FIC: "Thou Art Not Alone" (3b/6) (SPN, Nephilim'verse)
Return to Chapter Three (Part A), or the Nephilim'verse
“So,” Sam said, setting aside his cellphone, “it turns out that Anna Milton does exist and she did escape from Connor Beverley two days ago.”
“Great,” Dean replied, staring down the highway. There was surprisingly little snow in this part of Tennessee and the roads were clear. It was a good sign. “Glad we’re not wasting three days’ drive on nothing.” They came into a little down, dark and silent, save for the McDonald’s down the road. He was sick of fast food again already, but he was starving.
“Right.”
He could feel Sam’s stare in the silent darkness. “What?”
“You actually have to ask?” Sam replied. His disbelief was palpable. “I was there at the bar yesterday, too, Dean.”
“And?”
“And you burned Ruby with your hand, Dean.”
Dean hit the break a little too forcefully for just a red light. This wasn’t the conversation he wanted to have right now. Hell, he really wasn’t in the mood for conversation at all.
“What, it’s okay for you to use your powers or whatever to hurt a demon - a demon who’s been useful to us - but I can’t exorcise them and send them to Hell, because it’s wrong?”
“There’s a big difference,” Dean said curtly, “between what you can do and whatever it is that I can do, Sam. A huge difference.”
Sam scoffed. “Right. Because there’s such a huge difference between angels and demons.”
“I’m not-”
“Whatever.”
The light turned green. He wasn’t hungry anymore. They passed the red and yellow building without comment.
“Ruby saw something in you, Dean, something that scared her. And Ruby doesn’t scare easily.”
“Yeah, well, I saw something in her all right,” Dean told him, “and it scared the shit out of me, too.”
Sam frowned; Dean could see it in the reflection on the windshield. “What did you see?” he asked, his tone changing. “Was I wrong about her? Is she in on Azazel’s plans?”
“No,” Dean replied gruffly. “Sam, what I saw - what I felt-”
“Tell me.”
“I saw her humanity, Sam, the last shreds of a human soul. She wants to be good, for you, because she’s almost in love with you. Congratulations, Sammy. You’ve reformed a demon.”
The remainder of the drive to Nashville was conducted in heavy silence.
It became clear as he began to flip through Anna Milton’s folder of sketches that she was the real deal - whatever she was. There were references to the Witnesses, and Sem Hain, and the angels, that no civilian could have cobbled together. The psychiatrist on her case had no idea what she’d been dealing with. He already felt bad for Anna and he’d never met her.
He let Sam drive to the Miltons’ home, a neighborhood in the odd but aptly named town of Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina; he was trying too hard not to think to concentrate on the road. Sam had been right back at Bobby’s: he did want to know what was happening to him, what he was becoming, but all the possibilities scared him to death. He raised up his hand to eye level and stared at his palm, his fingers. He didn’t look any different not there or anywhere he could see, but he had burned Ruby with just a touch. How could that be?
It occurred to him, after a good five minutes of staring at his hand, that he was probably in some kind of shock. He almost felt drugged.
Mr. and Mrs. Milton were cold when they arrived, blood spilled and necks broken by demons who’d beat them there. It was a nice house, something Dean could have imagined Sam living in if he’d stayed at Stanford and gotten that law degree he’d been so set on. It was normal, albeit a little churchy with the décor, but then he recalled that Anna’s dad was a deacon in their church. ‘Her paranoia took on religious overtones,’ the psychiatrist had said. ‘She was convinced that the devil was about to rise up and end the world.’
The ‘religious overtones’ paid off: Anna was hiding at the church.
“The Dean?”
“Well, yeah, the Dean, I guess.”
“The angels talk about you. The first words I heard - September eighteenth - ‘Dean Winchester has been saved. Castiel has pulled him from the pit. Tell Michael that he may rejoice. Spread the good news. Hail Ediniel. Hail Ediniel.’”
“Ediniel?”
“I think it’s the name of an angel, but…I’ve never heard him speak. No one talks to him, just about him. I think they’re waiting for him to arrive.”
“And when is that?”
“Soon.”
Ruby’s timing was perfect, just as his skin started to itch like something more evil than her was coming close. Dean didn’t think he’d ever been glad to see her before. The burn had healed, clear olive skin showing as she grabbed Anna and ran.
“Don’t you recognize me, Dean? Oh, I forgot - I’m wearing a pediatrician today.”
Even as the demon beat on him, Dean didn’t recognize him, and it didn’t have a damn thing to do with the vessel he wore; he didn’t remember anything coherent from Hell. The hideousness of his natural face, under the human skin, showed through; he’d nearly fallen over with the flash of memory of the day before he’d died, of all those demons, of Ruby’s real face. The demon switched to choking and nothing else registered. He ignored the demon’s ranting and concentrated, trying to remember what he had done at the bar as an accident. He summoned the feeling he’d had at that moment and pushed it all into his hands, pushing against the demon’s face, trying to break his hold.
The demon yowled in pain and loosened his grip.
That was enough. Dean pulled away, struggling a little more than he’d hoped, and grabbed Sam. As they went through the stained glass window, he momentarily hoped he was one of those nephilim and he’d sprout wings on the way down.
The sensation of his shoulder popping out of joint as he hit the ground cured him of the idea.
He had to give Ruby credit again: she was all business when she arrived in the form of a motel housekeeper. He couldn’t even blame her for possessing the woman for all of a few minutes to give them instructions. This was a serious situation that called for desperate measures.
It took them almost an hour to walk to the cabin, sore and worn out from the demon ambush before. His shoulder was almost feeling normal and he tried not to think too hard about what that could mean.
“Glad you could make it,” Ruby said, opening the door.
“Yeah, thanks,” Sam said, and there was that weird gentle tone again. Crap. Yeah, because Mom would’ve been thrilled to see Sam hook up with a demon. Even one who was not like all the other demons. “Anna, are you okay?”
Anna was sitting on a crappy little couch but her eyes were bright and smiling. “Yeah, I think so. Ruby’s not like the other demons. She saved my life.”
“I hear she does that,” Dean muttered under his breath.
Ruby gave him a look.
Aw, hell. He rolled his teeth over his lower lip and forced himself to meet her eyes. “I guess I, uh - you know.”
Ruby frowned. “What?”
He scrunched his nose. “Guess I owe you. For Sam. I mean - just - you know.”
Ruby crossed her arms, scowling a little. “Don’t strain yourself, glowworm.”
Glowworm? The hell? “Okay, then. Is the moment over?” he asked a little too eagerly. “’Cause that was awkward.”
Sam was laughing at him. Dean ignored him. But at least Sam got stuck with breaking the news about Anna’s parents. It was a fair trade-off. And then, in the midst of Anna’s grief, her face changed: she went blank for a moment and then searched the room with her eyes. “No. It’s too soon. Oh, god, please.”
“Wait - what’s too soon?” Dean asked, crouching down in front of her, glad for a distraction from Ruby’s dislike of him. “Anna?”
“The angels,” she whispered. “They think I should die.”
“What? Why?”
“I don’t know!”
And then he felt them approaching. One unfamiliar, one vaguely familiar - and how on earth did he even know that much? The door burst open and two figures came through out of the darkness, their outlines shimmering slightly in his sight. Dean blinked, frowning, grabbing his gun, reassured by the familiar feel of metal, and after a moment he could see the human vessels they were possessing.
The familiar-feeling one was wearing a woman. That was new.
But it was the unfamiliar one that spoke first. “Stand down, Dean Winchester,” he said calmly. “Samuel Winchester.” He cocked his head. “And Rudtegard of Eselheim. Indeed, Michael did not overstate the complexity of this tribe,” he said to his companion, sounding a little surprised.
Dean glanced at Ruby. Rudtegard of Eselheim? He could understand why she went by ‘Ruby’ these days. He looked back at the angels. “Tribe?” he said. “What do you mean by that?”
In grand angelic tradition, he ignored Dean’s question. “No,” said the familiar-feeling one, the woman, “Michael said one should never underestimate the line of Miriamel. That was my error before.”
That was my error before. Dean squinted at the woman. “Castiel?” he ventured, incredulous. ‘The line of Miriamel’ - what the hell does that mean?
She nodded, a brief, birdlike dip of the head, but so damn familiar that she couldn’t be anyone else. So angels were flexible, gender-wise. Where was the guy Castiel had possessed last time? He shook his head. “And your friend?” he asked.
“I am Gabriel,” said the man. Great, another big-name angel. Michael, Uriel, Gabriel - who was next? Metatron? Somehow he didn’t see Alan Rickman praying to be of use to the angels. Gabriel continued: “We have come for Anna.”
“Why?” Sam asked.
“To save her,” Gabriel said simply.
Anna grabbed Dean’s arm, as though nothing could get her while he was around. It tickled at his grit and mettle. “You want to kill me,” she accused. “Why should I believe you?”
“Child,” Gabriel said softly, coming close. Anna flinched, pulling Dean with her a little, but Gabriel managed to touch her. It was a weird angle, but it looked like he simply brushed a strand of hair off her face. It was…paternal. It reminded him of Michael. “Child, you have misunderstood us. You hear our words, but do not know our meaning.”
“Okay,” Dean said slowly. “She hears ‘kill’, you mean - what? Hug? Bless? Rescue? I’m not exactly seeing a lot of room for interpretation here.”
Gabriel blinked at him. “Castiel is right about you, Dean Winchester, and Michael, too,” he said. “We simply wish to save Anna.”
“Still not hearing anything new, Gabe.”
“Anna is an Oracle, Dean,” Castiel said from her place nearer to the door. “She is a-” She seemed to search for words. “She is a security risk.”
“Oracle. Right,” Dean said. “Like Delphi. Fumes and hallucinations.” Four feet away, Sam choked. Served him right for planting the idea in his head in the first place.
“No, not like Delphi,” Gabriel corrected. “An Oracle is a very special kind of being. She possesses angelic blood.”
“What, like the nephilim?” Sam asked with equal parts curiosity and suspicion.
Castiel stepped forward eagerly. “Michael has not informed us-” She fell silent as Gabriel held up a hand. “No,” he said. “That is not what Samuel means. He speaks of the human lore, not the actuality.” Gabriel stepped back, away from Anna, and Dean, to whom she was still somewhat attached. “There are indeed nephilim, Samuel, but Anna is not one of them. Rather, one of her ancestors was. She carries traces of those abilities from millennia ago. Random genetic combinations have manifested these abilities in her after many generations of dormancy.”
“The nephilim were evil,” Anna whispered, but at the same time her grip on Dean’s arm - not the one with the busted shoulder, not that it hurt anymore - loosened. “They hastened the coming of the flood.”
Gabriel gave her a crooked smile, indulgent. “Don’t believe everything you read.”
“And we don’t believe everything we hear, either, so get to the point,” Dean butted in.
“The blood is dilute, but she is of my lineage,” Gabriel said plainly. “I would not bring pain to the child of my children’s children and generations in between. I would protect her soul from the coming harm.”
“Coming harm? You want to kill her. That’s not harm?” Sam said, but then Ruby laid her hand on his arm. “He means the demons,” she said. “They want to ascend her soul before the demons have a chance to get her.” Dean saw that hint of humanity in her again. “The demons will tear her apart if they have a chance and use everything they learn from her to break as many seals as they can. Castiel was right when she said Anna was a security risk.”
Castiel stared at Ruby with obvious curiosity. Ruby looked away, like it was painful to be stared at like that. For all Dean knew, it was painful; an angel and a demon meeting eye-to-eye? That couldn’t happen very often. “What does this ascending her soul thing involve?” he finally asked.
“Dean!” Anna hissed. He could almost feel her anger - it was hard for him to imagine that what the angels were suggesting was anything to be happy about, but though he didn’t always agree with the angels, they’d always been right about things on some level. “Just hear them out, Anna,” he said. “Let’s just hear them out.”
“Her soul will be removed from this plane of existence and transferred to another,” Castiel said, like she was reciting something memorized. “From the mortal realm, Earth, to the transcendent realm called Heaven in your language. She will be given choices there, among them the opportunity to return to Earth in a new incarnation.”
“Reincarnation,” Dean said. “Huh. What’s the catch?”
Gabriel frowned. “There is no catch, Dean.” The look on his face told him that Gabe couldn’t even begin to understand why Dean would think there’d be a catch. The guy obviously didn’t have many dealings with demons.
“Will she still be able to hear you guys if she’s reincarnated?” Sam asked.
“Not as she does now,” Castiel said. “She may be a psychic, a medium. The soul and the body are not one, but neither are they completely separate. She would not necessarily enter a body descended from nephilim. Her experiences in this life may leave her consciousness sensitive to the supernatural.”
“Like Pamela,” Dean said gruffly. His discomfort of the memory was smoothed over a little when Castiel had the grace to look repentant as she replied in the affirmative.
“Stop! Just - everyone, stop,” Anna begged. “Reincarnation. Psychics. Oracles. Nephilim. Just - stop. Please.”
Gabriel reached for her again, saying her name softly, but Anna pulled away, dropping her hand from Dean’s arm. He suddenly felt cold without her touch. “No,” Anna said. “I can’t - I can’t think with all of this. You’re all talking about this like it’s nothing when it’s really everything. You’re asking me to die.”
“I am asking you to live another life,” Gabriel said, in tone that seemed to mean he was correcting a mistake but Dean got it, he got what Anna was saying. The angels just couldn’t understand, but Dean did, and from the looks on Sam and Ruby’s faces, they did, too, despite their seeming unspoken agreement with Gabriel and Castiel’s plan. This wasn’t just some kind of witness protection program, where you ran around with a new name and some hair dye; this was a whole new level of ending a life.
“Is it her choice,” Dean suddenly asked, “or is this one of those things where you’re going to do it anyway?”
“Why would she not agree to do this?” Castiel asked, her face truly clear of any kind of guile. Michael had been right: Castiel was young and didn’t know much about humans. Gabriel seemed to recognize this as well and turned and gave her some kind of silent instruction. Castiel disappeared in a blinding light - blinding to Sam, Ruby and Anna, he realized as he saw them turn away or raise an arm against the brightness - and the sound of wings. When the light dissipated, Gabriel still stood there, a sad expression on his face. “You have twelve hours, or until the demons find you,” he said softly. “We will be nearby. I pray we will be near enough.”
They holed up in the abandoned cabin. It was freezing, but there was a fireplace in the inner room and plenty of well-aged wood stacked nearby and it was comfortable enough by the hearth after a while. Anna was given the best chair - big enough for two, really - by silent consensus and sat, silent and blank faced, by the fire. When she’d been quiet a good hour and no other supernatural creatures had tried to blow down the doors, Dean volunteered Sam for a food run. Ruby volunteered herself to assist. “What, this angel crap getting to be too much for you?” Dean asked, almost teasing. Crap. Sam was rubbing off on him. Ruby was not a friend.
Damn. She was something. He shook his head. Sam could figure it out for them.
“You’re kidding, right?” she said, eyebrows raised and smirking with bravado before reaching into one of her jacket pockets. “You guys don’t have any money and I don’t think any of us want to wait a couple of hours for Sam to pull off a convincing drunk and hustle a game or two of pool.” She pulled out a thick wad of cash and the smirk almost turned into a smile. “I got your five hundred back from that idiot in Larchwood after the two of you left. Apparently, he thought a pretty girl was going to be even more stupid than Sam. It was a piece of cake.”
Sam stared at the money. “That’s more than the five hundred.”
“What can I say?” Ruby continued, stuffing it back into her pocket. “I’m good. Besides, I have an idea about keeping the demons away. We’re going to need supplies. No guarantees, but it’ll buy us some time.”
“Still got that witchy mojo, Rudtegard?” Dean said, remembering that she had been a witch when she was human, however long ago that was. “Gonna throw together a spell?”
She glared. “Rudtegard von Eselheim was an idiot who made a stupid deal and died biting off more than she could chew,” she said angrily. “I have six hundred years of common sense about demons and what keeps them at bay. You can either accept my help or fuck off.” That said, she walked - stomped, more like - outside.
Dean exchanged a series of confused looks with Sam that boiled down to ‘demon women are just as confusing as human women’. Then, shrugging his shoulders, Sam followed Ruby out.
“I don’t want to die,” Anna suddenly said half an hour after Sam and Ruby left. Dean almost jumped out of his chair, having heard nothing but the crackle of the fire and the occasional piece of wood falling as it burned away for a good long time. “I don’t want to die, but I don’t want the demons to win, either.”
He scooted his chair closer. “I get that. Believe me, I get that.”
She stared into the flames for a minute before looking at him again. “You were in hell.”
“Yeah. Yeah, I was.”
“It was bad, wasn’t it?”
He gave a half-chuckle of surprise. “Understatement of the year,” he told her.
“Tell me.”
“I don’t really remember anything,” he finally admitted, “but I have dreams. Nightmares, really. They get pretty nasty.”
She reached out, rested her hand on his. He hadn’t realized how tightly he was gripping the arm rest. “I have to know.”
“I get flashes, stuff I can’t quite figure out. But there’s pain. Sometimes someone’s hurting you and sometimes you’re the one doing the hurting. I can’t - I can’t really say anything more than that,” he said. It was the God’s honest truth, to borrow a phrase.
She sat quietly for a few minutes, mulling it over. “Why did you go to hell?” she finally asked. “I hear the angels talking about you, and - I don’t know what you did that was so terrible. They say you’ve done amazing things - saved people from monsters and demons, risked your life for people who will never know what you did-” She started crying.
“Hey, hey, what’s this about?” he asked gently, getting out of his rickety seat and sitting down next to her. “What’s going on?”
Anna wiped at her eyes with shaky fingers. “I just - ever since I started hearing them talk to you, about the godly things you’ve done but you went to Hell anyway, I’ve tried to figure out how you could have-” She took a breath. “How you could have offended God so greatly despite everything. If someone like you went to Hell, then - what does it really take for a human soul to escape that?”
“Aw, crap, no, Anna,” he said, wrapping an arm around her shoulder, hugging her tight. She felt cold to his touch, despite the nearness of the fire; she was shaking. “It wasn’t like that. Anna, it wasn’t that I wasn’t good enough or something like that. Not the way you think. I - jeez.” He took a breath. “I sold my soul to a demon to bring my brother back from the dead. Things were pretty bad and it looked like they were only going to get worse - not just for me, but I guess the whole world - and I didn’t know how to fix it without Sam. So I made a deal. Every deal is different - I had a year before it came due - but it all ends up the same place: you go to Hell. I was just lucky enough that these angels seem to think I’m good for something and they sent Castiel in to get me. I’m the one who decided I wasn’t good enough, Anna, not God. I made a choice, free will and all, and I chose Sammy instead of me.”
She was crying again, but there was a hint of a smile on her face. “Oh, thank God. Thank God,” she whispered under the tears. “I’m not lost.”
He let her cry it out and when the shaking went away, he said, “I don’t think Gabriel and Castiel would’ve said you’ll go to Heaven if they didn’t mean it. I mean, I don’t know them personally, but the angels aren’t really into flat-out lying.” Omitting things, twisting words, maybe - but not out-and-out lying.
“I know,” she said. “But-”
“Anna, what did you do?”
She looked away. “You’ll think it’s stupid-”
“Hey,” he said, pulling her face gently back in his direction. “Just tell me.”
“A year ago,” she started, speaking slowly. “I was engaged. He was training to be a police officer, up in Norfolk. We had a fight and my roommate - roommate, not a friend; we barely ever saw each other with our schedules, and it was okay as long as she paid her half of the rent on time, you know?” Dean nodded, though he didn’t really know. This was stuff normal people did and he had never been normal. “Anyway, my roommate talked me into going out. Said it would cheer me up. I got drunk; I slept with this guy I met at the bar. Two nights later, before I could see him again and explain, my fiancé was in a car accident and died. His friends in Norfolk said he was on the way to see me, to try to make up. The coroner said there was something wrong with his heart, something that didn’t come up in his physicals for the police academy, and it just happened to give out on the freeway. Just bad luck. But-” She sighed. “I felt so guilty, like I had to be punished for what I’d done. I dropped out of school for a quarter; I lost an internship I’d tried so hard to get; my roommate moved out on short notice. It felt like the whole world knew what I’d done, even though I knew the only person who could possibly know was my roommate. And just when things seemed to be getting better, a new quarter was beginning and I’d get back on track - it was September-”
“And you started hearing the angels.” Just bad luck, she’d said. Pretty fucking bad luck for a normal person. For someone not a Winchester.
“And everyone thought I was going crazy, including me. My fiancé was dead and my life was a mess and wasn’t that enough punishment? No, now I was going crazy and in a hospital. Wasn’t God appeased yet?” she said, a distant look in her eyes. “And the angels wanted me dead - surely I was wrong about everything now and God was made of wrath instead of love. Surely I was bound for Hell.”
“No,” he whispered, hugging her to his chest. “You’re not. You’re a good person, Anna, you have to believe that.”
“Thank you,” she said softly. “Thank you.” She pulled away, but not far; she straightened and he could feel her breath on his face. She kissed him - she started it, not him, but he soon responded. It was slow and sweet and gentle, low on passion and high on comfort. They took their time without any hint of it going anywhere beyond kissing and he was okay with that. It was one of his favorite kinds of human contact and he knew he’d been pulling away from people lately. Hell and angels and strange new powers did that to you, and he couldn’t imagine that a mental hospital and a dead fiancé had been much easier on her.
Finally, it ended and she leaned back. “I don’t want to die,” she repeated softly, “but I don’t want the demons to win, either.”
“I know.”
She leaned against him and it was just nice and comfortable to hold her like that. The fire was settling into a pleasant glow and after a few minutes he got up to add more wood. She curled up against him again when he sat back down. “So,” she said into his chest, “if you brought Sam back from the dead, does that mean he’s a zombie?”
He laughed. “No more than the rest of us Winchesters, I guess,” he said.
“There’s got to be a story in that response.”
And so he started telling her the story of the adventures of the brothers Winchester. By the time he got to Sam going off to Stanford, she was asleep.
The sound of the Impala pulling into the driveway woke him up. He barely had a chance to sit up straight before Sam and Ruby came in, carrying a couple of pizzas (him) and a brown paper bag (her).
He hadn’t known a demon could look at you with that combination of sadness and longing before.
He hadn’t known he could feel sorry for a demon before.
“Don’t worry,” Ruby said after a moment, clearly uncomfortable. “I hexed your car, too.”
Anna woke him in the middle of the night. The fire had turned to low, glowing coals, barely giving off any light at all. The world was dark and made of sounds: the fizzling sound of the coals, Sam snoring, Ruby breathing, the creaking of boards. “Dean?” Anna whispered.
“Yeah?”
“I’ve decided.”
He threw some more wood on the fire before he let her pull him outside, just in case.
The first time was slow. She said it had been a year for her, that drunken mess that started everything, and if this was going to be the last time in this life, she was going to take her time. She marveled at how few scars he had, gently touching the fading handmark on his arm, and he had to explain that he’d come back untouched. She giggled at his story of trying to embarrass Sam with the ‘rehymenated’ line and said he certainly seemed to know what he was doing for such a mature virgin. He admitted he’d had sex with the bartender there; she teased that once barely counted and put her hands on his wrists, encouraging his fingertips on her breasts. He felt her presence like he did the angels, warm in his blood, and she groaned. “Your hands are so warm,” she whispered and he pulled back, afraid of burning her, but she grabbed his wrists again and pulled him close. “No,” she said, “do that again.”
“Are the angels talking yet?”
“They are,” she said, and she got a strange look on her face. “Gabriel’s worried about what might happen.”
“I don’t blame him,” he said. “What else?”
“Uriel’s saying-” She giggled lightly, but her expression was still dark.
“What?”
She smiled. “He’s surprised you’re attracted to me. He seems to think you usually go for brunettes.”
“Okay, first: I’m an equal-opportunity womanizer, everyone’s welcome, and second: I could have lived without knowing that Uriel even knows about my love life, let alone cares about it.”
“Hm.” She gave him a disbelieving look; okay, so maybe he wasn’t quite that easy, but anyone who knew him for five minutes knew he had a healthier than average appreciation for the fairer sex. He went for ladies who knew what they were doing, strong women who could kick his butt if he pissed them off; despite Sam’s occasional disapproving look, he was not actively trying to leave a broken heart in every town they passed through. Anna was more…waif-like than his usual paramour but she could hold her own.
It had nothing to do with the whole freaky angel powers gig, like meeting like, or any of that emotional crap Sam would analyze to death.
She got that distant look in her eyes again. “They’re talking about Ediniel again.”
“Whatever. I don’t care about him. It’s just you and me right now, babe. Just you and me.”
She tilted her head and now she was back with him. “I’ll try to remember that. Think you can distract me enough to forget about them?”
“I’m always up to a challenge.”
The second time was faster, more frantic. He ignored the fading pain of bruises, cuts, and sore muscles, pushed her to do the same. “Here,” he said, guiding her lips to a spot on his shoulder, numb with bruising. “And there,” he said, putting her hand on his thigh, near where he’d once had a scar. He could feel her touch there, new after six years of nothing. “Where?” he asked and she just said, “Keep doing that, right there, that’s it - oh, God.”
They watched the sunrise from the hood of the car. It was cold, freezing even, but Anna wanted the full effect, which apparently was not possible inside with the heater running. They wrapped up in what blankets he could find in the trunk, huddling together underneath, and waited as the sky slowly lightened and became washed with bright color.
His head began to ache slightly, and at first he thought it was exhaustion; the last few days had been trying, and he was still recovering from jumping out a stained glass window, no matter what his shoulder claimed to the otherwise. Then he realized the hum in the distance was growing louder, a sound he’d thought was highway traffic a few miles off; it was a murmur, a cacophony, indistinct voices. Louder and louder until at once he couldn’t stand it any longer and he wrenched himself from Anna’s side, throwing his hands over his ears, but that did nothing. “Dean? Dean?” she cried, grabbing at his shoulder. “What’s wrong? All you okay?”
He could barely hear her over the voices, like a crowded diner where every soul squished in was shouting at the top of their lungs. “The sound,” he said through clenched teeth. “The voices. God, it hurts.”
“I don’t - I don’t hear anything,” she said, pulling the blankets back over his shoulder. “I mean, the angels are upset about something, but you don’t hear them. That’s not what’s special about you.” She paused. “Is it?”
“Not until now, it wasn’t,” he managed.
“Okay, okay,” she said. “Try to pick one out. Any one of them. You’ve met more of them than I have - maybe if you think of one of those meetings. Concentrate on one of them. Can you do that?”
He couldn’t and under the pain he was mad. He was mad at Michael - why wasn’t he warning him about these things? Why wasn’t he telling the whole story? What was he holding back? Why wasn’t he around more often? - And then -
“It is more than a month away.”
“You must tell him, Michael. The boy is precocious.”
“There is still time. Full manifestation will not be early.”
“It will be easier if he knows.”
“I know.”
“He wants to trust you, Michael. He should not fear learning what he is.”
“Dean? Dean? Can you hear me?”
He took a deep breath. “Yeah,” he said. “I can hear you, nice and clear.”
She pulled the blanket tighter around him and then clasped his hands in hers. They were warm, so different from the evening before. “Are you okay?” she asked.
He nodded. “I will be.”
“Did you hear them? Did you find one to listen to, I mean?”
“Yeah,” he said slowly. “I listened. For a minute, I listened.”
She frowned, her eyes sad. “I guess it’s over.”
“Yeah.”
“I guess we should go back, then.”
“Yeah.”
She slid off the hood.
“So, if I’m an Oracle, if I can hear the angels and I see demon faces, and that’s just a little bit of angel blood or DNA or whatever from forever ago, then-” She hesitated.
“Go on.”
“Then if you can hear them, and see them, and - God, what else? You said you can sense them coming. Burn demons. If I can do what I do with just a little connection, and you can do so much more, then how close is your family relationship to the angels? What are you, then?” she asked.
He swallowed, bit his lip, breathed. “I don’t know.”
Continue to Chapter Four