RENEGADE "ANGEL"

Another One Bites the Dust, PART I

"I'll be back, boys!"

    Dean and Sam looked up from their piles of books and Sam's laptop. "What?" Dean demanded.

    Cordelia shrugged. "I've got some unfinished business in Aberdeen I need to attend to. I'll be back as soon as I can, but I think a few of my contacts might be able to help out with the Lilith situation."

    "I thought you didn't really work with the paranormal," Sam said.

    "I tried not to, but it didn't always work out that way."

    "How are you getting to the airport?" Dean demanded.

    "Taxi."

    "No! I'm driving you!"

    Cora shook her head. "Absolutely not. You have stuff to do. Do the stuff, and keep me updated, and I'll find you when I come back. See ya!" She left without giving either brother more time to argue the point.

    Aberdeen still ebbed and flowed with business in a manner slow enough to be considered lazy, but the place was alive underneath its disguise. Cora basked in the familiarity of it, strolling past shops she had passed almost daily for five years.

    The sign remained on her door: Phantom Investigators closed until further notice. Leaving it as it was, Cordelia unlocked her door and returned to her old office.

    She had absolutely been lying to Sam when she said that she avoided taking paranormal cases. Paranormal cases made up most of her work, her clients sent by Bobby and his contacts in Europe and by word of mouth.

    That Phantom Investigators girl? She's good at dealing with stuff like this, a hunter would say to a friend not in the know who was suffering a haunting or such like. Then that client would turn to someone else. You have a problem? Oh, go to Fable Castellanos. She'll clear it up for you. And on it went.

    Of course, there were differences in the way Europe was run. Cordelia kept her hunting business on the down low. Rumors circled amongst the few hunters she knew and kept in regular contact with about a group—presumably government level—that dealt with monsters through mass extermination. It all sounded rather Doctor Who-esque to Cora, especially when the technology the group supposedly used was brought up in conversation. She didn't doubt the group—the Men of Letters, they called themselves—was real. It wasn't just monsters they went after, and it wasn't just monsters that disappeared frequently when a few clusters popped up here and there; hunters often vanished, and usually the word on the street was that the Men of Letters was to blame.

    In Aberdeen, the group was scarce. Most of Scotland and Ireland managed without interference from the British Men of Letters, and the creatures that hailed from the two countries were smart enough not to get caught. Even still, Cora—or rather Fable—didn't advertise her paranormal involvement as blatantly as she could have in America.

    With the dye washed out of her hair, no one recognized her. Cora enjoyed the anonymity as she stared at the golden letters on her door's window. She hadn't been away from it long, but already her life in Aberdeen felt like a dream. It had been astonishingly easy to slip back into the Winchester life with her brothers, even if she had to fight the Scottish accent she'd picked up or correct herself when she used a British term rather than an American one (the confusion surrounding the word "chips" in the Impala and in stores had made life difficult for several months).

    "All it took was a few months," she murmured to herself, reaching into her pocket for her keys, "and already six years feels like six minutes of a dream."

    Matters were made worse when her neighbor exited his apartment.

    "You'll have no luck there, miss," said David MacAwley, a man in his mid-thirties who worked for a law firm. He reminded her of Sam. "Fable's been gone for months, and nobody knows when she'll be coming back. You're better off going to the police."

    He shuffled down the hallway without another word. Cora stared after him, completely at a loss.

    "Six years, and my neighbors don't recognize me after a few months..."

    What else had changed, except the dye washing out of her hair? Something must have changed, in order for the neighbor who had always baked something for her when she was working a tough case to not even notice or take a second glance in her direction.

    Cora unlocked her door with shaking hands and pushed inside. She ignored most of her flat, heading straight for the bathroom. She flicked on the lights, glad she'd decided to keep paying her rent and utilities, and stared at the face in the mirror. She looked at herself—really looked and really paid attention—for the first time in months.

    It was Cora Winchester who stared back at her: green eyes and mousy brown hair, a small nose, and a cupid's bow mouth on an oval face. It was the older version of the teenager she'd always been.

    But it wasn't Fable Castellanos.

    Cora pulled out the badge registered under that name, staring at the tiny identification photo. The differences were glaring. She'd forgone makeup back in the States, so the angular shape she'd magicked onto her face while in Europe was gone. Her lips were her natural tone, rather than a deep burgundy that matched her favorite pea coat. She'd lost the colored contacts that made her eyes a mysterious grey and all the silver dye had faded from her hair. Instead of mysterious, she just looked...normal. No wonder David hadn't recognized her.

    Cora dragged a hand through her hair and shoved her badge back in her pocket. Fable was gone for now. Cora had to remain to solve her brothers' problems.

    Lilith was not Cora's primary concern. It seemed as though most of the information was contained to America, likely to drive her brothers mad, and maybe only one or two of the seals were being broken outside of the American border. At any rate, the British Men of Letters would be the only reliable source of demonic info, but there was no chance Cordelia was going to reveal herself to them.

    If demonic information was closed off, perhaps angelic information was a better place to start.

    Cora had an entire shelf dedicated to any and all theories related to heavenly beings, derived from Biblical statements and elsewhere. She had the Book of Enoch and a complete translation of Enochian terms in English (as close as one could get). She had several annotated Bibles and books of prophecy relating to angelic roles in divine plans. She had multiple books that broke down the known angelic hierarchy, and several that filled in the gaps of unknown information as best as possible. Cora had dedicated much of her life to discovering if angels existed as opposites to demons; now that she had met Castiel and was certain of their existence, she just had to use what she had to come up with something useful.

    Shoving aside John Milton's Paradise Lost and Dante's Inferno, Cora pulled from her shelves an annotated Bible, a book of Enochian terms, and a hierarchy of angels.

If angels and demons were opposites, surely that meant they had equals on either playing field. If she could just find Lilith's possible equal, maybe they would have a lead. And if not... Well, they had to start somewhere.

    Chasing seals and trying to stop them from being broken wasn't enough. They needed to do more. They needed something big.

    They needed to cut the head off the snake.