Fic: Feast Of All Saints, Chapter One

[oselle]

Title: Feast Of All Saints, Chapter 1 of 2
Genre: Slash, AU based upon Episode 5:04, "The End"
Pairings: Dean/Castiel, Dean/OFC, Castiel/OFC
Principals: Future!Dean, Future!Castiel
Rating: NC-17
Warnings: Sex, language, gore, angst, no Sam
Spoilers: For SPN Episode 5:04
Word Count: ~11,500 for Part 1
Disclaimer: The Winchesters and all canon characters are the intellectual property of their creators. All original characters are mine. No money was made or sought in the writing of this story.
Summary: It's 2015 and the world's gone to hell in the Croatoan apocalypse. Separated from their group of virus survivors, Dean and his erstwhile guardian angel find themselves stranded in Appalachia. A sequel to The Shame Of It All and Once, could be considered the third part of a trilogy with those stories (but this one can probably stand alone). Those other two stories were in the PG range, so please take note of the rating and pairings for this one.

Dedicated to catsbycat who gave me the best-ever post-apoc Dean picture (thereby helping to inspire this story) and to baylorsr who feeds my addiction with freshly TiVod episodes that let me enjoy Dean's thigh holster again and again. And again.



Feast Of All Saints, Chapter One

When Cass woke it was nearly dawn and he'd been dreaming and was grateful to be awake. Outside the bare tree branches were black against a sky that was pale and wintry though it was not yet winter. He sat up in the bed and the room was cold and he rubbed his face.

In the dream he'd gone down to hell again and brought Dean up through the pits and cities and plains of hell. All around them the infernal engines turning and turning. The forsaken screamed and cursed and begged but Dean never said a word. This was a dream and a memory also. In those days he had been Castiel, who knew the light of heaven and the power of grace and the blessed freedom of loving God alone.

* * *

He found Dean sitting alone in the kitchen. The tall windows behind him showed a view of the back garden and the trees and the mountains beyond all shrouded in mist and above them a violet sky that promised early snow. This house had been built for someone very rich and it would be a good place to spend the winter but there were maps spread out on the table and Cass looked from the maps to Dean and said, "Are we leaving?"

Dean glanced up at him and then back at the maps "We're sitting ducks here. You know we can't stay in one place too long."

"We've only been here a week."

Dean didn't look at him. "What's the matter, you getting used to sleeping in a bed?"

"Maybe some of the others want to stay."

"Well, they can stay if they want. And when the crotes or looters or QC show up I hope it'll have been worth it."

"We couldn't handle looters or crotes?"

"Frank was on lookout in the attic yesterday and saw movement down on the state route. Trucks, human transport probably. That means Quarantine Control. You wanna try and handle that?"

Cass looked away to the encircling hills. "No one ever found this place before we did."

Dean shook his head. "It's time to go. I'm not gonna get put in a cage and cooked. Or starve in one of their goddamn camps." He stood up and pushed back the chair with his knees and started folding the maps. "We should finish packing up. Be on the road by tomorrow before it starts snowing."

Cass stood there and watched him and after a moment Dean stopped and looked at him. "What?"

"It's almost winter and there's food and shelter here. These people are tired, Dean."

"Everyone is tired. The whole fucking world is tired. You want to be tired or dead?" He brushed past Cass. "Get the others up."

* * *

He went to the cellar to make one last sweep of the place. There were eleven of them in the group and every one of them had scavenged the house so most of the things that could be of any use had already been packed. He didn't know why he'd come down here. He stood at the foot of the stairs and swept his flashlight around. The owner had built a wine cellar here of stone like some monk's cell and closed off by a baronial oak door fitted with a polished brass handle and hinges. No expense spared. The brass handle glinted warmly in the flashlight's beam and Cass crossed the cellar and opened the door. Whoever had lived here before the virus had either never stocked the cellar or had gotten back in time to salvage his collection because from floor to ceiling the wooden cradles were empty.

He stood there and looked at the empty shelves. The room smelled like dust and wood and faintly of earth. There was a time when he would have wished the place to be full so he could sit down there and get drunk and if he'd had any weed on him he would have gotten stoned too and spent the night with one or two women or whoever would have had him. The night Frank and the others had brought Dean back with a crude broadhead arrow jammed into his leg had been the night of Cass's last toke and last sip. The last of his old power too, the final trace of it gone for Dean and after that the well dried up for good. He remembered the sound of the arrowhead bursting wetly through Dean's leg and how Dean had looked up at him from that dirty table and smiled at him in the cold lamplight. My guardian angel, he'd said.

He couldn't have said why he'd straightened up after that. He thought that maybe he'd become a new man. Again.

"I am a new man," he said and his voice fell with no echo against the heavy stone walls.

The shelves bore labels for the different varietals. On the lowest shelf there were no labels and no cradles and Cass got down on his knees and bent over and laid his head almost on the cool stone floor and shined the flashlight toward the back of the shelf and saw something there. All of the shelves rested on concealed and quiet casters so that they could be discreetly pulled out and Cass pulled this shelf out and at the back of it was a pale wooden crate with 1923 burned onto it and no other markings. He slid the crate open. Inside was a bottle of Scotch whisky packed in excelsior, unopened and the same year on the label as on the crate. He put the flashlight under his arm and held the bottle in one hand and traced his fingers over the label. It was heavy cream paper and the lettering was embossed onto it like an invitation. No expense spared. The whisky was amber as syrup and someone now long gone had poured it into this bottle in the city of Oban in 1923 and Cass sat in that cellar beneath the Appalachian hills in the fifteenth dead year of the dying twenty-first century and stared at it as if it were some treasure salvaged from the ocean floor and now alien and astonishing to the world above.

* * *

The snow began mid-morning and by late afternoon it was thick on the ground and in the trees and still coming down. Dean stood on the porch with Frank and Cass watched them from inside the front hall. He couldn't hear them but he could see their breath steaming in the cold air. Frank had been a longshoreman in Port Arthur and he stood some four inches over Dean and seemed twice as wide but he deferred to Dean as they all did and he nodded and turned and stepped down from the porch and went off around the side of the house, his shotgun over his shoulder as always and his boots crunching on the snow. Dean stood there with his back to Cass and looked out at the encroaching twilight.

Chuck had come up beside him and he looked at Dean and at Cass and Cass didn't look at him and he said, "Guess we're not leaving tomorrow morning."

Cass smiled faintly. "Is that a vision, Chuck?"

"You know I don't have those anymore. Not since all of, y'know...you people split."

Cass looked down at him. "Do you miss them?"

"What, the angels or the visions?"

"Either one."

Chuck shrugged. "You're the only angel I ever met who wasn't a total prick. As far as the visions?" He shook his head. "I never saw anything good anyway. Not like lottery numbers or anything. Not that that would've mattered, huh?" He laughed and elbowed Cass and shook his head again and left. Outside it grew darker and when Dean turned around his face was tense and he came inside and shut the door on the night and the snow.

* * *

He was sitting up in the kitchen when Dean came off watch. It was nearly three in the morning and he heard Dean go into the study downstairs instead of upstairs to bed and he followed him there and found him standing in front of the fire with his back to the room. His rifle was propped against the sofa and he was chafing his hands and his jacket was snow-dusted and steaming in the warmth. He looked over his shoulder at Cass and then back at the fire.

"It's fucking freezing out there," he said.

"Who's on watch?"

"Chuck and Karen. What are you still doing up?"

"Couldn't sleep."

Dean nodded and stared into the fire and Cass sat down in the wing chair next to the sofa. He had the whisky bottle in his hands and he rested it on his lap and was about to speak when Dean said, "We're not leaving tomorrow. We'll wait until the roads clear."

"Okay."

Dean folded his arms and hunched over the fire. "Fuck, it's cold."

"Maybe this'll warm you up," Cass said and he held the bottle up with the label to Dean and Dean turned his head and squinted at it in the dark.

"What the hell..." He crossed to where Cass sat and took the bottle from him and held it up to the fire. The whisky glowed like a jewel. "Where the hell did you find this? We combed this place."

"I guess we missed a spot."

"Son of a bitch," he said and then said it again. "Even before everything went to hell I couldn't've afforded this shit." He uncorked it and tipped his head back and took a drink and held it in his mouth for a second before swallowing and then he closed his eyes and said, "Goddamn, that's good."

Cass put a double old-fashioned glass on the coffee table in front of the sofa. "There you go."

"Fancy," Dean said. He sat down on the sofa and poured three fingers of whisky into it and then tipped the mouth of the bottle to Cass and Cass shook his head. "You've turned into a fucking Mormon on me, Cass. I can't even remember the last time you had a drink. Or a smoke... Jesus, you were like Cheech and Chong back there for a while."

Cass smiled and Dean downed the whisky and poured himself another and leaned back against the sofa. He looked at the fire and Cass looked at him and then looked away into the shadows. There was a window at the other end of the room and the snow was banked up against it and still falling. He could hear it tick against the windowpanes and now and then it would sift down the chimney and hiss when it hit the coals and the flames would wax and wane and sigh in the gust. Except for this the room and the house were quiet. Dean leaned forward and poured himself another shot and took a sip and then sat there with his elbows resting on his knees.

After a while he said, "Cass."

Cass looked at him. He was gazing into the low flames and the light was warm on his face and he looked quieter and softer than Cass had seen him in a long time. For a moment he couldn't answer and then he said, "Yeah."

"Tell me something."

"All right."

"There's nothing of Jimmy left in you, is there?"

Cass shook his head. "No."

"He's dead."

"His soul departed. Years ago."

"He wanted to go."

"Yes."

"What if he didn't? Would you...would he still be in there with you?"

"An angel needs permission to inhabit a vessel and we can't...they couldn't unhouse a soul without permission either."

"Unhouse."

"Evict. Kick out."

Dean nodded and took another drink. Then he said, "Do you know where Jimmy went?"

"No. The angels didn't know where the souls of men went. They knew earth and hell and heaven but in their heaven there were no human souls."

Neither of them said anything. A knot burst in the fire and sent up a flurry of sparks.

"Cass, is my brother dead?" Cass looked at him but Dean was staring into the fire distantly.

"He has to be."

"There's no way...there's no part of him in Lucifer, is there?" He looked at Cass. "It's just his body. That's all."

"Yes. I'm sure."

"What if Sam didn't want to go? If Lucifer can't kick him out, he'd still be in there."

Cass shook his head. "Lucifer's an archangel. The first of all the angels. No one could stand it."

"But Sam was different."

"No," Cass said. "No. If you'd said yes to Michael your soul would have been burned out. You couldn't have stayed. It would have been torment worse than hell to stay and Lucifer's even stronger than Michael. Sam...Sam died as soon as Lucifer took him. He had to."

"Is he in hell?" Dean asked. Cass didn't answer and Dean said, "Cass, is Sam in hell?"

"I don't..."

"He said yes to Lucifer. That can't win you too many points with the man upstairs."

"God is...God doesn't think the way men do. Or angels."

Dean huffed out a laugh. "You still think there's a God?"

Cass put his head down and thought about this. He believed in God but had long ago come to understand that God did not believe in him or in Dean or any of them who had been left on this earth. Had maybe never believed. He said, "I don't know what I think anymore."

Dean didn't say anything to that. The wind moaned outside the house and the coals cracked and fell and flared. Cass looked at Dean and Dean was staring at his feet. His heavy boots had been caked with snow and the snow had melted and darkened the rug in a circle around his feet.

"I used to rub his feet," Dean said.

"Who?"

Dean smiled. "Sam's feet. I used to rub that kid's feet." He poured himself another drink and swallowed it and sat back against the sofa. "We spent this one winter in North Dakota. Not the whole winter just the worst part of it, you know? Sam must've been six, he was already in school. Anyway one day he lost his boots...no, some other kid took them. He'd changed into his sneakers for gym and left them in the coat closet and some kid took them by accident. We stayed after school and tore that fucking coat closet apart. Nothing. So by then it was four o'clock and we'd missed the bus and up there at four o'clock it's practically dark out already. So I said we'd have to walk home, it was like...a mile, maybe. And he only had these cheap shit sneakers from Kmart. I'd've given him my boots but I couldn't've fit in his sneakers and I wasn't walking home in my socks. Jesus Christ. It was so fucking cold up there it was like you could break the air off in front of you. Snow on the ground too. We got halfway home and by then Sam was limping.

"You wouldn't know it, he grew up into such a fucking lumberjack, but he was a little kid back then. I mean a little kid. Hell, he was only six. And there he is limping in these fucking sneakers because his feet hurt so bad. So I tried to carry him but what the fuck, I was only ten years old and he had his whole bag with him and everything. So I carried his bag instead and I've got him by the hand and I'm dragging him along. And I'm scared shitless this kid's feet are gonna fall off. I swear to God not one car passed us. Not one car. The whole way. We got home...home, we had one room on top of a laundromat. It always smelled like Downy up there, but it was warm, really warm when the dryers were going. Sam's feet were all swelled up and I could barely get his sneakers off. He was crying like crazy, poor kid. I got his sneakers off and his socks and his feet were red, I mean tomato red and the tips of his toes were white. I didn't know what to do so I just started rubbing his feet. They were frozen stiff, just frozen. And then he stops bawling and I asked him if it was better and he said yeah. And he wiggled his toes around to show me. Christ, was I relieved. I could see myself trying to tell Dad why they had to cut Sam's toes off."

He paused and rubbed his face. "We were there for about a month and every night after that when the laundromat had closed and it would get really cold upstairs, Sam would ask me to rub his feet. He'd put his goddamn cold feet against my leg in bed and ask me to rub them. And I'd do it."

Dean paused and shook his head. "He was just a little kid."

He fell silent and Cass didn't say anything. In all the years he'd known Dean he couldn't remember him ever saying so much at once. Hadn't heard him so much as utter Sam's name since the night he'd been shot. A year ago. More.

When Dean spoke again his eyes were half-lidded and he wasn't looking at Cass or at anything.

"Sam should have died," he said, and then, "He did die in Cold Oak and I brought him back. If I hadn't none of this would have happened. No Lucifer, no Michael, no broken seals...nothing."

"You didn't know."

"I knew it was wrong. Of course it was wrong, Jesus Christ, you don't have to be a hunter to know that you don't bring someone back from the dead. I just didn't know what else to do. That was my job, looking out for Sam. I had to do something. Something. But I think about that a lot now. All the time. I think that was some sort of last chance, Cass. Like a...like an override switch." He looked at Cass. "I fucked it up."

The fire had banked down low and now the room was almost in darkness and was growing cold. Dean turned his head away and closed his eyes. After a while Cass stood up and went to the fireplace and moved aside the screen and stirred the coals and put some kindling and logs on them and waited until they caught and then he put the screen back and stood up. He turned and looked at Dean and thought he was asleep. He went to him and sat down beside him and the glass was tilting on his knee and Cass took it from his hand and looked at the sip of whisky in the bottom of it and then drank it and it was smooth and warm and sweet.

Dean said, "I left him, you know. I left him with no choice." He seemed to be talking to himself or in his sleep. "I should've stayed in hell, Cass. Some good it did getting me out." He smiled. "God, that must piss you off."

Cass sat beside Dean and didn't say anything. With all of his ancient power he had once descended to perdition and brought this one soul up out of all that waste and from among all the damned and then hadn't been able to give him over to his fate. For love of this one soul he had betrayed God and for love of this one soul he fell from grace and so was still falling. He touched the side of Dean's face, barely. Dean opened his eyes and looked at him, turning into the palm of Cass's hand. He had thought Dean was nearly asleep but he was awake and his eyes were clear and focused.

"You know I have to fix this, Cass. You know that."

Cass shook his head and said, "No..." and Dean leaned against Cass's palm and closed his eyes.

"Yes I do. That's my job, now." Then he said, "Christ, I'm tired."

Cass wanted to say something but his throat caught and he couldn't find his breath. He cupped Dean's jaw, his cheek. Hold this moment. Keep it.

There was a sharp crack and Dean opened his eyes and sat up straight. Cass's hand hung there empty. He wanted to believe it had been a knot in the fireplace and knew it wasn't. It came again and Dean shot to his feet.

"Shit," he said and now there were shouts from outside and Dean grabbed his rifle by the barrel. "Come on," he said and Cass got up and went after him and he turned for just an instant in the doorway and looked back at the warm room and the soft fire and the quiet peace of it and knew he'd never see a place like this again.

Frank was already in the front hall and the others were running down the stairs or from the kitchen and Dean said to Frank, "Crotes?"

"QC."

"Fuck."

"Yeah, we're in the shit now, brother."

"Chuck and Karen?"

"Karen's by the garage, Chuck I don't know."

"Get everyone outside and loaded up. Take them down that back way we scouted maybe they haven't found that. Take the Jeep."

"Got it," Frank said and took off.

Now the floodlights came on and the front of the house with its wide windows lit up so bright Cass felt as if he could see through it like a curtain and past the open door and the tall windows he saw the military ATVs on their quiet caterpillar tires and the high mounted lights and gun turrets and the loudspeaker boomed through the snowy woods telling them there was no reason to be afraid. They should come out peacefully and they would be brought to a safe place.

Dean grabbed Cass's arm and they ran towards the kitchen. "Guns," he said to Cass and in the kitchen Cass grabbed what he could. Pistol, ammo, his coat off the back of the chair. The soldiers were on the front porch now. He heard the Jeep roaring off down the back of the mountain and then he and Dean were through the kitchen and in the garage and Ted was at the wheel of the Ford and he shouted at them to get in. Cass climbed inside and Dean had his foot on the running board and then he stepped back.

"Someone has to lead them off."

Ted said, "What?"

"You go. I'll take the Chevy and lead them off."

"That thing's never gonna make it through the snow."

Cass climbed out of the truck and Ted shouted, "What, you too? Jesus fucking Christ!"

Dean said, "You're not coming," and Cass only slammed the truck's door behind him.

"Get back in the fucking truck!"

"No."

Dean swore and leaned past him into the truck's cab and said, "Follow Frank, there's a rest stop on 321, we'll rendezvous there. If that's screwed keep going to Knoxville. The hot zone's unpatrolled, or it was."

"Son of a bitch, Dean."

"Just go," he said and hammered his fist against the Ford's side panel and Ted floored the truck out of the garage and the last thing Cass saw was Chuck's face in the shotgun window and he thought he would probably never see him or any of them again either.

The Chevy was a late-model Impala they had scavenged in Birmingham. It had been a police cruiser whose roof was still pockmarked from the flashers and it was fast but no good for hauling or the offroads or the snow. They got in and Dean gunned the engine and backed it with tires squealing out of the garage and sawed it around and took off in the opposite direction from the rest of the group. In the headlights two soldiers were by the side of the drive in combat position and they fired on the car and Dean and Cass put their heads below the dashboard and Cass heard the safety glass of the windshield puncture with a flat popping sound. Then they were past the soldiers and Dean handed Cass his rifle and Cass took it without a word and leaned out the passenger window and fired. The soldiers were in winter camouflage but he saw one of them go down in the red wash of the Chevy's taillights and then it was all black behind them. The windshield had three holes in it and the glass was starred and Cass leaned forward over the dashboard and punched the broken glass out with the heel of his hand and it came out in one piece like a sheet and fell away into the dark.

When they reached the state route it was white with snow and beside the treeline was the flatbed rig that had offloaded the ATVs and behind that an H3 Hummer. They hit the road going so fast that the Chevy's rear end fishtailed behind them and Dean had to haul on the wheel to bring it around and by then the H3 was on their tail.

"Fuck," Dean said. "Put on your seatbelt."

"What?"

"Seatbelt," he said and then Cass heard the flat crack of riflefire and the searchlight outside his window exploded and he fastened his seatbelt and Dean did the same.

He heard their tire or tires blow out and for a moment there was an eerie whistling quiet because the car had no wheels on the ground. It landed first on the edge of the roof, passenger side, and Cass heard a window implode and felt glass spraying his face. Both airbags deployed. Momentum kept the car going, flipping end over end, headlights strobing onto snow. Cass was knocked out for such a brief moment he hardly knew he'd been out, only that there was a second of pure blackness before he came back to himself as the car landed on its four wheels with a thunderous shudder. The engine revved hard for a few seconds before cutting out altogether. The keys jingled in the ignition, a silvery windchime sound. He could hear Dean breathing hard next to him.

"Dean?"

"You all right?"

"Yeah."

He heard Dean get out and then Dean was pulling him from the car.

"Get out," he said. "Run, follow me."

They had outpaced the H3 but it was coming up behind them now with its headlights and roofrack blazing. He almost fell and Dean dragged him into the darkness of the woods. He heard the men getting out of the Hummer. Under the trees the snow was light on the ground and they were able to step around it so that they wouldn't leave tracks. Their feet passed silently over the soft pine duff. He felt wetness on his temple and reached up and felt that it was lacerated and bleeding. He kept his hand over it so that he wouldn't bleed onto the ground.

They came to a deadfall and climbed over it and Dean pulled him down to the ground. Dean's rifle had a nightvision scope fitted onto it and Cass could just make out Dean's silhouette in the dark with the rifle bridged across the dead tree trunk. He shot the first man just as he came through the trees. Cass couldn't see him but he heard him go down. Dean fired twice more, one right behind the other. They lay there in the dark. No more men came but in the distance they could hear the heavy sound of the flatbed's engine rumbling to life. Dean stirred and stood up and said, "Come on," and Cass got up and they turned from the deadfall and set off into the woods.

* * *

They walked the rest of the night and they didn't talk. It had stopped snowing but it was very cold. The cut on Cass's forehead had congealed into a plaque of frozen blood and his head and neck ached terribly. Only now and then would he look up at the sky to see the light of the stars through the trees. After a while what light there was faded from the sky and Cass knew it must be near dawn. It was too black to keep walking so they hunkered down onto the forest floor and he only knew Dean was beside him because he could hear him blowing onto his hands. He asked Dean if he was all right.

"Bitch of a headache," he said. "I think I hit the roof."

"So did I."

"Anything else?"

"I have a cut on my forehead."

"Where?" In the dark Dean touched his forehead. His fingers were glacial.

"Here," Cass said and he put his hand over Dean's and guided him to the spot. Dean traced his thumb over the cut.

"It's not so bad."

"No."

"We'll stitch it up later," Dean said. He slipped his hand away.

Cass nodded in the dark. They stayed there until dawn began to gray the sky and then they got up and went on. The sun came up but it was no warmer. The snow on the ground had frozen to a brittle crust and the rays of early sunlight that reached through the trees were too cold and weak to melt it and as they walked it broke like glass under their boots. They didn't speak and their breath steamed out in front of them and disappeared in wisps of white vapor. It was now just past seven in the morning and they had been walking for nearly four hours and the cold was making the old broken bones in Cass's foot ache. Ahead of him Dean was favoring the leg where he'd been shot the year before and Cass could tell by the way he was breathing hard through his nose that he was in pain. The wound had left a deep crater where the arrow had gone in and a hard keloid scar where it had come out and the meat of his leg had been torn up all the way through and must have healed in some way that had shortened or twisted the muscle because Dean always had a slight limp now that became worse when the weather was cold or wet or when he was tired and couldn't hide it.

The trees thinned onto a narrow and rutted dirt road where the snowcrust was untouched by any footprints or tire treads. To the right the road wound off into the woods and to the left they could see the roofline of a small cabin. They came upon it through the trees so that they could get a better look at it without being seen and they stood there and stared at it. The wood of the cabin's roof and siding and porch had gone silvery gray with age and neglect and the windows were broken out and not even the faintest whiff of smoke came from the tin stovepipe that stuck out of the roof.

The cabin must have been used only by seasonal hunters because it had the look of a place inhabited by men and that not often. There was a green couch in the front room and a very old television with rabbit-ear antennas sitting on a cart and for no reason at all Dean went to the television and switched it on and flipped the channel dial and it sat there gray and mute and he switched it off. The place had a derelict smell of mildew and rot and ancient cigarette smoke. Cracked and yellowed pull shades on the windows. One bedroom with a naked boxspring on a steel frame. In the kitchen the cabinets all stood open and a few battered pots and one skillet were on the floor as if someone had thrown them there in rage or disgust. There was no table in the kitchen and on the faded linoleum floor a brown stain had long ago dried to a claylike crust with some hairs still stuck in it. Someone had died here, maybe more than one person. Most likely crotes had done it and had taken the dying or dead with them to do God only knew what.

In the bedroom early sunlight was falling through the window onto the bed and Dean told Cass to sit down in the sun so he could look at his head. In all their vehicles they'd kept a duffel packed with emergency supplies in case they had to make a break for it on foot and Dean had grabbed this just before they'd run. He threw it on the mattress next to Cass and then stood there studying the cut.

"Four, five stitches," he said.

He unzipped the bag and took out the first-aid kit and gave Cass a piece of gauze to hold over his eye while Dean cleaned out the wound. It burned and Cass twitched and bit the inside of his cheek.

"I'm not using the lidocaine for this," Dean said.

"That's fine."

Dean tilted Cass's head to the side and stitched the wound. He had a knee up on the bed and his hip against Cass's shoulder and Cass braced himself against Dean so that he wouldn't move while Dean sewed him up. Dean's leg was warm, his hands were cold. He had a quick and practiced touch. Almost gentle. Cass's breath smoked whitely in the pale shaft of light.

"How's your leg?" Cass said.

"All right. A little stiff." Dean went on with his work and then said, "I think the others made it out okay."

"I think so."

"The sonsofbitches didn't know about that road back there."

"No."

"Frank will look out for them."

"We're going to meet them at the rest stop."

Dean was quiet for a moment and then he said, "Yeah."

There was a faint click and snip of scissors as Dean cut the thread and then he took the gauze from Cass's hand and dabbed it over the closed wound. "Done," he said and he turned away and cleaned the scissors and the needle with alcohol and put them away and closed the kit and put it back in the bag. Cass turned and looked at him.

"Do you want to stay here and rest a while?"

Dean shook his head. "We're not gonna find a car out here so we have to hoof it to the rest stop and I don't want to be out here after dark. It's goddamn cold enough." He raised an eyebrow at Cass. "You?"

Cass stood up and said, "I'm all right. Let's just go."

* * *

They reached the rest stop in the afternoon and by then the sky was gray and heavy and it had begun to snow again, just flurries but in a fierce and biting wind from off the mountain. They lay flat on their stomachs on a low rise that looked out over Route 321 and the rest stop on the northbound side and Dean studied it through the scope of his rifle but no scope was needed to see that the area had been turned into a Quarantine Control garrison. A razorwired chainlink fence had been thrown up around it and inside were troop vehicles and soldiers walking around, smoking or looking up at the snow and even from this distance they could hear the steady rumble of a gas generator.

"You don't think Frank drove into that?"

"No," Dean said with his eye still on the scope. "He wouldn't plow into a place without securing it first." Dean put down the rifle and for a moment he put his forehead on his arm and closed his eyes. "Why the fuck didn't you go with them, Cass?"

"Someone had to go with you."

He smiled tightly with his eyes still closed. "In all my ways, right Cass? Was that it? God gave you charge over me to keep me in all my ways?" He looked at Cass. "I think you could've ditched this detail a long fucking time ago."

Cass didn't say anything. He stared at Dean and then he started laughing. Trying to hold it in but laughing with his mouth shut until he was almost snorting and his eyes were watering.

"What's the matter with you?"

"Nothing," he said. He shook his head. "Just...oh my...oh my. God." He had to press his head against his arms because he was shaking.

"You got a concussion or something?"

"No," Cass said. He raised his head and wiped his streaming eyes and cleared his throat and looked at Dean. "Are we going to Knoxville?"

Dean stared at him for a second and then said, "Yeah. Yeah, we're going to Knoxville."

They got up and put their backs to the road and started walking. Dean was limping heavily on his bad leg and Cass took the duffel from him without asking and Dean let him take it. Now and then Dean would glance at Cass out of the corner of his eye but Cass walked with his head down and didn't look at him and so they went on.

* * *

They were still on the road when the daylight began to fail. It was cold and gusting and the silhouette of the mountains brooded around them and slowly merged into the darkening sky. Since leaving the weigh station they hadn't seen another person or heard any vehicle or even smelled smoke. The people had left these outlying places in search of food and electricity and safety in the larger cities and those who hadn't left on their own had been cleared out and herded into camps where they could be quarantined and controlled. The ones who hadn't gone willingly had been presumed to be infected and were shot and burned or sometimes just incinerated alive. There were special pens for doing this. The real crotes tended to be wily enough to escape and so many of the executed were healthy but the newspapers and cable television shows that still existed until just a few months ago never mentioned any of it because it was understood that the country would do what it had to do to survive. That the country and the whole world were in fact dying never entered into any of the speeches on moral certitude and the triumph of the American spirit. If the speeches were still being made somewhere they didn't reach these places. Here the people were gone and if any remained they had burrowed into the hills like rats to ride this out. They would not ride this out. There were only four riders left and Lucifer was at their head and everything that God or man had made fell or would fall before them. This was the end of the world.

* * *

Icy rain began to come down after dusk and they took shelter at last in a house near Townsend that stood neighborless behind the trees in a small yard filled with garbage. The front door was locked but gave way easily. The house was dark and cold and had a faint sweet smell of candlewax and powder or perfume. A can of minestrone soup was on the kitchen counter with the top popped up and a spoon sitting in it. Dean picked it up and smelled it and put it back down.

"This is just opened," he said. "Someone's here."

They went upstairs armed and found a narrow hall with all of the doors standing open. Two bedrooms and a bathroom. The beds had all been stripped of their sheets and blankets and in the bathroom the tub was half full of murky water with a bathmat next to it and a towel draped over its lip. A plastic grocery bag of bar soap and shampoo and green dishwashing liquid hung from the doorknob.

At the last room Dean pushed open the door with the barrel of the rifle and in the flashlight's beam Cass saw that this bed was piled with blankets and a shapeless waxy mass was melted onto the nightstand. Dean took a step into the room and swept the flashlight around once and then the doorframe exploded above them in the flat crack and bright flare of one gunshot from the corner of the room.

They reeled back into the hall and pressed their backs to the walls across from each other and held position there in the dark. There were no more shots and it was very quiet except for the rain. A chunk of wood fell from the doorframe to the floor. They heard a slight mouselike scuffle from the room.

"We just need to spend the night," Dean said. "We'll just spend the night and we'll go."

Cass heard something like a snort, a breathy burst of disbelief. Dean heard it too and looked at him.

"If you wanna stay up here till morning that's fine with us. We not gonna bother you, we won't even come up here. We'll be on our way as soon as it's light." He paused and listened. "All right?"

No one answered. Dean looked at Cass and jerked his head back towards the stairs. Cass began to edge himself away from the door with his back still to the wall.

"We're gonna go downstairs now, okay? We're going downstairs."

They backed their way down the stairs. No one followed them and they heard no sound from the room. At the foot of the stairs Dean whispered, "That's a girl up there, that's why she wouldn't answer. But I got a look at her before she got that shot off."

"A little girl?"

"No no, maybe a teenager, but probably older."

"What's she doing here by herself?"

"Who the hell knows. But if we don't bother her she won't bother us. We'll just stay down here, keep an eye on the stairs."

"She's armed."

"So are we."

"She could be sick."

Dean hefted the rifle in his hands. "That's something new?"

They sat crosslegged like campers on the living room floor with their guns across their laps and they split the can of soup the girl had left open on the kitchen counter. It was the first thing they'd eaten since the day before. There was a woodstove in the living room but its smokepipe was bent and cracked open so they heated the soup in the can over a candle and ate it half cold and gluey with crackers from the mountain house that had been packed in the emergency bag.

Dean heard her first and grabbed the rifle from his lap and whirled to the stairs on his knees. She froze there with a pistol held out at arms length and her back against the wall. Cass went for his gun and she said to Dean, "If your friend touches that shotgun I'll shoot him and then I'll shoot you."

"You'd have to be a hell of a shot," Dean said.

"I am."

"That's not what I saw upstairs."

"You took me by surprise. I ain't surprised no more." She had a native Smokies twang in her voice and sounded young. It was too dark on the stairs for him to see anything of her except her jeans and sneakers and her hands around the pistol. "You said you were just gonna stay the night and leave. And there you are eatin my food."

Dean hadn't lowered the rifle. He looked up at her across its barrel. "Seemed a shame to waste it."

"It ain't forty degrees in that kitchen, it would've kept till mornin."

She came down a step. Dean said, "Uh-uh. You're not coming down here with a gun pointed at anyone."

"You're pointin one at me."

"I told you to stay upstairs. I said we wouldn't bother you."

"You don't tell me where to go. This is my house. And I want you out of it."

"Not tonight."

"I could shoot you right now."

"Then he'd shoot you," Dean said and tipped his head towards Cass.

She came down one more step and now Cass could make out the round face of a young woman probably in her twenties, not close to thirty.

"Not another step unless the gun goes down."

She hesitated. "You first."

"No."

"Are you sick?"

"No. Are you?"

"Would I be askin you if you were sick if I was?"

"Crotes do crazy shit all the time."

"Well I ain't one of em."

"Neither are we."

"What do you want?"

"I told you. Spend the night. We've been walking all day and we needed to get out of the rain, rest up a little. That's all."

"And eat my food."

"Well..." Dean said and he smiled. He was good-looking and his smile was disarming and it made people trust him. Even these days. Cass looked at Dean. He looked at the girl. She was wavering.

Dean said, "You can still go back upstairs and we won't bother you. Or you can lower the gun and come down here and have something to eat and we still won't bother you. It's up to you. No one's gonna touch you. But we're spending the night and we're leaving in one piece. You understand?"

She relaxed her elbows. She lowered the gun to waist level but still held onto it with both hands.

"What's your name?"

"My name is Dean. He's Cass."

She looked at Cass and then back at Dean. She came down another step. With her arms lowered Cass could see her now. An apple-cheeked face with eyes as wideset as a doll's. Long, dark hair that looked red in the candlelight. Pretty girl.

"My name's Bethany," she said.

"Do you want something to eat, Bethany?"

"Well of course I do. It's my food."

She came down the stairs and approached them and Dean sat down and looked up at her with the rifle still in his hands but not now aimed. "The gun, Bethany."

"You said I had to lower it, not give it up."

Dean looked at her. She stood there with the gun hanging at her knee. She raised her eyebrows at him. "I'm not stupid," she said.

"All right," he said. "All right, you hold onto that."

He laid the gun across his lap. Bethany sat down warily, crosslegged like they were. She took the can of soup and looked down into it. "We're gonna have to heat up something else," she said. "You two ain't left me much. Where'd those crackers come from?"

"They're ours."

"Can I have some?"

"Sure," Dean said and pushed them towards her. She took out two and crumbled them into the can of soup and swirled them around.

"Thank you," she said and then she looked up at Dean and smiled. She looked at Dean the way women almost always looked at Dean. The way Cass knew he must himself sometimes look at Dean. Her eyes sparkled in the candlelight. She was a very pretty girl.

* * *

By morning the rain had turned to pellets of sleet and every treebranch and blade of dry grass and piece of trash outside the house was petrified with ice and the trees were bent double under the weight and the steps and rails of the backporch looked as if they had turned to glass. The house was deadlocked inside a sarcophagus of ice and the sleet came down, sometimes switching over to freezing rain and making the ice thicker. The next day was no better. Dean found a roll of aluminum flashing in the cellar and patched the stovepipe with it and wrapped it with duct tape and they broke up chairs from the kitchen and burned them and the stovepipe held. Bethany said she guessed it was a good thing they'd come along or she'd have been a popsicle by now.

He asked Dean what they were going to do about getting to Knoxville and Dean looked out through the backdoor window, through the only patch of glass clear enough to see through. The rest of the window was rippled and watery beneath a layer of ice and outside the day was dim and sleet was falling hard enough to bounce off the backyard's hardfrozen terrain.

"We're pretty much stuck here until this shit lets up," he said. "They can't stay around Knoxville too long though." He rubbed the back of his neck. "Shit."

"There are other rendezvous points."

"Yeah, but..." He shook his head. "This is a fucking holdup I didn't count on."

"It's bad, isn't it?" said Bethany. They looked around and saw her leaning against the kitchen doorframe with her hands under her arms and she was wearing a heavy gray sweater and a white knit hat and her red hair and blue eyes stood out with neon clarity in the arctic light.

"Yeah, it's bad," Dean said and he turned from the door and crossed the room and she looked up at him as he brushed past her and she raised her hand and stroked his shoulder and he didn't seem to notice but Cass did. Her head was turned away from him and she was watching Dean and Cass watched her. She put her hand on the side of her neck and then looped a lock of hair around her finger and stood there with her head cocked and her shoulder against the doorjamb and one sneakered foot hooked around the other ankle.

He said, "Bethany?" and she looked over her shoulder at him. Her eyebrows were up and her lower lip was between her teeth.

"Yeah?"

"Why were you here all by yourself?"

"I told you. QC came and took my folks off. I hid in the cellar."

"None of them were sick."

"My folks? No, none of em. They just came and took em off. Why're you askin me Cass?"

Cass shook his head. "You're just...you're pretty lucky, that's all. I mean...under the circumstances."

"Well yeah." She smiled. "I've always been kinda lucky." She pushed herself off the doorframe and walked out of the room.

* * *

The three of them slept in the living room for warmth and took turns on watch. There was little chance of anyone making their way to the house in such weather but Dean didn't want them all asleep at the same time. The night of their second icebound day Dean pulled first watch and Bethany went to sleep on the couch and Cass lay down on a mattress they had brought from upstairs and for a while he lay awake and looked at Dean sitting by the stove with his rifle between his knees. He thought about Dean on that last night in the mountain house and of all the things he had said, especially of how it was his job to fix what had happened. He hadn't asked Dean what he meant and he still didn't know and he thought maybe it had been the whisky or fatigue or some brooding thought that Dean had simply spoken out loud but Cass knew Dean and knew that when he said something like that it was never just rumination. He turned it over in his mind and came to nothing and after a time he fell asleep.

He dreamt about hell, so vivid that he could feel his hand around Dean's shoulder and knew he was burning him but he felt no pain himself, only the fire of grace as it had once flowed through God and in him and he woke in the dark with the sense of that lost power still warm and humming in his hand and then it faded and was gone. He made a fist and pressed it against his mouth and the weight of his humanity settled on him in slow degrees like shackles descending link by link. He lay there and felt the cold floor seeping into him through the mattress and wondered why Dean hadn't built up the fire and then he realized that he could hear the soft sound of whispers and something else. He opened his eyes and looked at the couch and there was just enough of a red glow left in the stove to see Dean there with Bethany, who was not asleep, who was sitting on her knees beside Dean, who had one hand on his arm and another on his chest and they were talking and they were kissing. She unbuttoned his shirt and put her hand inside of it and he wrapped an arm around her waist and drew her to him. She pulled off her hat and threw it on the couch and he wound his fingers in her hair and she took her hand out of his shirt and pressed it between his legs and he arched up into her palm and Cass watched them and couldn't look away and he thought, They are going to fuck. He is going to fuck her right there on the couch while I'm lying here. And he felt sick and shaking and suddenly hard, so hard that he ached from his legs to his belly.

Dean took Bethany by the shoulders and lifted her off him and onto the couch. Her sweater was open and her shirt beneath it was rucked up and Cass could see the pale rectangle of her bare stomach. She was breathless and she reached for Dean and he took her wrists and pushed her away and she made a soft mewling sound and shook her head.

"Shh," he whispered. "Go upstairs."

"But..."

"Just go upstairs."

She licked her lips and said, "Okay," and leaned in and kissed him and then got up and turned to the stairs and began to climb them, undressing as she went.

Cass closed his eyes and lay still. For a few minutes Dean stayed where he was and then Cass heard him get up and cross to where Cass was lying on the mattress and then Dean's hand was on his shoulder shaking him. He opened his eyes as if Dean had just woken him and saw Dean hunkered down beside him.

"You're up," he said.

"Okay," Cass said. He propped himself on his elbow and looked at the couch and Dean said, "Bethany's upstairs."

"Oh," he said. "All right."

Dean handed him the rifle and stood up and went upstairs without another word.

* * *

When Dean was gone Cass got up and for a moment he stood still and listened to the ceiling creak under Dean's steps and then it was quiet. He turned to the stove and laid in some wood and paper and watched as it caught and burned and he closed the stove door and took the rifle and sat down on the couch. He picked up Bethany's hat and looked at it in his hands and then he put it down. The ache between his legs had faded and he felt cold and weary. The wind gusted and hurled ice pellets against the house like shards of glass. The fire crackled in the stove. Beneath these small sounds he could hear them upstairs. They were quiet as people were always quiet these days but he heard them all the same. Bethany's faint, breathy cries. The steady knock of the bedframe against the wall. His mind conjured up an image of Dean between the white spread of her thighs and Dean was naked although it had probably been too cold upstairs for that. He put his elbows on his knees and rested his head against the rifle barrel and closed his eyes.

He thought about himself and his life and of what he had been when he was still named Castiel. The angels had charged Castiel with raising Dean from hell and so he had. They had ordered him to watch over Dean and keep him from harm and help him with whatever he had to do until the time came for him to be given up and so he had done that also. Almost.

They had warned him that Dean would be willful and weak and stupid as all men were and they had been right, but they had never told him that Dean would also be many other things. That he would be a mystery. As all men were. He thought they hadn't warned him because they themselves hardly knew anything about men, nor had they cared to know. Among all of them only Anna might have told him but she had never had the chance. Had Dean been only what the angels thought of him there would have been no danger and no doubt and Castiel would not have fallen and Michael would have taken Dean as Lucifer took his brother and the war would have begun and might even now have already been over.

Now his old brothers and sisters were all gone and at the end they had asked him to go with them, fallen as he was, and he would not. He could not. How sad they had been. How bewildered in their ignorance of love. Yet Castiel had been ignorant also of one last thing and when the angels departed and that final lesson came to him it was shocking and sweet and yet so cruel that he wondered how all men didn't lose their minds. Maybe they did. Sometimes Cass thought he had gone crazy the first time he had looked at Dean with his new sight and seen that he was beautiful and had suddenly loved him and wanted him. With his hands and his mouth and his body. Something so wholly new and unimagined that it still stunned him.

By then Sam was lost and the virus came and Dean was not the same man and the world began to rot and die and so he kept his new knowledge to himself and tried to exhaust it with himself and with women and sometimes with men and still somehow it was never spent as if it came from some invisible and eternal spring that had always been there and once tapped would always flow until his own human heart finally stopped beating and dear God, maybe even after that.

It had grown quiet upstairs and Cass knew that Dean and Bethany were probably asleep. He thought about that. Thought about them together under the pile of blankets on that bed in the back room, naked and warm and drowsy with sex and a sudden bitter and inexplicable hatred for this one girl hit him with such brutality that it cramped his stomach and closed his throat. Envy in all its ugliness. His new humanity at its most awful. He could have wept, or shouted or hit something but he didn't. He sat alone in the cold and the dark of that dirty room and he longed for Dean and hated the girl and pitied himself. Harrowed by love, fouled with jealousy, shrouded in sin, human through and through.

* * *

He dozed lightly and woke when he heard them again and this time she cried out sharply once, breathless and heated, and then they were quiet. It was just before dawn and very dark out and the rain had stopped.

He sat with his head against the back of the couch and legs apart and his hands on his knees. When he heard a creak on the stairs behind him he at first thought it was Dean but while Dean could walk very quietly he didn't have such a light step. He turned his head and looked at Bethany and she paused on the last stair with her hand on the newel post. She was wearing ragwool socks and Dean's blue flannel shirt that came to the tops of her thighs and her bare white legs seemed almost to glow in the dull light from the stove.

She smiled at him and said, "Hi."

"Hi."

"I hope we weren't too loud."

"No."

She smiled again and came into the room and padded over to the stove and crouched down before it with her arms around her knees.

"It's pretty cold upstairs," she said.

"Is it?"

She looked at him and smiled. Her tousled hair slipped over her shoulder. "Well, it's cold when you're not..." She cocked her head and lifted her eyebrows. "You know."

"Maybe you should put something on," Cass said flatly. "Something else."

She stared at him and he stared at her and then he looked away. She opened the stove door and put the last of the kitchen chair legs into it and she squatted there and watched them burn. Then she said, "Hey Cass, do you know what this is?"

He looked at her and she was holding up her hand and he didn't know what she meant.

"What?"

"This ring," she said. She had a silver band on her ring finger and for a second Cass thought it was Dean's but it was too narrow and fit her too well. Then he thought that maybe it was a wedding ring and he said so.

"You're sort of right," she said. "It's a purity ring. Do you know what that means?"

"Not really."

"It means my cunt belongs to Daddy," she said. "I've had it since I was twelve. But Daddy's gone." She stood up and turned to him. "And now my cunt belongs to whoever I feel like givin it to."

She crossed the room silently on her stocking feet and she came and stood between his knees. She had only one button fastened on Dean's shirt and she toyed with it.

He looked up at her. "What do you want, Bethany?"

"Remember this afternoon when you said I was lucky?"

"Yeah."

"Well I am lucky. Here I was sittin all by myself and lonesome and scared and then a couple a cute guys like you come along, I mean really cute guys. And nice guys too, didn't even try anything."

He didn't say anything. He just sat there and looked up at her. She glanced at the dark window and then looked back at Cass and said, "Sounds like it finally stopped raining. Maybe we'll be able to leave today."

"We?"

"Mm-hm," she said. "I told Dean I know where we can get a car and gas."

"And you're coming with us?"

"I talked about it with Dean. You can't leave me here. It wouldn't be long before someone else came along. Someone not so nice like you."

She was standing very close to him and he realized he could smell her. A faint scent of shampoo and some perfume and also sweat and sex and Dean. He could smell Dean's shirt, his sweat, his skin.

She unbuttoned the shirt and let it fall open. She was stark naked underneath as he'd known she would be and she was slim-hipped and flat-bellied and full-breasted and she was so close to him now that her knees were against the couch.

"I want us all to be friends," she said and smiled and she reached down and took his hand and put it on her left breast. She felt bed-warm for all that it was cold in the room and her nipple was hard as a pebble on the round swell of her breast. He raised his other hand and she arched her back in expectation but he took hold of the two sides of Dean's shirt and ran them between his fingers. Dean had had this shirt for a long time and it was faded and frayed and soft. He'd been wearing it that last day in the mountain house, that last night. He'd been wearing it on the first night when they had found the water pump and Dean had stripped off and washed himself in front of Cass with no more modesty or awareness of being naked than an infant.

Cass sat up and leaned forward and closed the shirt and put his forehead against it and it smelled like Dean and felt like Dean and he sat there and clutched at it with his eyes shut. Bethany stayed so still that he almost forgot she was there. After a while he felt her hand on the back of his neck. He put his arms around her waist and laid his cheek against the soft flannel. They stayed there like that.

Then she whispered, "You want him, don't you?" and he startled and looked up at her.

"It's all right," she said. "It's all right." She stepped back a little and took one of his arms from around her waist and turned his palm up and put his hand between her legs. The insides of her thighs were damp and her hair was wet and she slid his fingers towards the opening of her cunt where she was even wetter and she said, "This is Dean, right here."

He stared at her. She smiled at him. "This is Dean's come, can you feel him?"

He couldn't answer her. No one had ever said anything so blackly exciting to him. So intimately arousing. His heart was hammering. He nodded.

She took her own hand away and in the firelight he could see that her fingers were wet and she put them on his lower lip and then in his mouth.

"Can you taste him?"

He had been with women and with men and he knew the taste of them both and he tasted her cunt on her fingers but he also tasted Dean. Dean's come. Running out of her. On her fingers. In his mouth. He closed his eyes and sucked on her fingers. A pornographic gallery flipped through his mind. He had wanted Dean for so long and had dreamed about him and spun fantasies about him that were tender or passionate and sometimes so filthy they were almost violent and now with the taste of Dean's come in his mouth he imagined sucking his cock up to the hilt, sucking Dean deep into the space between his tongue and the back of his palate and making Dean come hard, come spilling way down into his throat and he moaned and couldn't help it.

She pulled her fingers out of his mouth and straddled his lap and began to unfasten his buckle and jeans with deft fingers. He was hardly aware she was doing it. She got him undone and he was so erect she didn't even have to pull out his cock. She raised herself up and then she sank down on him and he slid up easily into her on her own hot slick and Dean's come. She began to ride him slowly.

"See?" she said softly. "See how we can all be friends?" His hands were on her hips, on Dean's shirt. "We're all gonna leave here together and we're goin to Memphis. That's where we're goin. I can get you in bed with him, would you like that, Cass? I'll tell him I want you both at the same time. He might not let you fuck him but he'll be naked and you can touch him and probably kiss him. People will do things in bed they wouldn't ever see themselves doing out of it. Things they wouldn't even think of doing. Hell, maybe he will let you fuck him. Or he'll fuck you. We'll fuck our way clear to Memphis, all three of us."

She rode him like a carousel horse and the couch creaked beneath them and he could smell Dean and taste him and he fisted his hands in the fabric at her back and she moaned and pumped herself harder. He came convulsively and she bounced on him a few more times and then came herself with her head thrown back and her hands laced around his neck. Then she slowed and went still and just sat there. She combed her fingers through his hair. His eyes were closed and he was panting and his cheek was against her shoulder and with the descent from that climax came a bleak and hopeless rush of shame, all the disgrace of love malnourished and so disfigured as it was disfiguring.

He opened his eyes and saw that the windows were lightening with dawn. It was not raining. She brought her hand around to his chin and turned his face up to hers. She smiled.

"Ready to go to Memphis?"

"We're going to Knoxville. We have to meet the others."

She shook her head and laid a finger across his lips. "We're goin to Memphis."

He stared up at her and her face was hidden by the tangle of her hair and he felt sick and troubled and cold.

"Christo," he said. "Exorcizamus te, omnis immundus spiritus..."

She giggled and stroked his forehead. "I don't know what you're sayin, baby but I agree with you about the Christ part. Jesus Christ is right."

She laughed and climbed off him and buttoned Dean's shirt. After a moment he tucked himself into his jeans and fastened them and buckled his belt.

"Christ-o, I'd kill for a cigarette," she said and strolled off into the kitchen. Outside the light was growing stronger and Cass heard birdsong for the first time in three days.


Go on to Chapter Two...