, a short ficlet exploring the idea of Castiel freeing Bela Talbot from prison, on his way of getting to Dean. That one was written from Castiel's point of view; this one is all about Bela's. Initially I intend it to be a proper plot-heavy fic, expanding on seasons 4 and 5; while that fell through, I think it stands on its own as a one-shot.
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Hell was masked to the human eye.
Their souls, primed for their around-the-clock suffering, were at one of its deepest and lowest levels, surrounded by endless sterile alleyways illuminated by unreliable, flickering artificial lights. Every human appeared as they were in life; despite their bodies being left behind on earth, tattered and bloodied, they looked solid and corporeal, ready to be tied up to a metal table and carved into. Each stab felt like a wound on the body: it spilt blood, it raised bruises. And at the end of each cicle, the wounds stitched themselves together leaving an immaculate body ready to be broken apart once more.
Even the demons looked perfectly mundane, with human appearances that perhaps reflected their latest vessels, as it was rumoured human bodies couldn't travel that far down the pit. Only their eyes, perpetually black, and the blades in their hands signalling their roles distinguished them from the humans that surrounded them.
But sometimes, out of the corner of her eye, Bela caught glimpses of the truth beneath. Sometimes the wounds inflicted upon her didn't spill blood, but light, hinting at a much deeper damage. Sometimes the faces of the demons above her flickered and showed the monstrous form beneath. Sometimes, Dean Winchester's eyes blinked black when he tortured her.
Among the other souls, among the demons, Bela hadn't bothered to put on a brave face ever since she hit the five years mark. They all had been brought down as low as she herself had, and everyone’s screams were drowned by everyone else’s; that was as close to peace as one could get, downstairs. It was different whenever she was put under Dean's knife.
Dean Winchester; Hell’s star torturer, despite every moral qualm he’d had against far less damaging acts on Earth, as long as they were committed by her. And oh how did she enjoy reminding him of that.
With Dean, Bela found nothing but reasons to put on a front. She first took offence when it became clear that the setup might end with her bleeding, but it was intended as punishment for Dean; either for Alastair's amusement or for any misbehaviour on his part which Bela wasn't privy to. She had discovered that the idea of making it easy for him sickened her, and she refused to become just one more face that he could confuse among the rest he tortured day after day. Seeing him with them, his enjoyment of the task was obvious in a way that highlighted Bela's success: with her, he’d try to withdraw inside his own head, forget what it was he was doing, and Bela would needle and prod and taunt until she broke him out of that reverie.
When she was under his knife, she finally had a goal, and Bela Talbot was someone who –with one very damming exception– always reached her goals. The pain was just as, if not more agonizing as it every other single time, but it was a slight deviation of the hellish routine she’d been stuck in for decades. Bela abhorred routines.
Another reason was their occasional witness. Alastair loved to hover over them and tease the possibility of revealing her secrets to her torturer. Bela’s soul practically pulsed in protest, for Dean had no right to them. Moreover, she hated Alastair even more than she had come to hate Dean Winchester, and giving him the satisfaction of seeing her afraid was not an option.
But most of all, it was that it was embarrassingly easy to put on a brave face around Dean. That boy had bought every one of her lies in life, and he now gave her the gift of buying them in death.
Soon, Bela could be able to appreciate how lucky she’d been to be under Dean’s knife that very day. The day it came for him.
Later, she would try to find the words to describe the creature, to fit it into a category, to compare it with what she knew from before. She would only remember flashes of a shape beyond the scope of her understanding, of colours beyond the scope of her imagination. The impression of something colossal that shook the walls of Hell to its foundations.
The best way to describe it was: it tore the illusion of Hell apart with each step, each glide it took. The walls progressively disappeared, leaving a bottomless void in its place. The semblance of demons' vessels was burnt away, showing the intimidating dark twisted horrors they hid. Bela's body was no longer a body, but pure energy that never stopped fighting against its boundaries, knowing it didn't belong there. Bela knew the creature's presence could've driven anyone alive insane.
It grabbed Dean and held him against itself, striking Bela as how people held infants safe in their arms against their chest. Then, for seconds that lasted days, it stared at her, through her. With a tender, hesitant gesture, it picked Bela up as well from where she, unaware, felt her arms extend towards it. It pulled her in its embrace, warm and safe and reassuring and everything Hell wasn’t. And it flew them out of there.
She felt the sunlight right before she lost consciousness, and the last thing she heard was a voice that reverberated with the power to shake the Earth. It said, Dean Winchester is saved.
Bela’s name went unmentioned.
Bela woke up coughing in her building in Queens, stumbling onto the floor surrounded by shards of dark blue ceramic with golden accents. Her first inane thought was that they must have followed her funeral arrangements to the letter.
There had been vanity to that, as well as a strange, detached rush at the fact that her knowledge of the immediate future allowed her to plan for something so morbid. She still thought she had a good shot at avoiding death altogether, but in case she couldn’t, she loathed thinking about what could happen with her body after the fact. That it would go unidentified, thrown somewhere without care. Or that it could be used.
Bela had put a considerable amount of money into making sure it was cremated and brought there, always carrying an ID for Frances Tarr, the name attached to the building. It might have been one of her few bouts of sentimentality, but she truly couldn’t think of any other place for it. She certainly wasn’t eager to end in the family’s mausoleum all the way across the ocean. There was, simply put, nowhere else for her.
While she stood up trying not to cut herself with the pieces of her own urn, it didn’t escape her notice that whatever brought her back could manage it even after she’d been reduced to ashes, with no sign of the damage made by the Hellhounds and even her clothes intact. It would’ve been inconvenient to return to life with nowhere to go otherwise, but she knew of few things with the power to pull that off. Nothing sort of a crossroads deal, and she couldn't quite picture anyone eager enough to do that for her.
Only then did she realize she’d triggered the alarm on the first floor and rushed to turn it off, struggling to walk those few steps. Taking deep, laboured breaths, she approached the stairs ready to climb the rest of the building.
The first floor was unassuming, looking exactly how you’d expect to find the house of a rich young woman with no interest in the occult. It was as far as the company she'd hired to deal with her remains would be allowed to go, with higher security on the upper levels (made even higher, after certain person bypassed them all in record time, much to her chagrin). Only the upper levels, with her private room at the very top, showed how far from that illusion the real Bela was.
She walked the stairs in a trance, disconnected from her surroundings. She could only muster yet more inane musings: a detached satisfaction at seeing her collection of the occult exactly how she'd left it; the impulse to turn on the heating when a shiver that had little to do with temperature ran down her spine. Finally, she reached her bedroom, ample and almost utterly lacking in personal markers, straight out of a tasteful interior design catalogue. Except, of course, for the gun tapped to the bedside table, ready for Bela to grab it if the worst came to happen.
Walking on autopilot, Bela stepped into the bathroom —almost just as ample, with a shower and a large jacuzzi—, and looked into the mirror.
The horror hit her then. It dawned on her that this was the first time that she saw her own face in over forty years.
Bela had to grab the sink, her fingers turning white with effort, as she took herself in. It didn't make any sense, she thought, for her to look so young.
It didn't make sense for her to look whole either. She had noticed she wasn't wounded and that her clothes had been restored as soon as she landed, but watching what that meant was a different beast.
She looked exactly, exactly as she had moments before dying. Black clothes, ready for a funeral. Face and body intact. She rose her fingers to her upper lip, remembering the bite she had felt tearing her from nose to jaw right before the end, feeling the immaculate skin on its place.
Bela took off her leather trench coat in a sudden, hysterical rush to burn all the clothes she wore that day, but that's when the mark on her arm stopped her short.
It was the handprint of a man wrapped around her lower arm, bigger and with noticeably longer fingers than her own. It looked red, violent, with the skin raised as if someone had branded her with fire, yet pleasantly cold to the touch.
Bela had no idea of what to think of it. Had the creature left it there? Did it even have palms to brand her with? Or was it like Hell: the truth there for those who could see it, but translated into corporeal terms for those who couldn't? Amidst the philosophical questions that Hell's reality often prompted in her, if only to provide a few moments of escape, Bela could only think of how inconvenient the mark's placement was. Until —unless— it faded, short sleeves were to become a thing of the past, for her.
Averting her eyes from the mark, and avoiding her reflection in the mirror altogether, Bela walked back into her room. She decided to grab some clothes to change after a good long bath, and to put aside any preoccupation about her escape and what it all meant until the task was done. But before she could open the closet, her eye caught the one other thing in her bedroom that would look out of place in that interior design catalogue: her cat's litter box.
And just like that, Bela had a new short-term goal again. She always functioned better with those.
Bela drove for hours on end, and she still didn't make it to Gertrude Case's home until the next day despite her best efforts.
The exhaustion of forty years without sleep seemingly caught up with her and, to her shame, she was forced to sleep on the backseat of her car. She had driven all the way to the doorsteps of a hotel only to back away at the last second, sickened at the thought of having to walk in and hear the noises of the crowd waiting in line and endure the chit-chat of the receptionist. Filling her tank was enough of a struggle.
Bela's back didn't thank her for her sudden, albeit not atypical bout of anti-social behaviour. She was definitely getting that bath as soon as she made it back home.
Once she reached Gert's home she took a deep breath and felt herself step into Alex's role, ready to be charming yet understated, to discuss the details of her sudden long-term trip to Italy to help a client, and to pick up her perfectly behaved cat, who she had missed very much.
One-third of Bela's cover being truthful was all in all a pretty honest scheme. Gert should count herself lucky.
It pained Bela that, out of all of her acquaintances, Gert was the most trustworthy one she could find. Bela didn't dislike her, far from the truth; usually, older women in her age bracket put her on edge, and despite refusing to examine her reaction closely, Bela couldn't fool herself into thinking the reason it didn't happen with Gert was that she was as different from her own mother as a rich woman could be. Fanciful, improper, adamant to cheerfully shock the people around her. But reliable? Far from it. Bela's best hope was that Gert had decided to throw her money around —the one thing she did have in common with Bela's mother— and found herself some caretakers to do her job for her. Otherwise, after four long months (and hadn't that be a shock, when she'd heard the date on the radio), Bela's cat could be dead for all she knew.
Relief filled her when Gert opened the door and he jumped straight into her arms. Bela rearranged her hold, letting him rub his face against hers without thinking to first politely greet Gert. Thankfully, she didn't seem to mind, as etiquette often flew over her head.
"He's missed his mommy," she cooed.
Bela repressed the grimace such term invoked in her.
"Mordred only knows me as Alex, dear." It was Gert's turn to grimace.
"That's one awfully morbid name for a sweet cat like that."
"I'm a fan of Arthurian legends, I told you," Bela said, cheeky.
"Many people are," Gert deadpanned. "They would've chosen Merlin. Or Lancelot. Galahad, even."
"He looks like a Mordred to me," she said in a melodious tone.
Gert rolled her eyes and opened the door further, inviting her in for a drink.
"Come in, girl. You need to tell me everything about Italy! Florence, you said, right? Oh, what a lovely place. I haven't visited it in over three decades, but European cities don't change much over time, don't you think? Oh! You have to tell me, did you ever meet those handsome young brothers again?"
Lost in Alex as she was, Bela didn't even flinch.
"A couple of times. Although last I heard, the least cute one went to prison," she couldn't help from adding, and enjoyed the delighted shock in Gert's face while Mordred meowed in her arms.
After a couple of hours where she had her fun discussing more and more outlandish theories that could've supposedly landed Dean in jail, Bela insisted on her urgent meeting with a made-up client who needed her for a seance with her late husband; not because she missed him, of course, but to confront him about the mistress she just discovered in his will. Gert loved stories like that, and never cared that most ranged from amalgams of Bela's encounters to outright falsehoods.
This time Bela forced herself to walk into a coffee shop and get something potent enough to help her drive straight back to Queens, justifying it by telling herself that now she would have a feline witness if she slept in her car like a vagabond; that, she could not abide. She arrived home exhausted, with Mordred in his fancy travel carrier, and she went straight for the elevator and pushed the security code to the upper floors.
Once in her bedroom Bela let Mordred free and summoned the energy to take off her shoes, landing on the bed as she was without the intent to ever, ever move.
Mordred climbed the bed with her, rising to her eye level and pressing into her. Bela turned around to face him and scratched his head, smiling.
"Hello, my boy. Did I tell you I missed you?" she whispered.
He meowed, and Bela kept scratching him as sleep lulled her in.
Bela woke up well into the evening, feeling marvellously well-rested. Mordred, an early riser by nature, was nowhere to be seen, but that was to be expected.
This time nothing was going to stop her from getting her bath. She had even dreamed about it. So she disrobed, disquieted at seeing not just the eerie handprint but also the lack of her appendectomy scar she found yesterday, and she stepped into the bathroom, once again avoiding looking at her reflection in the mirror.
It was exactly what she needed. Towards the end of it she mused about how nice it would've been to be able to swim a few laps in a pool, one of the few indulgences she hadn't included in her building; the maintenance alone was insane, and it would require far more people coming and going from her home that she was comfortable with.
Exiting the tub, Bela dried and wrapped her hair on a burgundy towel. She went to search for some comfortable clothes that would never see the light outside the building, landing on a pair of black sports shorts, her loose Manchester United shirt, with a crisp number eighteen on the back, and her fuzziest black slippers.
She followed Mordred's pitiful moans downstairs and opened a can of food for him, making note of the need to order better sustenance for him. Then, she grabbed her equipment —the board, the cards—, and went to a lower level away from her cat and her fragile collection. Asking the spirits for anything was liable to get messy.
Bela simply sat there for too long, wondering if she was taking the right path. It was time to confront the situation she found herself in. Free from Hell, human and alive, in the apartment she never thought she'd see standing again. Because someone, some thing, brought her back and left her with a myriad of questions all on her own without so much as an explanation.
She was nearly consumed with the desire to escape, to change her name and move far across the globe; she'd never been to Florence, but Gert's recommendation remained present in her thoughts. She felt a not entirely unfamiliar urge to reinvent herself once again. But these were demons that she was dealing with; perhaps something even worse. Humans were easy to hide from; demons, not so much. Would hellhounds still have her scent? Was her soul still bound to Hell, even now? If they found her, Bela knew throwing her back in was the least they would do. She needed to know everything: what was it that pulled her out of Hell? What cards did she still have up her sleeve? And so, she made her inquiry and patiently waited for a response.
It came to her like a hurricane. The spirits were restless, borderline terrified, and they warned of a great evil coming. They told her the being she was looking for had great power, greater than they'd ever seen. The room vibrated in a poor imitation of a horror film, uncharacteristic of the more tranquil consults Bela had built her business on; and before she could ask for clarification —was her rescuer that great evil? Was it something else?—, her board cracked right in the middle and every lightbulb on the floor exploded around her and barely missed cutting her.
Strike one, then. Bela's heart beat at a rabbit's pace, but she was just as determined to keep trying. Preferably the next day, after her hands stopped trembling. All she wanted to do at that moment was to call in a cleaning service for the room, order in some foreign cuisine. It was only then that she realized she was famished, and that she hadn't eaten since she'd come back; maybe she'd order in some Galbi, and perhaps she'd also pour herself a single glass of red wine to calm her nerves.
Bela laid on her reclining couch awake, late into the night. She still wore the high bun she used to remove her hair from her face during dinner, and she was channel surfing on the TV without paying attention to a single word said until she landed halfway through a rerun of Hitchcock's Rebecca and let it play out. She knew the dialogue so intimately there was no need to pay real attention to it.
She turned to watch Mordred, asleep next to her on his cushion. Was this what returning to the world of the living would always feel like? It seemed to Bela that an escape from Hell should shake the Earth, not open up her schedule to sleep in and cuddle with her cat.
She soon regretted that train of thought, when the lights on the ceiling and the TV's screen started flickering and a light quiver shook the couch. Mordred woke up with a loud noise of protest, and Bela grabbed and hid with him under her living room's table, expecting a repeat of the evening's seance. But the light show was cut short when Bela heard a knock on the floor's door that nearly stopped her heart.
It couldn't be demons, she reasoned. The very walls of the building protected against everything but hellhounds, since nothing could guard effectively against them for too long, and hellhounds don't knock. It couldn't be Dean Winchester either. A hellhound knocking politely on her door was miles more likely than Dean Winchester doing it. Every other option was immaterial. All, but one.
Feeling like the idiotic girl about to make the worst possible mistake right at the beginning of a slasher film, Bela left her hideout and walked towards the door as she heard how Mordred, the coward, ran behind the drapes. When she opened the entrance, Bela finally found herself face the face with the being whose handprint —she just knew this— was visible on her arm.
Bela would have clocked him as non-human even if, deep down, she hadn’t been expecting something to show up. On the surface, he couldn’t have looked more conventional: the perfect image of a boring white suburban father with a desk job he pretended not to feel trapped by. Any other day Bela would’ve theorized someone like him was either having a subpar affair or being dangerously oblivious to one.
But on Resurrection Day, everything about the man felt off. Too intense, too out of place. Bela could have also guessed he wasn’t a demon, or at least not one like she ever met before, and she’d met big game; putting aside the warding seals hidden within her walls, there was something more intangible at play. Demons, as a general rule, were damn good at blending in. One never noticed them until it was too late.
That didn’t do a lot to relax her. There was something all too human about demons, even taking their origins into account. This being was at the other end of the spectrum, capable to fight his way into and out of Hell. As Bela had already theorized, he had, by necessity, to be worse than any demon.
"Hello," he talked then, with a grave, pleasant voice.
Bela felt completely disarmed, ignorant of how to proceed. She stood there, watching him while he appeared content to gaze into her eyes with unnerving curiosity.
Oh, what the Hell. If he could appear inside this floor, he could've popped up anywhere in the building, her damn bed included if it'd so pleased him. There was no use in denying him entrance now. And the truth was that Bela, despite every good reason for it, wasn't scared of him.
However, she could hear a hysterical voice inside her head that sounded too close to her mother’s for comfort, berating her for not having tea to offer to the deceptively normal entity waiting in her hallway for Bela to give him a cue.
It hadn’t happened in years. Bela had happily shed the skin made out of all the strict rules impressed upon her during childhood; but once in a while, in uncomfortable situations, one of them came to her, familiar yet unsettling. Like how you ought to always offer your guests a cup of tea.
Bela never even bought tea.
"Come on in," she said, forcing a sardonic tone, and moved aside to make sure they didn't touch when he walked through the threshold.
She watched his back and followed as he took in the room, moving his head mechanically to inspect it as if he wasn't quite familiar with the body he was using. If the reality of him was what Bela could remember from Hell, something colossal whose image she could hardly cling to in her own memories, it meant he probably wasn't. What was he, behind this form?
Bela took it all in, beyond the initial impressions. She thought he looked like a more dishevelled version of agent Cooper. In her first life she only got to watch a couple of episodes of Twin Peaks, but hey. Maybe now she'd get the chance to finish it.
She might've not been scared, but Bela could feel herself growing anxious; while she tried to come up with an opening that was a little subtler than "what in the goddamn hell are you.", he turned around and pointed his blue eyes at her again, with laser focus.
"What's your name?"
Bela scoffed. Maybe subtlety wasn't the answer.
"You get a girl out of Hell, show up in her home, and don't even bother to learn her name?"
"You remember," he said. His voice was monotonous, without barely any inflection, but Bela thought the phrase itself sounded pleased.
"I knew where you were because of that," he added, pointing to the apparent magical beacon in her left arm, as if it could get any more creepy. "I followed it here. I can sense you have many names, but I don't know the real one. Getting you out of Hell... that wasn't the plan. You were at the right place, at the right time."
Bela had already given it some thought, aided by the shaky memories of her rescue, so it wasn't difficult to put two and two together.
"You came for Dean Winchester," she confirmed, watching him nod. "The Dean Winchester that was busy torturing me, whose eyes were maybe only a few more years away from turning pitch black. That's the guy you came to rescue."
"Yes," he answered, shameless.
Sensing a block in the conversation, Bela changed strategies.
"Well. What's your name?" she asked.
"Castiel."
That name didn't belong to a polite introduction in someone's living room. It was a name Bela would've expected to hear in a ritual, an invocation. A name with power.
"And what are you?" Bela decided to go with her initial impulse, damn everything.
For a moment, he looked like someone who didn't expect to be believed.
"I'm an angel of the Lord."
A charged pause preceded Bela's laugh as she sat down on the only chair next to the living room table. She covered her mouth, and she tried, she truly tried to stop. Castiel looked miffed, and Bela didn't think it was wise to laugh in the face of someone who could pull the near-miracles he had proven himself capable of.
But that was the thing: miracles. She hadn't found a single proof of angelic existence, not beyond a reasonable doubt, in an entire life of research about how to keep demons off her back. But a creature who could travel in and out of Hell, who could rebuild a body from its ashes, fighting demons as a natural enemy... what else would they call themselves?
"All right. Angels. Sure. But what does that mean?"
"Pardon?" he asked, head tilted in confusion.
"Do you have wings? Is there an alternative to Hell, a... so-called Heaven? Is there a real "lord"? If what I saw in Hell is what angels look like, what are you supposed to be right now? How are you made? Like demons, out of souls that pass away? A transmitted disease like some creatures? A genuinely different species? What does it mean?" She saw in real-time how, with each question, the look in his eyes had progressively turned from confused to interested, and archived that information.
"My real form, as you saw it, does have... something you humans would understand as wings. Several of them, in fact. What you see now is a consenting vessel, that I need to walk the Earth without causing massive destruction. Unlike demons, angels can't possess humans, if they don't allow it." He seemed insistent on that point.
"That's very polite of you," she said, watching as her sarcasm flew over his head.
"Thank you," he replied. "And there is a Heaven. It's where humans are meant to go for their final rest if they follow a straight path. They stay there for eternity, and they don't turn into anything else. Angels were the first creatures created by God. Not at all related to man," he finished, with an air of satisfaction.
It was at that moment that Mordred abandoned his bashfulness and made an appearance. He approached the stranger with an unusual forwardness. Bela witnessed, now nervous, how he picked up Mordred by the scruff of his neck and raised him to his eyes' level, studying his cat with almost the same intent he'd look at her in the doorway.
"You aren't supposed to pick him like that, you—"
Mordred became agitated, and the man let him down on the floor before landing his eyes on her once again. To her surprise, Mordred remained next to his legs, looking up at him.
"These are fascinating creatures."
"I agree. But I bet angels got them beat," she flattered him.
For a moment, she could've sworn the edge of Castiel's mouth curved almost imperceptibly into a proud grin. Then he looked up in a sudden movement, and a minuscule frown appeared on his forehead.
"We don't have a lot of time. I need to teach you how to protect yourself from angels."
That sentence gave Bela whiplash.
"What?"
"My mission was to bring back Dean Winchester. You didn't factor in it. Strictly speaking, I didn't disobey," he made sure to clarify, "but it was a... liberal interpretation of my orders. I fear what my superiors would do if they found out about you. Do you have quill and paper?"
"In that drawer." Bela pointed him to it, her mind still in a frenzy. "How do I even defend myself from an angel?" she asked, remembering how Castiel, weaponless, broke down the walls of Hell around her.
"As a human, you don't have the weapons to harm us. But these," he told her, concentrated on his drawing, "these are the only ways I know you could shield yourself from us." He pointed at the first one. "If you draw this on your walls, it won't let angels cross them. You can break them and repaint them at will if you ever need me to come here to help."
"And if that happens, what am I supposed to do? Pray?"
"Yes," he replied, completely serious, before continuing in an urgent tone. "This other one is to vanish an angel from where you already are. It has to be drawn in blood, and once it's done, you must press the wound of your palm against it to activate it. Do you understand?"
She nodded. That seemed simple enough.
Bela leaned in, focused on the drawings. Her chest hid the movement of her right hand, grabbing the knife she'd used for dinner and hiding it under the table, where she wiped it clean at best as she could in her shorts.
"Anything else I could do?"
"There is a way to hide you from angels searching for you, no matter where you are. But it's drastic. I'd need it to carve it on you."
Bela recoiled back, the point of the knife now pressed against her left palm.
"I think one mark from you is quite enough, thank you."
He averted his eyes, sheepish. In part to keep him distracted, she went back to her earlier question.
"Why Dean? What's so special about him an angel would get him out of Hell?"
"Dean Winchester has an important destiny to fulfill."
"That's vague," she said, tracing a circle of blood with her fingers on the underside of the table. Mordred was thankfully still mesmerized with the angel, paying no attention to it.
"I haven't even given Dean the details yet."
As if hearing that wouldn't only make Bela more eager to find out as soon as possible.
"Whatever it is... does it pose any danger towards me?" Bela allowed her voice tremble a little with the very genuine concern she would've otherwise tried to mask. She didn't have the full picture yet, but a few things became clearer and clearer. This Castiel had gotten her out of Hell, not without risk. He was now invested in keeping her safe, weary of the consequences of his actions. He offered her his protection, and maybe, just maybe, he could be convinced to do a little bit more to help her simply because he had already helped her. Because his transgression would be a waste if something were to happen to her.
Sunk-cost fallacy. It got to everyone. And although his face was impassive as he studied hers, Bela got the impression angels weren't an exception to the rule. That she was right about the exact process his mind was parsing through.
"He's the one that will stop Lilith before she opens Lucifer's cage and dooms the world," he declared.
Whatever Bela had expected to hear, that was not it. Not a single part of her felt prepared to deal with that phrase, not yet. She closed her eyes and swallowed around the knot in her throat.
"You have to understand," she said, instead of addressing that. "That this was the only way I could prove you were telling me the truth. It's nothing personal."
Castiel looked at her, puzzled. Bela didn't lose another second before pressing her palm against the sigil underneath the table.
She saw him disappear in a violent explosion of light that made her rush to cover her eyes. Mordred released a panic-stricken scream and ran away towards the kitchen.
"Well. Shit," Bela swore.
The sigil worked. And she might soon have to deal with a pretty pissed-off angel.
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