Chapter 15

They were right. I was wrong. It was going to take more than a half-hour to copy out the ingredients, circles, incantations and limiting boundaries of the spells in the file I held. I realised this twenty minutes later when my hand was cramping with the pressure of writing everything down as fast as I could. Looking up, I could see Dean's head was close to Lauren's, both bent over the Greek legends she'd dug up. I had the feeling that even he didn't think there was anything to the Greek stuff. From the comments Bobby had made about Greek mythology, I'd gotten the impression that most of the time they were contradicting themselves left, right and centre. Apparently that knowledge wasn't enough to prevent him from cosying up with the professor.

"I'm sorry, I do have to go to this meeting, it's about our funding for the library next year," Lauren said, easing away from Dean as she looked at me. "But I'd be happy to go over more of it later on?"

"It's a date," Dean said immediately, not even looking my way. "Uh, can we pick you up around…?"

"Oh, seven would probably be best, but I'll meet you there," she said, getting to her feet as he finally gave her enough room to stand up. "It's only a few minutes from my apartment and I have a standing reservation. The Black Clipper, down at Venice. 400 Court A."

"We'll be there, seven o'clock," Dean assured her, backing around the desk and catching a stack of folders as his hand knocked into them, proving his reflexes were still good even if half his brain was engaged in thinking about something else. He set them back on the corner of the desk and checked for anything else he might crash into as he took another step back.

Resisting the impulse to slap him upside the head and ask him if needed a seeing-eye dog, I closed my notebook and got up. "I'd like to be able to look at this file in more detail, Professor Saunders. Would it be alright with you if I take it now and return it to you this evening?"

I could feel myself becoming more and more formal the longer Dean stood there, a weird little half-smile on his face, but there was nothing I could do about it. I felt hot and bothered, my chest felt tight and if I'd been wearing pantyhose, I'm sure it would've developed a large, obvious run just because.

She hesitated for so long that I wondered if it really was because of her own publication that she was so wary about the information getting out. Her background and references had all checked out, but I was finding that suspicion was coming easier and easier to me in this world and I wasn't sure what to think when she finally nodded, smiling a little in an attempt to hide the oddness of her hesitation.

"Yes," she said, looking from me to Dean. "So long as I can get it back this evening, that would be fine."

"No problem!" Dean said happily. "We'll see you at seven. In Venice. 400 Court A. The Black Clipper."

She nodded, her expression becoming slightly more relaxed as he backed his way to the door without knocking over anything else.

"See you then," he added, stopping in the doorway and I had to swerve around him as I walked past, my shoulder bonking the doorframe, adding an ache I really didn't need. I kept walking and heard the door close as I got further down the hall.

"Awesome!"

I ignored that, my arms wrapped around the file tightly, walking faster.

"Hey, where's the fire?" he added, a bit less enthusiastically, from behind me.

"Gotta lot of reading to do," I muttered, wondering how fast we could find a motel and I could bury myself in the file I held. The last thing I wanted to do was have to look at his nauseatingly dreamy expression all afternoon.

"Yeah, well, we'll find a place to stay, somewhere down near the beach –"

"Fine."

I could hear him getting closer, the soles of his boots smacking along the parquetry floors.

"What the hell's wrong with you?" he asked as he caught me up at the stairs.

"Nothing."

"Then why are you all hunched over like a pretzel?"

I stopped abruptly, and he continued a couple more steps downward before he noticed, turning around to look up at me.

"I'd like to find a quiet place, copy these rituals, making sure I get everything right, get back to Bobby's and rescue Sam!" I said to him, very self-righteously, I admit it. There was a major storm system building up in my emotional weather and I didn't want to look at it, didn't want to deal with it, didn't even want to acknowledge that it existed.

He took it the way it sounded, I guess, his eyes narrowing and the muscle in his jaw jumping as he set his teeth together. "Meaning I don't?"

"You seem to have a few things on your…mind," I told him, my tone just this side of a snap, and continued down the stairs past him. I don't think he could think of answer to that because he let me go without responding, and I was nearly halfway down the second flight before I heard his footsteps behind me again.

Longer legs, a nice wad of anger and he overtook me without a word the next minute, forcing me into a half-run down the stairs and across the echoing chamber of the hallway to the front door. Catching the door on the backswing, I slowed down when I saw he was nearly at the car. If he was well and truly pissed at me, he could drive off and I'd be stuck here, with twenty bucks to my name and the professor's bulky folder the only thing of substance I had with me.

The car's engine was rumbling when I walked across the street and up to the passenger door. Dean was sitting in the driver's seat, staring straight ahead. I got in, aligning my gaze to parallel his and he pulled out.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

The Starlight motel was a surprise. I found it by Googling backpacker accommodation on my phone. Incredible what you can find on the internet. Cheap and cheerful, it was a few blocks from the beach, inland of the Venice canals and provided double rooms at a rate that wouldn't hit the stolen credit cards too hard. Not that I was all that worried about that.

The room had a big living-ish area, with a queen-sized bed on one wall, a sofa on the other and a kitchen area taking up a third. The décor was late seventies Beach Boys, aqua and turquoise primarily, brightly set off by safety orange – you know the colour, it's very popular with the prison system.

Two doors in the fourth wall led into a bathroom and a small bedroom, also with a queen-sized bed jammed into it. Dean dumped his duffle pointedly at the end of the bed in the living area and I carried my backpack into the bedroom. I could do silent instructions. I came back out and settled myself at the small square table next to the kitchen and opened the prof's file, ignoring the radiating anger at the other end of the room and forcing myself to concentrate on reading.

A lot of the contents of the file was what you might call filler. Lots of far-fetched explanations for the why and wherefores of Purgatory, guides of the dead, the rules of Heaven and Hell…I realised, as I skimmed through it, that all the reading at Bobby's had honed my sense of what rang true and what was just wishful thinking. The two rituals Professor Saunders had found, one Navajo, the other Celtic, however, seemed to be pretty much intact. The ingredients were going to be a real pain-in-the-ass to find.

I picked up my phone and called Bobby, leaving a message to call back on voicemail when it rang out. From the other side of the room, Dean was looking up something or other on the laptop and didn't even turn his head or ask about who I was calling. I guess he realised I didn't have that many numbers on my speed-dial.

There was one other document in the file that seemed authentic, at least to me. It wasn't Greek or any other distant and incomprehensible nationality and there was a funny symbol on the bottom right-hand corner of each of the pages, a six-pointed star that seemed to be drawn in one flowing line. I'd seen the symbol before, in Bobby's book, the Key of Solomon. I couldn't remember what it had been connected with but it lent an air of credibility. The document itself detailed a man's escape from what seemed to be Purgatory. It was fourteen pages, transcribed, I thought, maybe even from a real account, rather than just a developed myth and I got up and walked to the door with it, thinking that the motel office might have a Xerox machine I could use to make a copy.

"Where are you going?" Dean asked, head snapping around to pin me with a cold, stony look.

"I'm going to ask the office if I can use their photocopier," I said, more than a bit defensively.

"Wait for me," he said, standing up and picking up the room key.

"I don't need help with–" I started to say, but he cut me off sharply.

"They found the Impala. Doesn't matter how. We're warded, it's not and they could pick us up again." He pulled his gun from the back of his jeans, checked the clip and tucked it into a pocket, waving a hand at the door.

Walking across the parking lot to the office, I felt tired all of a sudden, as if someone had uncorked me and all my energy just ran out at once. It wasn't easy travelling with him when there wasn't bad feeling floating between us. This was going to be impossible. It was no comfort to realise that I'd brought this on myself, like so many other things, reacting emotionally instead of keeping my mouth shut. From his viewpoint, it'd been an attack out of the blue.

The office was open and the manager was agreeable to me making a copy. Dean stood near the door with his back to us, staring into the lot. I put the document into the feeder and pressed Copy, keeping my attention on the pages being spat out from the other end of the machine. I'm sure the manager was rethinking his generosity by the time it'd finished, his attempts to make small talk were ignored by Dean completely and I could only manage monosyllables. Gathering both copy and original five minutes later, I thanked him quickly.

"Done?" Dean growled as I walked toward the door.

"Yeah."

He led the way back across the lot and I trudged along behind him, wondering if I could get things back to where they'd been. It was a selfish thought. I didn't want to have to spend the next couple of days in this sticky, uncomfortable silence.

As I walked past him through the door, I stopped and turned around. "I'm sorry for saying what I did. It was completely out of line, and I – I didn't mean it."

Closing the door, he turned around slowly, leaning back against it and looking at me thoughtfully. "Yeah, you did, Dorothy."

He pushed off the door and walked to the kitchen, pulling a beer from the six-pack he'd bought on the way from the fridge and knocking the top off, swallowing a mouthful before he looked back at me.

"I know you're…uh…worried about Sam," he said. His tone wasn't mad, but at the same time, there was some kind of edginess to it. "I'm not fucking blind."

It was pretty close to a peace-offering, although I didn't get the last bit, but I brushed that aside as I figured out I could probably ease things a bit more by backing out of the arrangements for the evening, and giving him a night off the baby-sitting routine. Ignoring the sudden tightness in my chest, I pulled in a deep breath.

"I am worried about Sam," I said, truthfully. "I know you are too. Doesn't mean you can't have a break when the opportunity comes up."

He looked at me warily and I waved a hand at the file. "There's a lot in here, and I'm not feeling all that great," I said, also truthfully, walking over to the table and putting the old original and my fresh copy back with the rest of it. "It might be better if you go see the professor tonight, and I stay here and work up anything I can find on these things?"

"What?" He swung around, sounding genuinely surprised. "No. You - you have to be there too."

"Why?" I asked, more than a bit confused that my little olive-branch had been so resoundingly rejected. I thought he'd have jumped at the chance to spend time with the professor one on one. "You can go through the rest of the stuff with her, you don't need me."

He opened his mouth and turned away, closing it again without letting out whatever it was that he'd been about to say. "It's not a – we're both supposed to be there. I go there alone and it looks like I'm –" He shook his head, cutting himself off and coming up with something else. "It doesn't look professional."

I watched him walk restlessly across the room and it dawned on me that he felt uncomfortable. It was a thing that the writers on the show had been see-sawing on, some writing one way, the others going to the opposite extreme and I'd always wondered which was the more correct interpretation of the character.

Looking at him, I realised that he was…not exactly nervous, not exactly anxious, not exactly worried. Something in between. And that the writers who'd written him that way, when he'd been interested in someone on the show, a bit unsure of himself and careful about showing too much too soon, had gotten it right. The other half had as well. The only time he was confident about asking someone out was when he didn't care about them and just wanted a night off.

Now maybe this was all obvious to you, watching the show, but it was a bit of a revelation to me. I did a lightning-fast review in my head of all the episodes I could remember where one of the brothers had some interest in the opposite sex. The waitresses, the bartenders, the definite one-nighters, they all got the confident, cocky come-on. But the others, the ones he'd saved, or gotten to know, or had spent some time with…he didn't hit on them. Even Anna'd had to make the first move. I blinked as I remembered the roundabout way he'd asked Jo, the night before they'd gone to Carthage. He'd known her for awhile, had known that she'd been interested…and he'd still hedged, not willing to put his trust in her not to turn him down in some ridiculing, mocking way.

Sam had been more consistent, I thought. Wary. Unwilling to put the girls he met in danger. Even with Meg, he'd been more put off by her pushing interest than turned on, I thought.

Setting the memories aside, I realised it wasn't going to help me much here. In fact, his hesitancy made it all a lot worse. I didn't think I could go along just as camouflage. I wanted to make up for what I'd said, but…I sank down into the chair next to the table, looking at the floor.

But.

I know I said it was a bad idea. I know that. I still felt that way too…bad idea because…just because. Unfortunately, my rational, logical, reasonable arguments on the against side were fighting a losing battle with a bunch of illogical, irrational, unreasonable and downright mutinous emotions. Ever tried dieting? Or starting an exercise routine? Or saving for something really great? Or making any decision at all that based logic against the emotion of the moment? Not an easy fight. The truth was there wasn't even anything I could pin those irrational emotions on…not that I'd seen. And his interest in Lauren Saunders had been pretty freaking unmistakable.

"What's wrong?"

I looked up. He was looking at me intently, his expression hard to define. Taking a deep breath, I plastered a smile on my face and waved a hand toward the bathroom. Time to take one for the team, I decided reluctantly.

"You can tell her that I ate something that disagreed with me for lunch," I said, getting up from the chair. "She won't think it's weird," I added, looking into the open top of his bag. Nothing but crumpled t-shirts and worn and faded plaid shirts that I could see. "Do you have anything better than those in there?"

"What?" He looked down at his bag.

"Come on, she's a knockout, Dean," I said, clearing my throat as it tightened just a little bit. "It might not be an official date, but you can't wear those."

Looking at my watch, I made some fast mental calculations. "Go and find something decent, you've got an hour and a half."

"What?"

"And while you're shopping, try and think of something more conversational to offer than that," I added, a perverse amusement at his predicament unwinding some of the knots in my insides.

He was standing there, not moving and I frowned at him. "Get going, you still need to shower and shave."

I guess being told what to do about his personal hygiene broke through whatever mental block he was having, because he about-faced abruptly and opened the door, walking out to the car. I closed it behind him, ran a line of salt over the threshold and put the chain on as I heard the engine rumble to life.

I have to say, I hadn't imagined him being quite so easy to boss around, from what I'd seen on the show, and probably if my pushing and shoving hadn't been accompanied by a mental image of Professor Lauren Saunders, it wouldn't have worked so well.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

He'd bought two shirts, a new pair of black jeans and a hip-length, dark brown suede jacket. Pulling them out of the shopping bags, I laid them out on the end of the bed and looked at them critically. The jeans and jacket were fine. I thought the moss-green silk shirt would go better with them than the burgundy one. It would bring out the colour of his eyes. Not that I was thinking about his eyes.

The bathroom door cracked open and a surge of steam escaped into the room. I turned around and looked at him as he came out, the small motel towel wrapped precariously around his hips and held firmly by one hand. Neither of us said anything as he walked to his bag, rummaging in its depths and pulled out clean underwear. He turned around and went back to the bathroom.

Ten minutes later, he came out again, hair combed, clean-shaven, in a pair of white boxers. After the first glimpse, I looked back at the file on the table, checking to see that I hadn't missed anything.

I glanced surreptitiously at my watch. He had ten minutes to get dressed and get going. There was a little bit of muttering behind me.

"Which shirt you think?"

"The green one."

"Really?" he said, and I turned around in the chair, resting an arm on the back as I watched him put the burgundy one on.

It didn't look bad but it was a bit too close the colour of the jacket to be effective. He pulled the jacket on and looked in the mirror, frowning as he checked himself over.

"What's wrong with this?"

"Try the green one." Some people need to see for themselves.

Struggling out of the jacket, his fingers flew down the buttons and he yanked the shirt off half-buttoned, reaching for the green one and pulling it on as fast as he could. I saw him check his watch as he looked down to button up the shirt.

With the jacket on, the green shirt looked great and he turned around, his expression daring me to say something. I contented myself with a small, knowing smile.

"Don't forget to ask her about the document of the guy getting out through a doorway," I said, watching him grab wallet, keys and phone from the nightstand. "That's the only other thing she's got in there that looks like it might be something."

He gave me a sideways look as he took the file. "I have done this before, you know."

"I know," I said quickly, swallowing down a few choice comments about how well he'd done the last time he'd been in the same room with the woman he was going to question. Probably didn't need any more pressure, I told myself.

"Lock up, don't leave the room," he said as he pulled the door open. I closed the door behind him and checked the salt line, turning back to the small kitchen area.

It only occurred to me after the Impala had left the parking lot that he was going out for dinner (with a very beautiful woman), dinner and whatever else might (would probably) happen, making it unlikely he'd be back tonight…and I hadn't eaten yet.

The schizophrenic thought process wasn't helping my state of mind either. Y'all know what I was feeling so I'm not going to labour the point, and despite my noble self-sacrifice in the cause of trying to think of what might be best for him, I wasn't happy about it, which may have been why I forgot Rule Number One when running and hiding.

I picked up the motel's phone and tried Bobby again, this time getting through on his FBI line.

"What's going on?" His roughened voice was reassuring as it came through the line.

"I think it's the real deal," I said, without preamble. "Two rituals, both to call a guide for the dead. According to the mythology, the sparrows can lead even a mortal into any one of the other dimensions."

There was a grunt and a silence and I realised he wasn't surprised, just pissed at himself for not thinking of it earlier. I wondered how he'd known about it.

"Got a list?"

"Yep." I looked around the room for my phone. "I'll take a photo of the copies of the documents we found and send them through now."

"Where's Dean?"

"He's, uh, he's interviewing the Professor on the background," I said, tucking the phone between my ear and shoulder and stretching out the old-fashioned cord as far as it would go to reach the table. "She had another document, Bobby, I'm sending that too. It's got one of the symbols from the Key of Solomon on the pages, and it seems to be some kind of account of someone getting out of Purgatory."

He grunted again. "You there on your own, Therese?"

"Salted and locked in," I reassured him quickly as I spread out the notes and started taking pictures of the pages with my phone and sending them off to him. "Here're the notes on the rituals."

The document took longer, but I tried to get each page to fit the full screen exactly. Sam had updated Bobby's PC with some good graphics software that would help to counteract any fuzziness in the images, I hoped.

"That's all of it."

"When are you heading back?"

"In the morning, I think," I hedged, a little uncomfortably. If Dean's date was…successful…it might be later than that.

"You make sure you don't leave that room, till he gets back," Bobby cautioned me. "I've been looking for signs across the country and there were a load in Nevada yesterday."

I suddenly remembered the demons following us. "Oh, yeah, we were spotted, somehow," I said, wondering how on earth I could've forgotten about it. "Dean said the Impala wasn't warded against Crowley, but we found a tracking coin in it and got rid of it."

"Good," Bobby growled. "But keep your head down."

"Not moving an inch," I assured him. "You get all the files?"

"Looks like," he said, his voice distracted. "Yeah, got 'em. I'll get started on these ingredients."

"See you soon."

I hung up the phone and my stomach growled. On the nightstand, there were a bunch of menus from the local takeout places and restaurants and I grabbed them, going back to the phone and picking it up again. I decided on Italian, and the restaurant promised they would deliver in twenty minutes. Looking at my watch, I thought I'd have time to have a shower and get changed before they got there.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

You know how to a dog, one human year is supposed to be like seven years? Well, the evening went by much like that. My dinner arrived and I ate it. Then I put the takeout containers in the trash and cleaned the table and all the benches and made a pot of coffee and started to read through my notes again. There weren't that many and I turned on the tv and tried to watch it. It was boring. I turned it off. I paced around the room, wondering what to do with myself and when I looked at my watch for the fiftieth time, it was still only nine o'clock.

That my restless agitation was mainly self-inflicted was not helping at all, and of course, all I could think about was what was going on somewhere else. An information-only date would've been over by now. A getting-to-know-you date might well go on till midnight. Anything more could see me pacing around the room until sunrise – or longer.

I slumped onto the sofa and felt sorry for myself for a good ten minutes. Then my brain decided to take pity on me and come back from wherever it'd been hiding, and I started thinking again.

Aside from that one moment, in the back hall of the bar in Grants Pass, there hadn't been anything else, really, that I could tell myself was anything. On the other hand, he had made a point of bringing up that…whatever it was…when we'd gotten back to Bobby's. I considered the possible implications of that, going over his mostly implied rambling explanation again. That had to mean something, right? At the time, I'd been too uncomfortable with the idea of letting that out into the open and I'd agreed instantly but…

…but he'd also said that he knew I was worried about Sam. With that edge in his voice. I stared into space, replaying that, trying to work out why it seemed important. And the penny dropped…finally.

Dean thought that the feelings between Sam and me were mutual.

I sat up abruptly, feeling my heart take off at a gallop in my chest. You're reaching, I told myself. Even if he did, it didn't make anything else different. Didn't make the mostly-prickly atmosphere between us any better. Or change the fact that he'd most definitely been attracted to the tall, blonde professor and was right now, on a date with her.

I might have gone on like that, ping-ponging like a sixteen-year old between what I remembered and what I thought for hours, but I didn't get that chance.

The lights in the room flickered once then started to fade and brighten.

Dean would've been proud of me, because I threw myself off the sofa, rolling hard under the low table and to the gear bag at the end of the bed in record time as the door to the motel blew wide open and a huge gust of wind swept into the room, blowing the salt line aside with ease.

The shotgun was on top of the bag, and I grabbed it, bracing myself against the bed end and firing both barrels at the two men who walked in. Sounds great, right? Real Sarah Connor stuff. If only.

The pellets of iron and salt just froze in the air about three feet from them, then fell to the floor and a man in a black suit with a vivid crimson tie came into the room as the two black-eyed goons stepped aside.

Crowley.

He didn't look exactly like Mark Sheppard, although the resemblance was very close. I could never take Crowley really seriously in the show because even when he was jumping up and down spitting fury, there was a sense that he was still that crossroads demon, and as privately astonished by his promotion as everyone else.

This Crowley, the real Crowley, had none of that. Dark eyes narrowed as he glanced around the room, then he waved a hand sharply in my direction and I was lifted up, the shotgun torn from my hand and thudding as it hit the floor, the feel of hard fingers around my neck and under my jaw.

"Who the hell are you?" he asked, his voice holding that east London-almost-but-not-quite-Cockney accent as he drawled the words out. "Where's Dean then?"

I couldn't have said anything even if I'd wanted to because the invisible fingers that were holding me two feet off the floor tightened just enough to make me think I was going to be strangled right there and then.

The fingers disappeared and I fell straight down, my knees giving way and depositing me in an ungraceful sprawl at his feet.

"Winchester," Crowley clarified, looking down at me.

"I don't know," I said, backing up on my hands and knees until I felt the bed behind me. "He went out."

"He went out," the King of Hell mimicked me. "And left you alone? I don't think so."

Up to the point where I'd left my world, on the show Crowley had only ever tortured demons and monsters. I wasn't expecting him to actually try to hurt me, my mind kind of glossing the reality that on the show, torture really wasn't prime-time viewing.

"Where is he?" he asked again, staring at me, and I felt a savage pain inside, taking my breath and shocking me into immobility as it spread. My vision blurred and I dropped back to the floor, curling up to try to make it stop. I felt something trickle from the corner of my lips, a liquid that tasted metallic filling my mouth.

I couldn't tell you what it felt like, that pain. Only that it kept getting worse and I would've told Crowley everything if I'd been able to breathe or talk.

The rumble of a car engine broke through the silence in the room and the pain vanished completely as the demon turned to the door with a knowing smirk. He looked at the two possessed men he'd come in with and gestured to the bedroom door.

"Get her in there."

They dragged me to my feet and hustled me across the room and into the bedroom, Crowley striding after them. It was dark; I was sandwiched tightly between the two demons, one with its forearm across my neck, the other's hand covering my mouth completely.

I heard the door to the room open and Dean's voice.

"– could just go through that," he was saying.

"I'm not sure what –" Lauren's voice came through clearly and was abruptly cut off and I had a feeling that Dean had seen the salt and iron pellets lying on the floor where they'd fallen.

"Terry!"

Crowley opened the bedroom door and walked out, the demons more-or-less carrying me out behind him. Dean stood by the room door, his gun in his hand, the barrel pointing at them. Behind him and to one side, Lauren stood just inside the door.

"Let her go."

Crowley chuckled. "This is what I love about you, Dean, always trying to pretend you're operating from a position of strength." He glanced at Lauren. "Where's Moose?"

Dean didn't answer and Crowley shook his head. "Be polite, Dean," he said reprovingly, waving a hand in my direction.

The pain returned and I might've actually blacked out for a second, because when it vanished and I opened my eyes again, Dean was standing a little closer but his hands were empty, his face stone-hard.

"How'd you find us?" he asked, keeping his gaze fixed on Crowley.

The demon shrugged. "Had to go low-tech." He looked at Dean and smiled. "We tapped Singer's phones."

My stomach fell about twenty stories. I'd used the motel phone to call him. Rule Number One, never, ever use a landline to call a known associate or friend or family when you're trying to hide. Tracing the call back to the motel wouldn't have been difficult, even for a non-supernatural entity. Regular people did it all the time.

"What do you want, Crowley?" Dean asked, his voice thin.

"I want Castiel."

"He's dead."

"No." Crowley shook his head. "Not dead. But somewhere I can't see him. Give him a call and get him here."

Dean looked at him stonily. "I can't."

I think I've mentioned it before, but my tolerance for pain is not high and nowhere near the Winchester standard. I could hear screaming and I didn't even realise it was coming from me until I heard Dean shouting at Crowley, but I could feel, slashing cuts that were just pouring blood, a raw and agonising feeling of long claws or knives or something sharp and hard, cutting through my skin and stabbing me under it.

"STOP! Stop it!" Dean yelled at the demon and the pain disappeared, leaving a residual agony in my memories and my clothing wet and sticking to me.

"They're in Purgatory. Cas and Sam, they got sucked in when we did the ritual to return the souls!" he added, defeat making his voice harsh.

"Thank you," Crowley said with heavy sarcasm. "Your little friend appreciates your candour, I'm sure, despite the delay."

I opened my eyes and looked at the floor, catching sight of my shirt and jeans which were now an almost uniform red. A trickle of shame filled me, that I'd given Crowley the way to get to Dean, that I wasn't strong enough to defy the demon, that my pain had forced him into telling Crowley what he'd wanted to know. It might've been a dumb thing to feel, but I felt it. Somewhere, I'd hoped I would be more like the woman Sam had told me about, instead of just myself.

I didn't have a lot of time to feel bad, and I sure as heck wasn't ready for what happened next.

Lauren, who'd been standing silently by the door the entire time, suddenly moved. I say 'moved' but it wasn't something I could see exactly, one minute she was behind Dean, the next she was beside me, and the demon holding me up on my right was on the floor, its throat slashed wide open and bubbling with a fierce reddish gold light. I felt a hand on my arm, heard the deafening shots of Dean's .45 Colt automatic and then everything went black and there was a sickening feeling of being yanked into a million pieces, thrown around the world and violently reassembled.

I hit the ground and the hand was the only thing that kept me on my feet. Unfortunately, it wasn't Lauren's hand and it wasn't Dean's. When I opened my eyes and looked blearily around, it was Crowley standing next to me, his face hard and cold, and we were standing in a bare, concrete room…somewhere else.

He let me go when I turned my head and threw up my Italian dinner on the floor next to him.

"Charming."

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

Two demons had accompanied me to the bathroom, watching as I'd rinsed out my mouth and washed the blood from my face and as much of the rest of me as I could get into the sink. When I came out, Crowley was sitting in an ornate chair, in the middle of the empty room, his elbows resting on the arms and his chin supported by his hands.

"So," he said, looking me up and down. "Who was that with Dean?"

It occurred to me as I was opening my mouth to lie that if he'd tapped into Bobby's phones, he'd probably heard what I'd told him. "A professor from the university," I said instead, trying to remember what I'd told Bobby in that conversation.

"Not just a professor," the demon stated bluntly.

I didn't know what to say to that. I couldn't disagree.

"What were you looking for?" he asked, deciding to bypass the question of Lauren's behaviour and identity for the moment.

"Any kind of legend or myth that would let us get into Purgatory," I said. He nodded slightly and I realised it had been a test, against what he'd already known.

"So you have a ritual to open Purgatory that doesn't require the blood of a native, or a lunar eclipse."

It wasn't exactly a question, and my heart sank as I realised that was what he'd wanted. He still wanted the souls of Purgatory for Hell.

I shook my head. "No, opening the doorway is limited to that spell," I said, hoping I sounded more authoratitive than I felt. "What the professor showed us was more of a back door in there."

I was scared. Strike that, I was completely terrified, actually. I had the memories of what he'd done, even though it'd all been healed or undone or maybe had only been an illusion to begin with and it was taking all of my limited amount of willpower to keep myself from shaking from head to foot. No one knew where I was, and Crowley didn't really have much of a reason to keep me alive, other than what I could tell him. So I was figuring on telling him enough to stay alive, but not so much that he could get ahead of Dean. I had no idea how the heck I was going to manage it.

"Back door?"

I looked away from the interest in his face. "The, um, soul guides. They can take people to a different plane."

He was silent for a long moment, then he got up from the chair, snapping his fingers. A table and chair appeared in front of me and I stumbled backward from it. On the table there was a notepad and a pen.

"Write it down."

"I don't remember it," I said, my voice was high and shaky as I looked at the notepad. "I just photographed the pages, I couldn't read it."

I could feel the intensity of his stare and I kept my eyes firmly on the table.

"You're not a hunter," he said, and again, it wasn't really a question. "What are you doing with Winchester?"

"I…uh…I was helping Bobby with some research," I said, frantically hunting for a lie that would cover any eventuality. "He needed someone to talk to the professor, and I, um, told her that it was for a movie script, to get a real myth."

Demons could read minds, I knew that from the show, the crossroads demon had accurately pinpointed Dean's thoughts and fears when he'd made the deal for Sam's life. If he read mine, he'd know instantly I was lying. But he didn't seem to be getting that. I had the feeling he was trying to work out how much leverage I'd be, if he needed Dean to do something for him.

"Why can't I read you?" he asked, his voice very soft.

I crossed my arms over my chest to hide the shiver that went through me. My otherness? Being from a different world? Would it make me more of a pawn if he found that out?

He wasn't like Crowley on the show. If the torture hadn't convinced me of that, the open speculation in his face now would've. I was talking to a demon. Not a concoction of smoke and black eyes. Not an actor. But an actual demon, twisted for centuries in Hell. A demon who'd somehow gained the powers of the ruler of that place, and could do anything he wanted with me.

I don't really know how to describe what that felt like, how…helpless…I felt. I guess the only correlation in my world would've been those poor victims of serial killers, kidnapped and tortured and murdered by a deranged psychopath with no possibility of getting away. Crowley was worse. I didn't think he'd let me off as easily as killing me.

He frowned and turned away, the leather soles of his shoes audible as he walked across the room. I heard him murmur something to the demon standing by the door, then the heavy clunk of the door closing and I walked slowly around the table to the chair and sat down.

I wanted to be home. I wanted that so badly that it was making my stomach ache. If Cas had showed up then and offered me a ride, I'd have taken it in a second. I'd thought that the monsters had been bad, back in Grant's Pass. But they were nothing, absolutely nothing to the creeping feel of evil that Crowley and the demons filled me with. I couldn't stop shaking now that he'd gone and I didn't think I was going to be able to keep with the lies if he came back, despite the fact that he couldn't seem to tell if I was or wasn't.

Makes me sound like a total coward, doesn't it? Don't judge me until you've been there yourself. It was yet another thing that the writers hadn't really gotten across properly, especially in the later seasons, brushing over what facing demons – or angels for that matter –was really like. I don't know how they could've, really, not in a forty-five minute episode, anyway. There was a movie, I saw a long time ago, with Denzel Washington, called 'Fallen' about a demon. That'd given me a much closer feeling to the one I had now of the power and black-stomach-turning-vileness of a demon escaped from Hell.

Leaning my forehead against my crossed arms on the table, I let the fear just rampage through for a while, wasting time with futile wishes of being safe, being somewhere else, being not so scared. Eventually, it kind of worked its way through and I just felt empty, like you do after a really big sob-fest, or a really big scare.

Crowley wanted to get the souls from Purgatory. I didn't think he could do it with the way in that we had. I could probably fudge enough of the ritual in little bits and pieces to keep myself useful and therefore alive for a short while. I think he knew as well as I did that Dean's reactions in the motel room weren't especially indicative of how much leverage I'd provide on a personal level. He would've tried to save anyone in that position.

The professor, however, she was a very different matter. There was no way at all that she was an ordinary human, not moving at that speed and killing a demon. I didn't think she was a hunter, but I couldn't imagine what she could be. On our side, maybe. I didn't envy her the conversation she'd be having with Dean about it.

It took me another half an hour to remember that I still had my phone – Bobby's spare phone – in my jeans pocket and I groaned softly. I was never going to make a hunter of any description, I thought, shifting around to look at the demon guard by the door from under my arm. He was standing still, staring straight at me, and I wondered how I could it out, and turn it on, without alerting him. An open line would give Dean or Bobby a way to track me, and at least a possibility of rescue.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~