Hybrid ¤ON HOLD¤

{6} Riddle Me This

            Dean tried hard to ignore the screams coming from the basement. He cleaned all of his guns, he gave Baby a tune-up, and he even spent an hour locked in his room doing research before he got bored. Still, none of the walls could repel the sounds drawn from Claire's latest demonic victim. After a while he gave up on distractions and ventured back out into the map room. Sam was sitting at his laptop and Cas was flipping through some crumbling old book. Gryphon was nowhere to be seen, but Dean had already assumed he would be downstairs to stand silently by the door that acted as thin barrier between Claire's monstrous acts and the rest of the world.

            Not long after Dean sat down at the map table to thumb through John's journal, Claire came prancing in, white shirt splattered with blood. Dean grimaced at the sight. "You couldn't have changed?"

            She took a bottle of water off the table where she had left it earlier and shrugged. "It would just waste another clean shirt. I have to go back down."

            "He's not talking yet?"

            Earlier that week, Dean and Sam had brought home in the Impala's trunk one of Crowley's demons. Claire had been down trying to pry information from him for the past four days, only emerging back into the world for brief periods to eat as a form of re-energizing. Over the past four days, she had come out exactly three times. The last time was almost twenty-four hours ago. She always got a bit distracted when she was cutting into some hell-spawn.

            Claire laughed. "He's talking alright, just nothing useful to us. It is mostly him damning me to hell. He's not the first, doubt he'll be the last. I'm going to up my game when I go back down there."

            "You should try to sleep," Sam suggested.

            "I can't give him time to heal himself more than I am right now."

            No, sleep would not help Claire in any way, shape or form.

            Gryphon strolled in uneasily. "I enacted a sigil do the demon could not use his healing powers."

            Claire smiled up at him. "You're the best. But you know what would make you better?"

Gryphon rolled his eyes affectionately. "Bringing you food?"

"You know me so well."

Gryphon rolled his eyes again but kissed her forehead and left for the kitchen. Claire watched him go with a sated smile.

Dean chuckled. "You're smitten."

"You're one to talk, Curly Fry," she smirked back at him, sending a sly wink to Cas, who was extremely confused by the gesture, but was wise enough to not ask about it. That would have been an interesting conversation.

"Claire, you really should sleep," Cas prodded, observing the dark, almost-black bags under her eyes.