Linking Lives / Book 12 / The Life Series / Supernatural Season 13

Beat the Devil

In the library of the bunker, Sam, Dean, Aiden, Amara, Brandon and I stood with Rowena.

Rowena was assembling the ingredients for the spell. "Fruit from the tree of life. Blood of a most holy man."

Sam tossed a weapon to his brother. "Dean."

Dean caught it, putting it in his bag.

Rowena plucked a hair from Brandon's head. "And, uh, something from the other side."

Castiel walked in.

"Hey," Aiden told him. "How's Gabriel?"

"he said he needed a minute alone," Castiel answered. "He wanted to extract his grace by himself." He used air quotes. "'In private'. So I left him alone in Dean and Ness' room."

Dean and I looked up, giving Castiel a look. "What? No."

Sam chuckled. Brandon and Amara smirked. Aiden tilted his head curiously in confusion.

"I hate to interrupt, but I can't be the only one who's noticed the rather glaring hole in  this plan," Rowena told us. "We open up the rift, it gives us a day to find and save Mary and the boy. And it's a very big world over there, and you're not even sure where they are, so..."

"She's right," Brandon told us. "The clock may run out on us."

"Yeah," Amara answered. "It might."

"Yeah, well, we don't have any better ideas," Dean told us.

I nodded sarcastically. "Mm. That's inspirational."

Gabriel walked in with a vial with only a tiny amount of his grace inside. "Here it is. The final ingredient. A fresh serving of archangel grace."

Gabriel handed the vial to Rowena.

Rowena looked at him skeptically. "This is what you call a serving?"

"That is the jet fuel of divine emissions," Gabriel told us. "It'll be more than enough to get the job done."

Rowena rolled her eyes, pouring the grace into the spell, stirring it into the other ingredients. Castiel spun his angel blade in his hand. Gabriel ran a finger along his archangel blade. Sam, Dean, Aiden, Amara, Brandon and I pulled on our backpacks.

Rowena cast the spell. "Koth munto nuntox."

The rift opened, not as wide open as the other rifts we had seen.

"Okay, everyone ready?" Castiel asked.

"Yeah," Aiden answered.

"All right," Sam told us.

"Let's do this," Dean told us.

Castiel, Gabriel, Dean, Sam, Aiden, Amara, Brandon and I walked toward the rift, but before we could pass through, it flickered and dimmed, falling to the side. Everyone tilted their heads to follow the sight of the crooked rift in confusion. The rift disappeared altogether.

"Okay," Aiden told us.

"Well, that was fast," Amara told us.

"Very, very fast," Sam agreed.

"One could even say premature," I told them.

"Um, I thought it would be enough," Gabriel told us.

"All right, great," Amara told us sarcastically. "What do we do now?"

"Hell if I know," Dean told us.

"You do know," Brandon told us. "We all do. We need archangel grace. Gabriel's obviously running a little low, and we don't know how long it'll take him to recover. So that leaves exactly one source on earth."