A scream reached Cole first, ragged, carrying half a mile across dark fields off the county road.
He killed the headlights and pulled onto the shoulder.
The scream cut off.
He grabbed the knife from the passenger seat and got out into gravel loud under his boots, the barn black against a blacker field, its door hung open on one hinge, swaying.
Cole counted his steps to the door.
Fourteen.
The knife felt wrong in his hand too heavy, or his grip was wrong, or both.
He could smell hay and blood and something else underneath it, wet and animal.
He went in.
The woman was on her back in the hay, one arm up like she was warding off a blow that had already landed.
Her neck was torn open on the left side, blood black in the bad light, and the thing standing over her turned its head.
Werewolf.
Cole knew it the way he’d known the print.
The shape of it tall, wrong-jointed, human enough to wear jeans but not enough to hide what it was.
Its eyes caught the moonlight through the slats.
It moved.
Cole swung the knife and missed by a foot.
The wolf batted his arm aside and he went down hard into the hay, the knife gone, his shoulder lit up where he’d landed on it.
The thing stepped over him toward the woman and Cole rolled, grabbed a fistful of its jeans, and yanked.
It turned back and Cole saw teeth.
He kicked at its knee.
Missed.
Kicked again and caught something, and the wolf staggered but didn’t go down.
Cole scrabbled backwards in the hay, looking for the knife, and his hand closed on a board instead.
Old, splintered, half-rotted.
The wolf came at him low.
The gunshot was loud enough that Cole felt it in his molars.
The wolf dropped.
Cole looked up.
An old man stood in the barn door with a shotgun, barrel still smoking, and he racked another shell without looking down.
“Stay,” the old man said.
The wolf twitched.
The man put the second round into its skull and it stopped.
Cole sat in the hay, breathing hard.
His shoulder hurt.
The board was still in his hand.
The old man walked over, looked at the wolf, looked at Cole, and spat into the hay.
“Silver,” he said, like Cole had asked.
“You bring silver?”
“No.”
“Then what the hell were you planning to do with that?” He nodded at the board.
Cole set it down.
“I don’t know.”
The man grunted and walked past him to the woman.
He knelt, checked her pulse, and pulled a shirt out of his jacket to press against her neck.
“She’s got a minute.
You got a phone?”
“No.”
“Useless.” The man pulled his own phone, dialed, and gave an address Cole didn’t catch.
He hung up and kept pressure on the woman’s neck.
She was still breathing, shallow and wet.
Cole found the knife in the hay and stood up.
The print on the woman’s face flickered.
He watched it.
Stay.
Blink.
Fade.
Gone.
The man was watching him.
“You see something?”
“No.”
“You’re a bad liar, kid.” The man checked the woman’s pulse again.
“Ambulance is four minutes out.
You got a name?”
Cole looked at the receipt in his back pocket.
He didn’t take it out.
“Brenner,” he said.
“First or last?”
“Last.”
“What’s the first?”
“Cole.”
The man stood, wiped his hands on his jeans, and looked at Cole for a long time.
“You hunt?”
“No.”
“Then what are you doing in a barn at midnight with a wolf and a half-dead waitress?”
Cole looked at the woman.
The blood on the hay was already dry at the edges.
“I saw her at a diner.”
“And?”
“And I thought she was in trouble.”
“Thought, or knew?”
Cole didn’t answer.
The man picked up his shotgun, broke it open, and reloaded.
“I’ve been tracking this one for three weeks.
You show up the same night I corner it, no silver, no training, and you tackle the damn thing like you’re trying to keep it off her instead of killing it.” He snapped the shotgun shut.
“So I’ll ask again.
You see something?”
Cole met his eyes.
“Yeah.”
“What?”
“Her.
Dying.”
The man was quiet.
Then he nodded, once.
“All right.”
Sirens in the distance, getting closer.
The man slung the shotgun over his shoulder and walked to the barn door.
He stopped and looked back.
“You saved her by accident, kid.
Don’t make a habit of it.”
“What’s your name?” Cole asked.
The man smiled, brief and hard.
“I didn’t give it.” He walked out.
Cole heard the sirens pull up to the barn, heard boots on gravel and voices calling, and he looked at the woman one more time.
The print was gone.
She was still breathing.
He walked out the other side of the barn and cut through the field back to the Civic.
The knife went into the duffel.
His hands were shaking when he turned the key.
He drove back roads until the sky started to lighten, gray at the edges, and pulled into a rest stop off I-55.
He parked in the back and tilted the seat.
The woman was alive.
The wolf was dead.
A hunter had his face and the name Brenner, and Cole had no idea if that was a problem or a door.
He closed his eyes.
The Writ had shown him a death.
He’d moved it.
The print had lifted.
“Okay,” he said to the empty cab.
“Okay.”
He slept until noon with the sun warm on the windshield and woke up still in a dead man’s body, still in a stolen car, still in the wrong world.
But the woman at the diner was alive.
Cole sat up, rubbed his face, and checked the duffel.
Forty-three dollars.
A knife.
A notebook.
He opened the notebook to the first page and wrote:
Pontiac, IL.
Werewolf.
Woman lived.
Print lifted.
Hunter: old, gray beard, shotgun, silver.
Didn’t give his name.
Has mine.
He closed the notebook and put it back in the duffel.
The rest stop had a vending machine.
He bought a coffee with quarters from the cupholder and drank it standing in the parking lot, watching the interstate.
Semitrailers and station wagons and a Prius with Ohio plates.
Somewhere out there Sam and Dean were running the Apocalypse.
Somewhere out there the seals were breaking.
And Cole Brenner, dead insurance adjuster from Illinois wearing a drifter’s body, had just saved a waitress in a barn with a rotten board and dumb luck.
He finished the coffee, threw the cup in the trash, and got back in the Civic.
South was as good a direction as any.
He pointed the car at it and didn’t check the mirror.