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Prologue
Kevin nudges the mouse wearily across the pad, struggling to get the little white arrow to line up with the play button on a Youtube video. It’s exhausting, delicate work, like trying to thread a needle if the needle weighed fifty pounds. He can still remember what it was like to have a body, how he’d typed ten pages in a night and never given a thought to the complicated mixture of strength and dexterity it took to press the keys. He resents every single person on earth with the good fortune to have hands.
He should be grateful. The bunker had been a rat’s nest of confusing, interminable hallways that even a ghost could get hopelessly lost in—indeed, he suspected that was the point—but his mother’s house is blessedly easy to navigate for the newly undead. His mom tries her best to make him feel normal in ways that range from sweet to condescending to devastating. For the first week she made him follow the study schedule he had at 16, as if he still had a future at Princeton, until he’d screamed, “I’m dead, I’m dead, do you fucking get it now!” and thrown a trigonometry text book at her. She treaded more carefully afterward.
He’d never had a temper like that before, but without a body he’s got no anchor, and long periods of numbness are broken by sudden seizures of emotion. When the rest of his mind rots away, the fear and rage will linger, the final residue of his existence before he blinks out entirely. Kevin figures it says something terrible about the human race that love is never the last to go as a ghost disintegrates. The nasty bits always win in the end.
He tries to be kind the rest of the time, to make up for the outbursts he can’t control, but there’s so little he can do to help. He’d be happy to do chores, he’s home all day anyway, but laundry, cooking, and vacuuming are all beyond his physical ability. He slowly and painfully (all tasks are slow and painful now) alphabetizes his mom’s CD collection, because at least that’s something he can do.
But it’s a double-edged sword. The harder he works to participate in the world of the living, the faster he burns through his reserves and slips back into the Veil. The Veil was never safe, haunted by the dead angels and demons who are its natives, but the weight of millions of human minds has turned it into a vast, collective nightmare. He feels it waiting for him all the time, just beneath the sunny skin of suburbia, deep water under thin ice. Sooner or later it cracks and he falls, as inevitably as the living fall asleep.
Kevin tries to click the mouse on the “play” button for the twentieth time. Nothing happens. He groans and drops his head onto his forearm.
He’s so fucking tired all the time now. And so, so cold. He wishes he could go outside and soak up some sunlight, but he’s too busy to take a break. The Winchesters have been riding his ass.
The Bunker is always cold. The damp chill below the ground seeps through the thick stone walls and into Kevin’s bones. After hours sitting over the angel tablet Kevin’s blood cools and settles in his core, leaving him too resigned to shiver. . .
I. Angels
“Please don’t hurt me,” the woman says.
Kevin’s startled. Falling into the Veil feels like waking up in the middle of a conversation. He holds his hands up in a gesture of surrender. “No, no, of course not.”
They’re outside: trees, grass, blue sky. She’s an older woman, plump and unremarkable. “We can talk about this,” she says.
“About what?” He glances around and doesn’t see an immediate threat. It’s not like he materialized holding a machete. He’s not sure why she’s so scared.
“Put it down, just . . .” She starts to back away slowly. He realizes then that her eyes aren’t fixed on him, but on an empty spot of air several inches up and to his left. She pauses, as if listening.
“Janet? Janet’s a lying—no, no, hear me! You really think I’d do that?”
There’s a beat of silence, and her expression changes. She sees her opening, and grabs for whatever her invisible attacker is holding. There’s a brief struggle between her and nothing, and then her chest blossoms red and she falls to the ground. She lies there choking on blood for half a minute before she disappears.
Death loop. Kevin’s seen it before. He’s reasoned with the victims, comforted them, yelled at them, slapped them, but none of it ever gets a response. He turns away and starts walking. She’ll be back soon, and he doesn’t want to watch that show again.
To one side of him lies a forest domed with blue sky, and to the other lies an expanse of flat, nondescript ground over which the sky gradually shades toward white. In theory, uncreated space is the safest place in the Veil. Its existence is an advertisement that there are no other minds there, no one to prey on him while he gathers his strength. And yet his inner voice whispers to avoid it. Maybe it’s some useless remnant of his ancestors’ time on the savannah, an instinctive dread of subjecting himself to open spaces. He turns away from the blank desert and plunges deeper into the woods. From behind him he can just make out, “Please don’t hurt me.”
It’s a lovely deciduous forest, the ground dappled green and gold as the false sun shines down through the leaves. And yet there’s a subtle pressure in his chest, a nagging anxiety that slips in and out of his consciousness. He can feel his feet bending their steps into a circle, taking him round and round some tremendous reality he’s afraid to look at, but longs to see. He stops and turns pointedly in the direction his gut would have him avoid, and he’s overwhelmed by disabling dread. No going that way.
He sits. Whatever’s at the heart of the woods, he doesn’t need to screw around with it. He’ll just wait right here until he’s strong enough to break through the Veil and go home. After a minute it strikes him that he’s sitting on brilliant, emerald grass. Grass doesn’t grow on a forest floor. Once he sees it, he notices other cracks in the illusion. The air smells like flowers and the sticky broken stems of basil and rosemary. There’s no undercurrent of decay, no smell of loam or dead leaves rotting. The fruit trees are in bloom and fruit at the same time, pomegranates hanging in thick clusters next to a sprig of bright red flowers. Kevin doesn’t know much about botany, but he’s pretty sure that’s not how it works. The fragrant breeze penetrates the dubious form he pretends is a body, and warms him until the fatal cold that’s settled in his core dissolves. It feels almost like being alive.
The fragrance of the orange tree overhead is smothering. Kevin imagines picking one of the oranges and peeling away the sweet-smelling skin to get at the fruit. It’s a strange thought. Kevin hasn’t felt hungry since he died. Eat an orange, a voice in the back of his head insists. And although it’s the same voice he’s heard all his life, he suddenly knows it’s not his own.
“I don’t want an orange,” he says, although he’s curious what it would be like to taste food again. “Who’s there? Who are you?”
There’s a long silence, broken only by the trilling of songbirds. And then the ground shifts quietly on all sides of him as the back of a vast, golden snake breaks through the grass as if through water, and descends from the trees in glittering loops. The nearest coil drops from a branch above his head and settles a few feet from his face. If this serpent has a head, Kevin can’t see it. He shrinks against the nearest tree trunk.
I apologize for approaching you in this way, without an introduction, the voice in the back of his head says. How unnerving it is to discover it belongs to a stranger. I apologize for many things.
Kevin eyes the scaly mountain range that’s sprung up around him. “Who are you?” he repeats. He has no heart, but the imitation built into this shitty reproduction of his body is pounding.
Gadreel, the voice says. Kevin cringes and folds in on himself, his arms hugging his knees. He wants to punch the fucker in the face, and he wants to run like hell. Neither urge seems likely to end well for him, and it’s not like Gadreel has a face to punch, anyway.
If I could return your life I would, but I’m trapped here as much as you. I watched over Eden once. My memory of it is all I have left to give you. You’ll be safe here, and happy.
The scales slide back beneath the surface of the illusion without a ripple, leaving Kevin alone again. Except not. So very, very not. He’s always worried Crowley would grab his soul, the way he did with the Winchesters’ friend Bobby. Kevin can imagine the creepy bastard sticking him in a cage and just sort of keeping him, a dog for Crowley to kick or pet according to his mood. Gadreel was a threat he’d never even considered. Until now, dead angels had kept to themselves.
Kevin stands and starts to walk in what he hopes is the direction he came from. He tests his ability to break free of the Veil, but he’s met by a rubbery resistance that’s more than just his own weakness. Not good. He wants to scream at Gadreel to get the fuck out of his head. Like killing him wasn’t bad enough, like hanging out inside his friend listening to all their private conversations wasn’t bad enough, now he wants to keep Kevin in a goddamned magical forest and hijack the voice inside his head forever? Fuck that. But he’s pretty sure bitterness isn’t the right tack to take when he’s surrounded by a giant snake monster.
“Look, I appreciate you’re trying to help, but I’m doing okay on my own.” He can’t tell if he’s making any progress on his walk. One fairy tale tree looks like another.
Alone in the Veil you’ll fall prey to demons or wicked men, or become lost in madness.
“I’ll take my chances.” He hesitates. “Please let me go.”
There’s silence, and at first Kevin wonders if Gadreel is considering the request. But as it drags on he realizes the angel has effectively hung up on him. He calls Gadreel’s name, but gets no answer.
He walks for hours, and still nothing looks familiar. From time to time he tries to strike up another conversation with Gadreel, but he might as well be talking to himself. The longer he walks, the more convinced he becomes that he could walk forever and never hit the tree line. He feels around inside his mind until he finds the lurking pressure in his chest, the anxiety that moves his feet always in one direction and not the other. He turns toward the source of his dread again. It’s the “wrong” way, according to all his instincts, leading deeper into the woods instead of out of them.
But then, his mind isn’t entirely his own. What if it’s not his dread, but someone else’s? What’s at the center of the Garden of Eden? He smiles.
He takes a step toward the source of the dread, but the fear is sharp enough that he can hardly bear to lift his foot and set down again. He does it a second time, and a third, but his cautious inching forward only makes the process more painful. He steels himself, and then lunges forward at a run.
It’s like running toward gunfire. He bangs his shoulder off a dozen trees because he’s sure if he slows down he’ll stop altogether. There’s a shift in the air, a roiling unease that silences the birds. Kevin feels the barrier between the Veil and Earth grow softer. Pissing Gadreel off distracts him. Kevin can work with that.
What are you doing? Gadreel says, the first admission he’s made that he’s still paying attention. Kevin has no breath to answer.
He expects the Tree of Knowledge to look special, to be gloomy and imposing or else to gleam like poison candy, but it’s just an apple tree. He might have missed it entirely if it weren’t for a pang of guilt so sharp it almost brings him to his knees. Gadreel’s guilt. Kevin’s well past ready to get that guy out of his head.
The snake’s back rises up through the ground again, a landlocked Loch Ness monster. The scales clatter against each other in agitation.
“You didn’t think this through, did you?” Kevin asks. “You dropped me in the middle of your worst fear. Did you think I wouldn’t notice?”
I’m not one of the monsters you cower in your closet to escape. You’re a prophet. I was supposed to protect you. I’m trying to do that now.
Kevin pulls an apple off the tree. It’s not a Snow White apple, blood bright and dangerous. It looks more like a Red Delicious.
“You were supposed to protect Adam and Eve, too, weren’t you? Awesome job there.” Gadreel’s emotions sharpen into a single point, like a closed fist. He doesn’t have his eye on the exit.
You’re a child. You’ve had only the slightest taste of what waits for you out there. If I let you leave you’d soon regret it.
Kevin bites down on the apple and pushes up, like a diver swimming toward the surface. The tendrils of Gadreel’s mind cling to his ankles, but he kicks free. He opens his eyes in his mother’s kitchen, his hand clutched around nothing. The pots on the stove are steaming, but he is, as always, ice cold.
II. Demons
Kevin wakes up in a windowless hallway. There are candles in the sconces, and in the dim light he can just distinguish the flagstones beneath his feet. The row of sconces extends maybe twenty feet in either direction, and then there’s only darkness. He’s not in the mood to explore, but there’s no telling who or what this hallway belongs to, and he’d rather not stand out in the open until he meets the owner. He grabs a candle off the wall and steps forward.
Beyond the last sconce begins a row of heavy wooden doors on either side. There’s no telling how far this hallway extends; he keeps hoping a few more steps will show him some clear exit, or at least a glimmer of natural light, but he only finds more of the same. He could stay lost down here forever.
Maybe he should call out to the Winchesters. The bunker is hopelessly confusing, and he has a hazy sense he’s gotten lost in here before. They’ll be able to follow his voice and come get him. He almost shouts, “Sam, Dean!” aloud before he comes to his senses. Not the bunker. He shakes his head to clear it, and curses himself for letting his mind wander when he’s trying to get out of this creepy-ass hallway. Just at that moment his knee collides with a low side table, and he narrowly catches a metal tray before it clatters to the ground.
He sets it back on the table and holds the candle over it. It holds maybe a dozen tools: a hammer, pliers, scalpels, and vicious looking things he can’t name but can imagine the purpose of. His hand comes away from the tray sticky and smelling of sulfur. Demons. Shit. He searches within himself frantically for the strength to break away and surface into reality, but he’s too weak. He’s stuck where he landed until he recharges.
He needs to hide from them until he’s able to leave. He grabs a scalpel off the tray and slices a symbol into his left forearm, wincing at the sting. He feels queasy when he sees the blood well up. He knows it’s not real, but the sight of it still makes him wish he could lie down. This isn’t the time or place for squeamishness, though. He carefully swaps the candle to the other hand and does the same on the right before tucking the scalpel into his belt. The symbol is a useful trick he picked up from the tablet. As long as the demons aren’t looking directly at him, they shouldn’t be able to sense his presence. He hopes it works in the Veil.
Blood runs over his hands and down the candle, smearing the white wax red. He presses his arms against the side of his shirt as best he can. The symbols aren’t worth much if he leaves a bloody trail behind him wherever he goes. He can’t see the ground but he doesn’t think he’s dripping much. He considers the candle. It’s impossible for him to hide as long as it’s lit, but if he blows it out he’ll be in pitch darkness, and he has no way to relight it. He could go back the way he came, but standing around the lit part of the hallway means being entirely out in the open.
He hesitates, and then pushes on one of the closed doors along the wall. It opens. He peers inside, the flame flickering with the shaking in his hand. Nothing eviscerates him. He takes a step in, and sees what looks to be a surgical table. It’s covered with a white sheet that drapes almost to the floor. There’s something dark and lumpy puddled along the top, but he can’t make out much.
He shuts the door behind him and gets down on his knees by careful degrees, terrified he’ll drop the candle. He shuffles under the surgical table, behind the sheet, and sits with exquisite caution, until finally he’s cross-legged, with the scalpel in one hand and the candle in the other. He promises himself that if he hears someone at the door he’ll blow it out, but until then he’d rather not be blind.
He takes a deep breath. The sheet glows in the candlelight, surrounding him on all sides like a blanket fort. This isn’t such a bad hiding place, really. He only needs to hang in there until he gets enough strength to break through the Veil. A few hours maybe. He feels the warm blood dripping over his hand mix with hot wax and tries not to think about how long his light will last.
“Hi there,” a man says softly from just behind him.
Kevin catches himself before he screams. He turns and sees a humanoid shadow on the other side of the sheet. “Hi?” he chokes out.
“Are you new here?” The man whispers.
Kevin tightens his grip on the scalpel. “I fell through the Veil.”
The man lifts away the sheet that separates them, and Kevin braces himself to lunge, but the face revealed in the candlelight is blessedly ordinary. He’s just some guy, another human soul who’s gotten stuck in this place. He looks like he could be the dad of one Kevin’s high school friends. Kevin relaxes by a fraction.
“You can’t go back the way you came,” the man says. “They have it locked down. Made it so we can’t break through to Earth from here.”
“Damn it.” Kevin thinks about the long, black halls outside with dismay, but there’s no other choice now. “We’ll have to escape the old-fashioned way.”
“I can help you,” the man says. Kevin struggles to get up on his knees while clutching the scalpel in one hand and the candle in the other. The man lays a hand on Kevin’s elbow to steady him.
He twists Kevin’s arm back and grabs the scalpel so fast that Kevin doesn’t know he’s been betrayed until the handle is sticking out of his gut. This time he does scream. The candle goes rolling away from them both, sparking flames on the white sheet before it gutters and goes out.
“I can help you,” the man says again, and tries to grab hold of the scalpel. “You need to be clean. Your blood will wash away your sins.”
Kevin tries to knock him down, but he slips in the blood pooling beneath him and lands flat on his back, cracking his head against the stone floor. The man pulls the scalpel out of him and swings it upward.
The door crashes open and a demon scuttles through, its glossy black legs so huge and numerous they propel themselves off the walls and ceiling as often as the floors. It spears the man through with a single sharp pincer and tosses his body out into the hall. One of its legs knocks the burning sheet to the floor, and it goes out.
The room is pitch black. Kevin curls in on himself, clutching his stomach. There’s a moment of silence, and then: click, click, click. A steady tapping. It pauses and repeats. Kevin whimpers. There’s another, longer silence, and then an inhuman shriek like metal on metal, so loud that Kevin can only experience it as pain. After a few seconds it stops.
“Whatever you’re going to do to me, just do it,” Kevin says. There’s another set of clicks, as if in response, and then the light comes on, brilliant as a fluorescent bulb. Kevin catches a glimpse of a segmented leg clicking against the floor for an instant before it transforms into a tapping foot.
“Sometimes I forget you meat puppets don’t speak demon,” says a woman’s voice. “Come on out of there, Carnac.”
When Kevin doesn’t move immediately he’s grabbed hard by the arm and dragged to his feet. He clutches protectively at his stomach, half expecting his intestines to slide out, but there’s no pain and his hand comes away clean.
“Instant regeneration. Hell’s great for that.” The woman’s young and pretty, except for a shitty dye job and a wound in her left side that displays the edge of a couple of ribs. “Sorry about Roger. He was just trying to be friendly. See, we told him and the others this was purgatory, and they have to pay for their sins before they get to go to the Big Show upstairs.” She nods toward the ceiling. “They think we’re angels.” Kevin’s too scared to move a muscle, but she must see something in his expression anyway, because she grins. “Yeah, they’re really fucking stupid.”
She sidles closer and cups his face in her clammy fingers. “I’d let you have a go at him if you want. Only seems fair.” She nuzzles against his cheek. “It could be a real hands-on anatomy lesson.”
Kevin shudders. He’s not sure why this demon is so friendly, assuming this is what passes for friendly among demons. He wonders if Crowley sent her to collect him.
“Cat got your tongue?” she says. “You don’t remember me, do you? I’m hurt.” Her eyes flash black, and suddenly he knows her face. It was the first time he’d ever seen a demon.
“Meg.” He barely manages the syllable. He takes a deep breath, although it’s hard because she’s still too close and she smells like carrion. “You worked for the Winchesters.”
“For?” Her tone is cold. Clearly the wrong thing to say.
“With? I don’t know.”
“Against, mostly. Not that it matters now. What do you say, kid, want to play for Team Demon? If I can’t be Queen of Hell I mean to be Queen of the Veil. Better gig anyway. Certainly harder to get fired.”
Kevin’s got no interest in dismembering the souls of desperate people, no matter how stupid, and if he had anything to give he’d give it all not tobe getting fondled by a monster right now. But that’s not the kind of answer that gets him home.
“I could . . . I could deliver messages. On Earth. I talk to the Winchesters all the time. I can reach other people too if you want. I have internet and a phone.”
“On Earth?” She gives him a sly look. “You don’t want to stay here with us?”
“I think I’d be more useful—“
“All right.” She cuts him off, suddenly bored of whatever game she’s playing. “You want to take a message back, tell Castiel you saw me. Tell him I said he should watch It’s a Wonderful Life. And don’t fuck around and forget to do it when you get upstairs, or next time we meet the ‘catch and release’ program is out of business.”
She kisses him, and when she shoves her tongue in his mouth it takes like sulfur and death. He finds himself in his bedroom, gagging. As soon as he recovers he gets on his computer and emails the message to Sam and Dean. He’s not about to cross the future Queen.
III. Humans
The ground swerves beneath Kevin’s feet, and he almost falls down. He’s surrounded by kids. He’s standing in a school bus. Well, that’s different. And then it occurs to him that there’s only one reason a school bus full of children would be in the Veil. Strike “different,” replace with “fucking depressing.” At least no one here is likely to rip his guts out. He sits down on an empty bench at the back.
“We should be at the zoo in about twenty minutes,” the teacher says from the front.
That’s an appointment they’re not going to keep. He wonders how much the children know, and what story she’s been telling them to keep them calm. They look like they might be fifth or sixth graders, and while they’re not in open rebellion there’s a restless quiet over them, like they sense something’s wrong but haven’t quite decided what to do about it.
There’s a girl with a red barrette peering over the back of the seat at him. “Hi,” he says, and she ducks back down, startled. He leans forward and finds her huddled in the corner by the window, clutching a book about horses. The girl next to her is engrossed in a tablet, and doesn’t seem to notice her companion’s fear.
“I’m Kevin,” he says, and does his best to look non-threatening. He’s usually all-too-good at it.
The girl considers that. “Tanya,” she says finally.
He doesn’t know the first thing about talking to kids, but she’s scared and dead, and he feels guilty. “Is that a good book?” he hazards.
She sighs and flips it open to a random page. When he doesn’t react immediately she holds it up for closer inspection. At first he’s not sure what she’s showing him, but then he tries to read it. There are letters on the page spaced out like words, but none of them mean anything. It’s gibberish. Of course. She hadn’t read it yet, and now she never will.
“That sucks,” Kevin says, because he can’t think of anything else. The girl nods.
The teacher has begun to walk down the aisle, checking on the kids. Kevin wants to talk to her. He understands the Veil better than most dead people—just knowing it is the Veil puts him ahead of plenty—and maybe there’s something he could do to help her.
“I want to call my mom,” a girl in the third row says when the teacher walks past, but she gets no answer.
As the teacher approaches Kevin, she turns to a boy a couple of seats in front of him and says, “Put the Pokemon cards away.”
“I wasn’t looking at them,” the boy says, defensive and confused. It’s a normal protest from a kid who’s been caught doing something he shouldn’t—except Kevin can see clearly over his shoulder, and there’s nothing in the boy’s hand.
Kevin stands up when the teacher gets close. “Hey, it looks like you’re in a tough place, but maybe I—“
The teacher brushes right past him and turns back to walk up the aisle again.
“She can’t hear you,” Tanya whispers. “She never hears anyone.” She gestures to her seatmate. “Neither does this one.” She shoves the girl roughly, but she might as well be shoving granite.
The teacher is in a death loop. If the bus is twenty minutes from where it’s going, then in less than twenty minutes everyone on this bus is going to die. Again. He’s gotten hurt in the Veil before, and a brick to the head or scalpel to the gut just don’t carry the same weight here. You’re always okay in the end, because you can’t get worse than dead. He has no way of knowing whether that’s true when you’re caught in another person’s death loop though. For all he knows, if he dies here once he’s part of the cycle forever.
He needs to get off this bus. He needs to get the kids off it, if that’s even possible. He follows the teacher to the front, halting awkwardly behind her when she stops to talk to a child or adjust her cardigan. Maybe there’s some way he can force them to pull over. He’s painfully aware of the reactions of the children as he walks past: the bewildered ones who look up to watch the strange man who’s materialized in the middle of their field trip, and the dead eyed ones who can’t see him at all.
The teacher finally sits in the first row. The man she’s talking with doesn’t acknowledge Kevin when he walks by a moment later. Kevin has a half-formed hope that the bus driver will be different, someone he can reason with, but he proves to be as much of a mannequin as the other two. Kevin’s not sure what to do with that. He tries to shove the driver out the seat so he can take over, but as Tanya showed him, no amount of pushing can dislodge someone in a death loop.
Kevin glares at the useless bastard for a minute and considers his options. This is like the most nightmarish word problem that never made it onto the SAT: you’re on a bus going fifty-five miles an hour, and there are thirty-five children, and infinite repetitions of a fiery, high speed death are coming for you in less than twenty minutes, now solve for X. He gets down on his hands and knees and crawls between the bus driver’s legs, knocking his head against the dash. He groans and scrabbles his way into position, straining to reach the brake. Finally he wedges his hand between the driver’s hovering foot and the pedal and mashes it down. Nothing happens. That was a waste of time.
When he stands up again Tanya is in front of him, clutching the metal pole by the stairwell. She holds up a flip phone to show him the display. “It’s 9:16 again,” she says, near tears. “It’s going to happen.” She’s looking at him like he can fix it, because he’s a grown up and that’s what grown ups do.
Her opinion of him is far too high. He can’t stop the bus, and he can’t save the children from what’s coming. But he can save one.
“You want to get off the bus?” She nods. “We have to jump, okay? It’ll hurt, but only for a minute.” Hitting the pavement at fifty-five miles an hour is going to hurt a hell of a lot, but he’s guessing it’s better than the alternative.
Tanya doesn’t answer him because she’s staring over his shoulder out the windshield. He looks behind him to see a sixteen wheeler drifting across the center line. That would be his cue. He’s almost relieved he’s cutting it so close; he’s not sure he’d have the courage to jump if he had time to think about it. He grabs the girl under his arm and kicks the door of the bus. It takes three kicks to get it to open, and when it does he doesn’t so much jump as fall face-first, his ankle glancing off the stairs.
For an instant the world is jagged, blinding pain. There’s a sharp jolt of glass shattering all around him, and the low pitched crunch of cracking concrete. When he opens his eyes he’s in his mother’s living room. The floor is cracked from the force of his return, and all the windows are blown out. His arms are empty.
He wonders if she’s back on the bus or if she woke up alone at the accident scene. Maybe she landed elsewhere in the Veil, a garden or a demonic hospital. He’s so fucking tired of sad endings.
He bends down automatically to grab a nearby piece of glass, but his hand passes right through it. His mother will be home in a few hours. He concentrates on a single shard and begins the painstaking process of moving them to the trash one-by-one with his mind.
IV. The Void
Kevin’s mom is talking about her day. “Ted said to me—you remember Ted? . . .” Kevin nods. Of course he remembers Ted. He and his wife would come over for dinner, back when his mother used to host dinner parties, back when the broken windows weren’t covered in plastic sheeting and duct tape.
Kevin manifests less and less. It burns through too much of his energy. He can speak to his mom as a disembodied voice, but he can tell it unsettles her, so sometimes he still appears. If it weren’t for the fact that the couch doesn’t sink under his weight, this might be any ordinary night from his high school days, the two of them sitting together and sharing stories when they got home, debating whose turn it was to make dinner.
Kevin gradually loses the thread of his mother’s story, too exhausted to follow along. He blinks slowly and when he opens his eyes the world is white. He’s standing on hard, pale ground that resembles chalk, and the sky is vast and blank. He’s fallen into an uncreated space, outside the realms established by other minds. He turns slowly, but the plain extends as far as he can see in all directions, without shelter or variation. There is no sun, so the light falls evenly from all directions, leaving him without even the solidity of a shadow.
He can see a flock of angels in the distance, black paper cutouts against the white sky. Multiple heads and a long, spindly multitude of limbs, topped with wings like great sails. It’s impossible to tell how far away they are—given their size it could be miles, if “miles” is a measure that holds any meaning in this place. They don’t seem aware of him, or if they are they accept his presence with the same tranquil indifference as cattle at grass.
Kevin starts walking, keeping the angels to his right so he can watch them out of the corner of his eye. From time to time he feels them speak to each other in their own language, a deep rumbling that travels through the ground. He walks for what feels like hours, but he never passes them. They must be as big as skyscrapers, an alien city in silhouette. The pale line where the white ground meets the white sky never draws closer. He might as well be on a treadmill.
He stops. What’s the point of walking? He has nowhere to go. All he can do is wait until he’s rallied the strength to force himself back through the gray boundary to reality. He sits on the hard ground. After a moment he stretches backward and lies down, gazing up at the empty sky.
Every now and then the voices of the angels vibrate beneath him. He remembers floating on his back in the ocean as a child, the rocking cradle of warm water, the bracing green, briny smell, the taste of salt stinging his lips, the hot sun pressing down on his skin like a physical weight. He can never return to that moment. He’ll never again taste salt or smell brine or feel sunlight. The ground beneath him is unyielding, and the dead light shines down without warmth. But he feels the same vulnerability he’d felt then. He’s impossibly small, a lonely spot of consciousness in an infinite space. The giddy vertigo of that moment comes back to him, an overwhelming sense that he might lose his grip on the earth and fall upward into the sky.
His fear is sharp and inexplicable. It isn’t the fear of death, because death has come, and it isn’t the fear of pain, because there’s nothing in this void that wants to hurt him. It’s more like fear of the dark, the kind that haunts you when you’re too old to believe in monsters, but still feel danger lurking beneath the silence. The kind that waited around the corner of every dimly lit corridor in the bunker, an icy indifference indistinguishable from malice.
He shuts his eyes and listens to the familiar clamor of voices in his head. He hopes to find an imposter whispering in his ear. At least that would be companionship of a kind, someone to talk with, someone to battle and cast out, to hate or love. There are a dozen different tracks in his mind, fixated on stale wrongs, ancient embarrassments, and lost comforts, but every one of them has the dull familiarity of his own thoughts.
“Is there anyone out there?” He whispers the words aloud, wondering how far away the nearest human soul might be, what chance there is it can sense his presence. Maybe his voice will reach the flock of angels in the distance. He’s ready to make peace with them, to run from them, to fight with them. He just wants an answer. None comes.
After a long pause he mouths the word, “Gadreel?” His killer stalked him in the Veil before he revealed himself in the Garden. Kevin’s often thought the angel might still be following him. He’s sensed a glimmer of presence by his side from time to time when he thought he was alone, or noticed the flicker of a thought that didn’t sound like his own. He imagines a mountain range of golden scales rising up out of the chalky ground, dangerous and familiar. The silence stretches on unbroken.
He opens his eyes and stares up into the pale sky. He feels like he’s falling into it. He remembers the angel tablet with a jolt, and he doesn’t know how he could’ve forgotten it. He should go back to the library soon, and get to work on the translation. Sam and Dean will be disappointed he hasn’t made more progress.
Out of the corner of his eye he catches the dark line of a wing, as an angel in the distance flies home to its companions. The light catches on the feathers, and for an instant they flash bronze. It reminds Kevin of the pterodactyls in his childhood picture books. It’s a shame dinosaurs don’t have souls. That would’ve been something to see.
V. Deja Vu
The Bunker is always cold. The damp chill below the ground seeps through the thick stone walls and into Kevin’s bones. After hours sitting over the angel tablet Kevin’s blood cools and settles in his core, leaving him too resigned to shiver. His finger joints ache when he flexes them, the stone of the tablet rough under his hand.
Kevin squints at it. The line of symbols he’s focused on is illegible, yet familiar. Maybe he translated it already. He shuffles through his loose-leaf sheets, and turns over all the post-it notes. Nothing. He should be better organized. When he was in school he’d had a system for everything, flawlessly alphabetized and timed to the minute, but he’s lost the will to maintain order. The thought of trying exhausts him. For months now a heavy inertia has settled over him that resists doing more than strictly necessary to survive.
He picks up the glass of milk in front of him and takes a swallow. It tastes like nothing in particular. He’s suddenly acutely aware of the silence in the room, of how completely alone he is. He imagines the unmapped corridors around him spiraling out in darkness, empty and undisturbed. He knows this place better than anyone, has spent lonely weeks exploring it while the Winchesters were away, and even he can’t say where all its hallways lead.
At the edge of his memory presses the notion that he got lost in those halls once, wandering them without the hope of rescue. For days, maybe. For weeks. He’d cried of fear in dark places, scrabbling at door handles that wouldn’t turn and screaming for help that never came. The idea insists on itself, although he knows it can’t be true. He’s never gotten lost exploring the Bunker. Certainly never as lost as that. The memory sits on the tip of his tongue like a word forgotten, like a dream that dissolves in the morning light.
Dread knots in his chest. There’s something evil in this place the Winchesters have never stayed long enough to notice, a chilly mechanical malevolence left behind by generations of the kind of men who’d build a torture chamber beneath cozy wood paneling and stack reel-to-reels of human experimentation next to crystal decanters of scotch. It tried to bury him alive the first time he stepped inside it, and it’s been stalking him ever since, waiting for its moment. He can feel it coiled now, ready to pounce.
Sam’s voice rises sharply from the storeroom Kevin helped Dean ward. The words are indistinguishable, but Kevin predicts the rise and fall of the cadence before it happens. He’s heard this fight before.
Kevin’s heart races in his chest, rattling his fingers against the tablet. Something unspeakable is coming for him. He needs to run. He pictures the path from the library to the front door: a quick dash through the map room, then up the stairs and out. He can do that.
He hasn’t been outside in weeks. It’ll be fall now, the air as cold up there as it is down here, but made sweeter by sunlight and the earthy smell of fallen leaves. It’s been so long since he felt the sun on his skin. All he has to do is stand up and he’ll know that feeling again, he’ll return to the world of light and air. He wills himself to move, but he’s stuck in his seat, frozen in fear.
Sam walks into the library, and then stops and seems to consider Kevin. Assessing him. He’s stopped in this place before, watched him with the same gaze. He’s dangerous, all the malice of the Bunker caged inside a hulking human form. Kevin has the sense that if he tried to run now his feet would stick to the floor, gummy as molasses, the way they do in nightmares.
“Hey, Sam,” he hears himself say, because he has to say something, and those are the only words that come to him.
Sam steps toward him, calm and deliberate. Kevin wants to scream, but no sound will come. He chokes on the sounds in his throat, struggling to ask why Sam’s going to hurt him, where he is, how it’s possible for all of this to have happened before. But the only words that will come to his lips are, “Hey, do you notice anything a little bit off about Dean lately? Between you and me, I'm a little bit worried about him.”
“Don't worry about Dean. Dean will be fine,” Sam says, and closes in. Those are the last words, the ones that complete the circuit.
Sam grabs his head and the world lights up in white hot pain. Kevin screams, because now he can. The feeling of his eyes burning is familiar from a thousand repetitions. For one instant before the world goes dark, Kevin understands.
*
The Bunker is always cold. The damp chill below the ground seeps through the thick stone walls and into Kevin’s bones. After hours sitting over the angel tablet Kevin’s blood cools and settles in his core, leaving him too resigned to shiver. . .