Chapter 16

Demons do get bored, same as people. Thankfully.

I sat there, as still as a bunny in the headlights of an oncoming car, and after a long time, I heard his feet shift a bit on the concrete floor. I had my back to him, my head resting on my folded arms on the table, and I peeked under my arm to see him scratching his head. Sliding one arm off the table, I went as slow as I could, going around my hip until I could feel the back pocket. He didn't seem to notice, by then he was looking at his fingernails.

The front pockets of my jeans were tiny, useless little things and the only place I could put the phone was going to be down the front of my pants, I thought, easing it out when the demon turned to the door as if he'd heard something outside. I had a short tussle with the hem of my t-shirt, which was long and bagged down over my stomach and onto my lap, but eventually I got the phone under it, pressing Mute, then speed-dial one, then Call in quick succession as it slid between skin and denim. I sent a little winged thank you up to whoever'd been looking after me that it wasn't one of those huge phones so popular in my world, and just a tiny little Nokia.

In the movies, or on tv, people call their rescuers or possible rescuers and talk about where they're at, engage their captors into revealing all sorts of things. I didn't do that. For one thing, I was too scared to even consider talking to the man with flat black eyes behind me. For another, I had the faint hope that Dean might've called Bobby and Bobby would be too smart to mistake an open, silent line for a prank caller. I had no idea if the phone had GPS or if it was turned on or even how to do such a thing if all things were equal, like actually being able to look at the screen and press the buttons, so it was literally my only hope.

The door opened five minutes later and Crowley walked back in. I stayed where I was, feeling an icy trickle of anxiety worming its way through my insides. The King of Hell here was not prone to making one-liners. He preferred action.

He stopped by the table, exuding impatience and I lifted my head reluctantly.

"Get up."

The jeans weren't all that close-fitting and I stood up slowly, feeling the phone slide down the crotch. The t-shirt was pretty long and with a half-second's glance down that I hoped was discreet, I could see it covered the new bulge okay.

"Move it," Crowley said, waving a hand at the door.

Walking slowly, and I admit, somewhat gingerly, to the door, the demon-possessed man grabbed my arm above the elbow as I passed him and hustled me through and into a corridor at a faster speed.

The place was big, whatever it was. The phone remained more-or-less in place as we walked down the first corridor and turned into a second, climbing a short flight of steps and turning down yet another hall. It was all utilitarian, concrete and occasional light bulbs in cages set into the low ceilings or embedded in the rough walls. A factory or warehouse, I wondered, not very curiously. On the show, that was Crowley's preferred type of hangout but it could've been military or the bunker of a missile silo for all I knew or could tell from the featureless, sign-less walls.

The room the demon pushed me into was something different. A short, steep set of steps led down to a wide, windowless space with much higher ceilings, nearly double the height of the rest of the place that I'd seen. Benches and cupboards lined one wall. Some kind of reclining chair was bolted to the floor at one end, with one of those hospital carts next to it. At the other end a table stood with two chairs, one on either side of it.

There were a lot of stains on the concrete floor, of a colour I didn't like the look of. And the smell was appalling.

I would love to be able to say I got a handle on my fears and grew a giant set of balls as I was shoved down the steps by the demon, but I can't. You see rusty brown stains on the floor of a room that looks like it's second cousin to a world war interrogation chamber and it's not like you can think it's a cabana for a civilised conversation. My mouth dried up instantly and I wanted to assume a foetal position so badly, I might've whimpered.

"Have a seat," Crowley said and I made a beeline for the table, hearing him chuckle.

People say that really, the mind – or rather, our imaginations, I guess – is the best torturer. Show someone a clean, stripped bathroom and a chainsaw and the imagination goes to work, trying to fit the two images together and coming up with a scene from 'Scarface'. Mine didn't have trouble with all the things they could do, down here, things that I didn't want to experience first – or second or even third – hand.

I sat down at the table and waited.

The note pad and pen appeared in front of me.

"How 'bout you write down what you can remember, and we'll start with that?" Crowley suggested, his voice pleasant and cordial. I looked up at him, mouth opening to tell him I couldn't remember anything and he glanced at the bolted-down chair down the room. I didn't need to look at that again. I picked up the pen and pulled the pad closer and closed my eyes to visualise what the notes and drawings I'd studied had actually said and looked like.

Lying is a matter of blending unprovable falsehoods with believable facts, I remembered. And I had studied the documents in the file Lauren had given us. The only thing I could think of to do was to mix and match what had seemed to be the real deal with the dross mythology that had probably been harmless fill-ins.

"Good." Crowley commented, pulling out the chair on the other side of the table and sitting down.

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

I set down the pen and pushed the pad across to him. "I need to use the little girl's room."

He took it and lifted an eyebrow at me, then looked at the demon and nodded.

Normally, I'd die before I used a cutesy euphemism like that for the bathroom, but a book I'd been reading before…all this…had come back to me in small fragments and remembering the main character, I figured that the more helpless and girly and basically useless I appeared to Crowley and the demons, the less likely they would be to keep a close eye on me, and worry about if I was giving the whole story or trying to escape. So, I was channelling my inner five-year-old (the one who used to love pink teddy bears and a lime-green organza party dress!) to the max.

I wasn't sure if it was a better idea to keep the phone on me, or to hide it somewhere before some incautious movement tipped it into the leg of my jeans and it fell out in front of my captors. Sort of a fifty-fifty decision really, since, if Crowley decided to change locations and I'd hidden the darned thing, it would be an epic fail on my part. On the other hand, he might just blast me out of existence if it fell out in front of him and he realised what I'd done, negating the purpose of rescue anyway.

The bathroom was cold and echoing, chipped and broken and falling off tiles over floor and walls, a long urinal to one side and a row of doorless stalls on the other. The demon grinned at me as I stopped at the doorway and looked at it, waving a hand and planting himself squarely in the door.

I walked to the furthest stall, where the angle of the wall hid me from direct sight, and fished out the phone as I unzipped and pulled down my jeans. I didn't have anything waterproof to wrap it in, which vetoed the time-honoured hiding-it-in-the-cistern plan. And the lid was a heavy ceramic one which would've made too much noise moving anyway. There was a shallow gap behind the tank and a lower bracket to support it.

"Hurry up," the demon called out, its voice bouncing around the room and I sat down fast, forcing out what I could as I lifted the phone and held it to my ear. The line was still open, and I heard Bobby's voice, not close but clear.

"– we don't that much time," he was saying, some kind of background noise making the words sound mushy. "Signal's been stable for the last eight hours –"

"If Crowley didn't find it and leave it open while he moved on," Dean's voice overrode him sourly. "If he didn't kill her as soon as she spilled everything."

I clutched the phone to my ear, not wanting to give up even that distant reassurance of hearing them, knowing that they were doing something. My chest was hurting with the effort of not just bursting into tears and screaming into the phone to come and get me and I had to force myself to lower it and tuck it into the gap between the wall and the tank, sniffling madly as I got up.

Sorry if this all sounds as if I should be awarded the Wimp of the Decade award, but it was all pretty full-on and I wasn't sure how much longer I was going to be able to cope with it, to be honest. I did try and think of ways that a braver or more athletically agile person might try to get the drop on the goon guarding me and the King of Hell, but absolutely nothing that I thought have had the slightest possibility of success. And yeah, it wasn't helping my self-confidence to know that not only had I made the error that had landed me in this particular situation, but that I didn't have the knowledge, the resources or apparently, the smarts, to get myself out of it.

I wiped my face on the bottom of my t-shirt and followed the demon back to the interrogation room, my stomach clenching and unclenching and making me want to throw up again.

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

Crowley burst in through the door of the room, his face red and his eyes a blackish-red from corner to corner.

"Get her," he snarled at the demon and I staggered up from the table, my legs about as strong as over-cooked spaghetti and tried to run. I guess it's true than when it's down to the wire and it's kill or be killed, most people really do have enough inside to try and fight. I felt the demon's hand close around my shoulder and I dropped to the floor, breaking the hold and kicking frantically at it, hitting a knee-cap first, my other foot driving into its stomach. It doubled-over with an almost-comical whooof of expelled air and I rolled away, on my hands and knees for a couple of feet before I could get up, not knowing where the hell I was running, just running.

I stopped a few feet further, as if I'd hit a brick wall, literally. My nose got mashed and my head was ringing, and then I was lifted off the ground, my arms stretched up, pressure on my wrists and my feet dangling helplessly. I could feel blood trickling down over my mouth, probably from the mashed nose, and I didn't see the chain whip out and wrap around my wrists but I felt it a second later, it bit so tightly that my fingers were throbbing. That pain was nothing to the pain that filled my shoulders and back a moment later as I rose a bit higher and the binding was hooked over a metal fitting in the roof, the force or power or whatever it was that had been holding me up disappeared and my weight dropped, all of it resting on the too-tight chain and the joints of my shoulders.

"Thought you'd be clever, eh?" Crowley said, walking down the stairs and staring up at me.

I had no idea what to say to that. Had he found the phone? Or had he discovered that the partial spell I'd written out was a dud?

"I take it that Winchester did not tell you how easily disappointed I am with incompetence," he said, walking right up to me. "Or time-wasting."

I was about four feet off the ground, and I guess I didn't think – or wasn't thinking properly, more likely – that there was much that he could do since my knees were on his eye level. I was wrong.

I remember thinking that it was a good thing I'd left the phone in the bathroom, when a set of invisible but very much there razor-sharp claws turned the legs of my jeans to tattered, hanging strips. That was about it for thinking or remembering. I could probably get the exact catalogue of injuries from Bobby, but it would probably read pretty dry compared to what happened. And it can't have taken too long before my body just caved in on itself and I passed out the first time.

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

I came to in fits and starts. I couldn't feel my hands at all and I couldn't help but wonder how long it took a cut-off blood supply to do permanent damage. It wasn't helpful, thoughts like those, but I had zero possibility of blocking anything out by that stage.

I must have made some kind of conscious movement, or groaned, or something because Crowley turned around and looked at me, his face distorted with rage.

"Don't think you'll get away that easy this time," he promised through clenched teeth and I didn't know what he was talking about. If this was easy, I didn't want to think about hard. I couldn't figure out the individual injuries, I was just a seething mass of pain everywhere and I think if he'd actually killed me at that moment, I'd have gone happily.

"Heaven's a mess and I need those souls," he added, pacing away from me. "You are going to give me those rituals. You can do it on your own, or you can do it with a demon sitting inside of you, but you'll do it."

I would've liked to point out that I couldn't keep a coherent thought in my head, but the effort of speaking at all seemed way too much. He didn't seem to need answers anyway.

"There's no other way to get the tablet," he muttered as he passed by me again. "Do you know how fucking impossible it is to shut down those holy hordes without it?!"

He swung around and pointed at me, something inside breaking and a fresh flood of agony took what little grasp I had on what he'd said and drowned it completely.

"You aren't –"

The door burst open and there was a lot of noise, a lot of light and a sudden silence that forced me into opening my eyes just to see what the heck had happened.

Dean and Bobby were standing next to the table. Lauren was kneeling over the demon, pulling out a long, tapered blade and wiping it on the demon's clothing. Crowley was gone.

They dragged the table over and Dean climbed onto it, taking my weight with one arm as he unhooked my hands. He must've been expecting it, because my arms fell straight down, not even a hope of me being to able to control them and he'd moved his head so he didn't get clobbered by them, easing me down until my feet touched the table top. There wasn't much hope of me being able to stand on my own either, but maybe he was expecting that as well, because he didn't let go.

"You alright?" he asked me, the slight twitch of his expression telling me he already knew what a dumb question it was. I tried to make my eye focus a bit better on his face, but it was getting more and more blurry and I settled for a small very nod instead.

"Going to get you out of here," he said.

And I guess it could've been relief, or it could've been the pain, but I passed out for the second time, in the middle of trying to say something.

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

I woke up, some indeterminable time later, lying on a bed, someone close by wiping a cold liquid down the side of my leg.

"We've got the ritual and the ingredients, we need to get into Purgatory," Bobby was saying, somewhere in the room. "We get back to my place, wall it the hell around and do it!"

"What good's that gonna do!?" Dean snapped back at him. "He can see her now!"

Ah, I thought, only a little dazedly. That explained why my back felt like it was on fire.

"Can't carve her up again, not in that state," Dean continued, and his voice was fading and getting stronger. It took me a little while to realise he was moving back and forth across the room. I would've liked to have opened my eyes but they seemed to be stuck shut.

"We can't hang around here," Bobby argued and I had to agree with him, especially if my demon-hiding scar had gone.

"She's awake," Lauren said from beside me and I felt something cool and moist on my eyes as the room became silent.

"I'll get some food," Dean said abruptly and I heard the jingle of keys as the door opened.

"Wait a minute," Bobby said, then the door shut.

"Can you open your eyes now?"

I tried to get them open, rewarded after a moment with a thin, bright slit of light through my left one.

"Hold on, there's still some blood on your lashes," Lauren said, and the cool…paste? I thought it might've been…was wiped over the lid again.

This time I got the lid to open wider and I blinked it a bit as the room came into focus. Another cheap-looking motel room but such an improvement over Crowley's place that I nearly teared up looking at it.

"Where are we?" At least that was what I was trying to say, the words coming out in a husky croak.

"Colorado," she answered, seeming to understand them. "You've been out for nearly twelve hours."

Great, I thought, why didn't I feel better?

"What happened?" It wasn't a very specific question. She seemed to understand that too.

"You took quite a beating," she said, and I turned my head to look at her. Her face was sympathetic. "Nothing broken."

"What – a relief."

She smiled. "A lot of bruising." She touched the side of my face, the right eye swollen shut and tender under her fingers. "A few cuts. We've stitched the worst ones."

About as specific as my question had been, I thought tiredly.

"Your hands," she said and I looked down my body, seeing a bulky bandage around one wrist, belatedly registering the feel of another on the other one.

"They're pretty badly torn up, I'm afraid," she continued. "You won't be able to do much with them for a while."

They felt like lumps of rock at the ends of my arms, but my arms were aching as well and I had no desire to lift them, or doing anything at all with them.

"We wouldn't have found you at all if you hadn't thought of the phone," she added.

It didn't cancel out the stupidity of making a land-line phone call from the motel so I let that go.

"He asked you for the ritual?" she asked, and I nodded. "Does he have it?"

"No – mixed it – up," I said. I ran my tongue, which felt far too big for my mouth, around my teeth. "Water?"

"Yes, of course," she said, getting up and getting a glass. When she came back, she slid her arm around my back to help me sit up a little and I suddenly realised how much damage I had.

"Sorry," she winced. "If you can eat something, I can give you stronger painkillers."

"What – are – you?"

She kept her attention on the glass she was trying to hold to my mouth, letting out a little exhale as I managed to sip some of it. It went down like silk and my tongue felt a bit more comfortable as the cold water eased the dryness.

"A nephilim," she said, glancing at me. "My father was an angel."

I nodded a little, swallowing down the water. Pretty much every supernatural film in my world had touched on the nephilim and I knew the background, at least some of it.

"You – can't – heal?"

She shook her head. "No, I have very little power."

"Dang."

She smiled again and the door opened, Dean and Bobby coming in, carrying bags that were wafting strong scents of food into the room. Turning to look at them, Lauren put another pillow behind me, propping me up at an angle so I could at least see most of the room.

"Crowley doesn't have the real ritual," she said, and through my one working eye, I saw Dean look at me in surprise.

"What's he got?" Bobby asked, bringing a container to the bed.

"A mixed version, it seems," Lauren said, taking it from him. "It will buy us a little time."

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

I managed to eat most of the soup and sandwich Bobby had deemed the most suitable meal for me, and swallowed the painkillers Lauren handed over. The pain was receding, slowly and in waves and I sat up, feeling the tug and pull of the stitches on my stomach and back but not much else. I also felt exhausted, over-emotional and on edge, some formless but powerful anxiety or something making me jittery and restless.

Lauren and Bobby picked up the bags and carried them out and Dean walked over to the bed, looking down at me. "Can you walk?"

Whether I could or not, I thought, I was definitely going to try. I balanced myself with my clumsy, bandaged-up hands and got up, teetering a bit as the room took a swan dive on its own then righted itself. Take it easy, I told myself hurriedly.

"Take it easy," Dean said, almost in unison with my thought. "Just go slow."

The first step - and talk about baby steps! - was better, although my legs were wobbling.

I don't know what kind of injuries have been in your past, and I know I keep harping on about this stuff, but really, I hadn't had many that I remembered very well and I was continually being shocked by how weak and useless I felt whenever I got one here. It wasn't just the palsy of my legs or the fact that if I fell, I was pretty much terrified that I was going to land on my face, because my hands felt peculiar and I didn't trust them to catch me, there's an emotional and a mental aspect to being beaten up by someone as well. I literally felt like some broken up thing, in pieces and not all that sure I was going to be able to put those bits back together again.

And the worst thing was that it'd been my fault. I couldn't even blame bad luck or Fate, I'd seen enough movies where the idiotic girl calls her mother or her boyfriend from a motel phone when she's supposed to be in hiding and it hadn't occurred to me that for all my eye-rolling when I'd watched those scenes, I was doing it myself. The painful and yeah, okay, self-pitying thought made my throat close up and my chest contract, till I could hardly see the darned floor.

"I'm sorry," I said, swaying a bit as I tried to find my balance, both external and internal.

He frowned, at least, I think he did, it was in his voice. "For what?"

"For – for – calling Bobby on a land-line," I told him, risking a glance upward. "For being –"

He shook his head, cutting me off. "Forget it."

It wasn't the usual trigger for having a meltdown, but in its own way it was like Lauren's sympathy, undeserved and making it too easy. I thought later if someone had just said 'right, it was a goddamned stupid thing to do, don't do it again', I might have handled myself better.

I started shaking as I took the next step, my chin again tucked down against my chest so that he wouldn't see my eyes filling up and spilling over, then it all just broke loose. I took a half-step forward, lost my balance as my eyes closed and started to tip over and then there was a solid chest there and arms wrapped around me, and for a little while, that was all I could register, muttered comments coming and going above my head without any meaning, my entire world reduced to bawling my eyes out within the circle of his arms.

After a while I guess I ran out of sufficient bodily fluid for tears, but I couldn't stop the shaking which felt like I was in a blender on low speed. Neither of us moved and I slowly became aware that I could hear his heartbeat, under my ear, the slightly fast but steady boom-boom as comforting as how warm I felt, and how protected.

"We need to get going." I heard Bobby say and then the rumble of his voice in his chest, under my cheek, as he answered quietly.

"In a minute."

There was a slight huff and the sound of the door opening and closing again and I closed my eyes, trying not to move or think, just being for a while.

"It's just shock, Terry," he said, sometime later, I don't know how long it was. "Happens to everyone, gotta deal with the reactions sooner or later."

His voice was uncharacteristically gentle, very deep, exhaling on my hair. The shaking began to ease off and he loosened his hold, looking down at me. God knows what he saw. I mean, bruised, swollen everything and no doubt red-eyed and snot-nosed as well, I'm sure it wasn't pretty. He bent a little, leaving one arm around my shoulders and scooping up my legs with the other and I barely had to move, the sense of relief that nothing more was expected from me, not even walking, mingled with an astonishment that I was actually being carried somewhere (well, when was the last time someone scooped you up and carried you somewhere?!) and a deep, unanalysed comfort in the feel and smell and strength of the man doing it.

Bobby opened the door of the Impala and Dean inched his way into the back, doubled-over as he tried to avoid dragging me across the seat. I hadn't seen it, but Lauren said that scar from the sigil had been mostly torn off. He set me down with a long exhale, and I figured I wasn't as light as I'd been kidding myself.

"Dean."

Still mostly crunched up in the narrow confines of the car, he looked at me, one arm along the back of the front seat for balance.

"Thanks…thank you for getting me out of there," I said.

He gave me an incredulous look, and being Dean Winchester, I suppose it must have seemed a redundant sentiment, like he'd leave anyone with Crowley if he could stop it. It didn't matter, I needed to say it, because in my world, I didn't know anyone who would've done the same thing, at the risk to their own life.

For a moment, he just looked at me, then he reached out and pushed my hair off my forehead, shaking his head a little. "Anytime, Dorothy."

The name wasn't said with the usual stinging contempt. He backed out of the car and the front doors squeaked and clunked as the three of them got in. The engine started, the low thunder of it through the car's body almost as soothing as the driver had been. I could feel myself relaxing slowly. The plan, they'd said, to take shifts driving and go straight through. From here, it wasn't a huge haul anyway.

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

I burst into tears again, when we got inside Bobby's house. It was just so good to be there that I couldn't help it. Lauren put her arm around my shoulders and guided me into the living room, plumping up cushions at the end of the sofa and helping me to lie down on it. I'd walked in on my own two feet and the effort seemed to have taken the small store of energy I'd had. I suddenly thought that here, in the textures and smells that had become so familiar that I might've thought of them as 'home', I could sleep for the next year or so and wake up feeling myself again.

Ha ha. Like that was going to happen.

I don't mind telling you, that all this-this feeling strung-out and over-emotional and physically wrecked, was taking its toll on me. I hadn't thought of myself as being a sugar-puff. I was having to rethink that now. I couldn't have been further from Sam's description of me in the other life, I realised sadly.

Bobby had peeled off and I heard stuff clanging in the kitchen, Lauren following him a moment later. Dean dropped into the armchair across from the sofa and looked at me.

"Crowley say anything about Purgatory?"

He had, I thought. "He said that Heaven was in a mess," I said slowly. "Said that he needed the souls." I looked at him. "He wants to kill Cas."

Nodding, he looked at his boots, crossed and propped up on the low table. "Yeah, figured that one." After a moment, he lifted his gaze and met mine. "Was it just to get the ritual for the soul guide, why he worked you over?"

"I think so." I really didn't want to go peering at and stirring up those memories, but I understood that I had to. Not just for any information that could be gotten from them about the demon's motivations and plans, but for myself as well. The man sitting across from me was a good advertisement for not burying the painful things and hoping they'd stay buried, after all.

"And you gave him, what? A mixed up version?"

From memory, it'd been the ingredients from a Greek myth about appeasing Hades and some of the symbols of the Celtic spell, all altered slightly. "Lauren's folder had a lot of myths."

He smiled, just one side of his mouth lifting, and maybe a bit unwillingly.

"There was something he said," I told him. "Something about a tablet and a 'holy horde'?"

"A tablet?"

"I think so." The memories were very disjointed though I could remember the look on Crowley's face. Intense and almost fanatical. "He was practically foaming at the mouth about it."

Do you find that the people you can talk to easily are the ones you have the least to say to? There were a whole bunch of things I wanted to say to him, and I couldn't, not now, when he was thinking about his brother and monsterland and whatever the King of Hell was up to, but maybe not ever, because it didn't take much more than his face closing up to shut me up.

It really didn't help that I now had several very strong and difficult-to-push-aside sense memories as well.

"How do your hands feel?" he asked. I looked down at the bulky bandages. I could wiggle my fingers a bit now, but it hurt. The tendons and the wrist bone had gotten pretty mangled by the chain with my full weight on it.

"A bit better," I told him, somewhat optimistically. Lauren said they would heal up in time, that the damage hadn't been permanent.

His feet came off the table and he leaned forward in the chair. "Trust me, I know how it feels," he said. "And Crowley wasn't just trying to get to you."

I looked up then, catching a flash of something on his face that I wanted very much to think was for me, then Bobby and Lauren came in and it was gone, and Dean leaned back in the chair, taking the bowl that Bobby handed him and starting to eat.

Honestly, I could've screamed at Bobby for interrupting at that exact moment.

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

The psychopomp was not the most impressive supernatural creature I'd met here.

Lauren and Bobby had prepared the Celtic summoning in the dining room, laying out two circles, one to keep the soul guide trapped inside it, the other to prevent anything from being able to get in from the outside. In between, there were a number of hieroglyphic-looking symbols that Lauren said were the binding and summoning symbols for the sparrows of the afterlife. They looked like squiggles but I'm sure she was right.

When the bowl in the centre of the circles was lit, with a bright blue flash, and the room was just becoming unbearable with the smell of burning hair and herbs, a mousy-haired, small woman appeared, coughing slightly and waving her hand at the slowly coiling tendrils of smoke that were still rising.

"Alright, I'm here," she said, looking from Bobby to Lauren and narrowing her eyes at the sight of the tall woman. "I thought you were all dead?"

"Not all of us," Lauren said to her, turning away as Dean walked up beside her.

"What do you want?"

"A doorway into Purgatory," Dean said bluntly. "Return ticket, two one-way, four back."

The woman burst into laughter, trailing away when she realised that no one else there was laughing. She looked around at them, her gaze drifting over me and snagging for a second, then moving on.

"It's impossible," she told him flatly. "One I could probably sneak through, but you want to bring two out of Purgatory?"

"An angel and a human," Bobby confirmed, moving around the circle to face her.

"What the hell is an angel doing in there?" she asked, almost affronted by the idea. "He'll be dead by now."

"Why?" Lauren questioned, a frown on her face.

"Because there're things in there that will hunt him down and he won't be able to hide from them," the guide told her sharply.

"What about a human?" Dean interrupted, clearly not wanting to think about the things in Purgatory.

"Well, let's see," she said, shifting her weight to one leg and pretending to think it over. "There are the souls of the undead from here. Then there are the spirit creatures that evolved there. And then there're the things that couldn't be left out to run around anywhere else." She lifted a brow. "Your friend pretty fast?"

Dean scowled at her and turned away. "We need to get in there and bring them out, can you do it or not?"

"Oh, I can do it," she said, looking around at them again. "The question is, can you pay for it? Because these services do not come out of the goodness of my heart."

"How 'bout we don't kill you?" Dean offered, his shoulders tensing.

She laughed again, the sound jarringly high. "You can't kill me, and you should know that."

"Then we don't leave you to rot till Judgement Day?" Bobby said, crossing his arms over his chest.

"Kind of inconvenient to have me stuck in your house, isn't it, Bobby Singer?"

"How'd you know –"

"Oh, puh-leese!" she said in exasperation. "I'm a servant of Death, what do you think I don't know about you?"

Again her gaze flicked to me and away, and I wondered if I was the exception to her knowledge. She seemed to be a little uncomfortable with me, sitting at the far end of the dining table, watching but saying nothing.

"What's the price?" Lauren asked and I was relieved to see her cut through all the bullshit. It wasn't like there was any choice about paying it, whatever it was.

She turned to look at the nephilim, one hand on her hip, her lips pursing in consideration. "A marker. An IOU for services-yet-to-be-decided."

"What?" Bobby growled, shaking his head.

"What kind of services?" Dean asked, more matter-of-factly, though I could see the tension ratcheting up, his jaw muscle flexing slightly.

"Any kind I need," she said, smiling at him. "Whenever I want it."

It was like writing a blank check to a monster, and I could see how much he wanted to tell her to take her price and shove it where the sun don't shine, but he couldn't. Sam had been in Purgatory for almost two weeks. There was no time to have principles about what he might or might not have to do at a future date.

"Deal."

"No!" Bobby swung around and stared at him. "Not again!"

Lauren looked from Bobby to Dean, slightly mystified, but the guide just waited, her face expressionless. I guess if she knew everything about both of them, she must have known what this argument was about.

Dean ignored Bobby's outburst, looking at the woman. "Two in, four back out, everyone in one piece, right?"

She shrugged. "How many pieces you come back in is not my problem," she said. "But two in, and four out, yes."

"Alright," he said and stepped across the circles to her. The smoke stopped rising from the bowl instantly and the guide pulled a small knife from her belt, the click of the switch-blade very loud in the dead silence of the room. Dean froze then relaxed as she made a cut across her right palm and handed him the knife. He wiped it clean and cut his own right palm and they shook, their blood presumably mingling and sealing the deal.

"Goddammit!" Bobby turned away and looked at me bleakly. I wanted to tell him that there wasn't another choice, not for Dean anyway, but it would've been pointless. He knew Dean better than me.

"Lauren," Dean said, half-turning from the guide. She stepped across the circle and stood next to him and then, without any other farewells or fanfare, there was a loud pop as the air rushed in to fill where they'd been, and the circle was empty, just a faint hint of the awful smell of the summoning left in the room.

Bobby and I didn't look at each other, or say anything. It was going to be a long wait until they got back and I think that admitting, even to each other, even to ourselves, how scared we were, would've made it worse.

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

Two days later, I was sitting in the window seat of the dining room, feeling absurdly pleased as I picked up my cup of coffee with the fingertips of both hands and actually managed to lift it up and drink from it without either spilling or dropping it, when the whole house shook violently.

"Christ!" Bobby's voice yelled from the living room and by the time I'd gotten the cup down and myself to my feet, he was half-running through the dining room and into the kitchen, throwing the back door open and staring into the yard.

I saw his face turn milk-white and hurried as fast I could to see what was wrong.

Crowley stood in the yard, between the rows of junked cars.

"Nice wardings," the demon commented, looking along the length of iron track that Dean and Bobby had buried around the house. "You don't have to worry, I've come bearing gifts," he added, his hands coming out from behind his back. "Well, just one, really."

He tossed something to the bottom of the back steps and it took me a few seconds to register and then recognise what I was seeing.

The sparrow's head.

Eyes open and filled now with dust from the dooryard, her features were unmistakable and Bobby got the implications of it way before I did.

"Finally managed to get rid of the boys," Crowley said, nodding as he took in Bobby's shocked and outraged expression. "Locked up tight, the both of them. I can't tell you what a relief that is."

"You son-of-a–"

"Ah-ah, watch your blood pressure, Bobby," Crowley said, waving a finger at him. His gaze shifted from the hunter to me. "And you've made my torture-to-death list, dear, not quite at the top, but let's say top twenty. Toodles."

He vanished and Bobby looked back down at the head sitting at the bottom of his steps.

"Balls."

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