Chapter 1
WHEEL OF FIRE
2009, A.D.
Dean stares at the Colt like the weapon is his personal enemy. He’d been at it for most of the night, nursing the half empty beer bottle, precariously balanced in his hands.
The gun that could kill every evil thing on this Earth had failed to kill the most evil of them all. How was that for irony?
They paid their respects to Jo and Ellen, but the ashes of a burned picture are not nearly enough to help with the pain of losing them both. Not when the fingers of one hand are enough to count the friends they still have; not when it is all pointless like their deaths were.
“You should go to bed,” Sam whispers. For the past half an hour he has resorted to keeping his sentences short and to the point. Less liable to let his alcohol addled brain stumble on them. His beer bottle isn’t as far from empty as Dean’s but then again, neither of them is holding on to their first of the night. They could say that they’ve lost count after the first five, but it’s not like they bothered to count them in the first place.
It’s not even a matter of getting shit-faced. They’re just drinking until the numbness sets in, however many bottles that takes.
It would be easier on their stomachs if they were dealing with something more than alcohol, now corroding the lining until bile sets permanent residence; but not one of the three men inside that quiet house can bring himself to enter the kitchen and actually prepare something to eat.
It would be a waste of time, either way. There is no way any of them can swallow anything past the lumps in their throats.
Except for beer. That goes down smoothly.
Sam’s words didn’t seem to register on Dean’s perception. The silver ring in his finger is steadily beating a soft tempo on the brown glass of the beer bottle, a gentle melody that is playing nowhere else other than Dean’s head. It seems to be sound enough to drown out everything else.
“Dean.”
It’s not the word, not really. Sam’s already aware that those aren’t getting through. It’s that little brother tone, that familiar call to attention, that comfortable sound of ‘listen to me’, ‘acknowledge my existence’ and ‘I need you’. The call deeper than sound that transcends language and time.
Dean looks up, bleary face and red eyes, not from crying because he stubbornly refuses to do that, but from the sheer exhaustion caused by keeping them open. He blinks, rolls his shoulders and stops the tip-tip-tapping sound of metal on glass as an afterthought. “Yeah,” he bends slightly, until the bottom of the bottle touches the boarded floor near the couch. “You too man... s’been a long day.”
Sam would’ve snorted, if he wasn’t sure that the sound would be enough to make bile sprout from his nose. But damn! if that wasn’t the understatement of the year.
They had traveled to a town filled with death and reapers; lost Jo and Ellen to a pack of hellhounds and a couple of bush league, home-made explosives; faced the devil; lost the battle and run away like scared children as Lucifer unleashed Death on Earth. And Sam had found out exactly where and when they were going to lose this war.
So, yeah... it had been a busy, long day.
“I’ll take the couch,” Sam says instead. There’s a bed upstairs, one that Sam hopes his brother will take without much fuss.
The crash into that tree had been hard enough to knock Dean out and keep him out for close to two minutes. This was not a consequence of a bang to the head that Sam was comfortable with, but there was no point in checking Dean for a concussion or trying to stop him from drinking alcohol if he found it.
They were long past those trifling, petty things.
The chosen vessels for Lucifer and Michael would not be allowed to shuffle off their mortal coils over mundane things like a swollen brain or a broken neck. Fat chance of that. And while many would consider that a blessing, Sam and Dean couldn’t help but see it as just one more confirmation of their curse.
All of that didn’t mean that Dean’s concussed head and bruised back shouldn’t be put to rest on a proper mattress and pillow. This was not a night for lumpy, too short sofas for his elder brother.
Dean’s looking at him like he’s actually considering the offer. Or maybe he’s just trying to decide if he can stay conscious long enough to climb all those stairs. “Night, Sam,” he ends up saying, body swinging to the left when he rises to his feet too quickly.
Sam leans forward in the hard chair where he sits, itching to catch his brother if Dean decides to disagree with gravity any further.
Dean holds out one hand, stopping Sam’s ideas before they turn into motion. His feet shuffle a bit, tip of left boot coming dangerously close to kicking the beer bottle, but Dean remains standing.
Sam smiles to himself, fingers playing with one of the bottle caps on Bobby’s desk, trying to not look too obvious as he watches Dean’s slow and careful progress across the room. This is their new balance, this carefully built respect of each other’s faults and limitations. Sam isn’t about to ruin it because of a drunken slightly misplaced step.
The thick blocks of wood in the fireplace are slowly turning from embers into dark and cold coals, the fading glow of fire reflecting on the beer cap and dancing on its metal edges.
Bobby is long gone. After fishing a bottle of scotch from the stash he hadn’t touched in months, he’d rolled away to hide in the room that both Sam and Dean helped him put together on the ground floor of the house a couple of months before.
The TV, stuck on mute by the corner of the room, is playing some generic documentary on ancient cultures, the kind of program that Sam knows Dean likes to fall asleep to, but will never admit to any living soul.
Upstairs, Sam can hear the planks shift and creak under Dean’s feet, marking his progress from stairs to bathroom, from bathroom to bed. The mattress springs’ soft moan signals the moment when Dean finally goes to bed and stops moving.
Sam tosses the rest of his beer into the fire, watching the last of the flames die in a sprinkle of beer and white smoke. There was no point in drinking alone.
Dean had no intention of falling asleep. On any other day, he knew he was drunk enough to assure himself a nightmare-free sleep. But this hadn’t been an ordinary day.
He was too ashamed to admit it to anyone, but it wasn’t visions of Jo’s dying and ashen face that he feared would plague his sleep; it wasn’t the sight of her body being ripped to shreds by invisible claws that were meant for him. No... Dean knew exactly what he would be dreaming about as soon as he closed his eyes.
Hellhounds.
The thunderous sound of their bark, the scrape of their sharp claws against asphalt, the smell of their foul breaths... none of that had ever faded away. And it wasn’t just the one who had gutted him when Lilith had come to collect his soul. No... Dean had met the whole pack in Hell.
New souls were doggie food down there, and he had been no exception. And those puppies liked to play with their food.
When Meg had called his attention to the invisible beasts by her side, Dean had felt his stomach shrivel up and crawl into his throat. It was like their teeth had never really left his flesh.
When one of those beasts had pushed him to the ground, Dean couldn’t even tell if his flesh had already been ripped apart. Earth and Hell mixed in the same breathless gasp and the only thing Dean was sure of was that he was dead.
He could never thank Jo enough for coming back to save him from being chewed on once again. He couldn’t bear to feel like that again, to feel like less than a piece of meat, dangling from a hungry monster’s teeth.
If Dean dared to close his eyes that night, he knew that was exactly where he would be taken. Back into their mouths.
He’s wrong, though.
The feeling of dirt under his bare feet surprises him. Dean looks down, resisting the urge to kneel and grab a handful of the sandy gravel that covers the ground where he stands.
Up ahead, the still waters of a lake reflect the bright sunlight like a mirror, shiny and fluttering like mercury.
“Help me, Dean.”
Dean swirls around, small cloud of dust rising up from his toes. He’s not sure what looks more out of place in the sight that greets him: Castiel, standing under the hot sun wearing his usual trench coat, or the four giant statues of the Egyptian-looking guys sitting down, staring at the lake.
“Is this a dream?” Dean asks, palm of his hand shielding his eyes. Above, the sky was so blue that it hurts to look at it. It makes Castiel’s sad eyes look almost colorless.
“Help me, Dean... I can not escape.”
“Cas? What’s wrong? Where are you?”
The angel blinks, the words affecting his eyes more than the glare of bright light. “I am here... you must come to me.”
“Here where, exactly?”
Unlike the dream when Castiel had come to him before, down by that small body of water near Bobby’s place, where he and Sam used to fish when they were kids, this lake, this whole place is unfamiliar to Dean. It’s clearly some region Dean has never been before; foreign looking, like something more likely to be found in a exotic travel show on TV than in his memory.
“Abu Simbel,” the angel says, looking at him in earnest. “Hurry.”
Dean takes a step forward, intend on physically grabbing the angel to get some more answers before Castiel decides that he’s said enough and disappears on him. He’s not fast enough.
His fingers reach out, about to touch the fabric of Castiel’s coat, when a ring of fire shoots up and surrounds the angel. Dean draws back, shielding his eyes from the flare of light that springs into existence. A perfect circle, like the one where they had trapped Raphael and Gabriel before.
Dean can only stand and watch as the flames grow bigger and bigger while the ring grows smaller and smaller, closing in on the trapped angel, until it has nowhere else to move but onto his clothes. Castiel doesn’t scream, but Dean easily reads the pain in his face. The disappointment.
The fire climbs over Castiel’s wings and he disappears from sight, nothing but the sound of burning flesh and screaming and-
Dean gasps awake, a shout trapped inside his throat, heart hammering against his chest. Head swimming, he stares with wide eyes around the room, then down at himself. The shirt he’d fallen asleep in is drenched in sweat and the bed sheets are coiled around his feet like rope.
Dean pushes them away angrily, almost expecting to find his feet covered in dusty sand. They aren’t, but the dream, the vision, the whatever Castiel has sent him, had felt real enough. Dean can still taste the acrid smoke in his mouth.
He knows it wasn’t just a dream. Sensations were too strong, emotions felt too real and the pain Dean had felt inside his chest as he watched one more friend, one more ally die...
Dean’s sure that, somewhere in that place he saw, Cas is still alive, trapped inside that circle of holy oil. He might not be burning like Dean saw him, or so he hopes, but the sense of danger and the need to do something about it had both been very real.
The sky outside turns from indigo to pale blue, signaling the beginning of a new day and Dean trudges towards his duffle. Sam’s laptop is downstairs, but his is still inside the bag, left unpacked.
Wiping the crust from his eyes, Dean powers it up. He scratches his hair, waiting for the search engine to come online, typing the name of the place Castiel had mentioned even before the images finish loading up in the background.
474 000 results. Dean only needs one to know where Castiel is.
“Fucking hell.”
Bobby’s up, half-heartedly making some coffee and cheese sandwiches. They’re not for himself, Sam is sure of that, but he appreciates the effort non-the-less. Makes them feel more like normal people rather than just ‘the ones who lived to fight another day’.
Other than a mumbled ‘mornin’ and a short worded querying of Dean’s whereabouts, the two men have barely opened their mouths to talk. There is a feeling of ‘morning after a drunken one-night-stand’ in the air, that same awkwardness of waking up facing a stranger, too drunk to remember, too hungover to care.
Except for the alcohol-induced sex, all the other symptoms are there: the inability to meet each other’s eyes; the tricky maneuvering of personal space; the delicate balance between self-consciousness and withdrawal.
Sam sits at the empty table, the shot glasses left behind by Jo and Ellen mercifully gone already -for good, he suspects- fingernail scraping at a stain that has been there forever and isn’t budging now.
He should get up and offer some help to the older man, but offering help to Bobby is trickier these days than it is with Dean most of the time and Sam’s too hungover to deal with that right now.
The stomping of Dean’s boots down the stairs is like a handful of ice cubes down their backs, jolting them both out of their zombie-like mood.
Bobby and Sam turn from their non-conversation and look up at the newcomer before reverting their gazes back to whatever they were doing before. Watching water boil and struggling with unwavering stains, respectively.
The older Winchester looks about as rested as they feel.
Dean sits on the other side of the table with a sound of scrapping chair legs and stiff back. The second time Sam looks up, he recognizes the glint of urgency in his brother’s eyes. “What’s wrong?”
“Cas,” Dean pronounces straight-forwardly, his expression unreadable even to his brother. “He’s in trouble.”
“How-“ Sam finds himself starting, more in surprise at how fast something like that happens rather than the fact that Dean knows the angel is in trouble. The connection between Dean and Castiel is something that Sam learned to leave unquestioned.
However, it had been just a few hours since the angel had dropped them both at Bobby’s. What could’ve possibly gone wrong in such a short time?
The apocalypse, the sarcastic brain cells in Sam’s head, the ones that sound a lot like Dean, supply without prompting.
“I don’t know how...” Dean continues. “I just know that he needs our help and where we have to go.”
“And where is that?” Bobby asks. To the point, back in business.
“Egypt... Castiel is being held in Egypt.
Master Post
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