Holly Monroe sat behind the hulk of the Impala, smiling to herself. The police had, apparently, taken Dean's body away the night before. That was good. The winged John Doe was probably being poked and prodded at that very moment, as she and two of her colleagues waited in the motel parking lot for the perfect opportunity to recapture their future member.
The three psychics peeked over the trunk and gasped as Dean Winchester walked out of his motel room, talking to someone inside, and pulled a leather jacket over his shoulders. They slid back behind the car.
"I thought you said you got him," Holly hissed, glaring at her friends.
"Hey, you thought he was dead, too," one of the young men pointed out.
"Yes, but I can't see spirits like you can. I just assumed you knew he wasn't there."
"Well," the third psychic muttered, breaking up a potentially lethal fight before it could begin, "we were wrong. Now we just need to come up with another plan. Try to kill him again."
"Or," Holly grinned, peeking back over the trunk as Dean returned to the room with a newspaper and two cups of coffee, "we could just use this to our advantage. After all, sometimes life is a better incentive than death."
The minute Dean walked back through the motel room door he slid his jacket off and stretched his wings. It just seemed wrong to keep them hidden, and keeping them folded tightly to his body for long periods of time was starting to hurt.
"You know," Sam muttered, glancing up from the website on cults he was searching through, "if our lives were a TV show, this would be everyone's favorite episode."
"Ok," Dean said, sitting down on the bed and staring at his younger sibling, "why?"
"You've been walking around for the past couple of days without a shirt on. Haven't you ever seen 'Smallville?' It's not the excellent plotlines that keep people tuning in each week. It's Tom Welling. Shirtless."
"Oh. Well, now that I know why you're so intent on getting back to the room every Thursday night-"
"I'm serious, Dean. You can't just walk around shirtless all the time. Pick some clothes that we can cut up."
Dean shook his head. "No need. I'm not planning on this being a permanent arrangement. Once we take down this cult, we're gonna head on over to that church and-"
"I went last night. The priest doesn't know how to help. I think you're just gonna have to get used to it."
Dean sighed. "Not an option. Besides, I'm all for making the fangirls happy. Can't have a show without them, after all."
Sam stood up and headed for the door. "I'm getting your stuff and pulling the scissors out of the trunk. Get ready to pick a shirt." He walked out of the room, leaving Dean alone on the bed, smiling.
No way out. Well, things could always be worse. Besides, the whole flying-thing was actually starting to grow on him.
He groaned as someone knocked at the door, assuming that Sam had found what he was looking for and was planning on making Dean destroy his clothing. However, when he pulled the door open he found Holly Monroe standing there, beaming.
"Holly?"
"Dean," she grinned, pushing her way into the room, "I wasn't sure I'd find you here. I just… I was worried, I guess. There was a shooting near our neighborhood last night, and the cops found blood at the scene. I thought maybe you'd been hurt."
"Um, no," he muttered, watching her suspiciously as she nudged the door closed.
"Oh, thank goodness for that. I just wouldn't be able to live with myself if something had happened to you."
"I'm fine, really," Dean said nervously. He was starting to feel closed in, claustrophobic, and it seemed like the room was heating up.
Holly smiled wide. "Good, good."
Dean nodded, feeling the first beads of sweat dripping down his brow. "Hey, is it getting hot in here or something?"
Holly's good-natured smile turned into something malicious, something evil. "Of course it is, silly. Hard to get to your brother with you in the picture."
The hunter coughed, beginning to feel light-headed as the room continued to heat up around him. The psychic kept smiling, her eyes dancing with unnatural fire-light as she fed whatever energy she had into warming the room.
Finally, his body failed him, and Dean fell to the floor, unconscious, as the thermostat reached a boiling 105 degrees. Still smiling, Holly hefted him up and passed him out the room's back window to her waiting colleagues. Then, she sat down on the bed and waited for her intended victim.
Sam sighed and pulled the duffel bag farther up onto his shoulder as he dug in his pocket for the room key. As much as he hated to admit it, things were looking bad. The cult was still at large, and Dean… well, Dean was messed up beyond repair, or so it seemed.
He pushed open the door and was met by a wave of boiling heat. "Man," Sammy said, taking a step into the room and letting the door swing shut behind him, "you get cold or something? It's like a freakin' desert in here."
"Oh? I'd say more like a jungle," a cool, oddly familiar female voice cooed from behind him, "humidity and all."
Sam spun around, dropping the bag, to face a redhead with a big grin on her face. "Who are you?"
"Your new leader," she smirked as the Bible that had been sitting on the bedside table suddenly lifted from its resting place and flew through the air to hit Sam over the head.
One of the other psychics poked his head through the window to check on his handy work.
"Congrats," Holly drawled, struggling to lift Sam out of the window and into the back lot of the motel, "we got him."