Fic: Coyote, Wolf and Hound (5/9)
Fic: Coyote, Wolf and Hound (5/9)
Series: Special Projects
Summary: The honeymoon is over and the Winchester family settles into family life by doing what they do best: Hunting. This time they head into the Superstition mountains to look into another beheading case. Can you say Lost Dutchman Mine?
Author: pen37
Beta: Strangevisitor7
Fandoms: Smallville/Supernatural
Characters: Chloe, Sam, Dean
Pairing:Chloe/Dean
Rating: pg-13
This is a part of the Special Projects series. You can find the rest of the series here.
Also submitted for the Crossovers_100 challenge. Prompt # 81 Mountain.
Ch 1, Ch 2, Ch 3, Ch 4, Ch 5, Ch 6, Ch 7, Ch 8, Ch 9
With Chloe in the lead, the three of them headed out over marked trails into the Arizona Desert. As the sun climbed to its zenith, the temperatures rose with it.
Before long, Dean stopped and mopped his damp forehead.
"Chloe? Did you pack sunscreen?"
"Problem Dean?" Sam smirked at him from beneath the floppy pink hat.
Dean glared at him. "You Suck."
"Sorry," Sam said. "Can't hear you over the sound of irony."
Dean frowned and crossed his arms.
"I could let you take a turn under the hat," Sam said.
"Why?" The eldest Winchester asked suspiciously.
"Pity?" Sam shrugged.
Dean looked from Sam's face to the strawberry hat and back. The he shook his head slowly. "There's a catch, isn't there?" he asked. "You wouldn't be offering if there wasn't."
"Can't I just be concerned for my brother?" he asked nonchalantly.
The older Winchester brother stared at Sam's hat, and then licked his lips. Finally he nodded slowly. "Fine. Gimme."
Sam passed the hat over and then grinned as Dean put it on his head. Once the hat was secure, Dean pointed at Sam. "I better not hear a word about this again."
He gave Dean a bemused smile, and held his hands up in surrender. "Alright. You never wore a pink hat."
"Damn straight," Dean said. "And anyway, it's light red." He nodded in a way that said that those were the facts. Then he turned and marched off down the trail.
With a grin of his own, Sam turned just in time to see Chloe hide her own smile behind her hand.
"So . . .when are you going to put the other hat on?" she asked.
He feigned an innocent look. "I have no idea what you're talking about."
"Right," she said archly. "And I suppose that you - who could have written the boyscout handbook, I might add - forgot to pack your own hat."
Sam grinned and shook his head. "Can't pull over anything on you, can I?"
"I know you two," she said with a theatrical eye roll. "And I know enough to stay out of this. When I don't - hair dye and glue happen. And at some point, we can count on things blowing up."
"That was just the one time," Sam reached into the bottom of his bag of supplies, and pulled out a bucket hat with a Stanford team logo on it.
Chloe gave him a look of tolerant amusement as she looped her arm through his and let him lead her down the trail. "I gotta say, life with you and Dean is always interesting."
* * *
As the afternoon wore on, the three of them drew closer to Weaver's Needle. Chloe consulted the map, and then looked up at Sam and Dean.
"We're almost to the point where they found the hiker's remains."
Sam and Dean exchanged wary looks.
"Stay frosty, guys," Dean said. "This thing's going to be one mean son of a bitch, and when it realizes we're tracking it, it's only going to get meaner."
Chloe shivered. "You guys have tangled with a shapeshifter before, haven't you?"
"Twice," Sam said. "At least this time we're not ducking the law."
"I just don't get it," she said. "From what I've read in your dad's journal, shifters live in cities. Aren't they supposed to have subterranean nests? So what's one doing out here in the desert?"
Sam shrugged. "I'm a little fuzzy on the whole shifter as desert rat concept myself," he confessed.
"They're parasites," Dean reasoned. "They're intelligent and that makes them dangerous. But it also means that they can adapt. Way I figure it: if there's one of those skin-shedding bastards wandering around out here, then he's got his reasons."
"Tell me about the ones you've hunted before," Chloe said as she picked her way around a boulder-strewn trail.
"The first one we met was into carving up women," Dean said. "It made itself look like me - which was how I wound up with the FBI on my back. The second one was robbing banks."
"Like Tina Greer," Chloe said. "Only she didn't pull her skin off. She could just rearrange her features to look like anyone."
Dean shook his head. "Between the three of us, we've probably seen every freaky thing under the sun,"
"I hate to sound like a broken record guys," Sam said. "But - why out here? What's in this desert that a shapeshifter would . . ." he trailed off as he stared thoughtfully at the back of Chloe's map.
Dean narrowed his eyes in confusion and followed Sam's gaze. The legend there was scrawled in black ink. Lost Dutchman Mine.
"Oh no," he shook his head. "No way."
Chloe's own eyes narrowed. "What?" She flipped the map over, and read the text. Then she looked up, eyes sparkling with excitement. "Of course!"
"It makes sense, Dean." Sam said. "This thing discovers a huge gold mine, and it takes the ore out a little at a time. When someone gets too close, it kills them."
"It's intelligent. You said so yourself," Chloe added. "Intelligent things think in predictable patterns. Why do you think they can profile serial killers? Maybe beheading is this thing's M.O. Then it dumps the bodies off in the desert so that folks don't find its gold cache."
"It's nest is probably even in the mine," Sam nodded in agreement.
"Like the Wendigo we hunted at Blackwater Ridge," Dean said.
"Maybe," Sam agreed. "We don't know how long these things can live. Becky said that the one that looked like you - sorry Dean," he trailed off when he saw Dean wince.
Dean shrugged in response. "Well, it had good taste."
"Anyway," Sam rolled his eyes. "Becky said that one told her that it was once human and it just -learned to change the way it looked."
"Another meta?." Chloe offered.
The three of them lapsed into silence as they thought about that. Finally, Dean shrugged. "Well, it doesn't matter how it got that way. We all got to be meta somehow. The important thing is that we stop it."
"I wonder how long shapeshifters can live," Chloe mused. "I found pre-columbian stories that say that there was something evil in these mountains."
Dean shrugged at that. "Well, a lot of things we hunt don't have a natural life span."
They rounded a bend in the trail, and came across a dry creek bed. "This is the place," Chloe said.
Starting from the point where the remains had been found, the three of them fanned out and searched the area in a methodical grid pattern. Eventually Chloe stood, and looked across the weathered buttes.
"Anything?"
"No," Dean's face twisted in a line of disgust. "If there were any signs, then search and rescue or the local sheriff's office probably wiped them out. Freakin' amateurs."
"It's getting dark anyway," Sam said. "Pretty soon we won't be able to track anything. So we should probably make camp and start fresh tomorrow."
"Yeah, okay," Dean said reluctantly. "Let's hurry and find a secure spot to camp."
* * *
Chloe stared into the darkness from the blanket where she sat.
The bad thing about camping in the desert in spring was that while the daytime temperatures skyrocketed, at night they plunged equally as low. And while she didn't experience pain the way other people did, extreme cold was still uncomfortable.
Normally, she would be curled up in the warmth of the sleeping bag next to Dean. And while she also didn't need the same amount of rest that he did, she did like the comfort that being near him provided. Particularly in the middle of the night, with a possible shapeshifter out there.
But the bitch about being an equal partner was that she got to pull her own weight. Which meant that since her tracking skills were suck and she didn't need the rest, she got to take the late-night watch so that Sam and Dean could be fresh for tracking in the morning.
She sat with her back against the base of a cliff, staring off into the night. The wall kept them mostly insulated against strong desert winds that stung with both chill and grit. High overhead, the full moon provided enough light that they'd elected not to build a fire.
Which was probably for the best, considering that the shifter might already be out there.
Somewhere off in the distance, a clatter drew Chloe's attention. It might be wind pulling things off the cliff face. Or maybe a coyote.
Or it might be a shapeshifter.
Her hand crept to the holster under her arm, and she unstrapped the short-grip .45 that rested there. Then she rolled to her feet, and took a cautious step away from the wall so that she could see better.
She'd gone a few yards, when something was just suddenly there. Before she could bring up her gun, it forced her arm down. A sharp blow next to her ear sent her teeth rattling. She hit the ground hard. Shaking off the stunned feeling, she looked up in time to see a dark humanlike shape hold a rock high over its head.
Then the world went black.