Another week later I could eat mostly what I wanted—so long as it wasn't greasy or heavy or inundated with sugar, so not 'mostly' after all—and I could brush my own damn hair, but braiding was still a trial. Other tasks I did with my hands and arms weren't so difficult, so I chalked it up to my arms being above my head, and had to get creative.

At least sewing wasn't a struggle. I'd found a large enough scrap of faded denim in my sewing bag to wrap around the handprint on my forearm, and stitched in buttons and button holes, and did add the half-inch of white(ish) lace around both hems to soften the effect of the denim. People still looked—they probably thought I had a rude tattoo underneath—but at least they didn't freak out on me.

Well, there was one perk though, now that I think of it. I was still skinny as hell, so while I couldn't eat whatever I wanted, I could more or less eat in the quantities I wanted to.

Even if my damn appetite crashed like a train every time I tried.

I was trying really hard to be at least somewhat optimistic about this whole operation. I didn't have to grade anyone's tests yet. That was nice. My books missed me when I was grading tests.

Thankfully my nice clothes today hid the burn, so I didn't have to wear the cuff. Sam had caught wind of two people who had evidently 'eaten each other to death', and we had packed up and moved on to a different hotel to see if we could figure out what was up. Well, the boys wanted to figure things out. Even if I was recalling more and more details of this world, I still didn't feel invested in it. What happened here didn't affect my real life.

But because he didn't think I'd properly operate their gadgets when I couldn't immediately remember what they were called, Sam investigated the apartment at which the bodies had been found, and I spoke with the young woman who lived across the hall, who had known Alice—the female victim—at least on a casual basis.

"Both were dead when you found them?" I asked her for clarification as she drifted through the apartment, gathering Alice's belongings into boxes for her family, when they arrived. I'd kept my hair down for this, as it looked more in line with the type of professional I was pretending to be. Blazer and all.

"Yeah," she said with a wince. "At least, Alice was. He was still....chewing." She winced, paling slightly. I couldn't blame her. I'd paled slightly too when Sam had read us the minimal details of this particular case. The gruesome nature of it was what had caused us to choose the Eating Out Couple over a few rambunctious ghosts who had been on our way.

"As I understand it," I said, checking my palm-sized notebook, "there was more than blood in the apartment when you arrived. There was solid matter as well?" I'd been thinking of something at least resembling tactful to call the bits of flesh in the victim's teeth for the entire drive.

She nodded, hands trembling.

I closed my notebook, tucked it inside my breast pocket. "You know, Sarah," I said, and she glanced up as she worked. "I know you and Alice weren't close, but I understand this is a disturbing thing to have had to see. If it's any consolation to any part of you, blood loss is not a bad way to go, and the coroner says that's ultimately what killed them." I gave a tiny, sympathetic smile. "It's like freezing to death. Your brain has better things to do than warn you about the pain. As trite as it is, often the worst thing survivors report about extreme blood loss is feeling cold."

She flashed a fragment of a smile as well, and continued stacking picture frames from the coffee table.

Sam returned to my side, and saw that my notebook was tucked away, and we made our quiet departure.

Dean was similarly attired to Sam, and had his feet up on the table when we got back to the motel. I shucked the blazer and untucked my damned buttoned shirt while the boys mulled over the evidence, the parts of which Sam hadn't overheard I had shared in the car.

"No EMF, no sulfur; ghost possession and demonic possession are probably out," Sam summarized.

Dean nodded, probably wishing, just as we were, that this could have been just some run of the mill something that we'd already come across. "That's where I was putting my money."

Sam shook his head.

"Well what then?" Dean asked, rubbing his eyes. "Oh, guys, at the coroner's? You two didn't see these bodies. I mean these two started eating, and they just....kept going. I mean their stomachs were full. Thanksgiving dinner full." He appeared personally affronted by this.

I was already working on another loose braid. I hate not having my hair back somehow. "That they swallowed what they tore off is another indication this isn't just aberrant human behavior," I noted. "God, I hate the human ones."

"Talk about codependent," Dean muttered, though I knew he agreed with me.

"Well," Sam said with a sigh, suit jacket off. He took a seat with his brother. There was just room for three at the table, and despite wanting to join them, I made myself stay right where I was. They were not mine. "We've got our feelers out. Not much else we can do tonight."

He sighed again. Always had to be doing something. "All right. I'm just gonna go through some files. You can go ahead and get going."

Dean took his feet down from the table, blinking at him. "What?"

"Go ahead," Sam said. "Unleash the kracken. I'll see you tomorrow morning."

I raised an eyebrow at him from where I sat on the end of the bed I was using. Usually the boys slept in separate double beds, because boys are weird and can't sleep near each other, and I just picked one to kip with. I'm their sister; I don't give a shit and if they fart I'll fart back.

But these days it was them on one and me on the other. I'd pass the nightly hours with my actual brothers, but not these ones. That just seemed....weird.

Dean still didn't appear to get it. Neither did I, of course. "Uh, what?" he asked again.

Sam looked up from his laptop, which he'd turned toward him. "Dean, it's Valentine's Day. Your favorite holiday. What do you always call it? Ah.... Unattached Drifter Christmas?"

Dean threw up his hand, and I ducked my head, smiling at the frayed end of my braid as I wrapped it in elastic. He caught me smiling though, and I immediately stopped doing it.

Dean stood, sighing himself. "Well, be that as it may." He flipped the lid on the cooler and retrieved a beer, twisting the cap off and tossing it over his shoulder onto the counter. "I don't know."

I extended a hand toward him and beckoned. He retrieved a second and tossed it to me. The hospital had recommended against drinking. So had Sam. I had ignored both of those parties, and Dean was permitting me to, not that he really had any say in the matter.

Dean looked to Sam. "Guess I'm not feeling it this year."

Sam stared up at him, baffled by this turn of character. "So you're not into bars full of lonely women?"

Dean sipped his beer, gazing past him. He shrugged. "Eh, I guess not." He caught Sam's concerned expression. "What?"

Sam made a face at him. "It's like when a dog doesn't eat."

Dean rolled his eyes.

"Don't look at me," I chastised. They seemed to keep doing that, looking to me for input. I didn't have any input. I might as well get sentimentally attached to characters in a video game.

Well, that's ungenerous. I get sentimentally attached to characters in books all the time. But I wasn't sentimentally attached to these two, I was just alone for the ride until I figured out how to get off it entirely.

Sam and Dean both looked back at each other. "That's when you know something's really wrong."

Dean continued to look unconvinced and carefree. Purposefully so. "Remarkably patronizing concern. Dually noted." He dropped back into his chair at the table. "Nothing's wrong. We gonna work or what?"

Sam gave him a few more glances, and I approached only to retrieve a stack of books from the local library and take them to the far bed. Then Sam returned to his web pages, and I to my macabre literature.

Thankfully—or not, really, considering the circumstances—it was only a couple hours before Dean got a call from the local coroner then rubbed his hand down his face. "Jackets back on, lady and gentlemen. We've got another one. Double suicide in an office building, and a coworker shot in the chest. Didn't make it."

I sighed, and tucked my shirt back in to my pants. I was not taking this braid back out though.

"You can stay here, Tess," Sam reminded me.

"At least a murder-suicide provides something more mentally stimulating than this place," I said, yanking my blazer back on and flipping my braid over my shoulder. "Let's go."

"Agent Marley," the coroner greeted Dean at the medical center. "You just can't stay away."

"Sounds like you've tagged another double suicide," he remarked in return.

"Yeah, I've just closed them up."

"Dr. Gorman, these are my partners, Special Agent Cliff, and Special Agent McKinnon."

I was McKinnon. We each shook hands with the good doctor, then he shucked his lab coat.

"I've already pulled the organs and sent off the tox samples."

"Great," said Sam. "You mind if we take a look at the bodies?"

"Not at all, but like I said, their good and plenties—" He opened a stainless steel fridge to reveal Tupperwares of organs inside. "—are already done with."

We grimaced as one.

"Super," Sam replied.

Dr. Gorman tossed Dean the keys and put his street coat back on. "Just leave the keys with Marty up front. And please." He turned back to them. "Gentlemen, Miss, refrigerate after opening." He smiled, donned his hat, and was gone.

I smiled at his back. "I like his sense of humor."

"Of course you do," Dean muttered. "It's right up your alley." He sighed, and grabbed a handful of aprons from the rack. "Might as well get started."

I tossed out pairs of gloves, and we gathered around a steel table with the boxes of organs between us.

Dean eyed the open box containing a heart, then slid it toward Sam. "Hey."

Sam looked up.

"Be my valentine?"

Rolled eyes, and a grin attempting to find humor in a truly grim place. I snorted, and used a pair of forceps to pinch along the length of an intestine, searching for foreign objects. Dr. Gorman had probably already removed everything, but I wanted to be sure. And maybe he hadn't. In an entirely inappropriate way, at least this was a human I didn't mind touching. The ones I was most accustomed to being close with I was no longer comfortable with.

"Woah, wait a second," Sam said then, removing the lid of the man's heart and drawing it closer. "These hearts have identical marks. Check this out."

I pushed the illuminated magnifying glass toward him.

"Looks like some kind of letter."

From here I could see an odd pale striation, but I couldn't make it out like he could. Dean stood to look over his shoulder, and I set my intestine aside, through with it, and not expecting to reveal anything else from the rest of the organs.

"Aw, no," Sam groaned, and pushed the magnifying glass away.

"What?" asked Dean.

Sam gazed down at the hearts with a furrowed brow. "I think it's Enochian."

"What, like angel scratches?" Dean straightened, and his brows fell as he realized the implications as well. "What, you think it's like the tagging on our ribs?"

"Excuse me?" I was packing the organs back up.

"Long story," Sam said. "Dean, I don't know."

Dean closed his eyes, peeling off a glove. "Aw hell." He only had to press two buttons on his phone when he retrieved it from his pocket. "Cas, it's Dean." He listed the med center we were at as he paced around the table.

Cas appeared just over my left shoulder, facing Dean. "Christ!" I yelped, sliding off my stool and landing hard on my right side. "Shit." I winced. Still not enough meat on my bones to cushion anything more than a pillow being thrown at me.

Dean glanced down, but I'd swatted him away before when I'd stumbled.

Sam stood and looked over the table. "Tess, you all right?"

I groaned to my feet, tugged off my gloves, and proceeded directly to the sink on the other side of the room to wash my hands and be rid of the apron. I could hear Cas and the other two speaking quietly behind me, but only just. Good angel, Cas. Keep those dangerous words away from me.

Once I'd finished, I waited propped against the sink until Cas had finished speaking, then returned to the table. Sam filled me in while Cas muttered a few more details to Dean in undertone.

"You have to be shitting me!" I exclaimed at the end of it, arms crossed. I looked to Cas—I couldn't call him Castiel, as Sam and Dean never did and it just sounded strange to me. "I understand that to a degree angels are people too and people clearly do bad things to one another just for shits and giggles but why on earth would such a creature exist that's meant to force people to fall in love with each other? That's nasty."

Cas regarded me calmly, as he always did, and put his answer in Dean's ear.

Dean sighed. "It's not forcing, when the ones that haven't gone rogue do it. It's a matter of....suggestibility, and lowering inhibitions. Sort of like getting someone drunk or getting yourself drunk to get your courage up." He shrugged, but Cas didn't correct him.

I threw my head back. "Oh no, the more I learn the more I regret."

Cas could transport himself, but for the sake of conversation got in the car with us. Sam had offered me shotgun the first time Cas rode with us, but honestly I didn't have a problem with being in the angel's vicinity, just with what came out of his mouth. The Voice of God, and all of that. Didn't really matter to me if I was wrong. I was also adamant. He was cool about it, Cas. He leaned forward and tapped Dean's shoulder if he had something to say. I could tell the song and dance wore on my not-brothers, but they could suck it.

But this was the first case since I'd been released from the hospital that they'd so immediately involved Cas in, and I realized the second our food arrived at the heart-bedecked restaurant that this arrangement wasn't going to work out.

"I vastly appreciate your willingness not to speak when I can hear you like I asked you to," I said to Cas. "I will get over it in time. Feel free to talk to them again, just please not to me. You've got big words and I don't have room for them inside my head right now."

He watched me somberly a moment, then turned to Sam and Dean. "I appreciate Tess's willingness to adjust to the unfamiliar."

I laughed to myself. "Thank you."

The brothers rolled their eyes very heavily at me.

"So you," Dean said to Cas, "happen to know that he'd like the cosmos of this place?" He eyed the kitsch decorations dubiously. But then, Dean had only ever been into Valentine's Day for the booty.

"This place is an excess of human reproduction," Cas replied, glancing around. "It's exactly the kind of garden the cupid will come to pollinate."

Pollinate, oh my lord. I gave my chicken salad a few vindictive stabs.

Dean lifted his burger, looked at it, put it down and irritably nudged his plate away.

Sam's brows folded down again. "Wait a minute. You're not hungry?"

"Maybe we should take him to the vet," I suggested. "Low appetite, low libido."

Dean shot me a look. I shrugged, half-smiling.

Cas was eyeing Dean's burger, though.

"No," Dean replied to Sam. He then spread his hands defensively. "What, I'm not hungry."

"Then you're not gonna finish that?" Cas asked, indicating the plate.

Sam and I both raised eyebrows at him. Cas hadn't ordered any food. Did angels eat?

Cas extended an arm and took Dean's plate, and was about to take a questing bite of the burger—I'd have taken the fries, if Cas hadn't claimed the whole meal. But then Cas stopped, eyes widening, and replaced the burger on the plate. "He's here."

The boys' heads swiveled around, but I was already facing the rest of the restaurant. Because it looked obvious when we all suddenly put our attention on the crowd rather than each other, I continued passively eating, and snagged a fry anyway when the angel wasn't looking. Since we were friends and all.

"Where?" asked Sam, insistent. "I don't see anything." He craned.

Cas was eyeing the twirling, shimmering red hearts dangling from the ceiling tiles, eyes narrowed. The peculiar breeze. A few red paper napkins danced across tables, fetching up against food and hands. "There," he said, and the moment he spoke a man and woman in a booth began ardently kissing.

"Same side of the booth couple over there?" Dean asked, nodding in their direction.

"Meet me in the back," said Cas.

"This is the part where he murders us," I hissed to the boys, because Cas had disappeared.

Meant I could have his fries though. I added a few to my plate, Sam and Dean made faces at each other—they didn't even include me. Apparently they were used to my absence by now, or just used to me not participating in them—and I took my salad with me as we found a door toward the storage behind the restaurant. Dean made a different face at me.

"I'm hungry," I defended. "Look at me, I'm wasting away."

"You are, at that."

"Cas." Sam had found him. The angel had his hand extended toward the wall the storage area shared with the restaurant, as though blocking someone from speaking. "Where is it?"

"I have him tethered."

We came to stand behind him.

Cas spoke in Latin, and commanded, "Manifest yourself."

My eyes flicked from side to side, wondering if the cupid would look human.

Dean spread his hands at his side, looking at Cas. "So where is he?" He choked as something wrapped its bare arms around him from behind and lifted him off the ground.

"Here I am!" A cheery, cheeky, ass-naked man held him up. He giggled and tipped Dean back and forth like a toy.

My eyes were wide in indignation. Dear lord, how was this appropriate behavior for anything remotely angelic?

"Help!" Dean commanded, already beyond his limit when it came to male affection.

I spread my hands now, a plate in one, fork in the other. "What are we supposed to do? You'll recover with some therapy."

The naked man had spotted Cas. "Brother!" he cried, then gave Cas the full frontal version of what Dean had been released from.

Cas grimaced.

"This is the cupid?" Dean demanded, straightening his suit.

"Yes," Cas croaked.

The cupid released him, turning, and spotted Sam. His eyes lit up. "Look at you!"

"No," said Sam, walking away. The cupid reappeared in front of him and wrapped him into a lavish hug, though how any such thing could exist is beyond me. He rubbed Sam's back, and Sam winced.

"What is this?" Dean wanted to know, affronted.

"This," Cas said, coming level with him, "is their handshake."

"Well I don't like it."

"No one likes it."

The cupid spotted me next, and spread his arms as he stepped around Sam.

I pointed my fork at him as he approached. "No. Literal murder if you do."

He dodged the fork