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Fic: Feast Of All Saints, Part 2 of Chapter Two
(All ratings and warnings from Part 1 apply.)
Part 2
Outside the rain fell, the sky was dark. On the other side of the railyard the fire had banked down to a smolder and a few soldiers were dragging off the corpses. He edged around to the far side of the freight office and then set off across the tracks. Dean had been right, there was no fence around the place and in a while he had put the yard behind him.
There was a hospital on the other side of the river but it was too far away and he knew the place would be so fortified that he wouldn't even be able to get near it. Even if he could no one there would have helped him or even spoken to him. The city was stifling in the rain and he walked until he was in a sick sweat and he came to a park where people were living in tents and lean-tos made of cardboard boxes or sheet metal or other trash. Here he stopped and spoke to some of the people until he got an address on West Vine Avenue and a name of Blunt.
The place on West Vine was still marqueed as the Crowne Plaza. It was a hotel and a whorehouse and a shooting gallery and a hospital and Blunt was the proprietor and manager and enforcer of it all. The lobby where traveling salesmen and conventioneers had once enjoyed complimentary morning coffee among flower arrangements and blandly comfortable furnishings had become a loud saloon whose patrons were mostly military or private security and some sitting at the bar still in the biohazard suits with their respirators thrown back over their shoulders or dangling beneath their chins like a gunslinger's bandanna. Girls in hot pants and platform shoes served drinks and worked the men. He was stopped at the door by a toady who asked him what he wanted and when Cass told him the toady told him to go around to the back.
Behind the hotel next to the kitchen dumpsters and a pyramid of broken furniture and shredded mattresses the toady emerged from a metal fire door and stood there short and bulldoggish in the rain.
"How much've you got?"
"Five hundred dollars and I can get more. I have a fully automatic rifle and a taser and a .45, all military issue none of this homemade popgun shit. And morphine, I have some morphine."
"How much?"
"Twelve amps."
"You got it on you?"
"Not all of it."
"You got the money? Let me see the money."
"Let me talk to Blunt."
"No one talks to Blunt."
A man with a carbine rifle slung behind his back came out into the alley and unzipped his fly and began to piss against the wall and he watched them over his shoulder.
"Can you help me?"
The toady glanced at the man with the rifle and then looked at Cass.
"You said he was shot?"
"Yes."
"Where's he at?"
"Up by the railyard."
The toady looked at the armed man again and then took Cass by the elbow and led him a couple of feet away.
"There was some dustup at the railyards today. You know anything about that?"
"No, no I don't. Listen, I don't have a lot of time."
"I think you should get outta here."
"What?"
"Get outta here. People're lookin at you."
The other man hitched up his fly and headed back to the hotel and gave Cass a long stare before he went in. When the door closed behind him the toady repeated, "Go on get outta here."
"What about Blunt? They told me there was a clinic here..."
"There's nothin here for you. You stink like a mess a trouble and you can't pay enough to cover that up. Get outta here."
The man turned to the door and Cass grabbed his arm.
"Where else can I go?"
"I'll tell you where. Under the I-40 overpass where it hooks up with 275. That's for people like you. Now get out. If I see you around here again I'll shoot you, understand? Get out."
He shook off Cass's hand and pulled open the door and disappeared inside and the door slammed shut behind him and Cass stood there in the rain and then turned and began to head north up towards the interstate. He left the city center and after a while he came into a neighborhood of wretched apartment complexes and old warehouses and boarded storefronts. The streets were empty and drifted with trash. Everywhere the smell of burning, garbage, open sewers. A car on four bare axles sat askew next to a brick wall and in the backseat a naked woman was being fucked on all fours, the crown of her head hitting the inside of the window. When Cass walked by she looked up at him and shouted "Ten dollars!" and he looked away and kept going and behind him he could still hear her head thumping against the glass. By and by he found himself under the dark shadow of the highway overpass and here were shapeless crowds searching for whatever there was to buy. Canned food and tins of propane and matches. A bar of soap priced higher than the woman in the car. Further back there were stalls selling weapons and all sorts of superstitious charms and dubious medicine. He found a man wearing a straw hat and sitting in a lawn chair with a milkcrate of amber prescription bottles between his feet and a semi-automatic handgun in his lap.
"Are you a doctor?"
"You need a doctor?"
"Yes. Not for me, for my friend."
The man leaned forward and looked behind Cass. "Where?"
"He's not with me."
"What's wrong with him? Sick?"
"He's been shot."
The man whistled. "I'm not yer feller. I don't do wetwork. You need to see Doctor Duane."
"Who's he?"
He pointed back behind him. "See that camper back there? That's Duane. Tell im Bill sent ya."
He trotted across the rubbled ground to a rusting Winnebago. People were sitting or lying outside the camper in the rain, some with tarps pulled over their heads. He climbed the three steps and knocked on the door. From the side of the stairs a woman looked up at him.
"There's a line here, mister," she said. "You have to wait your turn just like anyone."
"I just need to talk to someone."
"We all need to talk to someone, sweetheart."
He turned away from her and knocked again and then the door peeled open and a girl of about sixteen was standing there in a blood-splattered rain poncho. Her hair was pulled back in a greasy ponytail and her hands were bare and also bloody up to the wrists.
"Yeah?"
"My friend's been shot, I need to see Duane."
"Take a number. All these folks were here before you."
"I have money. I have weapons, ammo...morphine, but I need someone to come with me."
"How much money?"
"About a thousand."
She squinted up at him and then told him to wait and she turned and disappeared behind a shower curtain that was strung up across the middle of the camper. When she lifted it Cass saw a man stretched out on two card tables. There were people holding his arms and legs down but he was still shaking hard enough to make the tables rattle and the legs of the tables and the floor beneath were slimed with blood The stench was indescribable.
The girl came back and said, "Tomorrow morning."
"No. No, that's too late."
"Well, we got our hands full here and all these people're paying too. Tomorrow morning's the best we can do. Can he hold out that long?"
"No, he can't."
"Where's he shot? Arm, leg?"
"Stomach, twice. No exit wounds."
"Shit," she said. She rubbed at her forehead with the back of her hand and left a bloody streak there. "I would've said I could come out myself but for a gutshot there wouldn't be much I could do."
"Is there someplace else?"
"Not for what you're payin. And look, I don't like to say it but it doesn't sound like your friend's gonna make it anyway."
Cass wiped his face. He was sweaty and shaking. "Will you just come out and look at him, it's not that far from here."
She looked at him and her face softened a little. She said, "Shit," and then, "Hold on."
She closed the door in his face and he stood there on the steps and waited for her. The day was growing dimmer and he looked at his watch and saw that it was nearly four o'clock and so Dean had been alone for almost two hours.
The girl came back with a man in a horribly stained butcher's apron. He sent the girl back into the camper and then took Cass by the arm and walked him down the stairs and out a ways. He was wearing pink rubber dishwashing gloves and he peeled them off and reached into the pocket of the apron and pulled out something rolled into a plastic sandwich bag.
"Are you coming?" Cass said.
The man shook his head and he unrolled the bag and took out a syringe and held it up to Cass.
"This is the best I can do. You don't even have to pay for it."
"What is it?"
"Somulose. One shot'll do it, you don't have to inject it into the heart, any vein will work."
"No," Cass said. He shook his head. "No..."
"Listen to me. It's quick and painless, he won't feel a thing. He'll just go to sleep."
Cass took a step back. "I don't need that. I need a doctor."
"Your friend was shot twice in the stomach? He needs a trauma center and there's no such thing. How much blood has he lost?"
"I don't know. A lot, but we bandaged him up..."
"It doesn't matter. He's going to bleed to death and it'll take hours and he'll be in a lot of pain. Even if you managed to get those bullets out he'd still go septic and that would be even worse." He pointed back at the camper. "You know how many people I treat in there actually make it? I don't even have clean water." He held up the syringe. "The best thing you can do is end it quick. It's this, or shooting him in the head. Take your pick."
"There has to be someone else, don't you know anyone?"
"Yeah I know lots of someones. Just like me and just like this." He made a sweeping gesture that took in the whole squalid place. "They won't be able to help you either, but they'll probably rob you and leave you lying in the street. At least I won't do that."
Cass took another step back and he stood there for a moment and then he yanked the pistol out from the small of his back and pointed it at the doctor. "You're coming with me. Now."
Duane smiled. He bent over and put the syringe on the ground.
"I'm sorry," he said and he turned and walked away.
Cass watched him cross back to the camper and climb the stairs. He heard the door squeal open and slam shut. He stood there for a moment. Then he put the gun away and bent over and picked up the syringe. He wrapped it up in the plastic bag and put it in the front pocket of his shirt.
* * *
He would go back to the Crowne Plaza. Or back to the park and see if anyone there knew anyplace else. If not that then the syringe. What else was left? What else?
He came to West Vine and looked at the Hummers and pickups parked around the hotel and could hear the raucous noise coming from inside. The full weight of desperation settled on him and along with it a fog of delusion that made him think if he could only get inside the hotel he would be able to find someone to help. He had things to offer. To sell. Maybe he would even be able to prevail upon Blunt himself if only he could find him.
He began to cross the avenue and he saw the toady at the door and knew the man would shoot him as he'd said. Shoot him and rob him and Dean would die alone and in agony after he had begged Cass to stay and Dean had hardly ever asked him for anything. Not even in hell.
He turned his back to the hotel. The railyard was just north of here. The park was much further to the south. After a while he began walking north with his head bent like a man who was drunk or sick and then he stopped and looked up from his feet at something he had seen before but not seen. He stood there and stared at the church. Red and white brick and a steeple with a clock that had stopped for good at eleven minutes after nine. At the windows the dim flicker of candlelight.
Standing inside the narthex he could hear the rustle of people in the church and he hung back in the doorway. He twitched at a touch on his arm and he looked down, his eyes adjusting to the dark.
"There's no service," the woman said. Tiny and gray-haired and her eyes big in the dark. "All the priests are gone."
"Service..."
"For the Feast of All Saints. It's November first."
Cass couldn't remember the last time he had known the date or the last person who'd kept a calendar. Even Dean had given up on it.
"You can go in and pray, though," she said. "Just mind the others."
He went into the church, not knowing why. He had never understood the way men worshipped God. The things many of them believed as being God or of God were often little more than legends or fairy tales that could be pretty but were usually ridiculous and sometimes brutally wrong and yet there was a holiness to these places that didn't come from any of the stories or statues or stained glass. God's own holiness. Most demons could not set foot in these churches and temples and even those angels who mocked man and all his creations did not mock these.
The church had been stripped of anything valuable. The pews and rugs and carpet were all gone and the people sat or knelt on the bare floor. The stone altar itself remained, too heavy and too useless to plunder, bare of linens and upon it nothing but a guttering stump of candle and a rough-hewn cross. And all these people in prayer before it. Two sticks of dry wood. He could have wept. He could have laughed or fainted. He could have torn his clothes in sorrow.
He got down on the floor. He went down to his knees and put his hands over his face.
Lord, I was Castiel once. You made me and knew me. If you remember me at all please forgive me. I loved him and didn't know that I would love him because I had only ever loved you. It was weakness and for this I fell from grace but I loved him and I love him and I beg of you Lord to help me or at least let me be able to go with him, wherever the souls of men go, even unto hell. Please, Lord, if you hear me, if you remember me at all. Please. Please. Please.
He raised his head and knelt with his hands palm-up on his knees. After a while he got to his feet and turned and went through the doors and back into the narthex. It was even darker there now and the old woman beside the door was only a pale shape in the shadows and she was slumped over as if asleep. He stood there unmoving and with the sensation of being watched. Yet it was quiet and there was no one here. And then he felt warmth against the right side of his face and his body and he turned his head and saw her seated on a bench against the wall beneath a narrow keyhole window where the last of the daylight still held. Seated in perfect stillness with her hands crossed one over the other in her lap. As if she had always been there. As if she were part of the place itself.
"Castiel," she said.
He crossed the narthex almost at a run and bent over and grabbed her wrists although they burned him.
"Anna, come with me. Come with me, Dean's hurt, he's dying."
"I know," she said. She was as serene as a piece of statuary and there was nothing human left about her except the semblance of humanity that she had worn on earth.
"Come with me!"
She took his hands off her wrists as if he were a child and she said, "I can't."
He went down to one knee so he could look her in the face. "What do you mean, you can't? You can do anything, you're an angel..."
"I'm here for a very short time and I can't leave these walls. I won't exist at all out there. We have no place here anymore."
"But you must have come to help him, why would any of you be here after all this time?"
"I'm here for you, Castiel."
"What?"
"I'm here to take you home."
He stared at her.
"Do you think I'd leave him? Especially now?"
"There's nothing you can do for him."
"He's going to die!"
"He should have died years ago. It will be peaceful, Castiel. It can come to pass right now."
"No! No, don't do that, please!"
"Castiel," she said. "You don't belong here. You never did. You have to come away from this place and be with your own again. All of God's grace will be restored to you. As you were once so you shall be. I know you remember heaven. The joy and the peace. The freedom of loving God, only God, Castiel. Come home with me, brother. Come and be free of all this."
He sat back on his heels and looked at her. His arms dangled at his sides. After a while he smiled.
"I remember it all," he said. "But I still won't go."
"Even if he dies?"
"I would rather be with him at the end than ever see heaven again."
"You love him that much."
He closed his eyes. "Yes," he said.
She fell silent. When he opened his eyes she was bent forward and studying him with such intensity that he felt himself witnessed through to his soul and she seemed to weigh what she saw against what she'd heard and in her eyes he saw a glimpse of the light of heaven and his heart ached for it but he was unmoved.
She sat back against the wall. "Today is the Feast of All Saints," she said. She raised her eyes and passed them over the dark beams of the ceiling. "These Catholics say it takes three miracles to make a saint. But it's much harder than that."
She looked down at him.
"The gift of grace comes to the angels freely, from God. The saints have to find it all on their own in this fallen world. Besieged by loss and need and love as you are. And yet somehow they do." She sighed.
"That's why they're better than us. You will never be an angel again, Castiel. But I think someday you will be a saint." She smiled. "Dean too. He might want to work on the profanity, though. It's a little jarring."
"Dean?" he said. "Dean?" He reached out and seized her hand. "You're going to help him."
"I'm not going to help him," she said. "You are." She grabbed both of his hands and the heat was excruciating and searing and wonderful. "You are." She sat with his hands in hers and he shook from his head to his feet. The church and the city and the rotting world around them receded and dissolved until there was light, only light and he saw nothing and felt nothing and knew nothing that was not light and flame and joy, joy, joy, fire of joy.
When she released him he thought he would fall over. He covered his face and could still feel her burning in his hands. She touched his face and raised his head to look at her and leaned in to whisper to him.
"You think you were punished for this love, but no angel chose you to go down to hell. God alone chose you, Castiel. And God does not make mistakes."
She smiled one last time and then she was gone.
* * *
He didn't remember leaving the church but he found himself back on West Vine. Up the avenue the grotesque hotel carried on just as before. He didn't remember setting off for the railyard but he reached it at dusk and he ran across the tracks and to the freight office and up the stairs and down the hall. When he came to room 210 he threw open the door and saw that Dean was not where he had left him. The corner was empty and his jacket and the canteen and the ampoules of morphine were still there and in the day's last light he could see slick patches of bloody vomit in a track across the floor. He found Dean at the opposite end of the room bent over his knees with the gun still clenched in his hand and he was hyperventilating and gagging and when Cass fell to the floor and took him in his arms Dean didn't know who he was and tried to shove him away. Cass turned him over and Dean's eyes were wide open and glazed and he wasn't looking at Cass or seeing anything at all. He lay in Cass's arms and gasped in his extremity and Cass pushed up his bloodsoaked shirt and shoved the bandage down and laid his hand over the wounds. Dean groaned breathlessly and grabbed Cass's arm and then he went still. He lay in Cass's arms and shuddered and Cass held onto him.
"In all thy ways," he said. "To keep thee in all thy ways, in all thy ways, Dean, in all thy ways." He didn't know he was saying it. He didn't know he was speaking at all.
Dean sucked in a breath and arched until his head was touching the floor. His heels drummed on the floor and he trembled as if in a seizure.
Cass closed his eyes and bent his head and pressed down on Dean's wounds.
"In all thy ways," he whispered. "In all thy ways."
When he opened his eyes some time later Dean was limp and lying across his lap with his eyes closed. He was so still that Cass thought he had been too late and that Dean had died. Then he touched Dean's neck and felt the pulse. It was now too dark to see so he passed his hand over Dean's stomach and felt no wounds, only the glaze of blood they had left behind, already beginning to dry. He closed his eyes.
He sat there with Dean in his arms. After a while he began to cry and after a while he stopped and continued to sit. He wiped his face and passed his hand through Dean's hair and then he laid him down gently and stood up. He was too exhausted to carry Dean so he took him under the arms and pulled him into the corner. He put his back to the wall and drew Dean up against him and covered both of them with his jacket. He wrapped his arms around Dean and rested his head against the wall and the room was dark and Dean was heavy and warm in his arms and then he fell asleep.
* * *
He woke in the middle of the night. Through the window a clear beam of moonlight fell upon the floor and he reached his hand out to it and the light filled his palm like water. He could almost feel it, silvery and cool. Wholly contained in the cup of his hand. He could not look away. He thought his heart would burst. Here at last was grace.
* * *
He woke next when Dean stirred. Dawn was just beginning to gray the windows and Dean sat up and looked down at himself and Cass watched him.
"How do you feel?"
Dean looked back over his shoulder and didn't say anything. He turned away and began unwinding the bloody bandages with slow deliberation.
He said, "Dean?" and sat up.
Dean had gotten the bandages off and he laid the sodden pile down next to him and sat there touching the place where he'd been shot. He turned back to Cass.
"What did you do?"
He told him a little of it. About Anna in the church but not all of it. Dean sat and listened.
"Are the angels back?"
"No. I don't think so."
"Are you an angel again?"
Cass shook his head. "She gave me a little..."
"Juice?"
"Yeah. Juice."
Dean nodded and looked away. "How was she?"
Cass smiled. "Herself. The same."
"Well I..." He creased his forehead. "I hope you said hi for me."
"I probably didn't."
"I guess that's okay," he said and then he sat there. Cass stood up and stretched out his legs. He looked out the window and saw a pale yellow sunrise coming up over the railyard and he knew that it would be a clear day. He turned and held his hand out to Dean and Dean took it but didn't pull himself up.
"God, how many times have you saved my ass?"
He pulled Dean to his feet. "You might want to work on the profanity. It's a little jarring."
"What?"
Cass smiled. "Nothing."
* * *
They took a northward route out of the city that led them through the highway underpasses. At the markets they spent most of their money on a canister of gas in case they found a car. At one of the stalls Dean bought clothes because his own were stiff with blood. He changed into the new things right there and the blood was so thick on his shirt and jeans that it cracked and fell off in ocher slabs when he took them off. There was no place to wash so he stood there and brushed the dry blood from his legs and stomach and it flaked off him like rust. While Dean was getting dressed Cass went to the doctor's camper and knocked on the door. When the door opened and the same girl was standing there in the same grisly state as yesterday he handed her the syringe without a word and left.
They kept heading north and they didn't talk about where they were going. In Powell they broke into a junkyard and after two hours of searching they found a car that started and seemed roadworthy enough and they left the interstate behind and continued on up the county roads. Their route took them north and to the east and they crossed into Kentucky not far from the Cumberland Gap. There was very little here beside the hills and the forest and the weather became cooler as they went further north and it almost began to look like snow again and Cass thought of Bethany's house in Townsend and of those cold nights filled with the eerie sound of branches outside breaking under their weight of ice. How long ago that seemed.
They drove over a small bridge and Dean pulled the car over to the dirt and stopped the engine and said he had to go down to the creek and wash up because he was so filthy that he couldn't stand the itch anymore. From the car Cass could see the little creek and its edges were white with frost and he told Dean he'd freeze down there.
"I don't care," Dean said, pushing the car door open. "I'm crawling outta my fucking skin."
Cass got out of the car when Dean did and he leaned against it with the rifle propped on his knee in case anyone should come along. Dean made his way down the slope and at the bottom he stripped off his clothes and laid them on the russet leaflitter by the side of the creek and splashed water on his arms and legs and then just waded in and hollered out "Fuck!" from the frigid shock. Two crows startled and took off cawing into the November chill.
Cass stood beside the car and looked at Dean and then he looked up into the trees. Stark black against the gray sky. Etchings in charcoal on parchment. The air was cold but fresh and after the city this country place felt clean. Peaceful. It was so quiet. He could hear Dean splashing and huffing from the cold and he turned and opened the trunk and dug around in it and found something like a quilted mover's blanket and he threw it over his arm and went down to the creek bank. Dean was climbing up out of the water when Cass reached the shore and he looked up at him with his teeth chattering. He was almost blue with cold.
"What are you doing? Go up and stay with the car."
"You're freezing. Take this."
"Thanks," he said. He wrapped himself up in it and stood there with his jaw clenched, too cold to move. "Christ, that was cold."
"Come on, I'll get the heater going."
He went ahead of Dean and got behind the wheel and started the engine and cranked up the heater and fan. Dean climbed into the passenger seat beside him still wrapped in the blanket with his new clothes over his arm. He put them down on the floor.
"I didn't want to get dressed until I was dry," he said and he held his hands out to the hot air. "That feels good. Fuck it, that feels great."
Cass started to put the car in gear and Dean stopped him.
"I have to show you something," he said and Cass turned to him and Dean pulled his left leg up onto the seat and moved the blanket aside. The arrow wound was gone. There was not even the faintest mark where it had been. Dean turned around and showed Cass the other side of his leg and that too was unblemished and he sat back down and looked at Cass.
"Two for one," Dean said. "How about that?"
Cass put his hand out and touched Dean's leg. The spot was completely smooth and Dean's fair hair was grown over it as if there had never been any wound there at all and Cass bent over suddenly and kissed him. He hadn't known he was going to do it and was instantly amazed when he did. A muscle twitched in Dean's leg but otherwise he didn't move and for a breathless moment Cass could only stay just where he was and then he straightened up without a word and faced forward and put his hands on the wheel. He started the car and pulled back onto the road. From the corner of his eye he saw Dean draw his other leg up onto the seat and wrap the blanket around himself and lean against the door.
They rode in silence until Dean said, "She wanted you to go with her, didn't she?"
Cass didn't answer and he felt Dean looking at him.
"Didn't she?"
Finally Cass said, "No," and Dean turned back to the door. After a while Dean said, "I'm glad she didn't. How's that for a selfish bastard?"
He glanced at Dean but Dean didn't look at him again. He opened his mouth and closed it and then he turned back to the road. When Dean was dry he bent over and picked up his clothes and got dressed.
* * *
They drove past nightfall and it was near midnight when they blew a tire and skidded to a bumpy stop. They got out and looked at the flat by matchlight although they both knew there was no spare in the trunk.
"Shit," Dean said. He looked up and around. They were surrounded by black woods. "I guess we should push the car off the road. Stay in it until it gets light."
There was a faint scent of woodsmoke on the air and Cass said he thought there must be people around here.
"Well, as long as they stay wherever they are we won't have any problem with them," Dean said. He stretched his back and said that he needed to piss and he walked a little way into the trees. It was so dark that Cass couldn't see him at all and he stood there with his hand on the warm hood of the car and listened to the engine tick and then from the trees he heard a muffled thump and then silence.
"Dean?" he said. He pulled out the pistol and tried to see. "Dean?" He staggered in the dark toward the trees where Dean had gone and called for him and got no answer.
No, he thought, No no no...
He heard a rustle behind him and wheeled around in the blackness and he felt a blow and then nothing.
* * *
He was warm and at first he knew only this. He lay in the warmth with his eyes closed and took a deep breath and sighed it out and then someone touched his forehead and he bolted upright and lashed out.
"Whoa whoa whoa," Dean said. He was crouched beside him with his hands up. "Easy easy, it's all right."
He felt a wall behind him and he pressed his back to it. There was a woman kneeling next to Dean and he looked at her and then at Dean and Dean said, "It's okay, Cass."
"What happened?"
"Just a misunderstanding," Dean said. "How's your face?"
He touched his jaw where he'd been hit and found it tender but not swollen. "Not bad. Are you okay?"
"Yeah," he said and then he shifted and gestured at the woman. "Cass, this is Amy."
"You're Castiel," she said. "I've really wanted to meet you."
He stared at her. He felt as if he should know who she was or did know but couldn't remember.
"How do you know my name?"
"You were in my old house. Do you remember? In Dalhart. Texas? About six years ago?"
He rubbed his forehead and looked at her again and shook his head.
"Cass," Dean said, "You remember, the night after I got out of the hospital? That time Alistair kicked my ass? I was at Amy's house, you came to get me?"
Cass sat there and thought. He remembered a rainy night and he remembered watching Dean as he left the motel room where Sam had left him to be with Ruby. Dean hitchhiking, drinking coffee at a diner. Leaving with the waitress. In her car, to her house where her mother slept on the couch and her children slept upstairs and she slept with him and all night Castiel waited. In the morning he found Dean in the woman's house and Dean had listened to him and gone back to Sam and so here they were these many years later all from that one night in the house of this woman whose name he had not even known until this moment. He looked at Amy and recognized her now, the same pale skin and light hair but less of a girl and prettier for it.
"You found us?"
"No, you found me," she said and then Dean said they should get him up off the floor and so they helped him up and he sat in a chair at a kitchen table with a kerosene lamp burning on it. Dean brought him a cup of water and he drank it.
"I'm sorry about you gettin knocked out," she said. "But we run a pretty tight ship here and we don't take too kindly to trespassers."
"Where are we?"
"East Kentucky. Middle a nowhere and that's how we like it."
"What are you doing here?"
"That's a long story," she said. "And you're in it, sort of. But you all oughta have somethin to eat first, you both look a little wild around the eye. Could you eat somethin?"
Neither of them had eaten since leaving Bethany's house and it seemed to Cass as if that had been weeks ago. He hadn't noticed he was hungry until she mentioned it and then he nodded his head, yes, he could eat something. He was in a sort of daze. He sat there and watched Dean peel potatoes and the potatoes astonished him. There were eggs too, even more incredible.
Amy fried the potatoes and scrambled eggs on a woodfired cookstove and Dean was next to her and Cass felt as if he were watching a married couple go about their evening routine, as if all the world outside had faded away and left only this sanctuary of calm and decency. He wondered if he was seeing things. When he'd heard Dean fall in the woods he'd thought they were going to die after all and die in that senseless and random way but they hadn't and instead they were here. He didn't know what to make of it.
They sat at the table, the three of them, Amy at the head and Cass and Dean opposite each other and on the plates were eggs and potatoes and real tomatoes that she had spooned out of a jar. He picked up his fork and Amy said, "Now, we say grace in this house. No matter what time we eat."
He looked across the table at Dean and Dean cocked an eyebrow at him and smiled and then put his elbows on the table and knit his fingers together and bowed his head down over them so that his mouth and chin were resting on his folded hands. Cass bowed his head too while Amy said grace but Dean was so beautiful in that attitude and in the warm lamplight that Cass had to raise his head and look at him. He felt as if he were seeing him for the first time and yet as if he knew him through and through. He loved him and had always loved him. God does not make mistakes.
His vision shimmered and blurred and Dean looked up at him over his folded hands. He would have looked away but he didn't. Nor did Dean look away. They sat and watched each other across the table and held the gaze until Amy said amen. And even after.
* * *
They sat up in the kitchen where it was very warm from the cookstove. The house also had a woodburning furnace and without electricity the forced-air blowers didn't work but the heat still rose up from the cellar through the old brass registers and warmed the rooms. Cass hadn't been so warm since that last night at the mountain house, in the study before the fire.
Amy told them she began having dreams after the night she'd brought Dean home and an angel had come to her in these dreams and told her to take her family and get out of Texas because hard times were coming. She said this angel didn't look or talk like any of the angels she'd ever read about or thought she'd seen, she was not all white and golden but sad and so grave and she never said anything pretty or sweet or that Amy would have wanted to hear.
"She told me to take my kids and head for the hills. And save whoever I could along the way and we'd be safe here. She told me the truth. My mother said I'd gone crazy and she wouldn't come with us and we had to leave her behind. A month after we left a tornado hit Dalhart and then the dust came and last I heard the whole panhandle's under about twelve feet of dirt. I don't think anybody made it out. I know she didn't. But that's the way everthing is now, isn't it?
"Did she have a name," Cass asked. "Your angel?"
"Her name was Anna," Amy said and Cass glanced at Dean. "You knew her, didn't you? She told me about you, Dean, she said that you had a hard road ahead of you and so God had set an angel over you...that would be you, Castiel. I knew I would see you again, Dean, that I'd see both of you. Anna wanted me to be here to help you when the time came. And now here you are. What does it mean?"
Dean shook his head and looked away from her.
"Are we at the end of the world?"
"No," Dean said. "Not yet."
"You all're gonna stop it, aren't you?"
"Did Anna tell you that?"
"No. She only said...she said that you were chosen. That God had chosen you."
They sat there in silence. The coals in the stove's firebox were banked down to embers and the cast iron creaked softly as it cooled. The kerosene lamp hissed and the clock ticked on the wall as the pendulum swung back and forth.
Cass said, "Do you still see Anna?"
"No I don't. Not in about the last two years," she said and Cass nodded.
"The angels have left us, haven't they?"
He glanced up at Dean. "Not altogether."
"You're still here," she said.
"I'm not an angel anymore."
"Are you sorry?"
"No," he said. He smiled at her. "No I'm not."
* * *
By now it was very late and Amy chunked wood into the stove to keep the fire going until morning and told them they should go to bed. The house was full of people but there was one little place on the third floor where they could sleep if they didn't want to sleep in the kitchen. It was cold up there but there was a bed and blankets and pillows.
They stood up and Dean took the lamp from the table and Cass turned to the door. Amy called Dean back and Cass looked over his shoulder and Dean said to wait and that he would be there in a minute.
Amy said, "Goodnight, Castiel," and he answered, "It's Cass now. Just Cass."
"All right, Cass. Goodnight."
"Goodnight, Amy."
He stepped out of the kitchen into a narrow hallway between the kitchen and the stairs. There was a small bench at the foot of the stairs and he sat down in the dark. He watched the play of lamplight in the kitchen and he couldn't see their shadows but didn't need to. He thought about himself waiting for Dean all night in Dalhart while he slept in Amy's house and he thought about them standing nearly shoulder to shoulder at the cookstove and how she'd become very pretty as if this life for all its hardship had nourished her in a way that being a waitress in Dalhart had not, and he knew that Dean would stay with Amy tonight, and every night that they were here. He put his head against the wall and waited for Dean to come and tell him he could go upstairs by himself. He sat very still and felt very quiet. He closed his eyes and waited.
The light grew brighter against his eyelids because Dean was coming out to give him the lamp. The light moved past him and he opened his eyes and saw Dean standing with his hand on the newel post.
"You awake?"
"Yes."
"Okay, let's go."
He stood and followed Dean up the stairs. They came to the second floor and went down the hall and turned the corner onto another staircase. Their shadows on the wall and the house all hushed around them.
They went the way Amy had told them until they reached a small room that was no more than an alcove with a curtain across it and a mattress inside and nothing else. There were indeed blankets and pillows on the mattress and the room was cold. Dean set the lamp down on the floor and straightened up and drew the curtain and then he turned to Cass and kissed him.
He kissed him again. He stepped back and stood there with his hands on Cass's face and looked at him and smiled. He raised an eyebrow.
"Yes?" he whispered. "No?"
Cass siezed the front of Dean's shirt and pulled Dean to him. They kissed again, open-mouthed, their hands on each other now. Dean pulled away and went to one knee and Cass looked down at him and saw that he was unlacing his boots. Of course. Cass bent down and did the same and their foreheads touched and they looked up at each other and Dean put a hand on Cass's shoulder and they kissed and went back to untying their laces. When that was done they stood up and undressed. Cass had dreamed and daydreamed and yearned for this so many times and in all of those fantasies they had been frenzied and passionate and thoughtless, tearing off each other's clothes in near desperation but they went about this quietly and separately. When Cass glanced at Dean he was folding his shirt and his t-shirt over his arm and he set them down neatly on the floor and Cass had to stop what he was doing for a moment and just watch him. He was so surprising. Always.
Dean unbuckled his belt and slid down his jeans and stepped out of them and took off his socks too and now they were naked and they embraced and kissed. The room was cold and Dean's back was rippled with gooseflesh and they were both shivering. Dean smelled like the creek where he'd bathed, fresh and faintly mossy with a forest scent of dry leaves and he tasted clean and almost sweet. Cass kissed Dean's cheek and his neck and his shoulder and down to his arm where the old imprint of his own hand was still branded into the flesh and he kissed that too, the silhouette of his palm and his fingers. The scar was warmer than the rest of Dean's skin and he wondered for the first time if Dean could also feel this burn on him and if it was painful or only a reminder of what he had gone through, of what they had gone through and come through and come from together. He laid his head on Dean's shoulder and laced his fingers across the small of his back and Dean held him and stroked his hair and for a while they just stood there like that.
Dean pulled back the covers and they lay down and the sheets were so cold they were almost stiff. They were lying on their sides facing each other and then Cass turned onto his back and Dean was on top of him so warm that the cold bed seemed to be melting like snow beneath them.
Dean raised up on his arms and looked down at him and said, "You've done this before?"
Cass nodded. He began to roll over onto his stomach and Dean touched his shoulder and turned him back. He put his hand under Cass's knee and bent it up towards his chest and Cass understood and he put a hand on Dean's hip to stop him for a moment. Dean was on his hands and knees and the light from the lamp was a pale wash of gold on him and Cass touched his face and his throat and his chest. His stomach where he'd been shot. In the light Cass could see a down of blonde hair beneath his navel and he traced it with trembling fingers and then touched his cock. It was erect and flushed and tipped with clear serum and Cass stroked him, the shaft and seam and slit and rubbed the silky liquid with his thumb and then brought his thumb to his mouth and licked it. He licked his hand until it was wet and then he slicked Dean's cock so that it was glistening in the lamplight and then he put his elbows on the bed and bridged himself up and with one hand under Cass's knee and the other braced flat on the bed Dean thrust up into him. Cass sucked in a breath and clenched his eyes shut and Dean put a hand over his mouth and said, "Shh, shhh." And Cass could only lie there for a moment and when he was sure that he could be quiet he opened his eyes and looked up at Dean and nodded and Dean took his hand away and put it back on the bed and went on.
They went about it so quietly that the only sound was the soft but steady creak of the floor beneath them. Cass pushed his shoulders into the mattress and gripped Dean's arms and rode out his thrusts and it was chill enough in the room to see their own breath and yet they were both sheened with sweat. He reached up and with his hand on the back of Dean's neck he pulled Dean down and kissed him and then Dean drew away and pushed hard into Cass, his shoulder buttressed under Cass's knee and his fingers digging into his thigh and he thrust and thrust and came. Eyes shut, biting his lip to stay quiet, spilling heat into Cass, filling him up. Cass came a moment later and gasped when he came and Dean didn't silence him. He moaned and bore himself down onto Dean and came. Shocking release, euphoria, and no shame, no shame at all.
* * *
They were both shaking. Dean began to pull out and Cass stopped him. He closed his eyes and lay there with Dean inside him. Then he nodded and Dean slid out and Cass caught his breath for missing him already and for wanting him again.
Cass let himself settle onto the bed and Dean lay down on top of him. Cass thought of all the terms of endearment he had heard and had used and not one of them fit except one. He whispered, "Dean." And then again, "Dean."
* * *
They lay together without saying a word and they both dozed and Cass woke when he felt Dean sit up. He touched Dean's arm.
"Where are you going?"
"I'm getting dressed, it's fucking freezing in here. Heat rises my ass."
Cass smiled and pulled him down to the bed. He turned on his side and wrapped an arm around Dean and kissed him and then sat up and covered Dean with the blankets and reached down and bent Dean's knees and lifted his legs into his lap.
"What are you doing?"
"You told me when Sam was cold you used to rub his feet."
"He was just a kid."
"You did it because you loved him."
"Yeah."
"And I love you," he said and Dean told him he was nuts but he lay there and let Cass do it.
"That's actually...it's really nice."
"Good," Cass said. He bowed his head and kissed Dean's knee and then he rested his cheek against Dean's leg and Dean stroked his back. They stayed like that for a long time.
Then Dean said, "This doesn't change anything, Cass. I'm still going to Detroit."
Cass nodded. "We are still going to Detroit."
"All right. We."
He caressed Dean's leg and his hand passed over the unmarked place where he'd been shot the year before.
"Three miracles," Cass said.
"Hmm?"
"Three miracles. It takes three miracles to make a saint." He raised his head and kissed Dean's leg where the wound had been. "This was one, last year." He let go of Dean's leg and turned and knelt over him and kissed his healed stomach. "This was two." He sat up and lay down over Dean and kissed him.
"Detroit will be three."
"You think so?"
"Yes," Cass said, "God doesn't make mistakes."
"It has to be me. You were right all along."
"I was half right. It has to be both of us."
Dean lay there and looked up at the ceiling and Cass watched him. Dean smiled.
"So you'll be a saint then? You know, three miracles and all?"
Cass smiled. "We'll both be saints."
Dean said, "Cass, all these years and sometimes I still don't know what you're talking about."
Cass laughed and kissed him. When they broke the kiss Dean said, "Get the lamp," and Cass leaned over and turned down the lamp until it was dark. When he lay back down Dean had rolled over with his back to Cass and Cass put his arm around him and Dean took his hand and threaded their fingers together.
After a little while Dean fell asleep and Cass lay awake behind him. He counted Dean's heartbeats. His breaths. He thought of saints and of men. He thought of the angels among whom he'd once been numbered and could have been again and he pitied them. For knowing nothing of this, and for having so little, and who in their great poverty knew only the confines of heaven, and the facility of grace, and the desolate freedom of loving God alone.
End
Part 2
Outside the rain fell, the sky was dark. On the other side of the railyard the fire had banked down to a smolder and a few soldiers were dragging off the corpses. He edged around to the far side of the freight office and then set off across the tracks. Dean had been right, there was no fence around the place and in a while he had put the yard behind him.
There was a hospital on the other side of the river but it was too far away and he knew the place would be so fortified that he wouldn't even be able to get near it. Even if he could no one there would have helped him or even spoken to him. The city was stifling in the rain and he walked until he was in a sick sweat and he came to a park where people were living in tents and lean-tos made of cardboard boxes or sheet metal or other trash. Here he stopped and spoke to some of the people until he got an address on West Vine Avenue and a name of Blunt.
The place on West Vine was still marqueed as the Crowne Plaza. It was a hotel and a whorehouse and a shooting gallery and a hospital and Blunt was the proprietor and manager and enforcer of it all. The lobby where traveling salesmen and conventioneers had once enjoyed complimentary morning coffee among flower arrangements and blandly comfortable furnishings had become a loud saloon whose patrons were mostly military or private security and some sitting at the bar still in the biohazard suits with their respirators thrown back over their shoulders or dangling beneath their chins like a gunslinger's bandanna. Girls in hot pants and platform shoes served drinks and worked the men. He was stopped at the door by a toady who asked him what he wanted and when Cass told him the toady told him to go around to the back.
Behind the hotel next to the kitchen dumpsters and a pyramid of broken furniture and shredded mattresses the toady emerged from a metal fire door and stood there short and bulldoggish in the rain.
"How much've you got?"
"Five hundred dollars and I can get more. I have a fully automatic rifle and a taser and a .45, all military issue none of this homemade popgun shit. And morphine, I have some morphine."
"How much?"
"Twelve amps."
"You got it on you?"
"Not all of it."
"You got the money? Let me see the money."
"Let me talk to Blunt."
"No one talks to Blunt."
A man with a carbine rifle slung behind his back came out into the alley and unzipped his fly and began to piss against the wall and he watched them over his shoulder.
"Can you help me?"
The toady glanced at the man with the rifle and then looked at Cass.
"You said he was shot?"
"Yes."
"Where's he at?"
"Up by the railyard."
The toady looked at the armed man again and then took Cass by the elbow and led him a couple of feet away.
"There was some dustup at the railyards today. You know anything about that?"
"No, no I don't. Listen, I don't have a lot of time."
"I think you should get outta here."
"What?"
"Get outta here. People're lookin at you."
The other man hitched up his fly and headed back to the hotel and gave Cass a long stare before he went in. When the door closed behind him the toady repeated, "Go on get outta here."
"What about Blunt? They told me there was a clinic here..."
"There's nothin here for you. You stink like a mess a trouble and you can't pay enough to cover that up. Get outta here."
The man turned to the door and Cass grabbed his arm.
"Where else can I go?"
"I'll tell you where. Under the I-40 overpass where it hooks up with 275. That's for people like you. Now get out. If I see you around here again I'll shoot you, understand? Get out."
He shook off Cass's hand and pulled open the door and disappeared inside and the door slammed shut behind him and Cass stood there in the rain and then turned and began to head north up towards the interstate. He left the city center and after a while he came into a neighborhood of wretched apartment complexes and old warehouses and boarded storefronts. The streets were empty and drifted with trash. Everywhere the smell of burning, garbage, open sewers. A car on four bare axles sat askew next to a brick wall and in the backseat a naked woman was being fucked on all fours, the crown of her head hitting the inside of the window. When Cass walked by she looked up at him and shouted "Ten dollars!" and he looked away and kept going and behind him he could still hear her head thumping against the glass. By and by he found himself under the dark shadow of the highway overpass and here were shapeless crowds searching for whatever there was to buy. Canned food and tins of propane and matches. A bar of soap priced higher than the woman in the car. Further back there were stalls selling weapons and all sorts of superstitious charms and dubious medicine. He found a man wearing a straw hat and sitting in a lawn chair with a milkcrate of amber prescription bottles between his feet and a semi-automatic handgun in his lap.
"Are you a doctor?"
"You need a doctor?"
"Yes. Not for me, for my friend."
The man leaned forward and looked behind Cass. "Where?"
"He's not with me."
"What's wrong with him? Sick?"
"He's been shot."
The man whistled. "I'm not yer feller. I don't do wetwork. You need to see Doctor Duane."
"Who's he?"
He pointed back behind him. "See that camper back there? That's Duane. Tell im Bill sent ya."
He trotted across the rubbled ground to a rusting Winnebago. People were sitting or lying outside the camper in the rain, some with tarps pulled over their heads. He climbed the three steps and knocked on the door. From the side of the stairs a woman looked up at him.
"There's a line here, mister," she said. "You have to wait your turn just like anyone."
"I just need to talk to someone."
"We all need to talk to someone, sweetheart."
He turned away from her and knocked again and then the door peeled open and a girl of about sixteen was standing there in a blood-splattered rain poncho. Her hair was pulled back in a greasy ponytail and her hands were bare and also bloody up to the wrists.
"Yeah?"
"My friend's been shot, I need to see Duane."
"Take a number. All these folks were here before you."
"I have money. I have weapons, ammo...morphine, but I need someone to come with me."
"How much money?"
"About a thousand."
She squinted up at him and then told him to wait and she turned and disappeared behind a shower curtain that was strung up across the middle of the camper. When she lifted it Cass saw a man stretched out on two card tables. There were people holding his arms and legs down but he was still shaking hard enough to make the tables rattle and the legs of the tables and the floor beneath were slimed with blood The stench was indescribable.
The girl came back and said, "Tomorrow morning."
"No. No, that's too late."
"Well, we got our hands full here and all these people're paying too. Tomorrow morning's the best we can do. Can he hold out that long?"
"No, he can't."
"Where's he shot? Arm, leg?"
"Stomach, twice. No exit wounds."
"Shit," she said. She rubbed at her forehead with the back of her hand and left a bloody streak there. "I would've said I could come out myself but for a gutshot there wouldn't be much I could do."
"Is there someplace else?"
"Not for what you're payin. And look, I don't like to say it but it doesn't sound like your friend's gonna make it anyway."
Cass wiped his face. He was sweaty and shaking. "Will you just come out and look at him, it's not that far from here."
She looked at him and her face softened a little. She said, "Shit," and then, "Hold on."
She closed the door in his face and he stood there on the steps and waited for her. The day was growing dimmer and he looked at his watch and saw that it was nearly four o'clock and so Dean had been alone for almost two hours.
The girl came back with a man in a horribly stained butcher's apron. He sent the girl back into the camper and then took Cass by the arm and walked him down the stairs and out a ways. He was wearing pink rubber dishwashing gloves and he peeled them off and reached into the pocket of the apron and pulled out something rolled into a plastic sandwich bag.
"Are you coming?" Cass said.
The man shook his head and he unrolled the bag and took out a syringe and held it up to Cass.
"This is the best I can do. You don't even have to pay for it."
"What is it?"
"Somulose. One shot'll do it, you don't have to inject it into the heart, any vein will work."
"No," Cass said. He shook his head. "No..."
"Listen to me. It's quick and painless, he won't feel a thing. He'll just go to sleep."
Cass took a step back. "I don't need that. I need a doctor."
"Your friend was shot twice in the stomach? He needs a trauma center and there's no such thing. How much blood has he lost?"
"I don't know. A lot, but we bandaged him up..."
"It doesn't matter. He's going to bleed to death and it'll take hours and he'll be in a lot of pain. Even if you managed to get those bullets out he'd still go septic and that would be even worse." He pointed back at the camper. "You know how many people I treat in there actually make it? I don't even have clean water." He held up the syringe. "The best thing you can do is end it quick. It's this, or shooting him in the head. Take your pick."
"There has to be someone else, don't you know anyone?"
"Yeah I know lots of someones. Just like me and just like this." He made a sweeping gesture that took in the whole squalid place. "They won't be able to help you either, but they'll probably rob you and leave you lying in the street. At least I won't do that."
Cass took another step back and he stood there for a moment and then he yanked the pistol out from the small of his back and pointed it at the doctor. "You're coming with me. Now."
Duane smiled. He bent over and put the syringe on the ground.
"I'm sorry," he said and he turned and walked away.
Cass watched him cross back to the camper and climb the stairs. He heard the door squeal open and slam shut. He stood there for a moment. Then he put the gun away and bent over and picked up the syringe. He wrapped it up in the plastic bag and put it in the front pocket of his shirt.
* * *
He would go back to the Crowne Plaza. Or back to the park and see if anyone there knew anyplace else. If not that then the syringe. What else was left? What else?
He came to West Vine and looked at the Hummers and pickups parked around the hotel and could hear the raucous noise coming from inside. The full weight of desperation settled on him and along with it a fog of delusion that made him think if he could only get inside the hotel he would be able to find someone to help. He had things to offer. To sell. Maybe he would even be able to prevail upon Blunt himself if only he could find him.
He began to cross the avenue and he saw the toady at the door and knew the man would shoot him as he'd said. Shoot him and rob him and Dean would die alone and in agony after he had begged Cass to stay and Dean had hardly ever asked him for anything. Not even in hell.
He turned his back to the hotel. The railyard was just north of here. The park was much further to the south. After a while he began walking north with his head bent like a man who was drunk or sick and then he stopped and looked up from his feet at something he had seen before but not seen. He stood there and stared at the church. Red and white brick and a steeple with a clock that had stopped for good at eleven minutes after nine. At the windows the dim flicker of candlelight.
Standing inside the narthex he could hear the rustle of people in the church and he hung back in the doorway. He twitched at a touch on his arm and he looked down, his eyes adjusting to the dark.
"There's no service," the woman said. Tiny and gray-haired and her eyes big in the dark. "All the priests are gone."
"Service..."
"For the Feast of All Saints. It's November first."
Cass couldn't remember the last time he had known the date or the last person who'd kept a calendar. Even Dean had given up on it.
"You can go in and pray, though," she said. "Just mind the others."
He went into the church, not knowing why. He had never understood the way men worshipped God. The things many of them believed as being God or of God were often little more than legends or fairy tales that could be pretty but were usually ridiculous and sometimes brutally wrong and yet there was a holiness to these places that didn't come from any of the stories or statues or stained glass. God's own holiness. Most demons could not set foot in these churches and temples and even those angels who mocked man and all his creations did not mock these.
The church had been stripped of anything valuable. The pews and rugs and carpet were all gone and the people sat or knelt on the bare floor. The stone altar itself remained, too heavy and too useless to plunder, bare of linens and upon it nothing but a guttering stump of candle and a rough-hewn cross. And all these people in prayer before it. Two sticks of dry wood. He could have wept. He could have laughed or fainted. He could have torn his clothes in sorrow.
He got down on the floor. He went down to his knees and put his hands over his face.
Lord, I was Castiel once. You made me and knew me. If you remember me at all please forgive me. I loved him and didn't know that I would love him because I had only ever loved you. It was weakness and for this I fell from grace but I loved him and I love him and I beg of you Lord to help me or at least let me be able to go with him, wherever the souls of men go, even unto hell. Please, Lord, if you hear me, if you remember me at all. Please. Please. Please.
He raised his head and knelt with his hands palm-up on his knees. After a while he got to his feet and turned and went through the doors and back into the narthex. It was even darker there now and the old woman beside the door was only a pale shape in the shadows and she was slumped over as if asleep. He stood there unmoving and with the sensation of being watched. Yet it was quiet and there was no one here. And then he felt warmth against the right side of his face and his body and he turned his head and saw her seated on a bench against the wall beneath a narrow keyhole window where the last of the daylight still held. Seated in perfect stillness with her hands crossed one over the other in her lap. As if she had always been there. As if she were part of the place itself.
"Castiel," she said.
He crossed the narthex almost at a run and bent over and grabbed her wrists although they burned him.
"Anna, come with me. Come with me, Dean's hurt, he's dying."
"I know," she said. She was as serene as a piece of statuary and there was nothing human left about her except the semblance of humanity that she had worn on earth.
"Come with me!"
She took his hands off her wrists as if he were a child and she said, "I can't."
He went down to one knee so he could look her in the face. "What do you mean, you can't? You can do anything, you're an angel..."
"I'm here for a very short time and I can't leave these walls. I won't exist at all out there. We have no place here anymore."
"But you must have come to help him, why would any of you be here after all this time?"
"I'm here for you, Castiel."
"What?"
"I'm here to take you home."
He stared at her.
"Do you think I'd leave him? Especially now?"
"There's nothing you can do for him."
"He's going to die!"
"He should have died years ago. It will be peaceful, Castiel. It can come to pass right now."
"No! No, don't do that, please!"
"Castiel," she said. "You don't belong here. You never did. You have to come away from this place and be with your own again. All of God's grace will be restored to you. As you were once so you shall be. I know you remember heaven. The joy and the peace. The freedom of loving God, only God, Castiel. Come home with me, brother. Come and be free of all this."
He sat back on his heels and looked at her. His arms dangled at his sides. After a while he smiled.
"I remember it all," he said. "But I still won't go."
"Even if he dies?"
"I would rather be with him at the end than ever see heaven again."
"You love him that much."
He closed his eyes. "Yes," he said.
She fell silent. When he opened his eyes she was bent forward and studying him with such intensity that he felt himself witnessed through to his soul and she seemed to weigh what she saw against what she'd heard and in her eyes he saw a glimpse of the light of heaven and his heart ached for it but he was unmoved.
She sat back against the wall. "Today is the Feast of All Saints," she said. She raised her eyes and passed them over the dark beams of the ceiling. "These Catholics say it takes three miracles to make a saint. But it's much harder than that."
She looked down at him.
"The gift of grace comes to the angels freely, from God. The saints have to find it all on their own in this fallen world. Besieged by loss and need and love as you are. And yet somehow they do." She sighed.
"That's why they're better than us. You will never be an angel again, Castiel. But I think someday you will be a saint." She smiled. "Dean too. He might want to work on the profanity, though. It's a little jarring."
"Dean?" he said. "Dean?" He reached out and seized her hand. "You're going to help him."
"I'm not going to help him," she said. "You are." She grabbed both of his hands and the heat was excruciating and searing and wonderful. "You are." She sat with his hands in hers and he shook from his head to his feet. The church and the city and the rotting world around them receded and dissolved until there was light, only light and he saw nothing and felt nothing and knew nothing that was not light and flame and joy, joy, joy, fire of joy.
When she released him he thought he would fall over. He covered his face and could still feel her burning in his hands. She touched his face and raised his head to look at her and leaned in to whisper to him.
"You think you were punished for this love, but no angel chose you to go down to hell. God alone chose you, Castiel. And God does not make mistakes."
She smiled one last time and then she was gone.
* * *
He didn't remember leaving the church but he found himself back on West Vine. Up the avenue the grotesque hotel carried on just as before. He didn't remember setting off for the railyard but he reached it at dusk and he ran across the tracks and to the freight office and up the stairs and down the hall. When he came to room 210 he threw open the door and saw that Dean was not where he had left him. The corner was empty and his jacket and the canteen and the ampoules of morphine were still there and in the day's last light he could see slick patches of bloody vomit in a track across the floor. He found Dean at the opposite end of the room bent over his knees with the gun still clenched in his hand and he was hyperventilating and gagging and when Cass fell to the floor and took him in his arms Dean didn't know who he was and tried to shove him away. Cass turned him over and Dean's eyes were wide open and glazed and he wasn't looking at Cass or seeing anything at all. He lay in Cass's arms and gasped in his extremity and Cass pushed up his bloodsoaked shirt and shoved the bandage down and laid his hand over the wounds. Dean groaned breathlessly and grabbed Cass's arm and then he went still. He lay in Cass's arms and shuddered and Cass held onto him.
"In all thy ways," he said. "To keep thee in all thy ways, in all thy ways, Dean, in all thy ways." He didn't know he was saying it. He didn't know he was speaking at all.
Dean sucked in a breath and arched until his head was touching the floor. His heels drummed on the floor and he trembled as if in a seizure.
Cass closed his eyes and bent his head and pressed down on Dean's wounds.
"In all thy ways," he whispered. "In all thy ways."
When he opened his eyes some time later Dean was limp and lying across his lap with his eyes closed. He was so still that Cass thought he had been too late and that Dean had died. Then he touched Dean's neck and felt the pulse. It was now too dark to see so he passed his hand over Dean's stomach and felt no wounds, only the glaze of blood they had left behind, already beginning to dry. He closed his eyes.
He sat there with Dean in his arms. After a while he began to cry and after a while he stopped and continued to sit. He wiped his face and passed his hand through Dean's hair and then he laid him down gently and stood up. He was too exhausted to carry Dean so he took him under the arms and pulled him into the corner. He put his back to the wall and drew Dean up against him and covered both of them with his jacket. He wrapped his arms around Dean and rested his head against the wall and the room was dark and Dean was heavy and warm in his arms and then he fell asleep.
* * *
He woke in the middle of the night. Through the window a clear beam of moonlight fell upon the floor and he reached his hand out to it and the light filled his palm like water. He could almost feel it, silvery and cool. Wholly contained in the cup of his hand. He could not look away. He thought his heart would burst. Here at last was grace.
* * *
He woke next when Dean stirred. Dawn was just beginning to gray the windows and Dean sat up and looked down at himself and Cass watched him.
"How do you feel?"
Dean looked back over his shoulder and didn't say anything. He turned away and began unwinding the bloody bandages with slow deliberation.
He said, "Dean?" and sat up.
Dean had gotten the bandages off and he laid the sodden pile down next to him and sat there touching the place where he'd been shot. He turned back to Cass.
"What did you do?"
He told him a little of it. About Anna in the church but not all of it. Dean sat and listened.
"Are the angels back?"
"No. I don't think so."
"Are you an angel again?"
Cass shook his head. "She gave me a little..."
"Juice?"
"Yeah. Juice."
Dean nodded and looked away. "How was she?"
Cass smiled. "Herself. The same."
"Well I..." He creased his forehead. "I hope you said hi for me."
"I probably didn't."
"I guess that's okay," he said and then he sat there. Cass stood up and stretched out his legs. He looked out the window and saw a pale yellow sunrise coming up over the railyard and he knew that it would be a clear day. He turned and held his hand out to Dean and Dean took it but didn't pull himself up.
"God, how many times have you saved my ass?"
He pulled Dean to his feet. "You might want to work on the profanity. It's a little jarring."
"What?"
Cass smiled. "Nothing."
* * *
They took a northward route out of the city that led them through the highway underpasses. At the markets they spent most of their money on a canister of gas in case they found a car. At one of the stalls Dean bought clothes because his own were stiff with blood. He changed into the new things right there and the blood was so thick on his shirt and jeans that it cracked and fell off in ocher slabs when he took them off. There was no place to wash so he stood there and brushed the dry blood from his legs and stomach and it flaked off him like rust. While Dean was getting dressed Cass went to the doctor's camper and knocked on the door. When the door opened and the same girl was standing there in the same grisly state as yesterday he handed her the syringe without a word and left.
They kept heading north and they didn't talk about where they were going. In Powell they broke into a junkyard and after two hours of searching they found a car that started and seemed roadworthy enough and they left the interstate behind and continued on up the county roads. Their route took them north and to the east and they crossed into Kentucky not far from the Cumberland Gap. There was very little here beside the hills and the forest and the weather became cooler as they went further north and it almost began to look like snow again and Cass thought of Bethany's house in Townsend and of those cold nights filled with the eerie sound of branches outside breaking under their weight of ice. How long ago that seemed.
They drove over a small bridge and Dean pulled the car over to the dirt and stopped the engine and said he had to go down to the creek and wash up because he was so filthy that he couldn't stand the itch anymore. From the car Cass could see the little creek and its edges were white with frost and he told Dean he'd freeze down there.
"I don't care," Dean said, pushing the car door open. "I'm crawling outta my fucking skin."
Cass got out of the car when Dean did and he leaned against it with the rifle propped on his knee in case anyone should come along. Dean made his way down the slope and at the bottom he stripped off his clothes and laid them on the russet leaflitter by the side of the creek and splashed water on his arms and legs and then just waded in and hollered out "Fuck!" from the frigid shock. Two crows startled and took off cawing into the November chill.
Cass stood beside the car and looked at Dean and then he looked up into the trees. Stark black against the gray sky. Etchings in charcoal on parchment. The air was cold but fresh and after the city this country place felt clean. Peaceful. It was so quiet. He could hear Dean splashing and huffing from the cold and he turned and opened the trunk and dug around in it and found something like a quilted mover's blanket and he threw it over his arm and went down to the creek bank. Dean was climbing up out of the water when Cass reached the shore and he looked up at him with his teeth chattering. He was almost blue with cold.
"What are you doing? Go up and stay with the car."
"You're freezing. Take this."
"Thanks," he said. He wrapped himself up in it and stood there with his jaw clenched, too cold to move. "Christ, that was cold."
"Come on, I'll get the heater going."
He went ahead of Dean and got behind the wheel and started the engine and cranked up the heater and fan. Dean climbed into the passenger seat beside him still wrapped in the blanket with his new clothes over his arm. He put them down on the floor.
"I didn't want to get dressed until I was dry," he said and he held his hands out to the hot air. "That feels good. Fuck it, that feels great."
Cass started to put the car in gear and Dean stopped him.
"I have to show you something," he said and Cass turned to him and Dean pulled his left leg up onto the seat and moved the blanket aside. The arrow wound was gone. There was not even the faintest mark where it had been. Dean turned around and showed Cass the other side of his leg and that too was unblemished and he sat back down and looked at Cass.
"Two for one," Dean said. "How about that?"
Cass put his hand out and touched Dean's leg. The spot was completely smooth and Dean's fair hair was grown over it as if there had never been any wound there at all and Cass bent over suddenly and kissed him. He hadn't known he was going to do it and was instantly amazed when he did. A muscle twitched in Dean's leg but otherwise he didn't move and for a breathless moment Cass could only stay just where he was and then he straightened up without a word and faced forward and put his hands on the wheel. He started the car and pulled back onto the road. From the corner of his eye he saw Dean draw his other leg up onto the seat and wrap the blanket around himself and lean against the door.
They rode in silence until Dean said, "She wanted you to go with her, didn't she?"
Cass didn't answer and he felt Dean looking at him.
"Didn't she?"
Finally Cass said, "No," and Dean turned back to the door. After a while Dean said, "I'm glad she didn't. How's that for a selfish bastard?"
He glanced at Dean but Dean didn't look at him again. He opened his mouth and closed it and then he turned back to the road. When Dean was dry he bent over and picked up his clothes and got dressed.
* * *
They drove past nightfall and it was near midnight when they blew a tire and skidded to a bumpy stop. They got out and looked at the flat by matchlight although they both knew there was no spare in the trunk.
"Shit," Dean said. He looked up and around. They were surrounded by black woods. "I guess we should push the car off the road. Stay in it until it gets light."
There was a faint scent of woodsmoke on the air and Cass said he thought there must be people around here.
"Well, as long as they stay wherever they are we won't have any problem with them," Dean said. He stretched his back and said that he needed to piss and he walked a little way into the trees. It was so dark that Cass couldn't see him at all and he stood there with his hand on the warm hood of the car and listened to the engine tick and then from the trees he heard a muffled thump and then silence.
"Dean?" he said. He pulled out the pistol and tried to see. "Dean?" He staggered in the dark toward the trees where Dean had gone and called for him and got no answer.
No, he thought, No no no...
He heard a rustle behind him and wheeled around in the blackness and he felt a blow and then nothing.
* * *
He was warm and at first he knew only this. He lay in the warmth with his eyes closed and took a deep breath and sighed it out and then someone touched his forehead and he bolted upright and lashed out.
"Whoa whoa whoa," Dean said. He was crouched beside him with his hands up. "Easy easy, it's all right."
He felt a wall behind him and he pressed his back to it. There was a woman kneeling next to Dean and he looked at her and then at Dean and Dean said, "It's okay, Cass."
"What happened?"
"Just a misunderstanding," Dean said. "How's your face?"
He touched his jaw where he'd been hit and found it tender but not swollen. "Not bad. Are you okay?"
"Yeah," he said and then he shifted and gestured at the woman. "Cass, this is Amy."
"You're Castiel," she said. "I've really wanted to meet you."
He stared at her. He felt as if he should know who she was or did know but couldn't remember.
"How do you know my name?"
"You were in my old house. Do you remember? In Dalhart. Texas? About six years ago?"
He rubbed his forehead and looked at her again and shook his head.
"Cass," Dean said, "You remember, the night after I got out of the hospital? That time Alistair kicked my ass? I was at Amy's house, you came to get me?"
Cass sat there and thought. He remembered a rainy night and he remembered watching Dean as he left the motel room where Sam had left him to be with Ruby. Dean hitchhiking, drinking coffee at a diner. Leaving with the waitress. In her car, to her house where her mother slept on the couch and her children slept upstairs and she slept with him and all night Castiel waited. In the morning he found Dean in the woman's house and Dean had listened to him and gone back to Sam and so here they were these many years later all from that one night in the house of this woman whose name he had not even known until this moment. He looked at Amy and recognized her now, the same pale skin and light hair but less of a girl and prettier for it.
"You found us?"
"No, you found me," she said and then Dean said they should get him up off the floor and so they helped him up and he sat in a chair at a kitchen table with a kerosene lamp burning on it. Dean brought him a cup of water and he drank it.
"I'm sorry about you gettin knocked out," she said. "But we run a pretty tight ship here and we don't take too kindly to trespassers."
"Where are we?"
"East Kentucky. Middle a nowhere and that's how we like it."
"What are you doing here?"
"That's a long story," she said. "And you're in it, sort of. But you all oughta have somethin to eat first, you both look a little wild around the eye. Could you eat somethin?"
Neither of them had eaten since leaving Bethany's house and it seemed to Cass as if that had been weeks ago. He hadn't noticed he was hungry until she mentioned it and then he nodded his head, yes, he could eat something. He was in a sort of daze. He sat there and watched Dean peel potatoes and the potatoes astonished him. There were eggs too, even more incredible.
Amy fried the potatoes and scrambled eggs on a woodfired cookstove and Dean was next to her and Cass felt as if he were watching a married couple go about their evening routine, as if all the world outside had faded away and left only this sanctuary of calm and decency. He wondered if he was seeing things. When he'd heard Dean fall in the woods he'd thought they were going to die after all and die in that senseless and random way but they hadn't and instead they were here. He didn't know what to make of it.
They sat at the table, the three of them, Amy at the head and Cass and Dean opposite each other and on the plates were eggs and potatoes and real tomatoes that she had spooned out of a jar. He picked up his fork and Amy said, "Now, we say grace in this house. No matter what time we eat."
He looked across the table at Dean and Dean cocked an eyebrow at him and smiled and then put his elbows on the table and knit his fingers together and bowed his head down over them so that his mouth and chin were resting on his folded hands. Cass bowed his head too while Amy said grace but Dean was so beautiful in that attitude and in the warm lamplight that Cass had to raise his head and look at him. He felt as if he were seeing him for the first time and yet as if he knew him through and through. He loved him and had always loved him. God does not make mistakes.
His vision shimmered and blurred and Dean looked up at him over his folded hands. He would have looked away but he didn't. Nor did Dean look away. They sat and watched each other across the table and held the gaze until Amy said amen. And even after.
* * *
They sat up in the kitchen where it was very warm from the cookstove. The house also had a woodburning furnace and without electricity the forced-air blowers didn't work but the heat still rose up from the cellar through the old brass registers and warmed the rooms. Cass hadn't been so warm since that last night at the mountain house, in the study before the fire.
Amy told them she began having dreams after the night she'd brought Dean home and an angel had come to her in these dreams and told her to take her family and get out of Texas because hard times were coming. She said this angel didn't look or talk like any of the angels she'd ever read about or thought she'd seen, she was not all white and golden but sad and so grave and she never said anything pretty or sweet or that Amy would have wanted to hear.
"She told me to take my kids and head for the hills. And save whoever I could along the way and we'd be safe here. She told me the truth. My mother said I'd gone crazy and she wouldn't come with us and we had to leave her behind. A month after we left a tornado hit Dalhart and then the dust came and last I heard the whole panhandle's under about twelve feet of dirt. I don't think anybody made it out. I know she didn't. But that's the way everthing is now, isn't it?
"Did she have a name," Cass asked. "Your angel?"
"Her name was Anna," Amy said and Cass glanced at Dean. "You knew her, didn't you? She told me about you, Dean, she said that you had a hard road ahead of you and so God had set an angel over you...that would be you, Castiel. I knew I would see you again, Dean, that I'd see both of you. Anna wanted me to be here to help you when the time came. And now here you are. What does it mean?"
Dean shook his head and looked away from her.
"Are we at the end of the world?"
"No," Dean said. "Not yet."
"You all're gonna stop it, aren't you?"
"Did Anna tell you that?"
"No. She only said...she said that you were chosen. That God had chosen you."
They sat there in silence. The coals in the stove's firebox were banked down to embers and the cast iron creaked softly as it cooled. The kerosene lamp hissed and the clock ticked on the wall as the pendulum swung back and forth.
Cass said, "Do you still see Anna?"
"No I don't. Not in about the last two years," she said and Cass nodded.
"The angels have left us, haven't they?"
He glanced up at Dean. "Not altogether."
"You're still here," she said.
"I'm not an angel anymore."
"Are you sorry?"
"No," he said. He smiled at her. "No I'm not."
* * *
By now it was very late and Amy chunked wood into the stove to keep the fire going until morning and told them they should go to bed. The house was full of people but there was one little place on the third floor where they could sleep if they didn't want to sleep in the kitchen. It was cold up there but there was a bed and blankets and pillows.
They stood up and Dean took the lamp from the table and Cass turned to the door. Amy called Dean back and Cass looked over his shoulder and Dean said to wait and that he would be there in a minute.
Amy said, "Goodnight, Castiel," and he answered, "It's Cass now. Just Cass."
"All right, Cass. Goodnight."
"Goodnight, Amy."
He stepped out of the kitchen into a narrow hallway between the kitchen and the stairs. There was a small bench at the foot of the stairs and he sat down in the dark. He watched the play of lamplight in the kitchen and he couldn't see their shadows but didn't need to. He thought about himself waiting for Dean all night in Dalhart while he slept in Amy's house and he thought about them standing nearly shoulder to shoulder at the cookstove and how she'd become very pretty as if this life for all its hardship had nourished her in a way that being a waitress in Dalhart had not, and he knew that Dean would stay with Amy tonight, and every night that they were here. He put his head against the wall and waited for Dean to come and tell him he could go upstairs by himself. He sat very still and felt very quiet. He closed his eyes and waited.
The light grew brighter against his eyelids because Dean was coming out to give him the lamp. The light moved past him and he opened his eyes and saw Dean standing with his hand on the newel post.
"You awake?"
"Yes."
"Okay, let's go."
He stood and followed Dean up the stairs. They came to the second floor and went down the hall and turned the corner onto another staircase. Their shadows on the wall and the house all hushed around them.
They went the way Amy had told them until they reached a small room that was no more than an alcove with a curtain across it and a mattress inside and nothing else. There were indeed blankets and pillows on the mattress and the room was cold. Dean set the lamp down on the floor and straightened up and drew the curtain and then he turned to Cass and kissed him.
He kissed him again. He stepped back and stood there with his hands on Cass's face and looked at him and smiled. He raised an eyebrow.
"Yes?" he whispered. "No?"
Cass siezed the front of Dean's shirt and pulled Dean to him. They kissed again, open-mouthed, their hands on each other now. Dean pulled away and went to one knee and Cass looked down at him and saw that he was unlacing his boots. Of course. Cass bent down and did the same and their foreheads touched and they looked up at each other and Dean put a hand on Cass's shoulder and they kissed and went back to untying their laces. When that was done they stood up and undressed. Cass had dreamed and daydreamed and yearned for this so many times and in all of those fantasies they had been frenzied and passionate and thoughtless, tearing off each other's clothes in near desperation but they went about this quietly and separately. When Cass glanced at Dean he was folding his shirt and his t-shirt over his arm and he set them down neatly on the floor and Cass had to stop what he was doing for a moment and just watch him. He was so surprising. Always.
Dean unbuckled his belt and slid down his jeans and stepped out of them and took off his socks too and now they were naked and they embraced and kissed. The room was cold and Dean's back was rippled with gooseflesh and they were both shivering. Dean smelled like the creek where he'd bathed, fresh and faintly mossy with a forest scent of dry leaves and he tasted clean and almost sweet. Cass kissed Dean's cheek and his neck and his shoulder and down to his arm where the old imprint of his own hand was still branded into the flesh and he kissed that too, the silhouette of his palm and his fingers. The scar was warmer than the rest of Dean's skin and he wondered for the first time if Dean could also feel this burn on him and if it was painful or only a reminder of what he had gone through, of what they had gone through and come through and come from together. He laid his head on Dean's shoulder and laced his fingers across the small of his back and Dean held him and stroked his hair and for a while they just stood there like that.
Dean pulled back the covers and they lay down and the sheets were so cold they were almost stiff. They were lying on their sides facing each other and then Cass turned onto his back and Dean was on top of him so warm that the cold bed seemed to be melting like snow beneath them.
Dean raised up on his arms and looked down at him and said, "You've done this before?"
Cass nodded. He began to roll over onto his stomach and Dean touched his shoulder and turned him back. He put his hand under Cass's knee and bent it up towards his chest and Cass understood and he put a hand on Dean's hip to stop him for a moment. Dean was on his hands and knees and the light from the lamp was a pale wash of gold on him and Cass touched his face and his throat and his chest. His stomach where he'd been shot. In the light Cass could see a down of blonde hair beneath his navel and he traced it with trembling fingers and then touched his cock. It was erect and flushed and tipped with clear serum and Cass stroked him, the shaft and seam and slit and rubbed the silky liquid with his thumb and then brought his thumb to his mouth and licked it. He licked his hand until it was wet and then he slicked Dean's cock so that it was glistening in the lamplight and then he put his elbows on the bed and bridged himself up and with one hand under Cass's knee and the other braced flat on the bed Dean thrust up into him. Cass sucked in a breath and clenched his eyes shut and Dean put a hand over his mouth and said, "Shh, shhh." And Cass could only lie there for a moment and when he was sure that he could be quiet he opened his eyes and looked up at Dean and nodded and Dean took his hand away and put it back on the bed and went on.
They went about it so quietly that the only sound was the soft but steady creak of the floor beneath them. Cass pushed his shoulders into the mattress and gripped Dean's arms and rode out his thrusts and it was chill enough in the room to see their own breath and yet they were both sheened with sweat. He reached up and with his hand on the back of Dean's neck he pulled Dean down and kissed him and then Dean drew away and pushed hard into Cass, his shoulder buttressed under Cass's knee and his fingers digging into his thigh and he thrust and thrust and came. Eyes shut, biting his lip to stay quiet, spilling heat into Cass, filling him up. Cass came a moment later and gasped when he came and Dean didn't silence him. He moaned and bore himself down onto Dean and came. Shocking release, euphoria, and no shame, no shame at all.
* * *
They were both shaking. Dean began to pull out and Cass stopped him. He closed his eyes and lay there with Dean inside him. Then he nodded and Dean slid out and Cass caught his breath for missing him already and for wanting him again.
Cass let himself settle onto the bed and Dean lay down on top of him. Cass thought of all the terms of endearment he had heard and had used and not one of them fit except one. He whispered, "Dean." And then again, "Dean."
* * *
They lay together without saying a word and they both dozed and Cass woke when he felt Dean sit up. He touched Dean's arm.
"Where are you going?"
"I'm getting dressed, it's fucking freezing in here. Heat rises my ass."
Cass smiled and pulled him down to the bed. He turned on his side and wrapped an arm around Dean and kissed him and then sat up and covered Dean with the blankets and reached down and bent Dean's knees and lifted his legs into his lap.
"What are you doing?"
"You told me when Sam was cold you used to rub his feet."
"He was just a kid."
"You did it because you loved him."
"Yeah."
"And I love you," he said and Dean told him he was nuts but he lay there and let Cass do it.
"That's actually...it's really nice."
"Good," Cass said. He bowed his head and kissed Dean's knee and then he rested his cheek against Dean's leg and Dean stroked his back. They stayed like that for a long time.
Then Dean said, "This doesn't change anything, Cass. I'm still going to Detroit."
Cass nodded. "We are still going to Detroit."
"All right. We."
He caressed Dean's leg and his hand passed over the unmarked place where he'd been shot the year before.
"Three miracles," Cass said.
"Hmm?"
"Three miracles. It takes three miracles to make a saint." He raised his head and kissed Dean's leg where the wound had been. "This was one, last year." He let go of Dean's leg and turned and knelt over him and kissed his healed stomach. "This was two." He sat up and lay down over Dean and kissed him.
"Detroit will be three."
"You think so?"
"Yes," Cass said, "God doesn't make mistakes."
"It has to be me. You were right all along."
"I was half right. It has to be both of us."
Dean lay there and looked up at the ceiling and Cass watched him. Dean smiled.
"So you'll be a saint then? You know, three miracles and all?"
Cass smiled. "We'll both be saints."
Dean said, "Cass, all these years and sometimes I still don't know what you're talking about."
Cass laughed and kissed him. When they broke the kiss Dean said, "Get the lamp," and Cass leaned over and turned down the lamp until it was dark. When he lay back down Dean had rolled over with his back to Cass and Cass put his arm around him and Dean took his hand and threaded their fingers together.
After a little while Dean fell asleep and Cass lay awake behind him. He counted Dean's heartbeats. His breaths. He thought of saints and of men. He thought of the angels among whom he'd once been numbered and could have been again and he pitied them. For knowing nothing of this, and for having so little, and who in their great poverty knew only the confines of heaven, and the facility of grace, and the desolate freedom of loving God alone.
End
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