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—Day 138—
Ensconced in the middle of the couch under a blanket due to the fact that even this close to noon, the temperature now only barely reaches above freezing, Dean grimly continues his third re-read of the reports from Ichabod.
He began just after Amanda left at noon the previous day, and his mood, while not particularly cheerful, degenerated rapidly despite an impromptu trip to his shooting range that afternoon. Rage and grief resulted in the destruction of many, many, many targets until his right hand shook too badly to even hold a gun, fingers refusing to even close, and his left little better; for the first time, Castiel was forced to stop him before he did himself serious injury. Dean didn’t even seem to notice Castiel treating his blood-streaked palms, skin a mass of broken, oozing blisters between the bright swells of new ones growing beneath the developing calluses. Glancing at his still-bandaged hands, gauze wrapped up to his wrists, he looks away before Dean catches him; Dean may not have noticed the damage he’d done to his palms, but he never stopped looking at the half-healed outline of teeth just above the wrist until it was covered by the gauze, expression a mixture of blind rage and blank curiosity edged with uneasy fear.
Observation and carefully worded questions over the last four days have confirmed beyond any doubt that Dean doesn’t remember anything from when he arrived on the second floor of the daycare to the moment Castiel entered the courtyard. After that is a blurred, inchoate mess that consists of snatches of his conversation with Castiel from his seat on Grant’s dismembered body between spaces of uncertainty, becoming steadily more organized until the moment, crystal-clear despite being unspoken between them, that Dean told Castiel to shoot him.
His nights, however, are where he makes amends for what he can’t do awake, punishing himself in endless, terror soaked nightmares that he can’t remember in more than unformed impressions of revulsion and sickened pleasure taken in inflicting pain and his own endless horror. Private consultation with Amanda, who like Dean was raised to be a hunter from childhood, confirmed his own belief that if Dean’s own mind, inured to horrors beyond anything most humans, even hunters, ever have to bear, felt it necessary to block it out, it was possible it had good reason to do it.
(“I listened to the way he questioned everyone yesterday,” she told him, glancing at the door every few minutes despite the fact that Joseph was keeping Dean occupied with very important business regarding his last trip to the border and wouldn’t let him out of his sight until Amanda personally dropped by with a casual question to indicate it was safe for Dean to return home. “And I watched him while I was telling him about the daycare to see how he reacted. Cas, if there was something there to trigger, that should have done it. If he remembers on his own, that’s one thing, but telling him the details to force it…”
“You’re certain?”
“Nothing’s certain in life, even death and taxes; it’s always gonna be best guess now and hope for the best.” Licking her lips, she met his eyes. “He knew Grant.”
“I know—”
“You don’t…” She looked away, taking a deep breath before looking at him again. “Grant was thirteen when his entire town was wiped out by Croat just before Kansas was zoned. His parents—they were picking up his baby sister from preschool on their way out of town when one of the teachers turned on her class, the one his sister was in.” She paused, swallowing convulsively before continuing. “They got out, but not before—they were all infected and knew it. Grant was waiting in the car, though, he was still okay, so they told him they’d changed their minds, decided to lock up the house and wait it out.
“They took him home, locked him in their attic with all the food in the house and the bottled water they’d bought for when they left town, and told him they loved him and always would. They blocked all the windows and doors as best they could to protect him, used their truck to block the front door, and drove the car to the other side of town to kill themselves and her, just so he wouldn’t have to hear the gunshots. It was only luck that Alison’s group happened to check that town for livability and found him.” She looked away, swallowing again. “He was in shock. Dolores had to put him on an IV, and Tony was force feeding him in a goddamn van for almost a week just to keep him alive before they found Ichabod.”
In the infected zone, tragedy was the rule with painfully few exceptions, but its power somehow never seemed to lessen no matter how great the number. “I didn’t know—”
“You couldn’t,” she interrupted, eyes suddenly filling with tears. “No one knew, not all of it, except Dolores, maybe. Grant never told them any more than what they could figure out for themselves—except Dean. And then he told me, because he wanted to know how old he had to be before he could start training for Chitaqua and be—be a hunter like Dean and help him save the world. So he could stop what happened to him—to all of them—from happening again.”
Dean’s amused anecdotes regarding Grant and Connie now have a different context. “Oh.”
She wiped her eyes impatiently. “That demon would have killed Grant anyway, we both know that; the kind that goes in for human sacrifice make sure the meatsuit’s fucked before they leave, voluntary or not. All Dean did was cut short what it would have made Grant do before it let him die. How Dean did it….” She shrugged helplessly. “Details. For now, if his mind thinks he shouldn’t remember it, I’d say it knows better than we do what he can handle. Which I’m pretty sure you already figured out on your own.”
“I wasn’t sure I was being objective.” He looked away, almost ashamed of admitting his own failure in his duty to Dean. He deserved the best, and Castiel’s best will never do anything but fall far short.
“You aren’t,” she answered bluntly, closing a hand over his in unexpected reassurance. “You can’t be; no one is, not when it comes to someone they love.”
“It’s my job to—”
“It’s not your job to do everything,” she interrupted, fingers squeezing his in emphasis. “It’s your job to do what you can, know what and when you can’t, and get help to get it done, and by the way, that’s exactly what you just did. Congratulations on your leadership and your human skills,” she added with a faint smile. “Even humans fuck up there, and I’m pretty sure that’s one thing Dean’s never learned himself.”
Looking into the warm blue eyes, he realized he was smiling. “Thank you.”
She smiled back. “Anytime.”
Ichabod’s final count of casualties totaled sixty-nine: fifty-five adults and fourteen children (not including the seven adults who lived in Ichabod only to betray it). While tragic, the number is far lower than any town could have expected, a credit to Ichabod’s strict protocols and experience, but Dean judges victory not in those who survived, but defeat in those who didn’t. The names of the dead, like those of the team leaders that Dean hadn’t even known, are branded into his memory for all time, losses carried by a man for whom fault and responsibility are interchangeable at best.
Survival, however, always carries its own burdens, demanding payment for the privilege of living not limited to the grief for those that were lost. In a town that by necessity and choice required of its residents an intimacy unknown in even the smallest of towns before the Apocalypse, no one is exempt from paying it.
Sandar and Julio, the two members of patrol that were possessed when guarding the town center, are currently in Dolores’ care, but despite few injuries, the psychological impact of possession always lingers, especially in those whose duty is to protect others from harm and were forced to cause it themselves.
Glen, Serafina, and Francisco, the only teachers to survive, were spared only the sight of the victims in the daycare, not the knowledge of what happened or how they died. Though the building was thoroughly cleaned and the damage repaired, reminders exist in the empty spaces in each classroom that was once a child, a teacher, an adolescent or adult on duty, in the parents who no longer appear to drop off their children each morning and pick them up in the evenings.
Three entire families lost their lives in the daycare that day; a mother and her two children; a father and his only daughter; and two women newly married the previous spring died on the first floor only moments after the human infiltrators succumbed to the Croatoan virus they’d deliberately allowed to infect them; the women’s five year old son and two year old daughter were killed inches from the second floor stairs and safety. That may have been considered the kinder fate to some of those who survived and now lived the alternative.
Dwayne, six weeks from his third birthday and killed on the daycare’s second floor before Dean’s eyes, was the only child of his parents, who found Ichabod after fleeing the raiders who attacked their small town on the northern border of Kansas the year before. Del, only two days old when Castiel first visited Ichabod, was her mother’s first and only child, born seven months after the death of her father in one of the last attacks on Ichabod before the barrier enclosed Kansas. Ten year old Jessica and her four year old brother Lian were found alive and uninjured in the locked kitchen pantry, their dead mother slumped across the doorway with a bloody butcher knife still clutched in one cold hand, the Croat she’d frantically half-butchered even as she died beside her; Dean was the one who put the bullets in its head that finally ended the weakened, mindless atrocities it was still committing to her dead body. Sandy, Una’s five year old daughter, was among the last of the children to escape to the third floor as Una and her eldest son, fifteen year old Clark, blocked the stairs to protect them. Grant’s birth parents may have been dead, but Dolores became as much his mother as the woman who bore him over the short years she’d had him, her contained grief no less for it being under such strict control as she continued in her duties to the town and the other survivors.
Ten grieving, bewildered children, brought to Ichabod as bait and now left alone in a town they barely know, live in a limbo of fear, loss, and uncertainty, victims of the most personal, most devastating kind of betrayal, the brutal violation of the trust invested in those given the gift and responsibility that comes with raising a child. If there’s anything to be thankful for, it’s their youth; only the oldest of them can even begin to grasp it, and Glenn and Serafina have worked tirelessly to shield them as best they could from what couldn’t be hidden.
Amanda wasn’t the only one who had the responsibility of ending the life of one of those infected; it was the duty of every leader in Ichabod to the people under their command. Manuel was the one to give Leanne, the only member of patrol who was infected, the shot that ended her life, and he and Teresa waited with her body and that of Hobby, who lost his life in the northern fields in defense of the town he loved. Tony took that duty for Jordan, a member of city services as well as a close, personal friend, who used his own body as a distraction in the northern fields to let the others escape in the few, too-long minutes before patrol arrived to protect them. Dry-eyed and tearless, Alison and Claudia stood witness with the other town leaders to the burning of the bodies from the moment the tinder caught until the ashes were placed within the town’s cemetery under a layer of salt before they were covered in earth, a single large stone with the date of death above a painstakingly carved list of the names of those that died.
Like Dean, they don’t see their success in those that survive, but failure in each and every death of those under their care.
(Some things couldn’t be written, and even more shouldn’t be, and not just for Dean’s sake; those things were private, meant for no ears but those chosen to share it. In the bedroom that night, Amanda told him more, spilling words between sobbing breaths that described life in the wake of a tragedy that left no one untouched.
She volunteered for duty in the mortuary as one of the few who hadn’t lost family by blood or choice and stood witness to the most intimate, most private moments of pain of those left behind; the agony of parents in silent vigil over their children, the children old enough to be allowed to do the same with and for their own parents and siblings, the extended families that gathered by each sheet-wrapped body, some having first waited out the short hours until the end with those infected from the other side of the fragile barrier of a pane of glass.
Cathy, Del’s mother, had to be dragged screaming from the tiny bundle of her child’s body, already half-unwrapped when they stopped her attempt to infect herself and is now being carefully watched and cared for by those in her building. The night before the bodies were burned, Connie evaded the watchers to see Grant one last time and had to be restrained by Amanda in her hysterical horror and grief at what was left of him until a shattered Dolores arrived to sedate her. Irrational from guilt and shock, Sandar escaped from the infirmary and broke into the mortuary to hold Leanne’s sheet wrapped body in his arms under Manuel and Teresa’s supervision the endless hours until he could carry it to the fire himself before he collapsed.
Amanda looked in vain for the faces of the four students she lost, feeling the shock of loss anew every time she couldn’t find them. Her new students channeled their fierce grief into learning everything she could teach them, burning out their pain in exhaustion on the training field each day, to honor the memory of those that they replaced. Jake and Peter were the two residents the demons possessed that he and Amanda killed; the grief-stricken families gave her without hesitation the absolution that she never would have asked them for, that she couldn’t and still can’t give herself.)
Abruptly, Dean throws the report back on the coffee table, nearly knocking over a half-empty cup, coffee long grown cold. “This can’t happen again.”
From the other side, Castiel nods agreement to what they both know is true; this won’t happen again. It will be a variety of different things, but apparently not quite yet.
“Surprised anyone could get through the barrier? It’s getting weaker, Cas.”
Jeffrey, six demons infecting over four hundred people with Croatoan for the attack on Ichabod, and that design in the courtyard that was purified by Teresa and Kamal. The laws of contamination should assure that anything left of the original was dissolved during the cleansing, breaking the tie with the children entirely if it existed at all. And yet….
This much has been confirmed, at least: when David and Melanie took the Croatoan body to an unoccupied portion of the border, there were results, though none of them quite know what to do with the information that the dead body burned to ash before their eyes when they finally decided just to throw it across and see what happened. Sometimes, Melanie said, still looking deeply unsettled, old school is best.
(Whatever that means. He’s not certain any school in all of history recommended tossing Croatoans across state lines just to see what happened, but its effectiveness argues it definitely should have been.)
While he generally wouldn’t extrapolate from so little information (or the words of a demon as incompetent as Jeffrey), at this point it’s fairly obvious the barrier exists and is indeed the reason for the current hiatus in Kansas. Demons can somehow now cross it, however, because it’s weakening. An experiment that confirmed absolutely nothing they didn’t already know while providing nothing new, even the origin point of the power that fuels it (and for that matter, what powers it). It’s not that he doesn’t appreciate visual proof, but that’s literally the only thing they didn’t have before.
Amanda’s report—with amendments and notes from Manuel as well as the others involved in the ongoing investigation—gave the current number of vehicles so far found at twenty-eight, including a retired school bus, two dilapidated minivans, and three vans. All those with plates were ones issued in Kansas, inspection stickers dating to three days before Kansas was declared infected. Searches of the interiors showed wear consistent with age and use, but far less bloodstains and far more intact upholstery than one might suspect from a vehicle that housed multiple Croatoans for any length of time. Only half of them had keys, the others showing signs of having been hotwired for use. The interior cabs as well as the trunks were otherwise immaculate; the minutiae of trash, equipment, and personal items are absent, trunks empty even of a spare tire or tools and equipment generally found in vehicles in frequent use.
Castiel’s familiarity with humans’ relationship with their automobiles, both those in constant use and those left to rust, tells him these were deliberately stripped. If he were guessing (he’s not, he’s certain), that would include the missing license plates as well.
Ichabod’s mechanical experts, Melody and Tyrone, are still in the process of examining the vehicles, but their initial findings are as confusing as the rest: many of the vehicles had engines that were barely serviceable, but some were brand new, as if taken from an empty dealership, and few showed signs of regular maintenance and very recent at that: oil changed within the last six months, sufficient brake and steering fluid, dashboards with signs of cleaning, engines repaired
The list of license plate numbers will be sent with Joseph on his next trip to the border, along with casual questions about any problems with people crossing either into or between the zones, but it’s far more likely all of those infected were from somewhere within Kansas. It’s not particularly limiting; the infected zone is dangerous, and acquisition would be both painfully easy and in some parts probably unremarked. People vanish every day from existing towns, and that doesn’t include the migratory groups or the raiders who move restlessly between the infected states and whose exact numbers are unknown.
(“Definitely not raiders,” Amanda told them. “From what I’ve heard, they keep their vehicles in good repair and sometimes mount rockets on the roof, the better to hit and run. Ichabod didn’t have much of a problem with them, but Mount Hope’s practically on top of 96; they got hit regularly before the alliance with the other towns and still get a couple of outliers every few months.”
“You’re kidding,” Dean said blankly. “You’re not. Rockets?” Then, “You want an SUV with a rocket launcher on the roof, don’t you?”
“I do, and so do you,” she answered serenely. “Sheila’s working on specs right now from all those military vehicles we stole—uh, repurposed since the military didn’t need them anymore.”
Dean looked at him helplessly, but Castiel couldn’t deny that he would indeed like a rocket launcher mounted on the roof of his jeep. And a minigun as well, so as to kill Croats by the legion from the convenience of the driver’s seat: who wouldn’t want that?)
“Cas? You with me?”
Making an effort, he returns his attention to Dean; from his expression, he’s been failing to get his attention for several minutes and it’s done nothing to improve an already terrible mood. He almost misses the resigned inevitability of a future ice age without generators and megafauna bent on consumption of human flesh; Dean’s bitterness fills each extended silence far more loudly than his anger. He supposes he should be grateful; it could have been absent, after all, and Dean as well, ended with the bullet he requested that Castiel place in his head.
“This—Cas, tell me it’s a coincidence,” Dean continues. “Nothing for months, then we go to Ichabod and suddenly they’re under attack?”
“It wasn’t our presence there that attracted them.” That demon’s surprise was genuine when it saw him, which is curious in itself, considering that the one that spoke to Manuel identified him as leader of Chitaqua. He doesn’t think ‘Cas’ or ‘Castiel’ is that common a name on earth, much less Kansas, and he’s definitely the only one in Chitaqua. “They wouldn’t have risked that attack with so few demons if they’d suspected anyone from Chitaqua was present. Especially if they meant to accomplish a complete human sacrifice without interruption, which is probably why they needed so many Croats to provide a distraction.”
A very sensible precaution, especially considering these were demons and ‘sensible’ generally isn’t a characteristic they possess. With most forms of human sacrifice, any interruption, even the most benign, ends in failure at best, often killing those performing it in the process as well as the sacrifices in question. The rules are very strict, and those exclusively devoted to the acquisition of power are even more so, but all of them have three things in common: each human must satisfy the strictest interpretation of the criteria, the time to perform it is limited, and once it’s begun, it must be completed all at once or it fails.
Using children isn’t uncommon, no, but the criteria for inclusion is never that general, and their range of ages makes even the general suspect; ten years old, after all, is well past the traditional age of reason. The oldest of them has already entered puberty, and whether or not her body has achieved menarche, she wouldn’t satisfy even the loosest interpretation of ‘child’ when it comes to stringent requirements of any form ritual magic.
“Six is a few?” Dean asks incredulously, interrupting his thoughts, then makes a face, possibly remembering he and Amanda killed three themselves with minimal effort. To be fair, however—he doesn’t have to be, of course, but he can be generous—their combat skills were truly terrible. “Never mind, I withdraw the question. Look—”
“I need a day, perhaps two,” he interrupts before having to work through whatever caustic commentary Dean happens to have at hand to deploy at his pleasure. “I need to go to the church where the children were originally found two years ago and see if I can discover what happened there. If it was a human sacrifice, then perhaps—”
“You think they were trying again in Ichabod after failing the first time at that church with the same kids? Why?” Dean snorts. “They couldn’t have been that stupid. Why not use the people they infected for Croat duty instead of attacking a goddamn town to get those kids again?” Still scowling, he reaches for Amanda’s report and skims to the relevant portion for this conversation and pausing, scowl fading. “Amanda asked good questions.”
“She knew I’d want more information and since I wasn’t there to get it, she did it for me.” Amanda was succinct but thorough on the major points, and during quarantine, he supposes the distraction might have been welcome to everyone involved. “At least, more information than I already seem to have.”
Dean doesn’t look up. “What?”
“Fifteen children, ages two and a half weeks to ten years and four months, were found in a rural Roman Catholic church that housed thirty-five members of order of the Sisters of Mercy, one novice to the order, and a priest.” Dean looks up, startled. “The only survivor other than the children was the novice, a young woman, aged twenty-four, who was completing her apostolic year in the novitiate and preparing for her first profession. The Sisters were crucified on the church walls by demons who possessed the priest and four lay members of the church and were engaged in ritual human sacrifice that was stopped by means as yet unknown, but it’s possible that part is simply delayed and will appear at any moment. Give me time.”
Dean slowly lowers the report. “How do you—”
“I don’t know how I know any of that,” he interrupts flatly. “Or why, until the attack on Ichabod, I didn’t even know that I knew it.”
There’s more, of course; Amanda’s report was startling not in content, but in how little he seemed to already know as he read it, more pieces appearing as from the ether and clicking into place with every word. The novice was near-catatonic and either unable or unwilling to tell them what happened or even her own name before she recovered enough to regain mobility and vanished from the infirmary one night despite the watchers who swore they’d been awake the entire night and never saw her leave until dawn broke to illuminate her empty bed. Alison wasn’t able to describe her knife very thoroughly, as the novice refused to release it, but he didn’t need it to know every detail of what she carried or why she wouldn’t let it be taken from her hands, and he can easily guess why she was able to evade her watchers so easily. The problem is that particular knife shouldn’t exist on this plane, not anymore.
“Infinite knowledge that you just didn’t find it until—yeah, didn’t think so.” Dean glances at the report one more time before setting it aside, green eyes suddenly focusing on him with visible worry. “Cas? What’s wrong?”
What’s wrong. “I—” He can’t find the words to explain; they all sound like lies. “I don’t know how I—why—”
“Hey, hey, stop it. Come here.” Obediently, Castiel gets to his feet to join Dean on the couch, almost immediately gaining half the blanket as well as Dean’s entire attention. “You okay?”
Smoothing his hand over the soft wool, he tries to organize his thoughts to something approaching coherency. “I’m not sure where to start.”
“Anywhere you want,” Dean says promptly, inching closer—to keep his share of the blanket, he supposes—before turning sideways and bracing an arm on the back of the couch. “Just start and we’ll go from there.”
Strangely enough, that actually does help. “Human sacrifice has a distinct pattern and angels would recognize it in all its many, many obscene variations, but the design in the courtyard—I recognized it for what it was, but I didn’t remember it being in existence until that moment. That’s not possible unless it went into use after I Fell and the Host left or it would have been known to me from the moment of my creation.”
Dean accepts the variability of infinite knowledge with a resigned nod. “So it’s new?”
“Yes, and that’s very rare and therefore troubling in itself,” he explains. “For one, it’s not easy to hide something like that from Time itself. For another, Hell doesn’t encourage innovation. I’d expect a human practitioner of the darker aspects of ritual magic to come up with something new—they do that as a matter of course, a solution for boredom, I suppose, though generally they kill themselves in the process of failing at it since knowledge is always lacking—but a demon, no. The rack and eternal suffering tend to have a dulling effect on creativity, and what little they might still exhibit isn’t encouraged by their masters, unless it results in new ways to inflict pain on the rack, of course.”
“Can’t risk demons getting above themselves, yeah.” Dean studies him thoughtfully. “That’s not the part that’s bothering you, though.”
“It bothers me, it’s simply lost among the many other things about this that bother me more,” he answers. “I didn’t remember the church until I asked Amanda about Lily’s vaccinations. When I saw the design in the courtyard, I recognized it, but not just the pattern of human sacrifice and not just that it was new to all of Creation. I also remembered it, the unique configuration of symbols that made it despite the fact that I have no memory of ever seeing it before that day.”
Dean sucks in a breath in belated understanding of the distinction. “You don’t forget anything.”
“I can’t forget anything,” he corrects Dean. “I remember everything that’s ever happened to me since I Fell, and nothing—and take this as a given, I do mean nothing in Creation—can affect infinite memory from when I was an angel. The only explanation that fits is that not only did it come into existence after I Fell, but I witnessed not just it’s use in that church, but it’s first use on earth in all of time and somehow—forgot about it. And this,” he adds for emphasis, “isn’t something I would have voluntarily attempted not to think about.”
“Right, so let’s start there.” He cocks his head. “Who—or what—could fuck with your memory? And for that matter, why?”
“For the first—that is a more complex question than you might think.” Dean’s eyebrows jump. “From what Alison told Amanda, this occurred over two and a half years ago—though due to their own problems, the exact date is vague—and since I know it happened after I Fell, the Host would have already been gone. Even if they’d been here….if Lucifer, the most powerful archangel in existence, couldn’t read my mind as I am now, I seriously doubt the Host could manage to erase any portion of it.”
“Or care enough about earth to even try on the way out the door.” Dean’s mouth quirks briefly at his emphatic nod. “So next up….”
“My Father,” not adding ‘obviously’ in the spirit of open and non-hostile communication. “However, in this case, there’s another possible candidate: a god. However—”
“A god,” Dean repeats blankly. “A god could fuck with your memory? Any god?”
He hesitates. “Not any god, no. But—”
“So this might have happened before they all—died, ran, were killed?”
“No, it definitely happened before then.” The knife is fairly convincing proof of that much.
Dean starts to say something, then frowns. “You know, I never asked—how did you know about that, anyway? Them all dying or whatever?”
“Cosmic events tend to attract attention, and the gods vanishing from existence all at once qualifies without exception.”
Dean snorts. “So a god might be able to fuck with your memory?”
“In my true form, or even in a vessel, it’s possible, but only in the sense that anything is possible, but extraordinarily unlikely, and not just due to the amount of power that would take or the fact they probably wouldn’t survive it. Call it a courtesy between infinite beings: generally, we’re discouraged from anything less than outright warfare to the death, and it’s fairly rare that there’s any reason for confrontation. Different spheres of interest, you might say.”
“And now?”
“If Lucifer couldn’t read my mind, then they couldn’t either,” he answers. “And certainly not like this; they wouldn’t even know how.”
Dean leans forward. “What do you mean ‘like this’?”
This is more difficult to explain. “I can’t forget anything, but you have to understand what that means. Think of it as someone writing on a blank sheet of paper and then erasing a portion; that portion would be blank, but you’d still notice where the words were on the page. Even if—in theory—a god could remove those memories, they couldn’t remove the space that those memories occupied any more than you can on a sheet of paper. I would notice a blank space where something should be, and there isn’t one.” Not looking at Dean, he forces himself to continue. “If I actively participated, however, that would be different. Because my memories are now formed organically and in linear time, they’re stored sequentially, past to present. All I’d need to do is take them out of the sequence so they wouldn’t appear in my past.”
“And the blank spot?”
“There wouldn’t be one, because the memories still exist; to find them now, I’d need to know exactly where to look, the absolute last moment before they were removed as well as the absolute first moment after, and then look between those two points or I’ll miss it.”
“And when you say ‘exact’….”
“Even if those two points were in the same minute, in linear time it would take me centuries of interrupted time to examine each and every point of time within sixty seconds to find the absolute beginning and end, and even then, I’d need to find both points at the exact same time or I’d still miss it.” Honesty forces him to add, “Dean, I couldn’t manage doing that for ten minutes. Imagine examining your life in slow motion, and ‘slow’ being an insufficient descriptor of the progress by several orders of magnitude.”
“Holy shit,” Dean says, looking horrified. “Talk about boring—”
“Whoever said you can’t die from boredom, they’re lying, and if I do that, I can prove it beyond a shadow of a doubt.” Shaking himself, he returns to the original subject. “Gods—and for that matter, angels—exist out of time, but more importantly, they don’t understand human memory, much less how it’s stored in linear time. I certainly didn’t until I was subject to it, which is why I’m the only one who would even know what to do, much less how to do it.” He looks at Dean. “However, I don’t have Grace, and to do this, I’d need power that I could use. A god could supply that, provided they were willing to do it, and I was willing to let them.”
Dean’s sheer lack of surprise is almost as reassuring as it is baffling “Weirdly enough,” he offers, seeing Castiel’s bewilderment.
“I kind of saw that coming. Keep going.”
“A god who let me use their power—and who I’d accept it from, even under duress—narrows down the possibilities dramatically,” he continues, reluctantly filing it away as yet another example of the ineffableness that is Dean Winchester, which are now greater than the largest number humanity has found a word to describe. “And there’s only one whose most distinctive weapon was a knife that could kill demons and couldn’t be removed from its bearer except by their own will.”
“The one the novice had with her,” Dean says in satisfaction. “Yeah, I was wondering why the hell they couldn’t get it away from her. So that knife—”
“It was the weapon of choice of her acolytes as well, who were, in case this sounds familiar, exclusively women who vowed themselves to her in divine service.”
“Service—humility, poverty, feed the poor, help the helpless—”
“—and slaughtering demons with the knives they carried, as well as anything supernatural that threatened humanity. Mostly the latter, however.” Dean’s mouth drops open. “Her cult was an exclusively militant one: very small but extremely dangerous. They had a very high rate of success in their area of influence.”
“A cult,” Dean says slowly, like Castiel just offered him a wrapped gift holding everything he ever wanted, including an endless supply of bacon cheeseburgers and pie, “of knife-wielding women who kill demons for fun and their goddess? Where the fuck was that in history class?”
“Perhaps you slept through it during sophomore year?” he offers wryly. “Her cult died out before the fall of Babylon, and in case you slept through this as well, at that point in history written records were rare, and literacy even more so.”
“You knew her, though. Got a name for me?”
“She doesn’t have one.”
Dean closes his eyes briefly, looking pained. “Of course she doesn’t. Too easy, right?”
“At least, not one I know anymore,” he continues, which makes Dean sigh his resignation to the universe making his life more difficult than it should be. “When her cult died, she destroyed her temples and disavowed her known names as well as her true one, effectively erasing her existence on this plane unless she took another one first, which is apparently exactly what she did. What it is, however, I doubt anyone knew but her. Privilege of a god: even angels aren’t permitted to access the full knowledge of their former names without their consent, which is one of the reasons that Gabriel was so successful in hiding what he was after he became Loki.”
Dean’s interest sharpens. “Can’t get a lot of worshippers like that.”
“She wouldn’t have done all of that if she still wanted them,” he answers. “I don’t know why she disavowed her true name, but it probably proved very useful when Lucifer began his purge. It’s very hard to find a god in time and space without a name and with no active worshippers, especially when the only point of reference is a very short period of time—by divine standards, in any case—millennia ago. As Lucifer probably discovered, hopefully much to his frustration, as he deals very badly with that.”
“All things on this plane have names, yeah, I remember.” Dean cocks his head. “You didn’t just know her, did you? What was she—friend, friendly ally, chaotic neutral—”
“My very first instructor in hunting in a human body on earth.” He bites back a smile at Dean’s surprise. “Or rather, of two of my vessels, who housed me during my assignments on earth then.”
Dean glances outside, eyeing the sun an hour short of its zenith, then sheds his blanket of misery—both metaphorical and literal—like an ill-fitting skin, stretching absently. “Joe’s got nothing to do until Ana gets back to him about how to blow up that warehouse or his next border run, so he can watch the camp while we’re gone. We leave now, we can probably make it a couple of hours before dusk, but just in case—”
“You want to come.” He’s not sure why he’s surprised. What happened in that church in the past not only caused the attack on Ichabod, but could be a precursor of something yet to come. “I’ll speak to Joseph,” he says, standing up belatedly. “Do you want me to—”
“Cas, you’re not doing this on your own, and—look, you want someone else, too fucking bad, it’s me or you’re not going.” He watches Dean’s expression abruptly change, belligerence becoming—he has no idea. “Uh, if this is about—look, I get we really haven’t talked about—you know, what happened.”
Castiel stares at him for a moment and decides not to even try; at his best, it could take days to decipher that, and he’d like to arrive at the church today. “Dean, the number of things that have happened that we haven’t talked about is legion. Even if we only count from this morning—”
“When we were—” Dean’s face goes through various contortions, all of which resemble pain. “In Ichabod. I told you to shoot me, you—you didn’t like that,” that would be one word for it, he supposes blankly, but only if there were no other words in all of existence, in which case he would have invented all of them then and there, “and things were said….whatever. Look, just take as a given, I get that you were upset.”
Castiel nods, trying to decide the number of syllables for the word he’s inventing at this very moment, because ‘understatement’ has the same relevance when applied to this conversation as ‘didn’t like’ describes to his reaction to Dean’s demand that he shoot him and ‘upset’ his feelings at the time. It may very well require an entirely new language, or in lieu of that, a very carefully controlled punch to Dean’s face; it could go either way.
“Yes,” he agrees when he realizes that Dean’s actually waiting for his answer. “I was.”
Dean starts to relax, like someone having successfully navigated a minefield without certainty they would emerge unscathed: the idea of two punches in succession grows almost unbearably attractive. It’s not as if the camp doesn’t have an icemaker should the freezer not contain sufficient ice to deal with the copious swelling.
“Not a problem,” Dean tells him, emanating reassurance and sincerity like a cologne experiment gone hideously wrong. “Just forget it, okay? I don’t want this to be weird.”
Weird. That word again.
“Would it be—weird,” he asks, staring into Dean’s eyes, “if I was engaged in a fit of hyperbole that day or if I were being both literal and breathtakingly honest?” The utter horror that stares back at him is almost as good as three punches followed by an ice bath and a diet exclusively devoted to oatmeal without sugar and canned lima beans. “Whichever is less so, you tell me.”
Dean visibly swallows before saying, “You get Joe, I get armed, and we don’t talk about it ever again, how’s that?”
“Good. Remain in the cabin until I return,” he adds on his way to the door. “I’m checking you thoroughly before we leave, so make sure you’re fully armed, which includes carrying sufficient ammunition. This is a test, and if you fail, I’ll be arming you myself every time you leave this camp for the foreseeable future.”
“You can’t—”
“Yes I can.” Pausing halfway out the door, he has the satisfaction of watching Dean’s mouth snap shut. “But please, if you have any doubts, feel absolutely free to make me prove it.”
“Why,” asks Dean, two hours and twenty-two minutes later, “do you always have to drive?”
There’s a sense of honest bewilderment in his voice. It’s almost surreal. “It’s my jeep.”
“Could have taken mine.”
Yes, they could have, which has been pointed out at least eight times since they left the garage, each time in response to Castiel’s answer to his question on why Castiel had to drive. That means that they’ve had the same conversation an average of every seventeen and three quarters minutes, and the last four he’s fairly sure have consisted of exactly the same words.
“We took mine,” he answers—now five times using the exact same words, maybe he should set a goal—and Dean returns to pondering the unsolvable mystery of why Castiel prefers to drive, expressing the winter of his discontent to the passing scenery.
He double checked the route on the latest updates to the maps from the patrol before they left, so very soon, a clean stretch of highway will appear, the pleasures of which even Dean can’t deny but will inevitably hasten the next reiteration of why Castiel is driving and he isn’t (possibly requiring him to recalculate a new average, that’s something to look forward to, he supposes). The reason why he likes to drive should be blindingly obvious by now, or their average speed during their drives together should have suggested at very least.
Deciding the scenery isn’t that interesting after all—overgrown fields, the occasional rusting car, some terrible road maintenance, sometimes a small abandoned town—and possibly feeling it’s not yet time to reiterate the topic of why Castiel drives so soon, Dean returns his attention to Castiel to ask, “Why did those demons go after a convent of nuns and kids in the first place? Virginity get you a higher octane sacrifice or something?”
“That’s assuming—wrongly—that only virgin women take orders; in case this wasn’t obvious, that’s often the exception, not the rule. Chastity is a requirement of service, but certainly doesn’t extend to the time before they took orders.” Uneasily, he starts to wonder just how often Dean slept during history class. “In any case, a virginity requirement is generally a drawback when it comes to any ritual magic, especially human sacrifice in pursuit of gaining power. Those that do require it are rarely used unless it’s the only option, and even more rarely are they successful. What defines ‘virginity’ can be subject to a surprising amount of interpretation and can vary by culture due to the differences in terminology as well as period of time. The corruption of presumed purity via sexual congress, willing or not, is most often simply a revolting perk.”
Dean grimaces. “I really didn’t need to know that.”
“I’d prefer not to know it either, but I don’t have a choice,” he answers truthfully. “As sexual purity is, for some less unthinkable rituals, a very strictly defined requirement, the inverse would be preferred for human sacrifice. In this case, it was probably their presumed vulnerability. A group of cloistered women, part of an order emphasizing service and humility would seem—”
“Easy pickings.” Dean’s sour expression deepens. “Son of a bitch.”
“They weren’t as easy as that, if what little Alison learned from the young woman and traders was accurate. The surviving woman was a novice to the Sisters of Mercy, an order founded on service with an emphasis on helping women and children. This particular convent, however, apparently took that in a unique direction in fulfilling their calling after Lucifer was freed from the Cage; they became hunters, and their service included finding and rescuing families as well as orphaned children, and they went into the world armed to do it. I’m going to guess that they made life very inconvenient for demons here.”
“Sounds familiar,” Dean says, looking at him speculatively. “Huh. You think that’s why your goddess may have been there? That doesn’t make sense. They weren’t hers, so why would she care?”
“In this case, it wouldn’t have mattered if they were hers,” he tells Dean’s skeptical expression. “You could say as a god that was her—purpose. If she’d known about an attack on a convent—or any enclave of women given to divine service—it would have attracted her attention, especially ones founded to help women and who fought demons as part of the terms of their service, no matter when it happened in time or what god they served.”
“I’m not seeing it.” Dean’s cynicism radiates almost visibly from the other side of the cabin. “We’re nothing to them but food, sometimes literally. They don’t even see us.”
Castiel thinks of what Alison told him: life lived in quantum. A very intelligent and insightful observation, especially from a woman who disclaimed any knowledge of angels. Amanda’s report wasn’t clear on the reason why the town investigated that particular church, though he suspects it was probably been as a result of either Alison’s clairvoyance or possibly Teresa’s bond with the earth, either of which would explain Alison’s reticence. Their relationship would make Alison personally ambivalent regarding disclosures that might threaten Teresa’s life, even to trusted allies who she knew were already aware of Teresa’s abilities, and the same would be true of Teresa regarding Alison.
Teresa would have done her best to isolate the contamination of the earth at the church even if she couldn’t break the bindings then. Even as strong as she is, a human sacrifice would be dangerous for her to attempt to cleanse alone, and she would have weighed the corruption of the earth against her duty to the people of Ichabod and the earth there. It makes him wonder if that was, at least in part, among her reasons for sharing her knowledge with Neeraja and Sudha, even given the difficulties far greater than simple translation.
Bruja blanca, white witch, is a general term describing any witch who followed the path of good, but Teresa came from a very specific tradition encompassing not simply doing good, but seeking out evil and destroying it; as Dean had pointed out, her job description and his had many similarities.
Dean’s, however, didn’t come with the strict, merciless training that began in early childhood and continued throughout apprenticeship, unforgiving of weakness and uncertainty, tested and tempered and shaped to bear the responsibilities of the power they would wield and pay the price it would exact without hesitation. The ability to enslave the very earth isn’t one that can be entrusted to anyone who would ever imagine doing it, and that was only one of the things Teresa could do; to share even a little of her knowledge with anyone not raised from birth in her traditions would be dangerous enough, but outsiders who embraced them with whole hearts and minds would always be accepted. Neeraja and Sudha are neither of those things, and her choice to teach them any part of what she did was one of faith and desperate hope; hope that it would be enough to save them all, and faith that whatever qualities had made her choose them would be proven true when they were tested.
“Cas?”
Frowning, he returns his attention to the subject at hand. “It’s not as simple as that.”
Dean’s expression tells him what he thinks of that as an argument; the problem is, he’s not wrong, and his experiences may be subjective, but they aren’t unique. It’s also an opinion that he’s begun to share; what he accepted without question as an angel on the nature of the divine and its rights on this plane has undergone a revision, and possibly one far less forgiving than even Dean could be. Unlike Dean or any human, the unfathomable isn’t a mystery to him, and the longer he lives on this world, the more he thinks the protections inherent to humanity have depended far too much on good intentions and good faith. Knowing the rules would help them a great deal, he reflects idly; that would probably be the reason they’ve always been denied that knowledge.
“Gods have a bond with their worshippers,” he says, testing the idea. “It’s not one sided, it can’t be, any more than an object dropped can defy gravity. There’s a price that comes with accepting worship, and it must be paid.”
“Never noticed it slowing them down fucking with us.”
“Humans possess free will; gods, like angels, don’t. They only have purpose, and that purpose defines them.” Dean blinks, looking at him in dawning surprise and something like approval, but why, he’s not sure. “A god requires worship—it’s why they exist—but to accept it is as binding a contract as any a human makes with a demon, and the terms are far less forgiving.”
Dean nods, still smiling faintly. “Huh.”
“There is no negotiation; the terms were set before Time began, and those terms are unbreakable.” He doesn’t fight the smile now; Dean will appreciate this. “Even Gabriel found that out the hard way. He enjoyed being a trickster, yes, but that was simply good fortune. Once he presented himself as Loki and took human worship in that form, he was bound to it as long as his worshippers existed on this earth. And that’s only one of the terms.”
Dean’s grin takes on an edge of pleased malice, and he finds himself thinking of his own counterpart again, this time with a sense of unreality; he had to have known what it would mean to try and claim Creation itself and accept the worship of all humanity. The limitations of an angel are nothing to those that bind a god; even dimly, he must have guessed how much he would lose.
“It’s a contract in that sense, but it’s strict and unambiguous in interpretation, and the penalty for consciously breaking it is far, far worse,” he continues, shoving thoughts of that Castiel away. “Either way, the penalty is identical.” Dean cocks his head, curious. “An eternity in Hell would be a far kinder fate for a god who breaks faith with their followers than that. They’d kill themselves to avoid it.”
Dean straightens, startled. “That why some of them did it here? Instead of fighting for their worshippers or running away, they killed themselves?”
“Lucifer was the first archangel of Heaven with all of Hell under his command. They couldn’t hope to defeat him.” He pauses, considering his answer carefully. “Taking service with Lucifer would not, specifically, break their contract—an oversight I still have yet to understand—but to some of them, I think—they could have fought yes, but defeat in battle has its own rules.”
“Spoils of war,” Dean says, expression hardening. “He’d get their worshippers?”
“It’s possible, even if an angel, technically speaking, shouldn’t be able to claim them. Kali, for one, wouldn’t have taken the risk; she’d burn her own temples to the ground and destroy her name and self to be certain he couldn’t touch them once she was gone.” Dean’s skepticism increases. “The bond with worshippers includes love, however it may be defined, however it might be twisted, and love is neither kind nor merciful. But they could be those things for those followers; out of love, they might have chosen their own destruction rather than take service with Lucifer or fight him and risk what would happen to their worshippers when they lost. It would be the one way, perhaps the only way, to free their followers from any possibility of becoming slaves and unwitting agents of humanity’s annihilation.”
“So your goddess—who doesn’t have worshippers or a name and hasn’t even been around in almost forever—you think she got involved in this because those women were doing her purpose?” Dean asks doubtfully.
“That knife guarantees her presence; more importantly, the novice couldn’t have wielded it unless she was acting as avatar or vessel of her divinity on earth. What I don’t know is how they could possibly have elicited her attention at all, especially considering her absence from this entire plane. They were Christian nuns; while the Roman Catholic church does keep track of gods,” he pauses for Dean’s shock; eliciting that has become a very enjoyable habit, “her cult wasn’t even in existence any longer when Rome was founded, much less the Church. If there are records of her anywhere in existence, I don’t know about them, and without knowing her name, she wouldn’t have heard them.”
“You’re a record, kind of,” Dean points out. “No, I get it; no name she recognizes now, so wouldn’t help even if there were records. Okay, so this is what we have: a nameless pagan goddess showing up to smite the fuck out of some demons who were killing women whose divine service included killing demons, and she used a random novice to do it.” Catching Castiel’s expression, he sighs. “Next you’re going to tell me it’s not random.”
“It’s random, as much as someone fit to be an angelic vessel.” Dean sighs noisily. “Which means it’s not random at all. The line of descent would have to be from one of those worshippers who bore children while in her service. She didn’t choose maidens, only women, but they didn’t interact with men, often for very, very good reasons, not least of which was the reason why they were no longer maidens.”
Dean blows out a breath, looking grim. “So not many?”
“There were some, of course; she had no objection to her worshippers marrying or bearing offspring, but they were a very small cult. In that much, a portion of the current population would qualify, but there’s also this; this woman survived being an avatar of a goddess, and relatively intact if what Alison remembers is accurate.”
“Even archangels can’t manage to pull that off,” Dean observes caustically. “Or just don’t want to?”
“I don’t know,” he admits under the weight of Dean’s judgment. “The only thing that is required of us is to gain consent.”
“So archangels are bigger dicks than I thought.” Sitting back, Dean turns his gaze to the passing scenery, but the feeling doesn’t lessen. “I didn’t even know that was possible. They don’t have to, so they don’t fucking bother.”
Castiel makes a conscious effort to loosen his hold on the steering wheel.
“When given the choice, gods will almost always choose someone that can hold them without permanent damage,” he says. “They make an effort to assure there’s at least one person living at any given time who qualifies in that respect. It’s not a break of faith to choose otherwise, but in memory, I can’t think of one who did so when not under extreme duress.”
“Because that’s love: not destroying them, just taking over their bodies and their lives,” Dean snorts. “So what would this goddess need for her perfect vessel?”
“A non-virgin woman of unbroken female descent from one of her worshippers.”
Dean whistles softly. “So that’s really specific. Why?”
“She was—when her cult was founded, she was only one aspect of a much more powerful goddess.” Dean’s expression goes from surprised to bewildered to interested in turn. “For lack of a better term, she—separated herself and became an fully independent entity instead of merely a facet of the whole.”
“Gods can do that?” Dean asks curiously. “That happen a lot?”
“All the time; that’s one of the ways the number of gods increases. They simply don’t often succeed.” Dean nods slowly, mind filing that away as he does everything else he learns for later follow-up. “She was effectively a new god on earth, and like all the gods, she had to start from the beginning and establish the foundation of the bloodlines from those who chose to worship her. There were restrictions, and she never gained enough power from worship to expand the scope of potential vessels.”
“Are there any left?”
“When I Fell, there were six women living who qualified, and two women and three children who could potentially do so,” he answers immediately.
Dean’s eyebrows jump. “Small cult, few kids, but eleven potential avatars?’
“An advantage of being a potential vessel for a god—or for that matter, an angel—is that as long as they exist—and she did still exist—potential divinity does somewhat skew the odds of survival to bear appropriate issue in their favor.” He grins at Dean’s expression. “Angels and gods can also make humans lucky, you might say.”
“No shit. How do you know that, anyway?” Dean demands, waving a hand as he opens his mouth. “No, I get it, infinite knowledge, but usually it takes you time to find shit like that now. Spend a lot of time searching your memory lately? When?”
“Oh.” He wonders if this is what ‘uncomfortable’ feels like. “It’s different when it’s knowledge I actively—sought for myself.”
Dean sits back. “You tracked her bloodlines? All this time?”
“I also followed those that would produce potential vessels I could use,” he counters. “Keeping track of the various bloodlines on earth might be considered the closest thing to a hobby in the Host and among the gods; everyone did it. Those families with the potential to bear archangelic vessels were very popular subjects, as were those who were fit for use by the more powerful gods. Not to mention,” he adds temptingly in the face of Dean’s interest, “their habit of procreating with their followers, which considerably shortened the process of acquiring acceptable vessels. Zeus’s propensity to impregnate anything that qualified as living with a lack of particularity on how or in what form should be explanation enough. His potential vessels can be found in most of the animal kingdom, if you’re curious.”
“Like squirrels? Seriously, how—” Dean makes a visible effort and stops himself before focusing on Castiel speculatively. “Right, this was your Friday night in Heaven, sounds great. But your goddess has been off the radar for a while, and you said she wasn’t very powerful in the first place.”
“Oh, she was powerful,” Castiel corrects him. “As an aspect of a god, upon separation, she was all that they were when they were first created. When I say separated, it might be more accurate to say ‘rebelled’.”
Inexplicably, Dean starts to smile. “Your buddy was a rebel goddess? You don’t say.”
“She was successful in her rebellion—again, translation is somewhat wanting in this case—so she lost nothing. As far as personal power is concerned, she was a perfect—much younger, for value of ‘younger’ when it comes to infinity—replica of the goddess she separated from. She simply didn’t supplement it from gaining a large following to offer worship, which is a different kind of limitation.”
“Were you watching to see if she came back?”
Cas focuses on the stretch of road before them; potholes do terrible things to the undercarriage. “She gave up not just her followers but her own name; gods don’t come back from that.” From the corner of his eye, he sees Dean’s eyes narrow curiously. “Two of my vessels served in her temple and bore female issue after entering her service, and three of the women and one of the children who could act as her avatar were among their descendants. One of them I was considering as a vessel before I chose Jimmy, and she was extremely attractive. I often wondered if you would have responded better if I’d come to you in a female vessel instead of male.”
Dean smirks at him, frustratingly undistracted. “You’re allowed to say it’s personal and you don’t want to talk about it.” The smirk widens annoyingly. “And admit it’s personal and not about freaky angel hobbies.”
“It wasn’t personal,” he answers shortly. “I was just a soldier in the Host, Dean, not an archangel; to us, there was no concept of personal. My contact with her through my vessels made her of interest, but that was true for any contact the Host had with the gods.”
“Like Gaius in the Grove,” Dean answers, sitting back and turning his gaze to the windshield. “That was just a mission, nothing personal.”
“That was different. His mother summoned me by name, and Anael was insistent….” He knows from the faint uptick at the corner of Dean’s mouth that he lost something, though what, he’s not sure. “What do you want me to say? You remember how I was when we met; as I was then, I was always. I didn’t think like that.”
Dean crosses his arms. “So you’re saying I changed you?” Before he can answer, he adds, “Frustration. You told me once before you met me, you had no—what do you call it, ‘concept’ of that.”
“Yes. I’m feeling it right now, in fact.”
“You never felt it before or just didn’t know what it was called?” Dean challenges. “Sound of one hand clapping, Cas; think about it. So,” he adds, turning to face the windshield and bracing a foot on the immaculately maintained dashboard as if entirely unaware how long it takes to remove scuff marks without damaging the vinyl, “how much longer until we get there?”
“Another hour at most,” he answers uneasily, trying not to look at Dean’s boot drag across the vinyl a full inch before stopping again. “You can’t clap with one hand.”
“And if a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound?” Dean smiles in satisfaction. “Tell me what you come up with. I always wondered about that myself.”
From the outside, the church itself looks untouched, but that might be relative, since it’s also the only building left standing.
There were five others at one time, if the crumbling remains of the foundations half-buried in dry, dusty earth are any indication, making a square around what was once perhaps a walled garden or courtyard. The convent itself, of course; the priest’s home, depending on how literal the rules of the order or how they strictly they kept them; a guest house, possibly, though there’s no way to be certain; and a surprise in a small country parish, the remains of what he thinks might have once been a small school and attached dormitory for its students. Despite the passage of time and decay, their original architecture is noticeably more modern and utilitarian, as if added quickly and without attempting to match the other buildings. Preparing for the future, perhaps from the moment Lucifer was freed from his cage: the mystery is how on earth they could have known short of clairvoyance. The Host certainly didn’t bother to offer them divine revelation on ongoing events, considering how little even the Host was permitted to know.
Looking at the once-neat grounds, he wishes he could have met the priest assigned to this parish. He would have been the one who authorized and encouraged this radical departure from the traditional duties of the Sisters of Mercy for this convent as well as possibly the construction of that school Preparation, defense, education, gaining training and weapons for the women to fulfill their calling, and sending them into the world with his blessing and support. A man with this kind of mind should have had the attention of the Host from the moment of his birth, the women here cared for and offered strength and support in their work.
They weren’t; a single convent, a single man, in a small parish in rural Kansas were far too small for the Host to care enough to even see.
“Cas?” Dean shuts the door and circles the jeep, coming to his side on the edge of the road, eyes flickering over the crumbling remains and focusing on the presumed school “Dude, a Catholic school out here?”
“Zachariah much preferred the period before the Enlightenment,” he hears himself say. “Knowledge was why you were thrown out of the garden—metaphorically speaking—but that also made it your birthright to acquire, and that was always discouraged. It was far easier to manipulate those whose faith was untouched by knowledge; they don’t ask why, and if they do, they accept answers no matter how inane without question.”
Dean looks at him quizzically. “Not a surprise, knowing Zack.”
“Father Francis was a Jesuit; they believe in education, in the spread of knowledge, and this convent benefited from that. These women were warriors of the Lord,” he answers bitterly. “Here, in this place, they fought for five years against demons after Lucifer rose, and we never saw them. I was training hunters in Georgia, and I didn’t even—”
“Cas….”
“Infinite knowledge,” he spits out. “All I had to do was look, and I didn’t. It was—they were too small. It wasn’t important enough for me to even bother.”
“Maybe,” Dean says quietly, hand coming to rest on his shoulder, “you had enough to do back then, even if you were still an angel.”
“That’s not an excuse.”
Dean studies him for a long moment before his mouth twitches, curving in a faint smile. “You really don’t do anything half-way, do you? Called that one.” Shaking his head at Castiel’s mystified expression, he squeezes his shoulder before tilting his head toward the grounds. “Let’s check it out so we can get to the church while we still have light.”
The sight of the bare, dry earth is disquieting, but the first step is disorienting, a different world entirely, the corruption spreading so deeply it’s an abscess in the earth itself, rotten and putrid and oozing filth.
“Cas!”
Castiel thinks, shocked: I didn’t realize I could still feel that.
Dean catches him the moment before his legs collapse beneath him, steadying him against his own body until the vertigo passes enough for him to find his balance. Watching him sharply, Dean reluctantly steps back at his nod, but one hand lingers determinedly on his back as the green eyes search his face.
“You sure you’re okay?” There’s a sharpness in his voice that demands honesty, and the implication anything less than a definite yes means they return to the jeep without hesitation.
Taking another breath to be sure, he nods. “Yes. It was—a surprise, that’s all.”
Dean frowns and starts to say something before abruptly turning to face the church and grounds, lips tightening as his hand drops automatically to his gun as if he’s fighting himself not to draw it. There’s nothing here that qualifies as a threat that would respond to gunfire, but he’s learned that instinct rarely succumbs to logic without argument.
“It wasn’t surprise.” As Dean swings to face him, he belatedly realizes that Dean had no reason to expect him to have any reaction to stepping off the road in the first place, much less catch him before he even fell. “Try again. Tell me what that was.”
He starts to answer and stops himself, distracted by the memory of the two days he watched Dean as his body burned out Croatoan. He didn’t lie to him in the bathroom; forty-eight hours is his limit on how long he can go without sleep with only prescription stimulants before speed is required. However that was because while he couldn’t recognize his own need for sleep until exhaustion made it impossible to do otherwise, he could recognize the signs of mental degradation, and they kept it at bay.
That’s changed, and those two nights made that painfully obvious. He doesn’t need them simply to think; now he needs them to stay awake.
The biological urge for sleep, like hunger and thirst, has always been difficult for him to interpret, but until this moment, he assumed that Dean’s insistence on strict adherence to a schedule was the reason he now ate and slept at regular intervals and why he needed prescription sedatives less often. In retrospect, that was remarkably stupid; habit may be powerful, but it’s not that powerful, and for that matter, while he’s tentatively begun to explore the idea of enjoying food, feeling hunger is still something he has yet to experience.
If ‘falling asleep’ can be defined as a sense of drifting that culminates in abruptly becoming aware he’s cold, stiff, and drooling onto the couch cushion by Dean’s hip despite the fact that his last memory was leaning against said cushion reading only seconds ago and yet hours have passed—and thankfully, while Dean was blinking at him sleepily, he didn’t seem to notice the grotesque wet patch before Castiel quickly covered it with his dropped book—then he thinks that yes, he’s officially experienced the human sensation of sleepiness.
That’s new, and he doesn’t think he can at this point legitimately pretend habit is another word for ‘magic.’
“How does it feel to you?” he asks before he can stop himself.
“Me?” Dean hesitates, but the tension in his body is too obvious to be denied, and to Castiel’s mild surprise, he doesn’t even try. “I don’t know. Weird, I guess.”
Dean’s concept of ‘weird’ is both wide in range and narrow in scope; it’s all in the inflection, and Castiel’s still learning how to interpret it. “Dean—”
“Wrong.” Dean’s expression changes, eyes distant. “Like it’s dead, but it can’t die, not really. Even though… it wants to be.”
He nods, mouth dry; that would describe it very adequately. “Corruption. At this stage, for the earth, it’s like living death; it’s being consumed until it’s almost starved but kept living just enough to be an ongoing source of feeding.”
“Sounds about right. And one more thing.” The green eyes meet his. “It feels like I really don’t want you anywhere near it. That enough for now or can we get this over with so we can leave?”
He can’t be certain, of course, but if he were guessing, Dean doesn’t want to talk about this anymore. “Of course.”
“Good.” Sliding his rifle into easy shooting on sight position, he jerks his head toward the ruined buildings. “Let’s check the grounds first.”
The first circuit of the grounds gives them an overview of the scope of the destruction and at least some idea of the sequence of events. The convent itself was burned first and done thoroughly, leaving nothing but blackened and cracked foundation half-buried in the ground; the school and attached dormitory, on the other hand, were done last, and interestingly, not nearly as completely. Despite the amount of time that’s passed, it’s clear that while the fire damaged the structure, its final collapse was due to decay of the unburned wood.
Dean’s tension is noticeably increased by the time they finish the second circuit, but he pauses at the edge of the cemetery behind the church with a frown. Eyes flickering over the twisted remains of the wrought iron fence, he passes over the various headstones without interest before returning to the fence. Then, shoulders straightening, he looks at Castiel in a silent but unmistakable question.
Obediently, Castiel steps over the twisted remains of the fence and feels the difference immediately; the consecration of the cemetery wasn’t broken despite the fact that the church and grounds were and very thoroughly. The omission is unusual; demons are very attracted to sanctified places for the purposes of destroying them, which he assumes is what passes for a hobby among them.
Looking up, he sees Dean looking at him, expression unreadable but unmistakably more relaxed. Apparently talking about it is anathema, but not testing it.
“Consecrated separately from the church grounds and unbroken,” he confirms, looking down at the neat line of dead grass on this side of the fence edging the bare earth on the other: the difference between early winter somnolence and corruption, bloating itself on the earth’s richness until only the faintest spark remains, content to leave it alive just enough feed from it into perpetuity. After all, if it killed it, there’d be nothing left for it to consume, and that’s all it knew how to do. “If they’d survived, they would have done it before they left. Just for completion’s sake.”
Dean’s in front of him the moment he steps back over. He’s prepared this time for the vertigo, but nothing can prepare him for how it feels to stand on a living corpse that only wants to die.
“And we have the answer no one really wanted on what demons do on Friday nights,” Dean says grimly, turning away to look at the church, but the hand on Castiel’s back lingers. “Okay, you ready?”
The answer is no, he’s not, but that’s irrelevant; this is something they need to know.
“Yes.” Dean didn’t need to say: we don’t have to do this now. You don’t have to do this to yourself. This isn’t a test, and if it was, survival is all you have to do to pass. It’s a test, it’s always a test, but it’s easier to pass when he’s not alone. “I am.”
The listing doors creak open at a touch, the heavy wood, while subject to the vagaries of the weather, surprisingly intact. Which is more than can be said for the interior; even with Alison’s verbatim description of the church in Amanda’s report, he wasn’t prepared to see the reality.
Dean sucks in a breath, coming to a stop just inside the door. “Holy shit.”
The description was unsparing and thorough, yet somehow, it still fell far, far short of what they’re seeing now.
The walls are all still intact, peeling dingy paint in strips like shed skin between wide swathes stained yellow-brown from water damage and exposure and blackened streaks and stains of old blood in hideously distinctive patterns. Frayed streamers of tattered, grey-red fabric from the carpet cling to what remains of the aisle between the decaying remains of the few intact pews at the back of the church, and near the altar that, though subject to exposure, is also intact; those are the only things that still are.
The splintered, blackened remains of what were once pews, clotted with fluttering yellow-edge pages from ruined hymnals, the twisted remains of tarnished candlesticks dotted with the remains of wax, torn strips of the formal vestments of a priest performing mass, the cracked vinyl covers of shredded Bibles and slivers of stained glass from the empty windows, crumble together in haphazard piles around a circle of clean, bare wooden floor in the center of the church, its perimeter outlined in charred black.
Dean’s shoulder brushes against his, a single point of reassurance in a place not simply stripped of what it was meant to be, but re-purposed to be everything it stood against. Taking a deep breath, he forces himself to dismiss the sacrilege committed for the most obscene of purposes and examine it like the hunter he chose to become.
“Right,” Dean says, voice startling loud in the lifeless silence. “Left or right?”
“I’ll take left,” Castiel decides after accepting both will be equally horrific and he wants neither one.
“Good, that’s where I’m going, too.” Shifting his rifle automatically—he’s noticeably improved with his weapons—Dean jerks his head for Castiel to follow him before starting toward the wall and the first set of bloodstains surrounding the empty holes where a woman sworn to service to the Lord was crucified.
They came back for the bodies after taking the children to Ichabod, Amanda’s report stated. After Dolores examined them, each body was carefully cleaned as best they could and each woman was photographed, along with as complete a written description of each woman, her clothing, her hair, birthmarks and old scars, anything that might—one impossible day—help identify her to her family or friends.
Afterward, their bodies were carefully wrapped in clean sheets, the town’s only Catholic (albeit somewhat lapsed) reading the prayer for the dead before their bodies were consigned to the fire with the entire town present to bear witness. They didn’t have the legal names for any of them; what the children remembered were those that they took when they joined the order. The ashes were placed in the town cemetery, covered with salt and buried in consecrated ground, each name carved into the stone that marks the place they were laid to rest. Teresa and their few religious leaders hoped that would be enough to keep them safe from whatever happened in the church.
“The priest was possessed,” Castiel says into the uneasy silence as they come to a pause before the altar after passing the eighteen places where a woman was nailed to die, with another wall and seventeen more to go. “He must be how they gained access to the church and the convent.”
“Yeah, there weren’t any men among the bodies,” Dean says, balancing the rifle against his shoulder, fingers sliding restlessly along the strap. “I remember that part from Amanda’s report. Just women, and the kids.”
“The nuns were hunters, and a direct confrontation would have been unwise. Father Francis was very old, and the other men were laymen who were attached to the church in some way and assisted Father Francis and the Sisters in their calling. They needed a less dangerous method of gaining access here.”
“So they used men the nuns knew and trusted,” Dean says in disgust. “They weren’t stupid; they wouldn’t have let a stranger anywhere near them, especially when they weren’t armed, not if they were hunters. Son of a bitch, the fuckers must have loved that part.”
“From what Alison gathered from the other towns and some traders, Father Francis was instrumental in helping the Sisters acquire weapons and some basic instruction, though she didn’t know how or from who. He also joined them in daily practice despite his advanced age.”
Dean’s mouth quirking faintly. “My kind of priest.”
“Then you’ll appreciate how well he was able to manipulate his superiors—including his bishop—to overlook what they were doing here before Kansas was zoned as infected.” Dean’s smile widens. “When he was given—very much under the table, or so Alison gathered from some of those who worshipped here—advanced warning of Kansas’s coming status and orders to leave—”
“They stayed,” Dean finishes softly. “Of course they did. Saving people, hunting things: fuck leaving, they were just getting started.”
“The nuns discarded their habits entirely for more practical attire and were armed even during mass,” he continues, looking at Dean. “Which was apparently very memorable to the very few alive who used to occasionally attend mass here.”
“Nothing like a nun with a gun to get your attention,” Dean agrees, fingers sliding restlessly the length of the strap of his rifle, fingertips brushing the holster of the gun at his hip. “If we’d known about them, we could have—” He stops short, a fleeting expression of surprise crossing his face. “I mean you—him, back then, maybe he could have—”
They didn’t know, but sins of omission and sins of commission are only different in action, not intention; they should have tried to find out. “If even a rumor had reached us, we would have been here to help.”
Dean’s mouth tightens grimly. “He surveyed the entire goddamn state and he missed them? How—never mind.” Shaking his head, he tips his head toward the other wall and the seventeen blood-marked spots awaiting them. “Let’s get the other side and the gallery upstairs before we check out the main event.”
It says something—though what, he’s not certain—that as little as he wants to examine the other wall, it’s still more than he wants to examine that clean, black-ringed circle. “I agree.”
Well after they left Chitaqua, it occurred to Castiel they should have acquired Chuck’s camera before they left to document the condition of the church so they could examine those as well for anything they might have missed. As it turns out, it wouldn’t have mattered if he’d thought to acquire it or not; even if he’d been holding it in his hands, nothing could have made him actually use it.
(Or as Dean put it, surveying the church floor from the gallery: “Perks of leadership; we make someone else do it.”
“I’m very glad I accepted your job offer,” he told Dean, and meant every word.)
He means it even more now, standing only feet away from the reason thirty-five women and five men died two and a half years ago, and four days ago that almost killed the fifteen children that survived.
There’s no sign of the actual pattern any longer, replaced by a ring of blackened wood, charred almost through the church floor. One and a half feet from the outer circle to the inner, the same as the one drawn in Ichabod’s courtyard. Unlike that one, however, the outer circle here is roughly fifteen feet in diameter, the inner twelve: large enough, he supposes, to hold fifteen children in the center, though with very little room to spare.
Stepping into the inner circle—the hardwood dusty but otherwise untouched—he turns in a slow circle before crouching to study the char more closely. After he Fell, before the gods died, soon after Ichabod was founded: that should be enough to give him something approaching a date, but no matter how often he searches his memory, there’s nothing to find. Even the corruption of the earth—something that can be objectively studied and quantified, the rate of decay measurable—is useless; Teresa possibly was able to stop it if not cleanse it, but even before that, it’s—
Impulsively, he opens his sense of time and barely shuts it back down before the migraine starts, but not before dropping to the floor with a strangled gasp.
Not strangled enough, if the sudden appearance of Dean crouching in front of him is any indication, hand on his handgun. “Cas? You okay?”
“I’m fine,” he says, and regrets it when he hears his voice crack on the second word. Resigned, he waits for his vision to stop swimming, but it’s not as if he needs to see to know Dean’s dangerously still and is most likely glaring at him. “Dean—”
“You didn’t do the—seeing all things shit again, did you?” he demands, one hand roughly tilting his head up, the better to glare directly into his eyes as well as check for bleeding. “Tell me you didn’t—”
“No. Just time,” he interrupts, adding at Dean’s mystified expression. “I was checking for a time differentiation, and there is one. At some point, this church was removed from linear time.”
Dean blinks at him before looking around warily as his shoulder dips alarmingly, as if it might be in danger of sliding into his hand despite the fact there’s nothing to shoot. “Uh, we’re—not out of time now, right?”
“No, I couldn’t see Time where it doesn’t exist,” he answers reasonably, which inexplicably makes Dean’s eyes narrow. “It’s just—off.” Dean blinks at him in a silent request for clarification. “I don’t know how to explain.”
“Try,” Dean says grimly, fingers tightening on his jaw as if Castiel might pull away and he’d like to keep the bone as a souvenir.
The television analogy unfortunately won’t work here. “It was taken out of time at one point in linear time and replaced at some point in the future. Its future, not ours. Well, it would be the past now, of course, but then….” Looking at Dean’s increasingly frustrated expression, he has a moment of inspiration. “Like you were, but only in Time, not place.”
“Right, so how long—” Dean sits back on his heels, looking into the middle distance before focusing on Castiel again. “You said ‘some point,’ not what point. You don’t know how much it’s off? Why? You knew with me.”
One day, he’s going to tell Dean that he’s only pretending to believe him when he pretends he’s not as intelligent as he actually is. Depressingly, now isn’t the time. “No. Before you ask,” he continues as Dean starts to open his mouth, “yes, there are many possibilities for why, including the fact that I have no idea how I can still do that or how it works in this form, but no, I can’t narrow them down without more information, including speaking to Alison and Teresa personally about what happened when they found the children. Or I could—”
“No,” Dean interrupts flatly.
“I didn’t even tell you what—”
“Don’t care.” The glare returns with a vengeance. “No seeing Time, no seeing all things, no anything you can’t do with five plain old human senses and no bleeding from your ears, got it? We’ll do this the old fashioned way.” Dean’s fingers tighten on his jaw. “Got it? I wanna hear the words, Cas.”
Staring into Dean’s eyes, he summons his most earnest expression, one guaranteed to convey both unmistakable sincerity and fuck you at once. “Yes, sir.”
“I’ll hold you to it,” Dean says pleasantly before straightening and starting toward the back of the church. “Would hate to accidentally concuss you with my rifle,” he adds over his shoulder, “but I won’t be sorry for it. Just for the record.”
Dean’s method in the church is much like the one he used on the grounds; the first circuit to establish familiarity before a slower second one, pausing at the walls to study each set of blood stains with the experienced eyes of a hunter and searching not for what they can recognize, but for any discrepancies. The variations on human sacrifice are numerous, but crucifixion, like rape, is always preferred when other forms of torture are inconvenient or when time is not of the essence; he supposes doing both in a church while at least one wore the body of a priest and the victims were nuns is what passes for ironic humor among demons.
Stopping at the altar again on his second circuit, Dean stares up at the remains of the cross on the wall above it with a fixed expression. Still inside the circle, Castiel frowns, focusing on the wall, and sees the blackened smears of blood on either side of the cross, the spacing of the holes matching those that line either side of the church: that makes thirty-six, but only thirty-five bodies were taken back to Ichabod. Thirty-five bodies, fifteen children, and one young woman, whose injuries didn’t include those associated with crucifixion
“Dean—”
“She was up there,” Dean interrupts without turning around. “The novice. That’s where they put her. Half the nuns were dead, the rest were almost there, the kids were already in that goddamn circle…and she was still fighting to get down to save ‘em.”
Swallowing, he paces the length of the aisle to join Dean at the altar, mentally scanning Amanda’s report again; it didn’t mention where each body they removed was located, and it would’ve mentioned if one of them was above the altar itself. Following Dean’s gaze to the remains of the altar, he pauses, studying it more carefully; despite the dark wood, the blood stains on it are obvious, a spray fanning upward from near the base and sprinkling the floor as well before trailing off at the very top. Looking down, the floor before the altar is stained with the unmistakable signs of coagulated blood, smeared but each one consistent with the center of the average female foot from the heel to just short of the ball.
Abruptly, Dean turns, looking down at the tattered remains of the carpet, focusing first on the area just in front of the altar before startling toward the center of the church again, eyes tracking the remains of the remaining carpet and then bare wood. Following, Castiel sees the fading bloodstains that still mark it as Dean stops short, staring at an unstained area of the floor a foot short of the outer circle.
“She stopped there.” He tears his gaze away to look at Castiel with the eyes of a stranger. “Tore herself off the wall—that she was nailed to—and walked on two surprisingly unbroken feet all the way here while pulling a goddamn knife out of thin air. She said yes to your fucking goddess because she wanted to save the kids and didn’t care what she gave up to do it.”
Even that long-ago day in Dean’s cabin when Dean asked him what he was, he didn’t look at him like that, as if he was— “I don’t remember.”
“That makes one of us.”
Turning away, Dean gives the circle a wide berth on his way to the back of the church. Taking a deep breath, Castiel forces himself to move, stepping into the circle and crouching as if to study the char again, though all it tells him is fire was involved at some point; the design itself was burned away entirely. It’s an excellent excuse, however, to pretend not to hear Dean as he approaches, footsteps echoingly loud in the silence before coming to a stop directly behind him.
After an eternity—or thirty endless seconds—Dean sighs. “Jesus, this place—you done yet? It’s char, nothing to see here.” Then, with an attempt at annoyance, “For the five regular old human senses, anyway.”
“I’m not human,” he answers flatly before pushing himself up off the floor and making himself turn around. “However—”
“Look, this place…” Dean turns to look back at the open doors briefly, expression unreadable. “Something about it—you being here, it’s getting to me, okay?”
Disarmed, he nods tiredly. “It’s unsettling, yes, but—”
“I don’t mean—it’s not…” Dean scowls, eyes drifting toward the doors again before snapping back to Castiel. “I don’t know what I mean, but let’s wrap this up before I knock you out and drag your ass out of here, okay?”
That’s—unambiguous. “The circle isn’t active. At least, not now.”
Dean’s eyes narrow. “That’s not the same as ‘gone’.”
“I was trying to ease into the subject,” he admits.
“A for effort,” Dean says, not quite rolling his eyes. “Now tell me what that means.”
“The corruption of the earth isn’t expanding, but it’s not healing itself, either,” he starts. “Even if Teresa decided against trying to purify it after they found the church, her presence would have been enough to elicit some kind of response, but as it was then, it is now. This is—it’s as if the corruption is in stasis. If I were guessing—which is exactly what I’m doing—that’s because while the circle was destroyed here, it still exists, just not now.”
“You even know what you mean?” Dean looks at the blackened outer ring, shaking his head. “So what your goddess did wasn’t enough? Divine fucking fire? You can’t even see it anymore.”
“I’m not sure—”
“It killed the demons pretty thoroughly,” he adds in surprise as he scans the area around the circle again. “Not even ash left—not that we’d be able to see it in this mess—”
“They didn’t die in the fire,” he interrupts. “I don’t need to remember what happened to know that. She didn’t need a full manifestation complete with avatar to kill them; she could do that with a thought without leaving the comfort of non-corporeal existence. This was an execution, and to observe all the formalities, she had to be on this plane to do it.”
Dean closes his eyes briefly. “I’m gonna regret asking this, but….”
“It’s what I’d do, if I had Grace and the permission of the Host when I was among their number,” he answers. “Or even after I rebelled and simply had Grace and this kind of motivation.”
“Anytime now, Cas.”
“There are no human remains of those possessed by the demons, even ash,” he explains, indicating the entire church. “She broke the binding between soul and body on this plane to free the souls but not the demons before moving them out of time with the demon still inside. The physical body can’t survive that without protection, as I explained before, but she only needed it to contain them until they were beyond any possibility of escape.”
“And then? She killed them there—wherever that is—instead of here. What’s the difference?”
“The goal of a formal execution isn’t death, it’s justice.” Dean sucks in a breath, eyes widening in understanding. “She hunted them down one by one and killed them there. She’s still hunting them and then killing them there. Long after she died by Lucifer’s hand, she will be killing them anew. As Gabriel did to you, she does to them in a discrete pocket of time built to that purpose, but the loop never stops with death before starting anew and they never forget what came before. It hasn’t stopped and will never stop, without a moment’s rest or freedom from fear or pain.”
“Kind of like you did to that guy in Michigan?” Castiel nods; there are similarities, yes. “How long?”
“Forever,” he answers softly, meeting Dean’s eyes and seeing the flare of satisfaction that matches his own. Of all people, Dean may be the only one who would understand. “Until the end of reality itself.”
“If reality wasn’t trying to end now,” Dean says finally, breaking the comfortable silence, “that’d almost be enough.” Flickering a glance at the walls, his face darkens. “Almost. So tell me more about what they were doing before they got fucked by a goddess.”
Castiel calls up the memory of the completed circle in Ichabod, tracing the design over the burn line. Almost effortlessly, a polished wooden floor stretches out below his feet as pews are ripped up and tossed aside to make more space, carpet stripped away by eager hands. Blurred, indistinct figures work together to draw the circle with slow, patient strokes, the individual sigils flowing from the stark white paint—paint, not chalk, another difference from what happened in Ichabod—this time starting at the north—the direction of the altar—and moving counterclockwise to the east, the symbols entered confidently with experienced hands. Until they reach the east—
“—and stopped,” he says tonelessly, vaguely aware he’s been talking but unable to remember when he started or why. “They entertained themselves with raping them while waiting for it to dry—they had to wait, because the nuns were protected against possession. That’s why they used paint; they couldn’t risk a single smear, and the nuns would find a way to break it no matter how badly they were injured if they used chalk.”
As if from a distance, he feels Dean’s hand on his shoulder, fingers reassuringly tight. “Keep going.”
“They….” For a moment, he has multiple visions of ghostly feet crossing in and out from what feels like a dozen perspectives, stumbling or dragged, digging their bare feet into the wood, scratching at it with broken fingernails as they passed; some were carried, bound and still fighting, too dangerous to risk forcing them to walk despite being uncertain it would still count if it wasn’t done under their own power. Low, malicious laughter interspersed with pain-soaked, enraged screams echo through the church for hours—days—as they were raped and tortured, whatever the demons could imagine without risking a too-early death that would make all their work useless, giving the sacrifice more power, before one by one each woman was nailed to the walls of the church.
Hours—days—a week, perhaps: it doesn’t matter. It felt like forever.
Finally, a single vision dominates, clear and hard, edged with rage and fear so strong it burned away physical pain; each half-conscious child (they didn’t have time to hurt them, too. It took days to find them, she didn’t hide them well enough, her fault, she should have learned more before she….) was carried inside the circle and placed within the inner circle before the last quarter—the closing sequence—was drawn, in chalk this time, because—
Mouth dry, he looks at the wall above the altar. “—once closed, it was done. That only brought it into existence; once it existed, it didn’t matter if the lines were erased. I was too late.”
Even divine fire couldn’t destroy it, they realized: nothing could, it was new, and how they created it was unique. All that could be done was—
“….Cas?!” There are hands on his shoulders, squeezing with the strength of desperation, and he focuses on Dean’s voice, then his face, green eyes wide and dark in a face washed of color. Blinking, he realizes they’re both on their knees. “Cas, talk to me!”
Licking his lips, he tries to speak, but for some reason, he can’t form words; how strange.
“Cas, you got to three and I’m dragging you out of here,” Dean snarls, cupping his face with shaking hands. “You tracking yet? One, fuck it, we’re leaving—”
“It…” He swallows at the thready sound of his voice, barely a breath, and forces himself to focus. “They had to forget it.”
Dean stills. “What?”
“It couldn’t be destroyed, because once it was completed, it didn’t just exist here,” he says as the blurred details slowly click into place. “That’s how they did it. They weren’t sure it would work, but it was worth the risk to find out, and it did.” He closes his eyes, realizing he’s shaking: has been, possibly for some time. “When I saw it, I knew it was the first time it had ever been attempted.”
“It was new, yeah.”
“Yes, but not just that.” Dean nods encouragingly and slowly, painfully, he retrieves knowledge he wasn’t even aware he had. “All but one segment was completed before they began to make them enter it. They used—”
“Paint,” Dean interrupts. “So the nuns couldn’t fuck with it, yeah.”
So he was talking that entire time: good to know. “They put the children inside and closed it immediately; they were almost out of time before their absence was noticed, I think….” She must have ripped that part from their minds, but the jumble of unorganized images is impossible to organize, bring into focus. “I’m sorry, I can’t—”
“You got nothing to be sorry for,” Dean tells him fiercely, giving him a shake. “Don’t even start. Now deep breath—what else? Why were they dragging the nuns into it if they were just gonna hang them on the goddamn wall?”
One deep breath doesn’t help; several, however, do. “Something new. When it was complete, everyone who was within it and everyone who had passed through it before were bound to it, and it was bound into them. Once the circle was closed, it burned itself into their memories, and that’s where it still exists in everyone who entered the circle before it was closed. All of their minds hold it, and the only way to destroy it there—”
“—is to kill them, which would also complete the sacrifice, son of a bitch.” Castiel nods tiredly, a faint throb starting in his temples from the effort of locating knowledge without the memory of acquiring it to give him guidance. “Wait—everyone within it and everyone who was in it and left before it was closed?” He nods again. “You mean all someone has to do is walk through it before it closed and they’re part of it?”
“That marks them enough for the circle to be lodged in their memories upon completion. He swallows, fighting down nausea. “I don’t even remember being here, but I apparently learned a great deal.”
“The nuns and the novice watched the whole goddamn thing live and in person,” Dean says quietly, squeezing his shoulder again. “What they knew, I guess your goddess got from them, and she must have given it all to you to help her figure out what this was before she fucked with your head.” He pauses, glancing toward the altar briefly. “How were they going to do it without the novice, though? They had to know she wasn’t in Ichabod; were they gonna go look for her next or something?”
“The novice wouldn’t be part of it, even if she’d entered the circle before it closed,” he answers, relieved beyond words to be on sure ground. “Being the avatar of a goddess does have some advantages; this only binds a human, not a divine being. It was burned out of her the moment she became a vessel.”
“I’ll give you that one.” Dean cocks his head, eyes distant. “Okay, let me see if I got this. Those kids were still in the circle when your goddess started smiting; they were already marked as sacrifices by that. The nuns were in it before it was closed and taken out, so they were marked when the circle was completed and the hanging them on the fucking wall was just entertainment and more pain equals more power, am I right so far?” He nods at Dean’s glance. “So that circle they were drawing in the town square during the attack, it wasn’t big enough to put anyone in, which makes sense now; they didn’t need it to be big. The kids didn’t remember what happened in the church, much less the circle, so they had to draw it again so they’d remember it.”
“They had to redraw the circle either way to give it form on earth, but to connect it to the original, the children had to see it as well as remember it. Once the connection was made, it’s as if it had never been erased, with all the original properties—and chosen sacrifices—of the original.” An arrested look on Dean’s face tells him he recognized that much. “You only notice it when its worst form is seen, as I told you. Though no one’s ever used it like this before.”
“Contamination.” Dean sighs in disgust. “Okay, let’s go back. How much has to be complete for it to start marking the sacrifices? Ballpark?”
“At least over half, I would assume, but…” Dean nods grimly; there’s no way to know for sure without testing it themselves. “From what I could read of it, the final segment of symbols are the closing sequence, and must be done all at once to complete closure. When we have time, I’ll reproduce it to study it closer—”
“Uh,” Dean looks alarmed. “You think that’s a good idea?”
“No, but it’s not dangerous,” he answers, mouth quirking faintly. “The other reason new innovations in human sacrifice aren’t common is humanity’s lack of knowledge on the meaning of all the symbols, much less formalities of their design. Whoever created this one not only knew those, they also knew conventions that haven’t been used on earth for a very long time. This one has restrictions specifically excluding anyone not born human from using them, a variation of those I carved on your ribs as well as Sam’s. Like you, it’s invisible to a god or an angel not in corporeal form and looking directly at it.”
“Anti-angel and anti-god?” Dean sits back, startled. “That’s really old shit. So that hasn’t been used in—”
“A very long time,” he agrees. “The most ancient rituals created on earth often featured such measures, but for obvious reasons, that innovation wasn’t popular, and among the gods and the Host, it was agreed that knowledge shouldn’t pass to future generations. Those rituals were buried as deeply as possible in human history along with the knowledge of what they meant.”
Dean reaches for his chest, palm flattening over his ribs almost unconsciously. “You didn’t tell me that when you started carving up my ribs. That was forbidden?”
“Dean, I’d just rebelled against the Host, been killed by archangels, and resurrected without explanation,” he answers, grinning helplessly at Dean’s quiet laugh. “Ask me how much I cared about archaic restrictions.”
“Not much.”
“I taught Bobby as much as he wished to learn—which, as you can guess, was everything—but the majority of it has value only in defense. I think I still have the notebook he used for his notes, if you wish to see it.”
“I kind of do,” Dean admits, rubbing a hand over the back of his neck before shaking himself. “Until you get a chance to draw your own copy, can you tell me anything else?”
His smile fades. “The final closure has to be done all at once, which is one of the few hard limitations I can see in the design. It can’t enter their memories and exist there until it exists in this form first.”
“Not really a limitation if we’re talking—” he looks around the circle, eyes narrowing, “—fifty, sixty feet around? Last segment is—”
“One quarter of the whole.”
“Eleven, twelve feet, that’s nothing, a couple of minutes….” Dean breaks off, looking at him, then at the circle again. “The one in Ichabod was smaller. How long was the closure?”
“A quarter of the whole.”
Dean stills. “And if it was bigger…?”
“A quarter—”
“—of the whole, I really don’t like where this is going. You’re sure about that?”
“Yes. The closing sequence is of a different pattern than the whole. Think of it as a binary door; it’s closed or open, but nothing between. It’s a compromise; instead of having to do the whole at once, they only have to do a quarter at once. Not a bad trade-off, in a horrific sort of way.”
Getting to his feet, Dean turns in a slow circle to take in the circle again. “The one in Ichabod had three or four sets in the exact same sequence before the closure….” He looks at Castiel. “How many on this one?”
He pulls up the memory of the completed circle again, ignoring the instinctive revulsion. “Ten, with more space between the symbols, though not much; they were more experienced with drawing ritual circles. I can’t tell the significance of that on a glance, however.”
“Shit.” Dean closes his eyes. “It’s a repeater. You can keep repeating the same goddamn symbols over and over again to get it bigger as long as each set is complete.” He spears Castiel with a look that begs for contradiction. “Including the closing ones?”
“I’m not sure,” he prevaricates, but that’s not an answer. “However, it’s either that, or the number is the same, but each one is simply very large. It’s very new, and since the sacrifice was never completed, only the creator would be able to tell us what he designed it to do, and only the first time it was completed successfully would he know if it actually worked.”
“Let me get this straight,” Dean says with fragile calm. “At half-done, it’s ready for business and you don’t even have to stay in it to be marked. Once it’s closed, everyone’s part of it, even if all they did was walk through it without knowing it. Even if it’s erased—by divine fucking fire—everyone who was marked can be hunted down one at a time, draw that thing again so they can see it, use their memory of the original to make the new one become the old one, and kill them then. And there’s no limit on size?” He nods reluctantly. “All the fucking benefits of human sacrifice, none of the inconvenience of having to do it all or nothing.”
He nods again, feeling impossibly tired. “That would be it, yes.”
“Right.” Taking a deep breath, Dean scans the church before extending a hand. “Okay, we’re getting out of here.”
He takes Dean’s hand and is surprised how much he needs it, stumbling briefly. “Dean—”
“No arguments,” Dean interrupts, hand shifting to his upper arm and pulling him unresistingly to the door. “We’re going home. Anything else you need to know, it can wait—”
“We still have a problem, and it won’t wait.” Making an effort, he stops short and is almost pulled off balance by Dean’s momentum. “Dean. It doesn’t exist now, but it does still exist. The children remember it now, even if they didn’t before. If it’s drawn again in their presence and they see it—”
“It’s back, fuck.” Dean closes his eyes. “Even if we got all the demons this time, no way they’re the only ones that heard about it.”
“They’re still in danger, and not only because they’re still bound,” he agrees. “Everyone who saw even a portion of the design in the courtyard now has the memory of it. It can’t hurt them, since they weren’t part of that sacrifice, but any demon can read it from their minds and no demon who saw it wouldn’t know what it was as well as exactly what it can do.”
“Fuck. We gotta get to Ichabod.” Pulling away, Castiel crouches and reaches into his boot, feeling the edge of the knife sheath for the small lump beneath it. “Cas what are you—”
Pulling out the keys, he straightens and presents them to Dean; it’s almost worth not driving to see the expression on his face. “That’s why you couldn’t find them.”
Dean’s eyes narrow before flickering down to his boot in unmistakable speculation.
“I’d like to see you try,” he adds, tipping his head toward the door. “Let’s go.”
They’re almost a quarter of the way to Ichabod when Dean finally says, “What if we’re wrong?”
Turning from his contemplation of the badly degraded road, Castiel frowns. “About…?”
“What if other demons know about this already? If they’re using it—”
“They aren’t.”
Dean jerks his gaze from the road. “How the hell would you know—”
“My fallen Brethren would purge their territory at a hint of something like this being spread among their followers,” he answers. “A human sacrifice that may only be limited by the physical size of the initial circle, and once closed, marks the sacrifices in a way almost impossible to remove, and who can then be hunted down and killed at their leisure? The first time it was successfully completed on earth, there would be no way to hide it from them, and if there’d been a purge in Hell of that magnitude, we would know about it.”
“Forgot about that,” Dean bites out, fingers tightening on the steering wheel. “Torturing demons for fun and profit at Chitaqua, why not get the gossip while you’re at it?”
“Exactly.”
Dean’s the first to look away, but it doesn’t give the satisfaction that it should. Several miles pass in echoing silence before Dean finally breaks it.
“Cas, how many people were part of this one? Nuns and the kids, that was it?”
“Assuming Alison was accurate on the number of women’s bodies they took from the church, fifty, including the children they rescued.”
Dean frowns out the windshield, but he doubts it’s due to the execrable condition of the road. “And how much power would that give a run of the mill demon these days?”
“Not enough to challenge an angel in Hell,” which makes Dean start, “nor the most powerful and oldest demons, but sufficient to claim territory in Hell from less powerful ones. Possibly even enough to carve out territory of their own and force the submission of lesser demons to gain sufficient followers to protect it. However, the first time it’s completed in its entirety, Hell would notice that much power acquired that quickly and wonder why. They’d have one, perhaps two more opportunities to use it before they were tracked down from the contamination of using death and pain for power, especially in these numbers.”
Dean nods, swerving reflexively to avoid a pothole the size of a small car. “You were right; the church was a test drive to see if it worked. Probably why they did it at that convent; out in the middle of nowhere, not much of a congregation showing up every day, limited numbers, no chance of interruption—who could call the entire goddess showing up thing—”
“I could be wrong.”
“Dude, I learned not to bet against you the hard way,” Dean says, tossing him a smile. “The only thing I couldn’t figure out is why they didn’t start a new one instead of taking the time to go after the kids in Ichabod, but….” He pauses. “Formal execution, that sounds like the kind of thing you don’t make mistakes doing. Like letting one of them get away.”
“No.” That much he doesn’t need to remember to know. “Even if one of them wasn’t at the church at that moment or tried to escape, performing a human sacrifice doesn’t just contaminate the earth, but those who did it. There’s nowhere they could hide that she couldn’t follow them, and she would’ve found them.”
“What about the creator? If he wasn’t there….” Dean snorts, shaking his head. “No way he shared that before trying it himself. Or ever.”
“Unless the other demons killed him before attempting it at the church, yes, but I doubt he told them enough for them to risk that. What does that have to do with….” For once, following Dean’s train of thought is almost effortless. “So how did those demons in Ichabod four days ago know about it at all?”
“The original group sure as fuck didn’t share with the class before they died,” Dean agrees. “Doesn’t mean they didn’t drop hints, though; threat of a purge just means it spread slower. How long has it been in Hell since then?”
“Roughly three hundred years, maybe as much as four hundred, depending on when this happened,” he answers, looking at Dean curiously. “You think they were following a rumor in Hell?”
Dean snorts. “You got a better explanation for risking going into Ichabod to get those kids three to four hundred years later? They weren’t guessing, Cas; they were sure enough to send four hundred something Croats and six demons to make sure they could finish it.”
“There’s always the possibility that a demon, for no particular reason, recently went to the remains of a destroyed Kansas church and worked out enough to become uncharacteristically curious and made an impossibly stunning intuitive leap to draw the correct conclusion.” Dean gives him a disbelieving look. “I didn’t say I believed it.”
“Or they came here following that rumor,” Dean says, slowing to search the darkness outside for the turn-off. “Church would be enough to tell them it was true, but not enough to actually do it. Question is, how the hell did they get the symbol if the kids’ memories were wiped? Everyone else was dead.”
“The novice survived,” Castiel answers quietly. “And so did I.”
Dean starts to answer then abruptly seems to change his mind. “Yeah, might as well just ask. Cas,” he says, voice stripped of expression, “did you trade an unspeakable ritual for a human sacrifice to a demon for drugs?” He cocks his head, looking thoughtful. “That’s how you been getting your scripts? That explains a lot.”
“Of course not, the border guards are perfectly happy to….” He narrows his eyes as one corner of Dean’s mouth twitches upward. “That wasn’t funny.”
“It really was. I think we can safely exclude the avatar of a goddamn goddess and a Fallen angel from trading this, considering that if you can’t remember it, I doubt she can either. If she’s still alive, anyway.”
“That’s probably the reason I don’t remember,” he admits, and Dean’s faint smirk vanishes. “As you said earlier, I’m a living record. My brethren in Hell have no knowledge of its existence, so that rules out any surviving demon, and I assure you, none would have survived that night. If she guessed—or I told her what it could do—that would have been a very good reason for her to want my memory altered. As the likely alternative was killing me, that would be one very good reason I’d agree to do it.”
Dean jerks his startled gaze back the road just in time to note a very inconveniently placed boulder that looks like its origin was the Red Hills, though what it’s doing here is anyone’s guess. Swerving onto the shoulder with a muffled curse, he waits until they’re back on the road before looking at him incredulously. “Your goddess-buddy would have killed you just because you saw it?”
“Hell’s ruled by corrupted angels,” he explains. “The last angels in all existence, in fact. She wouldn’t trust a Fallen angel to resist them for long, or perhaps even want to. They are—technically—still my Brothers.”
“Bullshit. They got no claim to you,” Dean says softly, but the ripple of anger in his voice is unmistakable. “And she didn’t know you very well if she thought you’d do that. Dude, you need better friends, just saying.”
“That was a long time ago,” he answers, unsettled and warmed at the same time. “I think you might say I’ve upgraded since then.”
Dean grins at him, and for a moment, Castiel almost forgets what they found at the church tonight.
“There aren’t any secrets in Hell,” Dean says suddenly, returning to the original subject. “Three hundred years: someone knew about this all this time, so why now and not anytime in the last couple of years?”
“This isn’t just a secret,” he says slowly, not sure how Dean will react to this part. “Demons began as human, and even Hell can’t burn out the part of you that will be ruled by no one but yourselves. Humans aren’t meant to be ruled by angels, even as demons, and obedience is enforced by fear and pain, loyalty bought and sold to the highest bidder, which is the only way angels can control the population of Hell, which considerably outnumbers them.”
“It’s worked until now.”
“It’s worked,” he answers deliberately, “because the rulers of Hell are angels who kept their Grace when they followed Lucifer to Hell; unlike demons, for whom it takes time to gather power in Hell and it can be easily lost, theirs is effectively unlimited. However, angels haven’t broken a human soul on the rack since they first acquired enough followers to do it for them.”
“Demons are better at torture, thanks for the reminder,” Dean says glumly, easing onto the edge of the road to avoid the large area of missing asphalt in the shape of a hexagon. Looking out the passenger side window, Castiel wonders if a ruler was used at some point; those are very straight edges for someone ripping up asphalt freehand. “What does that have to do with—”
“In return for their service, those first demons were given power, and those that have survived have continued to acquire it since. Angels may rule Hell, but those demons effectively run it for them, and they assure no other demon ever gains enough power to challenge them even if they were to band together, which granted is unlikely, but why take the risk. Something like this, however….”
“Cause some problems for the status quo for demons, yeah.”
“Not problems, and not just for those demons,” he says softly, getting Dean’s undivided attention. “We’re in an Apocalypse, and there are few secrets in Hell, including that Lucifer wants to wipe humanity out. No bodies for demons on this plane, all existence confined to Hell, and that’s only if Lucifer doesn’t purge Hell as well. They have to suspect that much, and the rulers of Hell would be stupid enough to threaten that to assure such loyalty as Hell defines it, because despite their power, fear and pain are the only things they know how to use. Dean, this isn’t a problem; this is revolution.”
Dean catches his breath.
“It takes millennia for a demon to gain power, and only the most ruthless ever gain enough to have territory. None of them, however, can hope to challenge the oldest demons, those who were given power by my Brothers and run Hell for its rulers.” Castiel licks his lips. “Not until now.”
“A demon could get enough power from this to take out the most powerful demons?” Dean searches his face before abruptly stopping the jeep in the middle of the road, turning in the seat. “What?”
“Not with fifty sacrifices, no. But once they knew how much could be acquired from fifty, it would be a matter of math to decide how many deaths would be needed so they could. A single sacrificial circle that can be of any size, take any number of sacrifices, and once it’s closed, the deaths could be accomplished over days, weeks, even months….”
“Draw it around a town in the infected zone,” Dean says tonelessly. “One demon could do it and have all the time they needed to kill everyone afterward no matter how many there were.”
“And no one in Hell would know about it until it was completed,” he says. “Which would give everyone just enough time to try to run. Except my Brethren, of course, but they might surprise me by showing some amount of intelligence and doing just that.”
Dean stares at him. “They could get enough power to kill an angel in Hell?”
“Yes, but—”
“Which would leave the rest to get together and go after whoever did it, so what would be the point—”
“That would only be a problem if you killed them.” He looks at Dean. “So don’t. They’re far more useful still alive.”
Dean stares at him. “What?“
“The power from the sacrifice would eventually run out, but the Grace of my Brethren in Hell replenishes itself,” he answers. “Why kill them when you could break them and force their submission to your will; then you’d have at your command the Grace of an angel as well as all that they rule in Hell.”
Dean licks his lips, eyes never leaving his face. “How—”
“I told you; demons began as humans, and obedience is enforced with fear and pain; it’s the only way to control them. Angels in Hell, however, are still angels; they were created to obey. Demons have had millennia to re-create the tortures of the rack in their own image; what it is now is beyond what it was when it began.”
“Hell’s first tortures were how angels were disciplined in Heaven.” Dean swallows, eyes dark. “For disobedience.”
“You can only suppress the instincts of an angel for so long. They were made to serve humanity, and demons are, in some ways, even more attractive; they were remade in the image of angels. A demon who could break them would get their willing submission; they’d obey not because of pain or fear, but—”
“Devotion.”
Looking at Dean, he nods; if there was ever a demon that Hell would willingly kneel for, it would have been Alistair’s apprentice. ``We do respond well to being forced to kneel and obey,” he says more lightly. “You of all people should know that.”
After a long moment, Dean smiles faintly. “Dude, I’m trying here, but this coming from the guy who told Lucifer to fuck himself to his face….”
“I have no objection to kneeling, you understand,” he says idly. “In certain contexts, at least.”
Dean snorts before putting the jeep in drive and starting down the road again. Stopping at a crossroad—or rather, a road crossed with what may or may not be a cattle trail—Dean carefully eases past the oversized tumbleweed formed of barbed wire and what seems to be kitchen appliances.
“Would Lucifer?” Dean asks softly, staring out the windshield intently. “Could a demon break him?”
“He’s still an angel,” he answers, equally soft. “What it would take to do it would be interesting, but ultimately academic. He’d kill himself first, and in any case, it would be both quicker and far easier to simply kill or Cage him.”
There’s a brief hesitation before Dean nods. “Right.” Peering out the windshield, he starts to smile, and Castiel, following his gaze, sees the faint sprinkle of lights in the distance. “Well, you ready?”
“Not yet,” he answers quietly. He’s never ready, but it doesn’t matter. “When we get there, I will be.”
It’s just an hour short of midnight when they arrive in Ichabod, which means either waiting for the patrol or deliberately crossing the ward line and seeing how long it takes for patrol to notice strangers wandering down Main Street. Which may or may not end with them being shot, though he assumes they’d be sorry afterward.
Fortunately, Dean decided against causing anyone post-murder anguish, which is why patrol finds them leaning against the hood of the jeep when a flashlight abruptly illuminates their faces, Dean with his arms crossed and looking annoyed.
“Dean?” a familiar voice says, and the too-bright light is immediately averted toward the ground. Blinking the spots from his eyes, Castiel makes out Amanda as she gazes at them in surprise, one of Ichabod’s teams hovering behind her. For a minute, he hesitates, studying her, a sense of something different dancing across the surface of his skin that he can’t quite identify. “Everyone stand down,” she orders, looping the gun over her shoulder as the team with her does the same. “Hey, what are you doing here?”
“You run patrols now?” Dean asks, rubbing his eyes ostentatiously. “Not that I care or anything, but—”
“Mark took the kids this afternoon so I could sleep before taking the night shift. Manuel wanted a night off,” she answers, beginning to smile. “Mercedes just found out she’s pregnant.”
Dean’s faint frown evaporates. “How far along is she?”
“Twelve weeks, so she’s pretty sure it’ll be okay,” she answers, matching his wide grin. “After the last few days, we needed some good news. There’ll be a party on the next rest day, but tonight’s was family.” Amanda looks between them, smile fading. “Everything okay?”
“We gotta talk to Alison and Teresa,” Dean says with a sigh. “She gonna kill us if we wake ‘em up?”
Amanda’s eyes unfocus for a heart-stopping moment. “No, it’s fine. Give her a few minutes.” Felipe, you’re in charge until I get back.” Felipe salutes playfully, punching Amanda’s shoulder as he passes them toward Ichabod’s perimeter. “I’ll walk you down.”
“Great,” Dean says, looking at Castiel for confirmation before adding, “Hey, tell her we’re sorry for showing up this late before you tell me when you started giving Alison an all-access pass to your head.”
Amanda’s shoulders stiffen. “Dean—”
“What’s Alison’s range, Cas?”
Coming up beside him, Castiel stares at Amanda for a long moment. “At least a mile with any reliability, but to be safe, behind Chitaqua’s wards would be the my preference to assure there’s no possibility that Alison—”
“I volunteered,” Amanda interrupts, looking between them worriedly. “She didn’t manipulate me, I swear. It’s just an experiment.”
“An experiment.” Amanda’s eyes widen at whatever she hears in Castiel’s voice. “You consented to what experiment, exactly?”
Amanda shifts uneasily. “It’s all or nothing, she said; she can shut everyone out or hear everything, and she needs to sleep, but since the attack, it’s been tense. It’s just a test to see if she can hear patrol if there’s an emergency, that’s all.”
Castiel nods agreeably. “So she can wake up even if she’s closed her mind entirely?” Amanda nods hesitantly. “Right arm below the elbow: let me see.”
Amanda swallows before carefully removing her rifle, setting it on the ground between them before sliding her right arm out of her coat and pulling up her sleeve. Reaching out, Castiel takes her wrist and turns it to reveal her inner arm, aware of Dean beside him, frowning at the smooth expanse of winter-pale skin before looking at him curiously.
“You can’t see it?” Dean shakes his head, lips tightening as Castiel draws a line across the barely-healed cut just below her elbow. “Blood was the binding: shallow cut, just enough to make a symbolic offering. Teresa’s a strict traditionalist; if you can’t see it, it was done with full and knowing consent of both parties.”
“Ritual magic.” Dean looks at Amanda’s pale face, eyes narrowing. “That’s a little more complicated than a psychic learning how to listen for someone specific.”
“Dean, I didn’t mean—”
“Alison can’t yet.” Letting go, Castiel takes a deep breath, fighting to keep his voice calm. “She isn’t nearly experienced enough to filter that specifically; this required a very skilled witch.”
“Five minutes,” Dean tells Amanda as she pulls her jacket back on. “Exactly—and I do mean exactly—what you consented to and when.”
“This evening before I went on patrol, she asked me and Manuel if we’d be okay with trying something, to get around the block she puts up to keep the town out until she’s better at filtering all the mental traffic from everyone,” Amanda says carefully, watching them both. “It was Teresa’s idea how to do it, but she wasn’t sure if it would work with me at all without a blood relationship like Manuel, so I made the offering. It’s just a—like an indicator, wakes Alison up if I think directly at her or if something upsets me, but Teresa wasn’t sure of the threshold or if that last part would even work.”
“Active versus passive,” Castiel tells Dean rigidly. “The first is simple, if difficult to accomplish; the second isn’t simple even when there’s a blood relationship. Alison—through Teresa—would need to be subconsciously monitoring your emotional state constantly to first get a baseline on you specifically before narrowing it down to only trigger at specific levels of emotional intensity. That would take weeks.”
“She said something about that, but it isn’t supposed to last longer than morning when she breaks it,” Amanda agrees, licking her lips nervously. “That’s why this is a test; she never tried anything like this, but she…look, she said she got the idea from you. Cas, I’m not an idiot; she explained the whole thing and the risk; the worst that could happen is it wouldn’t work.”
Castiel stiffens, but aware of Dean’s flickering glance, confirms with a slight nod. Taking a breath, Dean turns to Amanda, who visibly fights not to shift in place under the cool gaze.
“You didn’t think you should check with me?” he asks neutrally, but it’s enough.
“No,” she answers, voice subdued now. “I didn’t think about it. I should have asked permission first, I’m sorry. I get my first responsibility is to you and Chitaqua.”
“It was your call to go ahead with it if you wanted to,” Dean answers, surprising them both. “You wouldn’t be in command here if I didn’t trust your judgment, but with great responsibility comes great—other shit, like making sure your commander knows what the hell you’re up to. You tell me first, because you’re ours first, and it’d be nice to know when you’re about to do something stupid. You understand?”
Amanda blinks at him, disarmed. “Yes, sir.”
“Not like I have enough hunters now,” Dean mutters after a moment of silence, shoving his hands in his pocket to glare at the ground. “It makes a shitty impression to have one of my lieutenants suddenly go crazy, you know?”
“Right,” Amanda answers immediately. “I knew that. She’s breaking it at dawn, if you want to be there.”
“I will definitely be there,” Castiel says shortly, getting both of their undivided attention. Dean cocks his head, like he’s about to speak, but before he can, the warm lights of Alison’s home spill across Main Street in the distance.
“Amanda,” Dean asks, still looking at Castiel, “anyone around who can send a message to Chitaqua? Joe knew we’d be late, but overnight might be stretching it.”
“Uh.” With an effort, Amanda thinks for a moment before nodding. “Kamal’s up.”
“Not Kamal,” Castiel answers. “I need you both here tomorrow.”
“Leah,” Amanda says after a moment of thought. “She wanted to get a couple of things from home anyway, say hi to Joe. I’ll wake her up; it’ll make her night.” The blue eyes look between them warily. “Should I—”
“We’ll talk again tomorrow,” Dean interrupts, squeezing Castiel’s shoulder before he starts down the street. “I’m gonna go say hi to Alison right now. Cas, we’ll be inside; take your time.”
Castiel watches Dean jog toward Alison’s building for a moment before returning his attention to Amanda, whose alarm abruptly returns. This shouldn’t take long.
It doesn’t. “Look, I didn’t think—”
“That it would affect anyone else, other than the need to provide our contingent here with a new commander or losing another hunter?” he asks caustically, and Amanda takes a startled step backward. “Trust isn’t the same thing as safety; even with the best intentions, what Teresa did was new to her, and you could have been injured. At very least, you should have requested a deferral to consult with others before making your decision.”
“I should have sent a message to ask permission,” she agrees quickly. “I get that now, I just—”
“No, you should have sent a message asking for me to come to Ichabod immediately, so they could explain, in all the detail I required, exactly what they wanted to do to you,” he interrupts impatiently. “Then I would have explained it to you, including the risks, so you could make an informed decision on whether to proceed, and if you decided to do so, been present during the initial test to assure your safety. I’d expect you to insist on that much.”
Amanda belatedly shuts her mouth. “I can do that?”
“I spent five months training you to protect yourself as well as others against anything you might have to fight!” he bursts out before he can stop himself. “You have no defenses against a psychic that powerful or a witch; no matter how good their intentions or how pure their motive, there is always and will always be a risk. You can’t protect yourself from that, but in this case, I could have done it for you! Of course you can do that! You’re supposed to do that! Is it that difficult to understand?”
“Oh. Right, got it.” She shifts again, biting her lip before peering up at him, a flicker of humor in the blue eyes. “So in the morning, you’ll tell me if it’s okay to do again?”
“I’ll evaluate the risk and give you my opinion after observing the process and speaking to Teresa and Alison. After I’m satisfied as to Teresa’s intentions as well as the safety of what she asked you to do, we’ll talk about it, and then you can decide whether you wish to continue.”
“Okay,” she answers promptly. “Sounds good.”
“You can go,” he says finally, not sure what to add that he hasn’t already said; repetition would be perfectly acceptable, but Dean’s waiting inside and she’s supposed to be on patrol. Also, Joseph will be worried about them if they don’t send a message. “Have a good night. I’ll see you at dawn.”
“You, too.” As he starts toward Alison’s building, however, he hears her add, a thread of warmth in her voice, “Sorry for scaring you, Cas. I won’t do it again.”
Before he can answer, she’s vanished into the night.
When he arrives, Teresa is on her way to making up the guest room for them after ushering Alison reluctantly into the kitchen and a convenient chair, “…if you make your ankle worse—again—I’ll tie you the goddamn bed until it heals. I’ll make the tea when I get back.”
“I’ll do it.” Activity, he’s learned, is a superlative ameliorator of stress, and he’s familiar enough with the kitchen to find the tea and set a kettle on the gas burner to heat. Turning around, he sees Dean and Alison staring at each other across the kitchen table with matching expressions. “Dean?”
“Oh, just checking that Alison gets I’m okay this time with messing with my people’s heads,” Dean answers evenly, never looking away.
Alison rolls her eyes. “Can’t read your mind, Dean.”
“Right now, I wish you could,” he answers sincerely. “You get the only reason I’m even marginally okay with this is Teresa, right? Her oaths are strict when it comes to harm, and she wouldn’t do something like this unless it was imminent death or zero.”
“I know, and I should have asked you first.” After a moment, she sighs, sitting back with what he hopes is a frown of profound guilt. “It’s temporary, lasts a day at most even if we don’t break it. This was just a test; symbolic offering, no commitment, just—”
“Do you even understand the rudiments of what you and Teresa engaged in tonight?” Castiel says flatly, watching Alison stiffen. “You don’t, or you would never use the word ‘just’ when speaking of anything that requires a free offering of blood.”
Alison’s jaw tightens mutinously. “Cas—”
“It was Amanda’s decision to agree to your request, but it was yours to ask her the question, and that carries a degree of responsibility in the outcome,” he continues, keeping his voice even with an effort. “Especially since of the three of you, only one of you had any idea of the seriousness of what you engaged in, and what she was doing was based, at best, on a guess from what you sensed from Dean.”
“I had more than that,” Teresa says from the doorway, introducing herself into the room and the conversation before crossing to the table and seating herself to Alison’s right and reaching absently for her hand, lacing their fingers together. “If you need to apportion blame, it’s mine, not Alison’s; it was my idea, and I convinced her to try.”
“I think there’s blame enough for you both,” he answers, ignoring the way Alison stiffens, fingers closing more tightly around Teresa’s. “Alison had no reason not to disagree, after all; the only risk was to Amanda.”
Dean glances at him briefly before returning his attention to Teresa and Alison.
“If there’d been any risk to Amanda, I wouldn’t have done it,” Teresa says, voice hardening. “I know my craft, Castiel; I’ve practiced it my entire life.”
“That you can say that means you know nothing!” he snaps. “The earth is old, Teresa, but it is hardly more than a child compared to me. I was there when it came into being; do you think I don’t know what it is? There’s no guarantee that the earth’s priorities would include protecting Amanda if you made a mistake, however unwitting.” He swallows, remembering the church again, the women there who were forgotten before anyone even knew that they existed at all. “It is vast, and it is ancient, and she’s a single breath in all time and space; it doesn’t know her, how important she is to those here, how—how we’d be lessened in her absence. It knows you and Alison through you, it can’t not, but Amanda? She’s small, do you understand that? It can’t even see her!”
Teresa’s eyes widen, defensiveness vanishing. “I would have made sure it saw her.”
“I’m certain you would have tried,” he says bitterly. “You must forgive me, however, for not giving the earth the benefit of the doubt on how much it would care, for value of ‘care’ with an entity that has no context for it.”
“You know what it is,” she agrees, “and you also know that’s exactly what I am: context.” Even in oversized sweatpants and a flannel shirt over a sweater, black hair twisted into a loose braid, Teresa gives the impression of stillness, dark golden-brown skin smooth in lines of highly trained calm habitual to the point of reflex. When she meets his eyes, the sheen within the brown of the iris doesn’t make her any less human, but simply more; a curiosity alien to all that is mortal, fragile, that lives and breathes on the surface of its skin peers out as well, watching him as carefully as she does. He wonders what it sees when it looks at him, if it’s offended a being so foreign to all it is dares wear the skin of those born to its ashes and its dust. “That’s why I exist, Castiel; so it knows what we are, what we need, and that’s not just because it’s got nothing else to do. From the earth we came, and to it we return; it can’t not care, not since we were first created from it. It wants to know us.”
“Cas,” Dean says quietly. “Kettle.”
Startled, he turns to see the kettle starting to vibrate with the boiling water within and hastily removes it from the gas, turning off the burner with hands not entirely steady. As he starts to search the cabinets, Dean is abruptly beside him, hip-checking him before reaching for the mismatched cups himself and setting them safely on the counter.
“You okay?” he asks quietly, standing casually between him and the women at the kitchen table. “Tell me the call and I’ll make it.”
Slumping against the counter, Castiel takes a deep breath, then another, forcing himself to consider it dispassionately. “If Amanda were in any danger, it would have occurred immediately, not several hours later. She’s safe.”
“Not what I asked,” Dean murmurs, stepping closer until Castiel has to look at him. “You want me to get her back here and they break this now?”
“Teresa was accurate in her assessment,” he admits. “I do know, and that should be enough.”
“It’s never enough,” Dean corrects him. “Not when it’s someone you care about.” He inclines his head toward the table. “Come sit down, have some tea, breathe a little. Do your dead eye stare at them for a while; it’s creepy as shit and it’ll freak them out.”
“I don’t do that,” he protests, picking up two of the cups.
“You know, I get why angels always had to say ‘be not afraid’,” he says thoughtfully, getting the other two cups. “After seeing that, probably only way people didn’t drop dead of a goddamn heart attack.”
He frowns. “I never noticed.”
“Now you know,” Dean says cheerfully, shoulder brushing his as he goes to the table. “So enjoy it.”
Castiel ignores the charged silence as they sort through the cardboard box of tea bags, choosing their favorites from the variety available. To his surprise, Dean picks over them for several seconds before fishing out two, dropping one in Castiel’s cup and then his own.
“Try this one,” he says as Castiel pours out the water in each cup. “Tell me what you think.”
He considers the novel idea of Dean having opinions on tea as he fills the kettle with more water before setting it on the stove and turning the gas burner on. He suspects this conversation would be improved by alcohol, but not necessarily anyone’s ability to think, so tea it will be, and probably a lot of it, if for no other reason than to give them all something to do other than look at each other. There’s a pattern regarding his visits to Ichabod, he thinks; at some point, surely he’ll get better at not offending anyone within moments of arriving. Stranger things have happened, like learning sugar makes everything better and how to fall asleep.
When he returns to the table, he picks up the cup curiously; though still steeping, the fragrance is very pleasant. “Black currant.”
Dean shrugs. “Mom liked it. It’s weird what you remember, but that smell—it took me a while to track it down.”
Castiel considers his cup for a long moment before putting it down again to finish steeping. Alison’s glare indicates they’ve lost several steps in the progress of their relationship; he supposes adding ‘accusing her girlfriend of being stupid and terrible at her job’ to ‘threatened her with execution upon meeting’ wasn’t the best choice in reactions, all things considered.
“I will require a complete explanation of what you did,” he starts, “its structure and requirements, the expected results as well as the actual, and for that matter what you were thinking in the first place and exactly how it relates to what you saw in Alison’s mind regarding what she sensed in Dean.”
“Both of you,” Teresa corrects him mildly as she removes the tea bags from hers and Alison’s cups before placing them on a chipped plate apparently present for that purpose. The brown eyes study him for a moment before she inclines her head. “I should have spoken to you first about that. I meant to during your last visit….” The flash of pain is muted, but Alison shuts her eyes tightly, reminding him abruptly it’s only been four days since the attack, less than three since quarantine ended and they burned the bodies of their dead. “Paranoia doesn’t lead to clear thinking, and none of us have done much of that. I know better than to—”
“It was my decision, too,” Alison interrupts, squeezing Teresa’s fingers as Dean dumps both their tea bags on the same plate and starts adding sugar to both cups. “It wasn’t your fault. And I thought,” she adds, turning her glare on Castiel again, “that by now we’d have earned the benefit of the doubt. Maybe less in the way of execution threats?”
“He didn’t threaten to execute her, Jesus!” Dean answers, dropping the spoon. “What the hell, Alison?”
“Not yet.”
“You think he shouldn’t be a little upset?” Dean asks incredulously. “Fucking with Amanda doesn’t fall under ‘benefit of the doubt’ here; Cas sure as hell had every right to question what the hell you thought you were doing. Using blood’s serious shit; you know it’s the bodily fluid with the most potential for mystical abuse?”
Castiel just avoids spitting out a mouthful of tea at the familiarity of the words, frantically fighting not to choke as Dean adds self-righteously, “So don’t tell me we don’t have some grounds here to be concerned!”
“Bullshit,” Alison snaps back, ignoring Teresa’s frantic squeezing. “We got enemies enough, Dean; we sure as fuck don’t need our supposed allies turning on us for one goddamn mistake!”
“A mistake?” Dean exclaims, half out of his chair and oblivious to Castiel’s attempts at a significant glance to indicate this isn’t necessary. “You gotta be kidding me!”
“Teresa,” he says over Alison’s not-entirely-reasonable response, “I apologize for reacting as I did. It was a surprise, and after tonight, I seemed to have reached my limit on those.”
“…don’t tell me how to run my town!” Alison shouts, chair scraping back emphatically as she continues to clutch Teresa’s hand. “Who do you think you are?”
“It’s fine,” she answers, glancing up at Alison when Dean answers with something both very short and extraordinarily obscene before picking up her cup with her free hand. “I’m sorry for not speaking to you and Dean first. Amanda’s become a friend, and that’s who I asked to help, not one of Chitaqua’s officers and representatives in Ichabod. I forgot she had other responsibilities.”
“…and you were the genius who invited us into your town!” Dean yells back, bracing a hand on the table with an audible thump. Castiel winces, taking a sip of tea. “You’re lucky we didn’t conquer your asses for the fuck of it! So that’d take Cas about an hour: I’ll give him the rest of the day off before we take over the rest of Kansas! Week, maybe two, we’ll talk about who knows what, how about that?”
Teresa gives him a querying look. “I was being hyperbolic,” he murmurs in resignation. “At least a little: transportation alone would slow our conquest a great deal. As I was saying, under the circumstances, your actions were perfectly understandable. And a credit to Amanda as well. You’ve been very welcoming to her and our people here, and we appreciate that a great deal.”
“…when I’m done with their minds, they won’t be able to find their asses with both hands! Or remember what asses are!” Teresa winces, biting her lip. “So fucking try it, Winchester, I fucking dare you!”
“She can’t even step on a spider,” Teresa mutters, closing her eyes. “I have to take them outside so they can live and be free. She makes us watch The Bridges of Madison County once a month and cries the whole time.” He makes a note to find that movie; Meryl Streep’s performance was supposedly sublime, or so several very trustworthy websites assured him. “You and Dean made good choices on who to send.”
“They all speak very highly of your town,” he continues, trying to ignore Dean’s unsettlingly convincing plan to salt the earth where Ichabod once stood as a warning to those who cross him. This is not a moment he would appreciate being corrected on several misconceptions on the feasibility, and that doesn’t even include the existence of a witch with a bond to the earth being in residence who might object to poisoning the earth in front of her. “He spent hours explaining in detail to everyone at the camp what would happen to them if they made anyone in Ichabod so much as nervous. The only reason we’re allowed to be armed is it was in the agreement with the alliance and the entire point of our being here at all.”
Alison smiles at Dean, all teeth. “Bring. It. On.”
“Amanda is very much enjoying living here,” he tells Teresa’s pained expression.
Teresa smirks over the rim of her cup. “I’d say so, yeah.”
“As well as the residents,” he adds casually, and Teresa’s smirk widens knowingly. “Or so she’s told me, in startling detail.”
Teresa bursts out laughing, and as Castiel takes a satisfied drink from his cup, he realizes the kitchen’s now unexpectedly silent. Looking up, he sees Dean staring down at him with an expression drifting between angry and bewildered. A quick glance at Alison verifies she’s looking at Teresa in a very similar way.
“You’re done?” Teresa asks sweetly, raising her eyebrows, and Castiel watches, fascinated, as Alison’s mouth snaps shut, hot color spreading across her face not entirely the result of anger. “Tea’s getting cold. Sit down and drink some. Now.”
“It’s very good,” Castiel agrees, retrieving Dean’s chair—which has inexplicably slid back several feet—and nudging the back of Dean’s knees with it to indicate he should sit down before Castiel has to apply enough pressure to make him. To his relief, Dean does so without the need for additional measures, and if he’s not mistaken, the flush isn’t entirely the result of energetic shouting of useless threats to any and all who would oppose him (that being Alison). “The tea, I mean,” he adds, pushing Dean’s cup in front of him. “An excellent choice: thank you. You should have some.”
“Anytime.” Warily, Dean takes a sip, eyeing a subdued Alison on the other side of the table uncertainly. “So—everything okay?”
“Yes,” he answers, turning to Teresa. “I—”
“Any chance you’ll get to the point of this little visit?” Alison asks, glaring at them both before jumping slightly, tossing an uncertain look at a serene Teresa. “I mean, please tell us. We truly want to know. Please.”
Dean’s left eye twitches, but a very gentle nudge to his ankle seems to cut off whatever terrifyingly explicit threat he was considering as a viable response. “What happened four days ago—we think we know what happened, or part of it anyway.”
Alison’s hostility fades as she searches Dean’s face. “Right. You went to the church?”
“Yeah.” He looks at Castiel. “You want to start?”
“No, not at all,” he says, setting down his cup with a rattle. “The first thing you need to know; it might not be over yet.”
Teresa lets out a breath when they’re finished. “Whoever said there’s nothing new under heaven lied.”
“An angel probably inspired it,” Castiel tells her as she looks mournfully at her empty cup before going to retrieve the kettle. “They always lie.”
Alison’s mouth quirks, murmuring thanks to Teresa as she refills her cup before looking at Castiel curiously. “So using memory to keep it active—I’m guessing that’s different.”
“It’s a creative solution to the vexing problem of interference in ritual human sacrifice,” he answers as Dean selects their tea bags. “However, as with all things, there is a price to be paid for every advantage. From what I’ve read from the design, the requirements are very strict regarding killing those marked after the circle is completed if they don’t or can’t do it immediately. It’s a risk that a more orthodox version wouldn’t have; the victims can’t simply be killed or die in any way other than according to very specific criteria or it fails and unmakes it all.”
“The memory needs to be active,” Teresa interprets, nodding. “And they don’t forget it, for that matter.”
“Both, though the second is assured by ritual itself when the memory is first created,” he answers. “To recreate the original, the circle must first be completed anew and the victims must see it. That triggers conscious recall, which is required to connect the newly created circle to the original and bring it back into being, and only then can the victim be killed and their deaths qualify for inclusion. It does still have one component in common with all others, however: it’s all or nothing when it comes to the victims. Everyone marked is part of the whole, and one single death outside those parameters makes it impossible to complete and unmakes it entirely.”
Dean drops his tea bag on the plate with a thump. “So one breaking their neck after getting away—”
“A revoltingly ironic way to unmake this, yes. And considering the mind of a demon, probably a perfectly acceptable one as far as limitations go.”
Dean grimaces as he finishes adding sugar to Castiel’s tea. “No way out but death. Including being killed by someone who wanted it to fail and knew how to make that happen.”
Alison takes a drink, looking grim. “I told Amanda everything I could remember about what we found at the church, but I can show Cas what I saw directly if that would help….” Startled, he fumbles his cup at the casual offer, tea spilling over the edge. “What?”
Ignoring Dean’s curious look, he takes the towel Teresa offers and wipes up the tea as he tries to work out how to explain what should be obvious.
“Generally,” he starts, “you don’t simply—offer up your memories to anyone who may want them. You shoot them, in fact: I think we’ve discussed this? I know Amanda drills you weekly on the firing range; your progress is excellent, by the way.”
“I knew you were behind that,” she mutters, scowling at him. “Cas, I show you shit all the time during our—that thing we do when you’re here. What makes this different?”
“It’s different,” he explains patiently. “That’s for your benefit, and your consent limits me to exactly what is required to teach you, nothing more and nothing less, and that gives you protection.”
“Then I consent to you seeing anything you want!” Alison says in exasperation before he can stop her—or even realize there was something he would need to stop—before picking up her cup again. “Though maybe after I slept? Reliving that…before breakfast, though.”
Castiel closes his eyes; you can explain in small and very easily understood words exactly what not to do—in their mother tongue, even—and yet, humans give blood, memories, and consent in blank check form at the drop of a hat to whoever may ask.
“Cas?” asks he who didn’t even bother himself to ask why Castiel wanted his blood that day for the wards and showed as much interest in his reasons after the fact as before, which was none at all.
“Tomorrow,” he says shortly; perhaps by then, he may be able to frame a better explanation of why one doesn’t give consent to even Fallen angels to do what they will, since historically that’s exactly what they do and never, once, has that ended well for the human in question. “Teresa, what did you sense at the church grounds?”
“I’ve never felt anything like that before,” Teresa answers, eyes distant. “The corruption was too large to risk cleansing alone, but I’ve checked it regularly, and it hasn’t spread.”
“It was wise of you not to take the risk,” he confirms, seeing the lingering guilt; a witch bound to the earth would feel that as a failure no matter how necessary. “Anything you accomplished would have been temporary at best; as long as this exists, so will it. You also have greater responsibilities that must take precedence.”
She shrugs, staring at her cup as the tea steeps into the water. “I know. It doesn’t help.”
“How’d you find out about it anyway?” Dean asks Alison, smiling in satisfaction at her guilty start. “That’s what I thought. You do more when you’re sleeping than I do awake these days. Any reason you didn’t mention this before, like when we got here? A warning would have been good here.”
“Dean, it was years ago,” she argues with muted heat—probably as a result of Teresa’s warning glance—before reaching for the sugar. “Pretty soon after we settled here, in fact, and I gotta tell you, since then, not exactly unusual to find whole towns wiped out.”
Castiel gives Dean a sidelong glance. It’s becoming an effort to remind himself Dean’s only been here four months, but Dean’s face doesn’t reflect any surprise. “You went looking even after you settled here?”
“Church set a precedent, I guess,” she responds, playing nervously with her cup. “We’d hear things, go check it out, see if there was anything we could do. Usually that was just burning the bodies, but sometimes, there’d be survivors. We’d bring ‘em here; not like we didn’t have room.”
“’Hear things’?” Dean asks mockingly. “Really?”
She makes a face. “Sometimes euphemistically, but yeah. If I’m gonna dream the goddamn future so I can fix it, might as well get to doing just that. Why not?” She raises her eyebrows challengingly. “Like you wouldn’t do the same goddamn thing.”
Of course she would do something, and becoming mayor has only increased the scope of her activities, and he doubts her leadership will ever be other than by example, the more dangerous the better. He makes a mental note to speak to Amanda about arranging with Teresa regular time for Alison on the training field as well and verify exactly what she knows and what she’s capable of doing now. Teresa and Manuel would have seen she knew the basics, but it was probably difficult for both of them to be objective with family, and Alison would take advantage of that uncertainty, since from what Amanda’s said, Alison is not overly fond of exercise and the outdoors.
“Fine, got me there.” Dean blows out a breath, aiming a rueful grin at Alison. “Go ahead; tell us about your dream trailer of the church.”
“It was—I’m not sure how to explain.” She glances at Teresa, hazel eyes unfocusing briefly before she nods and returns her attention to Dean. “Teresa and Manuel had just arrived a few days earlier with another group, and…” She grimaces, looking at Teresa again. “You were doing your thing that you do.”
“Listening to the earth,” Teresa says patiently, a sigh in her voice. “That was only during daylight hours, however. I was actually sleeping that night. I think I mentioned once or twice I hadn’t actually practiced that part of my craft since I finished my apprenticeship. It was exhausting.”
Castiel tries and fails to imagine sitting for hours doing absolutely nothing but communing with the earth. The sheer tedium….
“They knew what I meant,” Alison objects.
“I didn’t,” Dean volunteers, getting a dirty look from Alison. “Keep going. What happened?”
“I woke up,” Alison says, rolling her eyes at Dean’s scowl. “Obviously. I knew the signs of something I needed to do, but this was—stronger. And you,” she says to Teresa, “were awake in the kitchen.”
“To get some milk,” Teresa says, glaring at Alison in return. “You’re the one with the weird visions, I just listen to the earth.”
“And it talks back!”
“And I’m the one with a fallen angel,” Dean says, looking between them. “I win forever, okay? And—wait, why does it even matter?” He cocks his head, studying them before he starts to grin. “You just met—you didn’t know what either of you were, did you? That’s when you found out?”
“Pretty much,” Alison answers sourly. “Teresa kept asking me if I was okay—”
“You looked upset.”
“You try having a strong compulsion to explain you dream the future—and don’t get the details—to someone you’ve spent a week trying to convince you’d make an excellent life partner! While your brother was hovering every goddamn time I went near you!” Teresa’s mouth twitches as Alison looks at them in remembered outrage. “They didn’t give details about what happened before they came here, which join the party, that was everyone here, no one asked. I thought it was some nice, garden-variety homophobia from Manuel—you know, normal bullshit.” She snorts, looking eerily like Dean for a moment. “Like it could be something that simple.”
“I hear you,” Dean commiserates. “So it was—wait, did you say compulsion?”
Castiel straightens; he assumed that was a figure of speech, but as Teresa’s partner, she wouldn’t use that word lightly, not anymore.
“Every time I opened my mouth, that’s all that wanted to come out,” Alison confirms as Teresa nods agreement. “Ten minutes of that, Teresa had a choice between being creeped the fuck out or trying to work out what was going on. Thanks, by the way,” she says to Teresa. “I never did tell you I appreciated the part where you didn’t go for your gun when I started freaking out on you in the middle of the night over warm milk and toast.”
“I recognized what it was,” Teresa tells them, curling her fingers through Alison’s reassuringly. “Since I was the object, clear questions and physical contact helped clarify what she needed to tell me while repressing the memories, which I assume is why she put it on herself.”
“Generally, clairvoyance isn’t concerned with the continuing mental health of its bearer,” Castiel says, surprised. “I wondered how she managed to avoid—”
“Cutting my wrists in a heroin bathtub?” Alison interrupts sweetly.
“Yes,” he agrees, ignoring her scowl as Teresa nods. “You think she’s deliberately blocking the memories?”
“In the Valley seers weren’t uncommon,” Teresa says. “I worked with enough of them to get an idea of what they could do, and I was called in for a few when they first manifested. It wasn’t rare for them to block themselves entirely if what they saw was traumatic enough, especially if there wasn’t anyone they could trust enough to tell what happened to them or would believe them if they did tell.” Her expression darkens in remembered pain. “The ones that didn’t decide on another option, that is.”
The modern era isn’t so different when it comes to those who are different, and true clairvoyance has rarely been anything other than a burden. Even during times they were believed, acceptance was always at whim; serving an emperor or burned alive, it was always a matter of luck even if they survived the horrors their own minds inflicted upon them. And even then….
“In any case, this time a compulsion allowed her to tell me before she forgot it, without having to remember it herself,” Teresa continues in a more normal voice. Taking a sip from her cup, she shakes her head. “It’s not impossible for someone to do it without training, the human mind is—”
“Like that,” Dean agrees briefly, fingers slowly loosening from their tight hold on the cup. “So she told you what happened?”
“Of course not,” Teresa says, lips curving in a mocking smile. “When does that happen? No, a very brief—but very detailed—description of the church and the grounds, that there was something we needed to do there—not much there, but after seeing it, I think I can guess why—and a rough idea of where it was. Luckily, there’s a Catholic church in Ichabod, and I used the diocese records to find it. Not all that difficult: only place in Kansas that had a bishop’s personal authorization for Father Francis to open and supervise a rural school for indigent children with funding provided by an anonymous donor into perpetuity.” She grins at Dean’s mystified expression. “You’re not Catholic; let’s say I can imagine the reaction here when a rural parish priest gets a bishop telling everyone to leave him alone to do his good work; talk about jumping a few levels of very important-in-their-own-minds bureaucracy. The letter was hilarious if you know what you’re reading: no one can formally say ‘fuck off and God bless you’ like a pissed bishop to a whining local priest not happy he couldn’t get a recalcitrant parish priest recalled and then finds out said priest got his school approved and fully funded.”
Dean grins appreciatively. “¿Si vas a hacer, haga con huevos?“
Teresa laughs delightedly. “Spanish for tourists stuck, huh?”
“Shut up, your mom taught me that after the thing at the diner when I asked for eggs.” Taking another drink, Dean taps a discordant rhythm on the table. “Got anything else on Father Francis from that church? I’d really like to know how long he was working on this.”
“Not much, but I’ll show you what we have,” she assures him. “Anyway, Alison figured out I wasn’t just another resident, and all things considered, took the witch thing really well.” Alison gives her an incredulous look, and Teresa’s mouth twitches. “Actually she said ‘whatever, but are you interested in me?’ While I was breaking and entering a church, by the way, to track down her dream location. Because that was the important part.”
“It was to me,” Alison protests, and from the corner of his eye, he sees Dean hide a grin behind his cup. “Anyway, we had location, so I woke Manuel up—and I apologized for calling him a homophobic dick and he forgave me when I assured him I didn’t have any intention of burning Teresa for witchcraft—and we went to the church. It was—” She hesitates, looking at Teresa. “Teresa almost passed out when we stepped on the grounds; Manuel caught her just before she hit the ground.”
“Yeah, you can thank me for Cas not having a bloody nose,” Dean says, eyes darting to Teresa, who’s frowning uncertainly. “Something else?”
“Yes,” she says slowly, staring at the surface of the table intently. “Before that—just before I stepped on the ground—I thought….” She trails off, frustrated, then looks at Castiel. “It was now, had been, would be, always. It was nailed into the earth and the sky, unmoving, until we touched the ground. Then it was—now-now.”
“Cas?” Dean prompts, and he realizes he’s been quiet for too long. “What?”
“Time differentiation, but I’ve never heard it put like that,” he answers, wondering at the very distant possibility he isn’t interpreting Teresa’s explanation correctly. “It broke when you stepped on the earth there?”
She nods. “Never felt anything like that, but the earth—let’s say it confirmed what it was.”
“When you entered the church, how long did it appear to have been since the slaughter?”
“Last death was two to four hours earlier,” Teresa answers. “Rigor mortis hadn’t set in on any of them when we got Dolores there, and she used that to get a rough time of death for all of them when we got them back to Ichabod. Best guess, they were all within six to twelve hours of each other, but how long it was outside the church grounds….”
Castiel sits back in his chair. “The earth didn’t know?” Then, at Teresa’s raised eyebrow, “It didn’t tell you?”
“Which would normally injure my professional pride,” Teresa admits, folding an arm on the table and resting her chin in her hand. “In this case, though—and keep in mind translation is sketchy when you’re speaking to something that has no sense of time as singular instead of cyclical—it didn’t notice it. Or possibly wasn’t supposed to notice, that wasn’t clear.”
Taking a drink from the cooling tea, he thinks wistfully of far less stressful times, when his decisions only extended to the number of sexual partners in any given room and who would top. He also remembered those times existing, which is a feature he never realized could be optional instead of mandatory. “What you sensed was a fixed point in time, a kind of bubble, and grounded in the earth itself. Within it, time ran on a different scale, though at this point, there’s no way to be certain on the difference. What was a day for them may have been weeks, even months here. Your arrival was apparently an indicator to bring the church and grounds back into the regular time stream, but whoever did it didn’t compensate for the differentiation. Or rather,” he adds, “may not have been alive any longer to fix it.”
“And that means….” Dean trails off invitingly.
“It’s younger than the rest of Creation,” Teresa explains, with the ease of someone who’s lived for years with someone who often required such explanations. “Not much, though: a quarter year, I’d be able to tell from the differences in the earth myself, and Castiel….”
“Cas,” he corrects her absently, fighting down frustration with his lack of knowledge. “I should be able to tell no matter how much—I think—but observation states less than two months. Six weeks, if I were guessing, which I am.”
“How much power does something like that take?” Dean asks curiously, taking another sip from his cup. “The time bubble thing, I mean.”
“Almost nothing. It’s practically useless, in all honesty. To put in human terms, it’s the equivalent of a parlor trick.” He bites his lip, amused by the incredulity reflected on Alison’s and Dean’s faces as Teresa hides her amusement at the same behind her cup. “Remember the frame of reference for the immortal is very different. It’s generally used by the gods—and Gabriel, who possibly perfected the use—as a facet of extremely elaborate practical jokes on each other. Using it on humans was also an enjoyable pastime, but they couldn’t really appreciate the full range of a joke that could last centuries.” Despite himself, he has to fight down a smile, keeping his expression rigidly impassive; for the first time, he thinks he can understand the appeal. “Eternity is a long time, and even gods can become bored, I suppose.”
“Better than an amoeba,” Alison murmurs, one corner of her mouth quirking slyly. Ignoring Teresa and Dean’s quizzical looks, she cocks her head. “Remind me before you leave: we got a couple of copies of The Three Stooges and I grabbed one for you the other day. Got a TV at Chitaqua by any chance?”
“We just acquired one,” he agrees, intrigued.
“Tell me what you think after you see them,” she says with a ghost of a smile before returning to the original subject. “Okay, time was stopped at the church for six to eight weeks, is that what you mean?”
“Slowed, not stopped,” he corrects her absently and immediately becomes the center of attention. “Think of time like a river: if a dam was built, the output of power needed would be immense just to keep the pressure from destroying it, as well as require constant attention and maintenance.” He sits back, slotting it together. “Stopping time is also very, very noticeable; it’s rather obvious when a river stops flowing and bears investigation as to the reason.”
“Hard to miss?” Dean offers. “Might as well put up a sign saying ‘something interesting’s going on here’.”
“Complete with fireworks and a chorus, preferably Greek, yes,” he agrees, warmed by Dean’s smile. “Slowing time, however, is different; it’s simply changing the speed of passage in a discreet space. To even see it, it’d be like looking at a large river and finding the slowest point on a glance; you’d have to know it was there to find it and exactly where to look. There’s no way to tell without investigating whether it’s a natural characteristic of the river or artificial, and why would anyone bother unless they were in on the presumed joke, since that’s what they generally were?”
“Time has slow points?” Alison asks slowly, looking pained. “Chemistry was at one, physics was eight in the morning; sue me, I’m not a morning person.”
“Don’t trouble yourself,” he tells her earnestly. “You were at least two centuries from accidentally breaking cause and effect while expanding your understanding of special relativity; have you seen Groundhog Day? It was like the director was there. I can point out the relevant scenes if you have a copy available.”
Alison stares at him before she slowly begins to smile. “And it all started with sitting on a toad.”
“One hundred and seventy-four million gallons per hour per square mile,” he agrees, smiling back. “For three hours, thirty two minutes, and fifteen seconds, roughly.”
“Do you need us here for this?” Dean asks, green eyes telling him that they’ll be revisiting this topic in private for a full explanation one day. “Moving on from—both of you being freaks—let’s go with this not being a practical joke of the gods, just so I can sleep at night.”
“It wasn’t a joke, but it would have looked like one on the off-chance anyone saw it and knew my Brother,” Castiel assures him as he takes another drink. “Everything in that church was consistent with her purpose, except those children; that’s what doesn’t fit. Those women were the foundation of her claim, and the execution of those demons was just. That was all she would have been interested in—in a sense, it was all she could be interested in—so why fix that point in time afterward? And for that matter, use time to hide it? Gods generally don’t think like that.”
“That’s why it was slowed, not stopped,” Dean says in a strange voice. “Hide it…Alison, this town, all of you are here because there wasn’t anywhere else to go, right? What was the reaction to those kids when you brought them back?”
“We almost had a war on Main Street when we brought them home,” she replies with a faint smile, remembering. “The older kids told us—those nuns, they were hunters, but they didn’t just save them from whatever killed their parents. The nuns never told them this, but the older ones heard enough to—the towns wouldn’t take them, even the ones their parents lived in before they died. Sometimes their own relatives….” She takes a breath, the flash of hot anger there and gone in an instant. “All of us here—we knew what that was like to lose everything, even our homes and some of us our countries. Let’s say the kids were really surprised we almost had fistfights in the street over who got to raise them.”
Dean nods, mouth softening. “That how you got your trade network started. The kids: you started working on contacting other towns, spread the word that there was still somewhere for the kids to go with the church gone, searched towns when you heard something went down. I wondered about that.”
“We’d only been here a little while, and there weren’t many of us. Enough dry goods were left behind and some gardens still producing for us to be okay, but that wasn’t gonna last forever. The future—what future did we have, just surviving ourselves was hard enough, you know? And even wanting to….” Dean nods. “The kids, though—babies need milk, kids need food, and they couldn’t survive on their own; if we were gonna save them, we had to save ourselves to do it. So that’s what we did.” She shakes her head. “Word spread. We never turned anyone away without damn good reason. Side effect: regular contact with the towns close to us made us familiar—kids help with that kind of thing, I noticed—and half the battle was won right there. From there, it was easy to build up trust.”
“Bread upon the water,” Dean says, smiling. “You found those kids a month after you settled here, right?”
“About six weeks, give or take,” she answers, looking amused. “God, those first weeks….we all huddled in the buildings and didn’t even go outside if we could help it. Me, Neer, Sud, and Rabin would go days without seeing anyone else. Get out, stock up our supplies, cook on a fire in the fireplace downstairs, stay away from rooms with windows.” The hazel eyes grow distant. “Then—out of nowhere—the lights came on.”
“Tony and Walter got the grid up.”
“Yeah, for five seconds. Then it overloaded and lights out, except—” She sits back, eyes fixed on the table. “Five seconds, I looked around and saw my best friends and I were sleeping on a pile of clothes and mattresses in a room with peeling wallpaper, with a pile of empty plastic bottles and crap we couldn’t be fucked to throw away because why bother. Animals do better than that. We weren’t living, we weren’t surviving; we were marking time until we were dead.”
Dean takes a sip from his cup.
“Me and Neer braved the wilds of town looking for the power station, found Tony and Walter, and they explained that they couldn’t bring it up again without risking burning it out, not until we could lower the load on it. Every house in the town had to be checked to turn off the lights and unplug the cells and turn off the coffeemakers. A few months of hard work, and we’d have electricity. Probably. If we didn’t miss anything.”
“And option two?” Dean asks, looking like he’s enjoying himself immensely.
“Everyone get together, pick one area for all of us to live, and he’d work out how to cut power to everywhere but there. We go though, flip everything off that needed electricity, and a week, two at most, we’d have lights.” She looks up at Dean. “But to do it, it would take everyone, and we’d have to be outside, right in the middle of the street every day, going between buildings and checking and double checking, because we only had one chance to get it right.
“I lived in that goddamn building with peeling wallpaper and I wanted light to see how to get that shit off. I wanted to sleep in a bed and eat food off a plate and to do that, I had to go outside and I wanted to do that and not be afraid. I got three of four; I was still afraid, every minute, but when Tony showed us the guns he’d collected from around town, me and Neer were first in line to get them and learn to use them.” She wipes hastily at her eyes, glancing at Teresa in a moment of shared warmth, before looking at Dean again. “And for his efforts, Tony got back to find out the lights were on and he was our first mayor. I don’t think he’s forgiven us for that one yet.”
“So after six weeks, give or take, you got electricity, plumbing, and people ready to start living their lives again,” Dean says cryptically. “Ready to start taking in survivors who didn’t have any place else to go, and you get a goddamn dream telling you exactly where to get some kids who needed just that. Anyone see where I’m going with this?”
“You think that goddess screwed with time to hide them until they had somewhere to go?” Alison asks incredulously, eyes darting to Castiel. “Would she do that?”
“Her purpose was those women; that’s why she was there. The children—she wouldn’t hurt them without reason, but they weren’t—” He pauses; they were small. “She wouldn’t even see them.”
“What about that novice?”
“If it was to save her, she could have taken her when she left.” He studies the edge of his tea cup resentfully. “I need to point out, what we know is almost entirely speculation. It would help, of course, if the earth would give us a narrative of events,” he adds in Teresa’s direction, “but I assume you’ve done your best.”
Teresa rolls her eyes, unoffended, while Alison and Dean both seem to find some point in the distance utterly fascinating.
“Amanda’s report covers the rest,” Alison says after taking an unnecessarily large drink of tea, cheeks suspiciously flushed. “When we had the kids and the novice home and were sure they were okay, we went back to the church, got the bodies down, and brought them here for Dolores to check out and give them a clean burn. The kids only knew the names they chose when they took orders, and since everything was either charred or wrecked, we buried them here under their names in the order.”
“What about the novice—the kids had to know her name, too.” Alison makes a face. “Don’t tell me—they couldn’t remember it. Because of fucking course they can’t.”
“Or they just aren’t telling,” Alison answers wryly. “They visited her every day, brought the babies with ‘em. Weren’t surprised when she left, either. On a guess, the older ones helped her out, though I can’t prove it. All they said was it was a really long drive, and she really wanted to go home.”
“Did she drive?” Dean asks.
“No missing gas or cars, but I guess she could have found one on the road,” Alison answers, shrugging. “We got her picture still—in retrospect, I’m surprised she didn’t take it with her—and Dolores’ guess on her age and some basic demographics, in case—in case anyone came looking for her, we could tell them something.”
There’s a pensive silence after that, and it’s Dean that finally breaks it.
“You said the kids don’t remember anything about the courtyard? Or the church?”
Alison shakes her head. “The courtyard—it’s blurred, lots of blank spots, shock I guess—but the church….” She gives Castiel an uncertain look. “What happened to them there—it’s like….”
“Like the memories aren’t there,” he says numbly. “And no space where they should be.”
“There should have been, right?” Alison sighs in relief at his brief nod. “Thanks, I was wondering about that. It was like it didn’t even happen.”
“Including the symbol?” Dean asks. At Alison’s nod, he focuses on Teresa. “Do you remember? The symbol, I mean.”
“Of course.” She looks at Alison. “I haven’t asked Kamal and Amanda yet, but I assume they do as well.”
“We can ask them in the morning,” Dean says grimly. “On a guess, they will. Anyone else see it?”
“Amanda followed Cas’s order that no one else enter unless by my will and with my express permission,” Teresa answers, choosing her words carefully. “Alison gave the order to the town, and no one disobeyed. I asked Kamal to join me in case he had seen it before, and he insisted on remaining in case I needed help to complete purification. No one else entered or left.” She hesitates for a moment, exchanging a look with Alison. “Why did you ask if we remembered it?”
“Because—”
“Because what Alison described regarding the children’s memories is what was done to mine,” Castiel interrupts. “By me.”
Alison’s eyes widen as beneath the table, Dean’s hand suddenly closes around his wrist, conveying reassurance with a warm squeeze. “That doesn’t mean—”
“It means the goddess didn’t remove their memories,” Castiel says softly. “I told you, a god wouldn’t do it like this, they wouldn’t know how. I did it, and then my own. It doesn’t make sense. Why wouldn’t I simply let her remove the design from their minds or do it myself?”
“Cas—”
“You said this works on active memory?” Teresa interrupts, leaning forward when she sees she has their attention. “Dean, you’ve seen the symbols for Ichabod’s wards; do you remember all of them?”
Dean starts to answer, then grimaces. “Most of them, yeah. Why?”
“Most, not all, and you saw them in Laredo first; that’s why you recognized them, right?” He nods. “But if I gave you a pencil and piece of paper, I’m going to guess you’d only get maybe half of them accurately.” Dean blinks at her, hand frozen in the act of picking up the cup. “What about that design in the courtyard?”
“Every line,” he answers softly; he can’t remember anything before Castiel’s arrival, and nothing of actually seeing the design in the courtyard even after Castiel unmade it with his blood. He remembers that, however. “Teresa?”
“I can,” she confirms. “So why can’t the kids after seeing it this time? Even if it was shock, Alison should be able to find it in their memories, and she can’t.”
Dean sits back. “At all?”
“Nothing,” Alison confirms, gulping the last of her tea before looking at Castiel. “No blank space, either.”
“Why go through all the trouble of making something without a time limit and risk fucking it up by depending on the same shitty human memory that makes you lose your keys five seconds after putting them down?” Teresa asks in what he supposes is supposed to be a rhetorical question.
“That’s a different type of memory,” Castiel argues, unable to help himself. “In any case, what does that have to do with—”
“Think about this one. You escaped—or think you did—a human sacrifice and can’t get the memory of that design out of your head,” Teresa says conversationally. “What do you do now? Other than visit a psychologist: let’s assume you realized you needed a little more specialized help.”
“Go to a professional in the field,” Dean says immediately. “A hunter. Ritual human sacrifice: that would get our attention. Protect them while we tried to figure out how to fix it, yeah.”
“A psychic, a seer, a witch, any practitioner,” Teresa says, counting off on her fingers. “Who else would a human who was desperate go to?”
“Crossroads,” Dean breathes, sitting back. “Make a deal to get out of it.”
“Exactly the people you don’t want to know anything about this. Not a great way to keep a secret, especially if you want to hide this from other demons,” Teresa says. “That’s assuming our smarter than average sacrifice didn’t run into any demons along the way who read their minds, saw that design, and realized what it did. First principle of keeping a secret: be the only one who even knows a secret exists.”
“If the sacrifice doesn’t remember the design until they see it again,” Dean says, starting to nod, “they don’t know it’s even there, much less have any reason to try to find a way to get rid of it. Repress that shit and move on.”
“We can remember because we weren’t part of it; unintended consequence of making a memory stick, it works on everyone who sees it, but the full ritual is the only way to hide it after. If Alison can’t see it in the kids’ heads now, even going to a pro wouldn’t help,” Teresa continues, bracing both elbows on the table and leaning forward. “They wouldn’t even know the person was still marked, or how, much less where to look.” She turns at Castiel. “This thing is using organic human memory formation to do the job, no magic needed; the only thing new here is persistence, making sure you can’t get rid of it and keeping it from degrading or altering, since memory does that all the time. Even if a goddess could wipe their memories of what happened entirely, how do you get rid of what they don’t even know that they remember?”
“Human memory can’t be entirely destroyed without physical alteration to the brain itself and that’s not easy, even for a god,” he says, thinking carefully. “When humans form and store a memory, each engram is encoded redundantly and with multiple alternate pathways should one or more be destroyed. The persistence isn’t magic; the ritual simply takes advantage of what your brain already does on its own. What it does is protect it after formation, as well as the redundant copies. That would include hiding it, even from the brain itself so it wouldn’t affect the memory.”
“Exactly,” Teresa says softly. “With only one built-in trigger: seeing the design. Perfect way to keep a secret: no one knows it’s there, even the one carrying it, not until you want them to. Even if you know it’s there, the only way to trigger it is to know the design and show it to them.”
“Including an angel or a god,” Castiel realizes, looking at Dean. “That’s why those restrictions were added to the design; not just to hide its existence. To keep the memory from being removed at all; even if they were looking at it in a human’s mind, they still wouldn’t see it.”
Dean swallows. “If that goddess couldn’t see it—”
“The only way to be sure it was gone would be to wipe their memories entirely. Everything they were, are, and could ever be, damaging the brain beyond repair.” He meets Dean’s eyes, seeing his own horror reflected there. “Tabula rasa, a blank slate whose pen was destroyed just to be certain; as they were at that moment they would always be. It would be kinder to kill them.”
“Or an angel who just learned all about human memory the old fashioned way told her there was another option,” Dean responds, looking at Alison and Teresa. “Cas, how’d you do it with yours again? You literally can’t forget anything, so…”
“I removed all the memories from the linear sequence,” he answers. “In effect—”
“Hid them,” Dean finishes in satisfaction, and Teresa straightens with a startled expression. “Most of the benefits of wiping them, but no mindfucked kids. All the demons were dead, so far so good, there was no one alive who knew the design or about the sacrifice at all. The kids remembered almost being sacrificed, though; that just might make a demon curious when they saw it, and wiping it—big blank space—would get attention. So lower the risk, just in case. Take everything about that sacrifice, and bonus, improved mental health for the under-ten crowd.”
“Best case scenario: all organic triggers would be gone that would retrieve the memory of the design, and maybe that would break it,” Teresa agrees, nodding. “Didn’t work, but it was a longshot anyway. Second best: with all the demons who were there for the first try dead, there’d be no one to come after them, so it wouldn’t matter if it was broken or not. That doesn’t mean word didn’t get around, though, and that’s exactly what happened. Removing the memory of the sacrifice would protect them not just from a random demon, but even from one who knew enough to go looking for some kids with a memory of a failed human sacrifice or—”
“—kids with a big blank space in their memories, all in the same place,” Dean finishes for her, looking at Castiel. “I heard something about that being kind of noticeable. I’m guessing a demon would notice that, so instead, hide the kids in plain sight. Only way to find them would be knowing what to look for.”
Alison closes her eyes. “And it almost worked.”
“It worked perfectly,” Dean says softly, but he’s not looking at Alison. “The kids survived.” With a flickering smile, he returns his attention to the others. “Not only that. Two and a half years since then; those demons weren’t waiting, they’ve been looking for them. Only way they found them was using human tools who could ask the right questions and even then, they had to be here for weeks before they were sure it was these kids. And that’s the only reason we know this exists at all, much less that somewhere out there, someone else knows not just it happened, but the design. All the kids were was confirmation; eventually, they would have tried this without ‘em and we’d be fucked and not even know enough to realize how much.” He slumps back in his seat, expression darkening. “And we’re no closer to figuring out how the hell to get that out of the kids’ heads before someone tries again. If the only way to remove it was mindfucking the kids, then….”
“We don’t have to remove it,” Teresa says slowly, looking up with a startled expression. “Just unmake it.”
“They were watching when I unmade it in the courtyard,” Castiel answers. “If that didn’t work—”
“In their minds,” she says, tapping the table restlessly. “Natural memory formation of the original, unnaturally persistent and no degradation, because it’s protected; they want to make a memory a sacrificial circle, we’ll treat it like one. Draw it again, let the kids recall it, then unmake it in their memory when it’s active as well as here.”
“And what about the copies?” Dean asks, the hope suppressed but there. “Will doing one get them all?”
Teresa looks at Castiel thoughtfully. “If they’re linked by contamination, unmaking one will unmake all the copies. On a guess, though, they aren’t; this thing makes the brain do the heavy lifting, so each copy will be discrete. However, that means every time recall is established, all the copies have to become active; not like they know about each other and can pick which shows up. Once it’s in their conscious memory, Alison can see it—see all the copies—and we can find and unmake each one.”
“We draw it, they remember, Alison reads their minds and…that’s not where this is going?” Dean finishes at Alison’s baffled expression. “Teresa?”
“She can see them,” Teresa agrees, and Dean follows her gaze to Castiel. “Altering them, though….”
“She could,” he admits finally, and Alison’s eyes widen. “However, I wouldn’t recommend this as a good way to learn the principles.”
“I could do that?” Alison asks blankly.
“You can do it now,” he tells her. “But it wouldn’t end well, and please don’t ask me to elaborate on what that means.”
“I’m not asking,” Alison assures him, looking shaken. “So how—”
“Something Teresa shouldn’t even know enough to guess,” he interrupts as Teresa shrugs. “The earth is indiscreet, I see.”
“The earth,” she says, “is practical.”
He sighs, looking at Alison again. “Even if you were experienced, mistakes are still possible, and with something like this…. It’s not a matter of knowledge or experience, but—something more fundamental.”
“What?” Dean asks when the silence stretches to the (very short) limits of his patience. “Seriously, just say it.”
“An angel would be very useful; manipulation of human memory is intrinsic to their beings, and they were created to serve humanity. However, due to their absence—and the restrictions against them, which may even apply to active memory.…” He closes his eyes, resigned. “The fact I altered my memory—and apparently that of the children—without ill effect proves I retained that, which shouldn’t surprise me as it’s certainly useless enough to qualify… nevermind. We can’t make mistakes; it’s instinct, and there’s no danger of permanent damage to the brain because we know exactly how to do it. What I don’t have,” he adds, opening his eyes to stare at Teresa, “is Grace, or even a compatible source of power….you must be joking!”
“Me,” Alison says blankly, looking at him, then at Teresa. “But I don’t have any power. I just—do it.”
He sighs, ignoring Teresa hiding her smile. “You do, it’s intrinsic and specific to your abilities so useless for anything else, and I don’t have time to explain more thoroughly on the off-chance you actually care, so just take it as a given. And this is a terrible idea.”
“No, it’s a good idea,” Alison argues, looking between them. “It’s fine, what do you need me to do?”
“Survive,” he says quietly, watching the color drain from her face. “I don’t know if I can see it without you, but even if I can, I would need you so I could make the changes, and that means access to your entire mind and exposing you to mine. You won’t survive, not even for the few moments it would take me to unmake each memory.”
She licks her lips before nodding. “I’ll do it.”
For a moment, he forgets how to breathe. “Alison—”
“I’ll do it,” she repeats. “So I’ll ask you again: what do you need me to do?”
“No—”
“Fifteen kids, Cas,” she says, learning forward urgently. “It’s worth the risk—”
“No.” Focusing on the table, he takes a deep breath, trying to think. “The children aren’t in immediate danger. We have time to consider other options.”
“What options?”
“And time to think of them as well,” he answers flatly. “This isn’t and will never be one of them. Teresa, how you could even think—”
“On a guess,” Dean says casually, “because she thinks she can protect Alison. Or the earth will.”
Teresa doesn’t answer, eyes darkening.
“Alison said you used to help her block everyone out,” Dean continues, taking a drink from his nearly empty cup. “I didn’t think much of it, but the thing with Amanda—Cas said she was the only one in danger, the earth would protect Alison. She’s not bound to it, you are. So why would it care what happened to her specifically? Your feelings?”
“That’s one way to put it,” Teresa agrees reluctantly, flickering a glance at Castiel. “It’s…private.”
“Which is why Cas can’t tell me?”
“Actually, I can.” Teresa’s eyes narrow. “The formalities required of an angel when interacting with Creation—which includes the earth and all that concerns it—no longer apply. It’s a matter of courtesy, and I’m willing to discard that at need or simply for spite. This would be need, but spite isn’t off the table.”
Teresa makes a face. “She’s bound to me, and what concerns me concerns the earth.”
Dean blinks slowly. “What?”
“She did it to save me.” Alison stares at her cup, fingers tightening in Teresa’s. “I—wasn’t entirely honest about—I didn’t wake up hearing everything the next morning; it was two weeks before I woke up. In the infirmary, on an IV line, with Teresa looking at me like I just came back from the dead.”
Dean lets out a breath, the set look softening. “How’d you do it?”
“Same way I was bound to the earth,” Teresa answers, calm fragile enough to shatter. “It took me two weeks to find her, and once I gained her consent, I could take it from her enough for her to adjust.”
“Noise shared is noise halved,” he murmurs, and Alison, glancing up warily, nods. “That’s what you meant.”
“And finally wake up,” Teresa whispers, eyes dark with remembered fear. “I’d die for her; living for her was a bonus.”
“That’s not to the death, you get that, right?” Dean asks, turning on Alison. “Teresa’s bound until it lets her go, and death’s not necessarily a dealbreaker. You get this—”
“I get her,” Alison answers, covering their joined hands protectively. “Even if it wasn’t my life on the line, I would have done it.”
“Cas, I made my offering when I was bound to the earth,” Teresa continues. “I got all of it in return, and I survived; that’s the test, and that’s how I passed. What I can do, she can, but that’s not what made her able to interpret that memory she got from you: that was her. If she can do that—”
“One memory,” he spits out, panic clawing through him. “One, and this isn’t a memory. This isn’t like your offering to the earth; all that it was, is, and will be is the smallest fraction of the whole of Creation, and Creation is only a single mote of what’s contained within me. She’ll shatter in a single breath!”
“Then when you’re unmaking those memories,” Alison says into the ensuing silence, hazel eyes certain, “do it faster than I can breathe.”
Teresa thoughtfully left clean clothes for them on the bed, which is less of a surprise than it once would have been. Changing clothing specifically for the purpose of going to bed is still a concept he finds difficult to grasp, but in this case, it’s not simply due to the sometimes inexplicable habits of humans. Dean is a hunter, and he rarely bothered to do so without some other factor (damaged or otherwise unacceptably soiled clothing, an injury requiring him remove it so it could be treated, a shower, sexual intercourse), but for reasons that elude him, Dean now does it every night and insists that Castiel acquire the habit as well.
Four months of experience have taught him this much; even the most inexplicable of Dean’s rules for human cohabitation is perfectly acceptable when supplemented with a system of rewards for compliance. That would be less of a problem if the reward system involved regular sex; sexual favors offered to reinforce acceptable behavior is one of humanity few successful leaps of logic. That it’s based entirely on Dean’s personal happiness and sense of comfort in his surroundings is not something he’s prepared to consider, at least until denial is no longer a viable option, which thankfully is not quite yet.
Picking them up—they’re very large, and he wonders if Teresa and Alison simply keep random clothing for potential guests available at all times or if she borrowed them from someone living here—he flickers a glance toward the door and the safety of a Dean-mandated habit of showering before bed. Somehow, he thinks tonight Dean will feel an exception is warranted.
“Gonna have to skip the shower tonight,” Dean confirms, kicking off his boots and setting them beside the nearby chair before pointing to the foot of the bed. “Sit down, Cas.”
Reluctantly, he toes off his boots first, another inexplicable habit, as Dean makes himself comfortable against the headboard and warily takes his assigned position at the foot, extremely aware of the space stretching between them.
“Okay, first thing—you don’t even remember what happened last time with that goddess,” Dean says unexpectedly. “This is all guesswork.”
“It’s possible I had a nefarious purpose instead, yes—”
“Don’t fuck with me,” Dean says warningly, and he shuts his mouth. “Your experiments in doing shit like this are running one-one when it comes to safety, so tell me you know doing this won’t kill you. I mean, not guess, not ‘let’s try seeing all things oops that was a bad plan and blood loss’; you can tell me this is totally safe.”
“Altering their memories?” he asks in surprise, adding quickly at Dean’s scowl, “No, there’s no danger at all. But I’d like to remind you that I didn’t agree to it.”
“You will,” Dean responds venomously. “Show you a fire, tell you it’s hot, you’d walk through it just to see if you could. So let’s get this part out of the way now: you’re telling me it couldn’t….I don’t know, do something to hurt you? By accident? Or on purpose,” he adds. “Let’s put that on the table, okay? Alison’s a psychic, tell me she can’t—do anything to hurt you or—whatever?”
Castiel blinks slowly. “A human psychic?” Dean nods empathically, seemingly forgetting Lucifer’s abject failure when simply attempting to read his mind. “Even if she wanted to,” he says slowly, wondering if he should be offended or worried about Dean’s display of very specific amnesia, “she couldn’t, no.” Then, “Why would you think she would?”
Dean’s expression goes through several bewildering permutations, each equally baffling, before settling—almost gratefully, he thinks—on anger. “Just covering all the bases, okay?”
“Dean—”
“Okay, next subject,” Dean interrupts. “Why don’t you want to do it?”
“What?”
“The thing with the kid’s memories and Alison,” he explains, as if that’s actually what he thought Castiel wished to have clarified. “Teresa thinks Alison will be okay, so—”
“She doesn’t know what she’s talking about.” Dean cocks his head. “She’s not wrong, but the scale against which she measures me is—inaccurate—because the earth doesn’t know what it isn’t, only what it is. Dean, the earth needs Teresa to tell it what you are when you walk the surface of its skin and are nourished by its bounty despite the fact you are born of it: it thinks of you as earth and is continually surprised you aren’t stationary and require food and dislike earthquakes. The obvious escapes it with truly unsettling regularity, because it’s limited only to what it is: earth and all that it encompasses. It knows what an angel isn’t—earth. What they are—what I am—it cannot know, and as that’s not earth, it doesn’t even know that!”
Dean starts to nod then sighs. “I get—none of that, but you’d know, so I’ll go with it.” He does something with his hands that after a moment, Castiel realizes is supposed to convey calm. “It’s a risk, a big one—”
“It’s not a risk,” he says flatly. “I will kill her. And possibly Teresa as well if their connection is as strong as I think it is and the earth doesn’t take action to cut its losses when it realizes nothing it can do will save Alison from me.”
“Right.” Dean hesitates. “That’s the only reason?”
“It’s the only one I care about.” Dean looks startled and tries to hide it, but not quickly enough. All at once, everything of this day, of the last four, coalesces into a single mass; anger, at those demons, at Lucifer, at the Host; at a goddess who’s been dead for years who would have dissolved those children’s minds without a thought; at Dean for what he asked of him and wants to ask of him now; at himself, for all that he isn’t and even more for what he still is, for a small convent who died in horror, unknown and unmourned, their names lost, because they were too small, and he had other things to do. You don’t understand, he wants to tell Dean; all I had to do was look, we could have saved them all, and I didn’t. They were too small. “You think I wouldn’t care.”
Dean’s eyes widen. “No, of course not. I just—”
“One human life,” he hears himself say. “I’ve killed so many of you, so why would one more bother me? It would be for a greater good, after all; I’ve heard it before. It’s always for a greater good. What does that even mean, greater good? Are there small ones? Who cares for them?”
“Cas, listen—”
“I’d shred her mind into ribbons, and I’d see it happening and still be unable to stop it,” he says, hearing his own horror in every word. “Every part of her would be dissolved into infinity, into what I am, into me, and it would take forever, I would watch it, she would feel it, we would feel it forever, because where we’d be when we do this, there’s only now. And when it was over….” He’d gaze upon the still-breathing corpse of a living woman, one who sees the vastness of humanity as he once did, a field spread with lights brighter than any star could ever be. He showed her herself, one light among so many, and he—he’d be the one to put it out. Simply by being what he is. It would never be over. “Killing is easy, Dean. If you want an executioner, let me put a bullet in the head of one of the children the way you asked me to put in yours; it would break the circle, take far less time, be far less painful, and one human, after all, is very much like another. You tell me which child: I’ll wait.”
“That’s not—” Dean starts, starting to look upset: good.
“What you meant? Of course it’s not: you’re not the one who has to decide whose head gets the bullet! That decision is and will always belong to the person who’s holding the gun, and that isn’t you either!”
“I know.” Dean takes a deep breath, clenched hands relaxing with a visible effort. “Alison volunteered. Look, I’m not saying to do it—”
“Yes you are.”
“—just—look, if the only option—”
“It’s not,” he says. “There’s a choice, it’s just not one you have to make, so you don’t have to admit what it would be. Alison volunteered; you don’t have to say her life matters less to you than those children’s. I’m the one who will kill her; you don’t have to suffer a single sleepless night after her death. Did I miss anything that you won’t have to do?”
“Fuck you,” Dean says hotly. “You think this is easy for me?”
“You’ll be alive, you won’t grieve for your lover and your sister, and you won’t have killed a woman whose mind you knew and remember each and every horrific detail of how she died for the length of your life,” he answers and has the satisfaction of seeing Dean flinch as if he was punched in the face. “Yes, I do think it’s very easy for you, and only you would be stupid enough to imagine you had the right to even ask that question.”
Dean licks his lips. “I’d take her place if I could.”
“You should be glad you can’t or there’d be one less child alive tonight and the circle would be broken,” he says, turning away from Dean’s stricken expression. “Don’t pretend to be surprised; it’s simply their misfortune that they aren’t you. You’d choose otherwise, I’m sure, but much like killing Alison, much like your request that I kill you, it isn’t your choice to make. Spare me your horror and your protests: this isn’t about you, no matter how much you think it should be.”
Behind him there’s only silence, the room closing tight around him; he can barely breathe, but they’re not home in Chitaqua: there’s nowhere else to go.
“I’m going to take a shower,” he says on his way to the door. “Don’t wait up; it may take the rest of the night.”