Disclaimer, Summary & Rating: See Chapter 1.

THE SCENT OF YOU

Chapter 4

It was just gone seven o'clock in the morning when Dean spotted the first billboard advertising the Lake Meredith Hotel & Spa Experience as he headed down Interstate 87.

He glanced across at Sammy, who was asleep and drooling slightly in the passenger seat. In repose, without his usual attitude and sparkle, the pallor of his face and the dark smudges under his eyes were immediately obvious. Chicago had taken a lot out of them all in every way – physically, mentally, emotionally and funny as it sounded, even spiritually. The tentative new accord between John and Sam was only a faint silver lining on the big black cloud, and Dean knew Sam was blaming himself for what he perceived as a personal failure to notice that Meg Masters was Evil with a Capital 'E' and all the accompanying bells, ribbons and whistles. As he had bitterly said, what was the use of having the 'Shining' if it only worked for him intermittently – and with regard to complete strangers – instead of the two people that mattered most?

Typically their usual temporary residences were the sort of motels with semi-burnt out and haphazardly flickering neon signs and which had an hourly rate prominently displayed in the parking lot. Any place pretentious enough to call itself an 'experience' was going to charge a hefty fee…but suddenly Dean didn't care. He was tired and stiff from the driving and saw no reason to keep going just to endure the joys of Amarillo's morning rush hour traffic for the end result of some skid row motel that ought to have been named Ebola Central.

As he approached Dumas there was another prominent and glossy billboard, so he took the Highway 152 exit off I87 determined to persevere no matter far out of the way the place ended up being or how slowly he might have to drive to avoid waking Sam (which would spoil the surprise) but fortunately the freeway he needed, 1913, was the first right and, as promised, it led straight to Lake Meredith.

He pulled into the parking lot noting that the hotel was middle rather than upper-class in style and architecture, which might make the damage to his billfold a little less. It was mainly one of those golf-and-water-sports type places, with the main hotel being a three storey affair complemented by those twee Swiss-style chalet/cabins. However, the prominent amenities boards in the parking lot happily made the point that all facilities – including the heated swimming pool, the Jacuzzis, the spa, steam and sauna rooms and the gym - were included in the room price, along with the full breakfast buffet.

Pulling into the guests' parking lot he slid out of the car as Sammy slept on and went inside, striding confidently up to the concierge and stating that he wanted a twin room with a Lake view for one week. He kept the insouciant smirk on his face as the desk clerk's eyes flicked over his faded black jeans, sneakers, old black Metallica tour T-shirt and his well-worn leather coat – not to mention his leather cord bracelets, the prominent silver-charm-and-leather necklace, the silver rings on his right-hand third finger and the similar silver ring he currently wore around his left thumb – in a manner designed to convey to Dean that the hotel's typical guests wore Gucci and were festooned with so many Tiffany diamonds they sparkled like a disco mirror ball.

Knocking off the attempted supercilious routine, the desk clerk quoted a figure that was impressive, but not as inner-cheek-biting as Dean had inwardly feared, and with a sudden clairvoyance of his own he knew that one of Sam's eleven catatonic-suicides had offed him or herself right here at the Lake Meredith Hotel…which would have been an 'experience' for the rest of the guests. Cue a slight lowering of prices and an increase of perks like 'all amenities included' to pull the punters back in.

Pulling out the wad of cash from his jacket, Dean laid down dead presidents and included a healthy tip just to show he could afford it. Taking the room key and assuring the desk clerk that he and his brother would carry their own bags, Dean went outside to where Sammy, alerted by an inner instinct that warned Dean was not where he should be – i.e., right beside Sam – was stirring to wakefulness and looking around him with puzzlement at the lack of cityscape.

Sam eyed Dean with grumpy disfavour as his brother grabbed their gear and chivvied him towards a waaaaay too-expensive looking hotel. Dean was never this chipper until he'd had at least an hour to mainline caffeine but he was grinning like a loon as he herded Sam into the lobby. Automatically taking one of the bags off Dean, Sam obediently followed him to the elevator, aware of the askance glances from the few other guests about at this hour, not to mention the staff…who were wearing actual liveries for crying out loud.

This was not their usual kind of place. Here the men wore pastel pullovers over beige pants or hideously checked golfing attire and looked like middle-management accountants who'd faint from a paper cut, instead of slithering out of tinted-window BMWs with three days worth of stubble, hair slicked back with enough oil to fill a barrel, leather attire as if from a bad bondage movie and Columbia's entire coke production in close proximity to the penis-substitute MP5 'room broom' automatic machine pistol they usually cradled or had 'macho-ly' stuffed down the front of their pants.

Likewise the women were middle-aged mutton, each a walking homage to collagen, plastic surgery and the whole nip-tuck-'n'-thigh-suck culture. Their tans were permanent and even in a manner nature couldn't match, their breasts impossibly pert for a forty-something and if it wasn't Prada, Dolce & Gabbana or Jimmy Choo, they didn't wear it. The females who frequented Sam and Dean's usual motels paid for the rooms by the half-hour and teetered in on four-inch Manolo Blahnik knock-off heels with orange hair, more make-up than a circus clown and wearing nothing other than handkerchiefs with delusions of grandeur.

The desk clerk gave them the evil eye and looked away in embarrassment when Sam smiled directly at him sardonically, knowing what he was thinking. It was true that one of their greatest advantages in throwing interested parties off their track was their lack of strong family resemblance other than their similar-coloured eyes. Sam and his height (thank you, Lord) took after mom's side of the family, while Dean's shorter but stronger (did you have to, Lord?) person came mainly from the Winchesters. A genealogist he'd met at Stanford had explained it was far more common for children to look nothing like either parent but take after a grand or great-grandparent or uncle/aunt. On the sole occasion Sam had got Dad to talk about Before, when he was Normal, it transpired that Sam looked like Mary's mother's father, and Dean looked like John's father's grandfather.

The downside, however, was situations like this when such as the desk clerk made erroneous assumptions about the nature of their 'relationship'. Most of the cesspits where they stayed only cared about the colour of your money and wouldn't bat an eyelid if you cavorted drunkenly naked about the place coked to the eyeballs with a dozen vestal virgins, oiled surfer dude types and a herd of goats, but ironically the more upmarket/pretentious hostelries could be very nasty about what they thought they knew.

"Ta-dah!"

Sam snapped back into it as he realised he'd followed Dean along the third floor corridor all the way to a room that was…nice.

As in the dictionary definition of the word; the old-style meaning of 'pleasant': clean, fresh-smelling and large. The beds were big, with hospital corners, and didn't look like they'd been used by an incontinent elephant every night for the past decade. There was no pervasive odour of urine and other unpleasantness, and the room had a big bay window overlooking the lake instead of hideous nicotine-coated plaster or 1972 bile-green flock wallpaper.

But Sam took all that in with one single glance; dropping his bag on the spot, he marched to the connecting door and shoved it open…and resisted the urge to get down and kiss the tiles.

Space, the Final Frontier…anybody over 5' 8" and bigger than a size 6 was familiar with the concept. Sam flung out his arms and twirled around on the bathroom floor tiles in a 'Julie Andrews on the Mountaintop' moment from The Sound of Music, chortling when his fingers didn't even come close to brushing the walls.

The bath was deep and long; the shower was large and square with frosted glass walls and not a mould-infested plastic curtain in sight – and the toilet was the other end of the room instead of being crammed into the same corner so close you could shit and shower at the same time. On gleaming glass shelves there were little complementary potions and smellies and a humongous cake of soap that promised to lather up for ever.

Dean was propped against the doorjamb, watching him with a typically big brother 'I'm never going to let you live this down' smirk.

Sam beamed at him and Dean took a step back, raising a hand warningly. "Dude, I'm too cool to cuddle – and I'm armed."

"Do you need to take a leak?" Sam asked, unwittingly echoing the Blackwater Ridge sheriff.

"No…"

"Then go away," Sam declared with a dreamy smile of anticipatory delight, "because I may be quite some time."

Dean chuckled and moved aside as Sam grabbed his holdall from the floor and disappeared back into the bathroom, hearing the bolt shoot firmly into place. There came the loud splashing of bath taps being turned full on and suddenly Sam began to warble in an off-key voice:

"Hoooome on the range…"

"Sammy, don't make me shoot you!" Dean called out even as he struggled not to laugh.

"Wheeere the deeeeer…" splash, gurgle, "'n' thuh an'elope plaaaaay…"

"Sammy..!" Dean called again, but shook his head, aware he was backing a lost cause.

Splash, splash – big splash like someone getting into a bath – "Annnd niiiiveruh iz heeeerd…"

"I'm going to get breakfast!" Dean yelled over the warbling.

"Take a couple of hours! Ah diiiisscurajin' woooooord…"

Shaking his head, Dean left the room, ensuring the door was properly locked and hanging on a Do Not Disturb sign just in case, even though it was unlikely an enterprising maid would enter the room to be 'disturbed' by the fact that two guests carried an arsenal of assorted weaponry and freaky religious objects around with them.

Dean went down to the breakfast dining room which was situated in a large conservatory overlooking the lake and golf course; he plucked a national newspaper and a regional newspaper from the complementary rows laid out on a side table and took a window seat. At that point there were a few more guests around; there were several middle-aged middle-management couples, a smattering of paunchy mid-life-crisis businessmen with Barbie-clone companions who were either trophy second wives, the girlfriend of the moment or hired for the duration, a few tables of executive golfer thirty-something types all called 'Gerald' and 'Tony' who ate breakfast like it was a competition with a cell phone grafted to an ear, and a few rich kids who looked to be in the same income bracket of Sam's Stanford friend, Rebecca 'my parents live in Paris half the year' Warren.

For a moment Dean had an image of Sam in a double-breasted Rodeo Drive suit and discreetly expensive silk tie, with that floppy flyaway hair of his shorn short-back-and-sides and Jessica Moore Winchester hanging on his arm as the perfect corporate wife with their Prep School Children of the Corn kiddies Brett and Brittany looking up at you from beneath a halo of flaxen hair with homicidal baby-blue eyes. There would have been no room in that white bread world for Samuel Winchester's reprobate brother with his penchant for denim and leather, endless stream of dubious-repute one-night-love-affairs and tendencies towards smart-aleck mouthing off at the Pompous and Self-Important.

Dean would never, ever wish his baby brother pain in any way, but a part of him had to wonder what would have happened had he not swallowed his pride and gone to Sammy for help in finding Dad. It occurred to Dean that the monster that killed Jessica Lee Moore had made the same mistake as it had when it killed Mary Winchester – it would have been far better served in just ignoring Sammy and letting him continue to cut John and Dean out of his life in his pursuit of white-picket-fence normalcy, instead of which it had reaped the whirlwind a second time by provoking Sam towards being the same relentless hunter of itself that it had made John Winchester 22 years before. Power and intelligence were not the same thing and it was a novel theory to consider that the evil which had caused so much harm to their family wasn't the sharpest knife in Hell's hand-basket.

He shook off such musings as a stiff-faced waiter stopped at his table, although without quite managing to pull of that genie-like appearance that you got at the Waldorf Astoria or the Hilton where the wait staff had the ability, like those sub-atomic thingies, protons or whatever, to get from Point A to Point B without travelling through the intervening space between.

He wasn't going to turn down any opportunity to get his money's worth out of their stay here, so he ordered the full breakfast without a qualm. The real delight was the coffee: they had such connoisseur wonders as Monsoon, Sumatran Tiger and even the rare Jamaican Blue Mountain. Ordering a large cafétiere of the Blue Mountain, Dean opened the national newspaper first and whiled away a pleasant two hours until mid-morning with the papers and some really great coffee. He even managed to complete one entire crossword and three-quarters of another, a favourite hobby neither his father nor brother knew of – being an aficionado of crossword-puzzles was a big no-no in the Bad Boys & Tough Guys How-To Handbook.

Continued in Chapter 5…

© 2006, Catherine D. Stewart