NOW

From the day of her birth, Erika Winchester had been an outsider.

In school, she'd never made much of an effort to connect with other children; instead she'd spend her days shadow-boxing or curled up in the corner with a book on mythology. People learned to avoid her. She was too strong, too fast, too...other...for their world. Even when she did try to communicate, it had taken her until she was six-and-a-half to differentiate between English and her other language, as they called it. After a while she just stopped trying.

Besides, it's hard to make real friends when you live under a false identity, when you can't bring them back to yours because you live underground.

Erika was a loner. That was just the way it was, and she was okay with that. The way it must always be. It didn't matter how much her family tried to convince her she needed to integrate with regular humans, immerse herself into their regular lives, because it would make her future so much easier.

Future! What a joke! If she didn't become a hunter the only 'future' she would ever have would be one pretending to be someone else.

You didn't get out of hunting.

You didn't get your children out of hunting.

Especially if your spawn, should you be stupid enough to procreate, were anything like the youngest Winchester.

But at least this way she was contented.

Erika's solitary life suited her just fine.

Or at least, it used to.

Things were changing.

Laurel Tanner had to get out. She couldn't stand to stay in that damp-smelling church listening to some guy her parents had never really liked read a stranger's words about what good people they had been, how much her sister's friends would miss her, and how hard it would be for her Aunt Jennifer now that her husband and son were dead.

This guy didn't know shit.

She knew most of her family members were killed in the accident. She'd seen the bodies of her mother, her father, her sister, her uncle. She and her aunt had cried over their corpses. She knew they were gone, and they were never coming back.

But her cousin Ky was alive.

There had been no body in the wreckage of her house, no trace of Ky at all. No reason to suspect him dead.

She knew something had taken him, and she was pretty sure it was coming for her next.

The cops thought she was crazy. Jennifer thought she was hysterical (not because she didn't believe in the supernatural, but because her religion made no reference to similar events). But it was the honest truth.

And no-one would listen. No-one was going to help her find the answers.

Everyone has their breaking point.

She stood up and walked out of the room mid-service. She broke into a run through the churchyard.

She didn't look back. She didn't look ahead. She just ran.

Until she slammed into the teenage girl with the short black hair and the obsolete camera (who she could tell wasn't there to mourn anybody) and knocked them both over.

She scrambled back to her feet but didn't offer the other girl a hand. Not that she needed to. The girl had the expression of someone who'd just have ignored it anyway.

They stood in stony silence. No way was Laurel apologising to some random who'd just appeared at her family's funeral, and the gatecrasher herself made no move to say anything.

"Who the hell are you?" she said finally.

"I could ask you the same question." There was a hint of a smile at the girl's lips, but no real mirth in her moss-green eyes.

"I mean it! What's your name and what are you doing here?"

"You tell me yours and I'll tell you mine."

"Laurel Tanner. I'm here because most of my family died." She wasn't going to cry in front of some bitch who'd just decided to show up on the second-worst day of her life.

"I'm sorry for your loss. I'm...Carrie, and my activities are classified."

Laurel stared incredulously. Is she for real? "Classified. What are you, some kinda government agent?"

"Something like that." Carrie shrugged and went back to her photography.

"You're a terrible liar." Laurel said. "I mean, you could have just said you were a photography student and I would have believed you. What the hell are you doing here?"

"Research." Carrie barely even looked at her.

"Your name's not really Carrie, is it?"

Carrie visibly hesitated. "Erika," she said finally. "Swear to God."

"Erica," Laurel repeated.

Erica rolled her eyes. "Erika. With a K. Y'know, like 'Daughter of Man' Erika?" And then, as Laurel watched in shock, Erika-With-A-K did the impossible.

She vanished into thin air.

Laurel had work to do.

A few years after Carver Edlund, famed 'scribe' of the Winchester Gospels, stopped writing, a woman claiming to be a prophet came out of the woodwork claiming the Supernatural novels to be prophecy. At first she was dismissed as a fanatic, but background research showed that many events of the books had occurred only days later in real life. The world was split into two camps; believers and non-believers both fought to be heard. Then the same woman released another statement referring to a bond being cemented between an angel and a human, and the subsequent birth of a nephilim child referred to variously as Erika, Destiel, and Daughter of Man. Although her parents had never been named, the titles used meant they were commonly believed to be Dean and Castiel of the so-called Winchester Gospels.

Laurel herself had always been a non-believer, unlike her aunt, but her encounter with Erika had sparked something in her. As soon as she got home she found herself checking up the details. Not about the events of the gospels, but about the nephilim prophecy.

There was no record of an Erika Winchester having existed anywhere...except in one place. Someone had found a copy of the educational records for a girl named Rikki Lawrence and posted them in an online forum.

Rikki had been born around the time the prophecy indicated that Erika had been, and the two had undeniably similar first names.

Sam and Dean Winchester had allegedly been born in Lawrence, Kansas.

All very circumstantial, except there were pictures enclosed. Pictures of a girl with jet-black hair, green eyes and the same pointed features of the girl Laurel had seen in the graveyard. The girl who'd disappeared before her eyes.

If that wasn't supernatural, Laurel didn't know what was.

And if it was real, she had concrete proof that demons were real as well. Concrete proof that something had taken Ky. Concrete proof that she wasn't crazy.

"No you don't."

Laurel turned around so fast she was dizzy. "Are you reading my mind or something? And how did you get in here?"

"I'm half-angel. I know a few tricks." Erika smirked. "But if you take this to the cops they'll write you off as some religious fanatic or a straight-up nutjob."

"And you know this how?"

"'Excuse me, officer?'" the intruder said in a ridiculous imitation of Laurel's voice, "'My cousin was spirited away by some kinda demon and I know all this because a legendary, possibly-fictitious nephil who only very narrowly avoided inheriting double-Y chromosomes showed up at his shared funeral and tipped me off.' Yeah, that sounds believable, Laurel."

"So there's nothing I can do for Ky?" Laurel asked.

"There might be," Erika said slowly, "but I don't think you'll like it."

"Why not?" But it was too late. Erika was gone again.

Laurel put her head in her hands. "God, I wish she'd stop doing that."

Anything that doesn't make sense will be explained later, either in this book or later in the series.