Dean had been back three days. Three days of clipped conversations, of nightmares that woke him screaming in a language that burned your ears, of that dark, hollow look he wore when he thought no one was watching. Three days, and Sam had already slipped out twice. Once for food, he’d said. But you’d seen the red on his lips when he came back, the way he wouldn’t meet your eyes.

Sam went rigid first. His eyes snapped to a corner of the room where the shadows pooled deeper than they should have.

The wings.

They unfurled from the darkness like heat shimmering off asphalt, vast and terrible and beautiful in a way that made your chest ache. Blackened feathers, scorched at the edges, stretching from wall to wall, casting impossible shadows that didn’t follow the light. They seemed to breathe, pulsing with a light that wasn’t quite light.

And then they folded in, condensing, shrinking, until a man stepped forward from the darkness.

He wore a trenchcoat that had seen better decades, a suit that looked borrowed from a corpse, and a tie that was perpetually crooked. His hair was dark, messy in a way that suggested he didn’t own a comb. His eyes were the color of a sky right before a storm—pale, deep, infinite.

But he wasn’t looking at Dean anymore. He was looking at you. At the goosebumps rising on your arms. At the way your breath had caught in your throat. At the way your eyes tracked something he knew—knew—no human should be able to see.