"Well, this certainly looks like our kind of place."

Sam Winchester blew out a sigh and nodded in agreement at his brother's observation. He hitched the strap of his backpack higher on his shoulder. "Still no word from Cas?" he asked despite knowing the answer. Dean didn't even bother to pretend to check his phone.

"Not a damn word," the older Winchester grumbled as he slid his own backpack off and rubbed his sore shoulder. Sleeping rough hadn't been easy on either of them. Neither of them were getting any younger. "Drags us out to the middle of goddamn nowhere in fucking Mexico and can't be fucked to tell us what we're even here for."

"We didn't have to come out to the coordinates he sent us," Sam pointed out. Dean gave him an exasperated look and stepped off the dusty mountain road toward the building looming over them.

There had been no question that they would travel to the location Castiel had texted them with no explanation nearly two weeks prior. A year ago Dean had stabbed Cas in the chest during their first meeting. Sam wasn't sure how Dean's relationship with Cas had evolved to its current state, but he wasn't going to complain. Cas made Dean a better person.

Dean took the lead, as he usually did, through the rusted-open gates and up the steep path to the ancient abbey's front door. A barely legible sign declared the place to be the "Basilica de la Señora de los Dolores." The church was hidden deep in the Sierra Madre del Sur, familiar only to the villagers who provided the nuns with whatever supplies they could not grow or make themselves. A kind farmer had driven them the last few kilometers in his rickety truck, chatting amiably to Sam, who did his best with his passable Spanish.

Crossing the southern border had been a strenuous and extensive venture. Passports remained outside their ability to falsify, and they had been unable to sneak the Impala past Border Patrol. Whenever they couldn't find a local bus or hitch a ride, they were forced to walk. Sam hoped that whatever reasons Cas had for calling them to the tiny abbey, the angel had at least planned for their return trip.

They reached a second, smaller gate in much better repair and stepped into a thriving community. Black-clad nuns moved about among overflowing garden beds, lines of drying laundry, and flocks of domestic waterfowl. An initiate wearing a sky-blue dress and a white veil over her hair approached them within moments of their arrival with a friendly smile.

"¡Bienvenido!" she called. "¿Puedo ayudar?"

"Um…" Sam wasn't sure how to explain their presence. "Mi nombre es Sam, y esto es mi hermano, Dean--" Before he could finish the sentence the girl smiled and clapped her hands.

"¡Sí, sí! Ven conmigo por favor, señor."

"What did she say?" Dean demanded when she waved them forward.

"Apparently they're expecting us," Sam replied, quickening his already-lengthy stride to keep pace with the young woman, who navigated the labyrinthine courtyard with ease and at speed.

"Well thank fuck for that," Dean muttered under his breath. He winced when Sam elbowed him sharply in the ribs.

"Language," Sam hissed as they entered the main building behind their guide. "Holy ground, dude."

Dean glared back but didn't argue. The young woman led them to a closed wooden door just outside the sanctuary. She knocked and, when a voice called from within, opened the door with a curtsy. "El hermanos de Winchester, Madre," she announced.

Sam stepped into the small office first because his Spanish was better than Dean's, and was greeted by a middle-aged woman in full habit and wimple rising from her desk. "Welcome to Our Lady of Sorrows, Dean and Sam," she said in accented English. "I am very glad you arrived safely."

"So we were expected," Sam said for confirmation.

"Yes. We began to worry you were waylaid." The Mother Superior circled her desk and came to stand in front of the brothers. She was tiny in stature, with skin the color of weathered mahogany and sharp, intelligent eyes. She studied the two of them for a silent moment and Sam resisted the urge to squirm under her assessment. Her expression was entirely too knowing, as if she could see the condition of Sam's soul simply by staring into his eyes.

Who knew. Maybe she could. She was a nun, after all.

"Follow me," she said at length, and swept regally from the office, forcing the brothers to scramble to keep up. They both towered over the petite woman, yet she, like the initiate who had led them to her, possessed a speed incongruent to her size.

Dean was not able to keep his curiosity at bay for long. "Who told you to expect us?" he demanded. He had never had much patience for devotees of any religion, and despite being unwillingly caught up in the literal Apocalypse, didn't intend to start now.

"The same person who summoned you here," the Mother Superior replied in a mild tone, unperturbed by Dean's bluntness. "El Ángel de Jueves."

At Dean's impatient expression, Sam quickly interpreted, "She means Castiel. Angel of Thursday."

"I knew that," Dean growled, scowling at his younger brother.

They followed the abbess outside once more, but this time down a narrow, winding footpath away from the bustling abbey. Dean tried once more to extract information from the taciturn woman. "Did Castiel happen to mention what was so damn important that he needed us to come all the way out here for?"

"I do not ask questions of the Lord's angels, Dean Winchester," the Mother Superior chided. "I listen to their message, and I obey. And so should you."

"Yeah well, that hasn't worked out great for us so far," Dean muttered.

The path eventually petered out into scrubby, desert bushes where the abbess finally came to a halt. She peered down the incline below them and pointed. "There," she announced. "The answers you seek will be found in there."

Sam followed her hand to find a small chapel hidden amongst the wiry trees and boulders. It was constructed of stones collected from the mountainside and roofed with weathered wooden shingles, making it all but invisible to the naked eye. Before either brother could ask any further questions, the abbess turned and scurried back up the path.

Dean growled under his breath. "Fine. Let's go see what this is all about. I swear to god, though. If Cas has sent us on some wild fucking goose chase, I'm gonna…" he trailed off because there really wasn't anything, realistically, that he would do.

Their footsteps crunched loudly in the eerie mountain stillness, eliminating any chance they had of making an unobtrusive approach. The chapel did not have a door, but the windowless interior was unlit and impossible to see into. Dean grimaced, clearly not enjoying the idea of entering a contained space blind, but still ducked in ahead of Sam, ever the protective older brother.

Sam looked around once his eyes had adjusted to the gloom. Other than the altar set against the far wall, the only furniture in the room was a low bench for supplicants to kneel on to pray. The altar held two beeswax candles, a shallow brass bowl, and a hand-carved and -painted statue of the Virgin Mary, her face covered with one arm as she mourned the supine form of her Holy Son. For a moment, Sam thought the chapel was unoccupied. Then a voice broke the oppressive silence, causing both men to startle.

"Why are your bones glowing?"

Sam spun toward the sound with a bitten-off curse, reaching under his jacket toward the pistol tucked into his belt. He managed, barely, to keep himself from yanking it free when he discovered the source of the voice.

The woman appeared in her early twenties, dressed in an initiate's blue dress with her hair uncovered and unbound. She sat on the earthen floor in the corner by the door, feet tucked out of sight beneath her skirt. She had a book in one hand, though how she could read in the dim light, Sam had no idea.

It took him a few more seconds to process the question she had asked.

"Our bones are glowing?" he echoed in confusion, wincing internally at how stupid he sounded.

"You can see our bones?" Dean demanded a heartbeat later.

The woman's brow furrowed. "I can't usually see people's bones," she said as if this was a perfectly normal conversation topic. "Most people don't have bones that glow. Why do yours?"

"I—uh—I don't know," Sam stuttered. He looked over at Dean, hoping his brother might have a better idea of what was going on, only to find Dean staring at him with similar intentions. He sighed and turned back to the woman. "I'm not really sure what's going on, but I think we're supposed to talk to you."

The woman's expression cleared. "Which one are you?" she asked, her tone friendly and pleasant.

Sam blinked at her. "Excuse me?"

"Which one are you?" she asked again. "Dean, or Sam?"

"You know our names?" Dean interjected sharply.

"Yes," the woman said. "Castiel told me you would come here to meet me."

"Okay, listen, lady," Dean spat, stepping towards the woman. "I don't know what game you think you're playing, but you're going to tell us what the fuck is going on. I don't exactly appreciate getting dragged out to the ass end of nowhere to—"

"My name," said the woman in a voice that made Sam's heart go still in his chest. "Is Jericho."

Dean's mouth slammed closed and he stepped backwards involuntarily, apparently affected in the same manner as Sam. Sam wheezed and gripped his chest while his heart remembered how to beat again, his mind racing as he tried to figure out what the hell had just happened.

The woman, Jericho, hadn't even raised her voice. She hadn't sounded angry. Her tone had been firm but conversational. And yet Sam's heart had literally stopped functioning for over three seconds at the sound of it.

Sam swallowed against a dry mouth. "Are you an angel?" he asked hoarsely. She didn't feel like a demon, and even without the high of demon blood scorching through his veins he could sense there was nothing of damnation about her.

"No," she replied simply.

"Are you a demon?" Dean asked, not having Sam's unique senses.

"No," she said again. "I'm Jericho." She said the name as if it should mean something to them, and Sam thought that maybe it was a title instead. A memory worried at the back of his mind like a tongue at a toothache, but he couldn't quite figure out what it meant.

"Okay, Jericho," he said before Dean could get them in trouble again. "Why did Castiel want us to meet you?"

"He wants you to keep me hidden," she said, closing the book she'd been holding. She stood up in a languid, graceful manner, revealing herself to be nearly the same height as Dean. "He wants you to keep me out of Heaven's reach."

Sam's mind continued to churn with the implications of her words. "Why? Who are you?"

"What are you?" Dean added, his foul mood not improved by the cryptic conversation.

Jericho tilted her head, her long, curly hair tumbling over her shoulders. "And lo, the whole land thereof is brimstone, and salt, and burning, that it is not sown, nor beareth, nor any grass growth therein, which the Lord overthrew in his anger and his wrath." Her voice was strangely flat, barely above a whisper, but it drowned out all other sounds, leaving Sam's ears ringing when she stopped speaking and fell silent again.

The memory finally snapped into place. "You're a weapon," Sam blurted. "You're the weapon Heaven used to destroy Jericho."

"Amongst others," Jericho said, in a disconcertingly pleasant tone. "Castiel felt my absence from Heaven would delay Judgement long enough for the two of you to find a more permanent solution."

"And was he right?" Dean asked weakly.

Jericho shrugged. "I'm not certain. He left to cover our tracks and he never came back." She turned abruptly and walked out of the chapel. Sam turned to stare wide-eyed at Dean.

"What the fuck is this?" he hissed at his brother. "How the fuck are we supposed to hide that from Heaven?"

"You think I know?" Dean snapped back. "I don't exactly have a direct line to the Pearly fucking Gates, man."

Sam shook his head and moved toward the chapel entrance. Dean caught his arm. "The hell you think you're doing?" the older Winchester demanded.

"Trying to get some answers," Sam retorted. "I'd like to know exactly how badly we're fucked this time."

"Wouldn't that be nice," Dean snarked. He still released Sam's arm, allowing him to follow the woman.

Jericho hadn't wandered far. She stood only a few yards away from the chapel, head tilted back to stare unblinking at the bright sky overhead. Her hair was the color of fire, red and orange and gold strands flickering in the sunlight. She didn't look at Sam as he approached her again, Dean wisely keeping his distance.

"Did Castiel tell you anything else that could help us, uh, keep you out of sight?" he asked after a moment.

She lowered her face to stare at him. Her eyes were brown and slightly almond shaped. She had a dark tan, but the consistency made Sam think that it was due to genetics, not sun exposure. He wondered if she had to use a vessel the way angels did.

"No. I'm sorry. I don't really know much about what is happening here. I've been kept in the armory since…well, Jericho, and none of the angels bother to visit me. Only Castiel, sometimes. He didn't tell me why he wants to stop Judgement. But he asked for my help and he's always been kind to me, so I agreed." She caught her lower lip between her teeth, worrying at it until was red and puffy. "I don't know if he wanted you and your brother to use me against Heaven. I don't know if I'm supposed to just be a deterrent. He was very preoccupied at the time. But I do know that he values the two of you highly. So I will do everything I can to protect you both and keep you alive until he can explain everything."

And Sam absolutely believed she could. There was something about her, some indescribable presence that made doubting her word feel needlessly reckless. He swallowed thickly. "Well, let's hope it doesn't come to that," He said lamely, and immediately regretted it. Knowing their luck, he'd just jinxed them all.