Back again, folks! Here we go. A big reveal! And the start of the real plot of this puppy.
That's right. We're not even there yet.
They had driven through the night in order to catch the angel causing the ghosts. True to her word, Catherine had let Balthazar drive, and she even fell asleep at some point after his annoying insistence on the matter. His abilities might have worked for her stamina, but it wouldn't do much with her mental state. He could hardly handle a sane Catherine; he didn't need a crazy one.
It was currently raining as Balthazar drove. As much as he didn't like traveling to get where one needed to go, he at least could grant that it gave one time to think. Then again, he reasoned, there wasn't much to think about, right? Tonight, they'll find their angel friend, beat the crap out of him until he tells them where the Winchesters are (because after all of this, he better know), then go to the those brothers, demand to see Crowley, get answers... On the other hand, there was a lot of work ahead of them, wasn't there? He sighed to himself. How much longer would this last?
He braved a quick glance over to his sleeping passenger and sighed again. It had already lasted too long.
The car passed the first city limits sign, so he figured it was time for her to wake up. How long were humans supposed to rest for, anyway? "Catherine."
After a quiet pause, he looked over to her again. She hadn't even shifted... Balthazar looked back to the road and smirked, before he quickly reached over and grabbed her arm. With a little jump and a yelp, she was awake and his hands were back on the steering wheel like nothing happened.
"Oh good. You're awake," he smirked. Catherine blinked around at their surroundings, trying to figure what jolted her awake so fast and having a feeling it was the angel. Balthazar just continued. "We've entered city limits. Thought you'd like to be awake for our host."
She wiped at her eyes and tried to get her bearings again, momentarily taken aback that Balthazar was driving until she remembered the previous day... or days. It had been awhile since she slept and that wasn't exactly a great nap. Still, she remembered his arguing that she take it anyway, so she wasn't going to complain. Instead, she looked around at the signs.
"Hopefully," she said in mid-yawn. "I mean, we still might be behind them."
Bal's eyebrow twitched. "I will not tolerate pessimism in this vehicle, young lady."
Right. Being too hopeful was a bad thing in this business, but she wasn't about to tell him that so bluntly. Instead, she actually smiled and gave a little chuckle. "Did you forget who's car this is, already?"
"It's your memories driving this thing," he motioned to her. "I'd like to think it's more of a joint ownership."
She rolled her eyes, but kept smiling. "I can't even remember the last time someone else has driven this car."
"What about that lad in those pictures back in your bedroom?" He didn't really know where the thought came from. He had only glanced at them while waiting for her. It hadn't even really occurred to him before that moment, yet he thought to bring it up anyway.
Then Catherine gave him a strange look that nearly wiped away that smile and his resolve hardened on the subject.
Balthazar shrugged. "You saw me looking at them. I didn't know it was a secret."
"No, no. It's not-" She paused, still trying to wake up when that bombshell was dropped on her. "Just came out of nowhere from you... But no, you're probably right. I imagine he was the last one. I hope you feel honored."
"Oh, I do," he smirked with a clench of his jaw. "Terribly so." Against his new nagging in the back of his mind, Balthazar dropped the subject.
He followed Catherine's directions until they arrived at what she assumed to be the most cliché place a haunting would occur and the only place she figured their angel friend would summon a ghost. Upon their arrival, he looked at their location in distaste and didn't move to get out of the car. "A sawmill," he groaned.
"An abandoned sawmill," Cat corrected. "It's perfect. I don't think they would have passed it up."
He turned to look at her, but she was already moving to get out of the car. "Catherine." He quickly followed her out while she was already opening the trunk. "Wait a minute, what if this hunch is wrong?"
"Do you have a better idea? We can't really wait for them to make the first move," she replied while putting a few salt shells in her shotgun. "If we're wrong then no harm done. We'll just have to do things the old fashioned way again. Besides, if you had an angel radar, I think you should have told me by now."
At a loss, he just groaned again. "Well..." She wasn't going to like this and he knew it, but he decided to try it anyway. "Maybe I should go in and check it out first."
Catherine hardly paused in getting her things together, but she did shoot him a look. "And what will you do if the angel is in there? Handle it by yourself?"
"Yes." He still knew she wouldn't go for it.
After a moment of staring at him, she eventually tilted her head to the side. "Nah." While he groaned again like a child, she took up the angel blade and closed the trunk. "I saved your ass against a ghost, remember?"
"That was the first time," he argued, "I saved yours the second. And besides, you don't have any experience against hostile angels."
"Well, I know they like the throw people against their own vehicles," she argued back, moving around him. "So long as we leave the car outside, we should be fine, right?"
"Cute," he growled. He did do that, didn't he? Balthazar had forgotten all about it. Aggravated, he ran after her.
She continued on, "The little human doesn't need to be coddled." She was still not over his near sacrifice at the hotel.
"I'm not coddling," Bal grumbled, stopping her with a hand on her shoulder. "I don't want the little human slowing me down."
She shrugged, effectively removing his hand in the process. "All right. Then, we'll split up."
"No!" he nearly barked. This was getting tiring and he never really had that great of an argument to begin with. From the look she shot him, he could tell Catherine felt more or less the same. He still endeavored to try, though. "That worked out so well last time."
"Balthazar." She managed to quite him in one breath, so Catherine took the opportunity. "We're both here. We're both in this together, so we need to work together. You're the one that told me that."
"That's when it was against a ghost," he argued back again, albeit much quieter than his earlier tempo. "Angels are a lot worse than ghosts. Even that thing at that dilapidated hotel. Whatever is going on, I'm at the center of it. Not you. I should be the one to handle whatever this mess is."
"I'm here, because I need to be," she hissed at him. "I pissed off the Queen of Hell, in case you've forgotten. I don't have a choice." He grew silent again and she knew that she said the wrong thing. He had been doing that to her since they started out on their journey, so she tried her hardest to shrug it away while turning her back on him. "Let's just find that stupid angel."
Balthazar watched her walk away from him for a moment, before flicking out his own angel sword, setting his jaw, and following her again until he shoved pass her. "I'm still going in first."
And so, Balthazar went into the building first, true to his word. Catherine stayed right behind him, though, whether he approved of her being there or not. She was partly there to just be stubborn, but she also didn't want him getting hurt because he wanted to go in alone. She was human, not helpless and useless.
It didn't help that he was also being stubborn over the issue. He could at least admit to himself that, no, he did not want her getting hurt. The biggest reason for which is that it would be on his watch if she did so. He was an angel and he couldn't stop one human from getting hurt? That was quite the burn he would have to listen to for eternities hence. Of course, the other reason was that he didn't really have anyone in his inner circle anymore. That had been dwindled down to Castiel and, well... He was never one to talk to himself, so he did enjoy talking – or arguing – with Catherine quite a bit.
So when Balthazar opened another door to reveal a room actually devoted to cutting apart logs, he quickly began to backtrack. "If the bloody thing's in there, it can stay in there," he grumbled.
Catherine shined her flashlight across the room, glistening across all of the razor sharp blades. Her reaction was more of a grimace. "If it was in here, we'd know... Right?"
As she looked back to him, Balthazar took the opportunity to close the door back. "Don't you people have those ESPN detectors or something to find these things?"
"EMF," she corrected with a huff, "But we're not looking for a ghost."
He rolled his eyes and turned back the way they came. "Of course not-" Balthazar stopped when he noticed his path blocked by several ghosts, all standing in a row and looking at the pair. Upon registering that they had been noticed, they began screaming before Catherine could even shoot at them.
They both tried to run into the room behind them, but the ghosts threw in a different direction before they were able. They're backs hit the doors that fell open with their weight and now they were both on the ground of what seemed to be a loading bay or something. Catherine was more concerned with her current problem than to really take a look around, but once she sat up again, she realized that the ghosts were not entering the room and were instead staying close to the outside of the doors.
This was when, in a near panic, she thought to take a look at her surroundings. The first thing she noticed was that her gun was now gone, perhaps slung somewhere else by their attackers. Next, she noticed that her clothes had been scuffed up with something red and, upon further inspection, realized it was the same stuff that was drawn across the floors of their new room with a small, empty circle in the middle that she assumed were the angel's sigils. They were too late.
Balthazar had come to the same realization. Blood was everywhere. Not only were they behind the angels, but the demons as well. It didn't make him feel any better to think that the ghosts that were strong enough to throw and trap them in this room were not planning on entering themselves.
The thought vanished when Catherine, out of the corner of his eye, ran over to him with her own angel sword at the ready. He quickly turned to find a glowing eyed, nearly skeletal version of a ghost that was interrupted in attacking him by his, once again, savior. The ghost threw the hunter back before he could even thrust his sword to it. Wounded, but not done, the ghost vanished as Balthazar stood again.
Hearing a yelp from behind, he turned to find that the ghost was targeting Catherine now and had just disarmed her. "The sigils!" she screamed back to him before he could even think about going to help her. She seemed to think being a distraction was a good thing, but only made him curse to himself.
The ghost didn't seem as powerful as the previous one and she noted that they had probably at least interrupted the demons. However, she didn't have any weapons and failed to really calculate how fast the being was and was hit from the side before she could gather her senses.
Balthazar, who just wanted this over very quickly, turned back to the sigils on the floor and lit the outer ring as it burned through the markings in a quick inferno. The fire engulfed the room until a wave of his hand put it out, only leaving the marks of the blood behind.
Catherine, however, fell to the ground.
He turned towards her, realizing that the ghost had already gone in the blast of fire, but also noticed that Cat was making no moves to get back up again. The fire hadn't gotten her, he knew it hadn't, but he still ran over to her quickly to find a great deal of blood and her gasping for air.
"What-?" What happened didn't matter. Fixing her mattered, so he put a hand to her forehead and the other against her strange, deep wound.
Catherine took in a deep breath to speak, not bothering with conserving her energy at this point. "Ghost. It... I don't know... struck me." Breathing hurt, though. Talking, even more so. She wasn't entirely good at judging how bad it was in the moment, but from how much red she seen earlier and the pained look of worry on Balthazar's face when he arrived next to her was enough of an indicator. Well, if she had stayed at the car, she resolved with herself, then he would just be in this situation instead of her.
Balthazar didn't seem to have been listening to her explanation, as he looked between his hands. The one on her head did nothing, the other only managed to get more blood on it. He had healed her scrapes earlier. Could he not heal a fatal wound even a little bit? Just buy time until he could figure out a better plan? Was he that disconnected from Heaven that he couldn't do this much? He resolved to try again, this time with a few rushed prayers to whoever was upstairs to lend him just a little bit of power. He had lost too many already and, while he only knew this human for a short time, he had grown fond of her and wasn't entirely ready to let her go just yet.
Before he could think up the first prayer, she was already muttering again and her words actually made him stop and listen this time. "It's okay," she quietly told him. It was kind saddening to watch him struggle to save her for someone with so much power. "Hunters..." She paused to get in another harsh breath, but things were already seeming very far off anyway. "We don't usually... live all that long anyway... It's okay..." Balthazar was frozen and could do nothing but look down at her, so she tried again. "You're an angel," she smiled, making herself cough in the process of that small twitch, but regained her breath again quickly enough. "You'll be fine... jackass..."
He still didn't make a move, ignoring a bright light moving behind the door. It was all he could do to look down upon her, while she tried to keep those few last breaths. She was mortal in a dangerous situation, yet this seemed like such a shock to him and even while thinking on how confusing of a thing that was, he figured that he should say something, anything, before she was gone. "That's not fair," was all he found himself saying as he realized that she probably thought he was only responding to her comment and not to the entire last few days at large. He also realized that it was less her that he was talking to and more of his Father...
The door opened, the light pouring into the room and across the markings on the floor, Balthazar's shadow even stretching to the far wall. Not at all feeling threatened and still far too shocked, it took him a moment to even glance to what was approaching them. Catherine watched it, the light being the only thing she was able to see with the rest of the world growing so dark. It stopped on her other side, Bal keeping a close eye on it, as it moved his hand away and touched her.
His attention left the light that began to quickly grow dimmer and was drawn to Catherine again as she slipped into unconsciousness and her wounds healed, blood vanishing and breathing finally evening out to a steady pace again. Baffled, he looked over to the visitor who was no longer glowing bright, but instead just smiling as he removed his hand from the woman. Balthazar blinked at him for a moment. "... Gabriel?"
"Now, that," Gabriel chuckled, pointing to Catherine, "could have been bad."
I've changed the main list of characters to scratch out Abbadon and add in Gabe. He's going to be playing quite the role in this, as well as some other people. Abbadon, however, may only show up once or twice again. Don't worry. You'll love her appearances.
Also, sorry that this chap took me a little longer than I would have liked. The holidays were a little nuts for me. Hope you enjoyed it, guys! More soon, I hope!