That Sunday was warm and sunny again, so Dean seized the opportunity to do some work on the Impala. She'd sounded a bit rough on the drive back from Oregon, and he wanted to make sure everything was ok.
Jane had had to go into town for supplies. Dean had agreed to babysit in return for a homemade apple pie.
After the visit from Cass the day before Angela had been usually quiet and solemn all evening. That often happened-Dean suspected her private conversations with Castiel were pretty intense. He'd never known an angel to make what one would call light conversation. But she'd woken up this morning bouncy and full of energy, back to her old self.
To keep her out of trouble Dean had settled the child down with a rag and a pile of greasy tools to clean. She was now sitting on the driveway next to him, diligently polishing away and singing along to the Oldies station on a beat-up portable radio. "Suffragette City" was playing. She got just about every word right.
With a cold beer in one hand and a wrench in the other, Dean was happy. Or at least as happy as he was capable of being.
"Hey, Dean, I was in the back yard taking a look at the roof. It looks like there're about a dozen loose shingles," Sam told him as he rounded the corner of the garage.
"Yeah, three feet of snow in winter will do that," Dean grunted without looking up.
Sam ruffled up Angela's hair as he passed her and came to stand next to his older brother.
"There's rain in the forecast for next week. Someone's going to have to get up there and fix them before then."
"I suppose somebody will," Dean retorted.
"Shoot you for it."
Dean straightened. "Fine."
Each man held out a hand and made a fist.
"Angela, you start us off," Dean told his niece. "Keep everything nice and square."
The song over, the child turned down the radio. "OK. Ready?"
"Yep."
"One...two…three...shoot!"
Sam held out his flat hand. Dean held out his index and middle fingers at an angle.
"Scissors beats paper, Dean wins!" Angela crowed.
"Dude, come on. Best out of three," Sam urged.
Dean just laughed. "No way. Roofing nails are in the shed, Sam. Have fun."
Sam sighed and peered up at the sky. "Not a cloud in sight. I can probably wait another day or two."
"Yeah, that's what I thought," Dean chuckled. He turned back to the car but Angela held up a small hand.
"Actually since you're both here, and Mom isn't, I need some advice."
"You do, huh? Romantic advice?" Sam asked teasingly.
She wrinkled her little nose. "Gross. No."
"Yeah, Sam. Don't you know cooties are everywhere?" Dean reminded him.
Angela regarded him steadily. "There's no such thing as cooties, Uncle Dean."
"Oh, right, I forgot, you're too mature for cooties." He wiped his hands on a rag. "So what do you need advice about, short stuff?"
"Well, it's a case, I guess."
Sam's eyebrows shot up. "A case? You mean, like, one of our kind of cases?"
The little girl frowned in thought. "I've been thinking about it, and yeah, I think it is."
The two brothers exchanged a long look.
Most of the time Angela behaved like any other five and a half year old girl behaved. But there were other times, particularly when she'd been around Cass, or any of the other angels, that she suddenly seemed spookily mature. Like an adult in a kid's body. Not even an adult—something much, much older.
Sam and Dean privately referred to this as the child's "angel side coming out." They tried not to make a big deal out of such moments. But it was always more than a little jarring.
"I'll get you some root beer," Sam offered. "Then we'll talk."
A few minutes later the Winchester brothers leaned against their car while the child sipped her soda.
"You won't tell Mom what I'm going to tell you, right?" She asked.
"We can't make that promise, sweetheart. If it's something important, something dangerous, then we'll have to tell your mother," Sam said gently.
"Why don't you lay it out for us first and then we'll worry about who's going to tell who what." Dean took a last swig of his beer and tossed the empty bottle in the recycling bin.
He paused to ponder that. He had a house and a kid to take care of, and he recycled. Who would have thought?
Angela thought about their terms for a moment, and then nodded. "OK. Well, it's about Claire."
Sam and Dean glanced at each other blankly. They had been bracing for the worst. This wasn't it.
"Who?" Sam asked.
"You know, Claire."
They continued to look puzzled.
"Jimmy's daughter," Angela said, as if that should be obvious.
"Jimmy Novak?" Sam asked in surprise.
Angela nodded.
Dean glanced at his brother. "Whoa."
"I know. That's a blast from the past, huh?" Sam turned his attention back to his niece. "Who told you about Claire and Jimmy, Angela? Your mom?"
She played with the tab on her soda can. "Uh uh."
"Cass?" Dean suggested.
"No, we don't talk about that stuff." The child shook her head. "I'm never going to need a vessel, Cass says. My soul isn't separate from my body the same way his is."
Dean squatted down next to the child. "Can you talk to Jimmy, Ange? I mean, have you?"
"No. He is Cass's vessel. He can't communicate, not with me or anyone else."
The child said this matter-of-factly, but it still sent a cold chill down Dean's spine. Glancing over his shoulder, he could see Sam was similarly troubled.
The brief time they had spent with Jimmy Novak, Castiel's vessel, had been one of the saddest experiences Dean could remember, and that was saying something.
Jimmy had been a devout man who had willingly accepted the angel's call to be is physical body on Earth. Cass had been abruptly called back to Heaven, leaving Jimmy to try to reconnect with the family he hadn't seen in months. Then demons had gotten involved, and the whole thing had gotten ugly. Really, really ugly. A dying Jimmy had ended up sacrificing himself, volunteering to become Cass's vessel again, in order to spare his only child, Claire, from the same fate.
"Then how do you know about Claire?" Sam repeated.
"And what do you know about Claire?" Dean added.
Angela frowned. "It's really hard to explain."
Sam sat down on the pavement next to hear. "Try, Angela. We want to help you, but remember that we can't communicate without speaking like you and Cass can. We need you to go slow. We need to hear the whole story."
"I've just been thinking about her," Angela explained. "Claire, I mean. It's like, one day I never knew about her, and the next I did."
"Did you dreamwalk, like your mom does?" Dean asked.
Jane was the only non-angel they knew who could dreamwalk and communicate with other people while they slept. It was also how she communicated with Heaven. When she was awake Jane could hear the angels only as faint background noise. "Like static on a television in the next room," she'd always said.
"No. It's just a knowing sort of feeling. Right here." The child held her hand over her solar plexus.
"Angel scanner?" Dean suggested to his brother over the child's head.
Cass and the other angels were tuned in to the world differently than humans. They were able to pick up on every minute event and change, like a spider sensing a vibration in a web. They used that knowledge to tip them off about danger.
The Winchesters used the old police scanner they kept in the trunk of the Impala to do the same thing. Hence the term "angel scanner."
"Maybe." Sam shrugged, looking back to his niece. "Ok, you know about Claire. What is it that makes you think there's a case?"
Angela shook her head in frustration. "I can't explain that either. But she's in danger."
"What kind of danger?" Dean asked.
The little girl squeezed her eyes shut as if looking deep inside herself. After a moment her blue eyes blinked open again. "It's not that specific. I just know she's in danger. She needs me."
"Honey, I love you, but you're five years old and not even four feet tall," Dean said bluntly. "Claire's got to be, what, a college kid by now. How can you help her?"
"I can," the child said. "I just know I can. You can help her, too. But we need to go to her."
Sam could see the child was getting upset. He put a comforting arm around her. "We hear you, Angela, OK? And we believe you."
She cuddled into his side. "You do?"
"Of course." Dean was already thinking ahead. "First things first. We need to have a sit down with Jane, see what she says. Where was it Jimmy lived, Sammy, do you remember?"
"Uh…Pontiac, Illinois. I can do a search on the Internet, see if anything turns up."
"They live in St. Paul, Minnesota, now." Angela corrected, resting her head against Sam's arm.
"OK then. A search of St. Paul it is," Sam assured her.
Jane opened the cabin door, grocery bags balanced on either hip, to find a Winchester council of war waiting for her.
Sam and Dean were sitting on the couch, with Angela perched between them.
"Oh, boy. That's never good," Jane said as she closed the door with her foot. "What's happened?"
"Everything's fine, Janey," Dean assured her.
"Really?" She set the bags down on the table. "This isn't like the time you had to tell me Angela got in trouble in class for telling her teacher she'd, and I quote, 'made that spelling test her bitch'"?
Dean smirked a bit. Sam cleared his throat.
"No, no, nothing like that," the younger Winchester assured her.
"And it's nothing like the time that bird smacked into the window and broke its neck, and she ran outside and picked it up, and it flew away like nothing had happened, all in front of the neighbors? And you guys had to convince them it was a really rare kind of bird with a naturally crooked neck?"
"I remember that. We said it was an Ironius maideni," Dean chuckled. "That was classic."
"We have a case," Angela announced boldly.
Jane pulled the milk and eggs out and put them into the fridge.
"I'm sorry, what do you mean 'we' have a case? You have school on Monday."
"And a case," Angela said with enthusiasm.
Returning to the living room Jane pulled up a chair and sat down.
"All right, talk." She quickly held up a hand. "Sam first."
"Sam always goes first," Dean groused.
As quickly as he could Sam filled Jane in on this discussion they had had with her daughter. Jane sat quietly, listening, asking for clarification on only a point or two.
"So the sixty-four million dollar question is, did your search turn up anything?" Jane finally asked.
Sam held up the sheaf of paper in his hands. "Nothing occult. But Angela's right about Claire being in trouble. Three arrests in the last two years. Minor stuff, mostly—loitering, destruction of public property. So far she's gotten off with a slap on the wrist every time."
"But she's twenty-one, almost twenty-two, now. Legally an adult," Dean added. "So that won't last much longer."
"I'm sorry to hear that. But, baby, I don't think that's the kind of thing you can help with," Jane gently told her daughter.
"I can," Angela said stubbornly. Her lower lip was jutting out, a sure sign that the child was digging in her heels.
Sam, ever the peacemaker, jumped to his feet. "Angela, let's you and I get the rest of the groceries. Dean and your mom can decide what to do without us."
The child squinted up at her tall uncle. "When adults come up with an excuse to get a kid out of the room it means they don't want them to overhear something. You do know I know that, right?"
"I do. Happened to me a lot growing up." Sam took her by the shoulder. "Let's go."
As soon as the door closed behind them Jane put a hand to her forehead. "Dean…"
"She came to us, Janey. She is genuinely concerned."
"I don't doubt that, Dean. But you know how I feel about always having to be the bad guy. I want to be her mother, not her warden. What would you do, in my place?"
"You want to protect her, that's natural." Dean leaned forward and rested his arms on his knees. "But she sees and experiences things none of the rest of us does. If her instincts are telling her something is wrong then something is wrong."
Jane shook her head. "I can't let you guys go to Saint Paul."
"She'll be perfectly safe, you know that…"
"That isn't what I'm talking about, Dean!" Jane lowered her voice again with a sigh. "We can't disturb those poor people's lives again. We just can't."
"Jimmy knew what he was signing on for," Dean reminded his friend.
"But his wife and daughter didn't. Nobody asked them. Not Jimmy, not Castiel." She smiled sadly. "Jimmy made a tremendous sacrifice. Without Cass you and Sam wouldn't be here. I wouldn't have Angela. I am grateful to Jimmy. I truly am."
"Then you should be willing to help Jimmy's daughter. Whatever trouble she might be in."
"Dean, do we have the right to open those old wounds? You know, I think sometimes you and Sammy forget how terrifying, how absolutely…life-altering all this supernatural stuff is to people who've never seen it before."
"I survived it," Dean reminded her. "And you survived it."
But Jane just shook her head.
"Cass never talks about Jimmy—I don't think it ever even occurs to him to do so. But it seems to me the Novaks must have had a very happy little life until Cass came along. I'm not saying Cass did it on purpose. He's not capable of thinking in those terms. But his actions still destroyed that family. You met Jimmy Novak, Dean. Can you honestly tell me that if he'd known what would happen he would have made the same choice again?"
"Maybe not," Dean admitted. "But he did agree to it. To spare her."
"And just imagine how Claire feels, having to live with that." The woman rubbed her eyes tiredly. "If that poor girl is acting up, who can blame her?"
"So what do you want to do here, Janey? You are Angela's mom. You get the veto whether you like it or not."
Jane was quiet for a long moment. "She was really serious about all this, huh?"
"I've never seen the kid this serious," Dean said truthfully.
Jane rubbed her forehead again. She was silent for a long moment.
"All right, she can go. But I'm going, too."
"That's fine." Dean grinned. "It'll be nice to have you on a hunt again. You always were a hell of a shot."
"It's not a hunt, Dean, and there will be absolutely no shooting, not when my kid's involved. Let's call it a…a…an exploratory…mission.
"A mission?" Dean echoed.
"I'll work on the phrasing before we get there," Jane vowed.