The Wedding Crashers

Chapter Four

Castiel had been a little confused by the situation, but really, that was to be expected. The wedding, Leah's dysfunctional relationships, and the idea that they were deliberately going into a nest of monsters but were not going to kill them-that made no sense to him. However, the fact that it was a nest of supercharged monsters and that they all-Leah included-very well might need some heavy-weight protection was clear enough. He'd agreed to come after not too much talk. Leah had been betting he would-it was more than obvious that he preferred to join them on their little adventures rather than sitting around playing his harp or whatever he did when he was upstairs. They'd arranged to meet up in Seattle in two weeks, as soon as they'd cleared out the den of skinwalkers they'd flushed out in the Georgia woods.

Leah leaned forward to apply her eyeliner; it was morning, but with the outfit she had, a darker look would work better. Not to mention that the idiot hellspawn had them all in evening dress at her morning wedding, but Leah doubted she'd know any better either way.

Once the job down in Dalton was finished, they'd taken off. The drive across the entire US had been long and tedious, even with all the stops to check out things like the World's Largest Ketchup Bottle outside of St. Louis. Leah had known better than to suggest that they just get Cas to zap them up there-there was not a chance in hell Dean would leave his car behind. She'd ridden around with the trio a few times when she'd met up with them on jobs, but never on a trip this long before. They should be glad she hadn't been the one driving-just a few hours of their seemingly endless bickering and she'd have turned the car around and taken them straight home in no time at all.

Leah had broken up their little spats from time to time with information about just what they were going to be walking into. She'd told them bits about the sorts of vampires and werewolves she was familiar with before, but then had been the first time she'd given them a complete run-down of what they were, how they worked, and all the ways they were different from the low-end fangs that she'd taken up hunting once she'd discovered them.

But that didn't take too long in the end, and they'd had a good three days of driving to fill with conversation. It was inevitable that they'd started asking other things-about who these people were, what they were like, and why she so badly didn't want to go back.

She didn't like to talk about it. Since joining their little team, she'd only ever spoken to Cas about it before, and then only briefly; all she'd ever really told the brothers and demigod was that she'd left because she disagreed with the others about her responsibility as a defender of humanity. Now, though, she'd reluctantly given them the general gist that, for whatever reason, she'd been singled out as the pack pariah and was treated accordingly.

She'd managed to deflect their interest from their behavior towards her by telling them about what they should expect at the wedding.

"Ten? Are you shitting me?"

"Nope," she'd said, taking a certain amount of sadistic glee in Layla's appalled reaction to that tidbit of information. "Hey-consider yourselves lucky-the only reason the bride is that old is because she wanted to wait. If the groom had his way, they'd have been married when she was seven."

"That isn't even legal-never mind the fact that it's just wrong," Sam had said firmly; Layla was apparently still locked up.

"In the name of Aphrodite that is not true love," scowled Layla.

Leah shrugged, leaning over the back of the front seats. "Hey-she looks legal, and she apparently wants it, so it's gonna happen. Believe me-in this family, whatever Baby wants, Baby gets. That's just the way it is."

"It's sick, is what it is-what the hell, man?" Dean finally managed.

She snorted. "Well, the bride aged faster than your average human-no idea why, given that she's half-vampire. I'd have thought she'd age slower. She was pretty much full-grown by the time she was seven-and no one seemed to question her mental maturity, just because she could read early and stuff." She shrugged and blew a breath out through her nose before she added, "But, either way, it doesn't really matter. Jacob-that's my pack leader, by the way-had decided he was gonna marry her the day she was born."

"...What?"

It always cracked her up when they accidentally spoke in unison. "You heard me," she said; she hadn't thought about it in so long that she'd actually managed to suppress her own revulsion to the whole situation, but seeing it through the eyes of her new friends was reawakening the horror.

"Jesus-I thought if we went to this vampire-werewolf confab, we'd get Kate Beckinsale in leather-not Humbert and Delores!"

Leah chuckled humorlessly. "It's called'imprinting.' Apparently after we change, the males of my kind of wolves develop this fixation on someone as their 'perfect mate' or something. That's what happened to me, you know-only from the other end," she found herself saying. "I was engaged to a guy in my tribe, but when he turned wolf, he decided he liked my cousin better and dropped me like a hot potato."

The words were bitter, and she hadn't meant to say them; she turned to look out the window when she saw the disbelieving sympathy in Sam's face when he glanced back at her and the shocked pity in Dean's eyes in the rearview mirror. Layla looked like she was about to kill. "She turned him down, though," she said to the window with false lightness, "at least until he tore her face off for it. Now they're married and working on their sixth kid, last I heard."

There was a long, tense silence. "Your tribe has a fucked up idea of what love is suppose to be," said Layla.

Leah had only snorted, and then changed the subject to the vampires. Having met angels and demons, demigods, (and herself, for that matter), the trio had no trouble accepting their supercharged abilities-although they definitely didn't like the idea of all those extra things so many of them could do.

"I really don't think they're gonna screw with you like that," Leah told them. "These vampires-they're not what you're used to. They're not living on the outskirts, foraging for food. They're pretty much entrenched where they are, living the good life right in amongst the humans." She scowled down at the upholstery. "What they really are is a bunch of self-righteous pricks-there's no way to sugarcoat that. They aren't going to eat you, but I can promise you that they'll treat you like crap. They have egos on 'em the size of the Brooklyn Bridge and their heads so far up their own asses that they don't even consider humans people, far as I can tell. They've certainly made it more than clear that they consider me and my kind nothing but animals."

"Wait-but your pack leader is marrying one of them?"

"Ridiculous, isn't it?" she agreed. She shook her head. "I've given up trying to understand any of them-and frankly, I don't want to. They can just live out their smug, pompous lives doing nothing but spending money and looking down on everyone else-I want no part of it. Me? I help people-and I don't care what they think of me."