Map of the World: September 15-27

Do you hear it?

—Interlude—

This time, the church isn’t silent.

The memory of screaming is soaked into everything, thickening the air until he can barely breathe. Getting to his feet, he stares in horror at the people nailed to walls splashed with drying blood, some still groaning, heads dipping limply toward the floor, others painfully silent. None of them are dead, not yet; this is so much worse.

Disbelieving, he takes in the wrecked, splintered pews, hacked apart as several indistinct figures move among the wreckage, making piles. A figure in the blood-soaked vestments of a priest stands in the middle of the church, gloating over the group of kids gathered inside a rough circle carved into the once-flawless floor, carpet skinned back in strips on either side of it. When he turns around, Dean’s not surprised at all when unseeing, ink-black eyes stare back.

“What—”

A hand grabs his arm before he gets a step toward them. “You can’t do anything like this,” Amieyl says quietly, breath warm against his ear. “We’re only mostly here.” When he looks at her, he sees her expression flicker. “Dean…”

“I’m dead.”

“No,” she answers, but on a guess, he’s pretty fucking close. “Not yet.”

Go with it, he reminds himself firmly. “Fine, whatever. What the hell is going on?” Looking around in sheer frustration, he realizes what’s he’s missing—that sound. “And why do I keep coming back to this church?”

“I don’t know,” she answers, sounding as frustrated as he is. “It’s like—”

A faint, agonized scream cut her off, and they both turn, trying to find the source. Some of those hanging on the walls begin to shift, moving weakly in response and setting off new trails of fresh blood, but the priest only smiles, turning around to gaze toward the front of the church. It’s too dark to make out what he’s looking at from here, but Dean’s pretty sure it’s the altar.

“Come on.” Amieyl’s fingers slide through his as she tugs him toward the right, hugging the wall as they circle around the nightmare in the middle of the church before crossing before the remains of the front pews. Looking up, Amieyl comes to a sudden stop, looking up in horror. “Oh God.”

Following her gaze, he catches his breath; a girl in the remains of a postulant’s robes is nailed to the wall above the altar—Jesus Christ, they did it over the cross itself. Her wimple’s long gone; short, thick black hair surrounds a painfully young face, dark skin slick with sweat and blood, lips bitten bloody as she twists helplessly, panting for breath. The bloodshot brown eyes are fixed on those kids in the middle of that circle, horrified and enraged and determined, like if she can just get down, she can get to them, save them from whatever this is.

Before he can step forward—get her down, Jesus, what are they waiting for?Amieyl’s fingers tighten brutally on his, impossible to escape no matter how hard he tries.

“Don’t,” she whispers, her eyes on the girl. “I told you; we’re only mostly here. We can’t do anything.”

“Then why are we here? To watch demons kill a lot of people?” he asks incredulously. “Amieyl—”

“I don’t know.” She licks her lips, eyes narrowing. “But I think it’s her.”

“I think so, too,” Lia agrees, coming up on his other side. He blinks, distracted by how different she looks now, even if the face she wears hasn’t changed at all. “Question is, why here and now?”

“God, I wish this was a hallucination. At least that’d make sense.” When even the goddamn figments aren’t sure what the hell is going on, though, he’s pretty sure they’ve left plausible deniability behind. “What—” He stops, listening, and almost sighs in relief. “There it is.”

“What?” Amieyl asks, frowning at him.

“You can’t hear it?” It’s getting louder; how the hell can anyone miss it? “That.”

“Hear what?”

The church doors slam open behind them, shaking the church. Turning around, Dean goes still at the figure standing in the open doorway, and beside him, Amieyl stiffens.

“When was this?” he whispers hoarsely.

“He just Fell,” Amieyl answers, shock flattening her voice. “This is after.”

After. Dean remembers the bedroom, the new wood of the doorways, the windows, what Cas can’t remember, what Chuck didn’t know about what Bobby and Dean were doing, how Cas survived. He still doesn’t know what they did, but looking at Cas, he thinks he knows why they did it.

“That,” Dean says, numb with horror, “isn’t living.”

Cas is skeletal, jacket huge over bony shoulders, t-shirt and jeans looking like they’ll slough off like shed skin as he starts up the aisle in jagged strides, hands roughly bandaged and smeared with drying black and tacky red. Every bone is pushing brutally against livid, tissue-thin skin pulled impossibly tight, cheekbones like razors above hollowed-out cheeks, blue eyes sunk in rotting black holes like he’s never slept, not once, not ever. The short brown hair is as brittle as straw around his face, bloodless lips bitten to unhealed wounds.

The wrongness is so profound it makes Dean’s skin crawl just looking at him. Nothing living can look like that, two days rotting in the grave and still breathing, still dying without hope of death, still living, still having to.

He gets it now, what Cas meant about Grace and what it hid; humans sense it, he said. Stripped away like a cheap varnish, no distraction of wings and power, he’s an unsheathed sword, a gun without a safety, chaos incarnate on earth.

One of the less intelligent demons starts toward him, lips stretched in a greedy smile, and Cas reaches out without looking, hand closing around his neck and slamming him to the floor before ripping his throat out. Pulling Ruby’s knife in a blur of speed, he guts the still-twitching body with a burst of sullen light before stepping over him, leaving a trail of bloody footprints in his wake.

The priest stares at Cas in unblinking shock; even the horrors of the Pit in all its cruelty and corruption pales before the angel that once walked through Hell in a forty-year slaughter and stands before them wearing a living corpse as his skin, watching him with blank blue eyes, still like a thin skin over something that shouldn’t ever get out.

“Something’s wrong.” It’s only Amieyl’s grip on his hand that keeps him from crossing the circle: fuck the demons, he’ll rip them apart with his bare hands whether he’s really here or not, something’s wrong with Cas. “Let me go! I need to—”

“You can’t save him,” Amieyl says rigidly. “He can’t even save himself. And he doesn’t care.”

Coming to a rigid stop, Cas’s eyes flicker over the circle, the walls, then the front of the church and pause there for a moment, bone-thin fingers flexing around the hilt of the knife. The back of his right hand appears between strips of filthy gauze, a blood-streak map of still-open slices and broken, unhealed knuckles, as he focuses on the demon priest, face like a blank sheet of paper.

“That is new,” Cas rasps into the silence, voice like gravel dragged through cemetery dirt, serrated edges and shattered glass and broken screams, jagged stretches of ice stretching to eternity, glaciers floating in an infinite ocean. “What are you doing here?”

The priest takes a step toward him, trying not to look terrified; it’s not working, and from the way Cas tilts his head, he’s enjoying it as much as Dean is.

“An angel kicked out of heaven and stripped of Grace,” the demon priest says with an embarrassing attempt at laughter. “Am I supposed to be afraid?”

“Since you are, that’s an incredibly stupid question to ask,” Cas answers, putting away the knife with jerky movements, like he can’t quite control his hands. “Don’t concern yourself with us; we aren’t here for you.”

“What—”

Another scream cuts off the priest’s response, and turning, Dean starts toward the front of the church—Jesus, they have to be able to do something, Cas can do something—but Amieyl and Lia abruptly jerk him sideways into the splintered remains of the pews. Above the altar, the girl goes utterly still, gaze fixed on Cas in surprise, bloodshot eyes widening.

“We are here,” Cas says softly, “to bear witness.”

Her lips move soundlessly, but even from here, Dean recognizes the shape of the word; he knows it like he knows his own name, the taste lingering on his lips more mornings than he can count, nightmares banished in a single exhaled breath.

“She called,” Amieyl says unsteadily as the temperature of the room plunges abruptly into a bone-chilling cold. “She got her answer.”

Pulling her closer, he reaches for a shivering Lia as the church tilts nauseatingly. The floor beneath/beside/above them begins to tremble as something sweeps through the room, through them, and it’s not cold, no, not that, the word hasn’t been invented for this: the airless vacuum between infinite stars unfolding itself in the physical confines of finite space; something this vast can’t be defined in the corporeal world. If he were really here, the knowledge alone would kill him; good thing it’s only mostly.

He can’t quite articulate what he sees twining around the girl’s body; not darkness and not light, but something that’s both and neither, curling up her legs and waist, looping tenderly around her in protective ribbons, cradling her away from her pain. She smiles weakly, looking at something without form in unconcealed relief, mouth shaping a word, but he doesn’t need to hear it to know what she just said. No one worthy of the question would say anything but yes.

It’s only a moment, a flash-burn of flowers and summer and music peppered with protective rage, before the world plunges into silence, tranquil like the center of an infinite storm.

Above the altar, the girl effortlessly rips her hands and feet free from the wall with the sickening sound of breaking bone and tearing flesh, dropping to the floor in front of the altar in a boneless crouch that shakes the entire church, fresh blood fanning out around her in vivid-red splashes. After a moment, she lifts her head, and he almost steps back when he sees her face, brown eyes reflecting a vastness beyond comprehension. Lia at the apex of her divinity, before she began to Fall, was like a spark from a campfire; this is a universe burned and burning alive for all of time.

“What the hell,” Dean breathes, “did she call?”

Straightening, she starts down the aisle, the ragged hem of her habit flaring around her blood-streaked legs as the wounds on her hands and feet vanish into nothing. Reaching into thin air, she pulls out a knife, blade a foot long, double edged and gleaming, sharper and brighter than anything made of metal.

Coming to a stop a few feet from the circle opposite of Cas, she regards each petrified demon with the indifferent interest of marked prey to be slaughtered at her leisure, then looks at Cas with something else entirely, and all Dean can think is that he’s glad no one’s ever looked at him like that.

“Castiel,” she says, her voice echoing through the church like a warning of a coming storm, one that could tear the world apart without even noticing or caring if it did.

Cas smiles. “Welcome back,” he says, blue eyes meeting hers, and Dean sees the stillness starting to crack around the edges and begin to spread. “It’s been a very long time since you last hunted on this world.”

And he realizes what it is he’s been hearing; it’s screaming.