Fic:Devil's Dance (5/6)
Devil's Dance (5/6)
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 4 , Part 6
Night in the desert was very different from Smallville, as far as Chloe was concerned. But it was still quiet, and private - two things that the tepee village was not. Especially with all the vacationing families and their junior Apaches running around.
So the three of them loaded up in the Impala, and drove out into the middle of nowhere to plan their next move.
Dean spread a blanket out across the hood of the car to keep the paint nice, and the three of them lay back against the windshield, side-by-side to talk.
Lying there like that, Chloe felt content in a way that she hadn't felt since she was fifteen. With a touch of nostalgia, she remembered stargazing sleepovers with Clark and Pete in the Fortress of Barnitude. Long before she knew about life on other planets, things that went bump in the night, or her own status as a member of the super powered persuasion.
Life was simpler back then, when her biggest fear was missing deadline.
The heat rising from the cooling motor warmed her from the back, and having both Dean and Sam's solid presence on either side of her was comforting. Above them, the diamond-dusted sky was so clear that she couldn't pick out the major stars from the sheer overwhelming number of tiny ones that she could see.
Both brothers pointed out constellations that she'd already learned by heart from the tips of Clark's fingers. Apparently, it was useful hunter lore - having to do with the changing of the seasons, druid customs and a lot of other things that she wasn't really clear on just yet.
She'd been content to just lie back against the windshield, and let the boys shoot their brotherly teasing over her head. She even borrowed Dean's lighter, and used it to make s'mores. Now and then she would pass one to the boys. The rest of the time, she ignored Dean when he sneaked a piece of chocolate from her stash.
The both of them must have felt the same contentment in the moment that she did, because even Sam and Dean's voices had dropped to a whisper as they all lay there.
“So after midnight, we go back to the church, break in, draw out the demon, and banish it.” Dean paused in thought, and then added: “With parsley sage rosemary and thyme.”
“How do we draw it out?” Even in the dark, Chloe's voice was colored with her smile.
“Wanna’ get married?” Dean's voice was low, husky and utterly teasing.
Chloe rolled her eyes at how full of himself he sounded, even as she fought the shiver that ran down her spine.
“Why Mr. Winchester, this is all so sudden,” she deadpanned.
“Come on,” Dean cajoled. “You, me, a little slow dancing. A little summoning spell and we'll see what turns up.”
“That has to be the worst pickup line I've ever heard,” she said mildly.
“Sounded good from my end.” He jostled her with a shrug of his shoulders.
“That's part of the problem.”
“The summoning spell has potential,” Sam changed the subject. His voice sounded partially amused, partially annoyed at their mild flirting. “We could just drag the demon up into a devil's trap, and then send it away so that it can’t get back.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Dean agreed. He reached across Chloe for her snacks. “Once I'm done with the chocolate, that is.”
* * *
As silently as shadows, the three of them glided up the path back into the church. Under the beam of Dean’s flashlight, Sam set to work with the chalk. Chloe watched in interest as she ran down the stanzas from the poem in her head. Once Sam had the trap drawn out, he picked up a ragged-edged book, and started the summoning incantation. Dean stood next to him, holding the light in one hand, and his gun in the other.
When the light began to flicker, Chloe held her breath, partially in trepidation and partially against the smell of spent fireworks that spread through the room like a tainted perfume.
The lights flickered out a final time, and abruptly Sam's incantation stopped.
“Sam?” Dean's voice held a note of worry. “Sammy?” The sound of the flashlight being smacked against his palm reached Chloe's ears.
Abruptly, the light came back on. Dean swept the room with it. When it finally landed on Sam, Chloe could see him dancing with a tall blonde. Next to her, Dean sucked in his breath in surprise.
In the flashlight, she could see that Sam's face was a mask of pain and anger. “Our demon?” She guessed.
“Yeah,” Dean said. “It's taken the form of Sam's old girlfriend. Dammit! Why didn't I think of that?”
Chloe let out a strangled oath. Sam had a pining-for-the-fjords girlfriend? Shit, why didn’t he say something? “Think he could dance his way over to this demon trap?”
“That's probably the furthest thing from his mind. Besides, I don't think he's the one leading.” Dean tried to circle the dancing couple to get a clean shot. But the demon smirked at him and kept circling Sam so that he was always in Dean's way.
The creature turned its head to look at Chloe with cold, black eyes as it danced past. The young reporter felt a shiver as she watched Sam dance helplessly with it.
As if it were taunting them, it waltzed right up to the line of the trap. Years of being Clark's go-to girl gave her an instinctual knowledge of what to do. Before she could give it a conscious thought, Chloe was moving.
She closed the space between them and barreled into the dancing duo. She rolled her shoulder to absorb the impact the same way she'd seen Pete do in high school football.
The three of them went down in the trap in a pile of arms, legs, and snarling demon. Dean was there instantly, grabbing her by the jacket and Sam by the hair on his head and hauling them both out.
She eased to her feet and checked for injury. Despite the shoulder-rolling trick, she'd managed to pinch some kind of nerve in her neck pretty badly. She rolled her head from side to side, and winced as fire shot through her shoulder. But already she could feel the tingle of muscle, bone and nerve realigning and repairing. She had a high pain threshold, and there were more important things going on right now, so she mostly ignored it.
Dean and Sam stood at the edge of the trap, staring intently at the demon. Lying there, it looked like an innocent girl. If Chloe had walked in at this particular moment, she would have drawn the wrong conclusion. Suddenly, she realized in part just how the boys had gotten their long rap sheet.
“Sam,” Dean's voice was flat and hard. “You want to do the honors?”
Sam was quiet for a long time as he stared at the demon. Now that the excitement had settled down, she stared harder at its face. It would've been very pretty, if not for the emotionless, bug-like black eyes.
Chloe shivered as the malevolent force of those eyes were turned on her. She would have compared them to alien eyes - except that even the evil aliens that she'd met had kinder eyes that that.
“Love to,” Sam's voice sounded sad and choked. Dean took up a protective stance near his brother as the younger man spoke haltingly the words to the verse that Chloe had discovered. In response, the demon howled and spat at him.
“You saved him, Sam. Why didn't you save me?”
“Why don't you get out of his girlfriend’s body, bitch?” Dean taunted. His face was hard, cold and forbidding, like chiseled granite. Chloe shivered, and for the first time really realized that Dean Winchester was a force of nature: beautiful and dangerous all at once.
The demon smiled at him. Her form shifted, and suddenly Chloe was looking at herself. “Is this better?”
Chloe looked at the twisted parody of her own face in surprise. “Yeahbuhwhat?”
Something in Dean seemed to snap. He crossed the barrier, and punched the demon. Chloe winced, and looked away.
“Sam,” Dean said angrily. “Finish this.”
With a cold shiver, Chloe turned her back on the room. She didn't care to watch as Sam and Dean banished something that wore her face. Behind her, the creature's voice rose in a howl of anguish. She shut her eyes, as her ears were filled with a shattering sound, rushing wind -- and then blessed silence.
When she turned back to look at the scene, Sam was staring at the design woodenly while Dean hurriedly packed up the materials. Chloe noted that the oldest brother seemed to pay inordinate amount of attention to what he was doing. As if he was trying to keep things from falling apart through sheer forward momentum. At last, he stood. “Alright, let's go.”
Sam blinked at Dean owlishly, but otherwise made no effort to follow. Dean was halfway to the door before he realized that Sam was not with him. He turned, and fixed his brother with a stare that was half-commanding, half-pleading. “Sammy, come on!”
Chloe swallowed convulsively, and placed a comforting hand on Sam's arm. He looked at her blankly, and she smiled a sympathetic smile at him. He returned her look with a sigh and an apologetic smile of his own. The two of them followed Dean mechanically to the car.
On the trip back to the motel, Dean turned the radio up so loudly that Chloe could barely string two thoughts together. She noticed that he was determinedly not looking at either of them. Anytime Chloe caught his eyes in the rear-view mirror, he coaxed a little extra speed from the car, and leaned determinedly over the steering wheel.