Chapter Text
The glass shatters into a million fragments that crash heavily to the ground alongside the flurry of limbs and wings.
Dean screws his eyes shut against the onslaught of razor-sharp shards. Cas’s wings shield him from the worst of it, but he doesn’t even have time to grunt in acknowledgement before the monster comes barrelling after them through the busted window with a roar that shakes the cabin’s foundations.
Scrambling to his feet, Dean yanks Cas up, glass cutting into his palm. The monster slashes with its giant claws, and Dean ducks. Cas hisses in pain beside him, and there’s no time to think. Hands reaching out blindly behind him in the dark, Dean finds a counter and scrabbles for anything that could be the slightest bit useful.
All he comes up with is a container of salt.
The monster’s approaching. Glowing eyes, matted fur, teeth too big for its mouth.
His weapons are lost to the ravenous snow beyond the rickety walls of the dark cabin. Cas is sluggish, slow, two seconds from collapsing to the ground. The monster latches its glowing eyes onto him, mouth getting wider and wider, ready to devour, and Dean does the only thing he can do – he tosses salt into its wide-open mouth. Instinctive, desperate, and hopeless.
But somehow – miraculously – it slows the monster down. The beast lets out a screech of pain and claws at its mouth, trying to dislodge the salt.
So, Dean chucks some more at it, this time getting some in its eyes as well.
“Dean,” Cas says urgently, as the thing roars in agony, “I think it’s a chenoo.”
“Meaning?” Dean asks, flinging more salt at the thing when it makes a move towards them. The container is rapidly depleting, and he doesn’t know what he’ll do when it does.
“It’s similar to a wendigo. Cannibalistic, fast–”
“Cas,” Dean interrupts. “How do we–” he ducks underneath another swipe from the monster, “–kill it?”
“Its heart is ice. We need to melt it.”
“Okay.” The creature lunges forward blindly, and Dean staggers back into the counter as he tosses more salt at it. “I’m running out.”
Cas pulls Dean sideways with a sharp tug, and the monster – the chenoo, apparently – grazes his arm as it slashes with talons like angel blades, and he thinks that it must be sharpening them daily, because seriously – what the hell. He would’ve been sliced to ribbons if Cas hadn’t yanked him out of the way.
“Didn’t you bring a blowtorch?”
They duck in sync with each other to avoid an arching swing.
“Yeah,” Dean pants. He’d brought one because they originally thought they actually were hunting a wendigo, before this thing popped out of the trees in all its ugly glory. “Lost it in the snow.”
The monster is still stumbling around with its eyes closed. Dean tosses half of the remaining salt at it, his only weapon, and he and Cas bolt across the cabin’s small room to buy themselves a couple extra seconds.
“Any ideas?” Dean asks out of the side of his mouth, trying not to draw the chenoo’s attention from where it's blindly groping for them on the opposite side of the room. It whips its head around anyway with a snarl.
Dean looks at Cas, watching the angel think, his tired blue eyes tinged with something wild. Dean can pinpoint the exact second Cas comes up with a plan - his jaw sets, his gaze becomes deadly, and his entire being radiates power and lethality.
And then, Cas takes a step forward.
“Cas,” Dean hisses.
“Trust me,” Cas demands, and there’s no room for argument in his rumbling tone.
So, Dean watches as the chenoo hurtles towards Cas – fast as a wendigo, and just as deadly. Cas stands his ground, and right as the thing’s about to tear his throat out, he reaches out his hand and touches it to the monster’s forehead in a flash of light. It throws out its claws with a bellowing roar in one last desperate attack, and then drops to the floor with a thump of finality, bursting into ashes at the impact.
The silence hangs heavily in the air. Dean takes the opportunity to catch his breath, slumped against the wooden wall. Between one moment and the next, he finds himself on the ground with his legs sprawled out in front of him, and Cas collapses next to him.
The adrenaline coursing through his body wears off slowly as they sit there, their laboured breaths the only sound in the shadowed cottage. Pain is slowly filtering through Dean’s senses — the searing heat from claw marks and glass gouges, the sharp sting of the cold on his rapidly numbing skin, the dull ache of cold, overworked joints. His vision is blurred from exhaustion and the phantom bite of vicious snowflakes, but Dean assesses the place on instinct, now that the immediate threat is dealt with.
It’s small, and the dark wood is showing signs of decay. Glass litters the floor where Cas had hurtled them through the window from the grey sky, and even the windows that are still intact appear to be a few well-timed gusts of wind from splintering apart. The furniture is sparse – a small kitchenette with rusting appliances on one side, a rickety table with dust-covered cards scattered all over it on the other. Across from the shattered window, there’s a large bed covered in a thick duvet and mismatched quilts.
And that’s it. Dean doesn’t even see a washroom. There’s probably an outhouse somewhere outside, but he can’t be bothered to search for it.
Beyond the wooden walls and gaping window, the wind is howling in menacing misery, causing snowflakes to dance and swirl in twisting patterns, deadly fast. The snow had started to pick up mid-hunt. It had screwed up their visibility and made everything a million times harder, and the only reason they’d gotten out of there mostly-intact is because Cas had torpedoed them into the sky and right through the window right when the monster had them cornered.
A flood of flurries rushes in through said window, and Dean shivers.
“It’s friggin’ freezing in here,” he mutters. The cold snakes around them, chilling Dean down to the bone. He shivers, and curls in closer to himself.
“You’re right.” Dean can hear the frown in Cas’s weak voice. “This cabin doesn’t seem to be retaining any heat.”
Dean snorts, glancing at the jagged window. “Go figure.”
He knows that there’s no way this place is going to get any warmer if they leave it as is, so Dean hoists himself to his feet, throwing a hand out to the wall behind him when he almost falls right back down. Dean picks his way across the mess of a floor and inspects the window. Since he’s not able to magically procure a pane of glass out of thin air to replace the damn thing, he pulls the drapes closed and tries to hook them to the windowsill.
They blow open again immediately.
Huffing out a frustrated breath that freezes in the air, Dean tries again to no avail.
“Whatever,” he mutters when they refuse to stay closed for the third time in a row. Dean turns back around, stumbling a bit as he does so – his legs are worn out and tired, trembling below his body weight. He shoves his hands under his armpits for heat and shivers there for a minute.
“We need to warm up,” Cas croaks from the floor.
Dean looks down at him with bleary eyes. “I know.”
And he does. But he doesn’t know how. The window’s busted and steals any semblance of warmth. There’s no fireplace, and Dean can only assume that means the person that built the place was a superhuman, because nobody normal could stand to be here for any length of time without some damn heat.
Dean does have a crap ton of layers on, but they’re soggy and cold, and they seem to be doing more harm than good at this point. They’re clinging to his goosebump-ridden skin, cold seeping into him.
On the floor, Cas doesn’t seem to be doing much better. His wings are curled protectively around him. The angel’s teeth are chattering, and he’s shaking more than the crappy windows.
If they die of hypothermia after beating a monster with nothing but salt and Cas’s badassery, Dean’ll be pissed.
“I can’t believe this place doesn’t have a damn fireplace,” Dean grumbles.
Cas hums. “The wind would likely blow out a fire anyway.”
Dean nods, rubbing a hand over his face as he tries to figure out what to do. They can’t go outside – the snow is climbing up the side of the house, dense and unforgiving, sealing the door shut. They’re trapped inside with a pile of chenoo ashes and a smattering of glass that glints wickedly.
The banks of snow are creeping higher and higher, close to pouring through the cracked window. Even if they did decide to take a chance and tear themselves apart going back through the broken glass, it’s a total whiteout. The snow is churning faster and faster, creating an impenetrable fog. It’s what caused their problems in the first place, and going back out there now isn’t going to solve anything.
“Okay,” Dean says, “there’s gotta be something useful in this dump.”
Cas doesn’t say anything. He just looks up at Dean, eyes unfocused and defeated.
“Okay,” Dean repeats, nodding to himself.
There’s really not much in the dark, lifeless cabin. Dean decides to head to the kitchenette, figuring the cupboards are his best bet. The wood creaks on its rusty hinges as Dean pulls the first one open. He goes along the wall, finding plates, bowls, mugs, canned goods, coffee grounds, tea bags. Not super helpful. He keeps going, and eventually finds more useful supplies – matches, duct tape, nails, a hammer.
“Thank god,” he grumbles.
He goes back over to the window, pulls the stubborn drapes taught, and clumsily hammers them to the wall with numb fingers. Dean opts to use a liberal amount, because he doesn’t want these things to flap open again. When he’s done, the drapes are keeping out the worst of the draft and practically all of the snow. The nails are straining with the effort of keeping it shut, fabric yanking against them. They definitely won’t last forever, but they’ll do for now.
When he turns back around, Cas is still tucked away against the wall, eyes closed and wings wrapped tightly around himself. He’s shaking worse than before, and Dean’s brow furrows.
“Dude,” Dean asks, “are you okay?”
Cas peels his eyes open, gaze landing somewhere near Dean. “Yes. Just need… to get warm,” he chatters.
“Yeah,” Dean says. “Yeah. We’ll get you warm, okay? Um…” he trails off, looking for a solution.
Dean himself is still shivering, but he brushes that aside. It’s irrelevant in the face of Cas’s tremors.
“There’s–” Cas starts, immediately coughing. He tries again. “There’s a – a stove. A wood-burning one. Maybe…”
“Yeah,” Dean agrees enthusiastically. “That could work. Okay, hold on, we’re gonna need wood. Do you–”
“Under the bed,” Cas interrupts, gesturing weakly towards it. He burrows further into himself, wings crossed limply around him.
Dean wastes no time. Glass shards crunch beneath his heavy boots, and he crouches down next to the bed, lugging up firewood with a hiss when it touches the slowly seeping cuts on his hands. His movements are getting stiffer, everything taking a little more effort, but he perseveres.
He lets the wood tumble to the ground when he gets to the stove, and his muscles twinge when he reaches back up into the cupboard for the matches he’d seen earlier. Dean opens the little door on the side of the stove, next to the attached oven, and tries to build a small tipi out of kindling for the fire starter. It falls over four friggin’ times before his numb fingers are able to make it stay upright.
Getting the match lit is even worse. If Cas wasn’t relying on him, Dean would be tempted to just call it quits and accept the hypothermia that’s lurking on the horizon.
Finally, though, his fumbling fingers strike the match just right, and a coveted flame comes to life before him. Gently, Dean lowers it to the kindling and watches as fire licks the wood, jumping and crackling in a wild dance of victory. He tends to the flames for a minute, feeding it larger pieces of wood until a steady blaze takes up residence in the small cavern of the stove.
“There we go,” Dean murmurs.
Cas hasn’t moved this entire time. Dean’s fingers have long since lost all colour, and he tries to rub some warmth back into them as he walks back over to Cas and sits down right next to him.
“Cas,” Dean frets. “Cas, are you okay?”
Instead of answering, Cas slumps sideways, resting his head on Dean’s shoulder and shivering against his side. Helplessly, Dean wraps an arm around Cas’s ice-cold shoulders and pulls him in tight.