Disclaimer: Not mine. Alas.
Thanks to Lyzzybelle, L.A.H.H, reannablue, criminally charmed, missingmikey, doyleshuny, emebalia, twomoms, BranchSuper, Visionairy, SPN Mum and Holliday for the reviews and to Cheryl for the beta.
Chapter II: And This Mystery Explore
Dean whistled as he braked outside The Raven. He supposed it was an appropriate name for a hotel opposite a haunted house a few miles outside Baltimore.
He glanced at Sam, smiled at the amusement in his brother's eyes, and said, "Go get us a room, bitch. And make sure it isn't a lame one."
Sam slid out of the passenger seat and went inside, ducking under the low-hanging signboard with a picture of a raven sitting on a skull. He was gone long enough that Dean started to worry. He was on the verge of getting out and going after his brother when Sam reappeared.
"What took so long?" Dean demanded.
"They're a little messed up. It isn't really open yet, though she said everything's good to go… Apparently we're practically the only people here. There's a couple of other rooms occupied but those are all the way across the hotel from ours. Some friends of Lou's, helping him get stuff set up."
"So we have a plan yet?"
"Lou left a message. He and his Wiccan friend are going to meet us in an hour to give us details of what they've done to the haunted house." Sam popped the trunk and pulled out both their bags. "Let's go."
Dean trailed inside after Sam, not bothering to help with the bags. What was the point of having a little brother the size of a house if you didn't get him to do the heavy lifting?
Dean spent the hour before they had to meet Lou catching up on some much-needed sleep. Sam spent it hunched over his laptop. Dean woke up fresh, brimful of awesome, and ready to deal with whatever Lou and his voodoo chick had accidentally unleashed in their haunted house. Sam stayed grumpy all the way downstairs to Conference Room B, where Lou was meeting them. (And, seriously, Conference Room B? That was just hilarious. It was like Lou thought he was running a high-end business hotel instead of a dive that was just too new and shiny to look like a dive yet.)
Of course as soon as Sam saw Lou and the girl, his bad mood vanished and he turned on the eyes. Sam called it professionalism. Dean called it being a little bitch.
"Do you like the hotel?" was the first question Lou asked, right after he'd poured them both coffee.
Dean didn't bother to respond. Sam would make the appropriate polite sounds, and he was still holding onto his grudge against Lou for upsetting his brother.
"Yes, it is an old building," Lou said, in response to some geeky comment Sam made about the architecture. "Eighteenth century, according to local records. Most of the main building collapsed in a storm in the 1830s and since it was so far out of the way, nobody really bothered to fix it up. It's been going to seed ever since." He smiled, the wide smile of a businessman who had made a good deal and knew it. "I got it for practically nothing. Tried to stick to the original plans when I was fixing it up. We had to rebuild all the main building, but there's some of the original architecture in the basement and the wings if you want to take a look later."
"Yeah," Dean said, cutting in before Sam could say something that would prolong this pointless conversation. Freaking architecture. "It's pretty. Now how about the job?"
Sam glared at him. Dean ignored it. If Sam had his way, he'd want Dean to be nice to freaking everyone.
"Right," Lou said, enthusiasm undimmed. "The job. The haunted house property isn't far. It used to be… I'm not quite sure what, probably a groundskeeper's cottage or something. There's a small road leading to the back entrance to this place, and the haunted house is on the other side. You wouldn't have been able to see it from your room, although it does face that direction. Too many trees in the way. This is Maggie –"
"Astra," the girl said firmly. "My Wiccan name is Astra, Lou. I've told you to use it." She turned to Sam and Dean. "Lou says you know something about the arts?"
Dean choked on his coffee. Before he could put Astra straight, Sam said, "A little, yes. Can you tell us something about what you've done?"
Dean tuned out Astra's explanation. It was Sam's job to pay attention to the lunatics. Dean's job was just to start killing things when Sam pointed him in the right direction.
When the torture was over and Astra and Lou had gone, Dean asked, "Well? Any of it real?"
"Probably not." Sam leafed through the pages of notes he'd taken. Idiot. "She isn't really Wiccan, more a girl who has a lot of little brass curios and wishes she were Wiccan. But there is just a possibility that she might accidentally have stumbled onto something real. We'll check it out."
"Awesome. After lunch? I saw a diner on the way here."
"What, that greasy-looking place a mile down the street?"
"Yeah. I bet if I make you eat a burger there you'll turn into a real boy."
"Hilarious. Is there some place we can eat that'll turn you into a normal person?"
"Hey!" Dean elbowed Sam. "I'm perfectly normal."
"Your perfectly normal arteries are going to give up the fight any day now."
"If listening to your bitching didn't hurt my arteries, a hamburger isn't going to."
They had a relaxed lunch. Meeting the hippie chick seemed to have reassured Sam that this thing was no kind of real threat and Dean was willing to go with his brother's instincts. Sam spent half the meal making his headache face. It would have been effective if he'd actually had a headache, but Dean suspected he was just trying to express his disapproval of Dean's meal choices. Dean ignored it.
They walked from the hotel to the haunted house.
It was one of the most ridiculous things Dean had ever seen. It was clearly a new building. He might not be an expert on colonial architecture like Sam, but he'd been in enough old houses to know which ones were really eighteenth-century and which ones were twenty-first century pretending. The haunted house was so new you could still smell the cement.
The front door was festooned with fake cobwebs complete with large rubber spiders.
"So how long is this going to take?" Dean asked, wrinkling his nose.
"Not long," Sam said, pulling out his phone. "We don't actually need to stay here… We can just take pictures of everything and then look at them in detail back at the hotel. We'd still have to come back for a final sweep tomorrow, though."
"Great," Dean said, a lot more cheerful now that he knew the plan didn't involve him hanging out in this weird place longer than a few minutes. "You go get whatever pictures you need and I'll… Yeah. I'll just be here."
Sam raised an eyebrow. "You're not coming in?"
"This place gives me the creeps."
"Seriously? You've hunted actual monsters from people's nightmares, and rubber spiders give you the creeps?"
"They're looking at me. What if they're possessed?"
"Idiot," Sam muttered, pushing past Dean into the house. "Fine, wait here."
"Holler if you need me to come hold your hand," Dean said. "You know, if there are any clowns in there or anything."
"Screw you."
Dean laughed. "Seriously, though, you need me to hang around? Because if all you're going to be doing is taking pictures, I just saw a hot waitress at that place we had lunch and I'm pretty sure she'd be willing to give me her number."
"Really, Dean?"
"Come on, Sammy," Dean said, grinning broadly and nudging Sam. "Lighten up. This isn't even a real job, this is just some crap for Garth's friend and a hippie chick. There's not even anything supernatural. It's a geekfest. I'll just be in your way."
Sam huffed, but it sounded more amused than exasperated. "Fine. You go have fun. I'll call you if I need anything."
"That's my boy!"
Sam watched Dean go, trying not to smile. When Dean turned, grinned broadly, and waved, he gave up, laughing and waving back. Sam supposed one of them should be having a good time, and it really didn't seem like a difficult job. Astra had maintained pretty thorough records and it all seemed like silly, harmless fun.
He rubbed his forehead. He could feel a headache starting, so it was just as well this was such a non-job. He'd just take his photographs and go back and get some sleep.
Sam let himself in with the key Lou had given him. The inside was like most haunted houses Sam had ever been to. Fake cobwebs hung from the support beams. There were large cupboards that would probably open to reveal mummies or zombies or headless corpses. The walls were covered in weird symbols in red paint.
Sam rolled his eyes and started snapping pictures.
He went through the first two rooms and then made his way upstairs. The steps were creaky and swaying, and Sam made a mental note to warn Lou that they might not stand the weight of hordes of eager teenagers running up and down them.
The upstairs was small. Sam made a quick circuit, photographing the pentagrams and other graffiti. By the time he'd finished, his headache was a lot worse, probably from the lack of fresh air.
Sam shook his head to clear it and stumbled down the stairs.
He did feel a little better as soon as he was downstairs. Probably some weird paint or something upstairs.
Sam finished up quickly and went back outside.
He'd been expecting fresh air to make him feel better, but it didn't, and suddenly the short walk from the haunted house to the hotel seemed daunting.
His hand found his cell phone, finger hovering over speed dial 1. After a moment, though, he put the phone back in his pocket. There wasn't anything really wrong with him, he was tired and he probably just hadn't gotten enough sleep. There was no need to spoil Dean's fun with the waitress from the diner.
The walk back took him about six times as long and he even managed to take a wrong turn (while crossing the one freaking road between the haunted house and the hotel; Dean would never let him hear the end of it if he found out) but eventually Sam was back in their room.
He didn't even bother loading the photographs to his laptop. He'd do it after his nap.
"I'll be back in a minute."
Dean nodded, eyes following Sharon's tempting curves as she walked away in the direction of the ladies' room. As soon as the door had shut behind her, though, he pulled out his cell to text Sam.
Done yet, bitch?
He expected a quick response. Sam had had more than enough time to finish taking pictures. It had been a tiny building.
There was nothing, though, and by the time Sharon came back Dean was getting a little uncomfortable.
He forced his mind back to their conversation, but not before sending another text to Sam.
Half an hour later, Sam hadn't replied to any of Dean's messages and Sharon was starting to lose patience with a guy who kept interrupting her funny stories to check his cell phone. It didn't take long for them both to decide to give up the night as a bad job.
Dean made sure to drive under the speed limit on his way back to the hotel, because he wasn't an overprotective idiot who was panicking because his little brother hadn't replied to his texts. (And a little because a storm had just started and if he skidded the Impala into a ditch he wouldn't be able to ream Sam out for ignoring his cell phone.) He also didn't press the elevator button about three hundred times and then sprint the five floors up to their room when two seconds had passed without the elevator showing up.
Dean did none of those things (and since nobody else was around, nobody could claim differently), but if he had done them, he'd have felt fully justified when he burst into their room to find the lights out and Sam a motionless blanket-wrapped bundle on the far bed.
He padded quietly into the room, noticing Sam's phone on the table with the message light blinking.
Then he sat on the edge of Sam's bed and pulled back the blankets. The movement woke Sam, who blinked up at him blearily.
"Dean?"
"Sorry, kiddo. Didn't mean to wake you. You OK?"
"Yeah, just had a headache."
Dean's senses went on high alert instantly. Sam's headaches were never good news. What if this was a sign of hell recurring or something? Maybe whatever Cas had done hadn't been enough to push Lucifer away for good.
"Headache?" He kept his voice level, because there was no point worrying Sam until he knew for sure there was something to worry about. "How bad is it?" His hand skimmed Sam's forehead, and he flinched at the heat he felt there. "Running a fever, Sammy."
He felt a little relieved as he said the words. Fever was normal. They could deal with fever. Especially because Dean could tell this wasn't a particularly high fever. Not a hospital fever or even a doctor fever, just a don't-let-Dean-sleep-tonight fever.
"Sorry?" Sam tried, and Dean laughed.
"Yeah, you should be. I ran out on Sharon because you weren't answering your phone. I had horrible visions of you lying here in a pool of your own blood and it turns out you've barely even got a temperature. You owe me a hot girl."
"I don't manufacture hot girls, Dean," Sam muttered, and the snark had Dean smiling and mussing his hair. If Sam could be sarcastic, Sam wasn't that sick. "And you didn't have to leave your date."
"And listen to you bitching tomorrow?" Dean patted Sam's shoulder. "Take anything for it?" Sam shook his head. "OK, then. I'll get you Tylenol. Sleep it off."
What did you think? Good? Bad? Please review!