Chapter 2

March 20, 2012. Thompson Falls, Montana

Ellie pulled into the turn around in front of the house, turning off the engine and pulling on the brake. She leaned her head on the wheel for a few minutes, listening to the tick of the cooling engine, the only sound in the deep silence of the mountains. One step at a time, she told herself. Just take it one step at a time.

She straightened, and hooked her pack from the passenger seat, opening the door and getting out. Retrieving her gear bag from the tray, she turned for the house. The bag seemed to weigh a ton as she walked up to the door, unlocking it and going inside.

The weapons clanked when she dumped the bag on the floor next to the staircase. She looked around the huge hall as the sound echoed. Maybe this'd been a mistake, she thought, catching her lip between her teeth. It felt too big; the emptiness and silence fingering older memories. She'd thought … cutting that train of thought off viciously, she walked through to the living room.

Her cell buzzed in her coat pocket and she pulled it out, looking at the message on the screen and deleting it.

You weren't there.

She hadn't been there on too many occasions, she knew, sinking down into the overstuffed armchair. She'd never known why it was the thought of him choosing someone else that'd terrified her the most – not until the past had come back, memories rising like bloated floaters. When she'd met him, she'd stayed distant because she'd known how he'd found his emotional release and she hadn't wanted to be one of the brief encounters that littered his life. Later, knowing him better, hearing about their lives from both brothers, she'd believed he wasn't capable of it. Too far from the moral code of the man who'd raised him. Too unlike the man he'd wanted to be and thought he wasn't. His respect for what he had was too strong. There was only one aspect of his life that was different. If the circumstances were right, she thought he'd still choose to save Sam, over anyone else.

Well, you were wrong, she told herself, staring bleakly at the wall of books on the other side of the room. And being wrong about that opened up a can of worms. She might've been wrong about all of it.

Looking back down at the cell in her hand, she pressed the number for Sam, hoping that she'd get his voicemail.

The call went to voicemail and she waited for the beep.

"Sam, it's Ellie. I'm – uh – I'm calling to say goodbye. I wish you all the best, and I hope that everything works out for you." She hesitated for a moment, then added. "I guess you know what happened. You take care." She closed the phone and pulled a small screwdriver from her jacket pocket.

It took a minute to reduce the phone to a pile of components. Less to smash them into fragments. She swept the pile into the trash can and leaned back, curling up as the chair's bulky arms enclosed her. Closing her eyes, she let her breath out and let the grief in.

Seattle, Washington

Sam's phone buzzed insistently as they returned to the car from the warehouse. He pulled it out, stopping beside the car and listening to the message on his voicemail.

On the other side of the car, Dean glanced across at him, brows creasing as he saw how still his brother was standing; he watched Sam's eyes drop shut, his face tighten.

"What?"

Dean looked at the phone as Sam held it out to him over the car's roof, glancing back at his little brother's face. Sam's brows were furrowed, his expression drawn.

Taking the cell, Dean hit replay for the message and lifted the phone to his ear.

Sam felt his heart sink when he saw his brother stiffen, Dean's mouth compressing. The tone of Ellie's voice had been regretful but final.

Dean shut the phone and passed it back over the roof, opening the passenger door and getting in. Sam put the phone back into his pocket and swung into the driver's seat. He turned the key and for a moment the whine in the engine filled the silence between them. He glanced at Dean's profile, seeing the muscle twitch at the point of the jaw.

"Dean …" he started tentatively. Dean shook his head.

"No." He stared through the windscreen, his face stony. "No, Sam. Not a word. I can't …" He took a breath. "Not now, I just can't."

Sam nodded. He put the car into reverse and twisted around, looking through the rear window as he extracted them from the parking spot.

Driving out of Seattle, the only sounds Sam could hear were the wipers clearing the steady rain from the windshield, the hiss of the wide tyres on the wet road.

March 21, 2012. Thompson Falls, Montana

Ellie woke, hunched in the chair, cold and sore. Her eyelids were swollen, her cheeks felt stiff with the salt that had dried on them. The room was in darkness. She pushed herself up, swinging her legs to the floor.

Walking to the doorway, she turned on the lights as she passed through. A glance at her watch showed it was closer to morning than night. She crossed the hall and walked down to the kitchen, her muscles loosening slowly. Her head was pounding and her mouth and throat were dry. She turned on the light as she entered the kitchen, going to the stove and picking up the kettle, feeling its weight. Lighting the burner, she set the kettle on it and sank into the rocker beside the hearth.

Sleep had brought more questions than answers. She chewed on the inside of her lip, nervously wondering if she should have stayed there longer, asked him why, asked him what'd happened instead of disappearing.

Drawing her legs up, she scowled at the uncertainty of those thoughts. It didn't matter why, did it? What mattered was the trust she'd had in him, that they'd built together over the years, that'd gone.

It would tear her apart to wonder about the why now. If it'd been something she'd done or hadn't done, it didn't matter. He could've talked to her about it. Don't listen to what people say, Michael's voice reminded her softly. Watch what they do.

What they do. Action was always more truthful than words. People did what they wanted to do. They only talked about what they thought they wanted and that was usually wrong. He'd done what he'd wanted to do and that didn't leave her with anything.

A sharp whistle filled the kitchen; the kettle boiling, steaming escaping from the spout, and she got up, turning off the burner and pouring hot water into a clean cup. She added loose tea and watched it settle to the bottom, her thoughts chaotic, razor edged with pain. She'd known he'd break her heart, someday. She shouldn't have been so ready to convince herself he wouldn't.

I-90E, Idaho.

Staring at the rolling road in front of him, Dean knew he was driving on auto-pilot, paying no attention to the signs that flashed by or the familiar landmarks or even the low rumble of the car he drove. They'd crossed into Idaho an hour ago and the road was empty, the cars eating up the miles.

From Seattle, they'd stopped in Spokane and switched cars. He'd grabbed a Mercury that'd been begging for someone who knew what they were doing, and Sam had picked an old Jeep, muttering something about being needing the headroom. Calling Frank had been a fat waste of time. Sam'd wanted to stop in Boise, get the national papers from the airport. He found he didn't care what they did, so long as they kept moving.

His brother was driving behind him, probably listening to some new agey kind of music and worrying about him. He'd tried the radio a half hour ago, but there wasn't much in the way of music and he'd turned it off. Now the quiet, and the wide, open country were making a backdrop for his thoughts.

The truth was he didn't know what'd happened. It hadn't been until he'd listened to Ellie's message that the full impact of the previous couple of days had hit him and everything came back with a crystal clarity that had – and was still – scaring the crap outta him. He'd learned hard and early about fooling around. Had learned it from both sides. After Amanda, it'd become a principle that was a foundation stone of his life, and he'd never, ever rocked it.

It hadn't had much testing, he had to admit; his relationships, the real relationships, could be counted on the fingers of one hand with a couple left over. But he'd never even had to think about it, before. He remembered the djinn in Cicero, leaving her number on the tab and Sid's eyes widening in admiration. Chicks dig unavailable guys, he'd told him. It was true. He'd never been tempted when he'd been with Cassie, or with Lisa. Hadn't even looked at other women once Ellie'd come back.

Until now.

Grief. Pain. Frustration. That overwhelming sense of not knowing what he doing or why he was doing it. Alcohol, dulling down the edges and letting him drift in fantasies of being someone else, just for a little while … the obvious interest of Lydia … they'd all been a part of it.

But it shouldn't have been enough. Not enough for him to forget, to pretend, not enough to do something – the one thing – he'd known would destroy what he'd had.

The conversation he'd had with her, the night he'd gotten wasted and she'd taken him back to the motel, asked him if he was happy … he flinched at the memory of what he'd told her, the promise he'd made her. He knew it was the thing she worried about. He knew it when she'd told him she'd hidden the details of her past from herself.

Everyone leaves you, you notice that? Trapped in a cave by a creature that would not stop, he'd felt her loneliness resonate and harmonise suddenly with his; had known down to the marrow of his bones what it'd meant.

It'd taken him a long time to figure out why she never seemed jealous or worried about his past, the women in his past. Eventually, he'd realised she was like him in that way. If the interest wasn't there, he walked away. And so did she, not sticking around to make a fuss about it, just getting out.

He could feel the justifications – the rationalisations – rising up, trying to make it seem understandable … he hadn't seen her for weeks … he was still grieving for Bobby … he'd been letting himself slip into the despair that now felt like an old friend.

He shook his head. That's all they were … excuses for something he'd never thought was possible. He stole. He lied. He scammed and hustled and cut corners and dumped chicks, but he didn't cheat on them.

His fingers clenched hard around the wheel. He'd waited for a long, long time for someone to trust. To love. To let in. The fuck was he thinking, throwing it all away?

He hadn't been thinking. In the wave of memory that'd hit him when he'd listened to her telling Sam it was over, he'd remembered something else … had remembered how easy it'd been to pretend he was someone else. Someone without a history of guilt and pain. Someone who was looking for nothing special. Someone who just wanted to forget.

He looked down at his hands, welded around the wheel and made an effort to loosen them.

He was struggling with the why because it kept him from thinking about the consequences. If he could figure out why it'd happened, he thought he could explain, thought he might have a chance of fixing things. Not much of one, maybe, but still a chance.

The alternative … there was no alternative. He had to figure it out. What had happened. Why.

He rubbed the heel of his hand over his forehead. It had been hard to go to Lisa, his grief fresh and raw for both his brother and the loss of the woman who'd loved him. It had been harder to let Lisa and Ben go, to ask Cas to remove their memories when he'd realised the half-life he could give them wasn't enough for any of them, and still their lives were in danger.

But this … he couldn't … he couldn't lose her again. Couldn't lose what he wanted again. There was just no way he could … so he had to fix it. Somehow. He had to.

March 23, 2012. Whitefish, Montana

"I'm sorry, Dean. There's just nothing. It's all gone." Sam looked from the laptop to his brother's face. "I can't track her. Maybe Frank …"

"Yeah. Maybe." Dean sat on the edge of the couch and stared at the floor. Every one of the old contacts was gone. She'd hacked into the phone company and pulled all the records from every phone she'd ever had. Even the forum had been wiped.

He hadn't gotten her new address in Montana, and he knew that by now, she would have erased any records that could be traced to her. He had no way of contacting her, and no way of finding her. Maybe Frank could find a way, but he doubted it. If Ellie didn't want to be found, she would make sure she wasn't. He didn't know many of her contacts. Katherine's voice had been frosty when he'd called The Hidden Door, her husband more sympathetic but equally unable to help him. The few others who'd been mutual friends were dead. Cas was gone, Balthazar was gone. He didn't know any angels who could find her, or her friend, the Watcher, Penemue. Wasn't sure that he would help even if he could be found.

She'd disappeared and he couldn't think of a way to change that. And he still didn't know exactly why. So there wasn't any point trying to track her down anyway. He put his face into his hands, elbows propped on his knees, and rubbed at his temples with his fingers.

He was no fucking closer to fixing this than he'd been when they'd driven out of Seattle.

Sam watched his older brother uneasily. He'd been surprised when Dean had shown up the next morning, looking very much worse for wear, joking about the night. He'd played along when it was obvious Dean wasn't going to talk about what'd happened, not sure what was going on, but figuring it was a better way for his brother to decompress than by drinking himself into oblivion. Now, he wasn't so sure.

"Dean."

His brother raised his head, looking at him. "What?"

"What happened? For two days, it was like …" he hesitated, forehead furrowing up, trying to find the words to describe how different his brother'd been. "It was like you'd forgotten about her, man."

For a split second, he saw panic in Dean's eyes; panic and a wild, raw terror he'd never imagined Dean capable of feeling.

"I don't know what happened, Sam." Dean's voice was a barely audible whisper. "I just … I don't know."

Then he closed his eyes and Sam saw his body tense, every muscle, every tendon rigid, standing out under his skin.

A moment later, when Dean opened his eyes and looked back at him, those raw feelings had gone, been hidden away, he thought, somewhere deep. Dean's expression was guarded again, his eyes dark and flat.

"Alright. This, uh, case – the one with the kids. We'll be in Kansas by nightfall. We'll get on with the job. I'll figure it out." He seemed to be talking mostly to himself.

Sam knew his brother, knew his limits. He watched Dean get to his feet, go to the gear bag on the table, his movements jerky and tight. His big brother was very close to those limits now, he thought. Dean wasn't going to deal with the situation. He was going to try to bury it. Lock it away where it would wait, one of the many unexploded bombs in a mind that'd been locking things away for far too long.

"Dean." Sam got up from the chair, walking to the table and leaning on it. "You have to deal with this."

Dean looked up at him, eyes narrowed and dark. "No. I don't. What I have to do is figure it out, Sam. Figure it out and fix it."

Sam shook his head. He didn't want to be the one spelling out the problems, but he couldn't sit around and watch his brother detonate either. "I don't think you can fix this –"

"Yes. I can. And that's what I'm going to do. So shut it." He tilted his head back, rolled his shoulders against the tension clearly delineated by the wire-taut tendons in his neck.

Sam turned away, going back to the low table to close the laptop. He could keep trying, he thought as the lid clicked. But for now, he'd have to leave it.

"All right. Next stop, Wichita then."

March 25, 2012. Thompson Falls, Montana

Ellie stared at the screen in front of her, her hands wrapped around a cup of hot tea, not taking in the information that was scrolling down, barely hearing the chatter of the printer on the other side of the room.

She'd called a moving company after trying one run to Albany. The drive had been too long, and hauling the boxes had exhausted her, her concentration all shot to hell on the return drive home. That weakness had shocked and worried her, forcing her to consider if a trip to a doctor might be prudent. She'd recovered slowly in the week that'd followed and had put it down to not eating or sleeping well, a situation that hadn't really changed.

Lifting her gaze from the brain-numbing flow of information on the computer, she looked around the study. It was all here now. Her books and the boxes of files, the artefacts and scrolls, manuscripts and accounts collected desperately in the past few years. She'd been gradually rearranging the house to suit herself, boxing up some of the witch's more personal items and stacking them out of sight and mind down in the lowest levels of the basement.

Glancing listlessly back at the screen, she tried to summon up the energy to get into the first of the long-term projects she'd set herself, but the thought of reading any more, of thinking through the ramifications of Ray's findings and what Patrick had sent her the day before, seemed pointless. She couldn't concentrate. Could hardly keep her eyes open. The constant tension was giving her an unparalleled run of headaches.

Getting up, she carried the cup upstairs, moving in a slow shuffle. She'd chosen the big bedroom that overlooked the chain of peaks heading west and north. The bed was a king, and she frequently woke on the opposite side to the one she'd gone to sleep on. Her nightmares were vivid, technicolour and brought her to wakefulness night after night; sometimes drenched in an icy sweat, her muscles aching with tension, her head pounding. Twice she'd woken up weeping, the pillows soaked in her tears, dried crusty-hard by morning.

Setting the cup on the nightstand, she thought she'd washed the sheets more often in the last week than in the previous year and she couldn't help wondering if she should go and buy new ones before the old ones wore out.

A shiver rippled the muscles of her back, goosefleshing her arms and she turned for the bathroom. A hot shower would do more to ease the aching tension and warm her up than the tea'd been able to manage.

Like everything else in the house, the room was large and designed with comfort in mind. The floor was heated, pipes carrying hot water laid under the tiles. The tub was huge and she looked at it for a long moment before deciding on the shower instead. Turning on the taps, she stripped slowly, even the effort of bending down to pick up her clothes and toss the into the hamper swamping her with fatigue.

Steam billowed from the recess and she stepped under the rush of hot water, closing her eyes and reviewing the little she'd accomplished over the past week.

Every account, every contract, contact and service she'd had was closed down, cut outs and dead ends in place. She'd cut herself off from every hunter, paranormal investigator, psychic and witch she'd had anything to do with over the last ten years. Her professional contacts had a clean, verifiable story that she was moving overseas for a while. Everyone else had been shut out. All the new accounts were in legit names, Kasha's tsk-tsk mutterings about the cost and difficulty of the new identification making her feel more paranoid than usual. It wasn't just to disappear from the man she didn't want to see or think about, she rationalised, soaping her skin with forced vigour. The levis were still out there, still a real threat and changing everything would help keep her off their radar.

She was letting the grief come, she wasn't trying to lock it away, pretend it didn't exist. But no matter how she looked at it, no matter how many times she went through her memories, good and bad, trying to accept them and let it go, the sorrow just kept on coming. And she was so godamned tired of crying.

It would have been easier to deal with if he'd died, she thought as she leaned against the tiled wall. At least then she could have understood what had happened. She'd thought she'd known him, thought she'd known him well. But she hadn't. And that was hurting every bit as much as the rest.

The heat of the water finally penetrated, loosening the knots in her shoulders and neck and she twisted around, letting it pound down her back. She was safe here, but in lockdown, she thought, mouth curling down disparagingly. A period of peace wouldn't go astray. She needed it. She was in no shape to be hunting.

March 27, 2012. Kansas.

"We need to clean this sucker when we get somewhere with a car wash." Dean brushed glitter from his arm and closed the window beside him. Sam looked down at his clothes, brushing more off his legs onto the floor.

He slid a sideways glance at his brother. Hearing him laugh had been good. He hadn't heard Dean laugh like that in a while. The sharp-edged profile was no longer relaxed though. He could see the return of Dean's tension in the tendons standing out slightly in his neck, in the grip of his fingers on the wheel.

Exhaling softly, Sam turned away, staring through the window at the darkness of the city as the Jeep's engine started and his brother pulled away from the kerb. The Mercury Dean'd been driving was in the long-term lot at the airport, and they'd already decided to take both cars up to Idaho, not sure of what they were facing there.

Dean didn't want to talk about the tension or what he was thinking or feeling. That wasn't a surprise. He'd overheard a few of his brother's calls, seen his impatience rising at the same rate as his frustration with himself. He wasn't sleeping much and he'd lost his appetite days ago. Sam had the feeling his brother had run out of new ideas on figuring out how to fix the problem with Ellie but couldn't admit to it.

The memory of sitting in a motel, somewhere, and Dean talking about going to see her came back to him with sudden force. He'd been the one to suggest his brother take some time with her. Take some time for himself. He'd believed Dean'd thought that over, had been most of the way to agreeing, maybe even looking forward to doing that.

It didn't make sense, what'd happened in Seattle.

Hearing the huff of his brother's exhale, Dean forced himself to remain quiet, flexing his fingers inconspicuously around the wheel. He knew Sam was worried. There was nothing he could do about it. He gotten through the last few days, he could get through the week. He sure as hell didn't need to talk about it.

The drive back to Idaho was a little over fifteen hundred miles. They could make it in a couple of days with an overnight in Colorado. He should be thinking about the bodies, he though sourly. The mutilated bodies that had rung all their alarm bells because they'd seen them before. But he knew that wasn't what he'd be thinking about over the next two days.

The question was the answer, Ellie sometimes said. He had no idea what it meant. Why had he gone with Lydia? Why hadn't he called Ellie, told her to get a flight to the city or when he'd felt so lousy, just stolen a car and driven east?

Sam had come up with the case to keep them busy – to keep him busy – get his mind off Roman and the lack of useable leads. He could have left it to his brother, gone and spent some time with her, gotten his head back together, felt the warm balm against his soul of loving her, being loved by her. If the question was the fucking answer it was a stupid one, he thought in frustration. He'd fucked a monster, sired another monster and gotten as close as he ever wanted to get to losing his fucking marbles. He still wasn't sure if Sam hadn't made it back in time, if he'd've killed Emma or let her kill him. And he'd lost the person he needed more than anyone else in the world.

Three times before he'd thought she'd gone. Had he really needed a reminder of what that'd felt like? It'd been bad back then, but it was a million times worse now.

You throw away your life because you've come to assume that it'll bounce right back into your lap. Death's words, and he remembered the warning implicit in the entity's tone when it'd said that. Had there been some echo there, thinking he could risk anything and it'd come back to him? He'd thought, he'd believed, that he would have chosen death before he'd risk what he had. And he'd been wrong.

His hands were aching and he flexed them again, turning his head slightly from side to side as he registered the muscles knotting up in neck and shoulders. Those muscles were so tight most of the time, he couldn't escape from the stabbing pains that shot through them. The constant tension had given him one long, endless headache, a tightness in his temples, and a steady throbbing behind his eyes.

Shooting a fast sideways glance at Sam, he wondered if his little brother really thought he'd wanted this.

March 29, 2012. Thompson Falls, Montana

The little town was glowing with life, the trees misted in the delicate green of new buds, green shoots mottling the dried and dead swathes of grass over the park and along the verges. A fast-moving mountain storm had come and gone in the night, and the town gleamed wet and clean; the sky a robin's egg blue, small, fluffy white clouds drifting across it, the pale sunshine gradually gaining strength.

Ellie came out of the consultation rooms in a daze. She paid for the tests and walked out of the office and onto the street, pulling her sunglasses down over her eyes and automatically turning left to walk back to where the truck was parked. Unlocking the door, she tossed her pack onto the passenger seat and climbed into the driver's seat, pulling the door closed.

Then she sat there, staring at the rear end of the car parked ahead of her without seeing it, the phrases the doctor'd used looping over and over in her mind.

She couldn't believe it.

Toll Ridge, Wyoming

Dean tossed and turned in the motel bed, the sheets tangling around his feet and legs, pinning him in place. In comparison with the dreams he used to have, this one was mild. But it was worse, in its own way, the images holding a finality to them; filling him with an anguish he couldn't face and wouldn't accept. He woke with a name caught in his throat, slimy with sweat, moisture trickling down his face.

It wasn't over. He refused to accept he'd fucked this up beyond repair. Leaning over the edge of the bed, he felt around for the bottle he'd left there, fingers closing on the smooth shape a moment later.

Sooner or later, he thought, wiping his mouth as the alcohol burned down to his stomach, warming and soothing, steadying his pulse, he was gonna lose his liver. His tolerance for the stuff was already too high. It took more and more just to numb the pain, never mind looking for a soft amnesia that gave him some time away from the crushing weight of his thoughts.

You're kidding yourself if you think you're gonna be able to do anything now.

That voice in his head, one he could never seem to shut out completely, could've been his Dad. Or Bobby. It was invariably harsh and often condescending, telling him crap he knew in his gut, but really didn't want to hear.

He might've been kidding himself, he allowed, gulping down another mouthful. He hadn't figured anything out, despite the way he'd dug through every memory of that night and the days before.

There wasn't a moment of the time he'd spent in Seattle that hadn't been screwed up and over royally, he decided, tipping his head back to lean against the bed head, but the truly fucked up part of it had been he hadn't even found what he'd thought he'd needed. The woman had been hungry, for reasons he got now, not interested in finding peace, and instead of the connection, that human connection he'd been looking for, it'd been like horizontal combat.

He'd gotten off, alright. Lydia'd fucked his brains out. She'd sucked him dry and started again, defying the regular limitations of biology. He vaguely remembered thinking he wasn't gonna last out the night.

She wasn't yours, not really.

But Emma had been his, monster or not. His flesh and blood. His daughter. As wrong as it could've been, but still his. All the implications of that, all the possible consequences had been spicing up his nightmares.

Half his life, he'd wanted family, his family, together and alive and safe. The other half, he'd wanted family, but one of his own. Someone to trust. Someone who knew everything about him and loved him anyway.

The mockery of having a daughter, conceived in lust and a desire to be someone else; a malformation of everything he'd ever thought or believed about family, a fucking lying deformation of love … it'd been all wrong. All of it.

Driving the long and empty miles down to Kansas, feeling numb and insubstantial, he'd worried and gnawed and gone over and over what he'd done, what'd happened, why it'd happened and behind all those questions, his memories of how it'd felt when it'd been right had kept on playing, like a goddamned Hallmark cable festival … memories of how it'd felt with the woman he'd failed.

He tilted the bottle up, letting the contents roar down his throat. It was a bad joke. A really bad one. Yeah, cheated on the woman I loved, and for kicks, didn't even get what I was hoping for but wait, there's more … got a monster kid out of the deal who wasn't human and wanted to kill me. M'brother killed her before she could stick me, but yeah, okay, I lost fucking everything. How you like them apples?

Rubbing the heel of his hand over his eyes, he tried to squash the acid-tasting self-pity.

Well, you do what you do and you pay for your sins …

He still didn't know what that damned song was or where he'd heard it.

On the other side of the room, in the second queen-sized bed, Sam lay on his side, listening to his brother's rasping breath, pretending to sleep.

The last three nights, the nightmares had come. He'd woken twice to Dean's voice, cracking as he'd called out in the night; twice to tearing breaths from the other bed. Dean wouldn't talk about them, but he didn't need to. Sam thought he had a pretty good idea what they were about.

The raw gasps slowed and steadied, and he heard the faint scratch of the flask lid being opened, the rustle of the covers as his brother shifted in the bed, the long exhale.

Over the last few years, he could hardly remember a time when he hadn't been woken at least once through the night by Dean's nightmares and night terrors, when they shared a room. After Hell, it'd been really bad. After Raphael, it'd been worse.

There was nothing he could do, at least not now. He'd contacted a few of the hunters that he knew were occasionally in touch with Ellie. All had said the same thing. She'd moved overseas, was going to be out of the country for a while. And that was all they knew. So far as Dean was concerned, the subject was off the table and it didn't seem likely it would be on in the near future.

"I think it would be kinder to send Dean back to Hell, don't you, Sam?"

He squeezed his eyes shut tightly, knowing who was crouching next to him, next to the bed.

He had no idea why the hallucination had taken the form it had; the corrupted and rotting form of Nick Swann. He'd seen Swann only a few times before he'd said yes, not knowing or caring how the devil had convinced the man to consent. It was one of the things he'd asked Ellie about, when most of the hallucinations had been about being back in the cage. She'd thought it was a way to distance himself from them, to believe they were outside of himself.

"I mean, between the nightmares and the drinking, it doesn't look like he's having that much fun. At least he could feel better about himself, justify all that guilt, all that angst, under a steady diet of torture?" There was a low chuckle, breathy against his shoulder. "Just a thought."

Sam pressed hard against the cut on his palm, the slight pain registering in his mind. He opened his eyes. There was no one beside the bed; the room was quiet aside from Dean's restless movements. He traced the scar on his hand, feeling the knotted contours uneasily. It had healed, underneath as well as on the surface. Pretty soon he wouldn't be able to use it to shut the devil out.

March 31, 2012. Thompson Falls, Montana

Ellie lay back in the over-sized tub, feeling the water cool around her. The bath had helped physically, easing a range of aches and pains she hadn't known she'd had, but it hadn't helped a lot with her mental state. She couldn't stick to one train of thought, her mind insisting instead on covering a range of unrelated topics, flitting from one to the next randomly, from the trivial to the agonising and back again. She was sure of one thing, but that was it.

Lifting her arm, she looked at the goosebumps along it and let out a deep sigh. Time to get out before the water got any colder. She raised herself, drawing her legs under her and standing up, the water running off her skin. The thick towel lay on the end of the tub and she wrapped herself in it as she stepped carefully out, turning back to snag the plug and free it.

Standing in the middle of the room, she realised she felt unanchored. Adrift. There was nothing she really had to do. She couldn't continue hunting now. The library still had to be catalogued, of course; the thought distant and without a sense of urgency. She frowned at her reflection in the large mirror above the vanity. She should get started on the database she'd been planning; her long-put-off project to provide a reference tool for those in the field.

She didn't move. It'd waited a while; it could wait a bit longer. The fatigue that'd been building over the past couple of weeks remained, had worsened, she thought, and the only thing she really wanted to do was crawl into bed and sleep.

Depression, or a natural course of events, she wondered? The desire made her uneasy. Too much like wanting to give up.

For the first time in her life, she had no pressing responsibilities, no cases to be worked, no one depending on her to save them or find the answers or retrieve some artefact. It should have been liberating, but instead it felt … empty, as if her purpose had vanished overnight. She could potter around this house doing absolutely nothing but sleeping if that's what she felt like. Shaking her head impatiently at the idea, she started to dry herself. It would feel better to get on with something useful and sleep when the tiredness was too much to hold back.

After weeks of going around in circles, trying to work out what had happened, she'd finally acknowledged she was never going to get the answers she needed. It would be preferable to work, she told herself. To bury herself with as much as work as she could handle.

She finished drying and walked into the bedroom, pulling clean clothes from the chest of drawers and dressing quickly. The soft woollen pants and oversized jumper were warm, giving her a feeling of protection – or armour, she considered with a derisory half-grin. She twisted her hair into a loose knot on the top of her head and pinned it place, then headed downstairs.

The kitchen was clean and warm. She'd figured out the eccentricities of the wood-fired range and kept it lit. Moving the kettle to a hot part of the plate, she turned back to the cabinets and took down a clean cup, spooning the herbal mixture Kath had recommended into it. Despite a desire to keep her business private, Katherine and Kasha had both known something was wrong when she'd called. Neither had pried too much. The kettle whistled and she filled her cup and carried it down the hall to the study.

Along one wall the line of printers were pushing out paper, articles from around the world that'd matched her search criteria. It was a quicker and cheaper way of getting information than getting the newspapers themselves, and she'd refined the process as tightly as possible, the bots searching out certain keywords and phrases, returning the information that matched to within ninety percent.

Up and running for three days now, the file of printouts on the desk was more than six inches thick. Every piece of publicly available information, and some not so publicly available, on everything she knew or could deduct about the leviathans. Somewhere in there, or still to come, was the information she needed. The information that would tell her what they were doing, and where, and when. And how to wipe them out.

She settled herself at the desk, tucking a leg under her as she opened her email, shutting out the thoughts that clamoured at the back of her mind, focussing her attention on the screen and the contents. A dozen enquiries, results, correspondence and personal emails waited for her to open and read them. Scanning down the list, she clicked on Patrick's and started to read, ignoring the faint throb of the latest tension headache.

There were two references to a stone or a series of stones, given by God to an angel and hidden in the wilderness. The first had been recorded by a soldier, lost in the deserts between Iran and Jordan, who'd met a prophet somewhere in the trackless wastelands. He'd later recounted his story to the hunter who'd found him and nursed him back to health. It wasn't coherent, talking of serpents and giants, a great battle that'd raged for more than five hundred years. Ellie smiled at Patrick's comments, and opened the scan for the second reference.

That one was more interesting. The document was very old, written in Greek and translated to Latin, detailing the journey and arrival in Rome of a priest from Carpathia, carrying a rubbing of a tablet he told the Pope was the gift of a Messenger. The rubbing showing markings over the face of the stone, quite clearly, but none had been able to read the hieroglyphs and the priest had insisted that only the chosen of God could read it.

'The rubbing's consistent with the few surviving descriptions given by the soldier of the earlier account, Ellie.' Patrick had written. 'There's a file here on a legend called the Word of God – it's backed up by some other references; anecdotal, mostly, and never fully corroborated or confirmed – about a set of tablets written down by Mattara. The most valid accounts we can find are some of the texts of the Apocrypha, but they're all over the place. Some of them reckon the Messenger was Enoch after God turned him into an angel; other say it's the Scribe of God, or the Guardian of the Watch, or all of them.'

'The etymology of the name's been argued back and forth for centuries, and no one the wiser now. I got in touch with Penemue about it and he confirmed both the tablets and their supposed contents. There were five set down by the Scribe, he said, and taken to earth when Metatron (or Mattara or bloody old Enoch) disappeared out of Heaven. Leviathan. Behemoth. The Mothers. Demons. And Angels. Each of them were supposed to give humanity the lowdown on how to control the creatures and how to shut down their planes. John turned up, loaded for bear. He's got a bunch of documents that reckon Lucifer was hunting the Scribe too, the word being that God'd given instructions to reveal what his favourite blue-eyed boy had done to help the levis on the tablet.'

Leaning back in her chair, Ellie stared at the screen. Manuals on how to shut it all down? That explained why Roman was frantically digging up the Middle East, she thought. She wasn't sure it was going to be much help to them – to anyone, she corrected herself quickly – in the short-term.

She was going to have to tell Patrick to pass on information directly to Frank, she thought, picking up her now-cold tea. Frank could pass it on to Dean. Maybe it would help the brothers to figure out what to do about the monsters.