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Chapter Text

12 Months After the Treaty

(May)

Sioux Falls, South Dakota

The one in the coat smelled like Bondye.

That was all that Conrad could think, between the spinning room and the heavy hot throbbing in his slow inhuman veins. He could feel it spreading through his body like a terrible black weed putting out shoots, like gangrene spiking through his system. They'd stabbed him with something, a small knife maybe, when he'd gone to check out the back room of the building. Right behind him, bam, like you'd think he was just turned yesterday.

He was still in the middle of this rotting empty warehouse in the middle of the night, as far as he knew, but with the toxin rolling through him it felt like he'd been picked up by a tornado and dropped off with some Kansas girl's house on top of him. He'd come in sniffing for clues, so to speak, while his friends (and he used the term loosely, on nights like these) were schmoozing it up at a make-shift tavern in the refugee camp a few miles away. They'd come into town looking for something that a small scale civil war might have uncovered and they hadn't had much luck, but somewhere in the haze of damp spring and mostly-buried human decay, Conrad had thought he'd caught a whiff of something suspicious. Something alive.

They had passed through the decimated city barely long enough to get a glimpse of the destruction before Worth was hunched over Conrad's seat and demanding they hit the gas right this damn second. Conrad had disliked having orders shouted in his ear, but he'd obliged. The doctor had a skittish streak when it came to Hanna, and lately he'd figured out that if he didn't let the wheels stop turning the likelihood of misadventures was reduced by half. And it wasn't that Conrad really wanted to hang around in that oversized necropolis, or that he wasn't worried about what Hanna might do himself, it was just that—well, he smelled something. The rot was mostly down to manageable, if pervading, levels and when he had gone to roll up the window, there it was.

And nobody believed him.

Surely, his companions had all told him with varying levels of politeness, nobody is still living in this bloody husk of a ghost town. All the survivors shifted down to the village a mile away, where they'd downed some trees and built themselves a crude fortress. Nobody had lived here for at least a year.

Right. Who has two thumbs, a splitting headache, and a distinct lack of paranoia now.

Conrad staggered back, hands groping for a surface to stabilize himself on. There were only two men here, as far as he could tell. One of them would be classically handsome under any other circumstances, and the other one... the other one smelled like Bondye.

"What," he managed, "what did you—"

The one with the face—Conrad must be really out of it, but the man looked like an oil painting come to life in shades of dirt and dried blood—that one twisted his lip up in a gross parody of a smile. He was beautiful, oh. Oh Conrad was going to throw up.

"Dead man's blood," he said, twirling a vial in his calloused hands. "Gotcha, punk."

Conrad clutched his wrists in the faint hope of stopping the poison spreading through him. He could feel his lips pulling back from his teeth. "Who did you kill," he snarled, less a question than an accusation.

"Who-" the man echoed, his grin dropping away. "What do you care?"

"If you think you can just drop into town and start slaughtering people for your sick jollies," Conrad said, teeth clenched, "you've got another bloody thing coming."

"Hey hey whoa," the man snapped, "I think you got it backwards. See, you're the blood suckin murderous creep in this dialogue, not me. I'm the cleanin crew, buddy. I'm just doing my job."

"Oh right, picking off anyone who gets in your way, ends justifying the means, sure," Conrad said, "I've met your sort. Best thing you can say for yourself is you don't wear a gas mask." He sniffed, then added, "Probably worried it would clash with your grubby flannel and redneck veneer of negligence."

The man's beautiful face stiffened in absolute fury. "Listen here, you neck chewing-"

"Dean," the one in the coat cut in. His voice rolled low, like a motorbike engine inside a human throat, and his words had an efficient but urgent sharpness to them. "Judging from previous encounters, the vampire should be paralyzed by now. He is not."

They looked at him. Conrad looked down at himself too, flexed his fist. It hurt like something that even Worth wouldn't want to touch, but it wasn't incapacitating. Conrad considered faintly that he'd been through worse, and not even all that rarely. He led a very battered life these days, more's the pity. He struggled to his feet.

"Once more," he said, wiping some spit from his lips. Pain made him salivate, he didn't know why. Most things he just chalked up to alien biology and tried not to think about. "Who did you kill?"

"Don't see why it's any of your-" Dean started, only to be cut off a second time.

"We siphoned it off of a casualty in battle last week," the one in the coat said, tilting his head in an almost birdlike way. "Since rot is more or less the point, a vial can last a long time."

"Oh," Conrad said. Some of the wind dropped out of his sails, and he wobbled a bit before getting a new grip on his indignation. "Well that's a bit gruesome isn't it! Not to mention unethical. Did you even get permission?"

"Permission?" Dean repeated, squinting. "Permission?"

The one in the jacket stepped closer. His eyes were as unemotional as they were piercing, clinically evaluative. "During a war," he told Conrad, levelly, "the niceties of social courtesy are less important than survival."

"War?" Conrad asked, his hands now on his knees as he took deep calming breaths—the pain was fading, slowly, but breathing helped with the fair amount that remained. "What war."

The oddly calm man took another step closer, despite his companion loudly ordering him to stay back, damnit, this isn't a play date.

"If not a war," the man said, apparently not concerned with whether this is a play date or not, "then what would you call the condition of the world?"

"Fuck," Conrad replied, "I don't know, an apocalypse?"

Behind them, Dean let out an ugly snort. "Believe me buddy, if it was an apocalypse, you'd know."

Conrad rounded on him. "Look, buddy, you just poisoned me apropos of bloody nothing and I don't think you've got any right to stand there in the god damn corner making god damn snarky remarks about my god damn terminology, so will you kindly cease!"

Dean turned red. He turned hot, flushed, blood-pumping red. He looked like he was gearing up for a fight, Conrad had learned how to recognize that look in his sleep, but Conrad turned on his heel and redirected his attention toward the one in the jacket, who was less obviously full of hot fresh blood. Obviously the safer alternative.

"Not a war," he conceded. "Maybe a dark age. Wars have opposing sides, and so far the most consistent enemy I've seen so far has been poor sanitation."

"War is simpler to conceptualize," the man in the jacket says.

Conrad considered him for a moment. "You remind me of someone," he said, at last. "But also you really don't at all. It's the, um, the smell—I don't mean that in a rude way. And you have a kind of… walk."

Dean let out an irritated breath. "Cas come on, we have people to find and places to go, we don't have time to chat up the baddies. Either gank him or get out of the way."

"Who do I remind you of?" the man—Cas—persisted.

"There's this guy, kind of a cowboy sort," Conrad said, "he goes by Bondye. He's got this… white smell, does that sound crazy? I've never mentioned it to anyone. I mean, he seems human enough. Vitals signs are all there, and Hanna's never gotten a magical reading off him—"

"Hanna?" Dean interrupted. His face is draining, and he looks a little like he's been punched. Or maybe taken one too many turns on a spinning chair. "Hanna, uh. That wouldn't happen to be a girl's name, would it?"

Conrad turned. Oh no, seriously. "You know Hanna?"

"Depends," Dean replied, and his voice was aggressively noncommittal but he sheated his knife all the same. "Little red headed kid, totes around a big dead sidekick?"

Conrad pinched his forehead, where the last aches of the tainted blood were giving way to a completely new headache. "Oh," he said, "isn't this just typical."

-A-

The ride back to the refugee camp was tense and also a little bit crowded. They had stuffed back seat with supplies and there wasn't much room left for Conrad amongst the boxes of hostess snack cakes and beef jerky.

"So," Dean said, after they'd gone a couple miles down the road. "How come that blood didn't knock you flat?"

Conrad shrugged his hunched shoulders, his hands clenched around the cushion between his knees. If Worth could see him now they'd all be dead, for various reasons. "Dunno," he mumbled. "Nobody's ever tried it on me before."

He didn't ask how many other vampires they'd killed this way. He didn't want to know. It was true that generally speaking all vampires are some kind of bastard or another and some of them are downright nasty, and it's also true that what with the treaty and everything it is technically legal for any human being to kill any non human guilty of homicide. It is, furthermore, probably also true that when you become a predator species you give up some of your right to sympathy, after all, he wouldn't much blame a cow that mauled a human in the slaughterhouse.

But on the other hand, he'd been a vampire for some number of years now and more and more every day it was becoming an 'us' and less of a 'them'. Conrad had found himself standing in the doorway of two rooms, not quite a member of either.

"And what's a little geek like Hanna doing runnin around with bloodsuckers?" Dean went on, fingers crushing the wheel of his antique car. "If I find out he's gone darkside on us—"

"Excuse you," Conrad snapped, "whoever the hell you think you are—"

"Who I think I am? Who do you think you are?"

The argument got very loud very quickly. Conrad's temper had a low threshold for knife-wielding assholes who thought they ran the world. Throughout the whole exchange, Conrad was vaguely aware of Cas sitting ahead of him in the front seat, very silent, very still. It got to be like a weight on a blanket, his completely stillness, until Conrad couldn't take it anymore.

"And what's his deal?" he shouted, thrusting a finger at the back of Cas's head. "He just sits there, is he drugged or something?"

Dean let out an exasperated breath. "He's just pissed off that I made him take the car, he's not on drugs. Jesus." He paused for a second, and then glanced away from the road for a moment. "Can you do drugs?"

"I am an angel of the Lord," Cas replied, sounding vaguely disgruntled. "I can experience one example of intoxication as well as any other, which is to say not with any ease."

And then they were off, bickering, completely forgetting about the passenger in the back seat which was—oh—probably for the best, but also completely maddening. No, don't mind the alleged blood sucking monster fiend in the back seat, let's just have ourselves a slew of incomprehensible in-jokes in the front seat while he cools his bloody heels, and also did we mention that one of us has been a fucking angel this whole time?

Conrad clutched his head in his hands. Neither in one room nor the other. No respect, no fear, just miles and miles of resentful ambivalence and half-hearted threats.

He'd never met an angel before. He supposed that if he had ever given it any thought, he would have hoped for slightly better circumstances. And also more... er... halos.

The edges of civilization started to unfurl in the yellow headlights, slews of downed trees and tilled earth. Just around the bend would be the first length of wall, just long enough to keep road traffic stalled out. Past that would be the watch tower the locals had rigged up, and then beyond that was the real wall. It was a work in progress, but so far they'd managed to get about half a circle of protection raised around the camp. Conrad frowned as they pulled up to the first barricade. He realized belatedly that he had never explained to the hunters where he had come from, or where he was staying, or given them any directions on the road to get here.

Until that moment, it hadn't occurred to him that at least one of his chauffeurs might need to live somewhere. Somewhere within driving distance of the abandoned town. Somewhere suitably fortified.

Conrad's eyes glazed over as they rolled through the checkpoint, receiving cheerful if weary greetings from the guards who undid the gate for them. One of them made a hopeful little crack about hunting, and Dean replied with a little shrug and a pinch of self-depreciation, something about bobby, and then they were off again.

"So," Conrad started. The car was mercifully silent again. "You live here."

Dean scowled into the rear view mirror. "For the moment," he replied. "We'll be taking off soon, as soon as things are settled down. Sheriff Mills doesn't need us mooching off her forever."

Conrad wasn't sure what to say to that. He'd met the sheriff briefly, while Hanna was negotiating for asylum, and she didn't seem like the type to let moochers hang around in her village.

They came up on the barricade. It had been built around the framework of an old gate, probably because people have this aversion to starting projects from scratch. You could still see the Singer Auto, but the Salvage had been done in by time, entropy, and possibly clumsy recent builders.

Conrad had seen a few new towns spring up since the big collapse—they'd picked up the lamentable John in one of them, may he writhe in Hell, and it seemed that any city too big to fracture into latches the way Chicago and New York had done was doomed to eventually leak out into the country side, leaving the city itself a ghost. Singer Auto was what survived of Sioux Falls South Dakota, with its pell-mell collection of post-fallout homes spreading out behind it like a bridal train. Sioux Falls had been only a little smaller than Tallahassee, and it had not taken the disaster much better.

The locals had been tight lipped about it. Conrad mulled this over for a moment and then decided, oh well, in for a chicken in for an egg.

"So you guys had some kind of civil war," he said. "…What happened to the other guys?"

Dean stayed staring straight ahead, elbows locked, but Castiel turned his stony face to regard his companion.

"We don't know," Dean said, at last.

"You don't know."

"No," Dean growled, "we don't know. There was a fight on main street, in the city, and the bastards went for the big guns, and then. Poof. Nobody. There were still a couple of them on the street taking pot shots, but the cover fire disappeared and then there were no reinforcements, and then when we pushed forward into the east side of the road it was empty. No explanation."

"And that was when the west side packed up their bags?" Conrad guessed.

"Spooked," Dean said. He sounded, not disappointed as Conrad would have expected, but mostly exhausted. "Probably for the best. There's something wrong with that city. Mills is tactical, she doesn't take chances."

"And you were back there today because…"

"None of your beeswax," Dean replied, promptly. "Why were you in the city?"

Conrad opened his mouth, paused, and then sighed. "As much as that was a lamentably hypocritical reply," he said, "I don't actually mind telling you that I was there on Treaty business."

In the mirror, nothing registered on Dean's face except vague confusion."What is this, a cowboys and Indians thing?"

Conrad squinted at the back of the man's head. "The Treaty. Moonlight Races. The Salem Accords? The council?"

Dean glanced over at Castiel, as if waiting for an explanation.

Castiel shrugged minutely. "Moonlight Races is an ancient term. In ages past, it was a rallying cry for various breeds on non-humans. As to the treaty in question, Dean, I have been fighting or I have been here on earth with you since your brother's death. I know very little of the world that I have not directly perceived through these eyes."

Dean's hands twisted on the wheel, but when he finally spoke, it was in the deliberately even tones of a man forcing himself to take in the facts. "Hey leech," he said, "you wanna fill me in on whatever the hell that is?"

"You just called me a leech," Conrad replied. "I don't think I want to do anything for you, actually."

"Fine," Dean said. There were clenched teeth in the word. "…What's your name."

"Conrad," Conrad said, sourly. "Achenleck. And most people at least try to find out before they poison me."

"Well I'm just a curveball all around," Dean snapped. "Now, what's the treaty stuff, and why haven't I heard about it before."

Conrad told him.

It took a while.

-A-

Hanna found them a few minutes after they had parked. He looked like he'd been putting up wards—there was ink smeared over his cheek and he was a bit pale, even in the darkness, and Conrad's nose detected a faint scent of crisped meat, like electrocuted poultry. Hanna always smelled a little bit repellent, but after he'd done magic it took on a slightly less soggy note. Conrad worried about the younger man, at times.

"Connie!" Hanna shouted, waving one predictably smeared hand. "Who are your friends? Hey, whoa, did you go out?"

"Hi to you too," Dean muttered, but Hanna didn't seem to notice.

"Yes," Conrad sighed, "I went out."

"But the RV is still here," Hanna pointed out, jerking a thumb over his shoulder at the hulking shadow of the camper.

Conrad hunched his shoulders. After the fiasco in Tallahassee he'd more or less given up on avoiding the bat stuff. He'd spent days at a time shape shifted during that incident, and it kind of… grew on you. Practice makes perfect or something. He didn't particularly want to explain that, though—it seemed somehow easier to let everyone go on thinking he was staunchly opposed to the whole concept.

"Waaaaait," Hanna said, "you're not wearing a shirt under that jacket, are you?"

Dean glared over the top of his car, irritation now redirected to Conrad. "Who said you could wear that jacket?"

"Well I wasn't just going to ride in a stranger's car without a shirt on!"

"What, do you have some kinda deformed monster nipples or something?"

Conrad was pretty sure he'd be turning red if he had any red left in his skin. "Take your stupid jacket back, then," he snarled, ripping the thing from his shoulders. "It's hideous anyhow!"

A look of panic splashed over Dean's face, and then he was scrambling over the hood of the car to snatch the jacket out of Conrad's hands before he could throw it on the ground.

"Watch it," Dean said. He said it in the same way that policemen who have been on the force for too long says "put your hands up," which is to say he sounded one safety catch away from doing something nasty. Conrad took an involuntary step back.

"So!" Hanna cut in, quickly, "Uh, thanks for giving my buddy here a lift! I don't know what I would have done if something bad had happened to him," he added, still smiling, but the smile had a sharp edge to it.

Dean scowled at him. "If he hadn't been a friend of yours," Dean replied, letting the hypothetical hang.

"Mine?" Hanna said. "Why would…"

Hanna squinted. He put his hands on his hips and craned his neck up, went up on his toes, got as close to Dean's face as he could before Dean wobbled backwards away from him with a disconcerted expression.

"Oh!" Hanna said, at last, dropping back down to his regular height, "You're one of the brothers, names like a gun, what was it, Rochester?"

"Winchester," Dean corrected, looking pained.

"Winchester! Right, right, gosh man the apocalypse has not been kind to you! Where's your brother? Must be around here somewhere, kinda hard to hide a guy that size!"

Dean's lips went tight. "Sam is dead."

Hanna went still. "Oh," he said. "Dang, man. I'm sorry to hear that. Plague?"

"Couple days before it, actually."

Conrad glanced over at Castiel, who had been awfully silent throughout this whole exchange, and who was now giving Dean an uncertain look as if he dearly wanted to correct him somehow but had no idea where to start. Conrad had the impression that whatever Dean was telling Hanna (and he had just lost track of the conversation entirely) it wasn't the whole truth, for one reason or another. Probably it had something to do with Conrad standing here, but hey, who knew with hunters.

"So, uh," he said to Castiel, because the alternative was both of them standing here in awkward silence while Dean and Hanna played high school reunion. "You're an angel."

Castiel didn't even look at him.

"Must be, um, big stuff going on down here, on earth," Conrad tried again. This was stupid, why did he even bother. "You know, if you're down here."

"My brother is attempting to bring about a second Armageddon," Castiel replied, with absolutely no inflection whatsoever.

"Er."

Castiel refocused his attention on Conrad, now with a flash of pointed interest. "The man you mentioned before, who has my scent. Where did you meet him?"

Conrad sighed. "Do you want the long version or the short version?"

Castiel wanted the long version.

Conrad had just gotten up to the part where Bondye had smuggled him back to the rebel camp when Sheriff Mills found them, her arms slung over with blankets, and interrupted the story.

"Sorry to barge in boys," she said, giving Castiel a motherly sort of look that struck Conrad as absurdly out of place. "Dean seems to be pretty deep in it over there and I hate to get between him and another human being. Hardly talks much these days, if it's not to his girl or the kid. Anyhow, I was just wondering if you folks will be staying the night in the main house or in that monster camper of yours."

Conrad bit his lip. He'd gotten kind of used to having his own room again while they had been in Tallahassee, and since they had all packed back into the RV there had been an even weirder sort of tension between him and Doc Worth than usual.

"We couldn't possibly impose," he told the sheriff.

"Nonsense," Mills replied. "Your friend there really did us some good work, we're happy to accommodate. It's just me and Bobby and Dean in the house right now, and Cas here but Cas don't sleep so he's not taking up any room. Got a spare bed and a couple of cots we made up for the refugees a while back, but since Bill got hit with the flu a couple weeks ago we haven't had anybody in 'em."

"Er, really, we're used to the camper, we're fine."

Mills raised an eyebrow. "Gonna get pretty cold later tonight, especially for you California kids."

"Thanks, but, you know, I'm not sure if we'd be… welcome…" Conrad snuck a quick glance at Dean, who was listening to Hanna ramble with a look of gentle bewilderment on his unfairly symmetrical face.

Mills followed his glance. "Ah," she said. "Oh, Dean's harmless! He's been living with us for, hm, three months now? Dean, how long you been living with Bobby now?"

"Four months," Dean said, glancing back. "We'll be leaving soon."

"Yeah," Mills replied. "Just like you told me last month. And the month before. Look, I like having you around, kid. You don't have to make excuses."

Dean shrugged and turned back to Hanna.

"He's all bark," Mills said, with the casual dismissal of someone who had never been stabbed by the man in question.

Conrad shrugged, helpless. He didn't have the energy to argue anymore. "I'll get our things," he sighed.

-A-

Bobby's House, as everyone seemed intent on calling it, was the head of the Singer Auto Encampent and actually quite lovely if you squinted. It must have been a nice place when it had been built in the fourties, but it hadn't been maintained more than the bare minimum since it was built. The man Bobby himself had put them through all sorts of tricky tests before letting them inside the place, and he hadn't given them much warning. Conrad was sporting a nasty case of iron burn for his troubles.

Still, once they'd explained the deal ad nauseam, Bobby had eventually withdrawn and let them be.

Conrad flipped a page in a huge book that seemed to have been illuminated by artists who had very little understanding of the term "uncanny valley". It was the Book of Kells for amateurs. It also had some sketchily written accounts of suddenly disappearing armies.

It was five in the morning, and Conrad was the last one awake. They'd set him on the research shift for the morning, since Hanna had worn himself out with the heavy magic earlier and had been having trouble staying awake. Conrad reflected wearily that there was definitely no such thing as a free lunch.

He looked out over the overflowing stacks of books. There was some kind of order to them, but he had no idea where it started. Bobby had dragged about five big tomes free of the chaos and dropped them down in front of Conrad a few hours ago, while Hanna and Dean had been embroiled in some pointless semantic debate about the amount of immediate danger the encampment was actually in. The rest of them were content with not knowing the gory specifics.

There was a creak in the hallway. Conrad looked up to find Worth, sans coat and boots, smoking in the doorway as if the morning would never come.

"Funny how the folks in Salem jus' knew ter send us over here," he observed, breath trailing silver smoke. "Hardly back up north a full week 'fore we got another assignment."

Conrad shrugged. "They're getting a better grasp on their information network. It was bound to happen sooner or later."

"An' how come they think we're some kinda peace-keepin' organization?" Worth carried on, as if Conrad hadn't spoken. "Ya drive a couple ambassadors around an' suddenly yer everybody's errand boy."

Conrad frowned into his book. "In my experience, when you give anybody an inch they're bound to take the mile."

"Ain't we done enough?" Worth asked the bookshelf, apparently. "When do we get ter settle in an' live quiet?"

Conrad snorted. It came out a pretty ugly sound. "We?" he echoed. "Me, I know better than to ask. But you? Worth, you wouldn't know how to settle down if you took a two year course and got your master's in it."

"Ey, I spent plenny'a good years livin' back home quiet as ya please."

Conrad gave up the pretence of reading his book. "Sure," he said, "and you really want to go back to that? Come on, we all know you love this, this whole… mad max thing. You've been waiting for this your whole shitty life."

Worth took a deep drag, narrowed his eyes. "Ya think ya suddenly know sommat about me 'cause we bonded in jail, Conniekins?"

"We did nothing of the sort," Conrad snapped. "I think, Doctor, that your motives are terrifyingly transparent. And I think that we were sent to this town with specific orders, and if nothing else I at least know how to follow them."

"Look at you, Mr. Soldier. Takin' orders."

"Everything is orders," Conrad replied, irritated. "Life is a series of them. Just because you don't listen doesn't mean they're not there."

"Not much good then, are they?"

"Not the point."

"What is the point then, Private?"

Conrad bared his teeth. "The point is," he answered, "that I plan to find this damn artifact, tell the locals as little as reasonably possible, and then get the hell out of town exactly like we were asked to do so that we can then continue surviving by the grace and good will of whatever fucked up sadistic god is in charge of our lives."

"Waa waa," Worth mocked.

"You are such a hypocrite," Conrad snarled, jumping to his feet. "So you can complain but I can't?"

Worth turned and stalked across the room, not stopping until he was looming just a couple inches over Conrad's head. "Kinda looks that way, don't it?" he said, pale smoke leaking from between his teeth. "Whatcha gonna do about it?"

Conrad—Conrad wanted—oh, Conrad wanted to break his nose and Conrad wanted to thrown down this huge heavy book and Conrad wanted to grab the bastard by the chin and—

"Forget it," Conrad hissed, dropping back into his seat. "Forget it. We're not doing this is a stranger's house. Go and, and sleep, or something. It's almost morning."

Worth stood there for a second more, and then he jammed his cigarette back into his mouth. "Happy hunting," he said, and strode out of the room without a second glance.

Conrad buried his face in the book. God have mercy on his questionable soul, he was so fucked up it wasn't even funny. So fucked up, and so very tired. He could never seem to get fully rested anymore.

Still. There was a little more time before daybreak and he had two more books to get through, and then he could escape this whole clusterfuck of a life for a few hours in the sweet dreamless embrace of an undead coma. Just a little longer.

He could manage that.

-A-

The dreamless sleep of Conrad, cocooned in a frankly underwhelming cot in the laundry room, was interrupted by a crash of thunder, a door slamming open, and a small person tripping bodily over him with shout and a thud of limbs. Conrad curled in on himself woozily, vaguely aware that it was high noon and he should not be awake and this was a state of affairs most easily fixed by remaining as silent and small of a target as possible, right here, on the floor of the laundry room covered in other people's linens.

"Oh shit," said a small voice, only a couple inches from his face.

Conrad's self preservation clicked on with some protest, and he opened one eye to get a look at the threat. It was a kid, maybe eleven years old, with dark hair and a sheepish expression.

Oh. Well was that all? Conrad doubted anybody that small would have much luck trying to shove a stake through his rib cage.

"Hey," said the kid, "hey, are you okay? Did I break anything?"

"Mmmmph," said Conrad.

The kid poked him, fairly gently. "Are you making that noise because you're asleep or because I crushed your lungs?"

Conrad grudgingly opened both eyes. "I'm fine," he mumbled, "takes a lot more than that to hurt me."

The kid went into immediate investigatory mode, appraising every inch of Conrad that he could get a look at. "Are you the vampire?"

"The vampire, he says," Conrad moaned, burying his face in a pillow. This was why he avoided children. "Am I the vampire, well I'm bloody well not the doctor I can tell you that much."

"Cause," the kid went on, "you could be the zombie, I guess, Dean says they kind of look like sad pale dead people."

Conrad sighed into the pillow, which was pointless because nobody could appreciate the effort that went into it. He considered lifting his head and sighing again for proper effect, but then that would be trying a little too hard. "Yes," he said, instead, "I'm the vampire. Who are you?"

"Ben Braeden," the kid replied, crossing his legs and settling in.

"And you're doing…what, in my room, exactly?"

"Uh." Ben looked elsewhere. "I was… looking… for a tornado shelter."

"In the laundry room."

"Yeah."

"Of a house you've presumably been in before, since I doubt Mr. Singer lets random strangers run around on his property whenever they like."

"…Yeah?"

Conrad wracked his fuzzy post-sleep memory. "Are you afraid of thunder or something?"

"No," said Ben, looking at him like he was crazy. "What am I, six?"

"Well why else would you be running around during a storm, tripping over people left and right?"

Ben's small face skewed into a deeply conflicted expression. Conrad took pity on him after a moment of anguished silence, turned over, and closed his eyes.

"Whatever," he said. "It's not my house, it's not my business."

The room was quiet for a moment, and then Ben said, "Promise not to tell Dean?"

Conrad sighed, again, loudly. "Sure. Promise."

Ben wriggled past the head of the cot and dug between the obsolete dryer and the wall. After a moment of fumbling, he pulled out a silver letter opener with a wicked curved point and a midsized water pistol. Then, with a motion that nearly stalled out and aborted, he pulled free an old fashioned revolver. Conrad scrambled backwards in a tangle of sheets and toppled out of bed.

"Is that loaded?" he hissed, furiously trying to free himself from the twine of bedding.

"Ye…eeessss?" Ben answered.

Conrad swore into the fallen stack of pillows and then pulled himself upright. "Don't store loaded guns, you idiot. And for god's sake don't point that thing anywhere near me!"

Ben grimaced. "I thought you were a vampire."

"Yeah, and if you take my head off with that thing I'll be a dead vampire."

Ben bit his lip, turned away, and unloaded the gun. "Sorry," he said. "I don't really—I'm not sure what exactly to do, Dean won't teach me."

Conrad relaxed marginally. "Why don't you ask your dad then?" he suggested. "Or your mum," he added, after a moment.

"Mom doesn't know much about guns," Ben said. "And dads aren't really an option for me."

Ah. Ahhh. Conrad dropped the wad of sheets back on the cot and sat down. Sounds like a familiar story. He couldn't very well ask if the father was deceased or just plain old departed, but he wondered just how familiar the story would be, if he pressed.

"I'm not scared of thunder," Ben emphasized, looking down at the dismantled revolver. "It's just that. Dean took all the guests out to look at his trunk, and mom left me here because she doesn't think I should be around that many guns, and I heard the thunder and I thought…"

The kid trailed off, glanced up at the cracked ceiling as if he could see the roiling sky overhead. He had a tense, jumpy sort of mood to him, the look of a survivor who isn't entirely sure of their continued survival. Maybe he'd seen some things. Well, with the world being what it was, who hadn't? Maybe the plague had taken the kid's dad, maybe something worse, maybe Conrad was jumping to conclusions.

"There's something out there," Ben said, at last. "Nobody knows what it is, but it got those guys in the city. Dean says crazy never happens once. It's gonna come for us next, maybe really soon. Dean's always talking to Cas about angels and wars and stuff, and they get a lot of tornados around here so everybody is all crazy about that all the time, and Dean won't teach me how to hunt even though I can do it!"

Conrad blinked. Uh. What do you say to that. Gingerly, he reached out and sort of… patted the kid on the shoulder. Like a complete git. Ben gave him a wary look but didn't seem too put off.

"There's nothing worse than feeling powerless," Conrad said. He winced, hoped he wasn't coming off as too after-school-special. "I know, believe me. But look, you're just a kid. You're not going to be much help in a fight. Maybe you should, I don't know, focus on defensive magic or something? Hanna can whip up a pretty stellar force field, he could probably teach you."

"When Dean was a kid he was fighting monsters," Ben muttered.

Conrad considered that for a moment. "I guess that explains a few things about his attitude," he said. "He's probably got his reasons for shooting you down though. Most people do. I mean, I guess you must like the guy, but he seems like kind of an asshole? I don't know why you'd want to risk turning out like him."

"You wouldn't get it," Ben muttered.

"Yeah, the emotional complexities of an eleven-year-old are completely beyond me, why do I try."

Ben said nothing.

Conrad sighed. Again. This time it was just instinct. "Look," he said. "I'm kind of decent in a fight these days and as long as the sun isn't out I can be up in a pinch. If you'll let me sleep until the next major crisis, you can hang out in here while they're gone."

"But it's boring in here."

Conrad gave him an exhausted eye-roll and settled back into his temporary bed, groping for a pillow that hadn't picked up too much dust from the floor. "Don't stay if you don't want to," he said.

Ben shuffled uncertainly.

"Ugh. Just… talk, or something. I can sleep through almost anything. Tell me about how you got here, your crushes, your mom, I don't care."

Ben gave the door one last uneasy look, and then he settled down on top of an overturned laundry basket and began to tell a halting rendition of his life story, beginning with Suzie Johnson in the fourth grade and ending—at least, the last that Conrad was conscious for—with the tale of Dean Winchester, who pulled up to the Braeden doorstep two weeks into the apocalypse with an angel, half a decent plan of escape, and four dollars to his name, and taken them away to South Dakota.

Vampires don't dream, but Conrad fell asleep with the fuzzy vision of a knight's storybook steed, an entire family loaded precariously on its back.

-A-

Evening fell once again, heavy on the Singer Auto Encampment. Conrad woke to the sounds of what was probably dinner in the kitchen, complete with shouting and clanking dishware. He lay there for a while, drowsily soaking in the ambient noise. So much life in one old house, bright and noisy and at least half of it intimately familiar. In the darkness of the laundry room, Conrad imagined that this was his home and these were his family, and tomorrow and the next day and the day after that would be all the same. He imagined an endless sequence of evening just like this, with a world on the other side of this door waiting for him to join it.

Of course, the whole cot-in-the-laundry-room thing spoiled the fantasy a bit. Conrad frowned and flipped over. What he wouldn't give to have an actual room, somewhere.

He climbed out of bed, did some damage control on his hair, and then slipped out of the makeshift bedroom.

Out in the heart of the house everything was a bustle of dying sunlight and activity. He could see Sheriff Mills through the kitchen entryway, ladling something into a cracked ceramic bowl. In the living room, almost buried in a stack of books, Hanna was flipping through a dusty old tome and chewing idly on a strip of jerky. Hanna looked up from his book, spotted Conrad, and burst into a grin.

"Finally up then!" Hanna said, making an early grab for the day's Most Obvious Statement Award.

"Yeah," Conrad said. "Any luck with the library there?"

Hanna scowled briefly, and then shrugged. "Thought I had something earlier, but the details didn't match. The guys say there wasn't anything left—no bodies, no artifacts, no nothing."

"How Roanoke," Conrad said.

Hanna raised his eyebrows. "That's what I said," he mused, "but Dean nearly had a panic attack when I said it so, uh, I wouldn't bring it up again. That guy's accumulated more inexplicable trauma than a borrowed Volvo."

From this angle, Conrad could see Dean hunched over the kitchen table like he was afraid someone would snatch his dinner out from underneath him. Apparently Bobby had a decent stockpile of supplies when the plague swept through, and they had been able to spare enough seed to put in a crop for the next year. Food wasn't exactly plentiful, but nobody around here was starving. Whatever Dean's problem was, it wasn't about that.

"We need more info," Hanna sighed, pushing aside his book. "Not that I'm not super into this whole free library thing, but right now I'm just fucking around in the hopes of stumbling across something useful. I've been reading about angels for the last hour just because. He's got a huge angels section and it's full of little bookmarkies."

Conrad glanced at the kitchen again, at the spot where he imagined Castiel was probably hovering. Not eating. Uncomfortably observing the meal as a displaced third party. Yeah, Conrad could imagine.

"Is the kid still here?" Conrad asked, "Ben, er, Braeden?"

Hanna gave him a quizzical glance. "His mother took him back to their place about an hour ago. She had an argument with Dean about something, you know," he paused meaningfully, and then added, "major drama."

Oh, that explained a few things.

Conrad rubbed his forehead. "We're not getting involved in some hunter's relationship drama. No way. Not happening. I'll put up with civil wars, revolutions, bounties, and political upheaval, but I am not going to play marriage councilor."

"But Connieeeeee."

"No. I draw the line."

Hanna shrugged mournfully and flapped a dismissive hand. "Be that way," he said. "Oh. Worth says he found you a donor. He's lurking in the kitchen I think."

"Ah."

Conrad rubbed vaguely at the center left of his chest. He was pretty hungry. He weighed the heaviness of the hunger against the scowling carelessness of Doc Worth this early in the (metaphorical) morning. Hunger won out, barely. He slipped into the kitchen with his head down, trying not to draw any more attention to himself than necessary. He was entering an intensely other space, and was tensely aware of it.

There was Mills at the counter, and Dean with his hoard of soup, and Bobby fiddling with some oddity in the drawers. At the far end of the table, Conrad was mildly surprised to find the zombie sitting across from their angel, orange eyes intently focused. His gloved hands were folded in front of him, shoulders squared—Conrad had a mild flashback to a cop show he used to watch in college, before he decided that cop shows were a lost cause and switched back to pirating indie films. The dead man looked effortlessly professional.

Conrad turned, spotted Worth on the other side of the room scowling and scraping the meat off a bone with extreme prejudice, and promptly kept on turning. Wow. No. No it was way too early to deal with Doc Worth, he had changed his mind, he was not even going to mess with that one. Not while the doctor was holding a carving knife anyway.

Instead, Conrad took a seat at the table with the zombie and the angel. They didn't eat food either, and they were as weird of anomalies as Conrad, if not even more so. As the chair scraped across the floor, Castiel cast one brief but intensely scrutinous at Conrad, like a soldier sizing up a potential siege site, and then promptly lost interest. The zombie was speaking.

"But did they have vehicles?" he asked. His voice was soft and insistent.

"Yes," Castiel replied, and his voice was still one shade removed from gargling gravel. "Perhaps three trucks in working condition, although I only witnessed two."

"And do you think they could have used those trucks to vacate the field?"

Conrad dropped his head onto his fist and generally tried to blend in with the wallpaper. He was pretty sure he knew what topic was currently on the table, but he was a little surprised to see the zombie taking such an active role in investigating it. Usually he just hung out over Hanna's shoulder and observed. He did look awfully natural sitting there, though, you had to give him credit. If they could find him a new fedora for the occasion, he'd be something straight out of a noir film.

Castiel's expression was reserved, but there was a slight pursing of the lips that spoke volumes. "I have now had," he said, "ample experience with automobiles. They do not move fast enough. Between the time when I was summoned and my appraisal of the battle, there was not sufficient time for a vehicular escape."

"You were summoned?" the zombie asked. Conrad recognized a note of curiosity in the words. It wasn't that the dead man was completely monotone, it was only that he spoke so softly and reasonably that you often forgot he had personal emotions.

"I was involved in a prior task," Castiel explained.

"What was that?"

"There is a war in heaven," Castiel told him, inclining his head ever so slightly. "Not unlike the one that was here in this vicinity. Two factions, alike in ambition, strive for the victory of their regime. I lead the less powerful."

Conrad snorted. Typical. Find out there's a heaven and it turns out they're too busy taking pot shots at each other to do anybody any good. No wonder the planet wasn't getting any heavenly FEMA the last couple years. The zombie, though, he seemed to be thinking along different lines.

"All by yourself?" he asked.

"I have lieutenants."

"But other than that, just you," the dead man mused. "That's a lot of responsibility for one man."

"I am not a man," Castiel replied, a little reproachful. "I'm an angel."

"And so are your opponents," the zombie countered mildly.

"Of course," Castiel said. He sounded distinctly nonplussed, and he snuck a glance at Conrad, as if he was trying to tell whether some joke was flying over his head. Conrad avoided his gaze.

"So," the zombie carried on, leaning back somewhat, "you received a call for help, and you came running just in time to find the whole area empty of human life. What were they expecting to need your help for?"

Castiel blinked. "Well they heard the horn and naturally suspected that additional soldiers were being summoned."

"Naturally?" Conrad cut in, frowning. "Maybe you don't know this, but human armies haven't used horns for at least a century."

Castiel shrugged, a gesture that looked stilted on his usually still shoulders. "Robert already looked into the Wild Hunt, I understand. It yielded no results."

Conrad was about to asked what a wild hunt was when Hanna's voice broke into the web of conversation.

"Did you say horn?" Hanna asked, eyes bright in the doorway. "Like a bugle type thing?"

"Yes," Castiel said, with a hint of impatience. "Like a bugle type thing."

Hanna rubbed his hands together with old fashioned villainous glee. There was a manic brightness about him that Conrad had come to recognize as a sign of terrible things to come. "Guess what guys? I think I know what our mystery abduction is."

TBC

Chapter Text

12 Months After the Treaty

(May)

Sioux Falls, South Dakota

In the beautiful old house at the center of the junk yard, Hanna had thrown the windows open to let some moonlight in. The heavy tome he'd lugged away from the shelves was spread open on the desk he'd pushed into the faint light, and he'd rigged up a few lanterns so that they spent more of their illumination on the page than glaring into people's eyes. Gilt illustrations in the margins glowed underneath his fingers.

"Behold!" he said, stabbing at one particular illustration.

Conrad leaned in along with everybody else. The drawing wasn't much compared to some of the glittering things Hanna had flipped past, but it was specific in a way that other drawing hadn't been—there was something concrete here where there had only been fantasy before. The twirls of ink marked out a primitive trumpet of some kind in a strange pale color, not quite like anything Conrad had ever seen.

"Gabriel's Horn," Hanna said. "The ultimate summoner's tool for the angel on the go."

"Gabriel," Dean repeated. He sounded unhappy, for some reason, as if the name brought up more than he would care to be reminded of. Conrad supposed that if you ran in angelic circles for long enough you might actually meet some big names. He wished he could ask.

Castiel made a noise low in his throat that could have been mistaken for a machine grinding a gear. "That is a powerful artifact," he murmured. "We have employed the spell once or twice on the battlefield, but the artifact itself has been lost for most of history."

"Isn't it supposed to be Gabriel's horn of truth?" Dean asked, squinting down at the page. He was a step behind Conrad, and so when he leaned in closer his cheek was only inches from Conrad's, his perfect lips twisted into a frown. Conrad froze down to the smallest muscle.

Hanna tapped the page idly. "That could be a colloquial thing, I guess? I mean, the horn can summon anything. Like, anything? Objects, metaphors, ideas…"

"In the field," Castiel said, "the spell calls angels to rally. It is difficult to obtain the ingredients and very few of us have ever known how to perform it, but after we lost the horn itself…"

"How do you lose something like that?" Conrad asked. "Isn't it supposed to be infinite, or something?"

On the other side of the desk, Castiel looked pained. "My brother," he said, "was not a very skilled housekeeper."

Beside him, quietly observing the scene, Conrad could see the zombie flash a rare smile.

"Well," Hanna said, spinning the book around for everyone else to see, "in any case I think this is what your guys were hearing. It's about the only thing powerful enough to move that many bodies without affecting the surroundings—kills people, leaves buildings standing sort of thing. Whoever has the horn must be interested in the singer auto faction coming out on top, huh?"

Dean and Castiel exchanged a pained look.

"I guess," Dean started, "at this point, there's a couple other thing you ought to know about the situation here in Sioux Falls."

Instead of just explaining what the hell he had meant by that, because apparently being cryptic was everybody's favorite hobby around here, Dean walked them all out to the edge of the compound where the auto shop's perimeter was run round with that overgrown fence. They stood in an uneasy half circle around a patch of wall where Dean had stopped and started to pull the brush away, his audience glancing occasionally over their shoulders.

"Here," Dean said, at last, and pulled back a branch.

In a dark stain that Conrad was afraid to contemplate too deeply, someone had smeared a circular sigil.

"Awright," Worth said, breaking the silence that had hung over him for hours, "y' better start talkin' pronto 'cause I'm gearin' up ter jump to some pretty nasty conclusions, and you ain't gonna like where that leads."

Castiel put his hand on the faded surface of the graffiti, carefully, like he was pressing down on the clicker of one of those shock pens that middle-school kids love so much. "You remember that I mentioned a war in heaven," he said.

"No," Worth snarled, at the same time that Hanna, Conrad, and the zombie all promptly replied, "yes."

"I have been leading one faction," Castiel continued. "The conflict is largely one of ideological disputes which are irrelevant at the moment. I came to Dean for assistance shortly after Pestilence's work reached the human populace, and in return for my help establishing this settlement he has been providing my siblings protection and respite."

"So… this is an angel refugee camp," Hanna said. He stepped closer to the sigil, probably trying to memorize its loops and curves for future use.

"Field hospital," Dean replied, with a hunched little shrug. "Bring 'em in, close up the gates, heal 'em up and ship 'em out again. They'll do us a little fetch and carry work here and there when we need, sometimes they'll help us stretch the rations."

"It's not enough," Castiel said. His voice betrayed no real emotion, but the words themselves rang ominous in the evening. "We lack the power to do more than hold our lines against Raphael, and the stalemate grows more costly with each passing encounter."

"About the time our street level civil war went cold," Dean carried on, "angels stopped showing up at the gates. Castiel was down here with me, looking into the disappearances, when we got word they were sending a couple wounded scouts in for patch up. Nobody ever showed. Angel HQ says they dropped off radio contact right when they should have landed here and they haven't called in again since."

"Many times my brothers have to stop and pick up bodies before they can manifest here," Castiel said, taking his hand off the sigil. "Most of our conflicts occur on a meta-corporeal plane, and so our soldiers have no immediate need of human bodies on the field. It is in the place between acquiring a host and arriving at Dean's that my brothers are most vulnerable."

"Yesterday we were supposed to get a battalion," Dean said.

"Garrison," Castiel corrected.

"Whatever. We were supposed to get an assload of angels yesterday because some major battle went, like, battle of the bulge ugly and Cas' people had to make like some tough customers and get going. We only got about half of them."

"They had been ambushed," Castiel said. He looked pained, heavy features frozen into a rictus of tension. "It must have been Raphael, but where they received the strength to pursue our retreat in light of their casualties and our allies assistance remains a mystery."

"Cas' lieutenant says that the ones who made it through were just past the battle line in Sioux Falls proper when the attack came. I mean, they were just on the other side of the street where all those people disappeared. Mills' people lay down wards pretty much wherever they go, so me and Cas were lookin' over the ones on that street when we ran into your vampire," Dean explained, looking at Hanna.

"His vampire?" Conrad sputtered. He was ignored.

"The sigil," Doc Worth interjected, apparently not satisfied.

"Half-finished banishing circle," Dean said. "There's more down the line. A couple to keep out angels that aren't packed in a protective meat suit, some obscuring runes, can we move on? Ask Hanna about it later."

"Actually," Hanna said, scooching closer to the grisly drawing, "I don't know much of anything about angels. Bondye taught me a couple tricks for demons but…"

Dean's expression flickered for a moment and then settled on mirthless and smiling. "Well that's typical," he said, a little spiteful, "god forbid we catch a break for once."

Castiel gave him a sharp look, but it was Hanna who actually reached out for him. Hanna was so tiny in comparison that it was almost funny to see him reach up and punch Dean in the shoulder, hard enough that Dean grabbed the arm and jerked back. Hanna grinned. After a moment, the hunter's scowl dropped into a vague affectation of coolness.

"We'll do what we can," Hanna said. "No man left behind, right?"

Dean looked away, crossed his arms. "Sure," he said. "Right."

-A-

Castiel took the doctor to the medical ward, later that night. The majority of Dean's people lived now in the houses beyond Bobby's property, close enough that they could evacuate to the protection of his fence should some angelic force threaten their safety. Castiel had told them that was unnecessary, that no angel would stoop to the slaughter of humans. He was glad now that they hadn't listened. The medical area was in one of those houses, emptied out and papered down as much as possible given resources.

"So whatcha got fer me?" the doctor asked, lighting up a cigarette as he spoke.

"I don't have anything for you," Castiel replied. Colloquialisms were distracting at the best of time, and this human seemed to be made of nothing but.

"Med specs," the doctor clarified, cigarette between teeth. "What's the layout, what kinda tools am I workin' with? Who's dyin'a what?"

Castiel walked faster. He had grown somewhat more patient with mundane methods of locomotion in the last two years, but he wished that people would just let him spacially shift them without complaining ad nauseam about their "organs" feeling "weird". "What I meant was that this is not my camp. I do not actually know the details of the medical area."

"Ah," the doctor said, wisely. "Yer on babysittin' duty."

"I could be of much more immediate assistance to your friend the witch," Castiel grated out.

"Hanna'll ask for ya when he needs ya," the doctor said. "I hear patience is a virtue."

"I have ample patience," Castiel snapped.

The doctor made a soft sound as if he had solved some small equation. "You wanna get back to the action," he said. "Yer all amped and ready ter fight and they got ya here guiding the tours while there's a big brawl goin' on right overhead."

"My brothers need me," Castiel said. Some part of him edged away from Doctor Worth's scrutiny.

"Sure, sure."

That tone of voice did not bode well. Castiel shot a look at the doctor, who carelessly maintained the pace that Castiel had pushed himself to set. If he only looked with human eyes at the road ahead, it was almost like walking beside Sam again. Deep inside his vessel, in the places that Jimmy Novac would have been more familiar with before he vacated the body, something produced sudden and heavy pain. Castiel suspected it was not an organ. All his organs were in pristine condition.

"I think you're under the impression that we are alike in some way," he said, not bothering to disguise the distaste in that sentiment.

"Didn' say that."

Castiel scowled. "I've been on too many battle fields," he said. "If I never had to lead another army, I would be satisfied."

"An' yet," the doctor sighed, "ya keep gettin' into fights, don't ya?"

Castiel stopped cold. "You know nothing about me," he said. He tried to ignore the fact that his hand was scrabbling at the sheath of his blade.

A faint ringing shifted through the air, cutting off Worth's reply. The ringing multiplied, peal after peal of small bells building into something that jangled the nerves deep underneath the human subconscious.

"Alarm," Castiel said. "Wait here."

"The hell I—"

Castiel blinked, and the world he opened his eyes onto was utterly altered. Underneath the Singer Auto sign, between two groups of humans engaged in frantic conversation, he reached out and put a hand on Dean's shoulder.

"Holy shit," Dean snarled, spinning like a leaf in a hurricane. "Cas you gotta stop doing that."

"Where's the trouble?" Castiel asked.

Dean nodded towards the gate, still locked and soundly warded. "Unidentified angel activity on the other side. They've got bodies but they don't know the passcodes—we thought maybe some of your junior officers panicked and retreated without authorization—"

"My brothers would never endanger their comrades that way," Castiel dismissed, attention already focused on the figures dimly visible beyond the gate.

"Yeah," Dean said, "I was hoping you wouldn't say that."

The figures beyond were human, to all visual perception. Their shadowed forms observed the necessary criteria—one head, two legs, no particular bioluminescence or other mutations to betray them—but the wings…

Wings are not perceivable with human eyes. There is much of an angel that human eyes cannot perceive. Human eyes do not observe the way that gravity forms potholes in the shape of space, either, or the way that time stretches like elastic as you rise up off the surface of the earth. There are things with mass but no shape, shape but no mass—there are things in angels that bend light as it shoots through the void, things that the simple rods and cones of organic eyes cannot possibly record.

Dean has told him that he's a snob. Dean is most likely jealous of his superior senses, which is only to be expected.

The figures beyond the gate crackled and flashed in the senses drifting outside of his vessel. They were most certainly angels, but they weren't any angels that he had spoken with before. His teeth ground together entirely of their own accord. A general has to know the soldiers under his command—if these were his brothers and sisters, he should have recognized at least one of them.

"I'm going out," he said.

"No," Dean snapped immediately. "Hell no. Once you clear the wards we can't let you back in until all that trash is off the lawn."

"I'll clean off the lawn, then."

"No," Dean repeated. "There's a dozen of 'em out there and I don't care what kinda General Kilgore you think you are these days, you can't take them all on at once."

"Cannons on my signal," Castiel said, and then he left Dean swearing and stomping behind him.

The world beyond the Singer property had a particular freshness to it. He had described it to Dean once as a breeze, as if the sigils on the gates formed a room full of stale air only slightly mitigated by occasional entrances and exits. It would have been easier to appreciate the open night in front of him if there hadn't been a squad of Raphael's kin unsheathing their weapons out there as well.

"Castiel," the foremost of them said, nodding slightly. "We did not expect you."

"You don't expect a lot of things," Castiel replied, warily.

The foremost angel, whose vessel had beautiful pale eyes, tilted his head. "Have you come to lecture us about free will, General?"

"If you'll listen. It's never too late," Castiel said, stepping back. "You have always had a choice."

The angel's expression soured. "Raphael warned us about all your big speeches."

Castiel narrowed his eyes. "That was not a big speech."

The angel drew his blade, the tip glittering in the broken moonlight. "No more distractions," he said. "Surrender now and Raphael will extend you the mercy due to a brother."

Ah well. Castiel took one more step backwards, right up to the edge of the gate, and said, "I don't think so, camel-fucker."

From somewhere on the other side of the fence a voice that sounded suspiciously like Dean's shouted, "Camel fucker?"

The angel's eyes flashed murderous. He flicked out his sword and dove at Castiel, charging clumsily with the legs he had clearly only recently acquired. He would have acclimated quickly enough, if he had had a chance—instead, Castiel slipped just slightly to the side, leaving the sword's broad point to sink through the plywood nailed across the fence. A light flared up underneath it, and abruptly Castiel's myriad of hovering senses went white with static.

Angels are not corporeal creatures. They have forms, to a degree, but their nature is more akin to a complex wavelength than a system of organs and chemicals. They have their own senses. These footsoldiers appeared to be unfamiliar with the organic input and output of animal sensory communication, whereas Castiel had been wearing this particular vessel for years with almost no interruption to speak of.

The sigil that had just gone on line was a sort of ethereal concussion grenade. A flashbang.

While Raphael's angels were staggering under the weight of static, desperately trying to filter their flesh senses from their metaphysical ones, Castiel was ducking between them, slashing left and right with the blade he never took off anymore. The one with the beautiful eyes went down. For a split second between the stab and the collapse, Castiel thought he could see a flicker of the host underneath.

Not for the first time, he regretted the loss of so many human lives in a conflict that they had no part in. If only there was some way to exorcise an angelic possession—but no, the bonds of consent made that impossible.

By the time the whiteout had faded, Castiel was splattered with blood and the ozone smell of burnt wings. The gate creaked open, hesitantly, and then Dean was standing at his side surveying the damage. A muscle in his jaw worked desperately. Castiel was more than aware that Dean could not care less about the death toll of angels in this endless civil war, but each human life carried a magnitude of weight that would have been beyond Castiel's comprehension before his own losses began to tally up.

"It isn't your fault," he said.

Dean glanced down at the blade still in Castiel's hand, still dripping a slow patter. "If I hadn't volunteered Mills' place as a med-tent," he said, "none of these bastards would have bothered picking up vessels."

Castiel stiffened. "If you're having second thoughts about our alliance—"

"Oh spare me Cas," Dean said, tiredly, "I'm your friend, I'm not just gonna not help you."

Castiel said nothing. There were any number of sentiments that might have been appropriate for the moment, but he was wary of accidentally stumbling on something "touchy-feely" while Dean was in one of his melancholy moods. Sam, he thought, could perhaps have navigated it. He would have tried at least. But Sam was long gone now.

"Alliance," Dean scoffed, just a little more than under his breath.

"I'm worried," Castiel said, instead. "They shouldn't have been able to come here. My lieutenants are engaging them on a disparate plane right now, they shouldn't have enough power to spare to take on our wards."

Dean pursed his lips, looking down at the bodies. "Hey, do dead angels leave corpses?"

"Mostly they leave remnants of discharged energy, but yes. Some grace remains."

"Great. So tell me, how come these dicks didn't leave any scorch marks?"

Castiel knelt at the shoulder of a fallen angel. The dirt was clear of burns, empty and unmarked where there ought to have been a swooping imprint of wings. By all rights they should have spread so thickly across the ground that the earth below was invisible, this many fallen in such close proximity. Carefully, Castiel took hold of a shoulder and lifted it up, squinting at the shadows underneath. A faint web of scorches spread from the scapula, burnt into the fabric of the shirt as well as the ground below.

"There is definitely a corpse," Castiel noted, after a moment. "They left behind a decayed grace, that couldn't happen unless they were dead."

"But no wings."

"No wings," Castiel agreed. "I'm not fond of the implications here."

"Implications?" said a new voice, from only a little ways behind them.

Castiel and Dean turned, both reaching for their weapons in what was probably a defensive reaction so deeply ingrained by now that it meant nothing substantial. A few steps away the small witch was standing, waving one hand. The hand wave could have meant any number of things, but most likely it was a belated greeting. Castiel relaxed marginally.

"Sorry," Hanna said, cheerfully, "chronic eavesdropper. What's the implication here?"

Castiel considered him for a long moment. He had put up with shadier characters than this one at Dean's behest, but he disliked the intrusion. He and Dean had been through ordeal after ordeal together, they had developed a "rapport", if you will. Hanna Falk Cross was not one of them. Castiel looked to Dean to gauge his reaction, but the hunter seemed to share none of his muted hostility.

"These are angels," Castiel explained, turning pointedly away from the witch, "but they're not angels. They've changed, somehow."

"Mutated," Hanna suggested brightly.

"Mutated," Castiel allowed. "A power increase of some kind. I cannot begin to speculate on the mechanics, but the timing…"

Dean drew a sharp breath. "You think it's the horn."

"I think it's the horn," Castiel said, "and I think it's the other half of your town."

-A-

"You seem very tired."

Castiel looked away from the field, dusty and golden in the low spring sunlight. He had been keeping vigil for hours now, since their party had slunk back to the Singer auto shop in worse condition than they had left it. Out of all of them, he needed the least recuperative allotment.

He turned his attention to the zombie in the doorway. No, he corrected himself, for the sake of accuracy. The abomination was the least taxed in terms of recuperation.

"I will manage," the angel replied, warily.

The zombie regarded him with unblinking bright eyes. His face was suspended in a perpetually thoughtful, perhaps indulgent, look of dull interest. Castiel found this comforting and unnerving all at once. He had been on earth for a number of years now and he had acclimated somewhat to the cues of human facial expression, after a grueling period of trial and error. He had come to rely on them, even. At times it was the only way to gain any insight into Dean's complex mental processes. But the placid expression on the corpse recalled Castiel's angelic siblings, his home, and the place from which he had come.

"I'm sure you will," the zombie replied. "But angels, if you'll pardon the assumption, don't seem like they ought to get tired."

Castiel tensed.

"I'm a bit concerned for you," the zombie went on.

"Your concern is not necessary," Castiel growled, "I'll protect this household as well today as I did the day before, and the day before that."

The zombie shook his head, just slightly, and stepped out of the doorway. He moved with an inhuman grace, stopping just a hand's length away from Castiel. He was taller, by a couple of inches. Castiel found this fact somewhat chafing, and then the chafing itself bewildering, and the the bewilderment just another impossible aspect of his continued existence.

"They push you hard," the zombie observed, "and I don't think they realize how hard. Are angels like cats, Castiel?"

Castiel squinted. "Angels and cats are not at all—"

"I mean," the dead man clarified. "That cats instinctually hide their pain. You can never tell how much a cat is actually suffering because they'd rather exacerbate their injuries than display discomfort."

"I am a soldier," Castiel explained, for the thousandth time. He felt as if he should have it tattooed across his chest the way the Winchesters have their wards. It would save him a number of unnecessary mouth movements. "I was designed to endure discomfort."

The placid look on the dark green skin broke into an expression that Castiel recognized as a kind of sadness, although the particulars of it escaped him. He didn't know this face well enough yet—he wished, for a moment, that he did.

"I've decided," the zombie said, at last, "that I'm going to worry about you. Nobody else around here seems to be doing it."

"I don't need to be worried about," Castiel replied, frustrated by the relentless line of conversation. "My capacity for—"

"Your capacity for martyrdom, yes, I'm sure. I understand it runs in your religions."

Castiel clenched his fists. "You have your own people to guard," he pointed out. "The night walker and the witch, they are your concern. I will guard my people and you should do the same."

The sad look didn't shift. Slowly, as if he was waiting for the snarl of a wild animal, the zombie stretched out his hand and placed it, palm cupping, over the line of Castiel's jaw. His skin was as soft and dry as the worn leather gloves that usually covered it.

"Now you're my people too," he said, simply. "Take a break, let me take over the watch, for a while."

-A-

Castiel found the small witch furiously engaging with a chant in the living room, legs crossed into a surprisingly accurate lotus position. The words were a slapdash amalgamation of horribly pronounced Sumerian and marginally more acceptable Latin. It had the general sound of an invocation, maybe a simple messaging to a creature elsewhere. Castiel watch silently for a moment as Hanna wrapped up his spell, the thin crackle of potency around his hands and eyes dissipating into mundane air.

"Who are you summoning?" he asked, at length.

Hanna's chin snapped up, half a second of suspicion on his aura before it settled into his usual pastel easiness. An aura isn't really made up of colors at all, but like every other angel before him, he'd had to resort to visual metaphors when conveying the impressions to humans.

"You were pretty interested in Bondye, as I heard," Hanna said. "And I don't know bumpkiss about angels."

Castiel drew himself up straighter. "You shared the location of our safe house with an unknown quantity?"

Hanna blinked. "Chill man," he said, "Bondye is a standup guy. Anyway, he'll just chat me back up if he knows anything, it's not like he can pop in and out of places whenever he wants the way you do."

The witch was incredibly naïve for even a former paranormal investigator, a job for which that was a prerequisite. "It's not relevant anyway," Castiel decided, at last, "since the compound is warded efficiently enough for anything I've ever encountered."

"See," Hanna said, "you got your panties in a twist for nothing."

Castiel squinted at him. "My vessel did not possess—"

At that moment Dean Winchester swung into the room, clapping a hand over Castiel's mouth before the angel had even fully registered his proximity. "Whoa," Dean said, "let's not have that discussion again."

Castiel peeled the hand away from his mouth with as much delicacy as he could manage. "Dean, I've told you before, it is not morally objectionable for you to own lingerie in the style typically marketed to women, there—"

The hand slapped back down again, this time with much more force. "Ahaha," Dean tittered, "crazy angels, right? Totally woohoo." He made a twisting motion with his free hand, somewhere in the vicinity of his own temple.

Castiel shot him a narrow look, but left it at that. He had made his peace with Dean's manhandling tendencies long ago. Hanna, watching the proceedings with some amusement, looked as though he would have liked to interject at that point, if it hadn't been for the doorbell. They all paused, staring towards the front door.

"I guess… I'll get it," Dean said, finally letting go of Castiel's face. The freed hand slipped down to the small gun in his jacket.

As he sidled towards the door, Castiel turned back to Hanna and whispered, "I am not 'woohoo'."

Hanna grinned. "Panties?"

"He claimed they belonged to a girlfriend. I'm fairly certain he was lying."

There was a shuffle at the door, and then Dean called out, "Hanna, who the fuck did you let through the gate?"

Hanna's eyes went wide.

Dean stepped through the archway again with his hand on the shoulder of a stranger. The stranger was unremarkable to any of the senses of Castiel's vessel—a respectable height, dark skinned, unarmed—but to Castiel's own senses it was as if a light display had gone off with no warning, bright and wildly changeable flashing and swirling. He took a step backwards, a sudden breath thumping out of his lungs.

"Cas?" Dean asked. His grip on the stranger grew viselike.

"You're not an angel," Castiel managed, taking deep breaths into his borrowed lungs. There were no wings, not even the mutant suggestion of wings.

"No," the stranger replied placidly.

"I told you," Hanna was saying, but Castiel simply tuned him out.

The stranger—certainly the same Bondye Hanna had spoken to moments before—was regarding him with a deep softness, regret or perhaps pity on his dark features. Other senses were adjusting to the brightness, and as it faded there seemed to be nothing underneath.

"And what are you?" Bondye asked, contemplative, examining Castiel as one might examine an unfamiliar breed of animal.

"I am an angel of the Lord," Castiel replied automatically.

"Maybe you are," Bondye said. "But anyways, that wasn't what I asked."

Dean Winchester, blessed creature, stepped in at that point. "Look," the hunter said, "if he doesn't want to tell you his name he doesn't have to."

Bondye nodded amiably. "He sure doesn't owe me anything. So, what can I help you boys with?"

"Not much," Dean groused, "if you don't even believe in angels."

Bondye spread his hands, pale palms up. "Oh, I believe alright. You'd be hard pressed to find someone who believes more, as a matter of fact. Tell me what's happened here."

So they told him. Or rather, Dean and Hanna told him. Castiel only watched him, trying to place him in the model of any known species extinct or existent. By the end of the conversation the best he'd been able to come up with was extraterrestrial, which would explain many things but not quite enough. The walls of the room had taken on a faint radioactive glow. A vase in the corner underneath a stack of old papers was humming a perfect unbroken G flat.

Bondye picked up a silver letter opener, flipping it over in his clay-stained fingers absently. "Riddle me this, boys. What do angels protect?"

"God?" Hanna guessed.

"Their own asses," Dean muttered.

Castiel would have liked to respond to that, but they wouldn't benefit from yet another pointless sideshow in front of outsiders, particularly not at this stage in the crisis.

"They protect whatever they're asked to protect," Castiel said, staring pointedly Dean.

Bondye pointed at Castiel, a snap of the wrist so fast that Castiel almost drew his sword. "True," the man said, "but also wrong. Angels protect humans. Or at least, that was their marching order, before the big thanksgiving dinner fiasco."

"Thanksgiving?" Castiel echoed.

"Your brothers knocked the turkey off the table," Bondye said. "Cranberry sauce all over the floor. Raphael singing passive aggressive karaoke in the corner."

"What—" Castiel started, but Bondye carried on serenely over him.

"Riddle part two," the stranger said. "What do demons want?"

"Souls," Hanna answered, instantly.

"Right," Bondye said. "And Castiel knows why."

Hanna and Dean turned to him. Dean's face was blank, but there was a lightning storm of terror racing through him, underneath that. Dean would expect the worst, because Dean always expected the worst. It was such an innocuous statement to make, it could mean anything, and yet the way that Bondye had looked at him as he said it had such a crushing weight of certainty. Not even accusation. Accusation, maybe, Castiel would have known how to handle.

So Castiel had spoken with a demon once. He'd been to hell twice: once as an invading agent, many years ago, and then again as a broker of an alliance at the beginning of his civil war. He had been searching for power. Hell had it in spades.

"Human souls," he said, "are made of energy. They can be used as an energy source on a massive scale."

"And you didn't think that was something you should tell us?" Dean demanded. "Have you been using my people's souls this whole time?"

"It doesn't work like that," Castiel said, roughly. "Souls are inextricably tied to bodies. Even if I wanted to use a living soul as power, I would have to access it through the body. I would need permission to touch it."

"So that's all that's stopping you, then?"

Castiel said nothing. He wanted to say—he desperately wanted to say—that he would never betray Dean's trust in that way. He was more than aware of how Dean would see such a thing. But the truth is, if such a thing were possible, he wasn't sure what he would do. He hoped he would have asked Dean first, at least. He feared that he would not have.

"Guys," Hanna cut in urgently, "guys, slow down here. Cas hasn't done anything to anybody, right Cas?"

Castiel nodded, uncertain.

"Maybe he should have told you," Hanna continued, "but it's in the past and you know now. The real question is what we're going to do with this knowledge. Cas, what exactly can angels do with souls?"

"Miracles," Castiel replied, simply. "Altering time. Healing impossible wounds. Altering matter itself."

"Winning wars," Dean finished.

"And the guys from Sioux Falls," Hanna said. "The ones who disappeared."

"A test run," Castiel said, with dawning certainty. "The horn can summon anything but it's only an instrument. They must have tried to call souls back to themselves and gotten entire humans."

Hanna rocked back on his heels, which Castiel noticed were painted with crude acrylic flames. "I don't understand that. Heaven is full of dead people, right? I mean. There is a heaven, obviously. Why not just use what you've got?"

Castiel smiled. It was an expression that took some effort. "My brothers have fought them to a standstill at the vault of heaven."

Dean made a gruff noise. "Cas's side took the advantage about a year ago," he said. "That was before Sioux Falls turned into a war zone."

It had been a brutal turn in the tides when they lost it, in fact. They had to give up their holdings all throughout creation, and even now his brothers were struggling to maintain the stalemate at the vault. How many had died in just the course of this conversation? He drew back from the calculation.

"The missing people must still be alive," Hanna was saying, "or else they would just end up in heaven, and they're no use there. Would they give permission?"

Dean scowled. "They might. And angels aren't particularly picky about what they have to do to change your mind about it, if you catch my drift."

"So," Hanna said.

"So," Dean replied.

They both stared fixedly on the same patch of carpet between them.

Castiel considered the carpet briefly, and summarily disregarded it. The carpet had no answers. If his enemies had a power that he didn't, there were only two ways to approach the situation. One: he could acquire the same power. Dean would never agree, but he didn't necessarily have to ask Dean's permission. Hell was still there, below them, as full of souls and as business-minded as ever. He could make a deal. Who would stop him? Who could possibly stop him?

Two: he could cut them off from the source of their power.

"A raid," he said. Three sets of eyes looked at him. "Raphael and his kin have always underestimated humans. That's how we gained the advantage a year ago, and it's how we'll regain it now."

Dean nodded, slowly. Dean carried deep scars, in places that no medicine could reach. Castiel felt a very human urge to sigh in relief roll through his vessel, looking at the certainty seeping back into Dean's body. Of course Dean had been thinking the same thing, considering the same options. He wasn't stupid. What had he thought Castiel would choose?

"Raphael won't know what hit him," Dean said, grim but satisfied.

There was a rustle as Bondye sat up from the desk he had been leaning against, adjusting his hat and collar as he went. "Maybe I shouldn't have come," he said, in a voice that was oddly pained for someone who had just contributed to such a powerful shift in the winds.

"Why?" Hanna asked. His eyes were worried, passing over the body of the man (creature?) as if checking for wounds.

Bondye shook his head. "I thought…" he trailed off.

Dean snorted. "Thought angels were supposed to be the good guys? Surprise, join the club. Turns out they're bastards."

"Oh no," Bondye said, with a look of perfect sadness, "I always knew that."

He reached out to pat Hanna on the shoulder, tipped his hat to Dean, and then made his way to the door without glancing even once in Castiel's direction. His whole existence shimmered like an oil slick. To hell with all the social niceties Dean was so serious about. Castiel followed him to the door, moving quickly over the wrinkled carpet. He grabbed the man's arm.

"What are you?" Castiel asked.

Bondye looked down at the hand on him and gently shook it off. It was a fragile motion. "Story teller," he shrugged. "Tried being a story writer once but, well, writing is hard. Much better to just be a teller."

"That wasn't what I asked," Castiel said, narrowing his eyes.

"Goodbye Castiel," Bondye said, averting his gaze. "I don't figure you'll see me again."

The man slipped out the front door and started down the road, boots kicking up faint dust as he went. He disappeared into a field of junked cars, and Castiel lost track of him entirely.

"Alright," Dean snapped, somewhere behind him, "so what the hell was that."

-A-

In the end neither Conrad nor Castiel could go with the raiding party. The great weakness of Raphael was that he could barely think of human beings as pawns. They were more like ammunition, lumber, some tedious but eventually necessary supply for the real actors of the war. Humans could sneak into a holding pen for humans, and Raphael's kin would be almost incapable of telling one group from another. In small task forces, measured out against the dwindling number of captives, they would not even notice a shift in the size of their resources until it was too late. And then - then Castiel could finally take up the reins again.

In the mean time, while they hovered in uneasy silence on the porch of Robert Singer's house, they waited for a signal.

Dean had gone. Dean wouldn't know how to lead from an armchair if someone had tied him down to it. But then, Dean had never been much of a leader. The sheriff was a leader, she could direct from the base of operations when it served her best, but Dean had never known how to do anything without throwing himself into it bodily. He would have made a good sergeant, in another time.

Conrad was perched in a rocking chair near the railing, as if ready to launch up from it at the slightest provocation. He had been quiet for most of the evening, but some flickering of light on the horizon made him flinch, and sigh, and ask, "What's the point of a doctor who spends the whole battle on the front lines?"

Castiel considered this. "In situations with a shortage of fighters," he said, slowly, "there might be a miniscule advantage to gambling in that way. But with any significant likelihood of future battles, it would be a much better investment to hold back sufficiently skilled soldiers."

Conrad looked askance at him. "You try telling Worth that," he said. "Maybe he'll listen to somebody who's not me."

It was not difficult to see that the bond between the human doctor and the vampire was a tangled landmine. He could sympathize. Befriending beings of brief and terrible lifespans was a trial in itself, all subsequent trauma and error notwithstanding.

"How old are you?" Castiel asked.

Conrad raised his eyebrows, and then after a second, replied, "Er. About 28. Why?"

Not so much the same at all, then. Still, there was a cold and dangerous road ahead of any immortal, particularly one so young. Castiel himself had only infrequently considered Dean's inevitable death - usually, in fact, in an immediate and present sense. Castiel stared out over the field, unseeing. In truth, he had only once or twice considered the distant specter of Dean's death. Old age, or a routine hunting wound. An aneurism. Kidney failure. He had always vaguely assumed, as angels often assume, that the only thing standing between a human and immortality was active malevolence. And yet, by its very nature human life was a scalding finite thing.

"When they die," Castiel said, "I wonder what we will do."

Conrad nervously glanced away, probably avoiding eye contact, but Castiel was not looking at him anyway. Castiel was looking through him. One of an angel's senses was a sense of temporal unfolding - like light entering the human retina, distance rendered events smaller and indistinct. The past was easier, one only needed to match one's own memories up against the fuzzy impressions of bygone things to render out the truth. The future, by contrast, was as changeable and mysterious as the clouds. Looking at Conrad, in his tense position with his hand tapping the arm rest, Castiel saw a distant skyline of death.

"Let's not do this tonight," Conrad said, finally.

Castiel returned his attention to the horizon, where a signal would come sooner or later. If he lost this battle with Heaven, he and all his kin would fall or die. He imagined a future here in this town, with Dean and with his siblings, all under the bright and terrible watch of Death. He imagined a future in which Dean was lost behind the barricades in Heaven, in which he himself was barred from entry. One cannot look at the specter of their own future any more than a human can observe his own retinas. In this way, corporeal and incorporeal were at the same inescapable disadvantage.

"No," Castiel agreed. "Not tonight."

END