Cole spat onto the floor mat before he understood why his mouth had gone thick and coppery and only after did the wrongness of it catch up to him: he’d never tasted his own blood, not once, not even dying, but he knew this wasn’t it.
The hydroplaning Camry on I-55 had been quick, nothing theatrical.
This was different, wrong in a way that made his back teeth ache.
Someone else’s.
He was in a car.
A Honda Civic, older, the vinyl dash cracked along the passenger side.
The dome light was on.
Two hands sat on the wheel, still, like they’d been there a while.
He pulled them back and turned them over.
Bigger than his hands.
Callused differently.
A scar across the left knuckles he didn’t recognize.
Cole counted things he could see.
The steering wheel.
The rearview mirror.
A gas receipt on the passenger seat with a name that wasn’t his: Charles Brenner, cash, Pontiac, Illinois, yesterday’s date.
A duffel bag in the back with clothes that smelled like cigarettes and laundromats.
A knife under the driver’s seat folding, four inches, the kind you bought at a truck stop.
He picked up the receipt and read it twice.
Pontiac, Illinois.
Late March.
The date was right for late Season 4.
“Okay,” Cole said out loud, quiet.
His voice sounded wrong.
Lower.
He flipped down the visor.
The mirror was small and cracked at the corner.
The face looking back wasn’t his.
Older, maybe.
Thinner.
Brown hair a little longer than he’d kept it.
Brown eyes, same as before, but the rest jaw, nose, the small white scar through the left eyebrow belonged to someone else.
Cole closed the visor.
The hands hadn’t changed.
Still someone else’s.
“Right.” He exhaled through his teeth.
He sat in the Civic for three minutes and tried to remember dying.
The highway.
The rain.
The Camry’s back end coming around on him and the guardrail filling the windshield.
11:47 p.m., a Tuesday, an ordinary American death on a wet road.
He remembered his mother in the Joliet hospice.
Maddie, twice a year at Thanksgiving if he made the drive.
The insurance claims he’d been processing since he was twenty-three.
He remembered all of it.
And he remembered Supernatural through about Season 10, the parts that had stuck, the parts he’d cared about.
Cole opened the driver’s door and stepped out into a gas station lot on the edge of Pontiac.
Two pumps, both dark.
A closed convenience store with bars on the windows.
Cornfields past the lot’s edge, flat and black under no moon.
He leaned against the Civic and counted the cars in the lot.
One.
His.
The knife was still under the seat.
He bent down, picked it up, and clipped it to his belt under his jacket.
Cole had never carried a knife in his life.
He got back in, started the engine, and drove.
The diner was the only thing open on a two-block stretch of Pontiac’s main drag.
The neon sign said Rosie’s in red cursive.
Four cars in the lot.
Cole parked the Civic in the back row and sat for a minute with the engine off.
He was in a dead man’s body in a world he’d watched on television, and he was going to walk into that diner and order coffee because he didn’t have a better plan yet.
“Fine,” he said.
“Fine.”
The waitress was in her forties, blond, permanently tired.
She poured him coffee without asking and left the pot.
Cole counted the other people in the diner.
A trucker at the counter.
An old man in a booth with a newspaper.
A woman in her thirties by the window, alone, eating eggs.
The waitress came back.
“You want anything else, hon?”
“No, thanks.”
She nodded and turned away.
Cole’s gaze caught the woman by the window.
There was something on her face.
Not on her face.
Over it.
A faint shape, like a photo double-exposed, a second face laid on top of hers pale, slack, eyes half-open.
It sat over her features like a death mask, translucent, and then it blinked out and she was a woman eating eggs.
Cole set the coffee cup down and didn’t move.
The shape came back.
Stayed.
Flickered.
A print.
A death-print.
He could see when she was going to die, and it was soon hours, not days the exact shape of her face at the moment it happened already fixed in place.
The woman looked up from her plate and caught him staring.
She frowned.
Cole dropped his eyes.
He counted to ten.
Glanced up.
The print was gone.
Cole stood, left a five on the table, and walked to the men’s room in the back.
He locked the door and leaned over the sink.
The mirror was small and speckled with rust at the edges.
Charlie Brenner’s face stared back, and the print was there.
His own death, laid over the stranger’s features.
Pale.
Slack.
Eyes half-open.
A stamp that said: this one, too.
Cole turned on the faucet and ran cold water over his hands.
He watched the print flicker.
Stay.
Blink out.
Come back.
He dried his hands on a paper towel and counted the tiles on the floor.
Twelve by eight.
“Okay,” he said to his own reflection.
“Okay.”
He went back to the booth.
The woman’s booth was empty.
The waitress was refilling the trucker’s coffee.
Cole sat down and finished his own cup, cold now, and looked at the parking lot through the glass.
The Civic was still there.
The knife still on his belt.
The receipt on the passenger seat still said Charles Brenner, and the face in the mirror wasn’t his.
Cole left another dollar on the table and walked out.
He drove back roads for an hour with the windows down and the radio off.
Cornfields on both sides, flat and dark, turned earth and diesel on the wind.
He passed a sign for a state highway and kept going.
The woman’s print had been clear.
Hours.
He didn’t know how he knew that, but he did.
Something in the way the edges sat.
The Writ if that’s what this was had given him sight, and the sight showed him how close she was.
And his own print had been there, too.
On the list.
Appointment made.
Cole pulled over onto the shoulder of a county road and turned off the engine.
He got out and leaned against the Civic’s hood.
The night was quiet except for the engine ticking as it cooled.
He opened the duffel in the back seat.
Clothes.
A flashlight with dead batteries.
A notebook, blank.
Forty-three dollars in cash rolled into a sock.
No ID except the gas receipt.
Charlie Brenner had been a drifter.
No one.
And now Cole was wearing him.
The zipper stuck halfway when he closed the duffel; he yanked it shut and got back in.
He drove until he found a Walmart parking lot on the edge of a town he didn’t catch the name of.
He parked in the back row, locked the doors, and tilted the seat back.
The print on the woman’s face had been a werewolf kill.
The knowledge arrived the same way, uninvited, but the shape of it the torn throat, the specific angle of her head matched.
Three weeks of kills in Pontiac.
The sheriff had filed them as a bear.
Cole closed his eyes and let the seat hold his weight, and for a few seconds the only real thing was the smell of vinyl and old cigarettes and the faint tick of the cooling engine outside, all of it too solid and too specific to be a dream or a hallucination or anything except what it was.
Late Season 4.
The seals were breaking.
Sam and Dean were out there somewhere, running the Apocalypse, and he was in a dead man’s Civic with a knife he’d never trained with and a sight that put death-prints on strangers’ faces.
And on his own.
The Walmart’s sodium lights burned orange through the windshield when he opened his eyes.
The woman in the diner was going to die in hours.
The werewolf was forty minutes out.
And Cole had no plan except the one that was forming in the back of his head, the one that said: you can see it coming, so maybe you can move it.
He sat up and turned the key.
“Okay,” he said to the empty parking lot.
“Yeah.”
He drove back toward Pontiac.