HAVING A BALL
Chapter 10
They left the room, Sam making sure the door was firmly shut as an added 'pen Pete inside' precaution. Guns ready, they walked cautiously along the main corridor, which was silent, all the room doors definitely closed, and completely ignoring the elevator almost next to their room that Pete had brought them up on.
Hunters did not like confined spaces – unless they were doing the confining. Besides, there was no way to know beforehand what would be there when the elevator doors opened or being able to re-close them in time should the fugly du jour happen to be looking the right way – or wrong way, depending on your viewpoint – when they arrived in the lobby. Having said bad thing manage to force its way into the small space where the hunters had trapped themselves was not part of any sound game plan, even before you factored in the potential for some bastard-lovechild-of-Freddy-Krueger-n-Edward-Scissorhands to simply shred the cables and send the impromptu coffin plunging to the basement.
The stairs weren't epic anyway; despite the building's height there were only three storeys since the rooms were spacious with high ceilings. Dean craned his neck down the curving staircase to the second floor, but nothing lurked. Quickly they made their way down; the stairs formed the top spur of a lower-case 't' shape, with one corridor stretching along left to right across the bottom and a second corridor stretching out directly in front like the long stroke of the 't' until curved left around the corner out of sight at the far end.
"Straight on down the long corridor, the stairs are there," Sam advised.
"How come you know?" Dean asked even as he began to move forward.
"It was on the information poster in the elevator when Pete brought us up to the room."
"What information poster?"
Rolling his eyes slightly, Sam explained, "The hotel would have been bankrupted if it had had to comply with building regs and remodelled to make all the staircases follow consecutively instead of being at alternate ends of each floor, but they got round it because each floor is laid out on a sort of grid-shape which means that no room is more than a thirty-second run from a stairwell in case of evacuation."
"Could you be any more super-geek?"
"You wanted to be the fireman."
Whatever riposte Dean would have made was lost forever; both spun round as a hideous shriek and a colossal din sounded suddenly far too close – and it was heading definitely in their direction.
"Uh, I think –" began Sam nervously.
Fortunately they were still at the far end of the long corridor, at the bottom of the stairs they'd just walked down, otherwise they wouldn't have had time as none other than the Wicked Witch of the West, literally flying a broomstick, came swooping around the corner at waist-height.
Or rather, a witch and a broomstick that happened to be sharing the same space at the same time; the witch was wailing in pure terror, her hands jerking desperately at the broom handle as she hurtled towards them. Abruptly half the bristles were snapped off as the broom whacked the corridor wall and it half-spun violently left; her head hit the wall with a solid crack and she fell off. Unable to do anything else Dean and Sam threw themselves flat on the carpet and the broom collided with the wall behind them; the broom handle snapped in half as loud as a rifle shot and it collapsed, inert, to the carpet.
Carefully they stood back up; the witch remained unmoving in crumpled heap of billowing black cloth, which in itself meant nothing; they had ventilated a Shtriga like a sieve and it had still bounced back up. Cautiously, with Dean a step behind covering him, Sam knelt one knee next to the witch. Since finding the radial pulse was much easier than the carotid on most people, he held her wrist and found the rhythm was rapid but slowing. He pressed against her head but the tall, black pointed hat, now a squashed, flattened mess, appeared to have absorbed most of the impact.
"She's alive, just knocked cold. I think she'll be okay." He told Dean.
"Let me check something." Dean moved beside him, then pulled up one black velvet sleeve to show an expanse of pink-white forearm, which ended at wrist where the flesh became a lurid green hue. Pulling down the collar of her black velvet dress slightly Dean was again greeted by healthy pink flesh in contrast to the lurid green of her throat and face. He brushed his fingers against her neck from the green to pink skin.
Sam was on the same page, "The green isn't just make-up any more."
They were two for two in the 'Joe Average' transformed into 'supernatural freak' category. Since she was out for the count and there was nothing they could do for her at this point, they moved very cautiously on along the corridor, but encountered no more surprises as they rounded the corner. Making their way along the corridor they reached the landing intersection; another corridor stretched off to their left and the stairs led down into the lobby, or you could walk across the landing above the lobby and the corridor continued on curving to the right to disappear through a pair of double doors. Most of the din was coming from beyond the double doors.
Dean ventured a few steps down the stairs and then back up, "Lobby's clear," he reported. "Though I bet you go down and through those doors past the reception desk and you're in the ballroom."
"I'd say there was another exit by a flight of stairs leading up and out the hotel ballroom through that pair off doors on the opposite landing." Sam nodded at them.
"Makes sense, rather than have folks trooping through the lobby all the time to get to their rooms while you're trying to check people in and out." Dean shrugged. "So let's go by the landing –"
"- Lobby -"
Dean glared, "I said landing first so –"
"Dean. Go. Down. Into. The. Lobby."
Freaky demonic super-powers or not Samuel Winchester did not get to order his older, cuter, sexier brother around anytime in this universe. "We're going –"
Sam looked at him squarely, his voice very calm and measured. "Dean, I need you to move very, very slowly and go down the stairs into the lobby. Right now. Please."
Sammy wasn't jerking his chain, nor jerking around.
"Wha-? Ooh crap."
Behind and past Sam, at the far end of the long corridor to their left, had appeared an animal. It was large and yellow-furred, but unfortunately was definitely not an obese Labrador. It had a mane, and big yellow-orange eyes far too reminiscent of Azazel.
"Guess it's too much to hope he's still a cowardly lion?"
Continued in Chapter 11…
© 2009, The Cat's Whiskers