and unable to think for herself. "I wanna help."

Wynonna. That's why they were there. She'd been in the car with Wynonna, talking, about…? Their jobs? The memory was so blurred, like seeing the shape of something at the bottom of a frozen lake.

"Well, I'll swing by and make sure that cat of yours is fed," the Sherriff said with surprising gentleness. Nicole still wasn't sure what to make of him. She read plenty of kindness in his spirit but there was the edge of something dark, the promise of secrets and the certainty of lies that made her a little bit wary.

She could imagine him bumbling into her tiny apartment and the cat, which had adopted her the second day she'd arrived in Purgatory, flying for cover under her bed. It always fled whenever men came to the door. She had a sneaky suspicion that there was something supernatural about the feline, but her ability to read didn't extend to animals. Thank God, or the spirit of every snail and earthworm in Purgatory would be added to the existing cacophony on her head.

"She doesn't really like men," she replied, but grateful nonetheless for his thoughtfulness. She didn't want to go home to the starved corpse of a cat in her living room.

"Well, who does?" Nedley said in a comment that caught her by surprise. She watched him exit, more amused than alarmed by his apparent suspicions thanks to the substance slipping into her bloodstream.

"So what was the last thing you saw?"

She pulled her attention away from her sluggish thoughts and focused on the Deputy Special Agent that stood in front of her with his notepad flipped open like he was an Old Hollywood Cop. Her gaze drifted past him to where Waverly had entered the room and her senses were suddenly full of nothing but her. There was so much fear and anxiety swirling around inside of her. It made Nicole's heart clench.

"Waverly Earp smilin' at me from her from her front porch," she said before she could stop the words from slipping into reality. She realized her mistake as soon as she'd spoken and the sharp look from Dolls was unnecessary. She pulled her eyes away from Waverly and tried to focus on the memory.

"And, ah, a man steppin' out on the highway. Flagging us down."

She could see him standing in the middle of the road but his face…there was nothing.

"Description?" Dolls asked curtly.

"No," Nicole sighed, frustrated at herself. She'd been so distracted. How could she have put herself in this position? What if she'd jeopardized everything? Her family would be able to sense what had happened, before long she could expect a visit demanding answers, guaranteed. She was supposed to be a guardian, a protector, a wise one, but here she was looking and sounding nothing more than a stupid mortal victim while her charge stood before her physically injured and mentally tormented by the thought of her missing sister.

"It's a blank space after that, until the woods."

She tried to make her brain work but there was nothing there. She could see the man standing there, she got out of her car. And then she could smell pine leaves and hear the crunch of boots on snow.

"So, ah, what happened?" Dolls said, not even trying to hide his own frustration.

Nicole remembered a swaying sensation and cold fingers against her body. It made her skin crawl just to remember it.

"Someone was carryin' me. I was blindfolded I think…or just really drugged. Next thing I know is I'm freezing cold, covered in dirt in a ditch by the side of the road."

She was so angry, too angry to realize that it actually came from a place of fear. Now she could understand why mortals clung to the idea of gods. She'd never known what true powerlessness felt like until she'd been lying there, not knowing if she was going to be allowed to live or die.

Dolls was staring at her with a frightening intensity. "Do you remember anything about Wynonna?"

She wished she could say yes, for Waverly's sake. She was shifting from foot to foot, agitated and frightened in the doorway, wanting to come forwards but afraid, so afraid. She was screaming with loneliness and the same powerlessness that had confronted Nicole. She wanted to badly to reach out and share the burden.

"No," she replied, furious. "I couldn't see anything."

In both senses of the word. She had no memory of the physical or the spirit. Whatever it was that had happened had to be demon related, but she had no memory of sensing danger or darkness. What good was she?

For the first time the man who'd introduced himself to her several weeks ago as Henry, spoke. He was another one she couldn't read well. So much anger and regret in one man she thought it impossible that he was only human, yet he was neither a demon nor an angel.

"Sight ain't your only sense, Miss Haught," he said as if he could read her mind. She looked at him sharply but there was no sign on his face that he knew of her true nature. He looked concerned, just like everyone else in the room. He stepped closer "What'd he smell like?"

Relieved and confused, Nicole shook her head. Henry closed his eyes.

"Close your eyes, just take a deep breath, let the memories come."

Unconvinced but willing to try anything, she did as he instructed. In the darkness she saw the glow of two red eyes. And then it hit her, the smell as she was carried by ice cold hands.

"Sour. Musty," she murmured, thinking out loud.

"Like death?" Dolls said quickly. There was no time to wonder why he knew what death smelled like.

"No," Nicole said, frowning, trying to place the scent. "Like…spoiled fruit. And gasoline. He kicked me."

She remembered the blast of sharp pain in her chest and lying on her back; the sky was cresting dawn above her.

"See I couldn't figure out why my chest was hurtin'. He threw me down and he said 'You're the wrong kind'."

Dolls latched onto the words. His mind turning them over was almost visible as he tapped his pen on his pad.

"Serial killers, they often have a type," he said to no one in particular. "A victim that they prefer."

"And Wynonna?" Waverly said fearfully, speaking for the first time. She was staring at Dolls with a pleading expression. He grimaced.

"She just be exactly what Jack is looking for."

The pain that broke outwards from Waverly caused tears to spring to Nicole's eyes. She couldn't bear to feel the scream of terrified panic that was roaring in Waverly's mind. Nicole felt as if she herself were losing the only lifeline that had ever shown her love.

"Waverly, I'm so sorry," she said helplessly her voice thick with tears.

Waverly shook her head, the emotions mirrored.

"It's fine," she said though internally she was sobbing. "I'm just glad you're okay."

She turned and fled but Nicole could feel her agony all the way down the corridor. She clenched her bandaged hand, not even noticing the ache as the wound re-opened.

One by one and without a word everyone fled the room and Nicole was left with the echoes of Waverly's pain tangled around her own.

A/N: Thanks for reading everyone! So far this is keeping to script but soon enough we'll have to take a wander into the unknown. How thrilling!

For those of you wondering, the angel lore and the circumstances around Purgatory will be made clearer throughout the story. Don't want to give you everything at once now do I? There would be absolutely no fun in that.

But in the meantime, I'd love to hear any speculation. What do you think Waverly will say when she finds out Nicole is an angel? And that she was sent there to befriend her?