I Promise | A Destiel High School & College AU

CHAPTER 20 - Closing In

"It can't rain all the time."
~Eric Draven, The Crow

Lying awake in the dead of the night, Dean pondered. He often found himself avoiding sleep nowadays, knowing that he'd only dream of Castiel.

It had been a day and a half since the call from Cas, and since Ash had begun to trace the call.

Sam didn't trust the situation. If these kids were really set on killing Castiel, and him if they had to, and they had gone to all this trouble to drag Dean around like a doll, they wouldn't have made the mistake to call Dean. It's not often that murderers make mistakes.

Though, these were college kids after all. Maybe they'd never done anything like this before. Maybe someone was putting them up to it. Still, Sam was anxious for the day they choked on their words and all the hate and torment they'd caused came full circle.

Benny, on the other hand, was willing to do whatever it took to bring Castiel back. Dean was hurting, and in turn Benny was hurting, too.

The shrill sound of the phone ringing startled all three boys, but Dean didn't hesitate to launch for the phone. "Talk to me," he said, counting on Ash being the one on the other end of the line.

He put it on speaker once his suspicious were confirmed.

"The good news is that I was able to intercept the signal from the call, which is pretty great on my part considering not a lot of people can trace calls that have already happened," Ash said, basking in his success.

Dean didn't hear anything after 'good news' and 'able to intercept the signal.'

Dean hesitated. "What's the bad news?"

Ash sighed. "The bad news is that there's no guarantee that the signal is exactly coming from the nearest cell tower that picked it up, and there's about a two and a half mile radius in between the estimated location of the signal and two cell towers in the area."

"Damnit, Ash, English!" Dean yelled.

Sam rolled his eyes and translated. "The signal came somewhere in between two cell towers, which are roughly two and a half miles apart. Cas is somewhere in there, but it's hard to tell exactly where, due to the poor signal in between the two towers."

Dean rubbed his hand over his eyes and turned away from the others.

"So we have eighteen days to search two and a half miles of land. We can do that. Right?" he asked, unsure.

Sam and Benny looked at each other, saddened but determined. They faced Dean with similar looks of assurance on their faces.

"Yeah," Sam said. "We can do it."

Benny moved to Dean and placed his hand on his shoulder. "Let's go get him back, Dean."

They'd learned from Ash that the location of the two cell towers that the call was traced from was about thirty miles out of town.

They packed their things and set out on their mission.

~

CRACK.

The sound of a bone being crushed filled Castiel's ears, followed by his own shrill sound of pain.

His instinctual reaction earned him another strike across the face. He'd been struck so many times over the past few weeks, he couldn't see out of his left eye, and his right was becoming increasingly less useful.

He'd become used to the blows to his face and side, but the feeling of his leg crumbling inside him was all new.

And Castiel did not appreciate it.