the part that’ll save your ass if you run into one of these yourself. Should get back to the problem at hand. Memory. Demons have the motive, for sure—they’d jump at any chance to mess with a hunter—but do they have the means? Alastair, Lilith, Azazel, Crowley, they’ve all shown that they have the power to do things far greater than a regular demon, but could they really put a tap into my brain and suck out the juice? I’ve been going through my sources as I put this together, and nothing points to them having that kinda power.
But that don’t answer the big question—why the hell is “Karen” scratched into the Chevelle’s windshield? What connection could there be? Could it be that demon, the one that Rufus ripped out of Karen, come back for round two? There’s just no way to know, not without more evidence.
You get now that demons are threat-number-one to humanity, but, I’ve got a nagging tickle in the back of my head, tellin’ me I might be looking in the wrong direction on this one. That I shouldn’t be looking down . . . I should be looking up .
Angels
UNTIL SEPTEMBER 2008, I woulda told you that angels were a myth. Demons were real, monsters were real, ghosts were real, hell was real, but the only thing standing up for the side of good was mankind. Kind of a depressing worldview, but that’s what the evidence showed. Though in a way, it was almost comforting—there was nothing out there gonna save us but us, and that made us important. It gave us purpose, activated our survival instincts—it’s the reason there are hunters. If there were angels up there making sure things were fair and balanced, we could all sit poolside drinking booze with little umbrellas in it and enjoying the scenery.
There are angels, but I’m not in Cabo working on my tan, so how do you square those two facts?
Angels are dicks .
Yeah, even He-Man there.
In the grand scheme of things, everybody looks out for themselves, and you’ll never learn anything truer than that. Everybody’s actions are steeped in their own interests, even angels’. They may have been created to serve God and man, but since God flew the coop . . . they’ve been following the letter of divine law, not the intent. They were created before us, but weren’t given free will. Bummer for them. Ever since, a certain heavenly contingent has been on the warpath, determined to wipe us off the planet so that they can come in and enjoy the paradise that God created for us. A couple of us talkin’ apes stood up for ourselves (with the help of an angel named Castiel who turned against his brothers) and we’ve (at least for now) stopped the great planetary enema of 2010 from moving forward. So, humans are still pretty much the only force in the universe standing up for humans, but that’s probably how it should be.
Why do I bring the winged bastards up? Because they’re the most powerful things out there, and the only ones that I know for a fact can mess with a man’s memory. An angel named Zachariah made Sam and Dean think that they were peons in a big architecture firm for a week. Castiel wiped away all of Lisa and Ben Braeden’s memories of Dean—that was at Dean’s request, once he realized that knowing him was just gonna get them hurt, or worse. So I know they have the hardware to blot out memories, though I can’t for the life of me figure out why they’d be targeting me. The Apocalypse was called off. That war’s over.
Unless—maybe I learned something that I wasn’t supposed to. Maybe, between Ashland and here, I saw something, read something, figured something out that turned the tables on the whole thing, and now they’re cleaning up the mess? No—because if angels are one thing, it’s orderly . My mind right now, it’s the opposite. When they messed with Sam and Dean’s memory, they did a bang-up job, made them really believe that they weren’t brothers, that they’d had entirely different lives than