But Deliver Us From Evil (1/8)
Fic: But Deliver Us From Evil (1/8)
By: Pen37
Beta: clarksmuse
Rating: PG-13
Fandoms: Smallville/Supernatural
Characters: Chloe, Sam, Dean, Jo
Pairing: Chloe/Dean, Sam/Jo
Disclaimer: Not Mine, Fun only.
Summary: While hunting Kelpie, things go very wrong for Sam, Dean and Chloe.
Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8
This is part of the Special Projects series. The rest of the fics can be found here.
Written for the Crossovers100 challenge. Prompt #30 Death. The table is here.
Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil.
It was the first time that Chloe Sullivan got to drive Dean Winchester's beloved Impala. It would figure that he only let her drive in a life or death situation. She whipped around the corner of a dirt road, sending a spray of gravel up in her wake. The back end swung around in a way that made Chloe wonder if they were going to spin out. But it was as if the old girl sensed the seriousness of the situation. Her course corrected and she plowed relentlessly forward.
“Come on, girl,” Chloe whispered to the car. “I need your help. Please.” She was talking to the Impala, unaware that she was actually praying. She glanced at the makeshift bandage wrapped around her arm and was surprised to note that it was soaked with blood. Her blood.
That shouldn't be, she thought. Chloe had increased healing speed, thanks to the radiation caused by the green kryptonite that was present throughout her body: a little souvenir of the first Smallville meteor shower. So she should have stopped bleeding long before her blood could soak the makeshift bandage. There must be a powerful anticoagulant in my system. Our systems.
Chloe Sullivan's hands were clenched so tightly on the Impala's steering wheel that they ached. She couldn't tell if she was white-knuckled from holding them so tightly, or if that was just all the blood making her seem so much paler. Distantly, she thought that if she wasn't holding on so tightly, her hands would be shaking uncontrollably.
The noises coming from the backseat scared her. Sam was barely breathing. She glanced over at Dean in the passenger seat imploringly. But reassurance wouldn't be forthcoming, because he had passed out, as well. Now she had a new fear: Dean's labored breathing.
“Dean,” she stretched across to nudge him with a bandaged arm and tried not to think of how her own flesh looked like ground meat underneath the torn strips of Dean’s outermost shirt. Or about how it wasn't healing the way it should. She shoved him once. Twice. No response.
“Dean, please!” She fought down rising panic as she realized that he, too, was out. She knew he'd been hurt, but he hadn't indicated to her that he was in trouble. But then again, he wouldn't. Not with both Sam and her all torn up. With a sinking feeling, she noticed the red stain that was suddenly visible at his side. She didn't want to think about how serious a wound had to be for the blood to seep through the many layers of clothing Dean wore.
With a strangled curse she fumbled for her cellular phone and dialed. Her fingers left bloody prints on the buttons as a memento of where she'd been.
The telephone rang twice - then was picked up by the one person she'd been hoping to hear.
“Roadhouse, this is Ellen.” Ellen's voice was like a shot of whiskey: steadying her hands and soothing her jangled nerves.
“El --” she choked once, cleared her throat and tried again. “Ellen, this is Chloe.”
The bar owner must have recognized something in Chloe's voice that told her that things were very wrong. “What is it?”
“Hunt gone bad,” Chloe said. “All three of us are chewed up pretty awful.”
“What was it?”
“It was supposed to be a kelpie,” Chloe said. “But it had hide like armor plating. And I think its saliva was an anticoagulant. I'm the best off of the three of us - and I think I might bleed to death if we don't get help.”
Ellen was wise enough not to waste time on pointless questions. “Where are you?”
Chloe squinted at a road sign as they flew past. “Highway 65. Near Lake Taneycomo in Branson, Missouri.
“One second, Chloe.” There was a pause on the line, and Chloe heard the jukebox playing Stand by Your Man in the background. “Chloe, I'm passing you over to a hunter named Jake. That area is his stomping grounds, and he knows of a doctor down there who don't ask questions.”
“Thank God,” Chloe muttered.
The hunter who came on the line had a voice cracked from years of smoking. He may have sounded gruff, but he was the best thing Chloe had ever heard. “Okay, listen up. You're going to see a Doc name of Svenson. He's retired, but a few years ago I killed a vampire what was stalking his daughter. So Doc does what he can to help us out.”
“Where do I find him?”
Jake's directions were short and to the point. He guided Chloe on the quickest, least trafficked route away from the strip in Branson, and toward Doc Svenson's home. Then he passed the phone back to Ellen.
“We'll call the Doc and let him know you three are coming. One question, Chloe.”
“Yeah?”
“That thing you were hunting? You guys get it?”
Chloe glanced down at her mangled arm ruefully. Her gun arm had been buried up to the elbow in the thing's mouth when she had the presence of mind to shoot. She was pretty lucky that it didn't nick an artery. If it had, she would have bled out by now. “Yeah.”
“You sure?”
“I think so. It's not armor plated on the inside,” She shook her head. “Soon as we're patched up, I'll send you my notes. If anyone encounters this again - I recommend lobbing explosives down its gullet.” She refused to say that she had doubts about all three of them making it through the night.
“That what you and the boys did?”
“When have we ever done things the easy way?” Chloe grumbled.
“Call back soon,” Ellen said. “I'll be waiting by the phone.”
“Ellen --” Chloe waited breathlessly as the bar owner returned to the line. “Don't tell Jo just yet.”
Chloe winced at the sharp intake of breath on the other end of the line. “Do I want to know?”
“Probably not.”
“Just call back soon.” With that final warning, the line went dead.
Chloe threw her phone into the floorboard, and went back to pleading with the Impala for something she didn't quite understand. More speed? Deliverance? Divine intervention? As she whipped around another corner, she felt something brush her ankle.
She risked glancing down, and saw her Grammy Sullivan's rosary lying there. It must have fallen out of her purse at some point. Chancing a second of inattention to the road, she leaned over, scooped up the beads, and wrapped them around her bloody, shaking fingers.
Technically, it was hers. A family heirloom given to her as a reward when she finally was able to take first communion, a full year after the penguins originally threw her out of catechism classes at Our Lady St. Rose for asking too many of the wrong kinds of questions. Gabe knew that she'd always admired the green shamrock beads, the tiny emerald chips on the St. Patrick medallion and the Celtic knotwork cross.
She'd never really used it. As soon as she'd gotten it, her mother made her put it away. It was an antique, after all: brought over from County Cork, Ireland with Grammy and Grampy in their youth. Later, when Moira went away, she took Chloe's rosary with her as a link to Chloe. Just in case she ever needed to use the strange metahuman powers that connected her to her daughter.
Chloe never missed it. Not until years later, when Moira pressed it back into her hands as a final goodbye before once again slipping off into a catatonic state. Her first reaction had been to bury the rosary at the bottom of her jewelry box. Back then, the shamrock-green beads reminded her too much of the meteor rocks that put her mother in her catatonic state to begin with.
But that was before she learned that there were more things in Heaven and Earth than even Shakespeare would dream of. Before she'd met Sam and Dean Winchester. And before they'd taught her how to bless water for use against a demon.
Suddenly that antique rosary from County Cork was a darn useful tool. She wondered what Moira would think of her thoroughly secular-minded daughter, using the Sullivan rosary to hunt demons with. She twined it between bloody fingers and said halting prayers for the lives of the two men she was coming to care for dearly.
Saint Michael the Archangel defend us in our hour of need.
30 Hours earlier
Chloe awoke with a jerk as the Impala pulled to a halt. She sat up groggily and stared out the rear driver’s window with bleary eyes.
From his seat in the driver’s side, Dean looked back at her through the rear-view mirror and grinned. “How do you feel about a cabin?”
“Depends on how primitive.” Dean didn’t have the best luck with choosing hotels. As a result, they usually ended up someplace that would have to class up to be called a dive. The word cabin in Dean’s vocabulary probably also meant rustic which probably also meant no running water.
And after the whole emotionally draining week with her mom in Kansas City, she just didn’t feel up to having to wear shoes to the ladies’ room.
“It’s nice,” Sam reassured her from the passenger seat. “Open floor plan, so we’ll have to watch the privacy thing. But it’s got a whirlpool in the bathroom, a deck with a swing and a barbecue grill.”
“Where are we?”
“Branson,” Dean said as he stepped from the car.
She considered that. “Do we have to sit through one of those time-share seminars to get this place?”
Dean shifted uncomfortably.
“Ah hah! I knew it!” Chloe crossed her arms. “When?”
“Tomorrow morning. You and Sam are going to -”
“Let you sleep in while we pose as the happy couple? I don’t think so. Why can’t you two do it?”
“We’re brothers.”
“So? Everyone we meet thinks you guys are into collecting antiques, anyway.”
“Cute,” Dean said. “You two are the early risers. You go.”
“You suck,” Chloe frowned.
“Besides, we let you sleep all that time.”
“How long was I out?”
“Since Kansas City. We stopped for dinner in Butler, Kansas. You were so out-of-it, we couldn’t even wake you up to go see Heinlein’s birthplace,” Sam said.
“Huh. I’m more tired than I thought.” A good night’s sleep for Chloe was about three hours. But the fear she’d been gripped in once finding out that Lex was searching for her mom again, combined with the restlessness she’d felt while visiting the care center where Ollie had stashed her meant a lot of sleepless nights.
So it wasn’t surprising that she was sleeping like a non-mutated person. She got out of the car, stretched, and rounded to the trunk to take her duffel from Dean. “I feel like I could sleep for another hour or two.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Dean nodded in agreement. “I could use a nap myself before diving into this next job.”
“Speaking of which, what is the next job?”
“Couple of suspicious drownings,” Dean nodded out toward a silvery lake that was just visible through the trees in the distance. “Sam caught wind of it when we stopped to eat.”
“Any theories yet?”
Dean shrugged. “Last time we worked a drowning case, it was a vengeful spirit.”
“How did that one turn out?”
“It didn’t,” Dean sighed. “The ghost stopped when he killed all of the people who killed him.”
Chloe placed a comforting hand on his shoulder. “I’m sure this will be totally different. Whatever it is.”
He looked at her hand where it rested comfortably on his forearm, and then favored her with a sly, lopsided smile. Chloe was certain that he was about to swoop in for one of those random, intense kisses that he’d stolen from her lately. But just as he was moving toward her, Sam walked right between them while loudly clearing his throat.
Out of the corner of her eye, Chloe watched Dean shoot Sam a glare. She rolled her eyes and fell in line behind Sam, leaving Dean in her wake.
The cabin, as it turned out, was very nice in the family-vacation-on-a-budget kind of way. It was an a-frame style with a king-sized bed in the loft, and a pull-out sofa bed. It reminded Chloe of the places that she used to stay with her dad when they took one of his father-daughter bonding vacations. She’d loved those trips, but they’d come to an end when Lana moved in with them.
“You two can take the loft,” Chloe said as she dumped her stuff on the floor next to the sofa. “I’ll stay here. That way I don’t wake anyone up prowling around.”
Sam and Dean both made faces at that. “Tell you what, gorgeous. Why don’t you come bunk with me, and we’ll give gigantor the couch?”
She rolled her eyes at his blatant suggestion. “Because I don’t want to start my morning wrapped up like the filling in a great big Dean burrito.”
Chloe automatically saw a disadvantage to not having her own room. Without it, she didn’t have anywhere for a strategic retreat once she’d tossed a verbal grenade like that.
“You sure about that?” Dean asked. “Because I like the idea of being full of you.”
Chloe paused with her mouth open. Her retort dead on her lips. Finally she shook her head. “Okay, you get points for that one,” she muttered. “I’ll admit it was good, but I’m still sleeping on the couch.”
Dean grinned at her, and then turned to take his bag up the stairs. He passed Sam and ran into his shoulder playfully.
“Dude,” Sam said. “You stay on your side of the bed. Because I don’t want to be the filling in a Dean burrito either.”
“No worries there, Samantha,” Dean said. “I’m not a cuddler with anything that doesn’t have boobs.”
“You could always try bundling,” Chloe called up to them even as she pulled out the sofa bed and crawled onto it. “It works for the Swedish.”
“Only if I’m curling up with someone busty and blonde.” His eyes traced over her form as he said that.
Chloe completely ignored that comment, instead she pulled her own covers over her head, and pretended to sleep.
Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now, and at the hour of death.
Jake’s directions were good, and as Chloe pulled up in front of Doc Svenson’s home, he was already moving toward the car. A thin woman with raven hair shot through with grey moved with him.
Doc Svenson took in Chloe’s bloody state in a glance. “You would be the ones that Jake called me about.” He nodded to the lady at his side. “My wife, Martha.”
Chloe got out of the car and stood - only to have her legs buckle under her weight. Instantly, the raven-haired lady was at her side, supporting her. Chloe shook her head in a vain attempt to clear it. She looked into the older woman’s eyes. “Martha is a good, dependable name.”
“Sven!” Martha’s eyes widened in alarm. Chloe would have been alarmed as well, but at the moment, the blackness was pulling her down. Its siren call erased all fear from her mind. She let her mind drift, even as her eyes rolled back in her head, and she slid from Martha’s grasp, to the dirt at her feet.
do not despise the prayerful voices of sinners; but, in your goodness, hasten to assist us,
By: Pen37
Beta: clarksmuse
Rating: PG-13
Fandoms: Smallville/Supernatural
Characters: Chloe, Sam, Dean, Jo
Pairing: Chloe/Dean, Sam/Jo
Disclaimer: Not Mine, Fun only.
Summary: While hunting Kelpie, things go very wrong for Sam, Dean and Chloe.
Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8
This is part of the Special Projects series. The rest of the fics can be found here.
Written for the Crossovers100 challenge. Prompt #30 Death. The table is here.
Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil.
It was the first time that Chloe Sullivan got to drive Dean Winchester's beloved Impala. It would figure that he only let her drive in a life or death situation. She whipped around the corner of a dirt road, sending a spray of gravel up in her wake. The back end swung around in a way that made Chloe wonder if they were going to spin out. But it was as if the old girl sensed the seriousness of the situation. Her course corrected and she plowed relentlessly forward.
“Come on, girl,” Chloe whispered to the car. “I need your help. Please.” She was talking to the Impala, unaware that she was actually praying. She glanced at the makeshift bandage wrapped around her arm and was surprised to note that it was soaked with blood. Her blood.
That shouldn't be, she thought. Chloe had increased healing speed, thanks to the radiation caused by the green kryptonite that was present throughout her body: a little souvenir of the first Smallville meteor shower. So she should have stopped bleeding long before her blood could soak the makeshift bandage. There must be a powerful anticoagulant in my system. Our systems.
Chloe Sullivan's hands were clenched so tightly on the Impala's steering wheel that they ached. She couldn't tell if she was white-knuckled from holding them so tightly, or if that was just all the blood making her seem so much paler. Distantly, she thought that if she wasn't holding on so tightly, her hands would be shaking uncontrollably.
The noises coming from the backseat scared her. Sam was barely breathing. She glanced over at Dean in the passenger seat imploringly. But reassurance wouldn't be forthcoming, because he had passed out, as well. Now she had a new fear: Dean's labored breathing.
“Dean,” she stretched across to nudge him with a bandaged arm and tried not to think of how her own flesh looked like ground meat underneath the torn strips of Dean’s outermost shirt. Or about how it wasn't healing the way it should. She shoved him once. Twice. No response.
“Dean, please!” She fought down rising panic as she realized that he, too, was out. She knew he'd been hurt, but he hadn't indicated to her that he was in trouble. But then again, he wouldn't. Not with both Sam and her all torn up. With a sinking feeling, she noticed the red stain that was suddenly visible at his side. She didn't want to think about how serious a wound had to be for the blood to seep through the many layers of clothing Dean wore.
With a strangled curse she fumbled for her cellular phone and dialed. Her fingers left bloody prints on the buttons as a memento of where she'd been.
The telephone rang twice - then was picked up by the one person she'd been hoping to hear.
“Roadhouse, this is Ellen.” Ellen's voice was like a shot of whiskey: steadying her hands and soothing her jangled nerves.
“El --” she choked once, cleared her throat and tried again. “Ellen, this is Chloe.”
The bar owner must have recognized something in Chloe's voice that told her that things were very wrong. “What is it?”
“Hunt gone bad,” Chloe said. “All three of us are chewed up pretty awful.”
“What was it?”
“It was supposed to be a kelpie,” Chloe said. “But it had hide like armor plating. And I think its saliva was an anticoagulant. I'm the best off of the three of us - and I think I might bleed to death if we don't get help.”
Ellen was wise enough not to waste time on pointless questions. “Where are you?”
Chloe squinted at a road sign as they flew past. “Highway 65. Near Lake Taneycomo in Branson, Missouri.
“One second, Chloe.” There was a pause on the line, and Chloe heard the jukebox playing Stand by Your Man in the background. “Chloe, I'm passing you over to a hunter named Jake. That area is his stomping grounds, and he knows of a doctor down there who don't ask questions.”
“Thank God,” Chloe muttered.
The hunter who came on the line had a voice cracked from years of smoking. He may have sounded gruff, but he was the best thing Chloe had ever heard. “Okay, listen up. You're going to see a Doc name of Svenson. He's retired, but a few years ago I killed a vampire what was stalking his daughter. So Doc does what he can to help us out.”
“Where do I find him?”
Jake's directions were short and to the point. He guided Chloe on the quickest, least trafficked route away from the strip in Branson, and toward Doc Svenson's home. Then he passed the phone back to Ellen.
“We'll call the Doc and let him know you three are coming. One question, Chloe.”
“Yeah?”
“That thing you were hunting? You guys get it?”
Chloe glanced down at her mangled arm ruefully. Her gun arm had been buried up to the elbow in the thing's mouth when she had the presence of mind to shoot. She was pretty lucky that it didn't nick an artery. If it had, she would have bled out by now. “Yeah.”
“You sure?”
“I think so. It's not armor plated on the inside,” She shook her head. “Soon as we're patched up, I'll send you my notes. If anyone encounters this again - I recommend lobbing explosives down its gullet.” She refused to say that she had doubts about all three of them making it through the night.
“That what you and the boys did?”
“When have we ever done things the easy way?” Chloe grumbled.
“Call back soon,” Ellen said. “I'll be waiting by the phone.”
“Ellen --” Chloe waited breathlessly as the bar owner returned to the line. “Don't tell Jo just yet.”
Chloe winced at the sharp intake of breath on the other end of the line. “Do I want to know?”
“Probably not.”
“Just call back soon.” With that final warning, the line went dead.
Chloe threw her phone into the floorboard, and went back to pleading with the Impala for something she didn't quite understand. More speed? Deliverance? Divine intervention? As she whipped around another corner, she felt something brush her ankle.
She risked glancing down, and saw her Grammy Sullivan's rosary lying there. It must have fallen out of her purse at some point. Chancing a second of inattention to the road, she leaned over, scooped up the beads, and wrapped them around her bloody, shaking fingers.
Technically, it was hers. A family heirloom given to her as a reward when she finally was able to take first communion, a full year after the penguins originally threw her out of catechism classes at Our Lady St. Rose for asking too many of the wrong kinds of questions. Gabe knew that she'd always admired the green shamrock beads, the tiny emerald chips on the St. Patrick medallion and the Celtic knotwork cross.
She'd never really used it. As soon as she'd gotten it, her mother made her put it away. It was an antique, after all: brought over from County Cork, Ireland with Grammy and Grampy in their youth. Later, when Moira went away, she took Chloe's rosary with her as a link to Chloe. Just in case she ever needed to use the strange metahuman powers that connected her to her daughter.
Chloe never missed it. Not until years later, when Moira pressed it back into her hands as a final goodbye before once again slipping off into a catatonic state. Her first reaction had been to bury the rosary at the bottom of her jewelry box. Back then, the shamrock-green beads reminded her too much of the meteor rocks that put her mother in her catatonic state to begin with.
But that was before she learned that there were more things in Heaven and Earth than even Shakespeare would dream of. Before she'd met Sam and Dean Winchester. And before they'd taught her how to bless water for use against a demon.
Suddenly that antique rosary from County Cork was a darn useful tool. She wondered what Moira would think of her thoroughly secular-minded daughter, using the Sullivan rosary to hunt demons with. She twined it between bloody fingers and said halting prayers for the lives of the two men she was coming to care for dearly.
Saint Michael the Archangel defend us in our hour of need.
30 Hours earlier
Chloe awoke with a jerk as the Impala pulled to a halt. She sat up groggily and stared out the rear driver’s window with bleary eyes.
From his seat in the driver’s side, Dean looked back at her through the rear-view mirror and grinned. “How do you feel about a cabin?”
“Depends on how primitive.” Dean didn’t have the best luck with choosing hotels. As a result, they usually ended up someplace that would have to class up to be called a dive. The word cabin in Dean’s vocabulary probably also meant rustic which probably also meant no running water.
And after the whole emotionally draining week with her mom in Kansas City, she just didn’t feel up to having to wear shoes to the ladies’ room.
“It’s nice,” Sam reassured her from the passenger seat. “Open floor plan, so we’ll have to watch the privacy thing. But it’s got a whirlpool in the bathroom, a deck with a swing and a barbecue grill.”
“Where are we?”
“Branson,” Dean said as he stepped from the car.
She considered that. “Do we have to sit through one of those time-share seminars to get this place?”
Dean shifted uncomfortably.
“Ah hah! I knew it!” Chloe crossed her arms. “When?”
“Tomorrow morning. You and Sam are going to -”
“Let you sleep in while we pose as the happy couple? I don’t think so. Why can’t you two do it?”
“We’re brothers.”
“So? Everyone we meet thinks you guys are into collecting antiques, anyway.”
“Cute,” Dean said. “You two are the early risers. You go.”
“You suck,” Chloe frowned.
“Besides, we let you sleep all that time.”
“How long was I out?”
“Since Kansas City. We stopped for dinner in Butler, Kansas. You were so out-of-it, we couldn’t even wake you up to go see Heinlein’s birthplace,” Sam said.
“Huh. I’m more tired than I thought.” A good night’s sleep for Chloe was about three hours. But the fear she’d been gripped in once finding out that Lex was searching for her mom again, combined with the restlessness she’d felt while visiting the care center where Ollie had stashed her meant a lot of sleepless nights.
So it wasn’t surprising that she was sleeping like a non-mutated person. She got out of the car, stretched, and rounded to the trunk to take her duffel from Dean. “I feel like I could sleep for another hour or two.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Dean nodded in agreement. “I could use a nap myself before diving into this next job.”
“Speaking of which, what is the next job?”
“Couple of suspicious drownings,” Dean nodded out toward a silvery lake that was just visible through the trees in the distance. “Sam caught wind of it when we stopped to eat.”
“Any theories yet?”
Dean shrugged. “Last time we worked a drowning case, it was a vengeful spirit.”
“How did that one turn out?”
“It didn’t,” Dean sighed. “The ghost stopped when he killed all of the people who killed him.”
Chloe placed a comforting hand on his shoulder. “I’m sure this will be totally different. Whatever it is.”
He looked at her hand where it rested comfortably on his forearm, and then favored her with a sly, lopsided smile. Chloe was certain that he was about to swoop in for one of those random, intense kisses that he’d stolen from her lately. But just as he was moving toward her, Sam walked right between them while loudly clearing his throat.
Out of the corner of her eye, Chloe watched Dean shoot Sam a glare. She rolled her eyes and fell in line behind Sam, leaving Dean in her wake.
The cabin, as it turned out, was very nice in the family-vacation-on-a-budget kind of way. It was an a-frame style with a king-sized bed in the loft, and a pull-out sofa bed. It reminded Chloe of the places that she used to stay with her dad when they took one of his father-daughter bonding vacations. She’d loved those trips, but they’d come to an end when Lana moved in with them.
“You two can take the loft,” Chloe said as she dumped her stuff on the floor next to the sofa. “I’ll stay here. That way I don’t wake anyone up prowling around.”
Sam and Dean both made faces at that. “Tell you what, gorgeous. Why don’t you come bunk with me, and we’ll give gigantor the couch?”
She rolled her eyes at his blatant suggestion. “Because I don’t want to start my morning wrapped up like the filling in a great big Dean burrito.”
Chloe automatically saw a disadvantage to not having her own room. Without it, she didn’t have anywhere for a strategic retreat once she’d tossed a verbal grenade like that.
“You sure about that?” Dean asked. “Because I like the idea of being full of you.”
Chloe paused with her mouth open. Her retort dead on her lips. Finally she shook her head. “Okay, you get points for that one,” she muttered. “I’ll admit it was good, but I’m still sleeping on the couch.”
Dean grinned at her, and then turned to take his bag up the stairs. He passed Sam and ran into his shoulder playfully.
“Dude,” Sam said. “You stay on your side of the bed. Because I don’t want to be the filling in a Dean burrito either.”
“No worries there, Samantha,” Dean said. “I’m not a cuddler with anything that doesn’t have boobs.”
“You could always try bundling,” Chloe called up to them even as she pulled out the sofa bed and crawled onto it. “It works for the Swedish.”
“Only if I’m curling up with someone busty and blonde.” His eyes traced over her form as he said that.
Chloe completely ignored that comment, instead she pulled her own covers over her head, and pretended to sleep.
Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now, and at the hour of death.
Jake’s directions were good, and as Chloe pulled up in front of Doc Svenson’s home, he was already moving toward the car. A thin woman with raven hair shot through with grey moved with him.
Doc Svenson took in Chloe’s bloody state in a glance. “You would be the ones that Jake called me about.” He nodded to the lady at his side. “My wife, Martha.”
Chloe got out of the car and stood - only to have her legs buckle under her weight. Instantly, the raven-haired lady was at her side, supporting her. Chloe shook her head in a vain attempt to clear it. She looked into the older woman’s eyes. “Martha is a good, dependable name.”
“Sven!” Martha’s eyes widened in alarm. Chloe would have been alarmed as well, but at the moment, the blackness was pulling her down. Its siren call erased all fear from her mind. She let her mind drift, even as her eyes rolled back in her head, and she slid from Martha’s grasp, to the dirt at her feet.
do not despise the prayerful voices of sinners; but, in your goodness, hasten to assist us,