CHAPTER 11

Castiel opened his eyes, blinking up at the darkness above him. His head was aching, and he winced, instinctively trying to reach up to rub the side of his head. His arm didn't move. He tried again. Still, nothing happened. All it did was make his wrist begin to ache.

That was when he realized that he was tied up. Not in a chair this time, though. He was lying flat, his back against the cold dirt floor, his arms and legs spread wide by the ropes around his ankles and wrists. At first, he couldn't tell more than that, but he stayed still and blinked, and finally, his eyes began to grow adjusted to the darkness. His vision swirled and blurred, but after a few seconds, he did manage to realize where he was. He was in a room – a small room, barely wider and taller than his body, and the ropes were tied to the walls.

And he was completely alone.

He cleared his throat. His mouth was dry, but he swallowed hard, then managed to force his mouth to work. "Dean? Sam?" he called, keeping his voice low, in the hopes that whoever had kidnapped him wouldn't be able to hear. He had some vague feeling that that would be a good thing to do, even if his mind was too fuzzy for him to figure out why.

No response. He called again, louder this time, then louder still, no longer caring about the kidnapper hearing him. If the kidnapper was around, then he or she would likely come and force Castiel to be quiet, but until then, he was going to make all the noise that he could.

His voice grew hoarse from shouting, and he finally gave up. If Sam and Dean were nearby, then they would have heard and responded by now.

Unless they were still unconscious.

Or unless they were both much worse off.

Castiel shook his head wildly, trying to dispel those thoughts, thought all he succeeded in doing was making his head begin to ache even worse. But no, he absolutely refused to acknowledge those thoughts. Dean and Sam had both still been at the graveyard when he had been attacked. It was extremely unlikely that they had been involved. More likely was that they returned to the motel room and discovered that he was gone. Which meant that they would be looking for him. Which meant that they would find him.

Castiel took a long, slow deep breath and tried to calm his heartbeat, with a mild amount of success. It was alright. The Winchesters would come for him, and everything would be well. All he had to do was wait.

Castiel did wait. For hours. Or, so he thought. There was no accurate way to measure the time. The gloom did eventually begin to lighten, so there must have been natural light coming in from somewhere. The fuzzy feeling in his mind faded slightly, until he could understand his own thoughts again, without having to wait while they processed in his mind.

His nerves felt like live wires. He wasn't entirely sure what that meant, but the phrase had been used in one of the TV dramas that Dean enjoyed so much, and the character in question had been terrified at the time, so Castiel figured that it was an apt description of his current state. He was feeling quite terrified himself.

Every second, he listened. Sometimes the boards creaked, because of the wind, or because he heard small animals skittering across them. There was a loft above him, he'd realized, the floor of which was the ceiling of his room. And the walls of his small room didn't reach all the way to the loft, nor all the way to the floor. There were gaps, maybe half a foot each. By staring under the gaps, he began to realize that there were other small rooms like this one, all in a row. In some of them, he saw piles of hay, or discarded tools that looked as though they hadn't been touched in years.

A barn, he thought. It was something that he had no experience with, outside of the one time that he had seen one of the TV. But he was fairly certain that that was where he was. And the small room was called a stable, he was reasonably sure.

It took his hours to figure that out. He wasn't sure if it was due to the slow nature of his thoughts, or because he was too terrified to think straight, or some combination of the two.

It took him even longer to make the connection that the body last night had been found in an abandoned barn, and to wonder if this barn was the same place. But then, he didn't see another body anywhere, nor did he smell one, but perhaps it was simply out of sight and not yet rotting.

He wondered about that quite a bit. He had plenty of time to worry about it, and nothing else to do to pass the time. He felt as though his time was torn between worry, terror, and attempts to escape.

The attempts did not go well. He tugged at the ropes, hoping to get the knots loose, but they did not give at all. He had taken to carrying knives in his sleeves, after seeing how useful Sam's knife had been, but whoever had taken him had also taken the hidden knives. There was nothing nearby that could be used to cut the ropes. He scanned every inch of the ground, hoping for some discarded tool or bit of metal that could aid him, but found nothing. He thought about chewing the ropes, but they held him too tightly – he couldn't maneuver his face close to any of the ropes, no matter how he contorted his body. It wasn't long before the throbbing in his head made him give up that strategy.

Again and again, he replayed the events of the previous evening, trying to determine what had brought him here. It was more difficult than he would have anticipated. His memories were vague, which made him worry that he would lose his memories. What would he do if Sam and Dean came for him, and he didn't even recognize their faces? It had never occurred to him to worry about this before, but what if his memory loss was reoccurring? What if he woke up every few weeks with no memories and the angels in his head, and this was the first stage?

Those thoughts did not help him. He took deep breaths. They did not help much. He tried to focus on the things that he did remember, which helped a bit more, in that it at least gave him something to think about, and almost distracted his mind.

There had been a clone of him, or whatever that had been. It had been hiding in the shadows, waiting for him to leave. And when he found it, it had attacked him.

The fight was a blur in his head, so he skipped over it, focusing on the one concrete memory that he had: his knife plunging into the clone's chest. The blood splatters. The pained gasps. The agony as it died.

So he had won the fight, and then ended up here.

He couldn't remember what happened after the clone's death, but it had led to an injured head, that much was clear. There had been people around, random strangers, so he supposed that one of them could have caused this. But the person closest to him had been Felicity Brunt. She had been standing right beside him, holding her gun. She could be the culprit. Or she could've been caught by the same person who had kidnapped Castiel, in which case, she would be another victim. He didn't know which it was, but regardless, she was clearly involved, somehow.

These thoughts kept the panic at bay, but he could feel it lurking just below the surface, ready to pounce at any moment. It was all he could do not to give in.

Any moment, he was certain, there would be heavy footsteps moving across the dirt, and someone would find him. He didn't know who it would be, but he knew that they would come, soon, now, any moment. Hours passed, and the feeling didn't disperse. He still felt himself waiting, almost panicking, expecting that this would be the moment, no, this would, it would happen, any second, he just had to wait long enough, someone would come-

And then someone did. The imagined footsteps became real, and for a moment, he was so shocked that he wondered if he were making it up. Maybe he wanted it so badly that his mind created the noise, to comfort him or torment him, he wasn't sure which. But no, they were definitely real, and they were coming closer and closer, until they finally stopped right outside his door.

He was holding his breath, he suddenly realized. He let it out in a long breath, and waited.

The door creaked open. His mind raced. Friend or foe? Someone to help him, or someone to hurt him? He couldn't tell.

Felicity Brunt stood in the doorway, staring down at him. She carried a lantern, and its glow allowed him to see her clearly. Her face was streaked with tears, her eyes red. Her shoulders shook even as he watched her, and the look on her face was perfectly blank.

"Felicity," he said, through dry lips. He still couldn't tell. Had the police found him? Had she been kidnapped, but had managed to escape and come aid him? Or-

"Don't say my name," she said. Her voice was low, and cracked halfway through the sentence, but it held more fury that he had ever heard in one sentence before.

Not friendly, then.

"You knocked me unconscious," Castiel said, slowly, almost more to test out the words than to accuse her of anything. But it must have been her. It was the only explanation for why she was here, now, staring down at him as if she was hoping for his death.

She didn't say anything, but she hung the lantern from a hook and stepped into the room - closer to him. For the first time, he noticed the knife in her hand, and recognized it as the same knife that the clone of himself had been wielding.

"You would have killed me," he said, his voice stronger now. This, he understood. There was no more wondering who the culprit was. Now, he knew, and all that was left was to find a way to defeat her. He might not know why she had done it, but that suddenly seemed irrelevant, and his mind sharpened to the hunting mode he always experienced when faced with a challenge.

The difference, though, was that this time, he couldn't fight. He couldn't even move.

"And you killed my brother," she said, and took another step forward.

"Your brother," he repeated dumbly, and his mind flashed to the... thing that had been wearing his body, whatever it had been. "That clone was your brother."

"Shapeshifter," she said, her voice low, almost a growl. "That's the word we use."

"Shapeshifter." Castiel felt as though he could do nothing but repeat her words, but he understood so little about what was happening that he could think of nothing else to say. And it wasn't as though he didn't believe in shapeshifters, but he had never known that they existed. Then again, there was much that he didn't know, and at that moment, what came out of his mouth next was, "So it wasn't a vengeful spirit."

Felicity's mouth twisted into a grimace, and he could see honest pain in her eyes as she said, "No, Sylvia's gone. We- We checked. She's passed on, wherever she goes." She crouched down beside Castiel. The blade gleamed in the firelight, and the stared down at it as she added, "We created our own vengeance."

Castiel blinked, and tried to understand. Slowly, the pieces began to combine in his mind, and he said, slowly, "Your brother was a shapeshifter... He could transform into whoever he wanted?"

"Yes," Felicity said slowly.

Her eyes were locked on his face now, her eyes wide and unblinking, and for a moment, he wondered if the look on her face was more unnerving than being left alone in the darkness had been. But he swallowed down his nerves and managed to continue, "Including the people who had killed you sister? He could become them, and confess."

"And Gretchen Strauss," Felicity added, her mouth twisting the word as if it were something dirty. "We knew she had been paid off, we knew she was in on it, but we never found any proof. Confessing it would do no good if there was no evidence to condemn her. But we found more than enough elsewhere. So we hit her where we could. Nobody will ever know the truth of the part she played in my sister's death, but I don't think it matters now. She's been punished enough, don't you think?"

Castiel's mind instantly supplied the image of Gretchen, lying across her bed and clutching at her knife wound, and then immediately pushed it aside. "But why?"

"Why we did this?" Felicity asked. "Or why they did?"

Castiel swallowed again, and said, "Both."

For a long moment Felicity was quiet. Then she tilted her head as if thinking hard, and said, "Do you have any idea what it's like to be willing to kill to protect someone? To do anything for them? Because that was what I felt for my little siblings. Now imagine how I felt when they were taken away from me."

"So you murdered her murderers," Castiel said.

"I would do anything for my sister," Felicity said, and suddenly, the knife was pressed against Castiel's shoulder, hard enough that he could feel the edge of the blade pushing against his flesh through the fabric, but not hard enough to cut him. "Or my brother."

Castiel took a deep breath, forcing his breathing to stay steady, and tried to think of anything to say that could stop her from hurting him the way that the look in her eyes seemed to indicate that she wanted to. Or, at the very least, anything that could keep her talking while he tried to think of a plan. "Why?" he finally said again.

Her face crumpled. It wasn't anger anymore. It was grief. "We knew why," she said.

She was silent then, her eyes distant. Castiel said nothing more, just kept his eyes locked on her, his mind racing with possibilities. He could knock her off balance and hope that he could take her knife – but there was no way to do that, not when he legs were also bound, and no guarantee that the knife would land close enough to his hands that he could grab it. The rope had no slack, not even the slightest bit of give. He couldn't move so much as an inch in either direction. He couldn't get away.

"Not at first," she said suddenly. There were fresh tears in her eyes now. One rolled down her cheek and hung for a second on her chin before falling. "He can read their thoughts, you know. When he becomes someone else. I don't know if Sylvia could, she never tried, never wanted to be anything but herself."

"She was a shapeshifter as well," Castiel said softly.

Felicity nodded, the gesture small enough that Castiel nearly missed it, just the tiniest inclination of her head. "And they found out."

Castiel thought about asking, but then stopped. He thought that he already knew.

"Never about Emory, never about my brother," she said. "Just Sylvia. They called her a monster, would have thought that they were both monsters, if they knew... But they only knew about her. So she was the only one who died."

Once again, Castiel swallowed, but this time, it was because he could feel bile rising in his throat. "I am so sorry," he said, the words barely more than a whisper. He didn't know how he could be, how he could feel sorry for the woman who had kidnapped him and was now slowly running her knife down his chest.

But he could imagine a young girl – her sister – being taken off and murdered because she wasn't quite human. And it made him sick.

Felicity didn't even acknowledge his words, but she must have heard him, because her eyes narrowed, her gaze seeming to sharpen. "You took my brother from me," she said, and then the knife dug down.

The pain flared, sharper than anything that he had ever felt, so white hot and burning that it took him several seconds to realize what was injured. His arm, he finally realized. His upper arm. Blood was soaking through the layers of fabric, until his sleeve was wet and heavy with it. And he was screaming. That was another thing that he didn't hear at first, not until he heard his own voice echo through his ears.

"It was supposed to be over, you know," she said, her voice quiet now. Her shoulders her shaking, her mouth quivering like she was on the verge of breaking down and sobbing. But she lifted the knife up, held it up so that he could see it, could watch the needs of blood drip off the edge of it, and her hand wasn't shaking. "Before you arrived, it was going to be over. We'd gotten everyone we needed. All three of them, the ones who did it, all of them were dead. It was supposed to be over. Nobody else could get hurt."

Castiel had finished screaming now, only because it didn't do any good. The pain refused to fade. It was there, present, not lessening at all, and all that screaming did was make his head throb worse. So instead, he panted hard, gasping for breaths that shouldn't be this difficult to draw, but he broke off long enough to gasp out, "But?"

Anything to keep her talking.

Anything to keep her from hurting him worse.

"You came," she said simply. She lowered the knife again, poking lightly at the place where he had been cut already, and it didn't matter that he could see the knife, could see that she was barely touching him with it, it still hurt as though she were pounding against his flesh, still made him choke on a scream that he tried – and failed – to stop when it was halfway out of his mouth.

"Hunters," she said, with obvious disgust. "I know what you do. You hunters save people, you think that it's your job, but why did you come here? How did you even find out about us?"

"How?" he asked. He didn't think that the word made sense – his voice was being strangled by the pain now, which was beyond anything he had ever experienced, or at least anything that he remembered experiencing.

Somehow, she understood. And she answered.

"You," she said. "You asked me about ghosts and demons – yes, I know the signs, I knew exactly what you meant the moment that you said it," Felicity told him. She lowered the knife again, once more pressing it against his chest without actually cutting him. "And you were on the wrong track – you weren't even close, not yet – but you'd come for us eventually, and I knew that you'd try to kill us for what we'd done. Hell, you'd probably kill my brother for what he could do, even if we'd never done anyone harm."

"No," Castiel protested, then stopped. They had come here with the intention of stopping the murders, that was true. And that usually meant killing the thing that had been doing the killings. But in this case- If they had known the reason why-

He wasn't sure what they would have done, if he were being honest. Maybe Dean and Sam would have let them go. Maybe not. He didn't know.

"Don't lie," she snapped, and sliced with the knife again, this one catching him across the chest. And again, he screamed. "Emory's been inside you head, remember? He's been you, he knew what you were thinking, you crazy little psychopath. Everything about you, what little you remember. He knew that you wouldn't let us go. We were trying to protect ourselves."

"How?" Castiel asked again. He was panting harder this time. His body was awash with pain.

"I took your picture at the crime scene," she said. "That was all he needed to- to transform. You were supposed to come with me, out here, alone. He would take your place, they'd never suspect it. You didn't know it was a shapeshifter, they'd think you were possessed, they'd never want to harm you- and then it'd be too late."

Her voice broke off, more tears flowing down her cheeks, her whole form the picture of heartbreak. But now, Castiel was picturing her and her brother, conspiring to kill them – to kill Dean, and to kill Sam, and he no longer felt the sympathy he had before.

"You plan on killing me now," he said. He didn't make it a question. He could imagine what her plan was.

She nodded. "You killed my brother," she said. Her voice wavered so much that it was nearly impossible to understand her now. "I went back for his body, you know," she said, choking out the words in between sobs. "I didn't want to leave it, but I barely got you to the car- Someone had seen you fight and called 911, and I had to leave." She broke off, shaking her head hard, then continued, "When I came back, the police were crawling everywhere. Your friends were there, too. I had to look at them and act like nothing was wrong, I couldn't let anybody know- And my brother's body was just being loaded into the ambulance. He was on... on a stretcher, and I watched them pull the sheet over him. It didn't even look like him- I don't even get to bury his body, he's stuck in your form now, and then they... they took him away from me."

The knife was beginning to waver now. This would be the perfect time to take her off guard, to try to break free. But still, Castiel couldn't move. And with the wounds now cut into his arm and chest, he didn't know if he could win a fight with her, even if he did manage to break one of the ropes so that he could attack.

"And all of it's your fault!" she announced, her voice suddenly turning into a scream. She lifted the knife over her head, breathing hard. Castiel didn't see and sanity left in her eyes, nothing to hint that she would stop.

She was going to kill him.

He squeezed his eyes closed, and waited.

Then there was a crash, and suddenly he heard Dean scream, "Come out here, you bitch!"

"Dean!" Castiel shouted, eyes flying open. He couldn't see them, he couldn't see anything outside of the stable, but he could hear them now, running toward him. He took a deep breath, and screamed again. "DEAN!"

Felicity was on her feet in an instant, spinning around. She knew that the Winchesters were coming for her, and was ready to fight back.

She didn't last even close to a minute. The door flew opened, and Dean came racing forward, not slowing down at all, just slamming straight into her, knocking her back against the opposite wall. She screamed. The knife fell from her hand. Then Dean's gun was against her head, and he pulled the trigger.

Her head exploded, chunks of blood and flesh sticking to the wall behind her covering Dean's jacket and face. He didn't even seem to notice.

Castiel watched, eyes wide, breathing hard.

Sam was already at his side. Castiel hadn't seen him enter, but there he was, already using a silver knife to cut the ropes holding Castiel. "It's okay, Jimmy," he said, his voice low and urgent. "We're here, it's okay, it's fine."

Castiel breathed, and nodded, and couldn't take his eyes off Dean.

Dean was instantly on his knees at Castiel's other side, pulling out his own knife and cutting the bonds. Already, Castiel was free. Sam grabbed him and helped him to sit up, which Castiel did. The pain made him gasp, but he managed, at least.

Dean didn't touch him. He was staring at Castiel, the same way that Castiel had been staring back at him. He didn't even appear to be blinking. One hand hovered at his side, halfway extended, like he wanted to reach forward and close the distance, but couldn't. He hardly even seemed to be breathing.

Castiel coughed. "Dean," he said weakly.

Then Dean hugged him, crushing Castiel against his body hard enough that it made his wounds flare with pain, but he didn't complain. He wrapped his arms around Dean and held on. One of Dean's arms was around his waist, the other one holding the back of his head, practically keeping Castiel upright, and Castiel buried his face against the side of Dean's neck and squeezed as tightly as he could. His whole body was shaking. He was fairly certain that he would've fallen if he hadn't had Dean there.

After a long time – not long enough – Dean moved back. He didn't take his hands off of Castiel, though, just extended his arms to separate their bodies, then looked Castiel up and down, his eyes instantly finding the two wounds. "Are you okay?" he demanded, his voice low and rough. "Where else are you hurt?"

"Nowhere," Castiel said, then winced. "My head."

Dean's hand was already along the back of his head, but now he moved his fingers carefully across Castiel's skin, feeling until he found the tender area where Castiel had been hit. "Anywhere else?"

"No," Castiel said.

Dean nodded, and a second later, Castiel found himself crushed against Dean's chest again. "Okay, you're going to be okay. We'll get you back to the motel and stitch you up."

"Okay," Castiel agreed softly.

Even so, it was several moments before the two of them managed to get up off the dirty stable floor and make their way out to the waiting Impala.