Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The wind howls so loudly that Sam’s scream is lost in it, that the crack of the Colt firing sounds like a pebble being dropped. But somehow, when the yellow-eyed demon turns away from Dean’s crumpled body, Sam can hear him speak clearly. “Right. Where was I?”

Sam doesn’t even know what he’s screaming, ripping his throat hoarse with, threats or pleas, but none of it seems to have an effect. Yellow-eyes just looks at him for a moment with something like pity, then turns toward the Devil’s Gate, the black tide still flowing out of it. Toward the human figures laboring to push it closed. He clicks his tongue, then shrugs. “Not much they can do,” he says, looking to his right, like one of the demon smoke-clouds had asked him a question. “Leave them be for now. Even if they close it, we have the key.” He gestures with the Colt. “You know your orders.”

The black tide surges forward, and Yellow-eyes comes toward Sam, sinks down on one knee before him. Sam snarls wordlessly, and for a moment he thinks he can feel himself move, push just a little against the force holding him down. Yellow-eyes tilts his head, and the force redoubles, crushing Sam back against the tree. He reaches out and touches Sam’s face, takes hold of his chin very gently. His expression is serious for once, unsmiling.

“Listen to me, Sam,” he says, and now Sam’s mouth is glued shut as well, shutting him up. “You want your brother back? You have one chance. Come with me, now. Stay with me, obey my orders, and don’t try to fight back. Do that for a year, and I’ll give him back.” He blinks and Sam’s mouth unseals. “What do you say?”

“You’re lying,” Sam spits. “You won’t—you can’t—”

“Not only can I, son,” Yellow-eyes says, and he smiles sharply, “I’m the only one who can. Trust me, no crossroads demon will take a bargain to get poor little Dean back, not after I give the word. And nobody else will have access to him—he’s ours, Sammy, he went straight down. So.” He takes his hand from Sam’s face, stands up. “Come with me, and you’ll not only get your brother back, I’ll be able to answer all those questions you’ve been asking yourself. Everything will make sense, Sammy. On the other hand…” He glances back, to where Dean—God, Sam can’t even look at it. “Stay here, deal with a mass invasion of demons, have fun with the migraines, give Dean a nice hunter funeral to match Dad’s. Your choice.”

Sam stares up at him, pain and shock and rage still boiling so hot through his system he can barely breathe. Yellow-eyes tilts his head again, and the force around him lets up. It’s all Sam can do not to just throw himself at the creature, try to kill it even though he knows it’s futile. 

But stronger than anything else is the desperate, bone-deep knowledge that he can’t live in a world where Dean’s dead. He can’t live in a world where he never gets any answers. He can’t—and he realizes that he’s crying, tears hot on the shock-chill of his skin, and in another situation he’d feel ashamed but right now he doesn’t care. 

The demon’s still watching him, waiting, serious again. Sam chokes back a dry sob and says, “Yes. I’ll take—I’ll fucking take that, just promise you’ll bring Dean back. Promise he’ll be okay.” 

“Not a scratch on him,” Yellow-eyes promises, and holds out his hand. 

Sam doesn’t want to take it, but he’s shaking so bad he can barely get his legs underneath him; he needs the support to stand. Yellow-eyes pulls him closer, once he’s on his feet, and before Sam can react kisses him gently, at the corner of his mouth. It’s startlingly chaste, and Sam can only stare in response. “Sealing the deal,” Yellow-eyes says, with a half-shrug. “Didn’t figure you were in the mood for tongue.”

He sighs when Sam doesn’t react, releasing his arm. “Okay. Let’s move on to the next stage—finally.” Glancing to his left, where one of the demon-smokes has curled in the air as if in response to summons, he says, “Someone grab that body over there and keep it fresh. We’re gonna need it later.”

Sam tries not to vomit at the idea of one of the demons forcing its way into Dean’s empty body. That’s necessary, if the bargain’s going to be held up, and at least Yellow-eyes giving the order means it likely will be. Has to be, Sam thinks viciously. Demons had to keep their deals. Dean wasn’t really dead, not for long. Sam just had to go with this for now, play along, figure something out. When Dean was back, things would go back— 

But he can’t even make himself finish the thought. Because even if he can pretend that he’ll manage to fight whatever Yellow-eyes has planned, even if he can pretend he can survive this year and get Dean back and escape somehow—as Yellow-eyes turns to go and gestures for him to follow, Sam knows in his bones that this is another turning point, that after this nothing will be like it was. Normal is so far gone there’s never any going back to it.

He drags in a ragged breath full of graveyard dirt and unclean smoke and the gluey damp of tears, and looks back just long enough to make sure the demons are passing away, leaving everyone still at the gate alive and intact. Then he follows the yellow-eyed demon, and he doesn’t look back again.

Chapter Text

When Sam wakes up it takes him a moment to remember where he is, but no time at all to shove himself out of bed, nerves on high alert and hand reaching for a knife that isn’t there, because he’s able to tell that something’s wrong. The room is large and sunny and smells of old wood and coffee, not like any of the dark little motel rooms he and Dean have stayed in. 

Dean. Something in Sam draws tight, threatens to snap. Another part of him is calculating, this is the first day of three-hundred and sixty-five. A year has never felt so long before. 

“Morning, sunshine.” 

“Fuck!” Sam spun around to face the source of the sound. 

Seeing where it came from does nothing to calm his racing hearbeat. There’s a little kitchen/breakfast nook kind of place on the side of the room and Yellow-eyes is lounging against the bar part of it. He smiles brightly at Sam, like there’s nothing unusual about the situation. For a moment, Sam wonders if all this can be a dream, like the dream Yellow-eyes had entered in Cold Oak, but his skin stings when he pinches at it. 

“Afraid not,” Yellow-eyes says, like he’s reading Sam’s mind. “Coffee?”

Spurred by the word and the smell, Sam shuffles a little closer, reluctantly. “What time is it?” He thinks he fell asleep last just before sunrise. They’d traveled through the night, on foot, in a strange haze of smoke and shadows, one that occasionally parted to show the distant lights of a town or a motel—never enough for Sam to navigate by. The house they’re in currently—he’s not sure if it’s an apartment building or a huge hotel—had appeared through the darkness just as Sam’s pride was warring with his desperate need to rest. He’d nearly cried in relief when Yellow-eyes stopped at the door. But once he was upstairs in a room—so fogged with weariness he recalled very little of how he got there—he only slept in fits and starts. The gunshot kept coming back to him, the gaping jaws of the Devil’s Gate. The numb horror of not being able to do anything. 

“Almost noon. Figured you needed your sleep.”

Yeah, the numb horror hasn’t really backed off. It’s more a clinging presence at the back of his mind, stemming from standing here having to talk with the fucking yellow-eyed demon, knowing that he’s stuck here. Sam drags in a breath, trying to quell his panic and anger. Drags in another. In a minute, he’s able to speak almost normally. “What you promised—”

“About Dean?” Yellow-eyes has turned away, is opening random cupboards. Looking for cups, Sam realizes, when he finds two and pulls them out. It’s such a bizarrely mundane action it makes Sam’s brain short out for a second. 

“Uh—no,” he says. “Although—”

“We won’t be taking questions at this time,” Yellow-eyes says, with a tiny smile in his direction. “Rest assured you’ll get him back in a year’s time, if you keep up your end, but that’s all you need to know, Sam.”

Sam bites his lip, repressing the urge to raise his voice, demand answers. He doesn’t know what the demon will take as not obeying, as grounds for not fulfilling his half of the deal. “Okay,” he says, and his voice only wavers a little. He’ll just have to look for answers elsewhere. Somehow. “Okay, fine. But there was the other part—” 

“Hm?

Sam blinks at him, surprised—despite everything—that Yellow-eyes seemed to be playing dumb. “You said you’d answer my questions.”

Yellow-eyes laughs softly. “Said I’d be able to, Sammy. That’s not the same thing, is it?”

Sam clenched his hands tight into fists, fighting back another violent impulse. Yellow-eyes watches him for a moment, and his eyes seem to brighten a little with approval. “But I’m finding myself in a charitable mood, again,” he says. “Ask away, kid.”

Sam lets out his breath slowly, tries to sort through the questions in his mind. One unexpectedly rose to the surface. “I can’t just call you—” He gestures awkwardly. “What’s your name?” 

Yellow-eyes seems oddly pleased at the question, a small smile curving his mouth. “Right, we haven’t really been introduced.” He finishes pouring the coffee, nudges one of the cups toward Sam. “Azazel.” 

Sam hesitates, then picks up the cup. Much as he hates it, he needs to drink something, and coffee is all too welcome after the scraps of sleep he’d gotten last night. “Azazel? That’s—” Something about it niggles at the back of his mind, and after a moment he pins it down. “Kind of weird for a demon.”

Azazel raises an eyebrow. “Why is that?”

Sam feels like he’s being tested; probably because he is. He looks Azazel straight in the eye. “Because I didn’t think demons would have names incorporating the name of God.”

It’s an angelic name, and one he almost thinks he’s heard somewhere before, but he doesn’t have time to rack his brains when Azazel is cracking a grin and responding. “Good to see you hit the books as well as the shooting range. You’re right, Sam, it is unusual. But, ah…” He spreads his hands. “You may have noticed that I’m unusual. Next question?”

Sam takes a gulp of too-hot coffee while he thinks. Part of him wants to pursue the first question, but he shouldn’t waste the demon’s surely-limited patience on one thing only. “You say you want me to lead an army. How are demons going to follow a human?” 

Azazel’s grin gets a little bigger, like he’s thinking of a private joke. “They’re not.”

Sam waits, then realizes that’s all the answer he’s getting. “Then… why am I here?” 

Azazel drifts closer; it’s a tendency of his, Sam’s begun to notice, to always be moving as he talks. Circling Sam, or drawing closer and closer by tiny increments. Sam takes a step back to compensate and Azazel stops, like they’re playing some twisted red-light-green-light game. “If I told you,” he says, smile fading for the moment, “you wouldn’t believe me, Sammy.”

Sam frowns. “What do you—why wouldn’t I believe it?” 

“Because you wouldn’t want to. Or…” Azazel clicks his tongue in thought. “You might believe it eventually, or if I show you enough evidence—you’re a smart kid, Sammy, you know when you can’t beat the truth. But you’d hate it.”

Sam tightens his grip on his mug and breathes through his nose, trying to stay calm. “Okay,” he finally says, voice level. “Tell me, and I’ll deal with it. Or don’t, and stop taunting me with it. There’s no point in just hinting.”

Azazel beams at him, like he’s a favorite student that just passed a test, and Sam gulps more coffee to stave off his nausea. It’s hard enough to be in the same room as the creature that had killed everyone in his family (although Dean wasn’t really dead, Dean would be back, it was important to remember that); it’s harder still to feel his approval, and wonder what the hell is wrong with him if a demon likes him so much. 

“Alright,” Azazel says. “But we need to have a little history lesson first.” He indicates one of the nearby chairs and waits until Sam reluctantly sits, then slides onto the one opposite him. “Tell me, what do you know about angels?” 

Sam avoids choking on his coffee with difficulty. “Angels?” 

Azazel just nods. Sam tries to think. “Uh—there’s a lot of lore. Second-hand accounts, usually not counting, like… the Bible. But most of it’s conflicting, or hard to track down. A lot of people don’t believe they exist.”

Azazel looks curious. “And what do you believe, Sam?”

Sam shifts uncomfortably in his seat. “I, uh. Don’t know. I believe in God.”

“Really. Living the life you have, seeing everything out there, you sincerely believe there’s a God in Heaven?” 

Sam squares his shoulders. “Yes.”

Unexpectedly, Azazel cracks a grin. It’s sharp-edged this time, bitter. “Score one for your team, Sammy. God is real. Though he keeps pretty quiet these days.” He leans back. “Angels are real too. Not so much the… harps and clouds depiction, think a little more of the thousand wings and eyes, fury of the Lord, razing of Sodom type.” 

Sam stares at him. He doesn’t know how to react; he still isn’t sure Azazel’s telling the truth, or why he’d be telling it if he was. “And—they’re not still out there, razing and et cetera, because why?”

Azazel shrugs. “This and that. The first war took it out of them, mostly. And sad to say, a lot of them don’t like the neighborhood that much. Think it’s filthy, uncultured, unworthy of God’s approval, that kind of thing. But they’re going to start showing up sooner or later, Sam, and the war’s going to start again. You’ll see them for yourself, then.”

Sam swallows hard, puts the remains of his coffee aside. “What war?”

“Really, Sam? Take three guesses as to who Heaven would be fighting with.”

Sam draws himself up, can’t stop from answering like he’s trying to get an A in class. “Hell’s the obvious answer, but considering the amount that popular legend differs from reality, not the only option. Some stories say angels battle Lilith’s children—monsters. Some lore even points to fallen angels, although that’s rare.”

“Eve’s children.”

Sam looks at Azazel, confused by the matter-of-fact tone more than the statement. Okay, maybe equally confused by them both. “What?”

“Eve’s children,” Azazel says, “not Lilith’s. You said it yourself, Sammy, about legend and reality. But that’s not the important part. First and third options are. Both right, Sam, because the fallen angels built Hell. It’s not an afterlife so much as it is a war camp. Humans only get routed there because they’re useful.”

Sam stares at him, acutely aware for a moment of the dissonance between the normal, sunny apartment and the utterly insane information that had just been dumped on his lap. “You’re saying fallen angels are real?” he finally managed to say. “They’re widely discounted in every—”

Azazel gives him a deliberate, come-on-kid-I-know-you-can-do-this kind of look, and Sam breaks off. Some words from earlier echo back to him, sink in again. He pushes his chair a little bit backward.

“Figured it out yet?” Azazel says.

“You,” Sam says, and he knows there was more to go with it but his voice just stops. All he can do is stare, mind working furiously, because—because it can’t be, but his brain keeps on fitting pieces into the puzzle, the holy water that hadn’t worked, the difference in the eyes, the things that no other demon they’d seen could do. And the name. And his mind finally comes up with where he saw it, bored and researching crazy lore, in somebody’s impassioned and misspelled translation of a Bible-canon reject. “Azazel,” he finally says, voice ragged. “It’s from the Book of Watchers.” 

“So you read some of Enoch’s records.” Azazel didn’t sound pleased. “God’s prophets are always annoying, but him—he was something special.”

Sam barely hears him. His mind was still wrestling with the initial idea, trying to dig up the scraps he’d read. And Azazel taught men to make swords, and knives, and made known to them all the metals of the earth and the art of working them. There had been other things, too, but Sam had read it with only half his attention, and it had been years ago. He could barely recall some of the other names: Sariel, Bezaliel, Ramiel. Something about nephelim, about monsters born of angels and humans. He looks up at Azazel, breath tight in his throat. 

“This is insane,” he says. “You want me to believe this, give me some kind of proof.”

Azazel nods slowly. “Fair enough.” He straightens in his chair, and a look of concentration enters his eyes. A moment of silence passes. 

“Uh—” Sam says.

“Give me a minute,” Azazel mutters. “It’s been a long time since I pulled out this particular party trick.”

Sam has what are you talking about on the tip of his tongue when something sears across his vision, sudden and bright, so bright it blots out the sunlight for the moment it’s visible. He shoves himself back in his chair, heart hammering. The—whatever it was, whatever he’s seen, was so brief he’s only able to piece it together from afterimages, from the reactions in his body. He feels like he can smell smoke; he feels like the light had reminded him of fire, despite how unnaturally bright it had been. It had felt—wrong, somehow, as well, making his heart thump off-key in his chest for a minute, making all his nerves jangle. 

It had, he realized from the shapes seared across his vision—fading slowly as he tried to blink them away—been shaped like a pair of wings. 

“You’re lucky I still have those.” Azazel’s voice sounds different; tired, Sam realizes with a shock. “And that I’m not—well, let’s say not as young as I once was. Fair few of us can’t manifest anymore, and in the old days—even with what you are, Sammy, it might have damaged you.” 

Sam gulps for breath, manages to rub away most of the residual brightness before opening his eyes again. Looks with new, newly horrifed eyes at Azazel sitting opposite him. Angel. Fuck. A fallen angel, but still—the main reason fallen angels were discounted, by those who believed in angels, was the implication they held. That angels could be fallible, could even turn to evil. 

With the bottom feeling like it’s been scooped out of his stomach, Sam can understand why nobody wanted to believe that. 

Azazel’s words finally fully sink in. “With—what I am?” Sam asks, his own voice sounding rusty to his ears. “What—”

But Azazel, who’s been studying him with a faintly concerned expression, shakes his head. “I think that’s enough for now.” 

He’s up and headed for the door by the time Sam manages to react, jumping up. “Wait!”

Azazel turns back. “Don’t want your brain to break, kid,” he says, gently. “Let’s give all that a few hours to sink in, huh? I’ve got some business to take care of, and you’re free to wander around. Just don’t leave the grounds, all right?”

He doesn’t wait for Sam to reply, just leaves, door clicking shut behind him as Sam struggles to find words. Sam stares at the closed door for a minute, overwhelmed with anger and confusion and the sickening, world-flipping pain of having something essential he thought he knew about the universe challenged; for a minute he struggles to calm down, then he remembers there’s little reason to stay calm any longer. He takes some of the anger out the good old-fashioned Winchester way, by punching the wall. 

He winds up with bloody knuckles and a new admiration for the structure, which clearly stands head and shoulders above whatever motel walls are made of. Next he checks the doors and finds a bathroom, where he cranks on the cold water and holds his knuckles under the tap until the torn skin stops stinging and goes numb. The sink’s big enough to stick his head under the tap, so he does that as well. The icy water doesn’t help much with making sense of his shitty new outlook on the world, but it clears his head a bit. 

Wiping water away from his face, he glances at the door he hasn’t gone through yet—the one that leads to the rest of the building. In any other situation he’d have left already, but since Azazel had told him he was welcome to he almost resented the chance to explore. Not that he’d let that stop him for long. Nice as the room was, it didn’t even have a TV; there was nothing else to do here. 

And he might not be like his father—might have, in fact, nearly quit drinking during college in an attempt not to end up like him—but right now, he really wants to know if he can get a drink in this building. 

Chapter Text

The building seems to be a hotel. It looks remarkably clean, but the ceilings are cracked in places, water damage spotting the floors beneath, and the wood of the walls is pitted and cracked here and there. Old and probably abandoned, Sam guesses, until Azazel took it over. 

Out the windows, he finds wild-looking grounds cut through with a road at some distance, and much further beyond a glitter that might have been a nearby town. Nothing looks familiar, and he can’t shake the suspicion that somehow, in the last half-awake night, they’d traveled a lot further than they should have been able to on foot. So, where he is—no clues there. His phone is long gone, and in the first few rooms he checks, he only finds one or two places where holes seem to indicate something electrical might have been ripped out. No way to call anyone. And he can’t leave, not if he wants to keep the deal.

He wants Dean, for a moment, so badly it hurts. Just—to take charge, set a definite course, even if it’s stupid as hell and something Sam will immediately argue with him about. He spent a few years without Dean at Stanford but for the rest of Sam’s life he was a constant, the rock that the rest of the universe was built on. Without him, Sam feels unmoored, absent and strange enough he checks to see if he’s dreaming once or twice more. 

No such luck. 

He goes down to the first floor and starts opening doors. There's evidence of demons having passed through—scuffed footprints on the floor, the stink of sulfur still in the air—but the building seems empty. He turns Azazel's words over in his mind, trying to fit pieces together. I already have my army. And now he might know who they're meant to fight, although if Heaven has stood by and watched the world for this long, he wonders if a few thousand more demons up above will really provoke them to show themselves. Or maybe he's thinking of it the wrong way; maybe the war's been going on all this time, just on a level humans were unaware of. Sam shakes his head in frustration. He doesn't know enough—and the strangest missing piece is his part in all this. Despite what Azazel said, Sam doubts that having the skills of a hunter really made him better than the other 'special children'. Can't imagine knowing that knowing what kind of knife kills a lamia will be any advantage against an angel.

He's still lost in thought when he opens a door into the sudden hush of a conversation, and realizes he's not alone. The room before him, less dusty than the others, seems like some kind of lounge; a bar runs along one wall, old yellow wood with a vicious slash of a burn mark scarring up one end. A woman leans against the bar from the inside, and a girl maybe a year or two younger than Sam perches on a stool with a drink in her hand. Sam stares at them, tongue-tied for a moment.

The girl with a drink in her hand smiles at him, slow and dark and sweet, the kind of smile he’d more expect to see in a bar around midnight. He almost expects her to say hey, sailor. What she says is, “Oops. I don’t think we’re supposed to meet yet.”

Sam says, intelligently, “What?”

“I was supposed to be out of here already. Didn’t think you’d come downstairs so soon. You won’t tell the boss on me, will you?”

The boss—Azazel. “I’m not gonna tell him anything.”

The girl smiles more brightly and Sam finds himself smiling awkwardly back. He stops himself. Demon, Sam, he tells himself. Tries to picture damp black creeping over those big brown eyes. It helps him stop smiling, at least, but the girl doesn’t seem to be bothered by that.

“Aren’t you going to ask my name?” she says.

“I—to be honest, I wasn’t going to. A lot of you things don’t seem to use them.”

The woman between the bar laughs to herself and walks away to the other end; to do what, Sam doesn’t know. The girl purses her lips briefly, eyes dropping. Sam half-expects them to go black but they don’t. She just looks back up a moment later, smile back and just a fraction tighter than before. 

“It’s Ruby,” she says, and her tone makes Sam instinctively guilty, even if he tells himself she’s not really a girl, she doesn’t have feelings to hurt. “A lot of us— things keep our names to ourselves around hunters. They’re not usually interested, you know?”

“I thought it was something to do with names having power.” Sam says.

Ruby’s smile turns just a touch patronizing. “It’s just a name someone gave me,” she says. “Not big mojo attached to it.” 

She gulps the remains of her drink and slides down off her stool; she’s short, maybe a foot shorter than Sam, making her neck into a pale straight line as she looks up at him. He feels oddly ashamed and angry for feeling so, but unable to do anything with his anger; she’s not threatening him, not doing anything much. Just looking, like she’s waiting for him to do something, or trying to memorize his face. He might be—is probably imagining it, but there seems to be a touch of sadness in her eyes. 

“Well,” she says, finally. “See you around.”

“Wait,” he says impulsively, as she turns to go. “Wait. Can I ask you something?”

She arches an eyebrow. “Last I checked, talking’s free.”

He swallows hard. “Do you know where Dean—where my brother is?”

Ruby’s face goes perfectly still, mask-like for a moment. Then she pulls an awkward face. “His body, or, uh…”

Sam closes his eyes for a moment. “Both. Body and soul.”

“Right. Body? Under lock and key already, I imagine. Being kept fresh and safe. Don’t know where, not my job. Soul?” Ruby dropped her eyes meaningfully to the floorboards. “Other than that, again, don’t know, not my department. Sorry.” 

Sam swallows. “Right.” He wants to snarl at how useless the reply is, but he restrains himself. He’s going to be stuck dealing with demons for a while; he probably shouldn’t alienate one that seems willing to answer questions. “Thank you.”

Ruby smiles and it’s so genuine and bright he’s warmed by it, despite himself. “Aw, you’re cute when you’re polite. Hope they don’t rub the shine off you too fast.” 

While he’s still struggling to respond to that she takes off again, heels clicking on the bare floor, and is out the door before he can come up with something. The woman behind the bar returns to his section, leaning on it with an easy smile. She’s young, he realizes—that is, the woman she's wearing is young, not even thirty, but something about her eyes and smile make her seem older. 

“Hell of a morning for you, huh?” she says. 

“Yeah.” He hesitates. “So uh, do you… have a name?”

"Call me Amy."

"Amy." 

She raises an eyebrow. “What were you expecting? Moloch? Raz’dah, Eater of a Thousand Babies?” 

He doesn’t take the bait. “This place seems pretty empty. Why are you here?”

“Well, somebody’s gotta keep an eye on you.” She gives him a slightly patronizing smile. “And I’m not the only one, honey. Bell and Book are just out right now, reinforcing the border. We don’t want any unwelcome guests.”

“Are those other demons, or Saturday morning cartoon villains?”

She laughs. “Some of us chose our names, some of us got them other ways. Azazel named Bell and Book—and Candle, obviously, though she’s not here at the moment.” She winks at Sam. “Between the two of us, she’s not very bright.”

Bell, book and candle. Seemed more like nicknames for witches than demons, but Sam put that curiosity aside for now. “You know his real name. Azazel. How much do you know about him?”

“How much do you know?” Amy countered, leaning back from the counter. “I’m not putting my skin on the line to answer any questions, kid. I’m just the chef.”

“The… chef?”

“You’ve got to eat, right?” Amy’s eyes crinkle at the corners with mirth. “I haven’t worked under Azazel before, but as it turns out, none of his people really knew much about cooking. Focus on the whole pillage, rape, burn bit and finer skills fall by the wayside. So he called Lilith—my lady—” Sam can’t help but notice the words my lady are tinged with a faint, bitter disdain, “—and she sent me up with all the soldiers.” Amy spread her hands. “And here I am, at your service.”

“You’re seriously here just to cook—just for me ?”

Amy shrugs. “I mean, demons eat too. Even if we don’t have to for long, hosts get all scrawny and weird without food sometimes. And the higher-ups eat for pleasure, now and then. But you’re my top priority, yeah, Azazel made that clear.”

Sam takes a minute to process that. It makes sense, in a way. Whatever was going on, Azazel seems to want him alive and healthy for a while yet. But overall, Amy is just adding more questions to his already lengthy list. He picks two.

“Can I get something to drink, then?” he says. “And if you can’t answer anything more important—how is it you know how to cook?”

“What’s your poison?” 

“Whiskey, if you’ve got it.” He folds his arms on top of the bar, waits for an answer to his second question. Amy glances at him and sighs. 

“That’s harder to answer than you know, kid.” She turns to the shelves half-hidden behind her. “How much did Azazel tell you, when he talked to you upstairs? I know there’s a lot he needs to say to you; I don’t know how far he got.” 

Sam swallows against the tightness that rises to his throat, feeling the weight of all the secrets he’s already learned, the weight of ones that promise to somehow be worse. “I already know… He told me the stories of fallen angels had truth to them. That he was one. And before, before we came here, he told me about the blood.” He opens and closes his hand, distracted by a moment by the veins in his wrist. The taint he could all too easily imagine coursing through them. “How he changed me, and the other children…” But that wasn’t all. There had to be more to Sam’s story; more than the others that had died, burned out as Azazel had put it, out in the world or in Cold Oak. Otherwise he wouldn’t be here. 

It could be as simple as the explanation Azazel had offered, that he had some advantage through how he was raised, but Sam can’t believe that’s all. What you are, Azazel had said, after he showed Sam his wings. Sam feels certain, somehow, that he wasn’t just talking about the blood. There was something more different, more wrong with Sam than the others. 

He just can’t piece together yet what that difference is. 

Amy slides a glass across to him, snapping him out of his reverie. She’s smiling a little, an unexpected softness on her face; a smile full of nostalgia. “That’s enough for me to answer your question,” she said. “I know how to cook because I didn’t always serve Lilith. My lord was Shemhazai, one of the first among the Fallen. All of them were interested in the world in different ways, but Shem—he was always enchanted by material things. Sex, pain, food. I started learning about the last to please him. It was fun.”

“Why are you with Lilith now?”

Her smile faded. “Because Shemhazai’s dead.”

Sam already has his mouth open, stunned, to ask what could kill a fallen angel, when understanding dawns on him. “The—it was the Colt?”

Amy makes a face as if just hearing the word tastes sour. “That thing. Yeah, we didn’t know what it was back then. Didn’t know to be afraid of it. So Shem…” She trails off, turns away. When she looks back at Sam, her face is emotionless, her tone casual. “So he died, and those of us that were more the fighting type got folded into Azazel or Dagon’s forces, and those of us who didn’t went to Lilith, or… yeah. I don’t envy them.” Without any explanation for that last bizarre sentence, she ducked to a nearby tiny fridge and pulled herself out a bottle of beer. “Anyway, I’d better shut my mouth now. I ramble too much when memories come up, you know? Hazards of being old.”

Sam takes a slow sip of the whiskey, grimacing a little at the burn on his tongue. It can’t answer his questions, but it does help focus his mind. He feels like he’s coming dangerously close to understanding what drove John Winchester to hit the bottle every time he came off a particularly bad case. Wanting more than anything to distract himself, he says, “How old? If the higher-ups are fallen angels—are the rest of you, the rank and file demons, something different?”

Amy twists the cap off her beer. “Wow, reports of you being a scholar weren’t lying. Afraid I’m gonna have to cut you off, though. Can’t answer those questions before I know for sure what Azazel wants you to know.”

Sam bites his lip, trying to keep his anger in check. “OK. So I’m just stuck here doing nothing until Azazel decides to fill me in?”

Amy made an apologetic face. “I can get you lunch.”

“I’m not hungry.” It’s not quite true, but his stomach cramps with nausea at the thought of eating right now. 

She drummed her manicured nails on the bar for a moment. “I’ve got a pack of cards around here somewhere. I know poker, or I could teach you how to play Eleusis.”

Only curiosity stopped him from immediately turning the offer down. “Eleusis?”

“It’s more fun with more players, but you can do it with two. One’s the dealer, and the other doesn’t know what’s going on.” She smiles slightly. “You just play cards, and the dealer tells you whether it’s a wrong move or not, but never why. You have to guess it for yourself.”

“That sounds… insane.” Sam picks up his glass. “And I’m not really in the mood for games.”

Amy shrugs. “Suit yourself.”

“Do you know when Azazel will be back?” 

“By tonight, probably. He’s—actually, sorry, shouldn’t tell you what he’s doing. But you’re a high priority, Sam. He won’t leave you hanging for long.”

She says it like that should reassure him. In a twisted way, it almost does. 

Chapter Text

It’s twilight when Azazel finally returns. 

Sam had passed the day in hours that felt like days, wandering the hotel and finding very little, eventually crashing back in his original room and sleeping for a while longer. Amy had woken him up in the afternoon with a sandwich, which she insisted he had to eat because she had ‘lowered herself to make boring American food’ and it would be rude to not appreciate her efforts. Afterward, he sat in on a few rounds of poker with her and Bell and Book, who finally appeared, for want of anything better to do. It goes about as well as could be expected until Bell, pulling a ringlet of hair straight around her fingers, complains about not being able to find a host with better hair, and he remembers all over again yeah, demons. 

He goes outside after that. Amy gives him a warning look, but doesn’t even bother telling him to not go far. 

Apparently they both know that he isn’t going to leave. 

He’s in part of what looks like a long-overgrown lawn, watching the sun finally sink below the horizon and wondering whether the butchered-looking bush nearby used to be an ornamental shrub, when Azazel appears next to him. Sam jumps; he’s unsure whether he’s still so out of it as to not hear anyone approaching, or whether Azazel did that teleporting thing he’s apparently capable of doing sometimes. 

“Howdy, Sam,” says Azazel, who seems uninterested in answering that question. “Ready for another round? Let’s walk.” 

Sam hesitates for a moment, but Azazel starts off without waiting for an answer. He catches up easily enough, though; Azazel’s not quick when he’s not teleporting. “So, what were you doing?” 

“One question at a time, Sam. Is that really the one you want answered?”

Sam bites back his anger, tasting blood on his lip. Stay calm, he reminds himself; you don’t know what he’ll consider breaking his rules. “Fine. You keep saying I’m different, you said there was something you could tell me that I wouldn’t believe. Try me.” 

Azazel stops. “You sure about that, Sam?”

Sam pulls to a halt too, turns to face him. “Yeah, I’m sick of not knowing what’s going on. Whatever it is, I’ll handle it.”

Azazel nods slowly. “Okay. It’s going to be easier to just show you. Bit more of a challenge when you’re not already dreaming, but all I really need to do it is your permission. Will you let me show you, Sam?”

Sam hesitates, but not for long. Azazel was right about one thing; he felt like if he went without answers for much longer, he’d lose his mind. “Sure. Yeah, show me.”

Azazel reaches out, quickly enough that Sam can’t step back, and brushes his fingers against Sam’s forehead. Then, like he had in the dream, he snaps his fingers.

When he does, the vision that suddenly encloses them is very different from the small, shadowed room Sam had seen the first time. They’re outside, with the sun cutting down, in a small lot behind what looks like a grocery store. The leaves on the few determined, scraggling bushes that push out of the concrete are brilliant green, and the light is summer-intense, but Sam can still feel the chill of the twilight they were really standing in on his skin. He shivers, and the light wavers around him. 

“Don’t focus on your body,” Azazel says. “Just focus on what you’re seeing and hearing. You’re not going to want to miss this, Sam.”

He gestures, and Sam looks in that direction. There’s a man and a woman standing a yard or two away from them now—he doesn’t know whether he missed them walking up in the few moments the vision wavered, or if time has just skipped forward in the ‘replay’ to the moment they were there. It only takes a moment to recognize the woman, and forget all about the chill against his skin. 

Mary looks different under the bright sunlight; more real, with her hair pulled back and her clearly worn T-shirt slightly darkened with sweat in the small of her back. Sam steps to the side to better see her face, heart in his throat, and like that extra focus was all he needed, the sound of the vision suddenly breaks through. 

“Thought you would prefer that we meet away from your house,” the man is saying, his cheerful cadence sickeningly familiar. “Away from John and little Dean. Was I wrong?” 

Sam glances at the man for only a moment—he’s nondescript, brown hair and currently brown eyes, not the important part—before turning back to Azazel. “This is you?”

Azazel nods. He hasn’t come closer; just stands back with his hands in his pockets, watching with a slightly abstracted expression. 

Sam turns back to the scene before him when Mary speaks. This close, he can see the shadows under her eyes, the fine lines of worry around her mouth, but her voice is cool and casual. “Just tell me what you want.”

“Well, we’ll start with the good news.” Azazel in the memory grins brightly. “It’s not your soul or your firstborn child.”

Mary doesn’t look reassured. “John—”

“Mary, come on. You know I can’t take back what I gave you to seal the deal in the first place. Not unless we break the deal, of course. And I’m sure neither of us want to do that.”

Sam almost turns to Azazel again, but he’s afraid of missing something. He just stares as Mary casts her eyes down, heart pounding in his ears. He’d never known her, barely known anything about her—John had quit talking much about her by the time Sam was all of seven, and Dean didn’t remember much—but he’d thought of her in the same category as most other people that Hunters had lost. Someone who’d lived a normal life, right up until dying; someone who didn’t know what was coming to get them. 

Maybe he should have guessed that Mary didn’t belong to that category already, since she’d recognized Azazel on that night. But of all explanations, her making a deal—it hadn’t been high on the list. 

“Just tell me what you want,” Mary says, looking up. “The little favor. I’ve waited long enough, I don’t need you fucking around any more before you tell me.”

Azazel in the past raised his hands in an exaggerated gesture of defense. “All right, fine by me. I was just trying to be polite.” His hands, and his smile, drop. “I need you to carry something for me, sweetheart.”

Mary’s brow furrows. “Carry—what? For how long?”

“Eh, it’ll take about nine months.”

Sam went cold. In the vision, Mary’s eyes widened. 

“You can’t be—” she starts to say, then cuts herself off. Shaking her head, she says instead, “No. No way. I don’t know what kind of Antichrist bullshit you’re planning—”

“Mary, Mary, you’re assuming the worst of me!” Azazel spreads his hands. “Do you really think I’m the Devil? Not that it’s not flattering, in a way, but I assure you it’s off the mark. The kid won’t be the Antichrist.”

“Then why—”

“Would you believe me if I said I just wanted to be a father?” 

Mary laughs, short and sharp. “No.”

“Pity. It’s at least partly accurate. Then I’ll just remind you—” Azazel’s smile drops as he moves nearer to her, and the brown eyes of his vessel blink away into all-too-familiar yellow. Sam curls his hands into fists, fighting the urge to step in between him and Mary, even though he knows it won’t do anything. 

“Say no,” Azazel says to Mary, head tilted to the side, “and our deal is broken, doll. You walk away, John’s dead when you get home. Dean grow up without a father. If he grows up, that is, because you’re not going to be protected anymore.” The mention of Dean bites into Sam’s chest like a knife. Not dead, he tells himself again, despite everything. Not really, not for good. “Maybe you’ll be able to protect him. You were a damn good fighter, once. But then… so was your daddy, and that didn’t help him much, did it?”

“Shut up,” Mary says, pinching at the bridge of her nose with her eyes squeezed shut. After a moment, she drops her hand and looks up; pale, but her mouth is set and calm. “If I do this,” she says, “are you going to take it away? The child I have?”

Azazel in the past considers, yellow shuttering away behind the human color of his eyes again. “Mm. Not immediately, no. I’m a busy guy, you see. Things to do, people to… you get the idea. I’ll still keep an eye on things, of course, but the kid’s not going to vanish anytime soon.”

Mary stares at the ground, her brow furrowed, her arms tightly folded across her front. Azazel in the past watches her, calm and expectant. And Sam just prays, for those few futile seconds, that she’s not going to say what he knows she’s going to say. That the truth is something other than what it obviously is.

“Fine,” Mary says, her voice expressionless. “I’ll do it.”

Sam turns and starts walking before he hears what Azazel’s reply was. The air cuts against his face, chilly again; the vision wavers around him, summer colors bleeding and fading out. His heart is beating so loud in his ears he can scarcely hear anything. He dimly, out of the corner of his eye, sees Azazel—the real and current one—turn to watch him, but forces himself not to turn in that direction. He wants—he wants a lot of things he knows are impossible. He can’t hurt Azazel, even if there was a way to actually accomplish it. He can’t turn back time and unhear what he just heard. 

The last edges of the vision ebb, leaving him standing in the torn grass near the edge of the trees. He stops walking and just forces himself to breathe, for a moment; his head was starting to swim. He wants to believe that what he just saw was a lie, but—

What you are. Not human. A—he struggled to remember the name. One of the nephelim. A monster. 

It makes sense. It fit right into the empty, disjointed cracks that he’d always felt running through the center of himself; the way he’d always felt different from Dean, from John, from even the other children of hunters they ran into. The taint he’d felt when he’d read about heroes and martyrs, and thought, not knowing why, that he could never be like them. It sure as hell explained the brief period he’d spent at fourteen utterly, secretly convinced that he was somehow a changeling—that nothing else could explain how different he looked from his family, how strangely his hunger fluctuated, how angry he sometimes got. 

He remembers the brief glimpse of Mary’s ghost, the way she’d looked at him. I’m sorry. 

Why she’d want to apologize, he can’t imagine. Unless it’s for being stupid enough to take a demon deal at some point, and—he struggles, for a moment, over that. But he can’t be angry, not honestly. Even if she knew more than he’d assumed about demons, about everything, she’d clearly been backed into a corner. It wasn’t her fault. 

When he finally turns and walks back, several minutes later, Azazel has lit a cigarette. The end of it flares bright, briefly, in the gathering darkness; above them, stars are starting to come out. Azazel waits for him calmly, watching as Sam comes and stops a few yards away. 

“Gotten it all straight in your head?” Azazel asks. 

Sam makes a sound that shocks against even his ears, a strange coughing bark of laughter he can’t help. He covers his mouth, and is able to speak after a moment. “There’s just—I can’t figure out one thing.”

“Yeah?” 

Honestly, there’s a few things he can’t fit together, but this is the most pressing question. “The other ‘special children’. Those, were they—”

“Nah. You’re the only one, Sammy.”

Sam pressed his lips tightly together for a moment. “Okay. Okay, but then why—why all of this? If you just wanted me, all this time—fuck, why didn’t you just pick me up years ago? Did you need the others for something different, and—”

“Sam,” Azazel says, “if you want to hide a needle, where do you hide it?” 

Sam blinked, thrown off. “Uh—what? I don’t know, a haystack?”

“No. You hide it in a bunch of other needles. You hide a tree in a forest.” Azazel’s voice is quiet, patient. “You might recall that Heaven didn’t exactly approve of nephelim, Sam. If they’d guessed that you exist, you’d have been killed a long time ago. But dependants, even powerful ones—humans with a touch of ability from our blood, that they’re more tolerant of. They’ll let it slide unless they’re directly attacked.” He dropped his cigarette, ground it out. “Do you understand?”

Sam felt numb. “You did… all of that, all the other kids, everything— ”

“I mean, I wasn’t going to complain if some of them turned out strong enough to fight with us. Some, I genuinely regret that we had to lose. Ava was a real contender. And the ones left, I’ll probably find use for them. But mostly—yeah, I did it so Heaven wouldn’t be looking too closely at the individual options. So they’d be less likely to notice you.”

“How can you just—” His hands are shaking, Sam realizes. He clenches them into fists. “How can you just say that like it’s nothing? All those people died—”

“I did what I needed to do. To keep you safe, to bring you here.” Azazel gives a small shrug. “To my mind, it was all worth it.”

Sam digs his nails into his palms. He needs to say it; doesn’t want to, but needs to. Needs it out in the open, out of where it’s been burning in his head. 

“Because I’m your son?”

Azazel pauses for just a moment. “I know it’s a lot to take in.”

Sam can’t help laughing again, harsh and sharp. “You can say that again. You tell me that it’s my fault all those people died, that you forced my mom to carry me, that I’m some kind of monster—yeah, it’s a little fucking much.”

“Being a nephelim isn’t the same as being a vampire or a werewolf, Sam,” Azazel says, his voice gaining a slight edge. “They were never monsters, they just didn’t fit into God’s holy show bible. They were killed for that, not ravaging the earth.”

Sam scrubs the back of his hand across his mouth. “That’s—great, yeah, that’s very reassuring. Sure.”

Azazel sighs. After a moment of silence, he says, “I would have preferred it to have gone differently, with Mary. I liked her, Sammy, or I wouldn’t have chosen her for this. But… it’s been a long time since we played nice with humans, and I didn’t have time to rebuild any bridges. You should understand that sometimes you don’t have time to do the right thing.”

“Why do it at all?” Sam demands, finally turning to him. “I’m gonna quote her here, I don’t believe you just wanted to have a kid. You—wait, you have kids, don’t you? That—the Meg demon, and that guy—”

“Thomas,” Azazel said. He looks sad, for a moment. “That was—different. They’re not nephelim, Sam, not like you. Simplest way to explain it is say they’re adopted. I needed you, Sammy, but that’s the one thing I’m afraid I can’t fill you in on yet. We’ve barely started, and I know that you’re a long way away from seeing things from our point of view. You need time to adjust, to understand. Then I can let you know.”

“ Adopted, ” Sam repeats, then, “Great, okay, another thing I can’t know. I guess this isn’t that much different from my other dad.” 

It’s a painfully teenage piece of snark, something that he’d like to imagine Dean would say and not him, but it makes Azazel laugh. “You know, I’m still not sure how much John knew by the end,” he says. “You weren’t the only one he played it close to the chest with.”

“How much he knew?”

“About everything. I assume not too much,” Azazel adds, “since he never tried to kill you.”

Chapter Text

The words hang in the air. Sam turns his face away. This is too much; his breath is already straining in his lungs, his hands starting to shake where he’s clenched them by his sides.

“Unless I missed something,” Azazel says, his voice sharp with a curiosity that almost approaches concern. “Did he?”

“No,” Sam says. “He didn’t.” Didn’t try himself. But had told Dean, save him or kill him— and Sam had thought, somewhere in the back of his mind, of course when he found out about the demon blood. When he thought that he was just tainted, monstrous, instead of essentially nonhuman. That would be justification enough—and if John had dug deeper, somehow figured out that Sam wasn’t even really his son, that he was the kind of creature that nobody had seen since fucking Biblical times—honestly, Sam would expect even more of a response then. Something he could clearly point at. 

But he couldn’t know for sure, and that’s another glass-shard uncertainty he doesn’t need digging into his brain right now.

“I see,” Azazel says, clearly unconvinced. “Well, in the end what he did or didn’t know doesn’t matter. He’s out of the way now, and we have to move on.”

Sam bites his lip and tries to breathe, still staring at the distant stars. Heaven, he thinks, is the only silver lining so far. Fallen angels meant those that hadn’t fallen, implied God. There had to be some good out there, to counterbalance all this bad; even if Sam wasn’t part of it. 

“Aren’t you expecting some kind of fight?” he says. “Now that the Devil’s Gate has been opened.”

“They’ll send a messenger soon, sure.”

Sam blinks, turning around. “Heaven will just… send a messenger?”

“Kiddo,” Azazel says, “I would love to give you the rundown of the current semi-peaceful state between Heaven and Hell, how we arrived at it and exactly what disruption is considered sufficient for a formal state of war, I really would, but I’m going to be honest here: You look like your head’s about to explode. I’m gonna call an end to questions tonight.”

Sam grits his teeth. “Fine. But,” he adds, as Azazel begins to turn away, “can I—” He grimaces, hating to do this but needing to. “Can I ask you for something?”

Azazel tilts his head. “Sure.”

“A journal. Something to write in. And a pen or something.” 

Azazel smiles faintly. “You’re gonna start keeping hunter’s notes now?”

“Can I have it or not?” 

“Of course you can,” Azazel says. “I’m just teasing, Sammy.” 

There’s that unwanted, upsettingly genuine tenderness in his voice again, that brings to mind you’re my favorite and it always had to be you and in my mind, it was worth it. Like the greatest hits of everything Sam once wished he could hear, monkey’s-paw twisted into the one place he didn’t want to hear them from. Sam refuses to meet his eyes. 

“I’m tired,” he says. “I’m gonna go back to the hotel.”

“Of course. Get plenty of rest,” Azazel says, “you’ll need your strength tomorrow.”

Sam’s too mentally fried to feel more than a mild sting of apprehension at that. 

It’s only after he’s retreated to the room he’d woken up in that morning that he realized that he should have asked whether the outside world was getting destroyed right now—although with Azazel, who definitely seemed to be the guy in charge, here, that seemed unlikely. Unless there were other fallen angels out there, directing the rest of the demon army. 

That was another unanswered question—where were the other fallen angels? Azazel was the only demon of his level that anyone had ever encountered, to Sam’s knowledge. John hadn’t mentioned traces of any others—although at this point Sam was beginning to think that John could have personally talked to God and he wouldn’t have filled Sam in on it.  

Wherever they were, Sam couldn’t answer the question himself. Stranded out in the middle of nowhere with no laptop and no books, he felt like he was going to go crazy just from the need to do some research. 

And despite how tired he was, he can’t make himself close his eyes. It’s the toss of a die whether when he does, he sees Cold Oak—Ava’s vicious expression, Lily and Andy’s dead faces, Ava’s neck snapping under Jake’s hands—or heard Dean’s voice echoing in his ears, he said I’d have to kill you. 

But Dean hadn’t. And he hadn’t taken the perfect opportunity he had to just let Sam die; he’d had to bring him back, and bind himself to Hell in the process. And now Sam was the one left alone, and the Gate was open, and the Colt was in Azazel’s hands. 

If John had known what Sam was, Sam thinks bitterly, he should have just let Dean know. Then maybe Dean would’ve decided he wasn’t worth saving. 

When a tap comes on his door, he turns his head listlessly toward it. “What?” 

He’s expecting Amy, but it’s Ruby who opens the door. “Hey again.” Coming inside, she hip-checks the door back into place; she’s carrying a thermos in one hand and a satchel under her arm. 

“What are you doing up here?” Sam asks. 

“Don’t sound so unhappy to see me, I come bearing gifts.” She hefted the items she was holding, then held the thermos out to Sam. “Amy thought you might turn down anything more substantial, so she made you some kind of protein shake thing. And I’ve got your journal.”

Sam takes the thermos; his stomach is clenching unhappily, but he knows he does need to eat something. “You got it already? That’s…”

“Quick service? Well, the king said to get it ‘soon’, but I already had a blank one to hand, so I thought I’d just see if it was what you needed.” Ruby opened the satchel and dug into it. “First thing I do when I’m topside—okay, first is that I usually get some french fries, because they are amazing and there are no french fries in Hell. One of the many reasons it’s Hell. But the second is getting myself a book or two, and the essential ingredients for a few spells. Feel naked without ‘em.” She gives Sam a little smile that makes him feel uncomfortably close to blushing, and holds out a leather-bound book. “Here, take a look.”

He takes it, surprised at how sturdy the leather feels, and opens it; it opens almost flat, and has creamy white, unlined pages. “This is good,” he says, surprised. “Uh, a lot nicer than the stuff I’m used to working with.” One of the words she’d used finally snags against his brain, makes him look up. “King? Is that—do you mean Azazel?”

Ruby shrugs, her face expressionless enough he can’t tell if he’s noticed something significant or utterly unimportant. “Higher-ups have a lot of different titles,” she says. “His name’s a little more significant than mine, Sam; I wouldn’t use it casually even if it didn’t burn my tongue.” 

“Even—oh, because it’s an angelic name?” 

“Got it in one,” Ruby says, and smiles again.“You really are smart.” 

Sam closes the book. “What, have you heard a lot about me?” 

“Oh, all good things. I’m one of the few privileged to know about what you are, for one.”

Sam snorts. “That counts as a good thing?” 

Ruby arches an eyebrow, digging in her bag again. “What, you’re seriously going to have angst over the fact that you’re half angel? You’re living the dream life of every repressed fifteen-year-old who listens to too much symphonic metal.” 

The laugh that jerks out of him is more about shock and reflex than humor. “You are aware that like… everyone around me has been killed, right? Not exactly a dream life.”

“Okay, but, ” Ruby says, finally finding what she’s looking for, “consider this: I also brought you pens.”

His snort of laughter is a little more genuine this time, much to his dismay. Meg had seemed sweet too, he tried to remind himself. Normal and funny, until she got what she wanted and turned into a fucking nightmare. On the other hand… if Ruby liked him, or was even pretending to, he might get more answers out of her. He clears his throat. “Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it.” She drops a couple of pens in his hand—again, higher quality than the ones he’s used to picking up from Wal-Marts and gas stations, and he wonders what stationary store she robbed on her way here—and glances at the door. “I should get back. The king has me on a big project.”

“Let me guess,” Sam says, “it’s secret and you can’t tell me details?”

Ruby scrunched her nose apologetically. “I mean, I can tell you that I’m looking for someone. And they are… ugh, they are really goddamn hard to find.” She winks at him. “You wanna dream up a vision about wherever they’ve gotten to, I’ll owe you one.”

So she also knew about his visions? How closely had demons been watching him, and for how long? He tries to conceal his unease. “I can’t have them on command.”

“And I can’t give you deets, so it would be useless anyway. It was a joke, oh my Prince. Is that all right?” 

“Fine, I—don’t call me that.”

Ruby quirks an eyebrow. “Sure, but you should be prepared to hear it. Or—god, what’s that other nickname that’s been circulating. Boy King. Not everyone knows the details, but everyone knows you’re important, Sam. You’re going to have to deal with that.”

Sam swallows, looks down at the journal in his hands. It suddenly feels way too small for all of the things he needs to outline, figure out, compile. “Right. Yeah.”

Ruby hesitates, half-turns toward the door, than turns back. “Hey, sorry,” she finally says, her voice softer. “I know you’ve got a lot on your plate, Sam.”

The sympathy is more jarring than her jokes, but against his better judgement he finds himself relaxing a little under it. He nods without looking at her. 

“You’re having trouble sleeping?” 

Sam can’t help but laugh. “Wouldn’t you?” 

“I don’t sleep anymore,” Ruby says. “Well, I can… sort of, but it takes effort, and time. A luxury few can afford. But I can help you with it.” 

He tenses reflexively, half expecting her to come on to him or something, but she just heads over to the breakfast-bar area where he’d talked with Azazel—God, that morning, whicb now felt like a few lifetimes ago. She drops her satchel, opens the top, and starts pulling out bottles and little plastic bags, which she lines up. Then a square of purple cloth. Sam cranes his head to the side and finally gets up, overcome by curiosity, but by the time he reaches Ruby’s side she’s already gotten her pile of leaves and dust into the center of the cloth, and is dumping her ingredients back in her bag. 

“You’re a witch?” he asks. She’d said ingredients for spells, but he’d assumed they would look more… demon-y, somehow, not like average back-garden kill-your-husband witchcraft. 

For some reason that makes Ruby’s shoulders tense. “Demon, Sam,” she says. “You can do magic without being a witch. A lot of witches borrow their power from demons.”

“Okay, sorry, didn’t mean to… offend you, for whatever reason that offended you…” Sam watches the pile disappear as Ruby bundles it up in the purple cloth, and without thinking finally takes a sip from the protein shake he was still holding on to. It was almost shockingly good; maybe he was more hungry than he’d realized. “So what is this?” 

She ties off the bag and turns to him, holding it out. Sam awkwardly tucks the journal under his arm—thank god he’d at least left the pens behind—and accepts it, only wondering afterwards if he should have been more careful. Probably not; he could number on one hand the amount of ways his situation could get worse. 

“When you’re ready to sleep, put that under your pillow,” Ruby says. “Should knock you right out.”

His skin crawls, instinctively, at having a hex bag in his palm, but he hides the reaction. “Thanks.” 

“Don’t mention it.” She scoops her bag under her arm, smiling at him from under her lashes. It’s definitely flirtatious, but Sam chooses to ignore that for the moment. He doesn’t have time to deal with… that, even if he didn’t have to worry about whatever poor girl the demon had hijacked. Ruby’s smile slips just a little, like she’s not used to getting a reaction, but her tone is bright and unaffected. “Well, I gotta get back. Things to do, people to find.”

“Right.” He hesitates, then goes over to open the door for her. She might be trying to manipulate him, but he could make a stab at manipulating her right back, even if he’d never had much practice with it. She’d seemed genuinely charmed when he was polite to her earlier. 

The chivalry gets him a small, surprised smile before she leaves, so he chalks that up as a possible win. In a weird way, the situation reminds him of his first weeks at Stanford—the overwhelming strangeness of everything, the way he’d abruptly traded in fighting monsters for trying to hold a conversation that passed as normal. How itching-out-of-his-skin wrong everything had felt until he’d settled down, rationalized life there as his new normal. 

With a chill, he wonders if in a few weeks all this will seem like the new normal. 

To chase away the thought, he turns to the journal. Some notes he makes easily—things to research, questions to ask, items he’s already learned—and some he lingers over, coming up with a simple code in his head before writing them down. He has no doubt that Azazel or someone else will look at the journal in time, and doesn’t want them to be able to read everything. He finishes the protein drink while writing, almost without thinking, and the nagging pain in his stomach eases.

When he’s got it all down on paper, the facts are still miserable, but he feels better for having them in neat lists and entries. It makes him feel like this is some kind of learning experience; something he’ll come out the other side of. 

When he lies down, he still struggles to close his eyes, and after a minute he reaches for Ruby’s hex bag. It feels wrong, using it; like he’s some dumb civilian that’s going to wind up cursed. But it smells sweet and spicy under his pillow, and the moment he gingerly puts his head down his eyelids get heavy; and when he finally closes them, Cold Oak doesn’t wait behind his eyes, and neither does the crack of the Colt in that dark cemetery. Just blackness, warm and soft and welcoming. 

When he opens his eyes, suddenly, in Bobby’s house, he knows immediately that he’s dreaming. One moment there was just the dark silence of deep sleep, the next he’s standing among familiar battered bookcases, sagging tables that he’d left fingerprints on as a kid. He can hear Bobby in the kitchen, talking to somebody on the phone. He takes a deep breath; he can’t smell anything, but his brain can fill in the faint stink of metal and gasoline that runs underneath everything, overlaid by the heady dust of herbs, the musty sweetness of old books, the strange ozone-chemical scent of salt spread again and again in doorways. 

He turns his head, both hoping and fearing that he’d dreamed Dean as well, but there’s nobody there. Resigned, he walks toward the kitchen instead; even if it’s a dream, he wants to see Bobby alive and well. He hasn’t had many lucid dreams before, but he hopes his lucidity means it won’t turn sour. The least the world can give him right now is a lack of nightmares.

Bobby is facing away from him, on one of the numerous phones. “—omens, can’t separate ‘em from each other,” he’s saying, voice more tired than Sam’s ever heard before. “All we know is that nowhere’s safe, nobody’s safe.” He pauses for a minute, then hangs up the phone. Another one rings, and he picks it up. “What?” he says, and then something comes through that makes him flinch and hang up. “God damn it,” he mutters. “God fuckin’ damn it.” 

“Bobby?” Sam says cautiously. God, this feels so real he’s starting to get unsettled. 

Bobby jumps, turning around. “Sam?” He stares at Sam in the doorway for a moment, eyes wide; then his face falls, his shoulders relax. “I’m dreamin’,” he says quietly. “God fuckin’ damn it.”

“ You’re dreaming?” Sam says, confused. “But I’m—”

Bobby stares at him again, and Sam stares back, and Sam realizes, all at once. “I’m in your dream ,” he says, wondering. “How—” 

He thinks first of the hex bag, but that makes no sense. The second explanation comes to him a moment later. Azazel had appeared in his dream to speak to him; was this something Sam had inherited, something that had lain dormant until he was stressed enough to use it, like the telekinesis? All in all, it didn’t matter right now. “Bobby,” Sam says urgently, “this is a dream, but I’m really talking to you, I’m still alive. I’m okay, just—stuck. Really stuck. I’m trying to find a way out. Are you and Ellen okay?”

“What the fuckin’ fuck, ” Bobby says quietly, which Sam can’t really blame him for, and then, “All right, nine out of ten chances this is all my imagination, but if it ain’t—we’re okay, Sam, we’re somewhere safe. Not here, I just keep dreamin’ I’m back.” He hesitates. “Considering what’s going on, there’s also a chance you ain’t you, so I’m not going to give any other hints as to location.”

“No, that’s fine. That’s smart.” 

Bobby hesitates. “If you’re… is Dean still alive, Sam?”

Sam opens his mouth, stops. Yes but no. Yes but I’m going to fix it. Yes but I literally sold myself to a demon to bring him back, so it’s all gonna be okay, and by the way I’m not human. 

“I think so,” he finally says. “I—I hope he is.”

“Sam,” Bobby says, “where the hell are you?”

Before Sam can answer, something jerks through his body, something that feels like a shockwave. His vision wavers. He wildly grasps at the dream, but it shreds into pieces; Bobby’s face, lined with worry, dissolving into the shadows of the old hotel room. Sam rolls his head sluggishly to the side, seeing in the blurred corner of his vision that something has jarred the pillow on his bed, pushing the hex bag out from under his. Doggedly, he squeezes his eyes shut again, trying to force his way back to the dream. 

Pain spikes behind his left eye, and determination dissolves into fear. 

No. But new images are already blooming into the darkness, each accompanied by a fresh wave of nauseating pain; not a dream, but a vision. Fragmented and scattered, like he’s grabbed at random and found a dozen broken pieces. 

There’s somewhere dark, somewhere that gleams in places with a sickly red light, and then it’s all bathed suddenly in the most intense white light he’s ever seen—

There’s Azazel with the Colt in his hand, outstretched and pointed at someone, his face blank with cold, placid rage—

There’s a girl—Jo, he realizes as she looks up, Jo with her face oddly dreamy, sitting in the middle of a room full of corpses—

Metal scraping. White light again. Jo with her teeth bared. The report of a gun. Ruby kneeling on bloodstained ground, her hands folded as if in prayer. 

A woman he doesn’t recognize, her stomach soaked in blood, propped up against a decrepit altar. She looks up, and her eyes are full of strange light, and she extends her hand. 

He becomes dimly aware that he’s shaking, that he’s sitting up, and that somebody has an arm around him and a hand on his forehead. Their touch seems to be draining away the pain, and he pushes into it thoughtlessly, shivering at the cool emptiness left behind. 

As his head clears, he realizes that it isn’t just him shaking; the room is, and there’s a conversation being held next to him. 

“—two minutes, tops. Obviously we weren’t prepared for this level of—”

“Yeah, they didn’t need to send a fucking cherubim to carry a message,” Azazel says, and Sam is quickly, unpleasantly fully awakened by the realization that it’s him standing next to Sam, half-holding him with a hand on his forehead. “They’re throwing their weight around. Raphael’s probably behind it.” 

“What should we tell them?” 

Sam tries to extract himself from Azazel’s hold, which he seems somewhat reluctant to break. He finally does, however, taking a step back and looking at the other person in the room, who turns out to be Ruby. “Send ‘em to Lilith,” Azazel says. “Pick whoever looks most like cannon fodder to tell them, but they’ll have to accept that. If they ask where I am, just tell them I’m busy.” He glances at Sam, frowns. “First thing after this, we’re teaching you how to fly,” he says, then turns back to Ruby. “We’ll need a door, sweetheart.”

Ruby nods, like that makes sense. “Of course. Where to?” 

“Ramiel.”

She nods again, and heads for the door, stopping in front of it. 

“What the hell is going on?” Sam asks, pushing himself to his feet as another shock reverberates through the house. 

“Heaven’s sending a more powerful messenger than I anticipated,” Azazel says, eyes on the window as if he expects to see something coming, “and I’d rather not risk them recognizing what you are just yet. The longer they think you’re just a seer, the easier this is going to be, and you could probably still fool the rank and file, but a cherubim… You and I are going to make ourselves scarce.”

Ruby coughs and says, “Almost done.” Her voice is thick, and when Sam looks at her he finds bile rising in his throat. The doorframe is smeared with blood now, a thick line around the perimeter and symbols around the outside of that, and Ruby is still fingerpainting more, hand going back again and again to her own throat; out of sight, but Sam knows what he’d see if she turned around. He squeezes his eyes shut for a moment, offers up a silent, bleak little prayer for the girl that had owned the body Ruby stole. 

“Who’s Ramiel?” he asks, more to distract himself than anything else. 

“Somebody I hadn’t planned to contact just yet,” Azazel says, and there’s an odd edge in his voice, almost like he’s… nervous? Sam opens his eyes and stares at him, but he can’t get a read on his expression in the semidark. “But if Heaven’s going to come out of the gate with the big guns, well. There’s nowhere safer to be at the moment, and we’ll have a chance to enlist his help going forward. Two birds, one stone.”

Ruby crouches to paint a last symbol, then stands up and puts her hand on the door, murmuring something. 

“Is he another—”

“Yep.” 

Another shockwave rattles through the building, and Ruby’s murmuring gets faster. The blood around the door lights up with a sickly glow. 

“Why isn’t he already on your side, then?” 

“Long story.” Azazel’s voice is definitely tense now, enough so that Sam bites his lip against further questions. “Ruby—”

“Done.” She steps back, turns around. Sam averts his eyes from the gash in her throat, the one she’s pinching closed with her fingers. “We’ll deal with the situation, sir. I’ll contact you when it’s resolved.”

“Good girl.” Azazel steps forward, lays his own hand against the door. Something shifts in the air, tugging at Sam’s skin with its wrongness. “Sam, come on.” 

Sam hesitates, for just a brief moment. Angels had to be the good guys, he thinks. Maybe if he stays here—

But Azazel opens the door, which now leads to an early-dawn-dark patch of grass and sky, and says without looking at him, “That’s an order, son.”

Sam follows him across the threshold just as white light begins to pierce through the window. The last thing he sees before the door slams shut is Ruby shielding her eyes from it, wincing. 

Then the door ceases to exist, leaving them both standing on a gravel road in yet another place Sam doesn’t recognize.

Chapter Text

Sam rubs at his head; there’s still some lingering pain from the visions. “Ramiel lives on an empty road?”

Azazel starts walking. “His house is this way.”

Sam follows him reluctantly. “And we didn’t just teleport to the door, why?”

“He’s a stickler for manners.” There’s an odd note in Azazel’s voice—anger or fondness, Sam genuinely can’t tell which. “He prefers people approach the old-fashioned way, give him fair warning.”

“Oh.”

Azazel looks back at him. “What did you see?” 

Sam drops his hand from his head. “What?”

Azazel gestures at him. “You were having a vision, back there. What was it?” 

“Oh. Yeah, that was—” He hesitates at the idea of telling Azazel anything, but he doubts he can dodge out of answering a direct question. Besides, it’s not as if it were anything clear—he’s more worried about keeping Azazel in the dark about his accidental dreamwalking. “It was just a bunch of fragments.”

“Anything is important, Sam.”

Sam sighs. “I saw a girl, sitting in a room with a bunch of dead bodies.” He’s going to avoid giving Jo’s name if it’s possible; he doesn’t like the idea of Azazel getting anywhere near her. Meg had been bad enough. “I saw you. Aiming the Colt at someone. Not sure what’s up with that. And, uh… some dark place with kind of red lighting, and then the light went super bright and white suddenly.” He searches his mind. “They didn’t feel connected, exactly, not like the other visions I had, even the fragmented ones—”

“Were you trying to force it?”

“What? No, I—” He stumbles over the words. He had been trying to do something, he realizes. “Maybe? I didn’t mean to.” He rubs angrily at the ache still going behind his eye. “Whatever you did—you did something , right? Is there some magic fix for them, to either make them more coherent or just get rid of them?”

Azazel stops, turns in his tracks. “It’s not something you want to get rid of, Sammy. Sure, they might be about as clear as a magic eight-ball sometimes, but your visions are one of the biggest weapons in your arsenal. Don’t resent them.”

“You’re not the one dealing with the migraines,” Sam mutters. “Or the visions that happen about five minutes before shit goes down. How exactly are those supposed to help?”

Azazel smiles slightly. “They could help if you knew how to get places real fast.”

For a moment, Sam doesn’t get it. Then he remembers—Azazel vanishing from one place and appearing another between eye-blinks, the odd comment he’d made before they left. “Wait. That teleporting thing you do—will I be able to do that? Is that what you mean by ‘flying’?”

Azazel just grins a little wider, turning back toward the end of the road. “All in good time, kiddo.”

Sam feels a brief, giddy rush of excitement that he tries to suppress. Nothing about this is good, he reminds himself. If you’ve got powers, they come from being some pre-Biblical freak of nature. He resumes following Azazel, pain still pulsing resentfully behind his eye. 

“There’s no magic fix,” Azazel says, glancing back at him, “but they’ll get easier as you get stronger. Until then, I can ease the pain if you let me.”

Sam rubs his arm, uncomfortable at the memory of Azazel touching him. “Right. I’ll take the migraines.”

Azazel’s quiet for just a moment, long enough that Sam’s about ready to ask if he has the fucking audacity to act hurt by that—but then he smiles and shrugs. “Have it your way, champ. Offer stays open. Now, run through those fragments again?” 

Sam does so, resentfully. This time, he remembers the last one—the wounded woman reaching out to him. Oddly, Azazel’s eyes brighten with interest at that one, but it’s not the one he asks about. “The dark place you saw,” he says. “Red light, then white, you’re sure?” 

“Yeah. The red light was pretty weak, and then the white light just blotted everything out.”

“Hm.” Azazel stops short; Sam does too, and realizes that after the last corner they turned they’re finally facing down a house. “I might need to make a call.”

Sam points, completely distracted. “Is… is this where Ramiel lives?”

“It is. Why?”

Sam gestures weakly. “That’s a vegetable garden?”

“Sure is.”

Sam drops his hand, giving up. “Okay.” Technically, he shouldn’t be so shocked; he’d seen monsters living in peaceful settings before. But he’d really expected something a little less Better Homes and Gardens from one on Azazel’s level. 

They’d only reached the base of the porch steps when the front door opens and a man steps out. He looks, kind of like Azazel does, like if you dropped him in a group of hunters he’d fit right in; worn workmanlike clothes, graying hair, bright watchful eyes. 

The spear he’s casually handling might make him stand out a little. 

Sam reaches for weapons that aren’t there reflexively, then holds his hands up on second reflex. Azazel just smiles, but his eyes actually seem to take the spear in—more consideration than Sam’s seen him give to any weapon that isn’t the Colt. “I apologize, Ramiel” he says. “I know it’s a bit early for a social call.”

“Eh, I was up,” Ramiel says, resting the spear against his shoulder. His voice is lighter than Sam would have expected. “Mind explaining what the Hell you’re doing here?”

“Big things are happening.”

“I am aware,” Ramiel says, voice cool. “Not yet aware of what, or why it should involve me. I am still retired, brother. Whatever idiotic war is brewing, I want nothing to do with it.”

Sam didn’t know whether to be more stuck on brother (it made sense, in a way, but that didn’t make it any less weird to hear) or how obviously unimpressed Ramiel is by Azazel. It might be refreshing, if he wasn’t worried about what it meant for him.

Azazel’s smile dropped, for once, completely. “It’s the same war you left,” he says. “Same war we’ve been fighting since before the flood. But things have changed, Ramiel. I think even you might be interested.” He glances sideways at Sam.

Ramiel looks at Sam, who’s just lowered his hands and immediately regrets the decision. His eyes narrow, then widen, and he looks back at Azazel. 

“Are you fucking kidding me?” he says. “A nephil? How many Celestials do you have on your heels right now?”

“None, yet,” Azazel says. “You think he’d have gotten this old if I hadn’t managed to hide him?”

Ramiel glances at Sam again. “Sure, he’s trussed up with misdirection and muting,” he acknowledges, “but still, goddamn, you must have gotten lucky. So, ah, on the bigger question: Why the fuck is there a nephil on my doorstep?”

Sam clears his throat. “I just wanna say that I didn’t want to come here. I don’t actually want to be here at all.”

Ramiel actually gives him a slight nod of acknowledgement; Azazel ignores him. “Like I said, things have changed. I’ve been working on a plan for quite some time, and it’s finally going into motion. At least let me make a case for it.”

Out in the nearby fields, something—a goat or a sheep—making a whining, bleating noise. The sun is beginning to come up over the tops of the trees. Ramiel finally, finally nods, and jerks his head toward the door. 

“Fine. Spin whatever bullshit you want, just don’t expect me to buy it.” Glancing at Sam, he adds, “You look like Hell, kid.”

“It’s been a rough couple days,” Sam says, too weary to be anything but honest. 

“Kitchen’s to the right. Get something to eat.” Ramiel turns his attention back to Azazel. “You want something else, I know that silence. What?”

“I need to make a quick call,” Azazel says, “and I can’t help but notice you have a—”

“No,” Ramiel says flatly. “She’s off-limits. There’s goats over in the next field, go drain one of them. Should bring back memories.” Azazel doesn’t say anything, or even change his expression that Sam notices, but Ramiel adds, “Don’t give me that look. You wanted human juice, you should’ve brought one of your little fanatics along. Goat blood will work. Deal with it.” 

He turns into the house, gesturing for Sam to follow. Sam hesitates, glancing at Azazel in mute astonishment; his face is still, eyes bright with anger, but when he notices Sam looking he seems to shake it off. He smiles slightly, shaking his head. 

“We didn’t part on the best of terms,” he says. “You’ve probably guessed.”

“If you’re not on the best of terms—”

“You’ll be safe with him, Sam. We have clashed, but unless I’d come here in force he wouldn’t even kill me. Family is family. And you’re not part of our—disagreement.” Azazel looks over at the field. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go sacrifice a goat.”

“Right. Uh, why?” 

“You can’t exactly run a telephone wire from Hell to here,” Azazel says. “And I have a feeling one of your visions might mean our base camp is seeing some action soon. I’m making a call there, Sam. That’s all you need to know.” He nods at the house. “You should go in. Just, uh… take whatever Ramiel says with a grain of salt.”

Sam nods, unable to think of anything more to say, and heads inside. 

“Who’s ‘she’?” he asks Ramiel, when he finds the kitchen. “The one who’s off-limits.”

“Girl who arrived last night. One of the prettier things shaken loose by a few million demons occupying the Midwest.” Ramiel glances at the ceiling. “She’s probably still sleeping. Told her she could take a look at my public collection in the morning, see if she found anything useful.”

“Public collection?”

Ramiel leans the spear in the corner of the room, between the stove and a wide window with plants on the sill. “When I left the cause, I thought it prudent to bring as many weapons as I could get my hands on. Make it an unattractive prospect for either Heaven or my still-faithful siblings to attack me. After that, well, collecting weaponry and other such artifacts of war became a pleasant enough way to pass the time. Some of them are more normal, and if I cross paths with someone who shares my enthusiasm I’ll show them off. Others are known only to me.”

Sam takes a step forward. “I thought the Colt was the only weapon that could hurt something on your or Azazel’s level.”

Ramiel’s voice tightens. “No. It’s the only one made by human hands that can put us out for good, sure. We still don’t know how they made the goddamn thing.” He turns back to Sam. “You want tea, coffee? Whiskey?”

“The sun’s barely up.”

Ramiel shrugs. “Like I said, you look rough.”

“Coffee is fine, thanks.”

As Ramiel busies himself with that, Sam scans the room. Aside from the spear leaning in the corner, it’s all painfully normal—well, there’s a clash of ‘rustic farmhouse’ feeling with things that would indicate ‘insane occultist’ to normal people, but after a childhood growing up around hunters that looks like normal to Sam. There’s a few photographs stuck to the fridge with magnets. One’s old, a Polaroid, of a pretty dark-skinned woman with a warm smile. One’s just a shot of a lake. One’s of the same lake, but there’s another woman standing by the shore; an Asian woman wearing a leather jacket and sunglasses, looking out across the water. 

“My sisters,” Ramiel says. Sam looks up. “Old one’s Sariel, from the last time I saw her. Must be a couple decades by now. The one dressed like a biker is Dagon.”

“Like… Lovecraft Dagon, or Canaanite pantheon Dagon?”

Ramiel chuckles. “Both. Little Howard drew off scary legends about us as much as he did anything else, and if you go back far enough the stories about fallen angels and heathen gods begin to blur together. Some of us didn’t like associating with them, but Dagon, she always said they knew how to party.”

“Huh,” said Sam, mind working furiously. That made sense—pagan gods were a messy, volatile field, with powers that differed wildly from entity to entity, era to era. Stories of fallen angels, especially those that were worshiped, could have easily blended in with them. 

God, if he ever got out of this he was going to revolutionize the lore. 

“So how did you and my brother end up here?” Ramiel asks. “What’s all the commotion about?” 

Sam shrugs helplessly. “I don’t know. To be honest, I found out I was a nephil… yesterday.” 

Ramiel laughs. “Well, shit. No wonder you look like you were hit by a truck.”

“Yeah.” Another fallen angel, one who almost certainly has their own long list of horrific acts under their belt, isn’t Sam’s ideal for a confiding ear; still, he can’t stop from wanting to talk. “I started having visions before that, and that was bad enough, thinking I was some—psychic freak. Now I found out that the thing that killed my mom, my girlfriend, my dad, and—” He breaks off for a moment, swallows hard. “My brother. Not to mention, you know, a lot of other people I know. That that thing is my real father.”

“He get you into some deal?” At Sam’s surprised glance, Ramiel shrugs. “I can’t think of another reason you’d be here.” 

“Yeah. He’s—he’s promised to bring my brother back, in a year.” Sam stares at the fridge, head full of churning thoughts. “I’m beginning to wonder if it’ll even matter by then.”

“Azazel probably thinks it won’t,” Ramiel says, his voice dry, “but Azazel’s been predicting the end of the world every fucking year since before Christ. I wouldn’t get too worried. Pull the muffins out of the fridge, will you?”

Sam blinks, then opens the fridge. There are actually muffins in it. “Did you… bake these?”

“Nah.” 

“OK.” That’s somehow a relief. 

“Woman who sells ‘em at the farmer’s market is sweet on me. Trades me some in exchange for fish. You like fishing?”

“I’ve never really… done it.” Dean had tried to teach him, once; it hadn’t gone well. Sam sets the muffins on the kitchen table, deciding to finally voice his confusion. “You lead a really quiet life, for a demon. Fallen angel. Whatever.”

“Eh, I still kill some idiots that try to steal from me now and then. That’s all the excitement I need.” The smell of coffee fills the room; Ramiel looks out the window, turns back to Sam. “I don’t think you can comprehend how long I spent at war, kid. All I want now is some peace and quiet.”

“That’s going to get difficult, right?” Sam says. “With everything that’s happening.”

Ramiel smiles faintly. “After I let Azazel say his bit and send you both on your way, I’m going to go back to exactly what I was doing before. This house is a fortress; unless Heaven and Hell start warring directly over it, I won’t even feel the aftershocks.”

“Must be nice,” Sam says resentfully, and bites into a muffin, which proves immediately distracting. “Holy shit, these are good.”

The outside door opens and slams shut. Azazel enters a second later, looking somewhat pissed off, a fresh spray of blood dotting the front of his shirt. “Had to kill two goats,” he says. “And I was lucky to get through even then. Is she really that important?” 

“It’s the principle of the thing,” Ramiel says. “You can’t just drop by and take my girls. Besides, I like this one. She’s spunky. And I haven’t even got around to screwing her yet.” 

Sam, who’d busied himself with pouring himself a cup of coffee, choked slightly on it, but Azazel didn’t seem to find anything unusual with the statement. 

“Fine,” he says, dropping into a chair at the kitchen table. “Forget about it. Let’s get to what I came here for.”

Ramiel takes a seat across from him, his expression resigned. “Get on with it.”

Sam takes another cautious bite of muffin, staying as quiet as he can. Part of him is resentful that Azazel is ignoring him at the moment, but part of him welcomes overhearing information instead of having it carefully fed to him, with Azazel watching for his reaction. 

“I’ve found him,” Azazel says, voice oddly intense and quiet, eyes holding Ramiel’s like he’s trying to convince him with just the sincerity of his gaze. “I actually found him. And I know how to get him out.”

Ramiel sighs. From the flicker of Azazel’s gaze, the line his mouth pulls into, Sam can tell it’s not the reaction he wanted. Ramiel leans back in his chair and Azazel speaks again, voice tense and almost desperate. “Listen, you might not want to believe me—”

“Dagon’s right,” Ramiel says, his voice weary. “You have finally, actually lost your goddamn mind.”

Azazel’s hand slams down on the table, his voice a vicious rasp for a moment. “Dagon doesn’t know what she’s talking about.” He sits back, eyes closing for a moment as he pulls himself together, then looks at Ramiel again. “She talked to you, huh, after she left?”

“Sure did. Stayed with me for a while until she needed to take off on her own.” Ramiel shakes his head. “I mean, I knew it must have gotten bad for even Dagon to leave, but this—”

“I still have Alistair and Lilith.” Azazel’s voice is thin and sharp.

“Our little brother who stayed in Hell so long it twisted him completely out of shape, and our sister who went crazy a long, long time ago. Sure. You have them.”

Sam is mesmerized, against his will. He never thought he’d see somebody able to be cruel to Azazel, but it’s clear that Ramiel’s words are connecting, and connecting hard. It’s somewhere between satisfying and disturbing. 

“It’s hard to believe sometimes,” Azazel says at last, his voice quiet and deliberate, “that you and the others would rather call me insane, spit on the faith that once kept us all together, than acknowledge the truth. That you failed. That you ran because you were scared, because you were tired, because you couldn’t keep going any longer.” Azazel leans forward, steepling his hands on the table. “And when I finally find what we all should have been looking for, you’d rather bury your heads in the sand than admit that you were wrong.”

Ramiel doesn’t say anything for a moment. Then he glances over his shoulder, at Sam. “Do you know what he’s talking about?” he asks. 

Sam shakes his head. Azazel says, voice dangerously soft, “Don’t speak to my son, Ramiel.”

Ignoring him, Ramiel says, “He thinks he’s found the original Devil. Star of the Morning. The most privileged and furthest cast-down Son of God. See, millennia ago—just after the Flood, actually—our leader, Lucifer, was captured. Reports differed on whether he’d been killed, or God had just locked him up and thrown away the key. And Azazel here, he was obsessed with the idea that he’d just been locked away.”

“Don’t pretend you didn’t believe it as well, back then,” Azazel says, voice cold with anger. “Don’t say that like everyone didn’t believe it.”

“Yeah, well, we were all a bunch of scared kids back then,” Ramiel says, tone flat. “Some of us grew up. Some of us didn’t.” 

Azazel’s mouth thins, and he reaches inside his coat. Ramiel’s brow knits; Sam tenses, his mind going to the flash of vision. Azazel holding the Colt. 

It is the Colt he pulls out, but he doesn’t aim it at Ramiel. He sets it down on the table and shoves it carelessly across to Ramiel, then leans back in his chair. “I hoped I wouldn’t have to lay this out as collateral,” he says, voice flat, “but whatever works, huh?”

Ramiel’s shoulders have gone tense. Sam wishes he could see the expression on his face. “Where,” he says, at last, “where did you find it?”

“I didn’t have to. The Winchesters brought it to me.” Azazel reaches inside his coat again, pulls out something small and bright. “There’s one bullet left—”

Sam makes a small sound in his throat, and Azazel finally looks at him. “Really, Sammy,” he says, “you thought I’d keep it loaded with the bullet that could put anything down for good, let it get handed around? It takes the same size of bullet as some of Colt’s other guns; that’s all I needed.”

To kill Dean. Sam clenches his jaw. 

Azazel turns his attention back to Ramiel. “You get the gun, for now,” he says. “I keep the bullet. I’ll be contacting Lucifer again in two weeks’ time, at the spot where his cage door opens. I want you to be there.”

Ramiel picks up the Colt, turns it over in his hands. “And?”

“If you’re not satisfied, you keep the gun, I give you the bullet, and you go back to fishing and screwing virgins.” Azazel smiles sharply. “If you see what I’ve said is true, you come back. With all the weapons you stole on your way out.”

Ramiel’s quiet for a moment, looking at the Colt. “Eh,” he says. “Fine, I’ll come see whatever ceremony you put on. Got nothing better to do.” 

Azazel stands up from the table. “That’s all I need from you. Sam?”

“Hold on,” Ramiel says, getting up as well. “He can’t leave yet.”

Azazel’s smile is viciously bright. “And why is that?”

“I’ve missed, what, at least twenty birthdays? Can’t let the kid leave without a gift.” Ramiel’s back to sounding laid-back and easy now, despite the Colt still in his hands. “Why don’t you go cool off, and I’ll take him down to the armory to pick something out. Should only take a minute or two.”

Azazel hesitates. “Fine,” he says at last. “Don’t take too long.” 

Sam, too stunned to say anything at first, follows Ramiel down a short hallway to another door. It’s only when they’re on the steps leading down he finds his voice. 

“You’re seriously going to give me a weapon?” He looks around. The basement’s normal enough—unfinished, for the most part, stone walls and floor, except every available surface is occupied by a rack or cupboard. There’s weapons, books, items he can’t immediately identify in the dim light. His fingers itch to go through every square inch, but Ramiel just keeps moving, heading for a door at the back of the room. 

“Why not? You could use one, situation you’re in.” Ramiel pushes a shield that’s propped against the door away and opens it. “Besides, it’ll piss Azazel off, and I feel like pissing him off. Come on, the good stuff’s in here.” 

Sam follows him, ducking his head through the low doorway. This room looks about the same as the one they’d left. “Through the… unlocked door?”

Ramiel laughs. “It’s only unlocked if you’re the right person, Junior, and the right person is me.” He pauses. “Sam, huh?”

“Yep.” He gravitates almost immediately to the largest group of similar objects—a bunch of weird silver knives lined up against the wall. They look almost like spikes, only curving slightly in at the handle, all of a piece otherwise. 

“Short for Samael?”

Sam wrinkles his forehead. “Did you say Samuel?”

“Eh, forget about it. Doesn’t matter.” A lock clicks. Sam looks over and finds Ramiel opening a safe in the wall. He looks at the Colt for another long minute before putting it inside. Sam notes the safe in his mind, the painting it’s hidden behind, although he doesn’t know what good it’ll do. “You know, it’s a pity you couldn’t have known him before.”

Sam frowns, picking up one of the strange knives. It has an interesting weight in his hand, cool and comfortable, but it doesn’t feel quite right. “Who, before what?”

“Azazel.” Ramiel closes the portrait and turns around. “Before he went insane. He used to be something… better. It’s a pity.”

Sam puts the knife back. “Better?” he asks, cautiously. 

“Yeah. We, ah… best way to put it in your language was that we shared a fair few missions in the old wars. We could work well together. Not always a guarantee with seraphs; a lot of them didn’t do well out on the battlefield. Azazel, though, he always took to it.” Ramiel nods at the far side of the room. “There’s swords over there, and some spears. Might work better for you. It’s good to take advantage of your reach when you can.”

“I don’t know how to use most of these,” Sam says, but goes where Ramiel indicates anyway. A seraph—he files that away in his head. Maybe it could be useful somehow. “Knives are kind of a no-brainer—”

“Only people who say that don’t actually know how to use a knife.”

Sam sighs. “Okay, then I don’t know how to use any of these.” He finds his hand drifting out to the handle of one of the swords lined up against the wall. “This is kind of cool, though.”

“Really?” Ramiel’s voice is unaltered on the surface, but Sam feels there’s a change of tone underneath. “Take it out, see how it feels.” 

Sam looks askance at him, but takes it out. The handle is wrapped in some kind of cloth, and as the blade comes into view he can’t keep his brow from furrowing. It extends only a short distance before hooking into a shape that resembles a sickle more than a sword. “Wait, is this actually a sword?”

“A khopesh. Egyptians were crazy about ‘em a long while back. This particular one is a nice piece of work—” Ramiel touches the blade lightly, and symbols glimmer faintly along its length. Not hieroglyphs—script that Sam doesn’t recognize. “Tempered in blood, worked with some pretty intricate Enochian script.”

“What can it kill?”

“Eh, pretty much anything. Not one of the four archangels, not our absent Father. It might take more than a single cut to take out a high-level angel. But soldier angels, demons, about any type of monster you can name—humans, obviously—all it’ll take is a nick.”

“So it’s poisoned?” 

“You could think of it as being poisoned,” Ramiel says, “if that helps. It’s all in the script and spellwork.”

“Woah.” Sam turns it over in his hands. It’s next to useless to him right now; he came to terms with that right after Ramiel brought up giving him a weapon. He can’t kill Azazel now, or he’ll never get Dean back—and killing anyone else would be pointless. But the khopesh, weird as it is, feels good in his hand. He goes to touch the one sharp edge, the outside of the curve, then stops himself. That probably isn’t smart. “I… I’m kind of into it.”

Ramiel shrugs. “Then take it, kid. I’m never going to use it.”

“Does it have a sheath?” 

They turn over about half the room looking for the sheath; in the process, Sam learns that the weird silver knives are ‘angel knives, standard issue stuff’, that there are far more varieties of sword than he ever imagined, and that Ramiel’s preferred weapons are lances or spears. It’s the most normal conversation he’s had since the graveyard, which is saying something and also a little pathetic, but it actually leaves him feeling better by the time they find a sheath of a usable size. He slides the khopesh inside and looks wearily at the stairs, not wanting to return to Azazel.

“Look,” he says. He shouldn’t have left this question for the last minute, but he hadn’t wanted to ask it. “About the Lucifer thing. Do you really think he’s gone for good? That Azazel hasn’t found him?”

Ramiel looks like he doesn’t like the question any more than Sam. “I don’t think that anyone can find something that God decided he didn’t want found,” he said, slowly. “I’ve thought that for a while. By the time I took off I’d already tried to bring it up a few times, but, well… Azazel was never good at taking a hint. None of the true believers were.” 

“So even if he is alive, you don’t think he can be found.”

Ramiel nods, shrugs. “If he’s alive.”

“But if he is, and if—”

“You’re full of questions, huh?”

“Just one more, okay. Please?” Sam’s throat is tight in desperation; he only barely relaxes when Ramiel nods. “If Lucifer’s still around, if Azazel actually finds him—how bad is that?”

Ramiel frowns. “For you?”

“For everyone. For the earth, you know, for humans.”

“The earth and humans are two different things, kid,” Ramiel says. “If Lucifer ever returned, the earth would be fine. He always liked it. Humans, eh. Not so much. But he wasn’t the big bad Devil in human legends, either. He got locked away long before most of that shit got started.”

“If Lucifer isn’t the actual Devil, where’d the legends come from?”

The smile Ramiel gives him is almost pitying. “From us, Sam,” he says. “The fallen. That was all us.”