Chapter 24

The files were still sitting where I'd left them, loosely bunched on the table along with my leather binder and I hurried past Dean to them, noticing that he stepped back, out of my way, as I dropped the backpack on the floor. For a second, I looked back up at him and his eyes cut to the side, looking around the shadowy, unremarkable room as if it was interesting. I can tell you now, it's not.

"We really don't have time for this," Castiel said unhappily and I looked back at the table, unzipping the backpack and picking up the files, notes and binder and shoving them in.

I straightened up and looked from Dean to the angel. "I have a feeling about this," I said inadequately.

"Dean, a 'feeling' isn't –" Cas started to say and Dean turned to the windows.

"Won't take much time to check it out, Cas," he said abruptly. "Get your stuff," he added to me, and I picked up the pack, slinging it over my shoulder and taking a step closer to him.

It might've just been me, all hyped-up with everything and nervous and just about shaking with all my unexpressed reactions to the last ten minutes. But I didn't think so. Dean kept his gaze on the floor as the angel walked to form the apex of the small triangle we made and reached out and touched us and I didn't have time to wonder why I hadn't even gotten a hug before we were thrown into blackness and nothingness and then deposited ungently on the sidewalk outside the derelict house in Providence.

"This it?" Dean asked, taking a small step sideways as he regained his balance.

I nodded. In the darkness, the house looked no more welcoming now than it had two months ago and I didn't have my ninety-nine cent block of salt to clutch onto.

"Cas, you getting' any vibes?"

The angel looked at the house and nodded. "Yes."

Dean turned his head and looked at me, his expression indecisive. I would probably be a liability inside if he or Cas had to move fast, but on the other hand, left out here by myself, I was going to be pretty vulnerable if whatever was in the house decided to flee and take a hostage. I could see he didn't like either course of action.

"There're some circles, um, spells," I said to him. "In Lovecraft's notes for Necronomicon, about talking with, well, not actually talking but communicating with other dimensions –?" I patted the side of my backpack.

"Alright," he said, a bit heavily. "You stay behind me, you understand?"

I nodded. I would've preferred to be pressed up against him, leaving his gun-arm free of course, if I could've. That house had given me the creeps to the max last time.

We crossed the road and I looked at the chain on the gate, kind of expecting it to do it's falling off thing and the gate to open as it had before, but it remained stubbornly shut and Dean pulled his picks and unlocked it, pushing the gate back with a horrendous screak of unoiled hinges that sent my heart up into my throat.

Cas walked through first, looking from side to side and totally unaffected by the haunted-house sound effects. Dean followed him a pace or two behind and I was right on Dean's heels, trying to not to breathe down his neck. My backpack bumped on my ass, making a little rattling sound.

There wasn't anything in the black shadows that filled the porch this time. Dean passed me the flashlight and dropped to one knee to manipulate the lock on the front door while I held the light steady. Cas was looking around, his eyes half-closed. I wondered how a being of another dimension felt to the angel. For that matter, how did anything feel to the angel who'd once described himself as a multidimensional wavelength of celestial intent. On the show, he'd shown himself susceptible to the more petty human foibles, like irritability, defensiveness and self-pity. Was that a side-effect of occupying a human vessel or did angels have those feelings when they were in a different dimension, being wavelengths, as well?

It's funny the things you think about when you're breaking into a house that's already killed several people and might contain a monster that was the inspiration for a horror writer's series of novels.

"Cas." Dean jerked his head toward the door as he pushed it open and the angel took point on our little sortie. Dean put the picks away and pulled out his gun and I kept a pace behind him, hanging onto the flashlight and shining it around the hall we entered.

For about ten seconds, it looked like any hall of any house built in the early nineteenth-century and unoccupied for more than a half a century. Cobwebs, dust, peeling wallpaper, cracks in the plaster. Then it changed.

The smell came first. So thick that I gagged straight away, my grip on the flashlight wavering and sending the beam swinging wildly around the walls, it smelled of rot – rotting wood, rotten vegetation and most gag-worthy of all, rotting meat. One summer, in my aunt and uncle's house, a possum had somehow gotten into the roof space and couldn't figure the way out again. I'd gone up to the attic for something I can't even remember now, and the smell had hit me hard enough to allow me to discover for myself what projectile vomiting both looked and felt like. My uncle had gone up to retrieve the body of the possum, with a shovel and a bunch of plastic bags, since it had swollen up and gotten kind of gooey up there in the summer heat, and even he'd been various shades of white and green when he'd come down. I'd overhead him telling my aunt that the body had more or less exploded when he'd touched it. She waited till fall to go and scrape the remains off the walls and floor and disinfect every inch of the entire space.

Anyway, that was the gist of the smell that filled the house. There wasn't anywhere to get away from it, and I finally pulled the collar of my shirt up over my nose and mouth to try and cut it a bit because I had the feeling that both the man and angel I was with would regard me as much more of a liability if I threw up and fainted at their feet.

I lifted the flashlight again, and the walls were dripping, some, thick, slimy liquid oozing down them in the shades that bruises usually come in, sickly greens and dark blues and vivid, thundery purples. I couldn't work out what it was, but after staring at one section next to the stairs for a long moment, I realised it was alive, each bit moving independently of the others. I took a sharp step back from it and bumped into Dean.

"Come on," Dean growled at me as he steadied me and waved a hand down the hall. Cas started to walk cautiously toward the kitchen and I tried to keep close to Dean yet still be able to shine the flashlight beam past the angel and ahead of him. I could hear a whispery, crackling under my feet but I really, really didn't want to look down and see what was causing that.

At the end of the hall, there was a big kitchen, old-fashioned with a pair of deep ceramic sinks, one of which was broken in half and stained a rusty red. There was no warning of the attack, one minute we were standing in the room, looking around, the next things were flying off the cupboards and from the floor at us, Dean was firing at an indistinct shadow shape that was barely visible in the flashlight's beam but much more substantial when it was out of it, and I dropped to my knees when an over-sized pottery jug smacked into the side of my head and made me see a whole lotta stars I'm pretty sure weren't actually there.

"The spells!" Dean shouted at me, not looking as he swung around, his arm taking the brunt of a cast-iron casserole pot flung at him. I pulled my bag off my back and stuck the flashlight in my mouth, and scrabbled in my pack for the right folder. All the actual spells and incantations I'd found in the book were in one spot, and I'd reproduced them as accurately as I could, having had plenty of time and nothing better to do with it.

"Here!" I lifted out the right one, a double-circle that was supposed to both protect the summoner from what he'd summoned and allow a primitive communication using mathematical constants as the key.

"CAS!" Dean grabbed the paper from me and shoved it at the angel and Cas looked at it for a moment and closed his eyes, lifting one hand and sweeping the floor completely clear with it, a line of fire following his fingertip as he turned in the centre of the room.

In my hand was a box of chalk I'd brought along to draw the spells. I put it away again, watching the angel draw out the complete circle in lines of fire that charred the design into the old, cracked vinyl covering the floor.

"In the circle," Dean said as Cas closed the join to the inner one, grabbing my arm and yanking me to my feet and shoving me inside. He backed in after me, rolling the shoulder that had taken the brunt of his encounter with the pot.

When all three of us were enclosed in the circles, everything stopped. Even the smell went and I dragged in a super-deep breath gratefully. I nearly lost it a second later when I saw one of the shadows in the corner of the room getting thicker and darker.

"There," I whispered to Dean, involuntarily taking a small step backwards away from it.

He looked over to where I was pointing and nodded. "Cas, can you talk to that thing?"

"I don't know," the angel said, looking at the spell in his hand and back to the shadow.

He knelt on the floor and tapped out a pattern of knocks. And the shadow came a little closer.

"Try again," Dean said, watching it.

Cas repeated the pattern and we all jumped when the whole house boomed with the same pattern repeated back, the plaster cracking and falling, the windows shaking, dust and ash falling from the interior of the chimney.

"What the hell are you saying?" Dean breathed when the last boom faded.

"I'm advising the creature that I know it knows this universal constant and hopefully intimating that we want to talk to it," Cas replied, his voice toneless.

I lifted the flashlight and the house boomed again, this time much more agitatedly.

"Turn it off," Cas said unnecessarily as my fingers fumbled for the off-switch. "It doesn't like much light."

There was just enough of a glow coming through the kitchen windows to see shapes and at least some of the details of our faces. Not much more than that, though. With the flashlight off, I found my eyes adjusted a bit more to the gloom but not nearly enough to be reassuring.

The shadow came closer. I felt my eyes bugging out a bit when I saw it now had a shape as well.

Cas flinched backwards slightly and Dean twitched in reaction. "What?"

The angel shook his head, stretching his hands out to touch the edge of the outer circle. The shadow resolved itself into a definite shape as it moved into the middle of the room, the ambient light from the window showing an old man, not all that big, tufts of white hair encircling a nearly bald head. It lowered itself into a crouch on the other side of the line that Cas was touching and reached out to set its fingers on the line.

Dean and I waited. Both angel and – and – whatever it was stayed motionless, both hunkered down next to the edge of the circle, eyes closed, breathing in and out. After a few minutes, Dean stood straighter, putting the automatic on safety and tucking it back into his pocket. I stretched my back and neck surreptitiously, and realised that there was some liquid trickling down the side of my neck and my head was pounding like a rock concert. I lifted a hand and felt a gummy, sticky mess of hair and liquid and bits of hard-edged jug.

"Lemme see," Dean murmured softly, glancing at my fingers when I lowered the hand. You couldn't see it was blood, it just looked dark, but I guess he had plenty of experience with judging that kind of thing.

"It's okay," I whispered back. With my luck, he'd discovered I needed surgery right when the next burst of action happened. I felt a bit woozy but I could see okay, and I didn't feel like I was gonna fall in a heap on the floor.

He made an ambiguous noise in his throat and looked back at the two still figures.

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

We were still standing there an hour and a half later, looking at the same thing. Dean was bored out of his mind and my head was now doing the rumba and I wished I'd let him do something about that earlier. I wasn't sure what since we weren't carrying around a first aid kit, but it still felt like it was a bad move.

Cas let out his breath and stood up, the entity standing up slowly as well.

"This is…Monty," the angel said awkwardly, gesturing to the being who was now fully detailed, an old man, maybe late sixties, early seventies, wearing a button-up sweater and baggy grey pants and battered Army boots. It lifted its head and I saw a kindly face, bushy white eyebrows dominating the features, a bulbous and crooked nose, scraggly, thin short beard patchy over its jaw.

"Monty?" Dean repeated doubtfully.

"He is from Purgatory," Cas confirmed. "He came through in 1937 and was disoriented, killing without realising what he was doing. When he tried to take over the biographer, he trapped himself, and then he couldn't leave the house."

"And now?"

"I think he understands that I can free him from here," Cas said, his tone thoughtful but not exactly a hundred percent certain. "He's driven to kill here. In our world, that compulsion should be lessened."

"Should be?"

Cas looked at him. "The planes exist to either side of all worlds, Dean. It's not that Hell doesn't exist here, more that there's no way to reach it from here. In our world, magic exists and what drives Monty here will not be needed there."

"Clear as mud," Dean commented, looking sceptically at the old man. "Monty."

"A pleasure to meet you, Mr –?"

Dean did a double-take as Monty offered him his hand. "Uh, Winchester. Dean."

"We have to go," Cas said, stepping out of the burned circle and looking around the kitchen. "The conjunction is fading."

Dean stepped out next to Monty and I followed him, pulling the straps of my backpack tighter over my shoulders as I moved closer to Cas. He lifted his hands and Dean repositioned himself, putting me between him and Cas, and Monty on the other side of him.

"You'll have to be closer together," Cas said, looking at us. "Touching."

For a moment, none of us moved, then I stepped closer to both the angel and Dean, putting my arms around them and Dean shuffled closer to Monty, gripping the old man's wrist. Cas touched him and that good old vortex of nothingness sucked at our molecules and threw them across the universe and my head gave a whopping great bang then stopped hurting altogether.

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

It was dawn when we landed in Bobby's dooryard, the sun just peeping coyly above the flat marshland and gilding the wrecks and old house in a temporary glamour of pale gold light.

Cas stepped back and looked around as the front door and screen slammed open and Bobby, Sam and Lauren came pelting down the steps. All three skidded to a halt when they looked from me to Dean and then to Monty.

"What the hell –?" Bobby and Sam said in unison, and Lauren walked closer, looking at the old man with undisguised curiosity.

"This is Monty," Dean said, waving his hand to the steps of the porch. "Long story."

For a long, awkward moment, Bobby and Sam looked at me and I looked back and no one said anything. I belatedly remembered what Cas had told them, and shook my head, wincing as that re-ignited the pounding in one side of my skull.

"I didn't want to leave."

Bobby grunted something indecipherable and noticed that my neck was red, frowning as he reached out and turned me to one side to look at my head.

"Dammit, girl, what'd you do to yourself this time?"

I wanted to say it was fine, just a flesh wound or something lightweight along those lines (and why is it when you have a perfectly good chance to use a quote from a movie, that you can never think of them!?) but the expression on his face made it hard to say anything. He put his arm around my shoulders and started to move me along toward the house and Sam stepped close, hand sliding under the strap of my backpack and lifting it off, and with them on either side, we walked into the house.

"Kitchen," Bobby said gruffly and steered me there, and I sat down at the small table as he went to get some water, medical kit and whatever he deemed necessary to patching me up for the umpteenth time.

Sam dropped the backpack on the floor next to me and sat down in the chair on the opposite side of the table. I looked back at him as he leaned closer.

"Cas told us you wanted to go home."

"I know," I said back, my voice all croaky and harsh. "I didn't."

Glancing past me to the dining room, he said, "Dean – uh, Dean took that –"

"You can catch up in a minute, Sam," Bobby interrupted, dumping the big white box in between us and setting a bowl of gently steaming water down beside it. "Therese, tilt your head over."

I did, conditioned to obedience to the old man now. The other chair scraped on the floor as Sam got up and left Bobby to it.

Bobby sponged at the matted clumps of hair and blood and picked out the bits of jug from the side of my head, the warm water running down my neck.

"What happened?" he asked quietly as he pushed my head further over and started using a dry wad of cotton-wool to mop it up a few minutes later.

I wondered how to tell him what had happened in a coherent way. "Cas said that Crowley had found a use for me," I started, trying not to flinch away as he pressed a bit harder. "I didn't know what it was but he showed me what would happen if I stayed."

I heard the frown in his voice. "An' that was?"

"You'd all die," I said. "When I was back, um, back in my old world, I ended up finding out a few things. Lovecraft thought that the souls from other worlds could be used as kind of…um…batteries, or power charges, somehow. Cas said that Crowley found out about it. That's why he came here."

"Back up a minute," Bobby said, peering closer at the side of my head. "What d'you mean he showed you?"

"When he took me down to Crowley, he kind of made Time stop," I tried to explain what had happened, at least the way I'd seen it. "Then he showed me the next few minutes in the future, I think. The demons came into the yard and –" I stopped, the recollection of that moment was not something I could say out loud. "He said that if I went back, it wouldn't happen. Crowley would stick to his deal and leave." Rolling my eyes around to catch a glimpse of his face, I asked, "Did he? Did he leave?"

"Oh yeah, he left," Bobby confirmed. "Cas popped back a half a second after he took you, and Crowley stared at him and vanished."

"What did Cas say?"

"He said you asked him to take you home," Bobby said, his voice heavy. "Said you realised you didn't belong here an' you didn't want to die here."

"And you all believed him," I said, my voice totally flat. I mean, I understood that. It was an angel. Why wouldn't they believe him?

Bobby sighed. "You got a half-dozen cuts, but none of 'em are deep."

"Bobby –"

He looked at me unhappily. "You gonna have to give us some time, Therese," he said, his fingers gently untangling the matted knots in my hair as he checked the surrounding area. "It'll work out."

Biting my lip, I wondered if that was true. There wasn't anything I could do now but give it time. "Dean said that Crowley opened the door," I said, swallowing against the tightness in my chest and changing the subject. "How'd he find the blood?"

"Don't know," Bobby answered, clearly relieved at the new topic. "Let a lot of stuff out when he did."

"Leviathan."

"Yeah," he confirmed, looking at me. "You got any more information on them?"

"Lots," I said, lifting a hand to touch my hair tentatively. "And it fits with the tablets Crowley was looking for too."

"What?"

"Can I wash my hair?" I asked.

"Yeah, just take it easy on that side," he said distractedly. "What about the tablets?"

"The one for Purgatory, it has the information on it about killing the Leviathan."

His eyes narrowed as he looked at me. "An' you know what that is."

"Yeah," I admitted with a long sigh. "It's not going to be easy."

I looked down at my backpack and leaned over, unzipping the top and pulling out all the files and notes.

"Everything's in here," I told him, putting them on the table. "From the show, anyway. I think there's more in the Lovecraft stuff Dr Visyak had in her library," I added. "The stuff from my world was pretty thin on the magical side of things, but it's different here."

He nodded. "Dean gave us the sections you marked out in Necronomicon."

I looked away from him, letting my gaze skate fast over the five sitting at the dining table. "I, um, I'm, I think I need –"

"Get some sleep," he cut through my mumbling attempts to excuse myself and put his hand on my shoulder. "Therese, you do belong here."

"Uh, um…"

Turning back to the medical kit, Bobby pulled out a bottle of Ambein and handed it to me. "Two of these. I'll see you in the morning."

Taking the bottle, I got up, feeling sticky and grimy and tired and…considering I was back, where I'd desperately wanted to be for the last six months, heart-sick. I picked up the backpack, and clutched the bottle of painkillers, and walked through the dining room without looking at anyone there, heading for the stairs.

Cas had told them I'd run away. It sucked that they'd believed him but it was just something I was going to have to live with.

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

When I came downstairs the next morning, only Sam was sitting in the dining room, my files and notes and binder spread out around him as he ate a bowl of cereal absently while he read.

"Where is everyone?"

He looked up and swallowed his mouthful hastily. "Uh, Lauren's down in the panic room with Monty, Bobby's gone to town for supplies and Cas and Dean're looking for the bone of a saint."

Not sure if I can describe how I was feeling at that moment. Disorientated is one word that fits, I guess. Disassociated might be another. I walked into the kitchen and got down a mug and poured myself a coffee from the pot, all the while feeling as if I'd stumbled onto the set of a play or a show and wasn't actually supposed to be there.

I hadn't let myself think of coming back, when I'd been back in my world. Too painful, too impossible, all that blah blah. Even when I'd been asleep, and dreaming, it'd always been of the past, not of the future. I couldn't help but wonder now if that was because Castiel had been right and I didn't fit here, some misalignment of molecules and time and space.

I stood next to the counter, sipping at the coffee, feeling empty and unsettled and definitely not all there.

"Cas told us the truth, last night," Sam said, materialising, it seemed, in front of me. I hadn't noticed him getting up and walking over.

"Oh." That was all I could think of to say.

"Terry, sit down," Sam said, pulling me over to the kitchen table and pushing me into the chair. "Listen to me, okay?"

"I'm listening," I said mildly. I sort of was, through the fuzziness that seemed to be encapsulating my brain.

"It was a shock, when you vanished," Sam said, dragging out the other chair closer and leaning forward, elbows on his knees as he peered at me. "A big one."

I couldn't meet his eyes, so I looked at the inside of my coffee cup instead.

"You were wrong about not belonging here, you know," he said. "I talked to my brother – really talked – for the first time in I don't know how long, and that was because of you."

"That's good."

"Terry, he just couldn't –"

I don't know what it was, some emotion that just geysered inside of me at the thought of hearing anything about what had gone with Dean in the last few months. I got up, shaking my head a bit wildly.

"I'm really happy you two talked, Sam," I said, as fast as I could get the words out. "I am."

I didn't want to hear why Dean didn't feel the same way as he had before I'd gone. It might seem like I was doing the ostrich trick, head in the sand and all that, but I just couldn't listen to the reasons. The end result was clear enough.

I looked away. "What's been going on with the Leviathans?" I thought of the episodes that had been filmed. "Since this place is still standing, I guess they haven't been targeting you specifically?"

Sam remained silent for a moment, until I looked back at him. He was frowning, not at me, at the floor actually.

"Uh, not until recently," he told me, his tone suggesting that he didn't approve of the change of topic.

"Did Dean break his leg?"

"Uh, yeah, how'd you know?" he asked me, the frown deepening.

"The scripts were all over the place, but some of them had to be right," I said. "What about Sheriff Mills, did she get away alright?"

"Yeah, she found that borax does a number on them."

I nodded, trying to think of what else had happened in the mish-mash of the season. "Is Frank still working on finding out more about what they're doing?"

He nodded. "Bobby called him this morning, gave him an update on what you'd brought back. He found the construction site in Wisconsin."

I wandered to the dining table, and heard Sam get up behind me. "So much is different that I don't know how you'll be able to use these." I pushed the files across the table.

They weren't the full scripts. Just summaries. I hadn't been able to kid myself that they would be of any use to anyone when I'd started collecting them, at least not as far as grabbing the shooting transcripts.

"Did you have a childhood friend called Amy, Sam?" I asked, turning around to look at him.

"Yeah," he said, his expression confused. "She was, uh…" he trailed off uncomfortably.

"A kitsune," I said. I hadn't bothered with the episodes before Osiris, thinking that they'd never happened here. "You haven't seen her since then?"

"No," he said warily. "Why?"

"Hopefully nothing," I told him. Dean had felt guilty over something else, I thought, looking back at the pages. "What about Becky? Have you seen her recently?"

To my surprise, he turned a beautiful shade of pink, and looked away. "Uh, yeah."

"Wow, you really got married to her, Sam?"

"It was a spell!" he burst out. "She was hexing me!"

I wondered how that had gone down with Lauren but decided against asking. I wasn't inclined to reciprocate with talk about my feelings anyway.

"The God of Time?"

"Uh, yeah," Sam said, calming down a bit.

"Amazons in Seattle?" That was harder to ask, and Sam's guilty look told me that'd probably gone down exactly as the writers had seen it.

"What about the clown thing in Wichita?"

He let out a long exhale. "Yeah, unicorn and everything."

"Demon in Idaho?" I asked, feeling the headache coming back. There were far too many things I didn't want to think about.

"No," he said, the frown returning. "What demon in Idaho?"

I looked through the notes and put all the things they had been through aside, fishing out the summary of the demon episode and handing it to him. I needed to talk to the angel, I thought as he took it and started to read. Needed to find out if what Lovecraft had speculated about was actually true. If anyone here could use me.

Sam skimmed down and looked back at me, his expression hardening. "Terry, I know you don't want to talk about it with me, but you need to talk to Dean."

"Hmmm, pot calling kettle black."

"I did talk to him. I talked about me and –," he hesitated slightly. "– and I talked about you. He didn't believe me."

I looked at him. "Somehow, I don't think that's the issue anymore."

"It is," he insisted. "He just won't admit it. And it doesn't help that you won't either."

I looked at him crossly. "First of all, you promised not to tell him, and second of all…" I felt the wind go out of my sails with a whoosh. "Second of all…I can't talk to him. I can't…if it's not all just me, just what I want, he has to know that for himself."

I turned away, heading for the living room and Bobby's new library. I hadn't come across the theory of the souls in the book here, but now at least, I knew where to look.

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

I know y'all are thinking that I should've gone to talk to Dean, told him that I'd been practically malfunctional in the time we'd been apart…yada yada. I couldn't. It was plain from Bobby's reaction that what Cas had told them when he'd gotten back had been believed. I couldn't blame them exactly, they'd all seen me run and hide plenty of times, after all. I could forgive Bobby for thinking that the smart move was to go home before I got myself tortured and killed. I couldn't make myself forgive Dean for not knowing that I wouldn't have – that I couldn't have done that to him.

And I couldn't stop thinking that if it was too hard for him, if he thought it would be easier to not care, then it was doomed to fail anyway. Sooner or later in a relationship, you run into a point where both people have to throw aside their armour and their baggage and say straight out, yeah, I'm in it for good, or no, I can't deal with this. To me, that was where I was standing now. And it looked like I was here on my own.

So, I walked into the library and pulled down the books and carried them back to the sofa in the living room, stacked them up beside me and started reading. Reading's always been a pretty good diversion for me, although I have to tell you, I would've preferred a good fiction novel to what I had in front of me. But escape's escape and at least buried in Lovecraft's other-worldly theories I wasn't thinking about how freakin' sorry for myself I was.

It's always pretty interesting how self-delusional a person can get.

The day drifted past. I was distantly aware of noises and footsteps in the hall and talking, but I kept my head down and my eyes on the pages and after a while, I kind of got into it, getting my binder and a pen and starting to write out more notes. The reward of research is that it's totally non-emotional, just following leads through dry, dusty books and usually even drier, dustier words, picking up clues which keeps the mind busy and distracted from everything. I'd used it back in my world to keep from acknowledging what I'd been feeling and I can admit to a sense of relief that it worked just as well here.

I was genuinely surprised when Lauren came in and switched on the lights, tutting at me as I blinked at how much brighter everything was and lowered the book I was holding from just under my nose to a more reasonable distance from my face.

She was carrying a tray and she set it down on the low table next to the sofa, and my stomach grumbled at the smells from it.

"You think hiding in here is going to help anything, Terry?" she asked, sitting at the end of the sofa and looking at me.

I hadn't been prepared for a direct assault and I didn't know what to say. I closed the book and the journal and set them on the arm of the sofa, feeling the pins and needles in my legs as I slowly and gingerly unfolded them from under me and stretched them out.

"I found some stuff here about souls, from other worlds," I said, hoping that the non-answer would clue her in to the fact that I really didn't want to talk about anything else.

"He was broken-hearted when you left, Terry," she continued, as if I hadn't said a word and I looked down at the carpet under my feet.

"Lovecraft said that souls from different worlds had different powers if transferred to a world not their own," I said, doggedly determined that we wouldn't have the conversation that Lauren was pushing.

"Not that he admitted it," Lauren told me blithely, her slightly narrowed eyes the only thing giving away that she was going to be as doggedly determined that we would have it. "He pretended that he was fine, that it was a good thing you were gone, that you'd made a smart choice. But he was –"

"I'll need to talk to Cas about this," I cut her off, raising my voice slightly. "'Cause it looks like that's exactly what Crowley wanted me for. And there has to be a way to keep him from being able to do it."

"Terry, don't do what I did," the nephilim said sharply, leaning forward and grabbing my hand. "Don't waste your life thinking that pride is more important than love!"

"It has nothing to do with pride, Lauren," I said.

"You're not giving him a chance."

"I'm here." I snapped back defensively. "He knows Cas lied. Sam told me he told Dean how I felt."

Lauren sighed. "He did. Dean didn't believe him. The two of you are –"

I shook my head at her, dragging my hand back. "What's the story with Monty?"

For a long moment, I thought she might try to keep up her argument, but maybe my point had gotten across or maybe she was just tired of arguing. I don't know.

"He's healing. The diet of humans wasn't good for him," she said, a bit huffily.

"Not good for the humans either."

"He's given us a lot of information on Purgatory, and on the Leviathan. They were locked away there by God," she continued, ignoring my snarky comment.

"Yeah, I knew that, does he know if the Leviathan kill recipe is good?" I asked, more rudely than was probably necessary. I looked at the food. I needed to eat, I felt light-headed and realised I hadn't eaten anything all day. The headache was reforming, just a slow boom at the moment, but it would get worse. I couldn't take more of Bobby's sleep-helpers for another two hours at the earliest.

"He says it is," she said, her tone a bit softer. "You'd better eat that. We can't track the Leviathans."

"Is there a business entrepreneur here called Dick Roman?" I asked, turning to the tray and picking up the bowl of soup.

"Yes." She lifted her brows quizzically. "Why?"

"The leader of the Leviathans has copied him, taken over his business empire," I said, slurping down the soup hurriedly. "Haven't you read the notes?"

"Well, I've been with Monty most of the day –"

"Go check with Sam and Bobby then," I told her. "It's all there, Roman Enterprises and their office headquarters and the food additives and the chain restaurants. And don't forget the creamer for the skinny people."

She blinked at me, her mouth slightly open, then nodded and got up.

"You need to tell Sam to tell Frank to be careful too," I said, forestalling what I could see from her expression was going to be another sally into the conversation I didn't want to have. "The Leviathans can track his monitoring and he needs to keep moving around."

If I could prevent some of the deaths of the seventh season, I thought it would be a good thing. Bobby's was the most important, but it seemed like they'd bypassed that somehow. I wondered irrelevantly if they'd met Krissy yet. That entire episode had seemed like filler when I'd read the script.

The episodes and what was happening here and Crowley and Purgatory and Lovecraft were pretty much a great, unwieldy snarl of events, possible events and unbelievable prospects of events in my mind and I thought that I needed to stop, write down some kind of timeline and get Bobby or Sam to verify everything that had happened while I'd been gone. It was a constant worry that I might forget something, like I had before, and no one here could stand to lose Bobby, least of all me.

The front door banged open and I heard the familiar thud of boots in the hall and got up, staggering a bit as my legs reminded me that they hadn't been used for most of the day, making it to the doorway in time to catch Cas as he followed Dean into the dining room.

"Castiel, can I talk to you?"

The angel turned back to me with obvious reluctance and I repressed the desire to smack him. I waved a hand to the door and he walked back to it, opening it and stepping out onto the porch.

"Was Lovecraft right about the souls?" I asked him as he turned to face me in the semi-darkness. "Can Crowley get some kind of power from mine?"

"Yes."

Just the one word and I felt a flash of frustration at the prospect of pulling more from him. I have to say, he was in character though. "Was that why you wanted me to leave?"

"Yes."

"Was that the only reason you wanted me to leave? Before Crowley showed up?" I tried again, wondering if there was a magic set of words that would make him talk.

He looked away. "Your being here is disrupting the lines of destiny," he admitted unwillingly. "Things that were supposed to happen have not. And things that were not supposed to happen have."

"Some of those have been good things," I argued. "Like you not going ballistic and killing most of the angels in Heaven."

He turned back to me with a very un-angel-like sigh. "Yes, that did occur to me. Which is why I didn't push taking you home before. I had hoped that no one would know of the power of the misplaced souls."

"Why did you tell them I wanted to go?"

"I thought they would accept it if they thought it was what you wanted," he said, very honestly, I thought. "And they did."

"Do you still think I don't belong here?" I asked nervously. Not something I really wanted to ask – or know the answer to, but I needed it, needed to know, I mean.

"I don't know," he answered. "You have brought a solution to returning the Leviathan to Purgatory. You found a being of another dimension in your world and we will be able to return him to his own. Those are not insignificant things in the lines."

"But?"

He shook his head, looking at the door. He didn't have to say what he was thinking.

"Are you going to try to send me home again?"

"No." He turned his head back to me. "No, whatever effects you are having, be they good or bad, they will have be dealt with."

I thought that was kind of an ominous thing for an angel to say, but it did relieve the slight tension I'd been feeling that I could be chucked back home again at any time. I nodded to him and turned for the door.

"Therese," Cas said, and I stopped and looked back at him.

"I did you a disservice by not telling Dean the truth of why you left," he said slowly. "For that, I'm sorry."

"They believed you anyway," I said to him, turning back to the door and going back in the house.

I know I keep saying that I understand why they did, but I guess, that somewhere a little deeper that was still hurting a bit. I wasn't the woman that Sam remembered from the alternative time-line, and I wasn't a hunter, or brave or…even very useful when it got down to brass tacks, but I guess I hadn't really believed that anyone, anyone here, would honestly believe that I'd just turn tail and run, leaving them with Crowley and possible death. I wouldn't have liked someone who could have done that.

For a moment I stood in the hall, not sure where I was going or what I had in mind to do. The headache was still pounding gently away on one side of my head, and I had a bit longer to wait before I could go and take something to get rid of it. I thought about just going upstairs and trying to sleep, but the truth was it hadn't been a very demanding kind of day, at least not physically, and I wasn't that tired. I thought about going down to the panic room to talk to Monty, but that kind of creeped me out, doing it alone. I didn't want to see or talk to anyone else.

I wasn't sure if Cas was still outside, but I turned around for the front door anyway, opening it and stepping out onto the porch. He wasn't there. I walked down to the yard and followed the alley between house and the piles of junkers, the moon just coming up over the marsh and lighting the ground enough to stop me from running into anything. Bobby had a '70 Corvette Sting Ray sitting on blocks in his open shed down near the end of the alley and I wandered over to it, parking my behind on the slick, sloping hood. With a bikini and a bit of weight gain, and some plastic surgery to remove the knobbled scars from my chest, I could do a photo shoot on this car, I thought, lying back and closing my eyes.

"You hiding?"

The deep voice was too familiar and way too close. I opened my eyes and sat up, having a small struggle to keep my ass on the slippery surface of the car before I jammed the soles of my sneakers against the slope.

"No, just waiting till I can take my next set of pain-begones," I told him, keeping my gaze fixed on my knees.

"You still got a headache?"

I nodded, shooting a sideways look at him as he sat down on the other side of the hood's predatory-looking scoop.

"Sam says you're pissed at me," he said, keeping his gaze on the piles of wrecks on the other side of the alley.

"No."

"You gunna lie to me now?"

I didn't say anything to that. What could I say? I wasn't going to get into this, I didn't even know why he was there. I heard his exhale.

"Before Cas came, before, uh, Crowley came," he said, his voice dropping a bit lower. "I wanted to tell you something."

I could feel him gaze shifting to me and away again. I didn't remember much of that day, to be honest. Just the images Castiel had shown me. They kind of wiped out everything else.

"You remember telling me that I used the memories of, uh, what happened in Hell to stop wanting anything?"

I nodded unwillingly. That conversation seemed like a long, long time ago.

"You were right," he said. "I did. I didn't do it deliberately, but it was easier to tell myself that people died and I didn't…didn't, uh, deserve anything…because of what I'd done there, than it was to admit that I didn't think, didn't let myself, uh, believe…"

He trailed off and I heard him drag in a breath, clear his throat.

"And the truth was, if I didn't think it was possible, then I didn't want it," he said, a minute or two later and I caught his slight shrug in the corner of my eye. "And if I didn't want it, it couldn't hurt, could it?"

I didn't really have much of a clue as to what I was supposed to say to that, if anything.

"Uh, Sam said…" he started to say, then stopped, coughing slightly. "He said…uh…told me…um…"

I knew that he could go on like that for a while, possibly even a long while. It wasn't so much that he was having difficulty with the words, I realised, as that he was aware of how vulnerable even admitting to them were going to make him. I turned my head slightly, sighting his screwed up expression obliquely.

"What do you want to know, Dean?" I asked him.

He looked around at me, and I saw his throat work as he swallowed. "Did you want to go home?"

"No."

"Cas told me he showed you the future, in front of Crowley, showed you the demons tearing me and Sam and Bobby to pieces," he ventured next and I closed my eyes, resisting the impulse to drag out the conversation by pointing out to him that it wasn't a question. I don't do all that well with dragged-out pressure situations, you might've noticed that about me already. I didn't want to be vulnerable in front of him anymore than he wanted to show that in front of me, but there was a definite limit to how long I could put with the tooth-pulling routine.

"Yes."

His next inhale was audible again and I wondered if I asked him to show me his palms, if they'd be sweating. Like I said, I think, before, relationships shouldn't be this hard. But with him, it just wasn't easy or simple.

"Sam didn't lie to you," I said. It wasn't exactly the answer I think he wanted but at the same time it told him the truth without spelling it out.

It could've been several minutes, we both sat there, on either side of the LT-1's scoop, not saying anything or moving, then he slid down off the curve and I heard his boots hit the dirt floor of the shed.

I don't know exactly how I was feeling. Walking the wire, I guess. No net.

I looked up when his hand dropped onto my knee. His expression was hard to make out, half in shadow because the moonlight was only shining in one window.

"It hurt like hell when you left."

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

AN: Sorry, chapter's are getting longer again. Should be able to keep the next few pared back!