Fic: Devil's Dance (4/6)
Devil's Dance (4/6)
Author: Pen37
Disclaimer: Not mine
Fandoms: Supernatural/Smallville
Characters: Chloe, Dean, Sam. Hints of Chloe/Dean
Series: Special Projects
Summary: The Winchesters plus Chloe Sullivan look into suspicious deaths in Holbrook, Arizona. There are concrete Tepee hotels, High Desert landscape, Najavo, Hopi and Celtic folklore, Chloe and Dean banter, and Sam hiding something.
Special thanks to my beta readers,
clarksmuse and
xtremeroswellia.
This is another in my Special Projects Series. It follows after Now Stop Me if You've heard this one, and The Greatest Hits of Mapquest, but before Crossfire, The Language of Waffles, and Conservation of Pain. According to my Beta Readers, this will make a lot more sense if you've at least read the first two.
Written for the Crossovers100 challenge.
Prompt #79 Desert.
The table is here.
Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 5
The chapel structure was a one-room church/reception hall with a quaint, old-west feel. The three of them charmed their way inside by pretending to be planning a party.
As the receptionist unlocked the hall, she turned to them. “It's so nice to see such a considerate sibling.” She smiled at Chloe as she eyed Dean and Sam. “There are so many families who don't support alternative lifestyles.”
Dean and Sam gazed back at her with uneasy half-smiles.
Chloe pasted on a grin on her face, and threw her arm around Dean's waist. “What can I say? I love my brother.”
“Yeah,” Dean smacked her across the backside in mock-playfulness. “My sister’s the best.” Chloe's eyes widened, and she gave him a death-glare.
“Well, I'll leave you three to explore.” The receptionist pulled the door closed behind her.
“Every time,” Dean muttered darkly. “Every. Damn. Time.”
“Worry about that later,” Sam said. “We need to explore before she comes back.”
“Right,” Dean said, suddenly all business.
Dean produced his EMF meter, and began to slowly, methodically search the room. While he was doing this, Chloe and Sam started to visually inspect the place. Smooth logs covered the walls, giving it a rustic appearance. When she looked up, Chloe could see the exposed timber rafters.
As he was crossing the dance floor, Dean stopped. He held the meter, up, and looked upward, into the open space above. “Sammy,” he nodded upward. The three of them followed his gaze.
“Great,” Chloe said, looking at the rough-timber braces. “How are we going to get up there?” She looked at Dean and Sam, and realized that the two of them were giving her the kind of look that meant that she was going to be damn glad she hadn't worn a skirt that day. She sighed. “Just don't drop me.”
Using Sam as a ladder, with Dean to brace and push, she climbed up. Then following Dean's directions and the EMF meter, she edged along the exposed rafter.
“Well, I can't say that life with you guys is ever boring,” she muttered as she felt another splinter dig into her palm. The dust tickled her nose, and she nearly sneezed herself off of her perch.
“Careful,” Sam muttered.
Chloe glared down at him. “No shit, Sherlock,” she muttered. “You figure that one all out by yourself? I'm like Haley Joel friggin' Osment up here. I see dumb people. They're all around me. They don't know they're stupid.” She sneezed again. When her nose cleared, she realized that she smelled something familiar.
“Guys? It smells like . . .” She paused to breathe deeply. “Sulfur.”
“Sulfur?” Dean asked and Sam echoed. They looked at each other, and nodded. “Demon.”
Chloe followed the smell to its source, and noted that the sticky, yellow substance covered a section of the beam. “Yep! It's all over up here.”
Before they could continue the discussion, the receptionist re-entered the room. She looked up at Chloe incredulously.
“Yeah,” Chloe said as she jumped from the beam, and let Sam catch her. “If we wanted to, we could string up lights. It's as solid as it looks.”
Off the receptionist's confused look Dean smiled. “Thank you, Ma'am.”
* * *
“I thought demons couldn't enter a church,” Dean sounded confused as they walked back to the car.
“It was probably never properly consecrated,” Chloe guessed as she picked splinters out of her palms. Her regenerating abilities were already helping to push them out, but this was much faster, and less painful. “The lady at the historical society told me that turn-of-the century Holbrook was like Dodge City without Matt Dillon. Organized religion was kinda’ nonexistent.”
“Heh, I always liked that show,” Dean chuckled. Sam paused to give him a funny look.
“What?” Dean shrugged. “That Festus was a trip, man.”
Sam rolled his eyes, and shook his head. “A demon. One that uses restless spirits to come back and kill their loved ones.”
Chloe stopped, and looked back at them. Restless spirits!
“Makes sense, really” Sam continued. “According to local native legends, there were portals to the underworld in canyons all over this area. It doesn't seem that unusual for something to just slip through.”
“Yeah, but how do we get it to slip back through?” Dean asked.
“Guys!”
They turned to look at Chloe in curiosity.
“I remembered!” She said. With a triumphant grin, she took off for the Impala. “Let me get my database.”
By the time the boys caught up with her, she was sitting half in the rear driver's side of the car, with her computer out, and the program running. Several keystrokes later, she turned the screen so that they could see.
The boys knelt in the dust next to her so that they could get a better view of the laptop as she spoke.
“Thought so,” Chloe nodded. “I heard this song when I was a kid: What is it that you want of me, and will not let met sleep? Your salten tears they trickle down, and wet my winding sheet. . . . Cold are my lips in death, sweetheart, my breath is earthy strong; if you do touch my clay-cold lips, your time will not be long.
“It’s called The Unquiet Grave. It’s about a woman whose fiancée dies. His spirit can’t rest because of her extended grieving, so he comes back to take her away with him to his grave. The girl saves herself by tricking him.”
“Why does that sound familiar?” Sam furrowed his brow in concentration.
“Probably because of Simon and Garfunkle: Go fetch me, my lady, a cambric shirt, whiles every grove rings with a merry antine, and stitch it without any needlework, and thou shalt be a true lover of mine.
“A pretty renaissance song, that’s actually a set of coded instructions,” Chloe explained. “The dead man asks her to perform a series of impossible tasks, otherwise he’ll take her with him to the grave, and she sets herself free by making him promise to first perform an equally impossible set of tasks: Thou must take it up in a bottomless sack, and bear it to mill on a butterfly's back. And when these works are finished and done, I'll take and marry thee under the sun.”
Dean looked at her incredulously. “I thought your specialty was metahuman freakiness. How do you know this kind of stuff?”
Chloe shrugged. “I've got a memory for facts,” she said casually as she shut down her computer.
“No kidding?” Sam grinned as he stood and stretched.
“Yeah, I’m lethal at trivial pursuit.”
“God help me! Not another trivia nerd,” Dean groaned as he got up and tried to massage blood back into his cramped legs.
Sam chuckled. “The only game Dean’ll play is poker. And I suck at poker.”
Chloe grinned. “Then I vote for a Trivial Pursuit night. I’ll bring the board game. You bring the pizza.”
“You're kidding me, right?” Dean asked, looking from his brother to Chloe, a petulant expression on his face. “A world of no!”
“Well you're just out-voted.” Chloe set her chin in a defiant line. “You can't hustle pool every night.”
“Man!” Dean scowled, and stomped his way up to the driver's side. He got in and slammed the door.
“How long is he going to pout?” Chloe asked, tilting her head at Sam and trying not to laugh. She could see Dean's expression in the rear-view mirror, and he was sulking like she had just taken his favorite toy away.
“Just until we distract him,” Sam whispered conspiratorially. “Couple of minutes or so.”
“Are you guys coming?” Dean stuck his head out the window, and glared back at Sam. Sam and Chloe grinned at each other, and crawled into the car.