Disclaimer: I don't own it.

Curse the Heavens

"Ma'am! Ma'am, are you all right?"

Someone was shaking Jane's shoulder, gently, like they didn't want to hurt her. The voice—male, unfamiliar—however, was getting rather anxious.

Jane's head was in a fog, black and dense and thick. Slowly she came into focus, reaching into the light like she was wading through glue. She realized she was lying down, and damn did she hurt all over. Some guy was still shaking her—did she pass out at a party? Funny, she didn't remember going to a party—

Jane sat up fast. A startled looking man nearly jumped out of her way, watching her intently. Jane almost fell back down again. Her head was throbbing and felt partially caved in, at least. She shook the pain away, her mind suddenly racing with bigger things, everything that had happened last night….

"Where's Castiel?" she said frantically, barely noticing the man crouched next to her.

"Huh? Look, miss, you'd better—" Jane ignored him and pushed herself off the ground. She was damp with morning dew, and the soft light of sunrise was bathing the small patch of lawn in color. The man seemed to think she shouldn't get up, because he kept trying to get her to lie down. Jane shrugged him off.

Castiel was gone. There was no sign of him, or the demons, except the marked-up grass, torn and muddy from the fight, and the remains of a broken bottle. The knife she'd dropped last night was gone too.

Jane took a few wobbly steps, staring in horror at the scene. Gone. They had him. He was dead—or worse, if they could do worse. Oh God, what now?

She almost fell over again, getting tripped up by her own feet and her stiff, aching muscles. Even the gentle half-light felt killer to her eyes. She half-crouched and tried not to throw up.

The anxious man grabbed her shoulders and tried to get her to sit down, babbling something about concussions and head injuries. "I'm fine," Jane muttered.

"Are you sure? 'Cause I called an ambulance, and you really should just sit tight for a minute," the man said, speaking slowly as if she was a very young child.

"No! I don't need an ambulance. I'm fine," Jane said, and she pulled away from the baffled good Samaritan, rubbing a hand to her throbbing head and feeling anything but fine. She had to get away from here, figure out what to do next, figure out what was going on. She stalked off even though she wasn't sure where she was going, no idea what she was going to do….

She had to find him.

Jane slammed the door of the beat-up pickup truck, glad to be out of its stifling interior and away from its leering driver. Hitchhiking sucked. She trudged over the dirty pavement, littered with gravel and debris. In front of her was St. Augustine's Church, small and innocuous. It was already becoming comfortingly familiar.

The rectory was unlocked, the lights out and beginning to grow dark as the sun dimmed and sank. Jane flicked the lights on in the hallway. She couldn't suppress a tiny pang of disappointment. She'd known, really, that no one would be here. Abdiel had made it clear that they were on their own, and the chances of Castiel turning up here had been, well, nonexistent. She hadn't been able to think of anything else to do, however, than to come to the church. It had started to feel like their base of operations. But now there was no one here but her.

Jane walked through each of the rooms anyway. The study, the living room, the kitchen—it was all empty. Her frustration mounted. What was she supposed to do by herself? Every hour that passed it was more likely that Castiel was dead, more likely the demons had broken the Seal, more likely they were coming for her. She was probably at the bottom of that list, although that didn't console her much. If she just had more time, or more information, or someone who knew what they were doing—

Jane sighed. She was worn out and desperate to do something, but everywhere there seemed to be brick walls keeping her back. The hallway now seemed particularly uninviting and she walked into the bathroom off the hall, hoping at least she could get something for her headache and maybe think of a plan.

She rummaged in the medicine cabinet for the aspirin she'd given Castiel and popped a couple in her mouth, dry swallowed and shoved the bottle back into the cabinet. She caught sight of her reflection as she closed the cabinet door. Besides the bloodshot eyes and dark circles that reminded her she hadn't slept in 48 hours, there was a nasty bruise forming on her cheekbone. It was splotchy and yellow, a remnant of the demon that had knocked her unconscious. She prodded it gently and winced. She could feel other bruises on the back of her head, from where she'd hit the tree, she supposed, and various assorted places, but they were the last things she cared about now. She gripped the sides of the sink, the cold porcelain under her fingers seeming to ground her there, in reality, when she felt her fragile calm chipping away. It was hard to recognize herself. The face in the mirror looked like a stranger, a slightly twisted face with a hollowness in the eyes she knew hadn't been there before. It scared her.

She slammed the cabinet shut. There was one place left, maybe her last recourse, even though in her gut she felt it was pointless now. She walked out of the bathroom, each step determined, trying to summon up the grit she couldn't feel.

St. Augustine's Church was cool and dark. It as empty once again—a town rather lacking in piety, she felt. The gently vaulted ceiling seemed to reach up, pointing towards the heavens, offering what assistance it could to deliver the many prayers it had heard. It seemed as good a place as any to curse the heavens.

Jane walked up the center aisle, her footsteps muffled in the carpet, eyes upward.

"Abdiel!" she shouted. Her voice was too loud, echoing through the church and returning empty. "Where are you?!" She waited for a long moment.

"Castiel's in trouble….and I need help…." she said, her voice dropping. She turned around the room, looking for something, anything, her words ringing through the church.

"Are you just going to abandon him?"

There was no response.

"Abdiel!" she yelled, louder than before.

"And how about you, God?" she shouted, angrier now, casting her eyes upward, hearing the bitterness but not caring. "Aren't you supposed to be watching out for us? Is this how you treat the people who do your work?!" She waited for her words to stop reverberating off the walls.

"Don't you hear me?" she said quietly. Still there was nothing.

"Help me!" The echo seemed to fill the entire room, right up to the great, vast ceiling as she stood in silence. She didn't know what she was expecting. A clap of thunder? A big, deep voice to come over the speakers The Ten Commandments-style? She exhaled heavily and hung her head. It was just her in an empty church, all alone, trying to save the world. She leaned against the side of a pew and hid her face in her hands.

There was at least one thing she could do. Jane shook off the fear, the abandonment, the awful sense that she was trapped by her own inexperience and about to let everyone down. Castiel needed her, Eliul and the demons were still out there, and somewhere they had the Seal. Maybe it was too late to save Castiel, and maybe it was too late to preserve the Seal, but she had been thrown in this that moment when she had seen her family's murdered bodies, and she wouldn't—couldn't—stop.

Jane searched for the hidden door in the recesses of the church, the one Castiel had showed her. Weak and powerless though the knife he'd given her had proved to be, she had felt better with it, that sign that she was not defenseless and she had some small power over the demons. There had been many objects in the basement, and perhaps one of them would let her know what to do.

She found the tarnished doorknob right where she remembered it, partially hidden. She grabbed it and gave it a tug—nothing happened. It jiggled slightly but was clearly caught on a bolt. Locked. Jane chuckled darkly. Figured. The entire universe was against her.

Inwardly groaning, she trudged out of the church and back to the rectory. She thought she might have seen a key lying somewhere around there.

The study was the first place of scrutiny. Jane opened the desk drawers, feeling slightly guilty about poking through someone else's things, although in this case she felt she was justified. Plenty of scattered paraphernalia, but no key. The side table and desk surface likewise offered no solutions. Jane folded her arms across her chest and looked around the room. The chief features of the study were the bookcases built into three of the walls and loaded with books. Bare spaces were filled with assorted objects, boxes, and the random junk that always seemed to collect in lived-in rooms. It was as good a guess as any. She tried the bookcase directly behind the desk first, shifting through the articles. Nothing. She moved her search to the higher shelves until she reached the topmost.

On tiptoes, she ran her fingers over the ledge, feeling for the telltale touch of metal. Finding nothing, she gripped her fingers on the ledge and hoisted herself up slightly, trying to peer at the surface of the shelf. Something snapped and, her added weight too much, the entire top shelf collapsed in a colossal and dusty heap. Several books narrowly missed hitting her in the face as Jane jumped back, startled. She sighed again. Abdiel was going to be annoyed she'd messed with his stuff. If he ever came back, anyway.

Jane started to pick up the books and papers, scattered all over the floor now with pages bent. She stacked a couple on the next shelf, plunking them down with exasperation. She looked at the place where the top shelf had been, examining it for the possibility of reinstallation, but she saw something else instead. There was a narrow crevice in the wall, just a small gap that might almost have been accidental, maybe caused by a shifting in the foundation. It had been hidden by the shelf and the books, buried into the wall behind, but it now sat exposed to the light. What interested Jane was the book shoved into the crevice.

She tugged it out, scraping the cover against the plaster of the wall where it was tightly wedged in. It was a plain brown volume, with no decoration or title on the cover, small but thick with pages. Jane turned it over in her hands, the worn leather smooth and cool. She opened the front cover. On the title page was a single word—Seals. Jane's heart beat faster. She flipped through the book, scanning the pages. It was filled with short passages detailing the Seals, hundreds of them, and pictures, grisly images of woodcuts and line drawings showing death and destruction. Her heart was thumping now as she flicked through the terrible pages and saw that the corner of one page had been folded back. She turned to it. Someone had made a small pencil mark in the margin, right next to a heading that read: Seal of Yahweh-Yireh (The Altar). The passage underneath was short.

One of the fourteen Greater Seals. It may be broken by the sacrifice of an angelic being upon it. Lost in the sixth century.

Jane snapped her eyes up. The pieces clicked. Abdiel knew. He'd known all along. Castiel said Abdiel had his own mission, something they weren't allowed to know about, something important to do with the Seals. One of the Greater Seals….He said this one was important and the demons would try to break it if they could. She didn't know what would happen if they did, but it sounded like something bad, to say the least. The angels, or at least some of them, knew where it was. They wouldn't leave it unprotected. They had sent someone….

Jane raked her memory for those tiny comments Castiel had made that had seemed insignificant at the time. All those things she didn't understand, those looks she hadn't quite picked up on….Castiel had said something, something about the demon's plans when they had seen the ritual at that burned-out apartment, what felt like a million years ago….What was it? They wouldn't break the Seal yet, because they needed something first…something they had just gotten. And that meant—

Jane dropped the book, broken shelf forgotten, everything unimportant now, and ran. The distance to the church seemed impossibly long and she felt like she was moving way too slow as she sprinted through the parking lot, skipped over the front steps and threw the doors open. The church was as she'd left it, dark and empty. But now she knew there was something else. Breathing heavily and feeling the beginnings of a cold sweat, Jane stood in the entranceway for a moment. Then she walked up the center aisle once again.

It seemed to take an age to get there. And then she was at the front of the church, in the old and tiny and insignificant church of St. Augustine. The altar stood in front of her. Funny she'd never noticed it before. She walked up to it. It was covered with a white cloth, the plain altar vestments reaching to the floor and creating nothing more than an unnoticeable blank surface. Gently, she caught the corner and pulled the vestment off.

Underneath was gray stone, a rectangular piece of rock marked with age, worn down from the smooth finish that must have once covered it. The sides were magnificently carved with figures and letters, chipping away in places but delicate and unearthly. It looked ancient and powerful. Jane stood in awe, hands barely brushing the surface, almost feeling the pulse and hum of something otherworldly inside the carved stone.

A crash shot through the church. Jane jumped and spun around, the cold sweat now trickling down her spine. The doors had just been thrown open, and hell was about to break loose.

A/N: I just realized I stole the underground-church-arsenal from the show. Fail. Anyway, we're nearing the end here. Thanks to everyone who reviewed, and everyone who is reading.