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Whatever they’re going to do to Lucifer, Mary hopes it hurts.
The angels separate them, thank God. Or whatever. Mary isn’t sure what to thank around here. They drag him towards a church that looks like it’s been bombed to hell. She gets slightly gentler treatment and the house next door. What do they call those, again? A rectory?
She almost asks the angel standing next to her, but thinks better of it.
They take her to an upstairs bedroom that would have looked old-fashioned even if Mary was back in the eighties again. The bedside table has a lace doily on it. Mary doesn’t question it. It’s not a dungeon, and right now, that’s more than enough for her.
“The room is warded,” the taller of the two angels informs her in that same monotone voice that all of Michael’s lackeys seem to have. “If you try to escape, or free you compatriot, we will know, and you will be found. You will not like what comes after.”
Silence from the angel. Mary sighs.
“Right,” she says, “no escaping. What if I need to piss?”
And they’re gone with that odd flapping noise.
Great.
Cas forces every thought out of his mind and works on instinct alone. He hasn’t fought this savagely since Hell, alone in the dark with only Dean’s soul to light the way. Teeth bared, he slams a demon’s head into the brick wall, heedless of the killing blow to the host. Another demon gets an angel blade to the throat—and before Cas has a chance to pull the blade free, he’s already stabbing the next demon through the first.
Behind him, Lucifer stirs. To Cas’s disgust, he puts his hands lazily in the air and accepts defeat. Having shared mind space with him for far too long, Cas can almost hear him—“Hey, faces like this don’t come along every day. I don’t want to break it.”
“You’re certainly a brave little songbird,” Asmodeus says, drawing his blade.
He isn’t getting out of this one by fighting. Cas takes off towards the kitchen—surely there’s a back exit, they have to get the trash out somehow—but a demon shoves him back in Asmoedeus’s direction again. They close ranks in a circle around the pair.
“You’re going to have to kill me.”
A little voice in the back of his head tells him it’s not true. He’s not leaving the Winchesters again. Dean. Not leaving Dean again. Not when he has a choice in the matter.
“Somehow, I doubt that,” Asmodeus replies.
If Cas had still had wings, he might have been able to fight him off. As it is, all Asmodeus has to do is get close enough to press two fingers to his forehead to knock him out.
For the first time in what feels like years, the door opens. Mary bookmarks her place in Revelations—hey, know thine enemy and all—and looks up, feigning boredom. Michael strides into the room, his coat billowing behind him like in a low budget action movie. Mary barely has time to wonder if he’s making that happen just for drama’s sake before he’s uncomfortably close. She still doesn’t get up from where she’s sitting cross-legged on the bed. Doesn’t want to give him the satisfaction.
“You called yourself Mary Campbell when my men asked,” Michael says, no preamble.
Mary nods. “Um, yeah. Because it’s my name.”
And because she hadn’t thought that throwing around the name Winchester was a particularly good idea. Although looking at Michael’s stormy face, it might have been the smarter course of action.
“Not from what my brother tells me,” Michael replies, finger tracing the outline of his lips absently. “He called you Mary Winchester.”
Oh no.
“Technically,” Mary tries, “my husband is dead. So. You know. Not really my name anymore.”
Michael’s face twists into a smile that creeps her out to her core. “Your husband. John Winchester, I assume.”
She has a feeling he’ll know if she’s lying. “Yes?”
This is so not good.
“Any children, Mary?”
She jolts off of the bed and shoves him backwards. He doesn’t move an inch, but the corner of his mouth twitches at her efforts.
“Don’t talk about my kids!”
Michael smiles. “My true vessel doesn’t exist in this universe. I make do. But if I no longer had to make do—”
“I won’t let you anywhere near him!” Mary snaps, throwing all her weight into a punch aimed at his face.
Michael catches it in midair and twists. Mary yelps as he tosses her down on the dusty carpet. Her shoulder throbs. Michael stoops down and pushes her hair out of the way to whisper in her ear.
“Lucifer escaped. And he left you here.”
And with that, he gets up and leaves the room.
“I’m not with him!” Mary yells after him.
“Don’t you dare—” Cas begins as Asmodeus picks up his cellphone.
Suddenly, it feels like his tongue is curling in on itself. Cas chokes on air, struggling to get another word out, to warn Dean that the voice on the other end of the line isn’t his, but he can’t seem to find his breath.
Asmodeus finishes his call and calls Cas a card to play. And instead of taking it, resigned, like he might have before his latest resurrection, Cas hurls himself at the bars hard enough to make them rattle. He’s not surprised that they don’t give. Asmodeus chuckles—yes, chuckles, like a villain out of those James Bond movies that Dean made him watch.
“Settle now, angel.”
Cas yanks at the bars again, more a show of defiance than the belief that he can actually escape. Across the way from him, Lucifer rolls his eyes.
“Take a chill pill, little bro.”
“And you—” Cas begins, rounding on him.
“Easy now,” Asmodeus tuts. “We don’t want to be gagged again, do we?”
“I won’t help you,” he snarls. “Nothing you could possibly do to me could compel me to put Jack in harm’s way.”
Asmodeus raises his eyebrows. Cas gets a flash of hot sun, of buggy South Carolina fields, of songs whispered in the dark of a homeland long gone. Asmodeus embodies the worst of humanity, and Cas has never hated someone so quickly or fiercely in his life.
“Not even to protect Dean Winchester?”
Cas bites back a retort he knows won’t help.
“Oh, trust me,” Asmodeus continues. “I know. There’s not a being in Hell or Heaven or anywhere in between that doesn’t.”
He clucks his tongue at one of his attending demons, who rushes to open the door for him.
“Don’t push me, Castiel. I can assure you, you won’t enjoy the results.”
When the door opens again, aching shoulder or no aching shoulder, Mary is ready to give Michael a piece of her mind. But it isn’t Michael standing in the doorway. A young man, probably twenty-two, twenty-three or so, gives her a little wave. Mary has difficulty tearing her eyes away from the bruise blackening his left eye.
“What do you want?”
The kid smiles awkwardly. And yeah, he’s probably only a little under a decade younger than her, but she can’t help calling him a kid in her head.
“A blood sample?”
Mary narrows her eyes. “Yeah. Not gonna happen.”
Panic flares. “Look. It’s not going to hurt or anything, I swear. I—Michael told me that you’re…that you’re, um, this thing called a vessel? And there’s this spell I really, really need to work or I’m totally screwed. Anyway, it needs an archangel’s Grace except Michael isn’t going to give me any of his in a million years, so I thought maybe a vessel’s blood might be a good substitute. You are, aren’t you? A potential vessel for Lucifer?”
Mary’s head aches and it has nothing to do with how Michael threw her earlier. “What?”
The kid shakes his head miserably. “I really need this from you. Or Michael’s going to do a lot worse to me than a black eye.”
Her hands curl into fists at her sides. Of course Michael was the one to beat up on some poor kid. Of course. Because whenever she put her faith in something—in the Men of Letters, in John Winchester, in angels—it all comes to nothing.
“Start from the beginning. Like with your name.” She forces a smile. “Mine is Mary.”
“Kevin. Kevin Tran.”
He takes a step into the room and closes the door behind them, no longer quite so skittish.
“I’m a prophet. Except God isn’t here, so I serve Michael. I’m sort of an amateur scientist. Slash witch, I guess. Michael wants a way back to your universe because apparently everything sucks less there. So I’m trying to break down the barriers between the worlds. I managed to get the rift to open again, but Lucifer escaped through it and it closed. And now Michael is totally going to kill me if I can’t replicate the process.”
A rift between worlds. Huh. A smile begins to form on Mary’s face. There might just be a way out of this after all. She rolls up her sleeve and starts to probe for a vein.
“All right, Kevin. I’m going to make you a deal…”
“It is kind of pathetic, you know.”
Cas knows better than to give Lucifer a second of his time, but given that they’re stuck staring at each other until Asmodeus returns, he doesn’t have much of a choice.
“What is?”
Lucifer flops back on the cell’s concrete floor and props his feet up against the bars, like he’s in a vertical recliner.
“Your little crush.”
Cas glares, but Lucifer goes on anyway.
“I mean, God, it would have been obvious even if we weren’t sharing a head. The way you’d just stare off after him if I didn’t take control of the eyes? Wow. Lame.”
He resolutely turns his back on Lucifer, but shutting off his ears isn’t nearly as easy.
“And you know the saddest thing? He feels the same way.”
He does his best not to react, but the quiet hum Lucifer makes tells him that he isn’t completely successful.
“It was enough to make me want to gag.”
“Enough!”
Cas whirls around and lashes out against the bars hard enough to make Lucifer draw back incrementally.
“Need I remind you who has the Grace here?” he says, drawing a few deep breaths.
Lucifer actually can’t seem to find words. Cas feels his first genuine smile in a while come on.
“That’s what I thought,” he says, turning back around.
Be careful, Dean.