Chapter 14

Breath-stopping epiphanies should change everything, right? But in real life, they really don't. Not for a while, at least. Maybe it takes processing time or maybe we just don't really want to know the truth and we hide from it a bit longer. I don't know.

While it felt like a massive confirmation to me, the idea that Metatron had somehow managed to weasel his way into the Order and change the rules governing Heaven and Hell and even attempt to manipulate everyone who might oppose him, it was an idea only. No hard evidence, really. Just anecdotes and supposition and a lot of coincidences that didn't really look like coincidences.

It was bugging Dean that he couldn't really get his head around a reason for Metatron to go to all this trouble, to take hundreds and hundreds of years to make sure he got his revenge.

I mean, that didn't surprise me, that he was feeling that way. Dean's a straight-shooting kind of guy and revenge, for him, is always hot, fuelled and fired by his heart and the raging sense of injustice of losing people. Despite the fact that he'd had the best example possible of a man who'd spent years doggedly hunting down the thing that'd killed his mother, he wasn't like his father in that way. Left with plenty of time to think, he could let some things go…things like that…if the risks outweighed the benefits. Not that he'd recognised that in himself.

Watching his brows draw together, in that half-bewildered, half-angry look he has, it occurred to me that it was one of the things that I really loved about him, that inability to see the pettiness in others.

We were sitting at the kitchen table, nursing large mugs of coffee, attempting to digest a hastily-eaten meal of everything fried you can think of, and trying to work out if Metatron was calling the shots on…well, pretty much everything…and what we could possibly do about it.

Sam looked worse again, dark, purple shadows under his eyes and what looked like a bone-deep weariness in every word and gesture. Lauren kept throwing worried looks at him, and the strain was showing on her face as well, her hair pulled back in a ponytail, the skin of her face stretched tightly over the bones. I guess that between worrying about Sam, the next trial he faced and its likely level of impossibility, and the probable nightmares about having someone ripping out her heart, it wasn't exactly a golden time for her.

Bobby looked like he hadn't gotten much sleep either. He'd been right, it'd turned out. The order's files and nearly all of the texts the library had supported that for God, up until quite recently, relatively speaking, the act of self-sacrifice, the giving up of one's life for another, had been a guaranteed wiping out of all mistakes, sins and bad choices for life and a straight express ride to Heaven. God, it seemed, forgave anyone for making that kind of altruistic gesture. But not now. And not in the last thirty years. Or maybe longer.

"We got two choices," Bobby said, thumping his mug on the table. "We call a psychopomp and you go wandering around in Hell, lookin' for a soul that's innocent, an' hopin' it's damned obvious, or we try an' get hold of Cas and find out for sure if Heaven's been horse tradin' souls and who's down there."

Dean shook his head. "I've been trying to get hold of Cas for the last two days," he said shortly. "Whatever's wrong with him, it's not going away."

It'd taken three hours to walk the brothers and Bobby through Lauren's reconstruction of my hastily put-together 'wall' of factoids. The walkthrough really kind of helped me get my head straight, if only to explain some of the extremely tenuous connections I'd seen between the events and the players and way things were just happening.

Bobby got kind of overly logical about the missing bits but even he couldn't deny there was something rotten going on, and the stench wasn't coming from Denmark.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

So, two hours later, we were all standing around a circle hastily drawn on the asphalt parking lot of the freight yard in Lebanon, trying not to look at the fresh cow's heart that sat, reeking a little and drooling blood, in a dish in the middle.

The heart'd come from the abattoir just outside of town. We were in the freight yard 'cause Dean'd gotten a bit antsy about doing a ritual to call one of Death's helpers close to the bunker. I mean, it was a valid point. Secret location, yada yada.

One minute we were there by ourselves. The next, there was a youngish-looking man standing in the middle of the circle, chowing down on the heart and not minding at all the fact that the blood and juices were running down his chin.

I'd seen a Crow, and a Sparrow. This one looked like neither. He looked…well, he kind of looked foxy. In a literal sense. He was dressed pretty snappily in a long, dark brown leather coat, greyish brown leather pants and a crisp white dress shirt, you know the ones with the frills down the front? Reddish hair was cut spiky on the top of his head, then pulled back in a ponytail behind his neck. Light brown eyes were nearly golden-coloured, long and narrow to either side of a bit of a snub nose, and his face was sort of triangular, everything leading down to a pointed chin. With three-day stubble, now soaked in blood.

"Winchesters. Hunter. Angelchild," he said, licking his fingers and looking around the circle. His gaze stopped on me, those calculating golden eyes considering for a moment, then sliding away to focus on Dean. "You do have an interesting assortment of friends."

"We need a ticket to Hell, two going, three coming back," Dean said.

The man opened his mouth to say something when Sam's hand closed around his brother's arm and dragged him backward.

"Give us a sec," he said over his shoulder to the psychopomp.

"Take your time," the man replied, looking at his fingernails, an over-long tongue darting out to slurp off a last bit of blood. "Got all day. Not."

"Not two down," Sam said to Dean in a low voice. "I gotta do this stuff on my own."

"You'll rescue the soul on your own," Dean snapped at him. "I'll be in the background – uh – watching your back."

Sam heaved an exasperated exhale. "No."

"C'mon, Sammy, this is Hell we're talking about – no way I'm gonna let you go –"

"You're right," Sam butted in. "You're not going to 'let' me do anything, Dean."

"Could we, mebbe, move this along?" Bobby suggested, from the other side of the circle.

"Sam, Dean's right –" Lauren added her five cents worth and Sam rounded on her.

"No, he's not," he said, his face screwing up. "There's one contender – one – and that's me. Nobody else risks their lives. Nobody else dies. I have to do this alone! And I can," he added, turning to look back at his brother.

"Alright."

I blinked, as surprised by Dean's sudden about-face agreement as Sam was.

"You're right," he added, shrugging one shoulder and stepping back. "You can do it alone."

"Right," Sam muttered, looking uncertainly at Dean, then turning to the psychopomp. "One down, two back."

"Wait a minute," Bobby interrupted, his brows beetling under the shadow of his cap. "We need to find an innocent soul," he said to the man, a bit belligerently, I thought. "Are there any down there?"

"Plenty," the psychopomp said, his expression agreeable. "Souls go up. Souls go down. Didn't used to be that way, but times changed."

"What changed that it became possible?" Lauren asked, taking a step closer to the circle.

"Don't know, don't care," he said, looking away with shrug. "Heaven and Hell have both gone through a lot of restructuring in the last few years. You want an innocent soul, there'll be a few to choose from."

"What's this going to cost us?" Dean looked at Sam.

"Well, that depends," the psychopomp said, sliding his gaze back. "Hell's been very tricky to get into lately; the King has become even more paranoid than he used to be. Word is, you two are the reason. Stirring up things."

"But?" Sam asked, frowning.

"But, if you're prepared to offer some camouflage, I believe we can talk about a deal." The golden eyes moved past Sam to rest on me. It took Dean and Sam a couple of seconds to realise what he was talking about. Took me a lot longer.

"What?!"

"No!"

"Huh?"

"Camouflage?" Bobby looked from the psychopomp to me and back again. "What're you talkin' about?"

Turning on his heel, the man shrugged. "Not from here, so the usual frequencies, signatures and soul markers don't apply. It would mean the difference between being visible in Hell and not," he said, looking at Sam. "Not just me either. She would cover your soul signature, which I guarantee every demon on the plane of the Damned knows."

"Why're you still talking?" Dean demanded. "I said no!"

I think, if there'd been any forewarning of it, they might've dealt it with on, you know, a more rational level. Not that I wasn't as surprised as everyone else. I was. Totally. No one had mentioned the idea I could be a little camouflage generator before.

"If we aren't prepared to – uh – offer camouflage?" Lauren asked, probably the only of us still following the conversation logically.

"Then no dice," the guide said. "Find someone else. Oh, and good luck with that."

"This is bullshit!" Dean looked like he wanted to punch the guy in the face.

"She's been in Hell – and Purgatory – and everything saw her jus' fine then," Bobby said, cutting Dean's next comment off. "How d'you know she's gonna be able to whammy the radar down there or whatever it is they've got?"

"She wasn't with me," the psychopomp retorted with an annoying smirk. "Look, this is simple. The deal's the deal. I don't negotiate."

"You're gunna fu–" Dean started and Sam overrode him

"Dean." He looked back at the guide. "No, you want us to take your word on something like this, you're gonna have to explain it."

Heaving out a dramatic sigh, the man nodded. "It's like this – every plane has different laws, different rules. For Heaven? You can't get there in a body at all. Has to be a soul, right?"

The brothers exchanged a glance and Sam shrugged a neutral-looking agreement.

"For Purgatory, and for Hell, being 'lower' planes, you can walk in, in a body, mental faculties mostly intact, and walk out again, though no guarantee of said mental abilities still being good. But the rules in those planes are different from here. And they're different again if you went in as a soul – or spirit."

I saw Dean's expression twitch uncomfortably. He ducked his head and stared hard at the ground.

"In all of Creation, there are only two things that can get into all three planes freely," the psychopomp continued, his expression flattening out. "Us – the soul guides, and the human soul. Angels can't enter Hell in vessels, only in constructs. Demons have zero chance of getting into Purgatory or Heaven. But, the rules binding each plane have these loopholes, see? She –" He pointed at me. "– isn't from here. This isn't her world. Crowley's drones and trackers won't see her because she doesn't match up, and next to her, they won't see him –" He jerked a thumb at Sam. "– or me."

"Crowley can see her –" Bobby scowled at the guide.

"Up here? Out in the open? In a vessel? Sure, if he's looking," the man agreed immediately. "But he's not looking for her in Hell, is he?"

Dean was getting that mulish expression.

"That's the deal," the psychopomp said, with a slightly rude take-it-or-leave-it gesture. "You need to get into Hell. I need insurance."

Having been discussed as if I wasn't there at all, I figured maybe I should join in. Not something I really wanted to do, y'understand. My memories of Hell weren't as bad as Dean's or Sam's, but I hadn't felt a need to go back there or reminisce over them or anything.

"What do I have to do?" I asked the guide.

"Do?" he said, brows lifting up. "Nothing. Stand around. Be your not-from-this-world self."

Didn't sound like something I'd have that much trouble with, I thought, trying to keep the agitation in my internal organs damped down. On the other hand, I didn't have the world's best track record when it came to keeping out of trouble and I could see Dean was thinking about all the times I'd gotten myself into situations that I'd needed rescuing from, even when it didn't seem like anything could happen. Of course, in my own defence, a lot of those situations hadn't been my fault.

"Then you better add another ticket," Dean said.

"No." The psychopomp folded his arms over his chest, staring implacably at Dean. "With her for cover, one Winchester, I might be able to get in and out without being seen. Two? Impossible. No one down there has forgotten you."

It was a kind of a compliment, I guess. Or maybe not. Dean's mouth curled down pugnaciously.

"If I don't go, she doesn't go," he said, and as inappropriate as the timing was, I did feel a little warm rush at the words. Well, who wouldn't? You can be as strong and feministically empowered as you want, don't go telling me a big strong guy standing up for you, wanting to protect you, doesn't make your knees melt.

"Then the deal's off." The guide shrugged.

"I'll be alright," I said, not even remotely sure of that, but figuring I had to do something to get us past the current no-go situation. I took a step closer to Dean, my heart actually palpitating in my chest, and tried to marshal my arguments.

"Sam's gotta do this," I said to him in a low voice. He knew that, knew that sooner was going to be better than later, and he ducked his head, his mouth hardening into a straight line that looked argumentative.

"I'll be careful," I added, knowing it wouldn't help. I'd always tried to be careful, after all. Careful was just something that was a bit hit-and-miss with me.

He lifted his gaze, and for a second, his expression just about tore my resolve to shreds. Then the look in his eyes disappeared and he nodded, unwillingly. We both knew that Sam couldn't take much more waiting time. Whatever the trials were doing to him, it seemed to be accelerating.

"You stick close to Sam," he said, his voice equally quiet and husky.

"Like an unwanted appendage," I promised quickly, and his mouth twitched up at that image.

He could make me feel like I was the only person in the world, just with a look, sometimes. It was a look that said of all the things he had told me about how he felt, there was heck of a lot of things he hadn't said, not out loud. Things that came through in other ways.

Looking past me, he said to the guide, "How long's this gonna take?"

"Twenty-four hours," the psychopomp replied, glancing at Sam. "You don't find what you're looking for in that time, it's too bad. In Hell, everything's renewed every twenty-four hours and we have to be out of there before then."

Nodding, Dean looked around. "Then we'll see you here."

The man turned around and gave a lazy snap of his fingers and a can of aerosol spray paint appeared in his hand. He walked to the wall of the building behind us, the freight yard's storage facility, and popped the lid off, painting a slightly skewed doorway onto the wall.

"Come on," he said, dropping the can and staring at the door and holding out both hands.

Sam and I looked at each other, then Sam shrugged and walked to him, awkwardly taking hold on of one of the guide's hands. I scurried forward and grabbed at the other, as the painted doorway began to fill in and look more and more real, in a psychodelic kind of way. Colours seem to bleed out of the black lines, filling the middle, swirling and whirling in an unsettling kind of way.

I threw a fast glance over my shoulder, seeing Dean, Lauren and Bobby standing there, then there was a pulling sensation in my stomach and I was yanked forward, although it didn't seem like I'd moved my feet. Squinting at the brightening wall, I thought I saw the painted doorway…opening.

Look the heck out, Alice, I had time to think. I'm still not sure exactly what happened, though Lauren said much later it looked like the doorway was some kind of miniature wormhole, because our bodies all stretched out impossibly toward it then we were sucked in.

Uh huh. That's also what it felt like.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

We landed – for lack of a better word – with a bone-jarring thump, and with my usual grace, I stumbled forward, smacking my nose into the guide's elbow.

"You alright?" Sam asked me as the guide walked forward, apparently unaffected by the impact of my face on his arm, and wiping at my watering eyes, I nodded.

Sam took that as an affirmative, and looked around, his eyes widening in recognition.

"Whoa, hold it!" he said, taking a long stride and grabbing the psychopomp by the arm. "This is Purgatory! We ordered the Hell tour, no side jaunts!"

"Keep your voice down," the man hissed at him, gaze darting around the clearing.

Sam was right, I thought, turning around. The flat light, the straggling woods, the creepy lack of colour, it was all too horribly familiar. We were back in the land of the monsters.

"Not even she would hide us from a stroll directly through a hell gate," the guide was saying to Sam. "There are back doors. That's why we're here."

The suspicious look on Sam's face would've made Dean proud, I thought, trying to divert my imagination's knee-jerk reaction to being here.

"Down there." The guide pointed down the slope. "Keep quiet and move fast!"

He didn't have to tell either of us twice. Throwing a fast look back at me, probably to make sure I wasn't going to fall behind, Sam followed him as he started down a hardly visible trail.

There are some places that improve with repeat visits. Los Angeles is one of them. Purgatory is not. It wasn't hot, wasn't cold, wasn't dark, exactly, but it wasn't all that light either. We were going downhill, the ground treacherous with decaying leaf matter and screes of pine needles that slid out under our feet at every opportunity, planting me on my ass twice, the second time painfully, with a close encounter between a hidden rock and my tailbone, and even though the woods weren't really dense, there were a lot of inexplicable rustling noises but nothing to account for them.

By the time we reached the river's edge, I felt like I'd aged about ten years.

"Not much further," the guide whispered, looking along the bank.

Unrelieved tension is tiring, in case you didn't know. My body'd been on red alert since we'd gotten here, and it was draining the strength right out of my legs, all the sneaking around and trying to remain unnoticed. The last time, I'd been blissfully ignorant and surrounded by people who were more than competent enough to fight off any attack, and I realised I'd had it easy.

Well. You know. Easier.

Given the fact that I was so freakin' wired-up, you'd think it would've given me just the teeniest-tiniest little warning, wouldn't you? Yeah. Apparently not.

The hand that closed around my throat wasn't big, not much bigger than mine, actually, but boy, was it strong. I was hauled backwards off my feet before I could so much as make a peep, and a face appeared above me; female, framed in tangled snarls of blonde hair, hazel eyes staring down at me, the pupils slitted vertically, like a cat's. My mouth was opening and closing like a goldfish, trying to get air, trying to get a warning out to Sam. Doing nothing but opening and closing, mostly.

"Let her go!"

Sam, bless his hunter's heart and upbringing, had twigged to my predicament before it got irretrievably worse.

The hand sprang open and I fell onto my back, sucking down air like a vacuum cleaner as the woman stared at him.

"Sam?"

Until that moment, I'd really thought the day couldn't get any weirder. I mean, when I'd woken up, things had felt – um, well, relatively normal – if by normal, you mean pretty much out of hand. There were the Metatron issues and the trial issues, but we'd had a plan. Kind of.

"A-Amy?"

I sat up, looking from Sam to the woman and wondering if I'd hit my head without realising it sometime in the last few minutes. Sam seemed to know the monster who'd been just about to kill me. And she seemed to know him.

"W-what are you doing here?" she asked him, her gaze flicking past him to the guide and back. "Were you turned?"

"Uh, no," he said, a bit awkwardly. "Why are you here?"

It probably wasn't a question he'd have asked under different circumstances. I mean, you know, Purgatory, only one reason for her being here and all, but she didn't seem to take it personally.

"I was careless," she said, looking away. "I didn't – I didn't have a choice."

"Ahem."

Sam looked around at the psychopomp, who was casting pointed glances down river. "Gimme a sec!"

I could tell the guy liked doing it by the way he gave another deep and melodramatic sigh, turning away.

I managed to get to my feet, and Sam looked at me. "Uh, Terry, this is Amy," he said. "She's, uh…we were…um…"

"Childhood friends," Amy supplied as he trailed off. Now that she wasn't in monster-mode, her pupils were normal-looking. "I'm sorry about attacking you."

I blinked at her. "Um, that's okay."

It wasn't, but what was I supposed to say?

"Amy, I'm sorry," Sam said. "I've gotta – it's important."

Abruptly, I remembered the scripts I'd brought back with me. The kitsune. I'd pretty much forgotten about it because here, Sam hadn't run into her again and Dean hadn't killed her. Walking down to where the guide was waiting impatiently, I wondered if it mattered in the greater scheme of things that Amy had been killed anyway.

Sam'd met her when his father and brother had been hunting her mother. She'd promised Sam she would never feed. Would live a normal life. And she'd had a child, I remembered. A son. There weren't any coincidences, but I couldn't imagine the possible permutations of him seeing her again now.

"Let's go," Sam said from behind me, his tone terse. I looked back and saw Amy standing there.

"Sam –" It looked to me like there was a lot of unfinished business there.

He shook his head. "Wrong time, wrong place."

He was right about that, I thought, following the guide along the river bank. Could hardly get a worse time or place than this.

We walked along in silence for a while. I wanted to talk to Sam about Amy, but didn't think it would do any good, not here, anyway. From the intense look of concentration on his face, I had the feeling he was thinking about it anyway.

"There it is."

The guide stopped and I followed his eyeline, seeing a weird-looking tree growing out from the river bank.

"That doesn't look right," I muttered under my breath.

It didn't. There were three trees, growing out from one place, each trunk stretching away from the others. The bark of the centre tree was dark, almost black. It was a kind of a charcoal grey on the tree to the left, and a paler, creamy grey on the other one. Like three different trees, in fact. The longer I looked at it, the less it looked like a tree – or trees – and the more it looked like the petrified remains of three people.

The guide chuckled. "The legend of the Three Brothers," he said, waving a hand at the trees. "All were sent to Hell, but they tried to escape. Not too successfully, as you can see."

The shiver started at the back of my knees and zapped its way to the top of my head. "We don't have to – go into them, do we?" I asked nervously.

"Under them," the psychopomp said, grinning foxily.

"Oh. Much better."

"Ladies first?"

"Uh, well. No. You can lead the way," I told him, looking around for Sam. He was staring at the trees too, his brow all furrowed up. "What?"

Shaking his head, he stepped forward. "Nothing. Let's go."

The guide walked to the base of the trees and dropped to one knee. Leaning past him I could see boulders, piled loosely there. He did something tricky with his hands and they started to move aside, a draught blowing out between them, hitting me in the face and triggering my gag reflex.

"Arrghk!"

From the corner of my eye, I saw Sam's nose wrinkle and his mouth thin out but he didn't react otherwise. Stronger stomach than mine, I figured.

Close to, the elongated tree trunks looked much more like torsos, stretched and in frozen agony. I looked up. The branches reached up and out, like arms, and above them, the trunk's whorls and striations seemed to form features –

"Terry."

Sam cut through my self-torture routine. I looked down and saw the heels of the guide disappearing into the foul-smelling hole.

Taking a breath in through my teeth, I held it and dropped to my knees, following him.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

It was disappointing and unsettling to find out how much I'd forgotten about Hell. Or blocked out. Or hadn't been aware of.

Once I stopped wanting to heave, the smell somehow becoming more acceptable to my olfactory sense, I got to notice a lot of other stuff I liked even less.

Like the heat, as a for-instance. Or the light, which was a dim and murky reddish colour that occasionally seemed to get thicker. Or the sounds.

The psychopomp led us out of a tiny little tunnel into a much bigger tunnel, one filled with the all of the above, and stopped as we reached a kind of a junction.

I didn't remember hearing any screaming but my own when I'd been here last, but now I could. Hear screaming. A lot of screaming. It was making my knees turn to Jell-O and my teeth chatter.

"You are in your blood and bones," the guide turned and said to me and Sam, his gaze flicking past me to focus on the man beside me. "You won't be able to see them, the souls here, or the demons, very clearly. They will not be able to see you very clearly. Do you understand?"

I didn't. What did 'not very clearly' mean anyway? Like ghosts? Like shadows? What?

Sam nodded.

"If anything turns and looks at you, stop. Look away. Think of something on the earthly, something natural."

Uh huh, I thought, a bit exasperatedly. Something natural? What the heck did that mean anyway?

He closed his eyes and seemed to go into a mini-trance and I fidgeted. Just a little.

"There are three innocent souls close to us," he said, opening his eyes again after a couple of endless minutes. "They won't be able to see or feel you, not until we're back in Purgatory. They will follow me."

Sam nodded again and I hoped that I was doing something other than just standing around like a fifth wheel. There were no wavy lines emanating from me to indicate that my presence was hiding anything, no changes in the air or feeling of invisible power or anything. It was all pretty unsatisfactory.

The psychopomp turned for the junction and we followed him, squinting a bit in the red light that made things hard to see. It took me a few minutes to realise that there was something else there, a subliminal sound or feeling, pulsing through the light or in the light, sometimes steadily, sometimes erratically.

"You feel that?" I whispered to Sam.

"Yeah." He grimaced, looking around. "Feels like we're inside a heart with arrhythmia."

The image agreed exactly with what I was feeling but at the same time made me want to run. I was sorry I brought it up.

"Soul number one," the guide said, stopping in the middle of the hall.

I looked around, unable to see anything but the rock walls of the corridor to either side of us. "Where?"

He pointed to a section of smoothed stone, on the right-hand side of the corridor. "Look from the side, from the corner of your eye."

I followed the instructions, seeing Sam doing the same thing, and both of us jumped.

Through the stone, inside the stone, maybe, I could see a man, his mouth wide open and most of his body pulped. A humanoid-ish shape of thick, almost-black smoke was moving around him.

I snapped my head away as the demon started to crank on a wheel close by the man's head. Didn't need to add to my subconscious library of icky things.

Sam was looking at the floor, his face set. After a second, he lifted his head and looked down the corridor.

"Keep going," he said to the psychopomp.

"What was wrong with that one?" I asked him, keeping my voice low and falling into step with him.

His face screwed up a little as he glanced at me. "He was starting to enjoy it," he said. There was an edge to his voice, some shading of bewilderment.

"How do you know?"

"I – I felt it," he said, the furrowing of his brow turning into a frown. "I don't know."

I could get Sam's confusion. Who the heck learns to love the torture they shouldn't have been even on the receiving end for? As to how he knew that, knew that the soul had been feeling that, I had a feeling it had to do with the blood Azazel had poisoned him with a baby, and the way the trials were working on that blood now.

No one had said it out loud yet, but I think we'd all been speculating on what would have to happen to Sam for the closing of the Gates to Hell. It seemed likely he'd been a more suitable contender for the trials than Dean because of what flowed in his veins. Because, in some way that wasn't yet clear to anyone, he needed it more.

It took us another interminable amount of time, trailing up and down corridors to find the next soul, and when we did, I don't think either of us really wanted to look into the weird, see-through rock at who was in there. I didn't have to. He did.

"No," Sam breathed, swinging around to pound a fist on the smooth surface. "NO!"

"What?" I blurted out as the psychopomp scurried over to us and made shushing noises.

"Are you trying to bring down every demon in this quadrant on top of us?!" he demanded in a muted yell.

"What's she doing here!?" Sam swung around and grabbed the guide by his coat, dragging him close and lifting him up until his toes were barely touching the ground. It's, um, sometimes kind of easy to forget that Sam is a Winchester with a Winchester temper.

The man rolled his eyes to the side, taking in the soul behind the rock, and attempted a shrug while being half-throttled and held off the ground.

"Traded," he gasped. "Crowley wanted information about you."

"What!?"

"Who is it?" I asked, feeling completely left out of this loop. Sliding a sideways look at the rock face, I frowned at the sight inside.

Tied down to a metal table, there was a young woman, blonde, shrieking in agony, with a smoky demon to either side. I didn't know her from a bar of soap, but Sam'd obviously recognised her.

"How do we get her out of there!?"

"Let me go!"

He dropped the psychopomp, who straightened his clothing and brushed at the collar of his coat fussily. Considering he'd ripped the look from The Matrix, I thought he was carrying on a bit too much about it.

"Who is it?" I figured I'd divert Sam's attention anyway.

"Lindsay," Sam said, his eyes narrowing as he looked around the bare and empty corridor for something – to attack the demons with, I guessed.

Lindsay. I tried to recall a character by that name on the show, but it evaded me for a few minutes. Then I remembered. Garber. Ohio. Sam working in a bar and trying to get out of the life, away from Lucifer.

"She died in 2011," the guide said to me with a huffy expression. "Car accident. Went straight to Heaven until someone killed one of Crowley's favourite hellhounds and someone up there made a deal."

"How do we–"

Sam's voice had risen and the psychopomp's head snapped around. "Ssh!"

Voices.

Coming from the far bend in the hallway. Loud. Arguing. Probably not just passers-by.

"Hide!"

Where?! I wanted to shriek at him, the demand strangled in my throat by a bubble of pure hysteria as I looked frantically up and down the bare corridor. There was nothing, not even a bump in the walls to hide behind.

With a bit of scuffling, the guide had grabbed Sam and pulled him behind me and I suddenly realised that his order hadn't been for me. They were both trying to fit themselves in between the rock wall and my too-small frame.

I guess, from an outside perspective, it might've looked funny, these two guys, one of them six foot four, the other five eleven or so, trying to hide behind my five foot five. It wasn't. I could feel Sam attempting to position himself so's he could leap out if it turned out the guide'd been wrong, while at the same time trying to make himself smaller, in case the guide was right. It felt like he was trying to tie himself into knots back there.

Think of something natural. The psychopomp's words came back and I had to swallow down another microburst of hysteria as my brain conjured everything under the sun that was as far away from 'natural' as could possibly be.

As the argument of the unseen demons got closer and closer, I found myself overtaken with an insane compulsion to giggle. I guess it was sheer terror. It was building, along with a terrible need to pee, and I had to hold my breath to stop it all from coming out.

When they came around the bend, both desires vanished instantly.

Demons, in all their natural glory, are more than ugly. These two weren't in meatsuits and they weren't writhing coils of smoke. They had substance. Voices. Heaviness in the way their feet – hooves – claws – whatever they were – hit the ground and sent up little puffs of yellow dust. They didn't look human. They didn't look like the popular artist's conceptions of devils. They looked…they looked like something that six months of a steady diet of the most horrific science fiction and horror movies might amalgamate and then throw up in your nightmares.

They were big, filling the hall from side to side, their misshapen skulls almost brushing the rough rock ceiling. They walked toward us, arguing about something in guttural voices that sounded like some vital piece had been removed from their vocal apparatus.

One of them stopped, right in front of me.

Trees, I thought, desperately. The tops waving slightly in a freshening breeze, the leaves rustling together as the wind make them chatter. Sunlight scattering, reflecting from the shiny side of the leaves, birds and squirrels in the lower branches…nuts and the beginnings of leaf fall littering the ground underneath.

"What!?"

"I dunno," the demon closest to me grunted. "Gotta a whiff of something."

For some reason, I couldn't shut my eyes. Probably some hastily resurrected sense of survival. The demon's…slits…you couldn't call them nostrils…widened a little and his head was kind of weaving, back and forth, like a snake tasting the air. He wasn't more than two feet from me, and I was getting a real good, close, look at him.

No hair and his skin wasn't red. It was that colour meat goes when it's been in the oven too long. Shiny. Pocked here and there with pus-filled sores. Features that looked more reptilian than anything else. It didn't have eyelids and its eyeballs protruded a bit, yellow corneas and bright red irises. A long thread of drool slid out of its slightly open mouth and my stomach rolled over when it was retrieved by a long, grey tongue, that zapped out of the lipless mouth, curled around the drool and zipped it back in, the flickering mental after-image that of a frog catching a fly.

Woods, the thought rose like a steam whistle in my head, screaming with desperation. The bright fall woods of the north-east, flaming with colour. I was staring right at it and its gaze dragged over me, fixed and uneasy.

"C'mon, we can't hang around here all day," the other one said. It didn't look the same, though it was definitely in the same ballpark in the revolting ugliness stakes.

"Yeah," the one in front of me said, reluctantly, I thought. "Alright."

It turned away and they kept walking and I stood there, every single muscle in my body contracted to the sort of rigidity reserved for extreme trauma patients.

The human body isn't meant to deal with unremitting stress and fear, you know. It was designed for a fight or flight reaction and when it's not allowed to do either, the emotional backlash is pretty severe. I wanted to be brave and shrug it all off. I couldn't. The only way I could stop myself from bursting into great, braying sobs of tension relief was by hyperventilating.

"Close," the psychopomp said from behind me as I sucked air in and blew it out like a demented bellows.

"Terry?" Sam's voice was in my right ear but I couldn't, for some reason, turn my head. "You okay?"

Nononononononono…that answer ratcheted through my brain but couldn't get out of my mouth because I was breathing too fast.

His arms wrapped around me and I felt his chin on the top of my head. "It's okay. It worked. We're okay," he murmured.

The hysterical laughter made a return appearance and I nearly choked on it. It wasn't okay, but I was gonna have to hold it together until we got somewhere where it would be alright for me to have the small nervous breakdown I deserved.

I managed to slow down the breathing and bits of me started to unclench and I managed a nod to indicate that the current crisis was mostly over.

"Good girl," he said, letting me go and turning to look at the guide over my head. "How do we get Lindsay out?"

The fox shook his head. "I open the door. You run in, kill the demons, I'll tell the soul to follow me."

Sam's jaw clenched up tight. "How am I supposed to kill two demons with my bare hands?" he asked.

"Not my problem," the guide said with another of those aggravating shrugs.

I looked from the fox-features of the psychopomp to Sam. "Maybe a diversion –?"

"What?"

"If they really can't see me, maybe I could – I dunno – hit them over the head with something and you could…" I trailed off uncomfortably, running out of ideas.

Not only did we not have anything around to hit them with, I couldn't think what Sam could do to them even if they weren't aware of him. He didn't even have Ruby's knife, just the silver one.

His mouth thinned out and he nodded in agreement, sending a dagger-like glare at the psychopomp. "Alright, we'll, uh, I'll think of something," he said, waving a hand at the rock wall. "Open it."

It wasn't a door. I mean, nothing opened exactly. It just started to get…thinner…I think. We could see through the rock even directly, then it got thinner still, like a sheer curtain, or maybe a lace one, and then it was gone.

I sucked down a huge breath and stepped inside, my internal organs doing the rumba and a flop sweat trickling down the back of my neck. The demons were…uh…coiling themselves around the table in the centre and didn't seem to even notice me.

There were, thankfully, things inside the cell. Or room. Or cave. Sneaking past the table, I spied a long-handled hammer leaning up against one wall and grabbed it, heaving it up with a half-stifled grunt. It was heavy enough to knock in the skull of anything solid but I wasn't so sure if it would have an effect on the smoke. I shouldn't have worried.

Sam stepped into the room without waiting for my diversion and the demons saw him alright.

Not really knowing much about Hell and demons and the way they operated, I was astonished to see the smoke suddenly pop out into bodies very similar to the ones we'd seen in the corridor outside, complete with bad breath, gross over-baked skin and over-developed deltoid muscles. I was so surprised, in fact, that I swung the sledge in my hands without even thinking about it, hitting the one closest to me in the back with a resounding bang.

It flew toward Sam, arms outstretched and he reacted without thinking too, I think, grabbing the meaty arms and swinging hard, using the demon's forward motion to accelerate it into the wall. There was a mushy cracking sound and it fell to the floor.

The second demon was looking wildly around, for me, I guess, since it couldn't work out why its colleague would suddenly start to fly, and Sam crossed the cell in a long and furious stride, grabbing it by the shoulder, under the blackened and broken-looking wing joint.

That's when things started to get strange.

Sam's right arm, from fingertips to shoulder, began to glow. I was halfway around the table, hoping I could repeat the earlier swing and do some damage to the demon when it started to gibber and twist away, and a thin, yellowish liquid seemed to be frothing in its mouth.

I don't know if Sam knew what he was doing, but he didn't let go and the white-hot glowing inside of his arm was creeping into the demon, seeping under the skin. The demon got more frantic, wrenching and yanking at Sam's hand, which might as well have been welded on for all the success the demon was having in trying to remove it.

The light, which'd started out a sort of reddish-gold and brightened to a clean, brilliant white was getting deeper and deeper into the demon and Sam's fingers dug in, both his and the demon's faces lit up into masks – Sam's of determination, the demon's of agony.

I don't know what I thought was going to happen, some grody and totally over-the-top special effects explosion, maybe, but the light flash-pointed inside the demon a second later, lighting it up like a Christmas tree light that got hit with a power surge, and it just…kind of…popped, falling into a pile of ash at Sam's feet, his fingers closing into a fist around nothing.

We both looked down at the pile, then the psychopomp came into the room and put his hand on the soul on the table, and Lindsay sat up, the chains and wire binding her there dissolving and falling away.

"Come on, we don't have a lot of time," he said.

I dropped the sledge hammer with relief, and finished walking around the table to Sam, being careful not to step in the remains of the demon. He was still standing there, staring down at the ash on the floor.

"Sam?"

"Wh-what happened?" he asked, loosening his fist and letting it fall to his side as he looked up.

"Hard to say," I answered, truthfully enough. I mean we'd both seen what'd happened but as to the how or why, that wasn't so easy to work out. I had an idea but I didn't think we had time to go into right now and I wasn't he'd want to hear it even when we did. "But it's time to go. We can figure it out at home, okay?"

He nodded uncertainly.

We followed the guide and the soul clutching onto him out of the cell and back down the hallway, neither of saying anything. We were, after all, still in Hell, and not even close to being out of the woods, if you'll pardon the Purgatory pun.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

We saw four more demons on the way out; two in the distance, two of them a lot closer. I couldn't help but wonder if, when I'd been down here before – had there been a chance of running, that is – if I could've snuck out under my own power. Of course, there would've had to have been a time when Crowley wasn't around. And I really would have needed to be conscious to manage it.

Crawling out through the narrow gap between the boulders and roots of the tree in Purgatory should not have prompted the big exhale of relief it did. I mean, there's a reason for sayings like 'out of the fire, into the frying pan', after all. But I still did it. The air smelled better, for starters.

As soon as we were on our feet, the soul of Lindsay Turner regained the form she remembered from life; enough anyway that she saw us, and recognised Sam.

"Sam! What-wh-what are you doing here?"

"Getting you out of Hell," he said, reaching out to her tentatively. She seemed to be substantial enough to touch, and she threw herself into his arms, burying her face against his chest.

Standing there, patting her back awkwardly, Sam looked like six miles of bad road. His face was grimy, a thin line of dried blood crusting down one side, but he looked thinner too, drawn and used up by the efforts we'd had to go through. And not just the running and hiding. Whatever it was that he'd done in there had demanded a huge cost from him. Lauren was going to be mad.

"Touching, lovely, let's get going," the guide said disparagingly, turning away from them and heading along the river bank.

Oh, yeah, I remembered. All uphill from here. Joy.

I followed the fox, leaving Sam and Lindsay to bring up the rear, vaguely wondering if I looked any better than Sam did. The transdimensional jumps, being scared spitless for much of the time, the aches and pains of wire-tight tension…I felt like six miles of bad road.

"How did Crowley know it was Sam that killed the hellhound?" I asked the psychopomp, forcing myself to walk a bit faster to catch up to him.

He looked at me, his mouth twisting up. "It was one of his favourites, I heard. He seems to take that kind of thing personally."

Oh.

"What are you doing here?" he asked, gaze flicking behind for a second. "You know you stand out like a neon light, right?"

Yeah, that I'd heard. What was I doing here? It was a good question. One I didn't quite know how to answer.

"Uh, it's a long story," I said eventually.

He gave me a foxy look that plainly said he didn't believe me, but left it, turning up the trail when we came to it without a second's hesitation.

Climbing up behind him, my noisy breathing underlining the fact that I still hadn't gotten around to getting to those fitness classes, I started thinking about what I was doing there. I was in love, for the first time in my life. That had to count for something. I'd found a home here, of sorts, one I couldn't imagine having in the place I'd been born. I didn't belong here, but I wanted to.

We got to the top of the slope and the psychopomp looked around, muttering under his breath.

"What's wrong?" I asked, glad to have stopped.

"Nothing," he said. "We're a few minute early for the gate."

Sam and Lindsay stopped in the clearing and Sam looked at the guide. "How do we get her soul back to Heaven?"

"I'll take it," he said. "First time I've ever been involved in a rescue mission," he added a second later, looking curiously at Sam. "Should get me some bonus points upstairs."

Sam's expression soured. "That's all this is to you?"

"What do you care?"

Lindsay opened her mouth to say something, when the undergrowth around the little open area seemed to erupt with movement.

My hair was nearly yanked out by the roots as a hand closed in it and pulled me backwards off my feet. I got a confused glimpse of bright eyes, a mouthful of jagged teeth and filthy skin when I also felt that peculiar pulling sensation in my stomach again.

"Wait!"

Sam yelled out from somewhere else, then there was a low, throbbing kind of growl and the hand let go, something flying past over me, all thick dark hair and howling rage.

Rolling to my feet, I saw the psychopomp standing next to a growing doorway, Lindsay held in his arms; Sam was slicing and stabbing at a creature with dead white skin, jet-black hair and a bristling set of fangs, and close to him, a lean figure with way too much body hair was chewing the neck of another vampire, mouth bloody and piercing blue eyes visible as it lifted its head and threw the head of the fang to one side.

"Sam, hurry!" I yelled and the werewolf spun around, one long, claw-tipped hand driving into the back of the vampire on Sam and dragging it off.

"The door!" I got over to him, fisting both hands in his coat and throwing my weight back to get him to his feet. The idea of being left here was giving me an adrenalin-fuelled surge of strength, Sam outweighing me by more than a hundred pounds.

He was looking past me, eyes nearly bugging out as he watched the werewolf and vampire slugging it out.

"C'mon!"

Behind the psychopomp, the doorway – or inter-dimensional wormhole, Lauren would've called it – was getting bigger, and I really couldn't bear the thought of missing that way out.

With a high-pitched shriek, the werewolf bit through the vampire's neck and the head went rolling into the bracken and shrubs. It dropped the body and turned around, those weirdly neon blue eyes staring straight at him. I realised belatedly it was a she-wolf I was looking at, the bone structure even under all that hair too delicate to be a male.

He was staring straight back.

"Sam!"

"Go," she said.

For a moment, he didn't even blink, just kept looking over my head at the werewolf, then he seemed to come back to himself, glancing down at me, and letting me pull him toward the psychopomp's outstretched hand.

I touched it, fingers scrabbling for some kind of grip and we were stretched and sucked into the hole, just one word from Sam as we made the transition.

"Madison."

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

Six hours later, leaning against the tiled wall of the shower, my eyes shut tight and the water pounding me, it still wasn't quite enough to get rid of the images that kept popping up behind my closed lids.

We'd stumbled out through psychopomp's doorway, back into the parking lot of the freight yard. Sam'd looked like he'd been repeatedly hit over the head with something large and heavy, and really, he had – too much of his past had shown up in too short a time and I couldn't guess at how he was handling it. I'd only felt like I'd been hammered by large, heavy things, my legs almost giving way when the surroundings registered on my senses and I realised we were finally home.

Lindsay had turned into a lovely blue blob and the psychopomp had held her close, the two of them spinning in a upwardly rising vortex that'd disappeared into the twilit sky without much fanfare. It should've been strange to see a soul, in broad daylight, as it were, but to be honest, my strange-o-meter had been redlining for the last twenty-four hours and I was all tapped out of astonishment, awe and wonder.

Dean, Lauren and Bobby had been there, and had watched Sam recite the incantation to complete the second trial. They'd also seen him light up, have what looked like a mini-seizure, complete with eyes rolling and falling to the ground, and had collectively panicked until he'd come to, shaking off his brother's grip and telling everyone he was alright.

A blatant lie, but a necessary one. Lauren was ready to cart him off to the hospital and I don't think even she thought that would do much.

Dean hadn't seen the direct effects of the spell in the first trial, being mostly out of it with injuries from the hellhound, and he'd been extremely subdued on the way back to the bunker.

"Hey!" His voice came through the waterfall surrounding me and the glass doors. "You alright?"

I mumbled something reassuring and straightened up, rinsing my hair and turning off the taps. I was fine. Really. I was just dandy relative to anyone else, I thought. I'd told Dean about Amy and Lindsay and Madison, and his face had screwed up. He hadn't even known about Amy or Lindsay, but he'd remembered Madison.

Sliding back the glass door, I got out and grabbed a towel, drying off absently.

While we'd been gone, they'd used the spell to track Metatron through his signature and it'd worked. The scribe of God was sitting in Boston, probably right in the middle of the Order's fortress there. Meddling with everything he could reach, it seemed like.

There was still no word or sign of Cas or Meg or Crowley, and as Bobby had growled when we'd gotten back to the bunker, without the Angel tablet, there wasn't much chance of doing anything about Metatron other than keeping tabs on him.

"Hey," Dean said again, his voice low and much more gentle as I came out of the bathroom with the towel wrapped around me.

From the look on his face, I guessed that Sam'd filled him in on the things I hadn't mentioned about our little sojourn in Purgatory and Hell. It was one of those little things that in the show was kind of…not passed over…but not really highlighted, that Dean noticed how other people were feeling, could pick up on that really easily when he wasn't focussed on the hunt. More so, I'd thought, than they'd shown Sam doing. Sam's empathy was usually shown in relation to the victims they'd questioned. Dean's just came from being able to put himself into their feelings. Or, at least, that'd been the impression I'd gotten, and it was an impression that had been strengthened, living here, with him.

I told myself I didn't really need to have a breakdown now. I was back, whole and intact, and the tension from the past day was slowly leaching out of me, with no further efforts required. What I needed to do – what I had to do – was to stay strong, stay focussed, keep my problems to myself, for the sake of what was going on. I sucked in a deep breath and smiled at him.

"Hey."

"You really okay?" he asked, taking a step closer and putting his arms around me.

Breathing in the scent of him, feeling that wonderful strength and rock-solid certainty of him, wobbled my newly-made resolutions horribly, and I had to ignore the sudden pricking behind my eyes and a compelling desire to babble it all out at him.

"Yeah, really okay," I said, happy to hear my voice sounding quite steady. Maybe I was getting better at this stoic, stable persona.

"Sam, uh, Sam said it wasn't an easy gig," he said, mostly into my hair.

"Oh, um, yeah, well, it was Hell," I prevaricated. "It was, uh, bad for him, Dean," I added, hoping that would divert his attention.

"I'm not going to cuddle him," he told me, leaning back and looking down at me. "He's got Lauren for that."

I couldn't help the little wheezing giggle that came out. "Um, right."

Lifting my head to look up at him as his hold tightened around me, I suddenly realised there was a very slight tremble in his frame, and the expression in his eyes was full of shadows.

I'm slow. I got no excuse.

"Were you worried about me?" I asked, and yes, I admit it, it was totally dumb thing to say.

His eyes closed and he let out an exasperated-sounding exhale. "What d'you think?"

I have to say, it hadn't really occurred to me, not in that way. I mean, yeah, yeah, you know there'll be worry and anxiety 'cause it's not a cake-walk and anything could happen, but…I don't know…I just hadn't realised it would be quite so bad, although now I was thinking about it, it hit me that for the past twenty-four hours, Dean'd had to sit it out, waiting and wondering, not knowing, with nothing but his imagination to keep him company.

Not a comfortable position for anyone to be in, but for him, a thousand times worse than being in the thick of the action, facing the danger himself.

"I'm sorry," I said to him, brushing my mouth over his and feeling the shudder that wracked through him pass into me, that light kiss searing into a deeper one, a really desperate one, as he half-carried, half-staggered us backwards to the bed and we collapsed onto it.

It was like all the emotions – the fear, the tension, relief, anger, apprehension – swirled together into this towering wave of arousal, and then just as quickly, crashed down into something else, something just as fierce but more…needing? Maybe? I don't know how to describe it, really. It wasn't the first time I'd felt this way, felt that we both felt this way, but it was the first time I'd really seen it and understood where it'd come from.

It was probably a better way to deal with all those emotions than any other, I considered vaguely, buzzing under his touch and reaching out for him at the same time. Let the physical and emotional get tied up and released together, a catharsis of mind and body and maybe even soul, so close and so tender that nothing could be hidden away or ignored and no pretence of being 'fine' was possible.

Lying against him in the after-glow, I did know that everything that'd knotted me up had gone, and that whatever the universe's reason for me being here, it was loving the man beside me that would keep me here until the day I died.

He rolled over a little, pulling me closer, his breath warm against my cheek.

"Don't do that again," he murmured, and I opened my eyes, looking into his.

"This?"

"You know what I mean," he said, a mock growl in his voice. "I–it wasn't fun."

"No," I agreed, straight away.

For a moment, we were silent, reviewing, I guess, the last couple of days. It wasn't going to get easier. That seemed to be a given. How hard it could get was anyone's guess.

"I don't think I can take that again," he said, reluctantly I thought. "Hell, I thought it was bad worrying about Sam."

I wasn't sure what to say. What could I say?

He slid down a couple of inches, until I could feel his breath against my neck.

"I–I can't–can't keep thinking I'm gonna lose you," he whispered, so softly I could barely hear him. "Fuck, I–you know I–I– love you."