Cole parked outside a bar called The Landing at ten past midnight and counted the cars in the lot.
Three.
One was a Honda Civic with a rosary on the mirror.
One was a Ford pickup with Missouri plates and a dent in the bed.
The third was a Buick that sat too low on the passenger side, like someone heavy rode there often.
Hannibal, Missouri, should have been on the Winchester route and wasn’t.
Cole knew it because he’d watched an episode where Sam mentioned driving past it on I-72, and Dean had said something about skipping small nests for bigger game.
The show had framed it as prioritization.
What it meant in practice was that four people died in Hannibal over the next six weeks while the brothers chased something else.
The door was unlocked.
Inside it was dark wood and old neon and a woman behind the bar with gray hair and a shotgun racked under the register where Cole could see it if he looked.
She looked at him.
“We’re closing.”
“I’m looking for Dot.”
“You found her.” She set down the glass she’d been drying.
“What do you want?”
Cole sat on a stool two down from the end.
“You’ve been keeping a list of people who went missing on Highway 79 this year.”
Dot went very still.
“Who told you that.”
“No one.” Cole put his hands on the bar where she could see them.
“A man named Lewis Cray disappeared March seventh.
A woman named Angela Moss disappeared March twenty-first.
A kid named Ben Hurley disappeared two nights ago.
You wrote their names in a notebook you keep in the second drawer under the register, and you’ve been asking the county sheriff to do something about it for two weeks.”
Dot stared at him.
“The hell are you.”
“I’m the guy who’s going to fix it before someone else gets taken.”
“Fix it how.”
“By making sure the thing taking them doesn’t make it to sunrise.”
Dot reached under the bar.
Cole did not move.
She came up with a spiral notebook, flipped it open, and slid it across to him.
Three names in blue ink.
Dates.
Last known locations.
The handwriting was steady.
“Lewis worked nights at the grain elevator,” Dot said.
“Angela was a teacher.
Ben was seventeen and his mom still calls me every morning asking if I’ve seen him.”
“I know.”
“And you tell me who you work for.”
“I work for myself.”
“Hunters work in pairs or they work for someone.
Which are you.”
Cole looked at the notebook.
The names were written carefully, like she’d been trying to make them matter to someone who could do something about it.
He closed it and slid it back.
“The thing you’re tracking is a nest,” he said.
“Four of them.
They’re living in the old Clemens house off River Road and they’ve been running careful till now.
Two nights ago they stopped being careful.”
“You know where they are and you haven’t done anything?”
“I got into town two hours ago.”
Dot’s hand drifted an inch closer to the shotgun.
“So do something.”
“I can’t take four on my own.
But I can make sure someone else does.”
He pulled a scrap of paper from his jacket and wrote an address on it in block letters, then a single word: Vamps.
He slid it across the bar.
“There’s a hunter named Garth Fitzgerald who works a circuit through Illinois,” Cole said.
“He’ll be in Quincy tomorrow.
I’m going to call him and tell him there’s a nest at this address that needs burning before dawn.
He’ll do it.”
“Why not you.”
“Because I’m going to make sure the nest stays where it is till he gets there.”
Dot looked at the paper.
“And how do you do that.”
Cole stood.
“You don’t want to know.”
He walked out before she could ask again.
The Clemens house sat a quarter mile off River Road behind a stand of trees that had grown wild enough to hide it from the highway.
Cole parked the truck behind the trees and got out with a notebook, a knife, and a pill bottle full of salt.
The house was two stories, white paint peeling, shutters half-gone.
No lights.
Four vampires inside, if the show had been right about the nest size, and the show had been right about most things until it wasn’t.
He walked the perimeter.
No wards.
No tripwires.
They were comfortable here.
The Lorebind pulled at him the way it had with the Pontiac wraith, a tide going out and then coming back in, and he let it pull until it hooked on something inside the house that tasted like old blood and older soil.
A name came up from the bind like a coin from a well: Cael.
Cole crouched in the dirt and wrote the name in his notebook.
He drew a circle around it in red pen, the way the Lorebind wanted, and spoke the command low and flat. You are reading on g.com, the official source.
“Cael.
You will not leave this house before dawn.
You will not permit anyone in this house to leave before dawn.
You will hold them here.”
The bind snapped tight.
Inside the house someone swore, loud and male, and there was a crash like a chair going over.
Cole’s mouth flooded with the taste of raw meat.
Copper and iron and something under it that was not quite blood.
He spat into the dirt and the taste stayed.
The second etching.
Permanent.
He stood and walked back to the truck, hands steady, and pulled the burner phone from the glove box.
Garth’s number was written on the back of a gas receipt from Joplin.
Cole dialed.
Three rings.
A voice that was all Tennessee and cheer.
“Hello?”
“There’s a vampire nest at 4712 River Road, Hannibal, Missouri,” Cole said.
“Four of them.
They’re stuck in the house till dawn and they’ve killed three people this month.
Burn it.”
“Who is this?”
“Someone who doesn’t work this territory.
You do.”
He hung up.
Pulled the SIM card and bent it in half and dropped it in the dirt and crushed it under his boot.
The phone went into the trash bag in the truck bed.
The raw-meat taste was still there.
He thought about the etching and the pill bottle of salt and the three names in Dot’s notebook, and he got in the truck and drove west toward the Kansas line without looking back.
Behind him, the Clemens house sat quiet in the dark.
Inside it, something stopped trying the doors.
At dawn, Garth Fitzgerald would pull up with accelerant and a match, and the nest would burn clean, and the Winchesters would drive past Hannibal next month and never know there’d been anything there to miss.
A town Cole had never heard of until he’d watched it die on a screen in another life would keep breathing.
Ben Hurley’s mother would stop calling Dot every morning.
Angela Moss’s second-grade class would get a substitute who’d stay.
The victim the show had tallied as collateral would live because Cole had bent a timeline two degrees left and made someone else the hero.
He drove and the raw-meat craving sat in the back of his throat like a second pulse, permanent, and he added it to the notebook under Lorebind etchings in handwriting that was only his.
The westbound lane was empty.
He found the dead air between two stations and left the dial right there, static hissing soft under everything, and didn’t touch it again.
Kansas was four hours out a missing dog, a woman who’d seen something with too many legs and Cole drove toward it with the radio saying nothing at all.