The Silver Queen Motel
May 14, 2006, 12:30 am
The group shuffled into their motel room, and Dean sat down on his bed with Alex still attached to his right side. Alex wiggled off her jacket without letting go of Dean and dropped it on the floor. Nic went right to the computer and booted it up. She wanted to get the photos dumped onto the computer right away. She then looked at everyone else, "I just need the light from the computer screen to do this, if everyone else wants to go to sleep."
"I napped too long this afternoon, I'm not that tired yet." Dean had leaned himself and Alex back against the wall with the pillows behind them. Alex only nodded kicking her shoes off, she had been getting drowsy on the walk back. She was still a little shaky though, she curled up against Dean, feeling safer with someone close. She thought if she could just keep close to someone, she might be able to fall asleep soon.
"I'm oddly tired actually." Sam pulled off his shoes and coat and sat back on the bed also. He looked at Alex next to him, "are you okay?"
Kris had let go of Sam when they got inside and she pulled off her shoes and went right for the bathroom to change into her pajamas. She just wanted to be warm and comfortable right now.
"Yeah, getting better. I just freaked back there. Too many memories I guess." Alex shrugged. She felt a little embarrassed that she so totally freaked out at the funeral home.
"It's okay, I understand what you mean." Sam gently rubbed her arm, and when he did he noticed her snuggle down more, sort of shifting a little. She looked about ready to fall asleep. He scooted down a little and stretched out, shifting slightly to his left side. He kept his hand on her arm and sort of curled up against her. He felt her wiggle a little, and then settle, getting comfortable, safely squeezed in-between the brothers.
Dean glanced next to him to see Alex finally looking relaxed. Her eyes closed, her right arm still locked across his stomach. Her left had curled in-between them, and she'd now rested her fingers over his brother's hand that laid upon her right arm. He also noticed Sam's eyelids start to flutter shut. Dean looked over at the other bed where Nic had pushed the lap top to the end of the bed and was laying on her stomach, legs bent at the knees, her feet rocking lightly in the air as she was transferring the images and started looking at the photos. She glanced over her shoulder, possibly feeling Dean's gaze on her. She smiled slightly, noticing that Sam and Alex both seemed to be drifting off already.
"Did you get them all transferred?" Dean spoke softly so as not to disturb the two falling asleep beside him.
"Yeah, sorry." Nic shook her head and sat up." I can turn this off now." She reached over and flipped off the lamp, assuming he might want to try and sleep too, especially with Alex still attached to him.
"Oh, no, that wasn't it. I was just curious." He didn't move to switch it on again though.
The bathroom door opened and Kris came back into the room in her pajamas, ready for bed. Nic turned to look at her youngest sister and smiled, "you alright, Krissie?"
Kris smiled softly, yawning then, looking a bit tired, "yeah, I just really want to curl up and sleep." She noticed Alex and Sam looked just about out, and kind of wished she could cuddle up with someone and stay warm. The other half of the bed that Nic was laying the wrong way on right now didn't look as inviting as the other.
Sam wasn't completely asleep yet and lifted his head, kind of seeing Kris looking back and forth. He shifted a little, pressing a little closer into Alex, who really was asleep already. "Want to join the party?" He half chuckled and smiled softly. Kris left her clothes from the evening on top of her bag and nodded, moving over to the bed that was getting ever fuller.
Sam was about to move and roll onto his back so he could try wrapping an arm around each girl, but Kris stopped him, "no, don't move, it's alright." She laid down next to him, wiggling her toes so they found a way under the comforter scrunched up at the foot of the bed. She kind of pressed her body against Sam's back and let her hand softly lay on his side. She was a little tentative in the way she touched him, but she cuddled up.
"Night, Kris." Sam's arm that was kind of between himself and Alex curled around his own stomach and his hand sought Kris'. He gave her hand a little squeeze when he found it and let his hand rest over hers. She was a little young, and very sweet, which maybe actually made things easier for Sam. He could just keep her close and try and protect her.
"Night." Kris said softly, finding Sam's big, warm hand over hers very nice. She felt like it wouldn't be long before she found sleep.
Nic had already returned to laying on her stomach and glanced again at Dean as Kris settled onto the other bed with Sam, Alex, and Dean. "The pictures are pretty clear. Lots of detail. The scratches are incredible. Deep, but not too deep. Almost like the demon was being careful when it made these. It didn't want the victim to bleed to death before it was finished. Their sole purpose is probably simply to inflict pain, torment. Everything this demon does is about causing pain, tormenting, breaking the person."
Dean almost laughed, not because any of what she said was actually funny to him, but just that she actually talked more about the case than he did. Nic smiled and turned her attention back to her computer. He actually sort of wanted to get to know Nic better. She seemed genuinely interesting, and her performance today on the job, even at the Hotel, had definitely caught his attention and made him more than a little curious about her. And now he sat with her little sister curled up asleep, with her head on his shoulder. He thought he needed to, and should get to know more about these girls, and right now seemed like a good opportunity to dig in a little with Nic. Plus this demon they were all after had some kind of history with the girls' family, so for that reason alone knowing something about them might be useful.
"Will she wake up if I try and slide out?" Dean asked still speaking softly. Nic looked over at him again with a, 'what did you say?' sort of look on her face, so he repeated himself. "Will she wake up if I try and slide out?"
"Probably not, she's a pretty heavy sleeper. Usually takes a nightmare to wake her." Nic half way smirked, and half looked very serious.
Dean carefully slid out from Alex's grasp. Not feeling too badly about leaving her, since she still had Sam to 'protect' her. She didn't wake, just shifted, leaning into Sam more, seeking the comfort of someone near. Dean actually sort of smiled at it before sitting down on the other bed with Nic. He looked over the top of her head at the screen. She'd zoomed in on a close up of some of the scratches. He figured he'd start in easy, talk a little shop first to warm her up and then try and get more personal. "Have you looked at the mark yet?"
Nic clicked a few times on the screen, "no, I'll pull it up." Soon an image of the woman's foot was on screen. Nic zoomed in again on the mark, Dean leaned in more to look closer. It may have looked like an odd scene, the two of them, but neither of them seemed to even notice. He'd placed a hand on either side of her body to hold himself up, and leaned over, his chin just above her head now, he was almost half laying on top of her.
"Is that it?" He shifted so he could point with a free hand. It was now noticeable to her the position they were both in, so she scooted over to make more room. He smiled when she did, and laid down next to her, on his stomach like she was.
"That's it." She now really focused on it, on trying to recognize it.
"Any ideas what it is? Cause I have no idea." Dean too was staring at the image on the screen trying to make something click in his head to tell him what it was.
"I think it might be a word or something like that." Nic spoke after a few moments of them both staring at it in silence.
"A word?" The concept swirled around a moment. It could be some foreign language. I looked like it could be anyway, maybe something Asian or Middle Eastern.
"My dad never learned how to speak or read much of other languages besides Latin, not how he tried to get Alex, Kris, and I to learn. But he knew how to recognize a lot of them. I never learned this one, but I think it's Sanskrit, which is what Alex said that one report speculated." Nic looked at it critically. She didn't know much about Sanskrit, but she had looked some stuff up on the culture around it for her dad once for a case he was tailing some years ago.
"How many languages do you know?" Dean wondered, since it seemed the girls knew at least a few.
"Just the basic ones, French, Spanish, Italian and their root, Latin. And my French and Italian are pretty rusty. Alex is the language whiz." Nic then shifted the subject, "I wonder what it means." She reached in front of Dean to get to the mouse control and started clicking around.
She was good at that quick slip of the topic, which Dean kind of smiled at. "Is there someplace to look it up, like maybe a site that lists the Sanskrit alphabet?"
"Possibly, that's what I'm hoping for." She clicked and typed and started looking through the page. She sat up and turned back to the bedside table. Dean shifted and looked over his shoulder to see what she was doing. She stretched over his legs and pulled open the little draw on the night table. There was a small pad of paper and a pencil, she pulled off a sheet and dropped the pad back in the drawer and closed it. Then she laid back down. She clicked to the window with the image of the woman's foot and copied the marking onto the paper.
Nic and Dean both stared alternately between the paper and the screen trying to identify the marks as certain characters. "I think that first thing is an M, maybe." Dean pointed at the first character on the paper and one on the screen that looked kind of like it that was supposed to be an M when translated into their familiar alphabet. He kind of chuckled though, not really sure he was right, but trying not to give that away too much.
"I think you might be right." Nic wrote an M on the paper. They kept looking, debating with themselves and each other a little if certain characters lined up with others. They worked out what looked like it could be a word, Moksha. Now Nic searched the word to see if anything came up.
"It's actually a word. Try that link." Dean pointed at one that looked like a good source.
Nic clicked it, and she read the short entry out loud, softly. "Moksha refers, in general, to liberation from the cycle of death and rebirth. It's a Hindu concept."
"But what does it have to do with the demon?" Dean wondered, scratching his head. He looked at Nic to see if she had any answers. She appeared to be turning it over in her mind also.
"It could be a sort of fucked up twist on the notion that the demon is using. It could have something to do with what the demon is doing to them." Nic sort of thought out loud, that sort of inner train of thought.
"Liberation from the cycle of birth and death, right? In Hindu that's where the soul no longer rebirths again, right. Maybe the demon is somehow taking the souls, thus preventing them from doing whatever it is they are supposed to be doing. I think there are folk stories of demons feeding on or stealing souls of good people to prevent them from doing the good they are supposed to do, in whatever form that's supposed to come in." It seemed to make sense to him anyway. It would be some twisted demonic version of the idea.
Nic looked at Dean for a moment, just sort of staring at him. She stared so long that Dean started to wonder if she thought it was stupid. He thought it made sense. "What? I think it makes sense. I might not be-"
Nic cut him off before he could speak any farther by grabbing his face with her right hand and kissing him full on the lips and then sat up as if it was nothing. "You're brilliant. It totally makes sense. It would be just like a demon to use a notion that is good like that and twist it for it's own vile purposes."
Dean was a little stunned, now he just sort of stared at her. She was definitely an odd one. "That does tend to be a popular thing amongst evil."
"Okay, so what do we do tomorrow?" Nic looked sort of revved up, and anxious. This was the first real clue in a while about this thing.
"I say we do like your dad, track down where it might be hiding, see if it's hiding something there." He turned back to the computer and started trying to find out about halls, caves, or tunnels in the area. As he did he felt her lay back down and watch what he was doing. Dean wasn't the most computer literate person, but he could punch words into search engines and check emails alright.
"Wow, that could take all day. Who knows how many of those old mining tunnels are even still accessible." Nic commented, reading over his shoulder about the Mines. There was even a Historic Mining Park.
"Yeah, well, I guess it's a good thing we don't have a lot else to do tomorrow, right." Dean then closed the windows on the computer and then let Nic shut it down. "I don't know about you, but I'm feeling a little too amped to sleep right now."
"Definitely. I think I'm actually going to take a walk, try and relax a little." Nic was way over revved. Her mind was racing, hoping this would be the break that would get her closer to this demon, to finding how to kill it, and getting the answers she needed.
"Sounds good." He glanced at the clock which now read 1:15 am. He definitely needed to walk off some of this energy. Dean was nervous, but excited about finding these tunnels tomorrow, or rather, later today technically.
Nic sat up and slung her legs off the other side of the bed and stood up. She moved her laptop back into it's bag and looked at Dean who was already up and waiting by the door.