—Interlude—
“…son of a bitch!” a woman says hoarsely, sounding terrified. “I can’t get a rhythm, it’s been ten minutes…” She trails off, and distantly, he feels the pressure on his chest vanish. “Cas,” and everything in that word kills him: regret and rage and grief, resignation. “Cas. I’m sorry.”
“Dean,” is breathed against his ear, enough to nearly drown out the screaming that’s pounding through his head. Blinking hazily into a night-dark sky, stars hidden by clouds, Dean tries to orient himself to where he is this time. “Dean, talk to me.”
Turning his head, Amieyl comes into view, looking worried. “I think I’m really dead now.”
“Not yet,” Amieyl answers cryptically, but before he can tell her how wrong she is, she pulls him upright, staring into his eyes. “Deep breath, okay? Just relax.”
“Relax? Are you kidding?” Pulling back, he looks her over critically. “You okay?”
“Yeah, it’s all good,” she says, smiling at him. “Breathe, Dean. We don’t have a lot of time here.”
“I’ll get right on that. Wait, where’s—” Twisting around, he tries to find Lia. “Lia? You okay?”
“I’m fine.” She drops beside him, careless of the crumpled folds of her skirts, expression unhappy. “If I’d waited a little longer, I could have…” She trails off, looking away guiltily.
“Could have what?” He remembers her ripping at his clothing in the church, then reaches under his shirt, feeling the memory of her fingernails across his chest and belly, the burst of heat, the way the tightness loosened. “When my heart stopped. You fixed it. That’s what you were doing.”
“I just gave you a little help,” she corrects him, trying to smile. “I can’t this time. You gave me too much, Dean. I shouldn’t have—”
“Not your fault,” he answers automatically. “I’m not even supposed to be here.”
“No, you’re not,” she agrees, reaching to lay a hand on his knee, squeezing gently. “You’re impossible, and this is maybe. It wasn’t enough. I’m sorry.”
Maybe again. Patting her hand absently, he twists around to look at the dark shape of the church, doors shut tight, then at the cool, still night around them, trying to figure out what feels so wrong. It’s not just the lack of sheep—people—either, or the dead feel of the ground under him, the thin hang of air around him. A few stunted, skeletal trees dot the landscape, reminding him of the pitiful remains of greenery in Kansas City, spindly arms reaching piteously toward the uncaring grey of the sky, clumps of yellow-brown grass sprinkled over the bare, lifeless dirt; it’s like staring at a painting, Apocalypse in Suspension, Without Sheep, but creepier, because this isn’t a painting.
Tentatively, Dean reaches toward one of those clumps of grass, poking a finger at one scraggly blade, and watches blankly as it doesn’t do a goddamn thing. “What the hell—”
“Don’t do that,” Amieyl says queasily. “I’m trying to ignore it.”
“How?” Another try produces the same equally horrifying result; pulling his hand away and fighting the urge to wipe it on the knee of his jeans, he hears it again, like it’s trying to get his attention. “Okay, I give up. What the hell is that?”
Cas says, “He promised he would be here.”
Amieyl frowns. “What?”
When Dean turns toward the church, it increases exponentially, almost in relief. “That.”
“I don’t…” She trails off. “In the church, you asked me if I could hear it. What do you hear?”
“Not sure yet.” Before they left the church, he almost had it. Speaking of… “What happened in there? That was real, right? It actually happened.”
Even his imagination, rich in horrors beyond human comprehension, couldn’t have come up with seeing Cas like that. “Two years ago, after Cas Fell, right?”
“Yeah, that’s what’s happening,” Amieyl answers, drawing her knees to her chest and looping an arm around them. “Happened, will happen, is happening.” She makes a face. “You know the drill.”
He does. “Cas said no one can travel time anymore. I mean, except Lucifer.”
“He’s—he will be right,” Lia corrects herself with a frown, playing with a fold of her skirt. “Just not yet.”
Right, start over. “The grove—”
“Yes,” Lia says with a flicker of remembered sorrow; pain, but nothing like the unhealed wound it was then. “I took you there. Then.”
“And we’re here at the church now—two years ago—and the gods aren’t dead yet.” Lia nods; okay, he’s getting this. “When will they be?”
“Tonight.”
He really should have asked Cas more about that. “What?”
“Backward and forward, he could see everything, including us,” Lia explains, waving a hand left to right in eerie imitation of Amieyl. “He failed the first time he tried to kill us all, because we could hide anywhere in Time. He couldn’t risk what we might do in the past or the future, so he changed the rules. He hunted each of us out of Time until he caught us in a single place and time of his choice, and then and there he killed them, one by one, until all that remained alive were dead.”
“Which will be tonight.” Dean looks at the church again, then at the world that surrounds them, the unmoving blade of grass. Maybe. “If all the gods die tonight, then you—”
“Not me.” Lia’s mouth curves in a trembling smile. “I met a man who told me there was a war to fight and showed me why I should fight in it. He was impossible, and he hid me when I pulled out of time to descend. He hides me still, because no one can see the impossible, even Lucifer.”
Dean’s mouth goes dry. “Me.”
“‘What I see tonight is the best of you,’” she breathes, smile fading. “I could see you from the grove, Dean; you were so bright, you set all of Time alight. Tonight, all the gods will die, but not me, because when I was called, I answered, and when I was asked, I said yes. You saved me.”
“You said—” To his horror, he hears his voice break. Swallowing hard, he tries again. “You said you thought I’d be taller.”
Lia tips her head to the side. “You are.” He’s still trying to work out what to do with that when she adds, “She pulled us out of time. I can keep you here, now, no matter what happens to your body, but that’s all I can do; I can’t save you, not this time.”
So he’ll have to do that part himself: fine, he can do that. “Okay, next question: what is it about this church? What keeps bringing me here?”
Just saying it reminds him of the sound still thrumming in the periphery of his mind; it’s fainter, like he’s hearing only a shattering echo, like it’s being filtered through a network of cracks now. Looking at the church seems to both soothe it and make it stronger at the same time, like—
“That’s the thing,” Amieyl says finally, and something in her voice gets his undivided attention. “You are.”
“Try again.”