"Dean—I'm high, not lobotomized. Give it." It would've been funny if Sam's next words hadn't been, "I can get it for myself."

Dean stopped in the middle of the hall. There were dead cops lying where they'd dropped in every doorway, at the foot of every chair, leaning on the edges of desks, and over all of them the gunpowder smell of burnt demon. He and Sam had killed all these people, to get at the demons.

Sam's hand landed on his shoulder, a little too heavy and a little too tight. Heat was pouring off him, but he wasn't sweating.

He wished Sam had been more tractable as a kid. "Why do you need it?" he asked, shaking off Sam's grip and his own chills and speeding down the hallway.

"I can't see," Sam growled, pacing him. Sam was walking sideways, long shanks crisscrossing over the floor tiles, eyes darting between Dean and Dean's backpack, fists twitching.

"Your eyes look fine."

"I can't see," Sam repeated, as if that was supposed to mean something.

Dean waved the case of lock picks in his face as they approached the cells. Corpse, corpse, guard-station, corpse, camera. "Get us in," he ordered, pointing at the main gate.

"Dean—"

"Talk while you pick. Sam, please." Sam stared him down for a long moment, then slowly took the picks and knelt in front of the lock. Dean breathed. "Sam. You know how when I was, when I was with the demon last night, how I was strung out up to Everest and firing on two cylinders, a pile of caltrops, and human lard?"

"What?" Sam asked, brow crinkling.

Dean winced. "Don't ask. You know what I mean? Sam?"

Sam huffed, eyed the lock, and switched out a scrub for a snake. "Yeah, I noticed."

Dean leaned in and gripped his jacket. Sam was quivering, his neck was burning like an electric stove. "Well, that's not how I felt," Dean whispered. "And that's not how that demon felt. Because I knew, and it knew, I was at the top of that game." His throat clenched, and he swallowed. "I was flyin', Sam. I knew what I was doing, everything, and I had a plan, and a method, and I was working on a concept, I was working on my goddamn Ph.D. And I'm not proud of what I did, but how I did it—I was good, I was Mozart. That's what you walked in on."

Sam's hands slackened over the lock. "What're you saying," he asked, voice steady, too steady. Vulcan. Mood swing could hit any second.

"I'm saying that's where you talked me down from," Dean muttered into his ear. "I was on a roll, but my brain was on a long winding track to nowhere, and you got me off of it. I trusted you, and you got me off of it. You did good. Now it's my turn."

Dean was bent so close that he could feel Sam's skin jump ten degrees, hear him stop breathing for a moment. There was a creak of teeth grinding, and his own heart skipped, stumbled. Sam was frozen like a scorpion waiting to strike.

The lock clicked. Sam spun the tension wrench around, packed up the picks, and pushed through the gate. Dean followed, sagging with relief.

"What can't you see?" Dean asked.

"Demons." Sam was in the lead, passing a cell every two strides.

"You think you missed any?"

Sam stopped, and Dean bumped into him, the bottles in the backpack sloshing.

It was the last cell in the lockup, packed with stiffs in uniform all rayed out around the ghost-pale body of Jimmy Novak dangling by chained wrists from the ceiling, as motionless as they'd left the demon in the boxcar. His chest was brick-brown with dried blood, and weeping cuts still held the shape of an Angel-Be-Gone. His back was tenderized, gouged, and smeared with something black and stinking.

Sam was staring, shocked. "He banished himself," he breathed.

"Dammit, Cas," growled Dean. He tried the door, stepping in black slime and bumping his boot against an invisible mass. "I think you exploded a hellhound, Sammy," he remarked.

"Didn't know I could do that," Sam whispered.

"Yeah, well. Door's unlocked." Dean planted his foot against the wall and heaved the sliding gate open until it jammed against a dead officer's arm. He slipped through; Sam lingered outside. "You coming?"

Sam averted his eyes. "You'd better get him down."

"He's not Riki-Tiki-Tavi. You're not an animal."

"Humor me."

Dean negotiated the masses of still-warm human flesh. Cops. Good, or well-intentioned guys, saving people from the things you couldn't turn to dust with an iron slug on the night of a harvest moon, that you couldn't bar from entry with pure elements and choice words in dead languages. He squeezed one boot between an arm and a torso, the other between a thigh and a face. Cas' cuffs looked like a cakewalk; the lock was police standard. He didn't see any Enochian, no Theban, no Aramaic, just 1020STAINLESS etched on the side of the hinge. No symbols on the cell walls. The ointment they'd painted on his back looked greasy and toxic.

Thready pulse. Wide dark pupils, no reaction as he pulled the lids up. Dean glanced down at Jimmy's legs, and saw that the left shin was a weeping mass of purple and red, with lines and arcs of punctures. Dog bite.

"Toss me the kit," Dean ordered.

Sam flicked the folder of picks into his hand. Dean used the handcuff key, lowered Jimmy to the floor, and switched him into a fireman's carry. As he picked his way toward the door, he heard the wet crunch of snapping bone: Sam had put his back into it and forced the gate past and through the dead man's arm where Dean had let it stop.

"Uh. Thanks," Dean said, stepping through.

"Move," Sam growled, double-timing back through the ward.

Sam was right. They were on a time crunch.

Getting through the station had set them back four minutes; getting back might take one or two. Sam was prowling ahead, quick as a wolf and still as a spider, as Dean made short strides under Jimmy's comatose weight.

They were in view of the door, surrounded by the bodies of intake personnel and the scrawled lamens of high-level demons, when Dean saw a woman walking, two fingers outstretched and reaching for Sam.

"On your left!" Dean bellowed.

Sam corkscrewed on his feet, dropping faster than gravity could pull and hitting the floor on one palm. His other hand whipped up and his face blanked, distant and pleased like whatever his powers were doing to his brain was butter and honey, long hot showers, the first good stretch after a day on the road—

The angel fluttered aside, slipped her hands into his belt, and slid out Zachariah's sword. "Poor man," she said, reappearing two steps away from him, the angel's weapon balanced on her fingertips.

Sam's hand shuddered. He pried himself upright, snarling, but the angel was already gone. The angel was reaching for Dean's face.

Dean had the demon-killing knife, but more importantly, he had an unconscious Castiel heavy in his arms.

The other angel had chosen a steely woman, like a schoolteacher, and had a calm walk and a lined face full of sympathy and resignation. She stared full into Dean's eyes as her fingers extended. Her hands were empty. Dean pitched Castiel onto a nearby desk and dove in the opposite direction, scanning the belt of her suit-skirt for a sheath or whatever angels used to carry their swords—there was nothing, not even a bulge. Dean scrambled along the floor, some crazy train of thought suggesting he use the desks as cover, but the angel fluttered again and cut him off. Dean sprung backwards, bouncing on his tailbone.

Then he felt the sickening gravity-gone-nuts jerk of a demon wrapping its phantom fingers around him, ready to slam him against the nearest wall. There was a demon. Sam had missed it, or it was smart enough to wait outside the trap—what's one more demon-angel party on the old journal?

Dean skidded backwards over the tiles, bootheels digging in uselessly.

He didn't slam against a wall. On his way, the sideways gravity changed its grip to his shoulders and its pull toward the ceiling, and he flailed his arms in the air until he collided with Sam's chest. Sam's furnace-hot arm clamped around him as the pull stopped.

There was no demon, only Sam.

Sam lifted the Knife from his belt, fabric shredded, and Dean's backpack felt lighter. Dean protested. "Sam!"

"Poor man," the angel repeated, as Sam let go of Dean to get both hands free. "That won't help you."

Sam hip-checked Dean to the floor as he lifted a bottle and the Knife, stabbed through the flimsy plastic, and shotgunned the blood from the jagged hole. Blood dribbled down his throat and his hands and his wrists, and clung to the blade like oil, reeking of gunsmoke, gangrene, and death. Dean scrambled to his feet, but Sam had already finished. He shoved the knife and bottle into Dean's shaken grip.

Sam was on the blood, and Dean was physically unable to keep him from what he wanted.

He met Dean's eyes for an instant; Sam's looked too dark, crazed, and whether that was shadow or wide pupils or black bleeding out again, Dean didn't want to know.

"Leave him," Sam growled, spinning to face the angel and shoving Dean behind his back.

There was the whole stupid dance, right in front of him. Sam wanted Castiel safe, but not as much as he wanted Dean safe, while Dean had assumed Sam was set on getting their friend back with or without him. Neither of them were good at reckoning costs. So here they were, Sam with blood all down his front and the city of Argonne lawless because Dean had broken out Alistair's lamen on an unlucky demon with a smoking habit.

Across from Sam, the angel cocked her head. "It didn't work," she said.

Sam shivered. "What?"

"You are more determined than ever," she explained. "I was trying to be humane."

Sam's breath hissed through his teeth. He raised his hand, fingers tightening on the air.

"Stop," the angel scolded. "You are only hurting yourself." Then she fluttered again.

All the hair on the back of Dean's neck was already on high alert, but still he caught the tail end of a wingbeat, the weight of eyes behind him, the scuff of a shoe, and he spun, lashing out with the knife, and lodged it handle-to-ribs in the angel's chest. It flared and sparked ineffectually. She looked down, unperturbed as Castiel had been, and handed it back to Dean, hilt-first.

It rested in his clammy palm.

Sam yanked him back by his shirt collar. "Get Cas and run," he snarled. There was no rage in his snarl. Sam turned toward the angel, eager, predatory, drunk and giddy with power, before his face blanked like a Buddhist monk's and his palm extended.

Dean sprinted back to Castiel and slung him over his shoulder again.

Sam faltered. As Dean hustled for the exit, he could see Sam wobbling on his feet, see blood from his nose trickle down to join the blood around his mouth, see the angel freeze before him, one slender hand pressed against the wound in her chest. Her mouth dropped open and she began to wail.

She wailed with the vessel's voice, and her true voice joined it.

Sam, like a moron, was going to stand there and let her punch his ears out.

Castiel wasn't going anywhere. Dean propped Jimmy up against the wall at the station entrance, then raced back to Sam, both hands over his ears. He caught him by the jacket just as Sam started to sway into a face-plant. "Upsy-daisy," Dean gasped, and where the hell did that come from? But the screaming had moved into his skull now, his ears were bleeding, white spots were blooming in his vision, and no-one in the building was hearing any human sounds.

Sam's free arm pawed at him; his burning hand wrapped around Dean's shoulder. Dean checked his face, and Sam was twitching and grimacing, eyes squinching shut and snapping wide, now black, now normal. The angel's face was turned to the ceiling, her eyes and open mouth shining white like Zachariah's had when Dean had killed him. Her hands stuck out stiff-open at her sides. Dean tugged Sam backward by his jacket, steadying him with his shoulder, and Sam took a shaky step into him. "Time to run, Sam."

Tug, step. Tug, step. Sam was bleeding from the ears and both nostrils. Dean swiped at his own face and found somebody's blood in his eye.

"Sam! Give it up, we'll lose 'er on the road!" Dean barked, pulling harder. Sam grunted, an inhuman rumble that Dean could feel through his chest. The screaming and the angel's light guttered, and then she fluttered out, leaving the station dim and ringing. A smudge of blood, far too much to be from the demon residue on the Knife, marked where she had stood.

Sam collapsed on Dean's shoulder, and they made a tripod for a few moments until Dean managed to shove Sam back upright.

"Let's move!" Dean shouted.

Sam blinked at him, pained and deflated, before stumbling out the door on his own power. Dean, panting, lifted Castiel and followed him to the Civic.

Note: As far as I can tell, what happened with Famine was like Famine swallowing a pound of steel ball bearings then Sam ripping them out through the evil energy being's equivalent to a stomach using a giant electromagnet. What happened here with the angel is like if Dean stuffed a couple wads of steel wool into her wound and then Sam turned on a giant microwave.

I'm not entirely sure what the word 'lamen' means, but in Key of Solomon, it refers to the symbol of magician's patron demon, worn to represent their contract. I figure it's a bit like a seal, to mark out the demon's territory.

As for Alistair's lamen: if the name of God causes pain to a demon, what about the name of Hell's chief torturer? Obviously this wouldn't work too well on Alistair himself.