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Part Two
*
Dean drove across the Illinois border, heading toward Eldorado, knowing the roads on some kind of mixture of instinct and deeply embedded memory, and let Sam, still weak from his near drowning despite his protests to the contrary, doze in the passenger seat. It took the rest of the day to reach the outskirts of the small city. Even though they were both legally dead and hadn’t had trouble from the FBI in months, even though Dean had his own person guardian angel and Sam his guardian demon-cum-girlfriend, Dean never really bothered to rid himself of the habit of regularly dropping off the major highways and interstates to use the old side roads and back routes to circle back on himself and leave behind a twisting, confusing trail. He stopped twice, once for more coffee while Sam was out cold at a tiny Dunkin' Donuts near Piedmont and once at a gas station outside Benton, where they grabbed a late lunch or early dinner of cold sandwiches, chips, and soda.
Eldorado was a simple, sleepy city when they approached it after dark and it wasn’t hard to find a cheap motel on the eastern outskirts. It was a dumpy little place with dull yellow sodium lights illuminating a dirty, slushy parking lot and drab two story building, but it was the kind of place that wouldn’t ask a lot of questions if they came back bloody or bruised and that was what they needed. After they got the key to their room at the front desk - two queens, ground floor - they made no bones about simply hauling the necessary bags inside. Dean shuddered inside, not liking how close they were to New Harmony, just a hop and skip to the Indiana border. He didn’t say anything to Sam, tried not to look at his brother, and just stripped to his boxers and climbed into the bed closest to the door. He prayed that he wouldn’t dream.
*
Dean scowled and ineffectually tried to wipe at his pants. “Did you have to soak me with the holy water?”
“You were the one who didn’t want me to be the one distracting the thing. Not my fault that I don’t have very good aim with an entire tub full of holy water.” Sam was walking a little lighter than he had before, when they had been reading about the disasters and deaths that had been occurring in the small, beleaguered city. Sometimes it was good to have a simple, straight forward hunt. Maybe they could never escape the knowledge that there was true evil in the world, that people were never safe and sound in their own homes, but sometimes, just sometimes, they could know that Sam and Dean could be enough to keep some people safe some of the time. And with the end of the world, with angels and Hell, with all of the God damned complications since Dad died, it had to be enough to help some of the people some of the time.
“A nain rouge,” Dean said, frowning as it began to rain, dark and wet on the dirty city sidewalk. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen one south of the Michigan border. What was it doing in southern Illinois?”
Sam shrugged and pushed his damp hair off his face. “I’ve read about them down in South America, too. I don’t see why they couldn’t be out here.”
“Fucking dwarves.”
They walked a ways down the winding sidewalks of the city, past apartment buildings and convenience stores. Once they’d realised what they were tracking - that it was a beady eyed red dwarf - even Dean had agreed that leaving the Impala at the motel was the best idea. Nain rouge loved to screw with technology. They lived for human folly, whether it was distracting a school bus driver into skidding on an icy patch and crashing his bus full of kindergarteners or dancing on high tension wires until they fell and killed onlookers. They were devious and deadly, but surprisingly easy to kill for all of that. It only took distracting them long enough to soak them in holy water. It was the tracking that was hard; it was safer on foot and safer to go mostly unarmed. The nain rouge were known for turning guns back on their owners.
The rain started to come down harder, partially water and partially ice pellets, but all unpleasant. Dean grimaced when he realised they’d both be soaked through by the time they got back to the motel on foot. He wasn’t happy about it, especially after Sam’s recent ice water experience, but he didn’t say anything, just stepped up the pace. Sam didn’t seem to notice that his brother was getting a fair bit ahead of him, but it didn’t really matter. They’d killed the monster, saved the town. The world was as safe as it ever would be and the Winchesters could celebrate with hot showers and take out Chinese.
Dean wasn’t sure why he was so distracted - maybe the miserably wet cold, maybe trying not to think about Sam in the shower, maybe the lure of a new city’s potentially dubious delivery Chinese - but one minute he was walking down the sidewalk of Eldorado a couple of yards in front of Sam and the next moment, someone had grabbed him and pulled him into a narrow alley between apartment buildings. It wasn’t his finest moment, not by far. He would never tell Sam, never tell a living soul, but seeing the bone white hands on him and hearing the low, guttural purr in his ear of, “Oh, pet, where did you think you were going?” struck an icy knife of fear into his gut.
By the time he got his bearings, realised that it was just some crazy human trying to get at him, the guy had him pinned. Dean tried to throw the guy off him, tried to use his position to his advantage like Dad had taught them, but the guy was good. He was crazy, talking nutty things in his ear, using his whole body to hold Dean down, but a big, strong crazy. Dean couldn’t see him, could only feel him, but the guy had to be at least as big as Sam, if not even bigger.
“DEAN!” Dean twisted to see Sam at the head of the alley, the rain dripping down his face.
“Get your own pet,” the guy said. “This one’s mine to play with.”
Dean tried to buck him again, but only got a face full of brick for his efforts. “Get off me you sick freak!”
He saw Sam’s eyes widen, going dark with anger, and then there was blood dripping down Sam’s face and the guy was screaming. He let Dean go and kept screaming, the kind of screaming Dean remembered from Hell.
“Sam, you’re - “ Dean started before he saw his own hand, dripping red blood. He reached up and touched his own face, shocked when his hands came back covered in blood. He turned to look at the guy, a stranger, a huge skinhead who looked like he was hopped up on one thing too many, who was writhing on the ground, howling in pure agony. Dean looked up, to find out where this was coming from, and cursed when blood, warm and salty, slipped into his eye. Suddenly horrified, Dean held out his hand letting the rain - the blood - pool in his hand.
“Dean?” Sam asked, still standing at the mouth of the alley, sounding as shaky and as lost as he had when he was six and got separated from him and Dad in Wal-mart.
“Sam? Sam, what’s going on?” Dean asked, stepping around the screaming skinhead.
“Are you okay?” Sam’s voice sounded steadier, if more desperate. “What did he do to you?”
Dean shook his head. “He just grabbed me. I would have been fine. I’ve had worse.”
The look on Sam’s face told Dean that his little brother didn’t believe him. He reached out, grabbed Dean’s shoulder, as if to pull him away from the mugger, even though the guy was seriously down for the count, and to reassure himself that Dean was real, was whole, was alive. Dean didn’t protest, knowing that he could use the reassurance himself.
“You’re okay?” Sam asked again, his voice another step closer to normal.
“Yeah,” Dean said and watched as rain water began to rinse the blood from Sam’s face.
The blood curling screams from the skinhead turned slowly into gurgling moans behind him and Dean couldn’t help but turn to see what had happened to him. Sure, the rain turning to blood was freaky shit, freakier than a lot of things Sam had done, than most things Dean had seen psychics do, but unless the guy was seriously afraid of blood, there was no reason for the screaming. But when Dean turned and took a close look at the skinhead, the huge guy curled up in a pathetic fetal position in the pools of blood in the alley, it was frightening. He looked like he had third degree burns on his exposed skin, as though something had just melted it on his bones, and his eyes, they were just gone, melted like Pam’s were after she had seen Castiel.
Dean winced and stepped back. He took in his clothes and Sam’s - both soaked through with blood and water. Even in the rain and with minimal bruising and injuries from recent hunts, they both looked like a cop’s worst nightmare, like some pair of grim butchers. The last thing they needed was to get caught like this or, worse, get caught with the skinhead, hurt and bloody and burned and moaning like the world was ending. He backed out of the alley and started heading up the street at a brisk pace, trying to keep to the shadows as best as he could. He gave a silent thanks that it was fuck o’clock at night or maybe morning by now and Eldorado was the kind of city that rolled up its sidewalks at nine.
*
Dean closed the door to Room 136 behind him, breathing a silent sigh of relief that no one had asked them any questions about their clothes, and felt his heart jump into his mouth. Zachariah was sitting on Dean’s bed, wearing that same silver business suit he had been wearing when they first met and his face reminded Dean of a cat whose tail was just stepped on. Dean looked at Sam briefly and then down at his own clothing. For all that the rain had stayed water since they left the skinhead in the alley, they still looked like crazed, soaking wet butchers or serial killers, with their clothes drenched in blood and water. They’d probably have to trash the clothes; blood stains were usually a bitch and in the normal course of things, they’d never had to deal with ones this big.
“You made a mistake, Sam Winchester,” Zachariah said, his voice low and gravelly and damning. His pale eyes flashed with anger, but his face was carefully schooled and still.
Dean could feel Sam frozen behind him. Zachariah’s voice wasn’t laden with the disdain it usually was. It was full of condemnation instead, as though Sam, Sam whom Zachariah had distrusted from the beginning, had failed some important test, had disappointed the world.
“Hypocrisy doesn’t do anyone any good.” Zachariah stood up, his suit straining around his broad shoulders, as thought it couldn’t contain the angel. “You wanted Castiel and Uriel to spare the so-called innocents of the precious Athena, but the citizens of Eldorado aren’t offered the same benefit? You think that you have the right to rain damnation upon a city, Sam Winchester? You think that it should be within your power to condemn their life-giving water and their very lives?”
Sam looked startled and confused. He hadn’t said much of anything on the walk back to the motel. Dean hadn’t bothered to ask what had happened or how. He didn’t need to ask why. The why of it all was as much a part of them as blood and bone; you didn’t just let someone take down your brother. Usually that meant throwing punches. Sometimes it meant shooting bullets. Very rarely, it meant taking someone’s life. You didn’t ask questions when someone looked out for you, not when your brother saved you.
“What?” Sam looked so baffled and innocent, if it weren’t for the fact that he was soaked in blood.
“It isn’t any human’s right to rain damnation. You do not smite other humans,” Zachariah seemed to fill the room, dark and angry and powerful as summer storm clouds hovering on the brink of destruction. “Heaven is keeping its eyes on you.”
*
Dean stopped the Impala outside a shabby looking motel just over the West Virginia border, as the blood red sun began to set behind the mountains. Sam had sat, silent and white, in the passenger seat as Dean zigzagged them through Indiana and Ohio all day. They’d pulled into a drive through for lunch and then just kept going.
Dean didn’t really think they could lose the angels, not really. They’d proven they were stubborn sons of bitches and worse than god damned bloodhounds. Wherever Sam and Dean Winchester went, Castiel and Zachariah, Angel Detectives Inc., followed. The end of the world, demons everywhere, that was bad enough. Coming out of Hell, hunting things, he could deal with. He really could. Being tailed by a couple of holier than thou winged jackasses was a little more than anyone could handle rationally.
Dean sighed at the decor in the motel room, maroon beds with silver drapes and metal furniture, and slammed his duffel onto his bed. God-damned angels. God-damned Sam. God-damned yellow eyed demon and his god-damned freaky god-damned blood rituals. He wanted to blame Sam for the whole blood-rain-acid-melting incident, he really did, but he’d seen the look on Sam’s face. Dean couldn’t say that he wouldn’t have done the same, or, at least, tried to do something like it, if he’d been in Sam’s position, watching his brother get pounded like that.
“Dean,” Sam began, from his side of their hideous room, perched on the edge of his own maroon quilted bed.
Dean pulled his second best knife from his bag and slipped it into his boot; his best knife was already tucked into his belt. “I’m going out.”
Sam looked like he was going to protest, his face scrunched and dark, the way it had been when he was a kid and about to complain about moving again.
“We’ve been in each other’s hair for three days straight and we’re low on cash,” Dean told him, heading straight for the door. “I saw a bar just down the road. Don’t wait up.”
*
The bar was as crowded and smoky as Dean had hoped. It was the kind of local roadside dive that could be found almost anywhere in the country, the kind of place that was as familiar and known and welcome as the open highway. It was good to just breathe in the smell of smoke and cheap beer and hear the badly piped in pop music and the arguing locals. He could deal with this; he could handle a bar; he could hustle a mark. He knew how to do this.
Dean sauntered up to the bar, keeping his gait loose and smooth. He order a beer, making sure his accent was as flat as the American heartland and anything but local. Smiling when the beer came fast and cold, he took a long draught and gazed around the bar, looking for an easy mark.
“Dean-o,” a familiar voice said from his left. “Going to a bar to avoid dealing with your brother? So predictable, buddy. I’d thought better of you. You’ll die for each other, kill for each other, but God forbid you actually have a conversation.”
Dean looked at the Trickster and wondered how screwed he’d be if he just told him to fuck off.
“You know, I think we should have this talk over food,” the Trickster said, smiling so Dean could see all of his teeth. “You haven’t had dinner yet and I really don’t think that any of us want you getting yourself good and drunk tonight.”
Dean blinked, just blinked, and felt the wooden bar stool shift under him and turn from a high, hard edge into something smooth and low. It was a diner booth, worn and shiny and vinyl, and the cold beer in his hand was an ice-filled glass of dark soda.
“I’d let you keep the beer, really one couldn’t hurt you that much, but I think Louise would object,” the Trickster said with a tilt of his head toward the waitress taking a dinner order at one of the nearby tables. “And don’t worry. We’re just down the street.”
Dean just stared at the Trickster through narrowed eyes. He didn’t really have the energy or weaponry to deal with him right now and he didn’t want to tell Sam that he’d encountered the Trickster again and let him live. They had enough on their plates right now without needing to deal with the chaos of a trickster god.
“I took the liberty of ordering,” the Trickster continued, “since I think we really need to get down to business. You like chili anyway.”
“Business?” Dean repeated. “That offer to teach me the rules of the ‘game?’”
“There is that. But I was actually talking about your brother. Raining blood in Little Egypt? That’s real cute. It’s almost something I would do.”
“What of it?” Dean demanded, his hackles up. He might not be happy, or even comfortable, about his brother’s blood, but he wasn’t going to stand for everyone to give him shit for it.
“Antony and Cleopatra, you two would die for each other,” the Trickster said as the waitress, Louise, arrived with the food. “But you two are cowboys, you would kill for each other, too. Taking the co-dependence a bit far, Zombie. You knew you’d kill for Sammy, knew that you were were thirteen years old. But you didn’t know baby brother would do the same for you, too, did you?”
“What’s your point?” Dean growled around a mouthful of spicy chili.
The Trickster actually looked surprised. “Having the powers of heaven at your side, ready to rain damnation upon your enemies doesn’t give you a little thrill? You’re not at least a little worried that he’ll be raining sulphur and wrath on sleepy, wicked little towns next? Casting judgments upon the lesser humans?”
“What the Hell are you talking about?” Dean asked, putting down his spoon.
"Young Hamlet embracing his angelic heritage at last, of course," the Trickster said as if it was obvious. He took a bite out of his sandwich before continuing. "I mean, I don't think anyone was expecting it to be one of the great plagues of Egypt, but really, you can't deny that he means business now."
“Angelic?” Dean repeated, his voice heavy with disbelief. “The great plagues of Egypt?”
“You have read your Bible, haven’t you, Dean-o? ‘Thus saith the Lord. In this thou shalt know that I am the Lord: behold. I will smite with the rod that is in mine hand upon the waters which are in the river. and they shall be turned to blood. And the fish that is in the river shall die. And the river shall stink; and the Egyptians shall lothe to drink of the water of the river.’ Doesn’t that sound familiar to you?”
Dean opened his mouth to protest, but the Trickster continued to talk over him.
“And rain that burns the wicked, but purifies the chosen? Only an angel could be that trite.” The Trickster looked closely at Dean. “You’re not actually hung up on that whole ‘Azazel is a demon’ spiel, are you? You really do just eat what your father spoon-fed you and don’t think about it.”
“Azazel was a demon,” Dean protested. “He bargained with Mom, selling my dad for Sam. He killed my grandparents. He bought Dad’s soul for my life.”
The Trickster laughed and finished his sandwich. “Azazel was an angel. Fallen angel, I’ll give you, but before he fell, he was of the same order as your precious Uriel.” He sighed, but still sounded amused. “Of all the angels, seraphim fall hardest.”
“Exactly. He fell.”
“Damnation doesn’t change what you are,” the Trickster explained, as if to a very stupid child. “You could have spent an eternity in Hell and you have still been the son of John and Mary Winchester. Oh, you’d be black eyed - or maybe even white eyed by then - and a miserable bastard, but you’d still be just a miserable human bastard.”
“You’re saying that demons are just people?”
“Maladjusted people with grudges like the Grand Canyon, but just people.” The Trickster grinned, smooth as glass and feral as a wolf. “Now, changing what you are isn’t terribly hard, as your brother well knows, but everybody knows that simple damnation isn’t the way to do it.”
Dean finished off his chili and dropped the spoon in the bowl. “That’s just… idiotic. Or one of your tricks. Demons are changed. Hell changes you.”
“Well, they’re dead,” the Trickster allowed. “And they’re damned and miserable sons of bitches, but they’re nothing special.” He leaned forward, over the table. “But do you really think they’re anything new under the sun? Do you really think that if a vampire drank the blood of one of your little demons that anything special would happen? Have you really thought this through at all?”
Dean just sat back and stared at him.
“I told you, I like you,” the Trickster said, “and clearly I have a fondness for idiots, the way I coddle you and your brother.”
“I don’t know what you’re trying to do,” Dean said carefully, “but I’m not going to fall for it. I was in Hell. I know what demons are like. And that yellow eyed son of a bitch was a demon.”
“Your brother needed all of two hundred and fifteen days and six months to learn his lesson and he really does have the brains in this family,” the Trickster told him enigmatically. “I don’t think I’m going to wait for your choice. The rules have have changed, after all.”
“What?”
“You’re an idiot. Do you want some pie?”
Dean was suspicious. The Trickster was talking in circles and that was never good and often dangerous. Pie, however, was generally safe and could keep the Trickster talking and he might finally reveal what he was doing. “Sure.”
The Trickster flagged down Louise and ordered two slices of the Friday special. He remained uncharacteristically silent, just watching Dean unnervingly, until the pie arrived.
Dean dug into the pie with relish. He’d never had pie quite like it; it was filled with warm, tangy-sweet berries and the crust tasted like pure butter and sugar. He made a mental note to make Sam try it before they left town and headed further east, deeper into the Appalachians. The Trickster made himself busy eating his own slice of the berry pie.
When Louise came to collect their plates, Dean looked up to smile at her, flirting as instinctive as breathing. And suddenly, for just a moment, Dean saw something else.
“Louise volunteers as a hospice worker,” Dean said slowly.
“Yep.” The Trickster slurped his soda loudly.
“And that guy over there, he takes in foster kids.”
The Tricksters just nodded and smiled as though it all made sense.
Dean looked around the diner and saw all of the people and knew what they did and didn’t do. “How the Hell do I know that?”
The Trickster grinned again. “You doubted me, Dean, doubted that I was telling you the truth. Seek and ye shall find; or, in this case, seek and ye shall see.”
“What did you do?” Dean blinked rapidly and scrubbed at his eyes, as if to rub everything out.
“I didn’t do anything. It was the pie,” the Tricksters explained innocently. “Now, if I were you, I’d be looking after young Sammy around now. You never know how much trouble little brothers can get into when they’re left alone for too long.”
Dean stared at him, but the Trickster was as inscrutable as ever. “Sam?”
The Trickster’s grin widened.
Dean bolted from his seat. Who knew what the Trickster could have done to Sam while he was distracted?
The Trickster hadn’t been lying; the diner was on the same block as the bar and only a short walk - and an even shorter run - from the motel. Dean didn’t bother to give Sam any warning that he was coming in. He fumbled briefly with the keys in his haste to unlock the door and then all but ran inside.
He practically stumbled into his own bed. Some of the people in the diner had shimmered with an inner light, an innate goodness of character that shown through in their actions. Sam, though, was something else. Somehow, it didn’t surprise Dean to see him like this, even though it was different from anything he had ever seen before. If the good people of the diner had shimmered, Sam glowed like the sun. He was still himself, with his stupid shaggy hair and too many shirts, but he was so much more than that. He was goodness; he was great; he was his own sun in their dumpy little West Virginia motel room.
It took Dean a minute to realize what Sam was doing, that his arms were around Ruby, who didn’t shine at all. He didn’t care to look at Ruby, though, not with Sam in the room. He was light and right and virtue. He was as bright as his own sun and shimmered with all of the colors of the aurora borealis. Dean stared at him and sighed, “Sam.”
Sam, who had frozen when Dean burst through the door, turned to him and asked, “Dean, are you alright?”
Dean smiled when the full shine of his brother’s inner glow cast upon him. He sighed again, basking in it, knowing that his brother was as good as he always knew he was and as great and as beautiful and as wonderful.
“Dean!” Sam repeated, his voice sharper. “Dean!”
“Sam,” Dean told him, reaching out to touch the glow and light that shimmered around his brother.
Sam grabbed his hand and Dean’s smile broadened, feeling the goodness through their contact. “What are you doing?”
“You’re… amazing,” Dean told him, dazed by it all. “It’s… amazing. The colors.”
“The colors?”
“Around you,” Dean explained, torn between wanting to close his eyes and relish the feeling of being near Sam and wanting to watch him. “I can see them now. They’re good. You’re good.”
“Dean,” Sam said sharply, dropping Dean’s hand to grip his face. “Did you take something at the bar? Did someone slip you something? In your beer?”
Dean blinked. Sam was worried. Sam’s concern overrode Dean’s sudden pleasure. “The pie. It was the pie.”
“There was pie at the bar?”
“In the diner,” Dean said, trying to avoid being distracted by Sam’s glow. “I had the pie in the diner.”
“The pie?”
Dean looked at Sam, trying to look past the light and color and beauty. Sam sounded very worried and there was something in the back of Dean’s head that was agreeing with Sam, a hunter’s instinct that said that this was wrong. He didn’t want to do it, to give up on what he could suddenly see and feel, but Dean closed his eyes and pulled back from Sam.
With the onslaught to his senses held at bay, if temporarily, Dean was not a happy camper. “Fuck.”
“What the Hell is going on, Dean?” Sam asked from the darkness beyond Dean’s eyelids. Even Sam’s voice held a brighter quality. It still sounded like Sam, it just had a brighter, better tonal quality.
“It was the Trickster again,” Dean told him, feeling more than a little defeated.
Dean could feel Sam practically vibrating with anger, but it was Ruby who spoke. “And you accepted food from him?”
“Did you swallow a dead cat or something?” Dean swung his head in the direction of Ruby’s voice, which sounded flatter and hollower than usual, like something or someone had died.
“He poisoned you?” Sam’s voice dripped fury and Dean knew, instinctively, that if the Trickster had, the Trickster would find himself dead and probably sooner rather than later.
“I don’t think so,” Dean said slowly. “I think he did some kind of magic on the pie. I can see what people have done. It’s.. If someone’s done something good, I can see it, just by looking at them.”
“A spell to see good deeds?”
Dean opened his eyes and looked at Ruby. She was as flat and shadowed as her voice, without a shimmer or a glow to light her up at all. Sam’s light was so strong that he was lighting up even parts of the room that he wasn’t in, but Ruby was like a shadow, hollow and empty and utterly without substance. “I don’t think you’ve ever done a good deed, not even when you were alive.”
Ruby looked over to Sam. “I’ve never heard of anything like that.”
“Do you know anyone who would?”
Dean made the mistake of turning to look at Sam again and it was as dazing as a blow to the head. Sam was just breathtaking and there wasn’t anything Dean could do about it, but watch him. He was still Dean’s baby brother, but now he was so obviously just as special and wonderful and good as they’d always know, always reassured themselves. He was even more beautiful, more wonderful, than he was in Dean’s dreams.
“Dean!” Sam’s voice was sharp, taut with worry. “Dean, you need to close your eyes!”
Startled out of his trance, Dean complied. “What’s wrong?”
“Oh god.” Sam let out a gusty, huffing sigh, the likes of which Dean hadn’t heard since Sam was a teenager. “I don’t know what’s wrong, Dean. I only know that you can’t look at me. I sent Ruby to see if she can find anything on this, to try to fix in.”
“I can’t look at you?” Dean asked, a little confused and still a little buzzed from staring at the glory of Sam.
“You just freeze up when you see me,” Sam said, sounding defeated and angry. “And talk about colors. Do I just not have enough good deeds for that bastard or something?”
Dean actually laughed, keeping his eyes tightly shut. “Not enough good deeds?”
Sam was silent, but Dean didn’t need to have his eyes open to see Sam’s closed off, angry face.
“Sam, you’re fucking glowing with it. I can’t stop staring at you because you’re like your own Fourth of July celebration. Fuck, man, I don’t think he was lying.”
“What are you talking about?”
“At the diner, the Trickster, he said,” Dean explained, “that you’ve got angel blood. He said that it’s not demonic, that damnation doesn’t change what you are. And the yellow eyed demon, he was an angel, back in the beginning. Azazel, from the order of the watcher, same as Uriel.”
Dean felt the bed dip as Sam sat beside him. “Dean, I rained acidic blood on a city last night - turned all the water in Eldorado to blood for about three minutes, according to the internet - and four people are in the hospital with critical burns. And I don’t know how I did it! I accidentally put three innocent people in the hospital because I got angry. Does that sound very angelic to you?”
“Uriel wanted to wipe Athena off the map because there were just two bastards living that town that wanted to raise Samhain,” Dean pointed out. “Damn it, turning water into blood is a Biblical plague. Are you telling me that Aaron was possessed? And angels are dicks anyway. I bet God’s a dick, too, if he exists.”
“Did you just call me a dick?”
*
Part Four
*
Dean drove across the Illinois border, heading toward Eldorado, knowing the roads on some kind of mixture of instinct and deeply embedded memory, and let Sam, still weak from his near drowning despite his protests to the contrary, doze in the passenger seat. It took the rest of the day to reach the outskirts of the small city. Even though they were both legally dead and hadn’t had trouble from the FBI in months, even though Dean had his own person guardian angel and Sam his guardian demon-cum-girlfriend, Dean never really bothered to rid himself of the habit of regularly dropping off the major highways and interstates to use the old side roads and back routes to circle back on himself and leave behind a twisting, confusing trail. He stopped twice, once for more coffee while Sam was out cold at a tiny Dunkin' Donuts near Piedmont and once at a gas station outside Benton, where they grabbed a late lunch or early dinner of cold sandwiches, chips, and soda.
Eldorado was a simple, sleepy city when they approached it after dark and it wasn’t hard to find a cheap motel on the eastern outskirts. It was a dumpy little place with dull yellow sodium lights illuminating a dirty, slushy parking lot and drab two story building, but it was the kind of place that wouldn’t ask a lot of questions if they came back bloody or bruised and that was what they needed. After they got the key to their room at the front desk - two queens, ground floor - they made no bones about simply hauling the necessary bags inside. Dean shuddered inside, not liking how close they were to New Harmony, just a hop and skip to the Indiana border. He didn’t say anything to Sam, tried not to look at his brother, and just stripped to his boxers and climbed into the bed closest to the door. He prayed that he wouldn’t dream.
*
Dean scowled and ineffectually tried to wipe at his pants. “Did you have to soak me with the holy water?”
“You were the one who didn’t want me to be the one distracting the thing. Not my fault that I don’t have very good aim with an entire tub full of holy water.” Sam was walking a little lighter than he had before, when they had been reading about the disasters and deaths that had been occurring in the small, beleaguered city. Sometimes it was good to have a simple, straight forward hunt. Maybe they could never escape the knowledge that there was true evil in the world, that people were never safe and sound in their own homes, but sometimes, just sometimes, they could know that Sam and Dean could be enough to keep some people safe some of the time. And with the end of the world, with angels and Hell, with all of the God damned complications since Dad died, it had to be enough to help some of the people some of the time.
“A nain rouge,” Dean said, frowning as it began to rain, dark and wet on the dirty city sidewalk. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen one south of the Michigan border. What was it doing in southern Illinois?”
Sam shrugged and pushed his damp hair off his face. “I’ve read about them down in South America, too. I don’t see why they couldn’t be out here.”
“Fucking dwarves.”
They walked a ways down the winding sidewalks of the city, past apartment buildings and convenience stores. Once they’d realised what they were tracking - that it was a beady eyed red dwarf - even Dean had agreed that leaving the Impala at the motel was the best idea. Nain rouge loved to screw with technology. They lived for human folly, whether it was distracting a school bus driver into skidding on an icy patch and crashing his bus full of kindergarteners or dancing on high tension wires until they fell and killed onlookers. They were devious and deadly, but surprisingly easy to kill for all of that. It only took distracting them long enough to soak them in holy water. It was the tracking that was hard; it was safer on foot and safer to go mostly unarmed. The nain rouge were known for turning guns back on their owners.
The rain started to come down harder, partially water and partially ice pellets, but all unpleasant. Dean grimaced when he realised they’d both be soaked through by the time they got back to the motel on foot. He wasn’t happy about it, especially after Sam’s recent ice water experience, but he didn’t say anything, just stepped up the pace. Sam didn’t seem to notice that his brother was getting a fair bit ahead of him, but it didn’t really matter. They’d killed the monster, saved the town. The world was as safe as it ever would be and the Winchesters could celebrate with hot showers and take out Chinese.
Dean wasn’t sure why he was so distracted - maybe the miserably wet cold, maybe trying not to think about Sam in the shower, maybe the lure of a new city’s potentially dubious delivery Chinese - but one minute he was walking down the sidewalk of Eldorado a couple of yards in front of Sam and the next moment, someone had grabbed him and pulled him into a narrow alley between apartment buildings. It wasn’t his finest moment, not by far. He would never tell Sam, never tell a living soul, but seeing the bone white hands on him and hearing the low, guttural purr in his ear of, “Oh, pet, where did you think you were going?” struck an icy knife of fear into his gut.
By the time he got his bearings, realised that it was just some crazy human trying to get at him, the guy had him pinned. Dean tried to throw the guy off him, tried to use his position to his advantage like Dad had taught them, but the guy was good. He was crazy, talking nutty things in his ear, using his whole body to hold Dean down, but a big, strong crazy. Dean couldn’t see him, could only feel him, but the guy had to be at least as big as Sam, if not even bigger.
“DEAN!” Dean twisted to see Sam at the head of the alley, the rain dripping down his face.
“Get your own pet,” the guy said. “This one’s mine to play with.”
Dean tried to buck him again, but only got a face full of brick for his efforts. “Get off me you sick freak!”
He saw Sam’s eyes widen, going dark with anger, and then there was blood dripping down Sam’s face and the guy was screaming. He let Dean go and kept screaming, the kind of screaming Dean remembered from Hell.
“Sam, you’re - “ Dean started before he saw his own hand, dripping red blood. He reached up and touched his own face, shocked when his hands came back covered in blood. He turned to look at the guy, a stranger, a huge skinhead who looked like he was hopped up on one thing too many, who was writhing on the ground, howling in pure agony. Dean looked up, to find out where this was coming from, and cursed when blood, warm and salty, slipped into his eye. Suddenly horrified, Dean held out his hand letting the rain - the blood - pool in his hand.
“Dean?” Sam asked, still standing at the mouth of the alley, sounding as shaky and as lost as he had when he was six and got separated from him and Dad in Wal-mart.
“Sam? Sam, what’s going on?” Dean asked, stepping around the screaming skinhead.
“Are you okay?” Sam’s voice sounded steadier, if more desperate. “What did he do to you?”
Dean shook his head. “He just grabbed me. I would have been fine. I’ve had worse.”
The look on Sam’s face told Dean that his little brother didn’t believe him. He reached out, grabbed Dean’s shoulder, as if to pull him away from the mugger, even though the guy was seriously down for the count, and to reassure himself that Dean was real, was whole, was alive. Dean didn’t protest, knowing that he could use the reassurance himself.
“You’re okay?” Sam asked again, his voice another step closer to normal.
“Yeah,” Dean said and watched as rain water began to rinse the blood from Sam’s face.
The blood curling screams from the skinhead turned slowly into gurgling moans behind him and Dean couldn’t help but turn to see what had happened to him. Sure, the rain turning to blood was freaky shit, freakier than a lot of things Sam had done, than most things Dean had seen psychics do, but unless the guy was seriously afraid of blood, there was no reason for the screaming. But when Dean turned and took a close look at the skinhead, the huge guy curled up in a pathetic fetal position in the pools of blood in the alley, it was frightening. He looked like he had third degree burns on his exposed skin, as though something had just melted it on his bones, and his eyes, they were just gone, melted like Pam’s were after she had seen Castiel.
Dean winced and stepped back. He took in his clothes and Sam’s - both soaked through with blood and water. Even in the rain and with minimal bruising and injuries from recent hunts, they both looked like a cop’s worst nightmare, like some pair of grim butchers. The last thing they needed was to get caught like this or, worse, get caught with the skinhead, hurt and bloody and burned and moaning like the world was ending. He backed out of the alley and started heading up the street at a brisk pace, trying to keep to the shadows as best as he could. He gave a silent thanks that it was fuck o’clock at night or maybe morning by now and Eldorado was the kind of city that rolled up its sidewalks at nine.
*
Dean closed the door to Room 136 behind him, breathing a silent sigh of relief that no one had asked them any questions about their clothes, and felt his heart jump into his mouth. Zachariah was sitting on Dean’s bed, wearing that same silver business suit he had been wearing when they first met and his face reminded Dean of a cat whose tail was just stepped on. Dean looked at Sam briefly and then down at his own clothing. For all that the rain had stayed water since they left the skinhead in the alley, they still looked like crazed, soaking wet butchers or serial killers, with their clothes drenched in blood and water. They’d probably have to trash the clothes; blood stains were usually a bitch and in the normal course of things, they’d never had to deal with ones this big.
“You made a mistake, Sam Winchester,” Zachariah said, his voice low and gravelly and damning. His pale eyes flashed with anger, but his face was carefully schooled and still.
Dean could feel Sam frozen behind him. Zachariah’s voice wasn’t laden with the disdain it usually was. It was full of condemnation instead, as though Sam, Sam whom Zachariah had distrusted from the beginning, had failed some important test, had disappointed the world.
“Hypocrisy doesn’t do anyone any good.” Zachariah stood up, his suit straining around his broad shoulders, as thought it couldn’t contain the angel. “You wanted Castiel and Uriel to spare the so-called innocents of the precious Athena, but the citizens of Eldorado aren’t offered the same benefit? You think that you have the right to rain damnation upon a city, Sam Winchester? You think that it should be within your power to condemn their life-giving water and their very lives?”
Sam looked startled and confused. He hadn’t said much of anything on the walk back to the motel. Dean hadn’t bothered to ask what had happened or how. He didn’t need to ask why. The why of it all was as much a part of them as blood and bone; you didn’t just let someone take down your brother. Usually that meant throwing punches. Sometimes it meant shooting bullets. Very rarely, it meant taking someone’s life. You didn’t ask questions when someone looked out for you, not when your brother saved you.
“What?” Sam looked so baffled and innocent, if it weren’t for the fact that he was soaked in blood.
“It isn’t any human’s right to rain damnation. You do not smite other humans,” Zachariah seemed to fill the room, dark and angry and powerful as summer storm clouds hovering on the brink of destruction. “Heaven is keeping its eyes on you.”
*
Dean stopped the Impala outside a shabby looking motel just over the West Virginia border, as the blood red sun began to set behind the mountains. Sam had sat, silent and white, in the passenger seat as Dean zigzagged them through Indiana and Ohio all day. They’d pulled into a drive through for lunch and then just kept going.
Dean didn’t really think they could lose the angels, not really. They’d proven they were stubborn sons of bitches and worse than god damned bloodhounds. Wherever Sam and Dean Winchester went, Castiel and Zachariah, Angel Detectives Inc., followed. The end of the world, demons everywhere, that was bad enough. Coming out of Hell, hunting things, he could deal with. He really could. Being tailed by a couple of holier than thou winged jackasses was a little more than anyone could handle rationally.
Dean sighed at the decor in the motel room, maroon beds with silver drapes and metal furniture, and slammed his duffel onto his bed. God-damned angels. God-damned Sam. God-damned yellow eyed demon and his god-damned freaky god-damned blood rituals. He wanted to blame Sam for the whole blood-rain-acid-melting incident, he really did, but he’d seen the look on Sam’s face. Dean couldn’t say that he wouldn’t have done the same, or, at least, tried to do something like it, if he’d been in Sam’s position, watching his brother get pounded like that.
“Dean,” Sam began, from his side of their hideous room, perched on the edge of his own maroon quilted bed.
Dean pulled his second best knife from his bag and slipped it into his boot; his best knife was already tucked into his belt. “I’m going out.”
Sam looked like he was going to protest, his face scrunched and dark, the way it had been when he was a kid and about to complain about moving again.
“We’ve been in each other’s hair for three days straight and we’re low on cash,” Dean told him, heading straight for the door. “I saw a bar just down the road. Don’t wait up.”
*
The bar was as crowded and smoky as Dean had hoped. It was the kind of local roadside dive that could be found almost anywhere in the country, the kind of place that was as familiar and known and welcome as the open highway. It was good to just breathe in the smell of smoke and cheap beer and hear the badly piped in pop music and the arguing locals. He could deal with this; he could handle a bar; he could hustle a mark. He knew how to do this.
Dean sauntered up to the bar, keeping his gait loose and smooth. He order a beer, making sure his accent was as flat as the American heartland and anything but local. Smiling when the beer came fast and cold, he took a long draught and gazed around the bar, looking for an easy mark.
“Dean-o,” a familiar voice said from his left. “Going to a bar to avoid dealing with your brother? So predictable, buddy. I’d thought better of you. You’ll die for each other, kill for each other, but God forbid you actually have a conversation.”
Dean looked at the Trickster and wondered how screwed he’d be if he just told him to fuck off.
“You know, I think we should have this talk over food,” the Trickster said, smiling so Dean could see all of his teeth. “You haven’t had dinner yet and I really don’t think that any of us want you getting yourself good and drunk tonight.”
Dean blinked, just blinked, and felt the wooden bar stool shift under him and turn from a high, hard edge into something smooth and low. It was a diner booth, worn and shiny and vinyl, and the cold beer in his hand was an ice-filled glass of dark soda.
“I’d let you keep the beer, really one couldn’t hurt you that much, but I think Louise would object,” the Trickster said with a tilt of his head toward the waitress taking a dinner order at one of the nearby tables. “And don’t worry. We’re just down the street.”
Dean just stared at the Trickster through narrowed eyes. He didn’t really have the energy or weaponry to deal with him right now and he didn’t want to tell Sam that he’d encountered the Trickster again and let him live. They had enough on their plates right now without needing to deal with the chaos of a trickster god.
“I took the liberty of ordering,” the Trickster continued, “since I think we really need to get down to business. You like chili anyway.”
“Business?” Dean repeated. “That offer to teach me the rules of the ‘game?’”
“There is that. But I was actually talking about your brother. Raining blood in Little Egypt? That’s real cute. It’s almost something I would do.”
“What of it?” Dean demanded, his hackles up. He might not be happy, or even comfortable, about his brother’s blood, but he wasn’t going to stand for everyone to give him shit for it.
“Antony and Cleopatra, you two would die for each other,” the Trickster said as the waitress, Louise, arrived with the food. “But you two are cowboys, you would kill for each other, too. Taking the co-dependence a bit far, Zombie. You knew you’d kill for Sammy, knew that you were were thirteen years old. But you didn’t know baby brother would do the same for you, too, did you?”
“What’s your point?” Dean growled around a mouthful of spicy chili.
The Trickster actually looked surprised. “Having the powers of heaven at your side, ready to rain damnation upon your enemies doesn’t give you a little thrill? You’re not at least a little worried that he’ll be raining sulphur and wrath on sleepy, wicked little towns next? Casting judgments upon the lesser humans?”
“What the Hell are you talking about?” Dean asked, putting down his spoon.
"Young Hamlet embracing his angelic heritage at last, of course," the Trickster said as if it was obvious. He took a bite out of his sandwich before continuing. "I mean, I don't think anyone was expecting it to be one of the great plagues of Egypt, but really, you can't deny that he means business now."
“Angelic?” Dean repeated, his voice heavy with disbelief. “The great plagues of Egypt?”
“You have read your Bible, haven’t you, Dean-o? ‘Thus saith the Lord. In this thou shalt know that I am the Lord: behold. I will smite with the rod that is in mine hand upon the waters which are in the river. and they shall be turned to blood. And the fish that is in the river shall die. And the river shall stink; and the Egyptians shall lothe to drink of the water of the river.’ Doesn’t that sound familiar to you?”
Dean opened his mouth to protest, but the Trickster continued to talk over him.
“And rain that burns the wicked, but purifies the chosen? Only an angel could be that trite.” The Trickster looked closely at Dean. “You’re not actually hung up on that whole ‘Azazel is a demon’ spiel, are you? You really do just eat what your father spoon-fed you and don’t think about it.”
“Azazel was a demon,” Dean protested. “He bargained with Mom, selling my dad for Sam. He killed my grandparents. He bought Dad’s soul for my life.”
The Trickster laughed and finished his sandwich. “Azazel was an angel. Fallen angel, I’ll give you, but before he fell, he was of the same order as your precious Uriel.” He sighed, but still sounded amused. “Of all the angels, seraphim fall hardest.”
“Exactly. He fell.”
“Damnation doesn’t change what you are,” the Trickster explained, as if to a very stupid child. “You could have spent an eternity in Hell and you have still been the son of John and Mary Winchester. Oh, you’d be black eyed - or maybe even white eyed by then - and a miserable bastard, but you’d still be just a miserable human bastard.”
“You’re saying that demons are just people?”
“Maladjusted people with grudges like the Grand Canyon, but just people.” The Trickster grinned, smooth as glass and feral as a wolf. “Now, changing what you are isn’t terribly hard, as your brother well knows, but everybody knows that simple damnation isn’t the way to do it.”
Dean finished off his chili and dropped the spoon in the bowl. “That’s just… idiotic. Or one of your tricks. Demons are changed. Hell changes you.”
“Well, they’re dead,” the Trickster allowed. “And they’re damned and miserable sons of bitches, but they’re nothing special.” He leaned forward, over the table. “But do you really think they’re anything new under the sun? Do you really think that if a vampire drank the blood of one of your little demons that anything special would happen? Have you really thought this through at all?”
Dean just sat back and stared at him.
“I told you, I like you,” the Trickster said, “and clearly I have a fondness for idiots, the way I coddle you and your brother.”
“I don’t know what you’re trying to do,” Dean said carefully, “but I’m not going to fall for it. I was in Hell. I know what demons are like. And that yellow eyed son of a bitch was a demon.”
“Your brother needed all of two hundred and fifteen days and six months to learn his lesson and he really does have the brains in this family,” the Trickster told him enigmatically. “I don’t think I’m going to wait for your choice. The rules have have changed, after all.”
“What?”
“You’re an idiot. Do you want some pie?”
Dean was suspicious. The Trickster was talking in circles and that was never good and often dangerous. Pie, however, was generally safe and could keep the Trickster talking and he might finally reveal what he was doing. “Sure.”
The Trickster flagged down Louise and ordered two slices of the Friday special. He remained uncharacteristically silent, just watching Dean unnervingly, until the pie arrived.
Dean dug into the pie with relish. He’d never had pie quite like it; it was filled with warm, tangy-sweet berries and the crust tasted like pure butter and sugar. He made a mental note to make Sam try it before they left town and headed further east, deeper into the Appalachians. The Trickster made himself busy eating his own slice of the berry pie.
When Louise came to collect their plates, Dean looked up to smile at her, flirting as instinctive as breathing. And suddenly, for just a moment, Dean saw something else.
“Louise volunteers as a hospice worker,” Dean said slowly.
“Yep.” The Trickster slurped his soda loudly.
“And that guy over there, he takes in foster kids.”
The Tricksters just nodded and smiled as though it all made sense.
Dean looked around the diner and saw all of the people and knew what they did and didn’t do. “How the Hell do I know that?”
The Trickster grinned again. “You doubted me, Dean, doubted that I was telling you the truth. Seek and ye shall find; or, in this case, seek and ye shall see.”
“What did you do?” Dean blinked rapidly and scrubbed at his eyes, as if to rub everything out.
“I didn’t do anything. It was the pie,” the Tricksters explained innocently. “Now, if I were you, I’d be looking after young Sammy around now. You never know how much trouble little brothers can get into when they’re left alone for too long.”
Dean stared at him, but the Trickster was as inscrutable as ever. “Sam?”
The Trickster’s grin widened.
Dean bolted from his seat. Who knew what the Trickster could have done to Sam while he was distracted?
The Trickster hadn’t been lying; the diner was on the same block as the bar and only a short walk - and an even shorter run - from the motel. Dean didn’t bother to give Sam any warning that he was coming in. He fumbled briefly with the keys in his haste to unlock the door and then all but ran inside.
He practically stumbled into his own bed. Some of the people in the diner had shimmered with an inner light, an innate goodness of character that shown through in their actions. Sam, though, was something else. Somehow, it didn’t surprise Dean to see him like this, even though it was different from anything he had ever seen before. If the good people of the diner had shimmered, Sam glowed like the sun. He was still himself, with his stupid shaggy hair and too many shirts, but he was so much more than that. He was goodness; he was great; he was his own sun in their dumpy little West Virginia motel room.
It took Dean a minute to realize what Sam was doing, that his arms were around Ruby, who didn’t shine at all. He didn’t care to look at Ruby, though, not with Sam in the room. He was light and right and virtue. He was as bright as his own sun and shimmered with all of the colors of the aurora borealis. Dean stared at him and sighed, “Sam.”
Sam, who had frozen when Dean burst through the door, turned to him and asked, “Dean, are you alright?”
Dean smiled when the full shine of his brother’s inner glow cast upon him. He sighed again, basking in it, knowing that his brother was as good as he always knew he was and as great and as beautiful and as wonderful.
“Dean!” Sam repeated, his voice sharper. “Dean!”
“Sam,” Dean told him, reaching out to touch the glow and light that shimmered around his brother.
Sam grabbed his hand and Dean’s smile broadened, feeling the goodness through their contact. “What are you doing?”
“You’re… amazing,” Dean told him, dazed by it all. “It’s… amazing. The colors.”
“The colors?”
“Around you,” Dean explained, torn between wanting to close his eyes and relish the feeling of being near Sam and wanting to watch him. “I can see them now. They’re good. You’re good.”
“Dean,” Sam said sharply, dropping Dean’s hand to grip his face. “Did you take something at the bar? Did someone slip you something? In your beer?”
Dean blinked. Sam was worried. Sam’s concern overrode Dean’s sudden pleasure. “The pie. It was the pie.”
“There was pie at the bar?”
“In the diner,” Dean said, trying to avoid being distracted by Sam’s glow. “I had the pie in the diner.”
“The pie?”
Dean looked at Sam, trying to look past the light and color and beauty. Sam sounded very worried and there was something in the back of Dean’s head that was agreeing with Sam, a hunter’s instinct that said that this was wrong. He didn’t want to do it, to give up on what he could suddenly see and feel, but Dean closed his eyes and pulled back from Sam.
With the onslaught to his senses held at bay, if temporarily, Dean was not a happy camper. “Fuck.”
“What the Hell is going on, Dean?” Sam asked from the darkness beyond Dean’s eyelids. Even Sam’s voice held a brighter quality. It still sounded like Sam, it just had a brighter, better tonal quality.
“It was the Trickster again,” Dean told him, feeling more than a little defeated.
Dean could feel Sam practically vibrating with anger, but it was Ruby who spoke. “And you accepted food from him?”
“Did you swallow a dead cat or something?” Dean swung his head in the direction of Ruby’s voice, which sounded flatter and hollower than usual, like something or someone had died.
“He poisoned you?” Sam’s voice dripped fury and Dean knew, instinctively, that if the Trickster had, the Trickster would find himself dead and probably sooner rather than later.
“I don’t think so,” Dean said slowly. “I think he did some kind of magic on the pie. I can see what people have done. It’s.. If someone’s done something good, I can see it, just by looking at them.”
“A spell to see good deeds?”
Dean opened his eyes and looked at Ruby. She was as flat and shadowed as her voice, without a shimmer or a glow to light her up at all. Sam’s light was so strong that he was lighting up even parts of the room that he wasn’t in, but Ruby was like a shadow, hollow and empty and utterly without substance. “I don’t think you’ve ever done a good deed, not even when you were alive.”
Ruby looked over to Sam. “I’ve never heard of anything like that.”
“Do you know anyone who would?”
Dean made the mistake of turning to look at Sam again and it was as dazing as a blow to the head. Sam was just breathtaking and there wasn’t anything Dean could do about it, but watch him. He was still Dean’s baby brother, but now he was so obviously just as special and wonderful and good as they’d always know, always reassured themselves. He was even more beautiful, more wonderful, than he was in Dean’s dreams.
“Dean!” Sam’s voice was sharp, taut with worry. “Dean, you need to close your eyes!”
Startled out of his trance, Dean complied. “What’s wrong?”
“Oh god.” Sam let out a gusty, huffing sigh, the likes of which Dean hadn’t heard since Sam was a teenager. “I don’t know what’s wrong, Dean. I only know that you can’t look at me. I sent Ruby to see if she can find anything on this, to try to fix in.”
“I can’t look at you?” Dean asked, a little confused and still a little buzzed from staring at the glory of Sam.
“You just freeze up when you see me,” Sam said, sounding defeated and angry. “And talk about colors. Do I just not have enough good deeds for that bastard or something?”
Dean actually laughed, keeping his eyes tightly shut. “Not enough good deeds?”
Sam was silent, but Dean didn’t need to have his eyes open to see Sam’s closed off, angry face.
“Sam, you’re fucking glowing with it. I can’t stop staring at you because you’re like your own Fourth of July celebration. Fuck, man, I don’t think he was lying.”
“What are you talking about?”
“At the diner, the Trickster, he said,” Dean explained, “that you’ve got angel blood. He said that it’s not demonic, that damnation doesn’t change what you are. And the yellow eyed demon, he was an angel, back in the beginning. Azazel, from the order of the watcher, same as Uriel.”
Dean felt the bed dip as Sam sat beside him. “Dean, I rained acidic blood on a city last night - turned all the water in Eldorado to blood for about three minutes, according to the internet - and four people are in the hospital with critical burns. And I don’t know how I did it! I accidentally put three innocent people in the hospital because I got angry. Does that sound very angelic to you?”
“Uriel wanted to wipe Athena off the map because there were just two bastards living that town that wanted to raise Samhain,” Dean pointed out. “Damn it, turning water into blood is a Biblical plague. Are you telling me that Aaron was possessed? And angels are dicks anyway. I bet God’s a dick, too, if he exists.”
“Did you just call me a dick?”
*
Part Four