Read Supernatural--Cold Fire for Free Online

floor. He sprang to his feet in a heartbeat, slashing at one arm, chopping another, stabbing a third. Severed fingers spun through the air, followed by the cheek and nose of an impacted face he caught with a backhanded blow of the hatchet. With every opening in the creature’s defenses, he plunged the knife into the rolling flesh, but despite the flurry of wounds he inflicted, the damage was superficial, with minimal bleeding and no true dismemberments, at least not at species joins.
    He caught a blur of motion in the periphery of his vision and narrowly avoided the darting snake heads that sprouted from the creature’s long tail. But a tentacle slammed into his back and knocked him to the ground. When it tried to wrap around his leg, he slammed the hatchet into the slick flesh, only partially severing the appendage. Another tentacle struck his chest, hurled him into the wall again and he lost his grip on the weapon.
    The Chimera’s mass leaned forward, its center of gravity close to a tipping point if not for the wide base of the tentacles, and the lion’s head stretched forward with a roar. Dean figured that this was the Chimera’s command center, despite all the talking human heads that riddled its flesh like a scattering of warts. Leaning against the wall to catch his breath, he grabbed the hilt of a throwing knife hidden in his belt and fired it at the lion’s head, grinning when the flat blade sank deep into its left eye.
    The resultant roar, accompanied by the indignant screams of all the other Chimera faces, was deafening. Dean doubted the wound was life-threatening, but it struck at the core of the monster, blinding one of its primary eyes and inflicting a substantial amount of trauma to the lion’s brain. The Chimera lurched forward so suddenly, Dean had no time to evade the body slam it delivered. The malleability of the Chimera’s ever-expanding fleshy frame saved him from serious injury, but it smothered him in a suffocating embrace. Turning his head aside, he gasped for the slightest sip of air while the creature’s unrelenting stench burned his eyes. If the military had been involved in the hunt, Dean imagined they’d spare the Chimera’s life in hope of weaponizing its body odor.
    Fortunately for Dean, the creature’s rage was too pure to grant him death by suffocation. It backed away, looped Dean’s leg in a tentacle and hoisted him into the air, spinning around on a procession of lion legs. As Dean dangled upside down in the tentacle’s grip, wishing he’d packed more throwing knives or, hell, maybe a flamethrower, he glanced down and his eyes widened in alarm. In about two seconds, the Chimera would have him directly above the roiling flesh pit. He’d be dropped into that infernal soup of miscreation. Before he could be reassembled as part of a hybrid—or grafted onto the Chimera itself—he’d be disassembled: his head, limbs and organs dispersed but still somehow alive, awaiting whatever horrific reassignment the Chimera deemed appropriate.
    Lion claws tap-tap-tapped across the broken concrete flooring, spinning the Chimera’s body, the tentacle swooping in an arc like an airplane carnival ride. The pit was six feet away… four feet…
    Sam yelled, swinging a section of twisted rebar overhead, striking the tentacle inches away from where it gripped Dean by the ankle. Instantly, the tentacle flinched, flinging Dean two feet from the hellish pit. Skidding forward, his legs flailed wildly over the edge before he could steady himself.
    Below, the mass of flesh rolled like a wave. As it crested beneath him, a forlorn face rose to the surface, wide mouth moaning. Then an enlarged scorpion tail rolled toward him, its tip striking the near wall before sliding back into the mass, giving way to a pair of mismatched arms whose fingers strained to reach Dean’s right leg as it hung over the pit.
    “Hey!” Dean shouted, yanking his leg clear. “I’m not spare parts!”
    “Uh, Dean,” Sam said