Chapter 23

Dean launched himself from the chair, heading for the door with long strides. He didn't seem to notice that the angel wasn't right behind him until he reached the doorway.

"You comin'?" he barked at Cas. Cas nodded and turned and Dean disappeared through the door. The angel turned back to me.

"You don't belong here."

I sucked in a deep breath. It wasn't what I wanted to hear.

Castiel leaned forward, his hand outstretched and I felt his fingertips on my forehead, jerking away too late. The fatigue, the slight rasp still stinging my throat, the left-over mucus that had been rumbling in the depths of my lungs, they vanished. I felt peculiar, as if I'd taken something pharmaceutical. Not exactly hyped up, but rather sensitive to everything I could see, hear, smell, taste and feel.

"You need to be there, to see," he added, a bit cryptically, and I got up, unsurprised when I found that everything was working not only well, but very well, and followed him to the front door.

On the porch, Sam and Dean were standing on the first step, Bobby and Lauren behind them. In the dirt yard in front of the house, Crowley stood on the edge of the iron circle that surrounded the buildings, head tilted slightly as he looked up at the Winchesters.

"There she is," he said cheerfully, his eyeline moving past them and narrowing on me. I wanted to hide behind someone. His expression, although smiling, was not pleasant.

"What do you want, Crowley?" Dean snapped at him.

"I want your little friend," Crowley answered immediately.

"Why?" Bobby called out to him, the very question I was interested in myself. What on earth could I have done to deserve this?

"Why?" Crowley repeated, smiling at him. "Because I do."

"Or what?" Sam asked him.

"Or I'll wipe this mangy patch of dirt off the map."

I noticed the sound then, it might've been there before, but it really started to gain volume as he spoke. A bit like a rumble, a bit like the sound an airplane makes when it's still a fair way away. I can't describe it any better than that, although as it got louder, it started to sort of hum.

The cloud rose up from behind the hill on the other side of the street, black and grey and purple, twisting and pulsing with a reddish light and both Dean and Sam tensed first, the rest of us took an extra second to recognise what it was.

"You'll have to get past the iron," Bobby yelled at him over the noise, which now sounded as if several jets were coming in to land on the road.

"What? This iron?" Crowley looked down at the slight bump in the dirt and lifted his hands abruptly. The iron track, laid a foot under the ground by Dean and Sam only three weeks before, and joined at each end with iron bolts and nuts, flew up out of the ground, breaking apart, the bolts flying off in either direction.

To say none of us were expecting it would have been the understatement of the decade.

I heard Bobby mutter, 'That's fucking impossible!', then Crowley laughed.

"Old dog, new tricks, let's get on with it, shall we?"

"If I bring her down, do we have a deal that you'll leave these people alone?" Castiel suddenly called out from behind me.

Dean swung around. "What? No –"

"I thought angels didn't make deals, Cas?"

There was a sudden hard grip of a hand on my arm and I was standing in front of Crowley, Castiel's hand still holding my arm and Dean and Sam simultaneously swearing and running down the steps toward us.

"A deal?" Cas bit out, staring at the demon.

Crowley's eyes narrowed but he nodded. "A deal."

And then it all stopped.

The angel and I stood in front of Crowley, who was frozen in his last expression, a nasty smirk twisting his mouth. Dean and Sam were almost at us, frozen not only in mid-stride but actually in mid-air, Bobby was at the bottom of the stairs, Lauren a pace behind him, both of them looking at their footing. I turned my head and saw the demon cloud hovering over the iron archway of Singers Auto Yard, the red and purple light unmoving in the middle of the black.

"What's going on?" I asked him.

"Crowley has discovered a use for you," Cas said quietly, his face expressionless as he looked down at me. "I'd hoped he wouldn't find it but obviously he has. You have to go home, now."

"I can't," I told him, looking around at Dean. "I won't –"

He leaned close, the hand around my arm tightening as he lifted the other over me and I flinched backwards.

"Look. This is what will happen if you stay –"

He touched me, and it was very much like watching a movie, unreeling behind my closed eyes. The yard, the dirt, Crowley and Dean and Sam barrelling towards us, Bobby on their heels. The demons in the cloud above us fell on the three men and for long moments all I could hear was screaming, deep inside of that black and grey cloud, then the screams stopped and the cloud floated up, dissipating into hundreds of separate, twisting coils. On the ground, the brothers and Bobby were an unrecognisable tangle of body parts and blood and shredded strips of clothing, the dirt under them glistening in the dull sunlight as the last of their blood soaked into the ground. Lauren stopped as a number of curling tendrils of smoke surrounded her, forcing themselves in through her mouth, through her eyes and nose. She struggled and fought but in moments, her eyes blinked and they were black, from corner to corner and then she came for me.

"You can have as much fun as you like after we get the soul," Crowley snapped at her and the demons following her and I felt my arms being pulled outward, bent back well past their intended positions and snapping like matchsticks.

I'd just started to scream when Cas lifted his hand and looked at me.

"He never had this kind of power," I whispered, feeling the bones of my upper arms involuntarily, the pain and memory of the breaks still too vivid to believe it hadn't actually happened…yet.

"No," the angel agreed immediately. "But I cannot find out how he got it if you stay here and they die for you."

He looked at the brothers, then back to me.

"You don't belong here, and you will be the cause of their deaths – or worse – if you stay here."

"And if I go…with you…home?"

"Crowley made a deal," Castiel said simply, looking at the demon. "He keeps his deals. They –" He gestured behind to the frozen men. "– will live. And I will be able to help them."

So. That was my choice. Nothing to do with how I felt or what I wanted, or what it was going to seem like to Dean, when the angel returned and told him whatever he wanted to, I guessed. It was a one-way ticket and there wouldn't be another one. Ever.

I wanted to look back at Dean. Wanted it so much I could taste it in my throat. I didn't.

"Let's go."

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

The…trip…for want of a better word, was different again from any of the others. I seemed to be lost in the blackness for a lot longer, unable to feel or breathe, my lungs aching and then starting to burn with the lack of oxygen. Then everything came back with a thump and we were in my apartment, sunlight coming in through the partly-open curtains, dust over every surface and Castiel vanished, the air popping softly as it filled the space he'd briefly occupied.

I looked around. Nothing seemed to have been moved or touched since I'd been gone. I wondered if it was possible that no one had noticed me missing. I was standing beside the sofa and the coffee table and I leaned over and picked up the remote to the tv set, flicking it on.

A news programme was playing and the date was in the corner. Five months. It didn't seem that long. It also seemed like a lifetime, in some ways.

At that moment, I realised that I'd left my bag, with everything that was pertinent to my identification, my life, my work, including my account cards, keys and security passes onto the lots, in Bobby's living room. I turned around and dropped onto the sofa, put my face into my hands and started to shake.

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

It wasn't that hard to get new identification, new bag, new cards. The money in my account had come and gone, paying the rent and bills which is why, I guess, my stuff was all still here. I called the studio and gave Karen the only cover story I could think of – a mugging, a head injury, induced coma and some amnesia. For someone who made their living making stuff up, she seemed to accept it without a quibble. She ranted at me for about ten minutes then told me that the new girl was an idiot and could I start tomorrow at five in the morning. I said yes. Of course. New passes would be at the gate. I agreed and hung up.

I dusted and vacuumed and looked through my wardrobe disinterestedly. I was operating on automatic and I knew it, I just couldn't seem to find any emotion at all. When I got around to dusting the shelving that surrounded the tv unit, I nearly did. Sitting on the shelves were the five box sets of the seasons and for a long, long moment all I could do was stare at the spines of the boxes. If I took one out, and looked at the picture on the cover, I thought I'd hit the jackpot and all the emotions that were somewhere lurking down in the dark would come rushing up. I turned away and went to the small kitchen. Basically I was too chicken-shit to let them come. I didn't think they'd ever leave.

Ordering a pizza for dinner, I figured I'd eat, have a shower, get to bed early, since I had to be at work pretty early.

It wasn't until I undressed in my bathroom for the shower that I saw them, and then everything came crashing back, breaking through my little protective bubble as if it wasn't there at all.

The scars, right? Front and back. Matching set.

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

One month later.

I guess Karen sent out a memo or something, because no one asked me anything about where I'd been, or what'd happened. Given that I probably didn't look too hot, my eyelids were puffy and no amount of make-up could cover the redness that surrounded them or my nose, for that matter, it might've just been politeness on their part. There wasn't much I could do about the waterworks. From the minute I'd seen my protective sigils in the bathroom's mirror, I hadn't really been able to stop. The Js had been nice, but involved in their jobs and since I couldn't look at either of them, the reunion had been very brief, consisting of some awkward questions about how we all were and me giving them the updated sheets and leaving abruptly. When I did sneak a peek at the filming later on, I began to see that the resemblance wasn't that strong. I mean, it was there, but in the scene they were doing they were both wearing suits and it just wasn't…well, you know who it wasn't. Since then, I found it was easier to leave the updates in their trailers and avoid the face-to-face stuff altogether.

Shooting the episodes of season seven was even more bizarre. I spent about three-quarters of my lunch breaks in the screening room, skimming through the earlier episodes that were in the can and had either been aired already or were close to it, and I was blown away by how little had been included in the scripts of what had actually happened, and how every episode seemed to be hanging on something that hadn't happened at all. I couldn't get my head around that at all. In several of the episodes, the characters seemed to be possessed – I mean, not actually possessed, but not themselves, and sure as heck not the men I'd come to know – but I'm pretty sure no one had specifically written that in.

At the script meetings, held every afternoon, I let most of the talk go straight by. The Leviathans were apparently shape-shifting, DNA-copying monsters that had been locked in Purgatory and were taking over the world. But for some reason they were not in most of the episodes. Once, I might have questioned that, now I found it very difficult to care.

"Terry! You with us?" Karen looked at me sharply over her designer glasses frames from the end of the table.

"Yes," I said, sitting straighter and looking at her, noticing belatedly that Sera had the chair beside her.

"The Lovecraft research, do you still have it?" Sera asked me, enunciating each word slowly and carefully and getting a few laughs from the rest of the table.

I tried to think of where I'd put the few books on the writer I'd been able to find in the three days before the episode script had been written. "Yeah, I've got it at my desk."

"Good," the producer said, smiling. She has a weird smile. It reminded me of the Leviathans, actually. Post-editing. "We might tie in some more of his work to the later episodes, can you summarise the high points and get back to me by the end of the week?"

"Sure," I said, making a note in the new journal I'd been forced into buying. It wasn't a big deal, the research lately. When I'd started, Eric had demanded that everything be as in-depth as possible, considering it was a tv show, but the last season and this one, more and more short-cuts had been taken and I'd learned that if I spent several days, digging around, finding out all sorts of interesting tid-bits, ninety-nine percent of what I'd found would be ignored and they'd used the one percent name or concept and make up the rest themselves. Or not explain it at all.

In any case, as soon as the meeting was over, I went over to the cubicle, picked up the books and photocopies I'd collected and headed for the door. The "idiot" (actually a nice girl who was just starting out in the biz and wasn't at all idiotic but had some learning to do) Karen had hired to take over my job was still there, now she was my assistant…and now, she stayed on-set while I went home at a normal-ish hour.

It was a side-effect of living it that I didn't really obsess about the show anymore. That and the fact that even watching the actors in bits of scenes pulled off all the scabs that I'd been trying to keep intact to give me some sort of buffer against the memories.

Five months doesn't seem like a long time, if you're pretty settled in a home life with a regular routine and doing the same things every day. It seems a lot longer when there's no routine, monsters, angels and demons, multiple injuries and surprises around every corner. It seems like forever when you've fallen in love for the first time.

I was doing okay in the day-time, really. I mean, let's say the bulk of the day. It probably would've been easier if I'd switched jobs. Maybe switched cities too. Or even moved to a different country. A lot of things caught at my attention and reminded me that it hadn't been a dream, that it had happened, just the way I remembered it all. A lot of things also reminded me that there was no magic in this world, and that the exact meeting of all those factors had been a billion-to-one shot that wasn't going to be repeated. Sometimes those thoughts needed five minutes spent locked in the bathroom, just to get them out of my head.

Nights…nights were not so good. Too much time to think, I guess. I couldn't make myself interested in anything on tv. Couldn't watch movies or read books. I had a few people inviting me out, for drinks or dinner or to go see something-or-other, but I turned them down. Not really the way someone trying to re-adjust to their life handles it, but you know, I figured I was entitled to a period of grieving.

The only problem was, I didn't really know how to let go. I mean, let's face it, how do you let go of something like that? Take an Italian cooking course?

I got home and locked the door, got changed, put a tv dinner in the microwave and set the books out on the coffee table, hoping that they'd hold my attention at least long enough to get really tired. If I was really tired, and I had a small nightcap before I tried to sleep, I could usually get through the night without waking up.

When the microwave beeped insistently to tell me dinner was served, I grabbed the container, sat down and started reading.

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

Three months after that.

"Terry, what's going on with you?"

I turned around at Karen's sharp question, grabbing the sliding bunch of files before they fell off the table.

"What? Nothing," I told her as I manoeuvred the slippery things back onto the desk.

"Look, I don't usually give a rat's ass about my employees, and you know that," she told me, unnecessarily since I did know it. Normally, she wouldn't have noticed if we'd all come in looking like the zombie cast from Dawn of the Dead. I was suspicious about the sudden change in her attitude now.

"You've lost a shitload of weight, you look like you're not getting any sleep, and while your work hasn't suffered, I'm getting the vibe that an intervention is coming due."

I looked at her, probably with my mouth open. "It's not," I said hurriedly. "I'm fine."

"When was the last time you slept?"

"I – uh," I floundered a bit, not sure of how to answer that. I did sleep, sometimes. "I'm just getting over a gastro, Karen, nothing more sinister."

"Why don't I believe you?" she asked, folding her arms across her chest and looking at me inquisitorially. "I know it looks like I don't pay much attention to people," she continued, her voice softening. I didn't know which was worse, the unheard of concern or the fact that she was taking it out on me. "But I do care, that my people aren't, you know, feeling alone."

"I'm not feeling alone," I said, forcing myself to make eye contact. It was like looking at a rattler on ecstasy.

"You haven't been the same since you got out of the hospital, Terry."

"Well, I – that is," I started to say, not in the least bit sure of where I was heading with whatever it was that I was trying to get out. "I've been seeing a counsellor," I finally blurted out.

"Have you? That's good news." Karen seemed surprised.

"Yeah, I didn't feel comfortable talking about it, but I think now …" I continued, warming to the lie. "… it's starting to, you know, get better."

"Good." She looked at the mound of files on my desk. "Just to be on the safe side, I'd like you take the rest of the week off."

"What?" I stared at her. Was she offering paid leave? That really was unheard of. "But all this –"

"Sophie can handle it," she said decisively and nodded to herself. "Yes, a few days off and I'll be expecting you back on Monday, looking a lot better."

She turned around and left and I picked up the three folders from the bottom of the pile distractedly, wondering how I was supposed to 'look better' in five days' time.

It wasn't like this was the first conversation I'd had along these lines from a variety of co-workers and one-time friends. I couldn't work up the effort required to eat most of the time. The research I'd started for Sera had pulled out a lot of very interesting things, and most of my nights I spent reading. It beat trying to sleep and having nightmares.

I wasn't sure why I was reading up on everything I could get my hands on regarding the gothic writer. Maybe I'd just shifted the obsession from the show to something that was closer to the life I'd lost. I try not to analyse my actions too deeply, since you never know what you're going to unearth in that kind of excavation, but when I thought about it rationally, I couldn't see what the point was. I couldn't tell them about it. Couldn't go back.

Pushing those familiar and unwelcome thoughts aside for the umpteenth time, I thought instead about Lovecraft's theories.

Apparently, he'd believed that souls were all-powerful, individual nuclear reactors that not only gave the angels all their juice, but the demons too. And that each soul was linked somehow to the energy of the place it'd been born into. A bit metaphysical for me to follow very well, but it seemed like that was why Crowley had wanted me. And what Castiel had been hiding when he kept trying to send me home. According to Lovecraft's theories, the power of my soul, away from its home, was available to whoever wanted to use it.

It did explain why the powers of the entities in their world hadn't had the same effect on me as it had on the Winchesters. Lovecraft didn't end his speculations there, however. He also thought that a soul in a different, parallel world – or whatever the correct term for such a thing might be – had powers of its own. Or at least, could tap into its own power more easily. I still wasn't sure if I'd understood that correctly. There were a lot of vague and unverified references to things that I think might have been more laudanum-based than a real source.

Not that any of this mattered, I repeatedly told myself. It was probably that conflict, between what I was doing and what the reality of the situation was that was making it impossible for me to move forward, back or even sidewards so far as accepting the status quo and getting on with my life.

When I dreamed, it was just of one man. Sometimes they were good dreams, dreams I didn't want to wake from. Sometimes they were revisits to what Castiel had shown me on the porch of Bobby's house. Sometimes they were a cluttered mess of memories, good and bad and whatever was in between. I'd tried sleeping tablets, endless cups of hot milk, tiring myself out with fitness routines, even managed to develop a bit of a taste for spirits but within about an hour of getting to sleep, out they came.

Sorry. I don't mean to keep going on about this. A lot of the time I just buried it and got on with things.

Getting back to Lovecraft's work, one of the other things he seemed to hint at was that during one of the workings of his spells here, in this world, something had come through, as it had in the other one.

I couldn't find anything really concrete about that, although there were a spate of murders in upper New York over the time period just after he said he'd done the spell. There was nothing about any of his friends dying and although he did die at the age of forty-six on March 15, 1937, it was from cancer of the small intestine, nothing weird about it. One of his biographers, a really obscure man who wrote just the one book in his life, the biography of Lovecraft, had more hints about what had gone on in the Providence home after Lovecraft's had passed on.

It seemed that along with the parties and séances and so on, Lovecraft had taken to using the basement for 'meditation' and had forbidden anyone to enter it. Pottenby, the biographer, had succumbed to his curiosity in '45 and gone to have a look. He didn't say what he found there, so maybe it was nothing but he died of ingesting a fish-hook two hours after he finished the manuscript of Lovecraft's life, and call it Winchester paranoia, but I found that hard to swallow…er…no pun intended.

On impulse, and since I had the next five days free, I decided that maybe I could take a look at the houses of both the writer and the biographer. I opened my laptop and booked the flights and rental car before I could consider it more carefully or change my mind. They do say that a change is as good as a vacation, and I needed something to do that was different. Somewhere to be that wasn't going to trigger everything.

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

Rhode Island's quite a pretty place, especially in the fall. The home that H. P. Lovecraft had once lived in was now a museum and after the morning tour, I realised I wasn't going to be able to see the basement unless I could break in somehow after dark. And I couldn't think of any reason to look in the basement of a house that had been empty of the man for more than sixty years anyway.

The home of the biographer, Edward Pottenby, however, was a different story.

It was surrounded with head-high weeds, the front fence leaning this way and that along the sidewalk, shingles missing from the roof and one chimney collapsed almost entirely. High mesh fences around the boundary proclaimed that the building was condemned. It took me about fifteen minutes to find the agency responsible for it, and another hour to go through the numerous newspaper reports that had dogged its history since Pottenby had died in that…well, gross…way.

There were a lot of deaths in the house. Some of them had been from natural causes, well, maybe not entirely natural, I mean no one died in their sleep there, at least not without having an autopsy performed on them afterwards, anyway, but a lot had had the same ick-factor and totally weird quality that Pottenby's had.

Witchcraft, I speculated? Or had the biographer seen or felt something in the basement of Lovecraft's that had…what? At that point, I faltered. This was my world and in my world there was no magic. No monsters that might've followed a curious old man back to his house and possessed him long enough to swallow a fish-hook and stayed on to possess the house he'd lived in. I mean, come on, it was preposterous, right? Something that happened in his world, not here.

I couldn't shake loose the feeling that something along those lines had happened here anyway.

I took photocopies of every report and the ownership papers of the house and went back to my hotel room, buying a bunch of coloured markers and a notebook on the way.

I don't know, it just made me feel closer to him, in some hopeless way. Geez, sue me.

Once I'd written up everything that'd happened, my little theory didn't seem quite so laughable. And no one had ever investigated why the house had been such bad luck for everyone.

No hunters.

That was one reason, I guessed, although it wasn't like there was no one researching ghosts or paranormal disturbances in this world. They might've been ridiculed and mocked for their scientific endeavours but they were definitely around.

I sat there, the room getting darker as the daylight faded to a golden glow and then to pink, wondering if I had the chops to call one of those paranormal scientists and tell them my theory. It occurred to me that since the idea of another dimensional being wasn't exactly common here, I could be party to their deaths, if they didn't take it seriously enough. That thought sent an icy chill shooting down my spine.

Or, I thought to myself, I could go take a small look at the house myself first. See if anything weird happened. My flight back home was at nine a.m. in the morning. I had the whole night.

I can practically hear your clamouring 'are you joking?' from here, you know. It was a bad idea, I can admit to that now. At the time, it didn't seem so outrageously stupid and if I'd been honest with myself, if I'd even once admitted why I looking so hard for evidence of his monsters here in my world, I probably would've run in the opposite direction as hard as I could. But, see, I wasn't being really honest with myself, back then.

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

It was full dark when I pulled alongside the kerb in the rental and the streetlights were out for nearly a block in either direction of the derelict house.

I'd packed a bag, I was delusional but not completely insane, after all. I had a ten-pound paper-wrapped block of salt and a bag of iron nails from the hardware store. God knows what I thought I was gonna do with them since I didn't have any kind of weapon, but it seemed like a good idea at the time. I had a flashlight and a box of matches and a pint bottle of lighter fluid, bought with the vague idea that if I did see something or something seemed to be there, I could maybe burn down the house and put it to rest, or evict it or something. I hadn't really gone into the details of that very much.

All of this – this haphazard and not-thought-out stuff – was pretty weird for me because usually, I'm the asshat yelling at the screen in the movies about what not to do in a haunted house (don't go up the dark and lightless stairs to the attic, you moron! Don't go down into the basement because you think you hear rats, you freakin' idiot! – that's me, in case you've been annoyed at a showing of a horror flick at your local movie house), and usually, I would have waited until at least daylight before even venturing to a place reputed to be haunted or possessed. When you consider what I'd seen in his world, it just stands to reason, right?

Yeah. Right.

Anyway, I parked the car and pulled out my bag of half-assed protective stuff and turned to look at the house. It was dark, of course. And silent, of course. And the chain-link mesh looked a bit difficult to deal with since I'd brought a small pair of wire cutters that would fit in my pocket, instead of the big ones that the store clerk had tried to sell me and which, looking now at the fence, I could remember Dean, Sam and Bobby having instead of the Hobby-Co pair I'd got.

I took a step across the road and the padlocked chain, that had been holding the wire-and-frame gate closed to all comers, dropped to the ground and the aforesaid wire-and-frame gate swung slowly open, toward the front porch of the house, a tacit and utterly creepy invitation.

The flashlight fell from my fingers and I distantly heard the tinkle of the glass breaking on the asphalt. I couldn't breathe. Literally, could not breathe. In the shadows of the porch, something moved and I swear my eyes were bugging so far out of my head I thought they were gonna drop out.

Well, I just about broke my thumb on the remote unlocking thingy for the car and must've hit a couple of different buttons on it to set off the alarm because that started to blare loudly, making me jump about four foot off the ground. Between the very girly scream that came from my throat and the alarm, it completely destroyed any semblance of silence in the neighbourhood. The car doors, blessedly, unlocked, and I yanked the driver's door open, threw myself and the bag into the front seat, managed to hit a couple of other buttons – I couldn't tell you which ones – which stopped the darned alarm and started the car, peeling rubber and blowing smoke the whole way up the block and back to the highway.

I was shaking for the entire ride back to the hotel and if you're thinking, serves you right, then I agree. It'd been a stupid thing to do, going in alone, going in at night…I almost called myself Dorothy.

Needless to say I did not get any sleep that night either.

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

Two months after that.

Every dream I dream is like

Some kinda rash 'n' reckless scene

To give out such crazy love

You must be some kinda drug

It wasn't right and I knew it wasn't right from the second that song came on the radio. Maudlin and hopeless and all wistful guitars and Elliott's voice whiny instead of rough and grating and hard, the music filled up the car and David turned the volume up and I thought – fail. Major fail. I wanted to go home.

And if my time don't ever come

For me you're still the one

Damned if I don't, damned if I do

I gotta get a fix on you

This was stage three of Karen's attempts to apparently lure me back to the world. Honestly, if I'd known she was going to be such a pain in the ass and for some reason care about me, I'd never have gone back to the job.

David was a friend of a friend's brother and a blind date. He was nice. He was tall, in good shape, which was due to his gym membership, he'd confided to me over pasta, and his hair was cut short at the sides and back, longer at the front and was mostly blond, with some artfully applied streaks. Which, to me said, hairdresser. Not barber.

He was a real estate agent with some firm downtown and he liked to sail in the summer and ski in the winter. I'd looked at his hands, when he'd picked up his wine glass. The nails were short, buffed and clean. There wasn't a nick or scratch on them, and at the time, when I'd still been contemplating going further than the forced dinner, I'd thought there wouldn't be so much as a scratch on the rest of him either. Maybe a little appendix scar. But probably not.

Have you ever needed someone so bad, yeah

Have you ever wanted someone, you just couldn't have

Did you ever try so hard that your world just fell apart

Have you ever needed someone so bad, so bad…

I leaned forward and snapped off the radio, eliciting a startled look from my date.

"You don't like it?"

"Just tired," I said, looking out the window. It was mostly true. I was tired. I'd been tired for a long time now. "Sorry, I'm not much fun on a Friday night," I added, not sure why I was even bothering to let him down gently since I had no intention of seeing him again. "It's been a long week."

That was an understatement. Season seven was done, and Sera had gone and we had a new showrunner, one of the old writers. He was very enthusiastic. That's the nicest thing I can think of to say about him.

"It's still early?" he said, turning to look at me as he pulled into my street. "We could just, I don't know, talk for a while?"

I waved a hand as we approached my building, not wanting to have to answer that oblique enquiry. Would it kill you to get out, talk to someone new, just start to have a life? Karen's accusation rang in my ears again and I sighed.

David pulled into a space in front of the apartment block and turned off the engine. He wasn't a stupid guy, or insensitive, I thought, shooting a side-ways look at him. He had to be aware of my go-away vibes. He didn't look like someone who was short of dates either. I couldn't work out why he was persisting.

"Let me walk you up, okay?" he said now as I gathered my purse and coat, and opened the door. "Just so I know you got in all right."

"Sure." Why argue?

We walked up the path to the front doors and I led the way through the narrow hallway and up the stairs, disguising a look at my watch with a quick rummage through my purse for the keys. It was barely ten, and I could already feel a desire to make a pot of coffee and drag out the files again.

At the door, I slid the key in, and David leaned uncomfortably against the frame.

"I guess I thought that went better than you did," he said, his gaze going from the key to my face.

I looked down. I wasn't good company. There wasn't any point in hiding that fact. "I'm sorry, David, I don't know what Karen said to you, but Fridays just…," I said as I turned the key and opened the door. "…aren't such a good night for me. Work's been frantic these last couple of weeks."

He stood straighter as I took a step inside. "How about Saturday night then? Next week? Something relaxing?"

"Uh, um…sure," I told him, feeling more and more desperate to just get inside and close the door. "Give me a call."

"I will," he said, and he reached out for my wrist as I pulled the keys from the lock. It wasn't a grab, just a light touch. "I enjoyed tonight, Terry."

I looked up at him and smiled. It was hard not to since he looked completely sincere. "Thank you, goodnight."

He nodded and turned away and I was finally able to close the door and turn the lock and put the chain on. I turned around and noticed two things. One, there was a lamp on, which I pretty sure I hadn't left on. The second thing was that there was an angel standing next to the sofa.

Castiel.

For a long, long moment, I couldn't believe it. Then a movement in the corner of my eye dragged my attention off the angel and I turned to see Dean sitting in the armchair near the bookshelves.

"Hey, Dorothy."

It's possible I had a small meltdown, right there and then. Certainly the ability to speak had gone and I couldn't do anything other than stare at him. He got up from the chair slowly, his eyes remaining on me, his expression…guarded, I thought. I would have gone to him, I mean, wow, I'd been dreaming a moment like this for months, but that guarded expression stopped me cold. I couldn't move my feet. In any direction.

"What are you doing here?"

Something flickered across his face, some emotion that came and went way too far fast for me to decipher.

"Crowley opened Purgatory," he said shortly. "Bobby thought you might be able to help us with figuring out a way to deal with what came out."

I saw Castiel's face twitch at his words, and wondered if it was a lie or only part of it was. I also very belatedly realised that Dean must have heard at least part of the exchange I'd had at the door with David, and I was wearing a dress. Just the little black number that I had for those sorts of occasions, but I guessed I looked like I'd just gone out on a date. I mean, I had just gone out on a date.

Glancing back over my shoulder at the door, I waved my hand vaguely. "That was, um, just a –"

Dean followed my gaze to the door, looking back at me and shrugging. "You're entitled," he said, cutting my explanation off. "You were the one who left."

Duh. I finally got it.

"I didn't want to –" I started to say, then realised that the angel hadn't even told him. I swung around to look at Cas. "You told him that I wanted to leave?!"

His gaze cut to Dean and back to me. "I told him you asked me to take you home."

Now, you've probably already guessed that I don't swear much. In fact, not at all. I cuss a little bit, harmless 'darns' and 'gollys' and every now and then a 'crap' will escape my lips, but overall, not a big swearer. The anger – no, the red-rimmed, unbridled rage – that boiled up in me was not going to be content with a 'darn'.

"How could you!?" That came as a squeak, not the furious roar I'd be aiming for. "Y-y-you-you-you…BASTARD!"

Castiel was obviously used to being sworn at by Dean, who had a significantly more varied selection than I did, but he looked away even so. Dean's face lost its expressionlessness and he looked from me to the angel.

"What's she talking about, Cas?"

"H-he-he-he…told me he'd tell you the truth!" I stammered my way through, practically spitting by this time. "All this time…"

At that point, words actually did fail me. It wasn't that I couldn't believe the angel's duplicity. I'd known he didn't approve of me being there, and certainly had tried to send me home a few times. Now, I knew why. Lovecraft's theories had at least given me that answer. But I hadn't even considered what he'd say to Dean. I'd thought he was, first and foremost, Dean's friend.

"Cas! What the fuck's she talking about?"

"I may have suggested that Therese wished to return home when in fact she was forced into returning here," Cas said stiffly, looking at the door. "We should go."

"What?!"

"We should leave, the conjunction between the planes will not last forever."

"No," Dean snarled frustratedly at him. "You lied to me?"

"It was for the best, Dean."

"Whose best? Your best?"

"If she had stayed, Crowley would have massacred everyone," Cas told him. "I saw what would happen, and I showed her. She choose to leave."

"That's not what you told me!"

"You would have wanted to do something about it," Cas said, looking back at him.

"Fucking-ay, I would've!" Dean snapped, turning away from him. "I've –"

He cut himself off, looking down at the floor for a few minutes.

"Alright, we'll get this out when we get home, let's go –" he said, turning around and glancing at me, his expression indeterminable with the lamp light only on one side of his face.

"No, wait a minute," I said, shaking my head. "Firstly, I'm not going without some luggage –"

"What?"

"Secondly, there's something you have to see," I kept on talking because sometimes that's the only way to stop from falling in a heap on the floor. "Something I found."

"We have to leave before the –"

"No, this is important, I know it is." I overruled the angel and walked to the bedroom, pulling off my earrings and kicking off my shoes on the way. "I won't be a second."

As I shut the door, I heard Dean's voice rumbling through the thin wood panels, Cas' reply less distinct.

He hadn't even known. I still wanted to kill the angel. It wouldn't have changed anything, not really, but at the same time, I couldn't even begin to think near the idea that all this time, Dean had thought I'd just bailed when the going got rough, had just run from his world, from his fight…from him.

I let the dress slither to my feet and grabbed a clean pair of jeans, pulling out a big backpack from the closet and stuffing it full of t-shirts, shirts, jeans, underwear, personal items and at the last second, the photograph I had of my parents, taken when I was eight. This time, I wasn't coming back. I dragged on socks and my boots, dropped the bag and pulled a t-shirt, loose sweatshirt and a coat on, and opened the bedroom door.

The conversation between the man and the angel, terse and low and thick with tension, stopped abruptly as I came out.

"We have to go to Providence."

"Rhode Island?" Dean's brows shot up as he looked at me.

"There's a – I don't know, not for sure – but I think there's a creature from Purgatory there," I told them as I walked up to them. "I think it's been there since Lovecraft opened the door."

AN: Quicker than usual, I know, but this one was agitating in my brain to get out. Hope you're enjoying the story and I'll try to keep the updates coming along quickly!