Chapter 17

AN: Sorry this one took so long to get out. I'd blame everything else, but the truth is it was a hard one! My thanks to my amazing beta who helped me logic my way out of the holes I'd written myself into and for clarifying things that got muddled in the telling. I hope it's worth the wait!

3 Days Later

Bobby lifted his head as I brought in his dinner, his eyes pouched and bloodshot. I set the plate and bottle of beer on the desk beside him and looked pointedly at the food. After a moment, he sighed and pushed the papers he'd been reading aside, picking up the fork and stabbing at a piece of meat.

Sitting in the chair on the other side of the desk, I put my plate on my knees and looked at the stew it contained. Cooking was an effort, one I only put in because we needed to eat. Actually eating what I'd cooked was near impossible.

"If I have to eat, you do too," Bobby said around a mouthful, staring at me from under the shadow of his cap.

I nodded and pushed the stew around my plate a bit more. "Even if we find the doorway, what good does that do?" I asked him. "We can't tell them about it."

"I got an idea about that," Bobby said, picking up his beer to wash down his food. "But we gotta have the exact coordinates first."

"Bobby, it's a different dimension – how do you know that the coordinates will even correspond there – wherever 'there' is – and if they do, they don't have a map or a GPS or anything to verify that they're in the right place."

"I know."

"So …"

"We'll figure it out, Therese," he said, a bit repressively. "There's always a way."

We'd already tried summoning another guide. First the Celtic sparrow and when they'd flatly refused to deal with us, the Navajo raven. The ravens had also refused to deal, all of them apparently knowing what had happened to the sparrow who'd taken Dean and Lauren into Purgatory, but at least they'd told us politely, not just looked at us in horror and disappeared.

Crowley was too powerful.

"Lauren has to know about this," Bobby said a few minutes later, staring at his notes. "She kept it."

"Even if she's aware of the portal," I said, waving my so-far unused fork for emphasis. "Maybe she didn't make any further notes on it because she couldn't find it."

"Maybe," Bobby allowed, swallowing his food. "Or maybe the location is there, it's just that we can't find it because it's in Purgatory …" His attention had sharpened on the pages.

"How is that going to help?" I asked him, leaning forward to try to see what he was seeing.

"Look at this," Bobby whispered and I put the plate down on the chair's arm, getting up to walk around and look over his shoulder. It took me a few seconds to see it.

"How'd I miss that?"

"Forest, trees, all that crap," he said, picking up the sheaf of papers and getting up. "Come on."

He threw the papers onto the floor and we stood looking at them for a moment before the pieces began to emerge from the puzzle, and Bobby knelt, moving the pages around on one side as I dropped to the floor and started to match the edges on the other side.

The text was all there and it all made sense, but it was something more. Whoever had typed it had varied the line lengths, and although it wasn't especially noticeable on a single page or even a couple, when you looked at all of them from a distance, focussing on the pattern, not the content, it was there.

It took us four hours to figure it out, moving pages back and forth, passing them to each other. Our dinners had congealed on the plates by the time we'd finished.

A picture of a location. A map. Kind of.

A mountain in the background, with a crooked peak, like a finger hooked in invitation. A sheer cliffside, with a line of scrubby trees ranged along the top. A dead tree, split and fallen into two pieces, one side that almost resembled a sleeping dog, the other rearing up, like a headless woman. And at the top of the cliff, indicated in the text by extra typed spaces, a pattern of jagged light, spreading out from a point of darkness.

"I'll be damned," Bobby said, standing back and staring at the pages we'd arranged over the big rug.

"Probably," I said, without thinking and he turned and grinned at me.

"Pessimist."

"It's a picture, but of what?"

"Well, we'll see if we get any matches," Bobby said, pulling out his phone and climbing onto a chair to get a better angle. He took a couple of shots of the floor and walked around the desk.

I stood and looked at the image laid out. "Why go to all this trouble to hide this?"

"It's a doorway to another dimension," he answered, a little distractedly. "Don't want it getting out."

"But, look at it, Bobby," I said, sitting down in the armchair and pulling my knees up against my chest. "You think the guy who came through the doorway did this?"

"No." He leaned closer to the screen as I turned my head to look at him. "No, whoever interviewed him probably did it."

"Interviewed him?"

"I knew it!" he said to the computer. "Alright, we got a location, up here." He hit the keys and the printer behind him whirred into life. "And if it's just a slip, or a join, it'll be the same for them, mirrored on the other side."

"And how do we let them know?" I asked, turned around and leaning on the desk, the image on the screen so similar to the one on the floor that I could hardly believe it.

"Time to go a'huntin', Therese," he said, pushing his cap back and scratching along his brow. "Pack warm."

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

He hadn't been kidding about the packing warm thing. I was sitting in the broken car by the edge of woods and it was totally freezing, so bad that I was getting a headache from the clatter my teeth were making as they chattered furiously, out of my control.

"C'mon, Bobby, where the hell is this thing?" I muttered, the words not coming out together but in a staccato line, punctuated by bursts of faint, castanet-like clicks.

As you've probably guessed already, the plan was to trap a monster. Monster souls – at least those monsters that had once been human – went straight to Purgatory on death, no passing Go, no collecting two hundred dollars. Bobby was figuring on grabbing one, carving the details into it and dispatching it to the underworld. Talk about long-shots.

I would've argued with him about it, but I just couldn't think of anything better.

We were about five miles out of a little town in Tennessee, on a tip from another hunter that there was a lone vampire working the area. I, of course, was bait. Bobby was sitting in the trees on the other side of the road with one of those long-range tranquiliser guns you see on African nature programs, loaded up with dead man's blood. The idea was to disable the vamp before he could suck me dry. Sounds good, huh? Yeah, I was pretty excited about it myself. If by excited, you actually mean terrified beyond the capacity for rational thought.

In any case, we'd been here for two hours now and there hadn't been so much as a whisper of anything at all on the road, and the inside of the car felt like I imagined a deep freeze must feel, just before hypothermic shock takes away the ability to feel anything at all.

I'd spent the last five days trying not to have any time to really think and sitting in the car had undone all my good work on that. The account we'd been scouring for any clues about getting into the place had given a breath-taking and stomach-twisting account of what Purgatory was like, inside. A land that had no night and no day but a perpetual twilight filled with creatures that preyed on each other, faster and stronger than they were in real life.

Corporeal shadows that hunt continually, taking sustenance from the deaths and resurrections of their immortal souls. Living flesh is a beacon to them, as bright as a light in the darkness, drawing them ever to any mortal who has the misfortune to be cast into their realm.

Not exactly the world's most reassuring piece of information, right? Most of the documented account of the poor guy who'd gotten in there and found a way out was like that. I couldn't sleep for the nightmares my imagination kept throwing at me whenever I closed my eyes, filled with images of Sam, of Dean, torn up and eaten alive, their screams setting off mine.

The window smashed in on the passenger and the whole car filled with the scent of rotten meat and I hate to say it, but I was so numb from the cold and so shocked by the noise and smell that I didn't move at all. At least, not until I looked into a dead-white face, saw its bristling smile and yanked on the door handle so hard I broke three nails and fell out onto the road on my back.

I didn't hear the shots, but something was sticking out of the vampire's chest as it lunged across the seat and out the door to get me, quickly followed by another similar something. It took a while to process that I was looking at the soft red markers on the darts, longer still to realise that the vampire was slowing down, its eyes becoming unfocussed and if I wanted to move, now was the time to do it.

Wriggling backwards over the asphalt, I heard a crash from the other side of the road and the slap of boots then Bobby was past me, chain clinking in one hand as he dragged the vampire out of the car and began to truss it up like a Thanksgiving turkey, winding the almost-musically chiming chain around its arms and chest, pulling the darts out and checking that they'd delivered their full load and lifting the creature to prop it up against the side of the car.

"Yurll…payf…this…scum," it slurred at him, its head swinging from side to side.

"Sure I will," Bobby said comfortingly back to it, looking over his shoulder at me. "You alright?"

I nodded. I was warmer, at least, my heart still thudding hard against the inside of my chest, improving my circulation with every beat.

"Get the silver knife from the gear bag," he told me tersely, his gaze remaining fixed on the vampire's face. Its eyelids were drooping and it seemed to be having trouble staying awake. I thought that was probably a good thing.

Bobby didn't seem to notice the smell of decomposition that surrounded it, probably because he was smelling pretty bad himself, some mixture of herbs, burned over a fire and made into a paste that he'd slathered over all his visible skin. I kept my teeth held tightly together and stopped breathing as I handed him the knife, taking the rifle and backing out of range immediately.

I'd carved things on other people and had things carved into me, but it wasn't a memory I especially wanted to revisit and when he pulled the vampire's shirt apart, I moved out to the road, checking that there was a dart in the breech and turning around slowly as I watched the darkness. The vampire must have been out because there were no screams as Bobby went about his grisly work.

"Don't we have to be near where they disappeared – or near where they're going to end up?" I asked him softly when he wiped the knife blade clean and got to his feet.

He shook his head. "I don't know."

Like I said, it was the longest of long-shots, this plan.

In the account, the monsters had looked like monsters, the writer had said. Bobby figured that if they carried their…memories, of themselves…or whatever it was that they took with them down there, then a picture carved into their bodies might make the trip as well. I was more dubious.

As it turned out, it didn't matter. I don't know if the vampire was stronger than most or if the dead man's blood hadn't been a big enough dose, or if luck was just running against us and nothing we could've done would've helped at that point. But the vampire came to before Bobby was ready for it, and grabbed him by the throat as he turned away to pick up the machete lying on the road. He swung that long blade at its legs and it let go of him, jumping back. It was beside me in less time that it took to blink, yanking the rifle from my grip, pulling my head back with a fistful of my hair in its hand, and I could feel breath on my neck, disorientingly cold, as it looked at the hunter.

Bobby stood up straight and looked back at it.

"You want to lose your pretty little friend?" it sneered at him.

I stood completely still, watching Bobby's face, and when his eyes flicked downward to the ground and back up to me, I was pretty sure I knew what he wanted me to do. I let myself crumple straight down, my weight dragging against the vampire, and Bobby stepped in fast, the machete blade whistling as he sliced the head free from the monster's shoulders.

It still had a good grip on me, however. And for some strange reason, the world tilted and rolled. I just heard him starting to say something when it all disappeared completely.

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

I hit the ground, minus a handful of hair at the back of my head, and heard a low, breathless chuckle from behind.

Well, you're in some pretty deep crap now, I thought, looking around. The vampire that had dragged me along in its death was crouching there, balanced on one knee with both hands on the ground. I noticed distractedly that Bobby's carvings had made the trip, dripping blood from the thing's chest onto the thick leaf cover of the ground. Then there was a hissing and a blur of movement and the vampire was bowled over by something else, attacking from the side. I had a chaotic impression of dark, flapping clothes and the deadened impact thuds of a fight and that was about it.

Not wanting to waste the unforeseen bonus of predator turned prey, I got to my feet and started running, dodging tree trunks and skidding on the soft, slick ground, the woods too thin to hide in and the light gloomy and grey, taking all the colour from every direction I looked in. My athletic ability has never been all that great, and it wasn't long before I was gasping and blowing like a fish out of water, and I had to stop, pressing myself back against the trunk of a tree as I tried to make my breathing quieter.

It was quiet there. Way too quiet. The sort of quiet that stalks you in a nightmare. The forest was open and scrubby, the ground half-covered with pine needles in great, thick drifts between the rocks and trees. The light stayed the same, and I couldn't feel any wind or air movement at all.

Purgatory. Should've gotten a group rate.

I was fragged and I knew it. Dean, Sam, Lauren and Castiel were somewhere in here, but they didn't know I was here too and there was no way I could find them, no way I could think of to even try to attract their attention without bringing down every monster in the place on top of me. I had no weapons. I had no experience of fighting monsters one on one anyway.

Fragged.

I nearly laughed when I realised that Crowley would be spared the effort of killing me.

I couldn't hear the noises, if any, of the fight I'd run from. I couldn't work out if it was safer to stay in one place, given what the document had said about living flesh being like a beacon, or if I should start moving and risk running into monsters on the way. The image of the clearing and the mountain and the cliffside was vivid in my mind, but I couldn't imagine which direction it was in or if I'd recognise it if there were subtle changes between this place and the real world.

I didn't have a lot of religious input in my childhood. I'm gonna blame that for taking so darned long to think of the obvious solution to my dilemma. When I finally did think of praying to the angel for help, I let myself slide down the tree trunk, hunched myself into as small as possible and prayed with all I had.

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

If you've never had a crush on someone, it's too hard to describe the rush of feelings you get when you see them again, especially when you've been frightened, yanked out of your world, pursued by monsters, tortured by demons and all that good stuff. It's harder still to describe the devastating crash of your feelings when the man you're crushing on finally appears, looks you over briefly and nods, turning away. I don't know why I built up a big reunion scene in my head, but wow, it wasn't nice to have that blown out of the water with that brief, dismissive glance.

"What the hell are you doing here?" Sam said, enveloping me in a much-needed and much-appreciated hug, his gaze no less thorough than his brother's had been when he stepped back and looked for injuries, but unfortunately, from my perspective, not what I was looking for.

"Bobby grabbed a vampire," I said, waving a hand back down the hillside to where I'd been dropped into this place. "We found a kind of a picture of where the portal out is located, and he carved it into the vampire's chest, hoping that you'd see it and maybe be able to find it, but the vamp was holding me when he killed it."

"We saw the vampire," Lauren said, moving forward to stand beside Sam. "You found the location in the account written by the Men of Letters?"

I blinked at her. "Men of Letters?"

She shook her head. "I'll explain about the society when we get out," she said, glancing over her shoulder at Dean, who was watching the back trail. "We've narrowed the area we think it's in, but I didn't remember the details of the image."

"What happened to our guide?" Dean asked, half-turning to look at me.

"Crowley killed her." I said. "The day after you left."

"That explains the no-show." Sam said to him, then looked at me. "Are you alright?"

I didn't know how to answer that simple enough question. I wasn't injured. I was in Purgatory with millions of monsters. I was with the two people I trusted the most to be able to handle the situation. I was having a hard time with my emotions. Where to start?

"Yeah, I'm fine," I said, the irony of using those words to these two men not lost on me. It seemed it wasn't lost on Sam either, from the half-disbelieving look he gave me.

"Let's go," Dean said abruptly, gesturing to the trail that led up the side of the hill with a long, peculiar-looking stone weapon. "Longer we stay here, more chance of something finding us."

Throughout the entire discussion, Castiel had been standing to one side, watching the conversation. As Sam turned for the trail and took point, Lauren walking beside him, and I followed them, he fell into step with me. I heard the faint rustle of leaves behind us as Dean moved after us.

"What is Crowley doing?" Cas asked, his voice pitched low enough that I don't think either Sam or Dean heard him.

"He's looking for a way to open the door into here," I told him. "The soul guides said he'd tried to make deals with them, to get in so that he could get the blood of a Purgatory native."

The angel nodded. "He thinks he has time until the next lunar eclipse."

"He said he was looking for a…tablet," I said, uncertainly.

From the odd twitch in his expression, I realised two things. One, Castiel knew what I meant by that. The other, he hadn't told the Winchesters.

"What kind of tablet?" I asked him.

He looked around the sparse woods, clearly debating what he should or shouldn't say about it. Neither of us heard Dean's silent approach and I jumped when he spoke from just behind me.

"Yeah, Cas, what kind of tablet?"

The angel looked over his shoulder at him, recognising the dangerously casual tone, no doubt.

"The tablets of the Word, Dean," he said, a bit unwillingly.

"The Word?" Dean asked. "The Word as in, uh, the Word of God?"

"Yes."

"Why does Crowley want them?" He looked at Castiel carefully. "Bit late to do him much good."

"The Word holds tremendous power," the angel muttered. "The tablets describe the planes and their inhabitants."

"Gimme a for-instance."

Cas sighed. "The Demon tablet holds all the secrets of Hell, the demonologies and the rituals needed to control them, the histories and how to defeat every demon ever created."

There was a long, low whistle from behind me and I could practically feel Dean's impatience with the angel.

"And you didn't say anything when I told you about Crowley wanting a tablet because…?"

"Because we're stuck here and were facing more immediate dangers."

"And when we get out, Cas?" he asked coolly. "You were gonna tell us all about it then?"

I looked at Cas as his gaze dropped to the trail. "Of course."

I knew it was a lie. I was pretty sure Dean did too.

The first thing I knew of the attack was Dean's hand, planted in the middle of my back and shoving me down and then I was flat, face-down on the ground, a strange whistling noise above my head, a guttural roar to one side followed by a bubbling shriek a second later. I looked around, looking away quickly as a headless body dropped next to me. Another roaring snarl made me face-plant again, and I only just snatched my hand clear as a clawed foot slammed onto the ground where it'd been. It was getting uncomfortably crowded on my little patch of ground and I rolled to the side, thinking I'd get out of the way of angel and hunters and their opponents, when an enormous hairy hand clamped itself over my shoulder and I was dragged backwards across the stony soil.

Dean swung around, one hand flashing out and latching onto my flailing wrist as the other cut through the arm attached to the hand holding me. He stepped across and swung the weird-looking axe again, and the snarl stopped suddenly, then he was staring down at me, absently wiping a blood spray from one side of his face, his expression hard and cold.

"Stay right here, Dorothy," he grunted, his head snapping up, the movement flowing into another swing that the monster in front of him seemed to just run into. On the show, not so much in the earlier seasons, but definitely in the later ones, the expertise of the Winchesters in combat had been downplayed until it was barely there. One of the reasons was that after Kim died, our really good fight coordinator and lead stuntman left to work elsewhere. The other reason was that supposedly the network wanted to keep downplaying the violence in the show and the writers all seemed to feel the same way. I thought it was a huge mistake, because let's face it, a little vicarious excitement and watching a man fight like a man was pretty darned thin on the ground in most people's lives, but they went with it anyway.

Watching Dean decimate his way through four vampires was a sight I didn't think I'd ever forget. Real fighting is bloody. It's extremely fast, so much so that most of it, I think I missed. No foley effects can really replicate the dull thud of body to body impact, and no special effects team in the world can get what a decapitated head of a vampire really looks like, or what a still-attached one looks like either, if you want to get really picky about it.

I tried to stay out of the way, but realised that it was easier for them to avoid me than it was for me to avoid them. The vampire's fingernails were long and twisted and a murky yellow colour and when it slashed for Dean's face and he snapped away from it, I felt the patter of his blood against my skin, warm in comparison to the vampire's cold blood, shocking in the reality of it.

The head went flying and the trail was empty, nothing but the panting of the three men breaking the peculiar silence of the place. Dean pivoted slowly in place, looking for anything else, I guess, then he looked down at me, and stretched out his left hand. Taking it, I scrambled to my feet, and only just stopped myself from flinching as he lifted his hand and turned my face to the side.

"That vampire blood?"

I shook my head, looking at the three parallel cuts that were still dripping, running from under his cheekbone down to the corner of his mouth. He swiped at them with his sleeve, turning his hand over and wiping the droplets of his blood from my cheek. I have no idea what expression was on my face – all I could feel was a kind of a numb shock – but it must've been something he wasn't comfortable with, because he turned away, nodding to his brother as Sam started back up the trail.

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

I've heard that above the Arctic circle, there are days when the sun doesn't really rise much and doesn't really set, just goes around and around above the horizon and the light, constant and not really varying, makes people kind of nuts up there in the summer.

Purgatory was worse. There wasn't a visible light source and for a while, and since I didn't have a watch, I didn't think much of it. We kept walking, and I couldn't tell which direction we were heading in since there weren't any real shadows to speak of. I was getting more and more tired, as the hours seemed to pass, and we came out of the woodland and walked across miles of plains, then climbed another low series of hills and were once again under the scraggly partial canopy of withered and stunted pines.

It didn't help that apparently I was travelling with the Fantastic Four. They didn't seem to get tired. An angel. Two men, in pretty darned good condition. A nephilim, who seemed to have inherited the angelic stamina part. Would it've killed the universe to include someone weaker than me in our party so that I didn't feel like some kind of hopeless specimen as I laboured up through the clinging undergrowth and slid helplessly on the thick layer of pine needles? I mean, c'mon, sheesh!

"Sam," Dean called out from the back some indeterminable time after I'd already figured I'd reached my limit for walking. "We'll take a break."

Sam looked around, his gaze zeroing in on me, and nodded.

Great. It was all too obvious that the four of them could've kept walking indefinitely if they hadn't had to worry about me. Actually, I was too exhausted to care all that much about it. I dropped to the ground where I stood when they all stopped and closed my eyes, just zoning out on the bliss of not moving at all. I wasn't hungry and I wasn't thirsty, and it wasn't that I was tired enough to sleep or anything, but boy, I was aching, from head to foot. The patch of scalp I'd lost to the vampire's grip was still stinging and uncomfortable.

Dean moved up the trail to take watch with Lauren, and Sam walked down, hunkering down next to me.

"You okay?"

I opened my eyes and looked up at him. "Yeah, just not used to this much exercise in one hit."

He grinned at me. "Regretting not getting that gym membership now?"

I would've stuck out my tongue, but it needed too much effort. "Do you know where we are?"

"More or less," he said, turning his head to look up the trail at Lauren. "There seem to be four main areas here, the hills, mostly wooded; the plains; a desert and some kind of sea. Lauren says that the place you saw is in the last stretch of hills before the sea."

"How does she know that?" I looked around the featureless hillside we were on in frustration. "How does anyone know anything about this place?"

"People have been here," he said, sitting down next to me. "Not all that many, Lauren says, but a few have made it out again."

"That's something I don't understand either," I said, frowning as I remembered my doubts. "Why is there a portal here? Shouldn't it be locked up tight? And how could that vampire drag me here?"

"Lauren said that she's been researching the other planes for a long time," he told me. "Her father told her that God put exit hatches in all of them. Just for humans."

"Must have had a head's up about the curiosity factor," I said, grimacing at the sourness in my voice.

"I don't know why the vamp could bring you along when it died," he added, gracefully ignoring my cynicism. "Lauren doesn't either."

I caught the difference in his voice when he said her name. He'd been dropping it in repeatedly in the last couple of minutes, and I looked at him, wondering if that'd been deliberate. I couldn't figure a way to just ask him.

"What'd you do to my brother while I've been stuck here?" he asked and I blinked at the unexpectedness of the question.

"Wha– I – nothing," I more or less sputtered in surprise. "Why?"

"Well," Sam said, lifting an eyebrow at me. "He was pretty tense when he got here, but when the guide didn't show up to get us, he got near frantic, worrying something had happened to you and Bobby."

I shook my head. "What you see is what you get, Sam. He was worried about you, and probably about Bobby."

He laughed, very softly, and the sound was kind of odd in that place. "What you see is never what you get, Terry, not with Dean," he said quietly. "You don't know him all that well."

I sighed. That was true.

"Come on. R&R's over," Dean called out, looking at us impatiently. Sam rolled onto his feet and started back up the trail.

I got up, feeling a bit better, I guess. I was still aching from head to foot but it felt like I could keep going anyway.

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

We came into the clearing looking from the wrong direction, of course, and it took me a long time of wandering around it before I recognised the tree, and then the cliff. There was nothing at the top of it, however.

Specifically, there was no jagged portal of lightning bolts or whatever it was that was represented in the picture the document had formed when it'd been laid out on the floor.

Lauren seemed puzzled too. "It should be there, activated when a human approaches."

Castiel looked at the ground uncomfortably, but so far as I could tell, his vessel was entirely human so it should've worked for him as well as any other human.

I looked around the empty space curiously, a tiny bit disoriented by the fact that I'd seen this, first in lines of type, then as a photograph and now was standing in the middle of it. Walking backward a little ways, to where the trail the other escaping human must have come in, I stepped between the trees and heard Sam shout.

"There it is!"

Running back into the clearing, I stopped in confusion because it certainly wasn't there now.

"What happened?" Dean looked at his brother. Sam was still looking up and he shook his head.

"Got me, it just disappeared."

Lauren stared at the cliff top for a long moment and then sighed. "I think that one of us is blocking it," she said, turning around to look at us, and then around the clearing. "If we go back to the trail-head, and come out, one at a time, we should be able to work out who."

Not being human hadn't really occurred to me, and I felt my stomach sink as I realised that the darned thing had done its Houdini trick when I'd come back from the trail-head. I looked at her.

"No need, I think it's me," I said. To prove my point, I turned around and walked back to the trail. I didn't have to look behind me to know that the portal had reappeared as soon as I got out of range.

"Bullshit," Dean said. "You're human."

"Maybe not here," Lauren said prosaically. "You said Terry's from a different world."

"Human's human!" Dean insisted, but he was starting to look doubtful.

"She's not staying here," Sam said, looking from the nephilim to his brother.

"You cannot get out if she doesn't," Castiel pointed out, a bit unnecessarily, I thought. The situation already seemed all too clear. There was a minute or two of silence, as each of them thought about solutions.

"Sam, take Lauren and Cas through," Dean said abruptly. "You'll have to figure out another way to get us out of here."

For a long moment, I didn't take in what he was saying, and then I did. Sam watched his brother walk to the trail-head and just nodded, apparently okay with him staying behind. Cas looked like he was going to protest then shrugged and followed Lauren as she started to climb up the cliff.

Looking back, Sam said, "Don't leave here, it's a fixed location."

Dean gave a sharp acknowledging nod and gestured toward the portal with his axe. I turned to look at him, not wanting to say the words but having to anyway.

"You don't have to stay."

"No one gets left behind," he said dismissively, watching his brother make the climb. One by one they stepped into the light and disappeared and when they'd all gone through, I didn't know what to say or do. I did, however, have a full and deep grasp of the saying 'be careful what you wish for'. Not that I'd been wishing, exactly, for this. But that was the upshot of the saying, wasn't it?

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

I suppose you're wondering why I haven't been endlessly moaning of unrequited feelings, all this time. The truth is, I wasn't all that sure what I was feeling. I've had dozens of crushes, most of them mutual, but I'd already realised that crushing on someone, even when it's returned, isn't the same as loving someone. Looks a bit the same on the outside, but trust me, it's not. Not that I'm much of a moaner when it comes to personal feelings…alright, at least not the ones that don't involve fear and physical pain…and I was scared to admit to anything because…well…it all just seemed so darned unlikely.

"Worst mistake?" Dean asked me and I dragged my thoughts back to the conversation we'd been having in fits and starts for the last indeterminate amount of time. From my side, it was hard to talk to him because there was a lot I wanted to talk about but I had the feeling it would all fall under the generalised umbrella of chick-flick conversation so I'd kept my mouth shut. Unfortunately, waiting I the clearing in utter silence, although probably a good survival technique, seemed completely unnatural as well. Dean'd started by asking me a pretty innocuous question and looking at the determined discomfort on his face, I'd realised that he was struggling as much as I was. Didn't help to know that.

"Getting married," I answered promptly. "An unmitigated disaster and six months of my life I'll never get back."

"Why was it a disaster?" he asked, glancing at me in between scanning the woods.

I was very surprised that he asked that, and it took me a minute or two to formulate the right – the truthful – answer.

"I had no idea what I was doing, and neither did he," I said, not quite able to look at him. "We didn't know each other, so it was doomed anyway, but it took a lot of untangling after we'd both admitted that it was a mistake."

There was a moment's silence as he digested that. "And you got married…why exactly?"

I slid a slightly cynical look his way. "The sex was white-hot."

He blinked then smiled reluctantly, half-turning away to hide it.

"Is it safe to stay here?" I asked, not sure I wanted him dwelling on whatever images that might have raised.

"No," he said, looking around the clearing. "But I sincerely doubt anywhere's safe here."

He looked back at me, his expression hard to read, and I got the feeling that he was thinking that if I hadn't been in the way, as usual, and gotten dragged down here by the vampire, he'd be back in the real world with his brother, and just the usual worries, instead of stuck here with me, wondering what would come out of the trees next.

"Dean, if there's anything you like about me, anything at all, could you tell me what it is, right now?" I asked him, out of the blue. It wasn't something I'd thought about, I just needed to hear something I could hold on to, something to counter-balance the idea that me coming here hadn't been another colossal mistake on my part.

His eyes widened a fraction and he looked away for a second. When he turned back, his expression was serious, and not mocking, for once.

"I, uh, like your honesty," he said, his gaze meeting mine.

Maybe that conversation would've gone somewhere, maybe not. It didn't get the chance.

A slim, young-looking man materialised in the centre of the clearing and Dean was on his feet, axed rising as he went to meet him.

"Come on, we haven't got much time," the young man said, looking disapprovingly at the weapon. I scrambled to my feet.

"Who the hell are you?"

"Does it matter?" the man asked, his mouth curling down. "I'm a guide, we're on the clock, and the sooner you're out of here, the sooner I can do what I have to, to stay out of Crowley's clutches."

"You're here to get us out?"

"Am I speaking Bengali? Move it."

Dean lowered the axe, looked around and grabbed my arm as the guide reached out to grip his wrist and mine.

The world turned inside-out and upside-down and I had just enough time to think I might be getting used to this constant rearrangement of my molecules when we were back in Bobby's dooryard, dusk purpling the air, and the guide vanished.

Dean let go of me and looked at Bobby and his brother, both standing on the porch with big grins on their faces.

"What was the price?" he demanded, striding across to them. I trailed along in his wake, relieved, overjoyed, tears pricking at the back of my eyes to see them, see the dusty yard, the peeling paint of the house, even hear Sam's slightly defensive tone when he answered.

"Same as the other one," he said.

"Dammit, Sammy!"

"Cheap at the price," Bobby growled at him, looking at me. "All in one piece?"

I nodded. "Starving."

"Figured that," he said, pushing Dean into the house ahead of him. "Cas has gone," he added to me more quietly. "What'd you do to get him so riled up about you?"

"Nothing!" I said. I mean, I'd opened a door which had sucked him into Purgatory, but surely he'd realised that there hadn't been another choice. "Bobby, how am I so different?"

"I don't know," he said, closing the door behind us and dropping a fatherly arm across my shoulders as we walked down the hall. "We'll figure it out."

In that moment, all my misgivings, all my doubts about being here, about the rightness of being here, vanished without a trace. The unthinking acceptance I could feel from him was something I hadn't even known I'd been looking for, but I must have been, because at that moment, I felt like I was home.

I caught a glimpse of Dean's face, as Bobby pushed me into a chair at the dining table. I can't describe his expression, only that it seemed like he wanted to say something but didn't.

We ate hugely, I guess making up for the four days of not eating we'd spent in Purgatory.

The three nights of not sleeping there fell on me next, and I could see Dean yawning as well. With a full stomach, I could hardly keep my eyes open. Bobby grinned at me, when my head slipped from the hand I had propping it up.

"You two were there for two days," he said, his gaze swinging between me and Dean. "Get some shut-eye and we'll fill you in tomorrow."

For once, Dean didn't argue, and I was way beyond any desire to know anything about anything except my bed and a soft pillow. I nodded and got up, bumping into the table and trying to keep my eyes open, staggering uncoordinatedly across the room to the stairs, hearing the unsteady clumping of boots behind me.

I'd just reached the door when I heard his exhale, right behind me, and I opened the door and turned in the same ill-conceived movement, very nearly falling into the room.

"Whoa, one direction at a time," he said, catching my arm and hauling me back into an upright position. "I, uh, wanted to ask you something."

"Ass-k, a-way," I said, completely punchy with exhaustion that seemed to be getting heavier and heavier.

He swallowed, and looked down. I squinted at him. He was clearly uncomfortable and I wondered tiredly if this wasn't something that could wait till morning.

"Is – uh – is there anything about me – that you…um…like, Dorothy?"

I blinked owlishly at him and shook my head. "Wrong question, Dean."

And with that pithy, and in retrospect, completely cryptic answer, I turned on my heel, swinging a little bit from the door and walked into my bedroom, falling face down on the bed and going out like a light.

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