Castiel woke up when they were thirty minutes out, tearing down the four-lane highway with Sam grunting and shivering in the backseat and Dean humming at the top of his lungs, thinking please don't seize. Please don't seize. Please don't seize.

Cas woke with a weird reverse-barking noise, arms and legs springing out every which-way and almost knocking the car out of DRIVE. Dean felt his heart skip. "Cas! You're out!"

Cas hyperventilated, eyes darting over the cars and hills, uncomprehending.

"Cas, look at me!"

"Dean." The angel's voice was raw, harsher than usual if that was possible.

"Hey, man."

Cas winced and curled forward, resting his elbows on his knees.

Dean split his attention between the road, Sam in the rearview mirror, and Castiel. "We gotcha. We're hidden pretty good right now, headed for the car, then a nice hidey-hole we'll cover with salt."

"Heaven," Castiel ground out.

"Some angel showed up," Dean said. "Sam took care of her. No idea if it'd even work on her, but when Sam has a plan—"

"Worked," Sam groaned, "like…horseman. Angel. Same deal."

"You scared the crap out of me," Dean muttered, watching the curve of Sam's back as he lay sideways across the back seats.

"You knew what to do," Sam babbled. "Always…knows."

There was a thud; Sam had kicked a passenger door. Dean signaled for a turnoff and looked at Castiel. He still looked like crap on a stick, like they'd left the demon looking last night. "Hey. You all right? There any spellwork we can take off you, get you back on your wings?"

Castiel blinked at him, then looked down at his hands, at his torn wrists. He shuddered.

"That stuff on your back," Dean persisted. "What's that doing?"

Castiel reached around one of his shoulders, rubbing off some of the viscous black slime that was staining the Civic's cheap upholstery. "Ink," he said. "It's just ink."

Sam interrupted them with a deafening scream. "RUBY!"

Dean's leg jerked against the accelerator and they almost rear-ended a Suburban. I'm going to go off the rails, he realized. We're not gonna make it. "So, Cas," he continued, his voice crumbling under the false confidence he was shoveling onto it, "any ceremonies, any supplies we'll need to lift whatever those sonsabitches laid on you, just, uh, start talking."

Castiel let his head drop toward the footwell. "There's nothing," he said, the words muffled. "Nothing's left."

Under the crude smears of ink on his back, lines of small raised cuts marked out two rune-like shapes. Two stylized, mocking, wings.

The whole thing had started like this:

There were a lot of demons in the area. Way too many, way too many omens, but no real concentration of power. A lot of little demons. Argonne was a hotspot for demonic possession, a curiosity for the Winchesters. Then there'd been the email from Chuck. Castiel was alive, in town, and being tortured. The hotspot became a priority. They slunk into the area, nabbed a random demon on his smoking break using a trap and a whole pile of salt, iron chains, and amulets, and were faced with the problem of getting the information they wanted out of a monster that was older and smarter than either of them.

Dean had made a shopping list and sent Sam into town, remaining in the shipping container to guard their informant. The place had possibilities: eyes built for cargo netting, a flat floor, and no windows.

When Sam got back, they strung the demon up per Dean's instructions. Sam removed the gag, and the thing spat venom at them for the time it took Dean to free up some duck tape and seal over the host's mouth and chin. Dean squinted off into space for a moment, then drew an odd pentacle over the tape in Sharpie. The demon cringed.

"Uh. Dean?" Sam asked, brow crinkling. "We kinda need him to talk."

Dean stripped off his jacket and flannel, laying them neatly in a corner of the boxcar. He looked at Sam, pained. The sun was setting, the gold of it sneaking through the maple leaves and the cargo door to flare around the edges of Sam's silhouette. "Trust me," Dean said. He grimaced. "Just…go somewhere. I'll call you when it's over. Please don't listen."

"Okay," Sam said.

"Take the car."

Sam nodded and backed his way out. The car rumbled off down the dirt track, and Dean shut his eyes for a long moment, until the only sound was the thin squeak of breath through the host's nose. He lit the kerosene lamp, hung it up so he had good light for his workspace, and picked up a small knife.

He didn't once look at the demon until he'd cut the clothes from the host, not so much as grazing the skin, and kicked them aside. Then he stared it in the eyes, dull, calm. They flicked black.

"You're gonna tell me where the angel Castiel is," Dean told it, breathing its breath. "When you're good and ready, I'm gonna take that tape off and listen." He went to the table, contemplated the bucket of salt and the wire brush. "But if your first words aren't, 'thank-you, Dean, for the privilege of spilling my guts to you, now here's the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,' then you got nothing I wanna hear."

There was a stench of body odor in the container now, over the smells of loam, litter, and disuse. Soon there would be blood. Offal. Bile. Other things. He picked up a rubber wading boot and a gas can full of holy water. "In the mean time, there's some things I been wanting to try." He grinned. "Let's make my dead boss proud."

When Sam had driven away from the boxcar, he'd gone as far as the little rise that the path crawled up, turned the Impala around, killed the engine, and coasted back downhill. The steel of the container walls was ringing with murmurs (Dean's) and quick footsteps (Dean's) and groans and the creaking of chains. Sam crept around the back of the container and pressed himself against it, taking deep calming breaths.

Last year, he should have been wondering how much Dean understood about monsters. Should have taken Dean at his word, maybe. But last year was over, and they were past the questions of who knows what, who suffered when, who stared hardest into the abyss, and who's on whose side.

Sam waited in the shadow of the boxcar, where the birds had already fled. Dean was hurting on the other side of the wall, and there was nowhere else Sam needed to be.

Note: Well. That was quite a body count.

Demon hunters exist in this horrifying ethical twilight, because to kill a demon, it seems to be necessary to kill the host. Save a host, leave future generations to deal with the demon. Make a preemptive strike against demon-kind, murder a civilian and potential new demon hunter. Decisions, decisions.

Sam's decision to nuke the entire police station was largely motivated by fear in this story-fear of failure, fear of alerting any watching angels to their presence-and fear, in my experience, is one of the primary culprits behind lax ethical conduct.