Supernatural: Night Terror Read Free Page A

of curses with the truck’s pungent white exhaust.
    Steven looked down at the painted line and realized that he’d pulled up in the middle of Park Lane. Fortunately for him, traffic was light in the evening. And the white exhaust was really spreading...
    Not exhaust. The white, cottony mist he’d barely acknowledged in the park had spread out across the road, swirling around his ankles.
    An accelerating motor—a deep-throated roar—drew his attention up again but this vehicle didn’t swerve.
    He had a moment to register the color red, with a white stripe across the hood leading his eye to the driver, but—
    Air exploded out of his lungs as his legs shattered and his body flipped through the air, bounding across the hood of the car, skipping past the windshield and tumbling up and away from the roof as if gravity had suddenly released any claim to his mass. But just as suddenly, it reclaimed him with punishing force, slamming him down onto the blacktop as if swatted from above by a giant hand. His head struck and his skull seemed to lose its rigidity, his vision splitting into two separate views a split second before one side went completely dark and the other began to fade.
    Somewhere he heard a woman scream.
    A man looked down at him, shock on his face.
    “Oh, God,” Steven heard him say.
    Steven wanted to tell the man not to worry, but the words came out jumbled and seemed to originate far away. Didn’t help that he was shivering as he spoke.
    “I can’t believe—that guy—he hit you on purpose!” the man declared.
    Steven tried to shake his head. Big mistake. Pain knifed through him so fiercely he blacked out for a second. Maybe longer. When the man’s pale face returned, this time with a cell phone pressed to his ear, Steven tried to explain what he saw before the moment of impact but only the last two words made it past his numb lips.
    “...nobody driving.”
    “What—?”
    A young woman stepped into Steven’s diminishing field of vision. She grabbed the man’s arm.
    “I—I can’t believe it!” she said. Her voice sounded distant and hollow.
    “I called an ambulance,” the man told her.
    “—tried to get the license plate,” she said, glancing briefly at Steven, long enough for him to see the horror and disbelief on her face before she looked away. “Blake, I—I couldn’t.”
    “That’s okay,” he said. “It happened so fast.”
    “That’s not what I mean,” she said. Her words were out of sync with her lips, as if she were an actress in a poorly dubbed foreign film. Movement began to leave smears of color across Steven’s vision. “I was looking right at the car and it... vanished.”
    “Vanished how?”
    Like the headless horseman? Steven wondered.
    “I don’t know how,” she said. “One second it was there. And the next it was gone.”
    Steven blinked, but when he opened his eyes there was only darkness. He thought they might still be talking above him but the only sound he heard was a soft, rhythmic thumping, fading and slowing and then nothing...

ONE

    The beam of Dean Winchester’s flashlight played over the pair of stained manacles dangling from an eyebolt mounted in the back of a stall in Cletus Gillmer’s horse stable. He didn’t need a forensic kit to guess the nature of the stains.
    “Sick bastard kept the victims chained back here,” he said.
    Across the aisle, his brother Sam examined the tack room, dominated by a sturdy wooden work table with eyebolts screwed into the surface at each corner.
    “And chopped them up over here,” Sam responded.
    “Not what old man Gillmer had in mind when he asked junior to take over the family farm.”
    They’d found Cletus Gillmer in the farmhouse, sprawled on an old recliner patched with duct tape, his eyes bulging and bloodshot, his tongue protruding and his throat savagely crushed. On the round table beside him, he’d left behind an old, loaded revolver and a curious, apparently interrupted, to-do list. After