Michael counted it as a win. Even if Jack was still a relative stranger to him both in what he was and who he was, he preferred a cheery nephilim to a melancholy one—or an angry one, though the boy before him scarcely seemed capable of it. If he were lucky, he had inherited his mother's temper over his father's.

"Nonetheless, that is a new low for him." Good to be warned that Lucifer was capable of ripping the grace out of his own son, not that Michael would have found the thought of it particularly hard to conceive of in the first place. A desperate, powerless Lucifer was more dangerous than any other. He might have learned that sort of disregard for his creation from their own Father anyway. "He's from sometime after he escaped the Cage, but before I did. A few years' difference."

He was still blind to much of what had happened in those years and couldn't narrow it down by major event. That was enough talk of Lucifer, however. It was clear it did nothing to lift Jack's spirits, and Michael heard about his brother often enough as it was.

"So what is it like living with the Winchesters? Are they teaching you to hunt?" he asked, with a hint of genuine interest. It was rare for hunters to take on a creature that might be called a monster himself.