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Oh, to just be fishing. A dock, a line, water clear and rippled with small bubbles like old glass, the kindest breeze. Cas warming his side, stoic and silent. (It was a daydream; he could admit this in a daydream.) Maybe the fish would bite, or maybe they'd just twinkle up at the surface every so often, tails flicking silver before they'd chase each other away from the danger of the hook with its juicy, dangling worm. A blue jay arguing in a distant oak and the air scented with pine. Paradise.
Instead, Dean thought, I am going to hell. Literally hellbound. No, wait. Hellbound™: the hottest ride at the Pottawatomie County fair, pun only intended because the air conditioning had crapped out. This was not even the fun, terrible kind of hell that smelled like sulphur and was decorated like a low-rent Spirit Halloween barfed in there, with Crowley dicking around like, you know, a dick, while ordering his minions to go steal a buttload of souls.
If Garth's lead turned out to be a bust, Dean was never gonna hear the end of it.
The little boat knocked against the wall of the canal. Dean clenched his jaw as dubious liquids splashed up over the boat lip. An animatronic werewolf with patchy fur clacked its plastic yellow teeth together as the boat passed by, pulled along by the current. A faux wrought-iron lantern blinked orange, purple, orange. Up ahead, an ironically neckless vampire was saying in a garbled Transylvanian accent, "I vant to suck your blud."
"I hate this," Sam whispered, and for once Dean couldn't even give him shit about getting into the spirit of the season and all that, because Dean hated it too.
"What’s that scent?" Cas asked from the seat behind them.
"Chlorine," Dean said, and Sam finished, "mixed with toddler pee."
When Dean turned around, Cas was sniffing the air again, like he was trying to determine whether or not Dean and Sam's assessment was accurate.
"Stop that," Dean said. "Don't breathe any more deeply than you have to."
"I don't have to breathe deeply at all," Cas informed him.
There was something about his expression that made Dean flash a smile at him and then regret it almost as helplessly when Cas smiled back, tentative, as though he’d ever been bashful for one second of his trillions of years of life. It made Dean feel shy, and elated.
Sam coughed.
Dean turned back around and glared at him. Sam was doing a fine job pretending to be transfixed by a Freddy Krueger slow dancing with a Jason while a Chucky was rigged to wiggle around on a folding table.
The boat hit some sort of log (log?) and a fresh wave of bog juice splashed onto Dean's boots and Sam's.
"I hate this," Sam repeated much more loudly.
"We get it," Dean hissed.
Finally, finally, the boat approached a bend in the canal. The current seemed to slow and the little boat thrashed back and forth unexpectedly as it crawled nearer a new scene.
Cas sucked in a breath he didn't need and his hand landed on Dean's shoulder. Dean followed Cas's line of sight and felt his stomach lift.
The vignette was lit in a strange burgundy hue. In the center, a throne -- for want of a better word and which was probably just a plastic adirondack draped in cheap velour -- was occupied by a large grinning mannequin, its wide teeth stained and its face and arms painted red. Someone had dressed the figure in a satin red jumpsuit that had fallen on hard times since disco went out of style.
The effect would have been as cheesy and lame as the rest of the ride but for what protruded from the mannequin's head: enormous, curling horns the color of bleached bone. At one end were points sharp enough to pierce hulls; at the other, blackened blood trickled from the wounds left when the horns had been rended from their original owner.
Dean swallowed. The hand on his shoulder tightened. There was nothing phony about those horns. Dean's daydream of exiting this godforsaken ride and catching a few rainbow trout in the local lake before the sun vanished for the day officially winked out of existence.
There was a minotaur in this town, and no wonder it was pissed.