Noah slowed his car with a gentle foot on the brake pedal. He was a careful driver and the fog setting in around the old road made him reluctant to push past thirty, regardless of the posted sign. Annie was going to kill him. She'd asked him for just one thing, to not be late. In his head he had this mental image of the blonde frustratedly biting her lip and scrunching her nose as she turned her face away from him. She always did that when she was trying not to cry.

His headlights couldn't seem to light more than twenty feet ahead of his car, at the absolute max. Noah slowed down further. His GPS showed that the road had sharp turns, and he didn't want any to catch him by surprise. The nineteen-year-old glanced down to his phone in the passenger's seat to see the map and how close he was to the next turn. Still a quarter mile away. No reason to speed up, but also no reason to slow down any further.

Noah rubbed his hand across an itch on his jaw, blinking tiredly at the road. The fog swirled, more like smoke than thick fog, making his headlights appear to flicker in brightness. No way they were really that bright, right? Maybe he'd put them on high by mistake. The man looked down to his controls for a second and confirmed that his headlights were on their dimmest setting. When he looked back up, a silver rail was flying at his car.

In his panic, he forgot how to breathe or to scream, just slammed his foot down on the brake and jerked his wheel hard to the side. His car skidded and the tires slid enough to make his stomach lurch. The rail guiding drivers along the turn of the road was only inches from the side of his car when he came to a full stop.

Noah sat there for a few seconds, panting and dropping his head down in overwhelming relief. That quarter mile passed faster than he'd imagined – maybe he was too tired to be driving. Maybe Annie would let him crash with her after the celebrations. If she wasn't too pissed at him for being late.

Since he had stopped anyway, and there were no noises or lights from cars coming in either direction, Noah paused to pick up his phone and check the map again, only to pause. The screen still said he was .3 miles away from the turn, but right in front of him he was clearly at the winding section ahead of his blue arrow. He tapped the screen and nothing changed. It had frozen. Shit. Riverdale was supposed to be a shortcut, but it wasn't saving him any time if he didn't have the instructions. He'd never come to Annie's from the east before.

As he sat in the still car, a chill settled over him. His heating system was still sending warm air streaming from the slotted vents, but the hair on his neck and arms began to stand up. Noah had the feeling he was being watched. He looked up, checking in front of him, off to both sides, and in all three of his mirrors. No one. He looked out his door's window to peer at the forests, wondering if he was sensing a deer about to sprint into the road. At least he was already stopped. No matter how hard he squinted, there was nothing.

He cursed to himself again. It was his own damn fault. He should never have agreed to run third shift the night before he had an exam to cram for and his girlfriend's birthday party. Now he was lost with no service in bad driving conditions, so tired his mind was playing tricks on him. Noah groaned and tossed the phone down onto the seat again, this time with the frozen screen facing down. He looked back at the road and let his foot ease up from the brake. He could do this. No problem. Annie lived within a mile of the toll road. If he just followed Riverdale further north, he'd get to that road. Even if he missed Annie's on the first pass, he knew how to get there from the gas station on E-470.

A tiny bit of movement caught the corner of his eye – something moving close behind the car, reflected in his rearview. Noah slammed his foot back down. The car, which had only just begun to coast a little, halted immediately and rocked on the chassis. He turned around, stretching his right arm over the back of the passenger seat to widen his view. Nothing out the rear window, which was weird, because he could have sworn he'd seen a person…

The tiredness was doing funny things to his brain. He wanted to laugh it off, and almost did – except for the uneasy feeling of being seen. Deer or no deer, Noah felt eyes on him, and some dinging bell in his brain was urging him to get away. Too much time wasted scrolling Reddit threads meant he knew that instincts weren't always bullshit, and alone on a dark road where he could barely see, Noah was inclined to risk being a fool if it just meant getting out. No one was ahead of the car, so he put his foot on the gas and nudged the vehicle around the rest of the sharp bend.

As he made his way further north, the fog began to let up within a mile. Noah relaxed his grip on the wheel. He hadn't realized how tightly he was clutching it until the blood returning to his fingers made them ache. He let the speedometer get to forty and evened out, breathing out steadily and staring ahead, keeping his eyes peeled for the sign for the toll road.

He never reached it.


Aspen was never as at home as she was behind the wheel of her '78 Fiat 124 Sport Spider. The loud purr of its engine was never too loud. The sleek look made her feel professional with flair. The trunk? Outfitted with an arsenal, ready to be donned in self-defense at any moment. In her Spider, she was home – or as close as she had had to a home for as long as she could remember in her sense memory. The idea of a house or apartment in one geographic location felt to the huntress like vulnerability and boredom.

Thornton, Colorado. She liked the midwest. It wasn't too icy, but she also wasn't going to keel over of heat stroke if the air conditioning went out. The only thing to knock about the midwest, in her opinion, was that she couldn't as easily find a place to go for a swim. Luckily for her, Thornton was just north of Denver and if she left the municipality's border, there was a collection of scattered lakes and ponds running southeast of the big national park.

Not that she'd come for the tourism, though. Ha, a hunter, doing tourism. Every time she tried, she wound up smack in the middle of another hunt, so at some point she'd just given up. Now Aspen cruised up Grant Street, the wide road parallel to the interstate, as she checked out what Thornton had to offer by way of cheap food and a no-tell motel. Kids were walking home from school and the leaves were only just beginning to turn to crisp, warm tones, like ripe apples. She stopped for a red light and peeked down at her phone and the map on her screen. For a couple miles now it had just been showing her surroundings. As far as Google was concerned, the driver had reached her destination.

The crossing guard went back to his original side of the street once the children had stepped up onto the curb. Waiting for the light to turn, Aspen watched the reflective logo on a jartop backpack slowly shrink with distance and tried to guess what was inside. Homework sheets with crumpled edges? A lunchbox with the crumbs of a homemade sandwich? She smiled wistfully. The woman didn't want kids – under no circumstances could she risk starting more bloodline drama – but she adored the reminders of their apple pie lives and banal schooldays. It was all so precious to her ever since it had come so close to ending.

A Nissan behind her honked. The light had turned green and the pickup in the lead was well ahead of her, already across the intersection. Aspen let her car rev and pushed the Spider through, carrying on her way. Two cars behind her – past the Nissan and sticking close behind the Mazda flanking it – a black sedan cruised with a quiet engine.

The school came into view on her right side moments later. Past it, there was a park, and then a daycare. On the other side was a bougie supermarket and a retro diner with neon signs flashing about their milkshakes. That was sure to draw in the youths. It's gonna draw in the hunters, too, Aspen thought, licking her lips and pulling into the parking lot.

The diner took its retro look seriously. A jukebox that had seen better days was still functioning in the corner by the bathrooms, and all the tables had bright red vinyl tops finished with thick edges of riveted chrome. It was cleaner than a lot of places that Sam and Dean settled for, which Aspen found was one of the things she appreciated most about working on her own. She wasn't constantly being outvoted to eat and sleep in places she thought should require haz-mat suits or vaccine boosters. A peppy waitress with long blonde pigtails just starting her shift greeted Aspen happily and showed her to a small booth where she could eat alone, then gave her a menu, told her how good the chili dogs were, and left her to it.

The woman hummed while she looked it over. The diner had a level of fun charm to it, but the menu looked bland and common. But she'd come for a milkshake, damn it, and she wasn't leaving without that ice cream, so she ordered the biggest size of mint chip shake that they had and got some chicken tenders to go with it to make some semblance of a meal. The waitress took the menu away and Aspen replaced it in front of her with her phone.

She opened up her emails and clicked on the read one Garth had sent her four days ago. It had taken her a couple days to finish up her hunt in Utah, and then since she'd already been right in the area, she said she'd check it out. The link in the subject line was to an urban legend website hyping up the hauntedness of Thornton's Riverdale Road, a windy, out-of-the-way stretch that stuck close to the eastern edge of the city limits. Since much of it ran past fields, it was touted as a Halloween gimmick for corn mazes and haunted orchard apple picking. She wouldn't have put any stock in the email to begin with if it weren't for the unusual amount of police reports related to the road. Those reports were only those that had become available through the Freedom of Information Act and public record from years past. Garth's strengths laid in research, and his excitement to find new, curious things could be annoying, but it had results.

Aspen counted nine dead people along the road since the turn of the century, and more before that. It was obviously hard to know what had caused them to die. One man in jogging clothes had been viciously torn up with classic human-versus-automobile injuries, suggesting a fatal hit-and-run, but some of the bodies had been found without such clear evidence of what had happened. Four of the nine had been dangerous car crashes where the motorists were found in their cars, either crashed through rails or partially flipped. From the looks of it, Garth had found evidence that that had happened a lot more than just a few times, but only those four whose names he'd found were the ones unlucky enough to die.

First step, she decided, was to see exactly how lethal Riverdale Road was. Something Aspen had learned over the years was that urban legends often had some truth to them, if for no other reason than because belief held power. But there was also no accounting for human idiocy, either. Several times she had started a hunt and found that she was on the trail of mere negligence or a human serial killer. While she was happy to put a stop to those if she was already there, her skillset was very niche, and an anonymous tip to an interested detective could go a long way in her place.

The black sedan opened up its driver's side door. Aspen looked up curiously as the movement caught her eye. A middle-aged man with short and thinning hair stepped out, heavily tinted sunglasses perched on his receding hairline. He was wearing a whole suit that would've made even Agent K stare. She nailed him for a fed immediately. There were two people who dressed like that: rich businessmen and feds. His body language, striving to be casual but belied by the subtle way he cased the diner as he entered, checkmarked the box next to the fed option.

"Shit," Aspen grumbled, turning her head back to her phone to not attract attention. The Leviathans hadn't taken her face for a homicidal joyride, but she wasn't naïve enough to think she'd fallen entirely off law enforcement radar, either. A local guy she could handle, and Jody could help her get her foot in the door with most any sheriff's department, but a fed, especially an older one who knew how to be covert, was out of her league.

Aspen kept her eyes glued onto her phone screen, forcing her thumbs to move and act natural as she continued halfheartedly researching Riverdale Road. Instead of relying on the links Garth sent to guide her to Thornton, she Googled the city and road and found a host of results. At least a whole page was devoted to ghostbusting and spook blogs posting the freakiest facts and most terrifying tidbits about the road, which, Aspen now knew, was a big local legend. Two blogs on the first page called it the most haunted road in the country, and three referenced supposed gates to hell – or Devil's Gates, as people in the correct paygrade knew to call them.

The big claims made her wonder how she'd never come to this place before. The odds of it being a Devil's Gate – especially with not one member of Team Free Will knowing about it – felt slim, after all the work they'd put into unraveling plots by demons and angels alike. Then again, the gate in Jasper was still closed, and Dad had known about it… But any assertions of demonic activity warranted a little look-see while she was in the area, just to be safe.

The fed was greeted by the same bouncy waitress with the popping aqua eyelids. He was perfectly polite to her, at least as far as Aspen could overhear of their tones. She kept her eyes on her phone, pretending to be the typical digital addict, as the waitress led him past to sit at a booth directly down the row. She could hear his voice but not his words, but they must've been something against the seat, because she apologized, looked around, and led him to a table by one of the massive windows. He sat down with a menu, not paying Aspen so much as a glance.

Aspen let out a tiny breath as the fed browsed his menu. She was probably overreacting, but there were some things she just didn't want to repeat. Cas couldn't bail her out all the time anymore, and she didn't want to scar some poor shmuck for life by disappearing on him, or getting him fired by doing so right under his nose. Just because she generally hated being around law enforcement didn't mean she didn't respect what most of them were trying to do.

The blogs touted the road as a who's-who of the supernatural world. Apparently the road had seen a pyromanic family annihilator, an apparition of an aspiring NASCAR driver, witches, cults, women in white, black dogs and Native American curses, lingering child spirits, the ghosts of lynched slaves, and more. Multiple sites linked it all back to the family annihilator. One asserted that he built a gateway to Hell, then burned his family's house down with his wife and kids inside as a sacrifice. Another said that he was horrifically unstable and the violence of the act anchored that stretch of road to the underworld, thus creating the gateway. Based on their misunderstandings of how Devil's Gates worked, she highly doubted there was one just a short drive to the east.

Her research came to a close as the waitress came back with an alarming amount of pep in her step for someone carrying a tray with a hot plate. "Here you go, honey!" She said cheerfully. The hunter raised an eyebrow but withheld the comment that she was older than her and instead thanked her for the service, reaching immediately for the milkshake.

The fries were mediocre, but the chicken was crispy, so it made for a decent meal. And the shake alone was worth pulling in for; it was creamy and the mint taste was nice and sharp. She finished pretty quickly and paid in cash, leaving the waitress a nice tip just as she brought what looked like a chocolate milkshake to the fed.


Aspen made her way to Riverdale Road first. If nothing was going on, she wasn't going to waste the night staying at a hotel in such a large city when she could get further from Denver and save a few bucks. The thoroughfare was practically empty as though most of the locals were too afraid to use it, which made it very convenient for the hunter to do her job.

She took her Spider up and down the ten-mile stretch a couple of times, once with the radio on to hear if it started glitching and once with the volume off and windows down to see if she felt anything that hinted at the supernatural. All she found on the road were sharp turns, a few cliff faces that would be nasty to get run into, and some dips and short dives that were possibly survivable, but also quite dangerous, especially if a driver were shoved off head-on. Aspen spent more hours in her car than she probably did sleeping, so it said something that even she wasn't willing to go the full speed limit on the windiest stretch up by what a sign called a dairy farm.

On her last pass southbound, Aspen nearly found out how unpleasant the cliffs were for herself. A car going at least the speed limit blew past her, veering into her lane to manage their turn without clipping the guard rail. It forced her onto a rocky shoulder and she felt a wheel lose traction. She laid forward on her horn while cussing and made her car stop entirely before she edged away from the narrow rumble strip and back into her tight lane.

"Christ," she spat, heart pounding. "No wonder people keep dying here. It's a shitty road with shitty drivers!" She raised her voice as if the person who nearly hit her could still hear, and made a note to herself to check and see when most of the fatalities had occurred. She would expect during rainy or icy weather.

Yet it was on this pass back down the road that she noticed the change in color of the guard rail and the bent frame where it had been hurriedly patched. Rough pieces were still pointing outward away from the road. Aspen looked in all of her mirrors but decided she didn't have the space to safely park out of the way from other reckless cars, so she just slowed significantly to take a better look. Flecks of what was either a dark blue or black were melted onto the guard rail just outside of the patch. Complemented by the limp string of yellow police tape that was fluttering near the asphalt, dislodged on one side, Aspen concluded someone else had recently taken a spill, too. That might be worth poking around about.

All seemed well, but there were so many rumors of demonic signs on nearby land that Aspen knew Garth would complain at her unless she checked it out. The time on her phone said she still had a couple hours of daylight left, so she cruised down south towards the shopping center she had seen last time she'd turned. She found a place to park where she'd blend in with other cars but not stand out for staying stationary for too long. Then she switched out of her comfortable, slip-on Sketchers and into a pair of hiking boots she kept in her backseat, grabbed a forged carrying license from her hidden compartment under her bucket seat, and went around to the back.

Sam and Dean didn't care that much for following the laws, but Aspen had always been more cautious. It seemed to her that ever since Cas joined the team full-time, they'd been even more reckless about getting caught up with the law. Aspen wasn't afraid of being caught with an illegal sawed-off, exactly, but it would cause problems she knew would be a pain to get out of, and since she hadn't felt anything particularly threatening on her cruise, she decided not to risk it in broad daylight. Besides, most true haunting activity was most active at night, for whatever reason, so she settled for packing a pistol concealed at her hip with some small caliber salt rounds in case of emergency, then quickly dropped her faux trunk floor back down to conceal her arsenal.

Halfway across the parking lot, the fed from the diner watched through a pair of binoculars as the woman packed out of her classic sports car. He hummed curiously as he saw the faux trunk floor, but had a good guess as to what might be underneath it. Rather than going to ask right away, he stayed put, sipping the remainder of his chocolate milkshake and seeing where she went.

After Aspen had her smallest backpack loaded with a couple of legal knives, a flare, a lighter, water, her MacGuyver'd EMF reader and a can of spray paint and salt each, she zipped it up, closed and locked her car, and turned to head in the opposite direction of the mall for a bit of a hike, only pausing for a moment to wait for traffic to pass.


In another life, Aspen was a car camper kind of girl. She'd thought it through, and she fantasized about it while she walked up close to the cliff face on the road. It was rough and uneven on the edges, so she was extra glad for the thick bottoms of her boots. She would keep her Spider in South Dakota while she was aimlessly traveling, and she'd use something with a more open-bodied frame. She'd take out one of the back seats to put in a small mattress, just big enough for her and a dog at her feet. She was leaning towards a Husky, but she'd take an Aussie, too. As long as it were something fast, smart, and cute.

She hummed contently while she walked, keeping her ears and eyes peeled for any sign of danger but not seeing or feeling any. At least past the golf course, the road seemed normal. Periodically she checked her phone, watching as she came closer and closer to the marker where the historic estate had once stood. About half a mile up Riverdale, Aspen came to a stop nearly on top of the marker, facing a huge iron gate. The black finish had been chipping and wearing away for years, so now it was flaky, rough, and rusted under her touch. The gates were chained shut with a padlock she had no hope of sawing through, and even if she'd really wanted to, the little bit of give that the gates had within the looped chain made them screech like they were pigs being luau roasted.

"Hm."

She wanted to rethink this, but she couldn't risk leaving a Devil's Gate just sitting around. And, according to blogs, this was the property where adventurers found the signs of devil worship. Aspen rolled her eyes thinking about it. Slaughtered animals and graffiti in their blood. Someone had been watching too many horror movies. If it weren't for her responsibility to do her part and keep Hell closed, she'd have called it Internet fancy and let it be.

Who, exactly, the property now belonged to was anyone's guess. Aspen figured it was probably in the hands of a bank, if not the municipality itself. It had been sitting empty for almost fifty years since the fire destroyed the home nearly beyond repair. Even if someone had the money and the willingness to raze it down and rebuild it strong again, the horrendousness of the former owner's crime against his family ensured that it stayed empty, letting the structures rot and the land become overgrown.

She shook her head, looked both ways to make sure no one was watching her potentially trespass, and then started working her way back up the road, following along with the gates. If the gates were in such poor condition, she couldn't imagine that there wasn't a weak part of the tall fence. The hunter kept attuned to her senses as she waded into taller grass, keeping an ear out for the sounds of any critters while she marched along the side of the grass. A couple hundred feet off from the road, she started to feel it: the chill. Not as though her life were in danger, exactly, but as if there were eyes watching her from behind.

Aspen looked over her shoulder repeatedly as she went, and even took out her old phone's camera to look through its lens, but there weren't any spirits following her as she went. The fence turned, finally, making a sharp angle and following the property line. As the land delved further from the thoroughfare, the trees, already shedding for the winter, became denser and almost regular, planted in neatly gridded rows like they used to be part of an orchard. Whatever kind of trees they were, the trunks were thick and gnarled, and the branches were long and twisted. The branches had grown wild in the time since the area had been groomed, and now their trunks slumped and listed sideways while arms and leaves extended out of their grids to create beautifully irregular designs.

The more trees she came near, the more Aspen felt watched, but at no point did she feel as though she wasn't safe. Just unsettled. She kept stopping, waiting to hear breathing or footsteps, if not to catch someone in the act. But that opportunity didn't come, and instead she just resigned herself to continue with the stare between her shoulder blades and at the bottom of her neck, knowing there was some kernel of truth to the urban legend after all.

The hunter couldn't see Riverdale Road for the orchard trees in the way when she found a connecting bit of the fence whose hinges had corroded almost entirely at the bottom. That was enough for her. She turned to put her back to it, lifted her leg, and gave it a few hard kicks backwards with her boot. The fence creaked and drawled loudly, the remaining bolt rattling until a very loud snapping sound emanated from by her foot.

She wiggled the top with her hands, but couldn't get either of those bolts weak enough to pull on. Aspen ducked down to make the most out of the bit that she had kicked free and squeezed herself in, glad she was up to date on her tetanus shots. Inside the gate, the grass was even higher along the fence like it had been using the iron to help itself stretch to the sun. A very ramshackle building was visible at the end of a long-forgotten driveway that used to carve a path all the way back to the road, but now it was just clumps of weeds and grass squished in between stones and rocks. Still, some stones and rocks meant less dirt and soil, so she walked on that old driveway down towards what she could only assume used to be a barn.

On her right, as she moved, Aspen passed torched earch and thin layers of rubble that looked like the main estate, which had been burnt mostly in '75 but had the job finished for it sometime in the decades that followed. At the end of the gravel half-path, she came to what she could only assume was once a barn, now transformed into something barely recognizable. Only two full walls were still standing up, rafters were hanging down, and huge parts of the ceiling had caved in. There was a horrible smell coming from inside, and the hunter lifted a hand to her nose, already having a good guess at what it was. Not a lot smelled like blood.

She stepped over cinderblocks older than her own self to technically be "inside" the structure that probably no longer counted as a whole building. The inside was overrun, too; farming and landscaping equipment, such as a tiny green lawnmower, had gone from probably a bright plasticy color to the dark, slick olive shade of mold and the once red handle was now a faded pink. A faint buzzing told Aspen that there was a colony of bees settled in somewhere, or maybe wasps, and as she looked up to see pieces of the sky through the delapidated roof, she saw jagged pieces of wood and splintered bits of rafters pointing down. Leaving this place standing was a public safety hazard.

If there were going to be a Devil's Gate, then this would be where it was. Aspen turned, looking for any sort of entry point. A still lake was behind the property and then it gave way to a field with no structures. Whether whatshisface had found one or built one, this was the only option. She stepped carefully so she didn't stumble among the mulch of rotted fallen wood and shingle, checking out the two remaining corners. That was where she found the source of the stench: pieces of animal carcass were swarming with maggots and blowflies, blood streaked through a few feathers that hadn't been pulled and dying the already warped wood of a trunk to a dark, ugly brown. Dried blood was smeared on the flimsy wall just behind the trunk, forming a simplistic skull drawn inside a wonky pentagram.

It could have been close to an Enochian sigil if she turned her head to the side and squinted until her vision blurred, and also if she imagined that there were characters between the points of the star. But that wasn't the case, and this was clearly not drawn by anyone who knew what they were doing. Further, the cuts on what looked like the parts of a chicken were messy, done by an amateur, and the blood had gone on lumpy. If she had to hazard a guess, Aspen would've said the chicken had been dead when some stupid, overdramatic kids found it, decided to hack it up, and tried to use the congealing blood to make it look like devil worship, feeding into local legends.

She rolled her eyes so hard she practically saw her own brain, walked away from the carcass, and reluctantly breathed in. The rotting meat was atrocious, but she also couldn't smell any ozone or sulfur. Demons were a no-go, and there was definitely nowhere for a Devil's Gate to be hiding in this safety inspector's bad dream.

"So glad I've come to check this out," she muttered, leaving the old barn. For posterity's sake, she gave it a walk-around from the outside and found some more stereotypical, but utterly meaningless, graffiti, these made in what looked like spray paint instead of blood, and the remains of a few melted wax candles and crunched-up beer cans.

The hunter squirmed out through the same gap in the broken gate and stuck close to it, looking over her shoulder as she left the trees. The sparser they became, the less the hair on the back of her neck prickled. That would require some looking into. She slid her backpack off and hoisted one strap over her shoulder to reach in with the opposite arm and pulled out her old Walkman-turned-EMF meter. She turned it on and it almost immediately started wavering in tone.

It was weak, but present, and a quick glance overhead showed no power lines. She turned back around and walked a few yards closer to where the orchard rows started. The EMF fluctuated, and remained in the low levels, but still upticked. There was definitely something hanging around. She left the EMF reader on in case it could alert her of anything else on her hike, but dropped it back in her backpack and took out her phone instead to make a note about the EMF in the abandoned orchard.

The entire search had taken barely ten minutes, so, seeing that the sun was only just beginning to tilt towards the horizon, Aspen resumed the trek up north. Her EMF meter stayed silent in her bag for the walk once she had passed the trees. About four miles up the road, Aspen was starting to think it would be time to turn back soon before it got too dark, but checking her phone showed she was less than a mile away from a cemetery. Go figure. She looked over at the way she'd come and saw the sky was darkening. Walking along this road at night was hazardous simply because of how easy it would be for a car to hit her; there was nowhere to quickly get out of the way, and too many sharp turns to be sure the driver would see her. Adding possible supernatural activity to that made for a particular brand of stupidity that Aspen didn't like endorsing.

Grumbling about being so close, she picked up the pace and hustled north to the cemetery. Her EMF started making a very low hum in her pack before she had even jumped over the guard rail to carefully slide partway down the trench and jump up onto the other side. Once she was actually on the plot of land and approaching the low metal fence that marked the cemetery plot, it was humming at her almost as loudly as it had in the orchard. Aspen stopped and did another scan for power lines, hesitating at the boundary line. Ghosts were 100% capable of committing murder while the sun was up, but for some reason no one had been able to explain to her, they seemed more restless and powerful at night. The orchard had felt eerie, but not threatening. Something about the cemetery made her stop.

Her EMF whined away and the hunter nodded to herself. Definite ghost activity here, too, but whatever it was made her flight instincts tease up at the ready. Hunting alone, those were instincts to listen to. She could come back with a sawed-off and face the risk of being picked up for it. The odds were unlikely, since no one lived close enough to hear the shots and she hadn't seen a single police cruiser in the nearing two hours she'd been on the thoroughfare.

That established, she balked at the fence and returned to the road, checking both ways as far as she could before hopping across the trench, grabbing onto the guard rail and hoisting herself over it and back onto the asphalt. The EMF was still whining, but more quietly, and Aspen noted the cemetery on her phone while hastily making a retreat back to where she had left her car. Now she knew what she was dealing with: ghostly activity, but no demons. It would be relatively safe so long as no one tried to Annabelle her.

The sun went down faster than Aspen had anticipated, leaving her legging it near twilight along one of the straighter stretches of the road. As night fell, the road conditions became even more hazardous. The lane markers weren't done in reflective paint, and the finish on the rails was dull enough that she doubted headlights on the material would catch the eye. She caught side of the decrepit half-barn, on her left now, and slowed into a more comfortable speedwalk. Less than a mile left; she'd be back at her car in fifteen minutes or less.

But the atmosphere on Riverdale Road was changing, and changing quickly. Without her blood rushing in her ears from the jog, the woman felt the difference in the air. It was the kind of sensation she could never quite explain, but had developed a knack for picking out early on in hunting. The closest thing she could liken it to was an almost metaphysical version of feeling the humidity before rainfall.

She wasn't scared. It was hard to scare Aspen – she was hardly recognizable as the once timid girl Dean had told about monsters. But she knew she was at a tactical disadvantage with so many potential threats – bad drivers, and at least two different sources of ghostly activity – and would be best served by leaving and making full use of an upper hand.

She slowed just slightly as she approached a bend in the road. She couldn't see around it and had no way of knowing if a car would be heading straight for her, although she didn't hear an engine. That was when she heard the EMF meter spiking in her pack again, making a annoying rattling sound as it vibrated against her can of spray paint. Then, underneath the whirring, she heard the thudding of footsteps.

As the footsteps drew nearer, coming from ahead of the bend she couldn't see, the EMF meter whined louder. Aspen tilted her head and drew her gun from her hip, taking the safety off and holding it down tightly and carefully. Rock salt, just in case – but she also didn't want to scare the shit out of a human. The footsteps and the whine kept getting louder until it felt like they were practically on top of her – and then Aspen stopped in her tracks as a puff of dust shot up from the asphalt coming around the bend, and another, and another.

It wasn't heading for her, and she couldn't see a figure, anyway. But she could see where its feet were landing, or rather where its impressions of feet were landing, thudding away as it passed her entirely. Aspen turned and watched, curious about the phenomena, gun up but not directly aimed. She kept her eyes down on the ground and, sure enough, watched tiny plumes get kicked up. The pace of the footsteps changed, turning from a jog into a hurried little run, stopping for just a second, and then picking up into a dead sprint, racing north up towards the cemetery. Aspen was just about to warily put down her gun when she heard a horrible crunching sound from that direction as the footsteps stopped. The EMF dropped off, too.

Huh. An invisible jogger who met an untimely accident, if that was anything to go by. This was the spirit that the most people seemed to have reported seeing or hearing. After seeing it for herself, Aspen felt like something was off about the narrative of an accident, though. He'd started running, stopped as if to look, and then taken off like his life depended on it. Maybe he'd known it had. That was a bit weird for a hit-and-run, unless it wasn't as simple as it had seemed…

That was definitely her cue to leave. A ghost who couldn't move on was sad and unsettling, but generally harmless when they didn't even manifest enough to acknowledge her presence. A ghost who may have been murdered, though, was much more likely to notice her and drag itself out of its cyclical delusion in order to take it out on a bystander. Aspen took a cue from the jogger's book and picked up her pace, tucking her gun and booking it the last half mile off of Riverdale. Her EMF stayed quiet the rest of the way, although she'd felt that gooseflesh feeling again when passing by the orchard.

Aspen cut through the back yard of a couple residences to make more of a beeline for the shopping center where she'd left her Spider and found it untouched exactly where she left it, which made her smile. She never expected it to be broken into, but she loved seeing it safe and sound all the same. She shouldered off her bag, turned off her EMF reader, and put it all in the trunk. For now, she opted to leave her gun at her waist. She did have a permit for it, after all. Thanks to Charlie, she had a permit for just about every state.

The sun was fully setting, so she patted herself on the back for her good timing and searched for a cheap motel on her phone. Before setting off to the nearest one, she sent Garth a message to let him know there was definitely some supernatural funk going on in Thornton.


It was always great when she lucked out and randomly picked a motel that had decent water pressure. That was one of the things she missed most about living out of the bunker. Her shower washed away the dust and sweat from her hike and last-minute run while she thought through her discoveries. Aspen knew of three separate supernatural problems. The vital next step was research – on the history of the land and who died there.

She sent a message to Garth asking him to scan everything he had and possibly save her a little bit of time, which she was sure the early bird would get around to before she'd so much as gotten her continental muffin. Garth didn't act like he missed hunting, but Aspen wondered sometimes if he felt bad for leaving the life as much as he had and that was why he was so happy to help out with researching and case finding.

After sending a proof of life text to Sam, Aspen put a salt line in front of her door and the windows in the room, then drew the curtains and turned off the lights to flop to sleep. The depths welcomed her quickly and when she awoke, she felt groggy but rested. As a reward for her many sacrifices over the years, she let herself lay in bed for half an hour until she felt truly awake, then began the process of the day.

Garth had, indeed, sent over everything that he had in much greater detail, including the phone number to a very friendly archivist who was more than happy to help petition the city to shut down Riverdale until it could be made safer. That was such a wholesome ambition that she almost felt guilty by being prepared to exploit it by lying for information, but such was the life of a hunter. Moral ambiguity was practically her bedmate. Sam had given a thumbs-up for being okay, which was about what she expected. Both of them were still a little salty.

"Really," she complained as the file loaded. It was at thirty some pages and still going. It reached forty, and stopped at 43. It was an amalgamation of PDFs, some saved directly from the Internet and others, it looked like, had been sent from the Thornton police department when asked. There were also two pages at the very end that it looked like Garth had collected from the historian on local properties around the thoroughfare.

She saved the whole file to her phone as she pulled on clean capris and a fresh shirt, checked that her keys, wallet, and room card were in her pockets, and headed out to the lobby. She wandered slowly while browsing through the pages to see how much of Garth's research was actually going to be useful. The answer, it seemed, was only some. There were plenty of jumping-off points, like the supposed sightings of an unmanned 70s Camaro, but extremely little information that could actually lead her to the physical tether keeping it there (if it were a fourth entity on that road).

She lowered her phone and stuck it in her pocket to roam the continental breakfast countertops and see what they had. Cereal sounded dull and she didn't trust it not to have gone stale, so she grabbed a muffin that had been wrapped pretty tightly, a bruised apple, and a cup of orange juice. The breakfast had been picked over already and only two other guests were in the dining area. One of them left before she had made it even halfway through the apple.

The hunter skimmed the pages, looking for words like "tree" and "orchard." Many blogs asserted that the orchard she'd found was haunted, but only a few speculated as to who was haunting it. The general consensus was that it was marked by the African-American slaves who'd been lynched by townsfolk up until the early twentieth century. Glumly, Aspen thought that sounded about right. The unnatural quiet, EMF, sense of being watched, and lack of feeling threatened was pretty common for places like mass graves. The ghosts weren't usually vengeful, just… trapped. As if all the ugliness that place saw had tainted it somehow, and now the spirits couldn't get free without extra help. The best way to get those ghosts to move on after hundreds of years would probably involve a medium or a priest.

She switched to her Internet browser to see if she couldn't find any local mediums who seemed like they might be the real deal. Going to get Missouri would be a long drive when she could just as easily find a legitimate medium or a priest willing to listen. Most of the clergy viewed ghosts and demons more metaphorically these days, at least insofar as they believed in their existence on earth, but with the uptick in supernatural activity over the last couple of decades, it was increasingly common to find priests who were willing to hear her out and perform a few rites, even if they weren't fully convinced of the purpose.

Aspen picked at her muffin now while moving back and forth between websites and blogs hosted by or promoting mediums in the Denver area, so far not finding anything that didn't stink of showmanship and scam. Footsteps trodded down the two steps down the shallow platform level of the dining room and went to the counter. Aspen glanced up just out of curiosity and felt her brain squeak to a halt. It was the fed from the diner.

Shit, her brain just said on a loop for a few seconds.

He looked at his cereal options. Aspen forced her eyes back to her phone before he had the chance to see her looking. If she kept her head down, maybe he'd leave her alone. Right? The diner was a coincidence. The same motel was… also a coincidence, possibly.

Nope. He was coming right to her table. Shit!

Aspen put her hand around her juice cup and looked casual. If her paranoia was right, then she could throw the juice at him and run.

"Hi," the fed said, putting on a polite smile. She saw through it, but he had the manners not to oversell it and didn't seem bothered that she didn't smile back. "Do you mind if I sit here?" He had a manila file underneath his arm, and an apple even more bruised than hers had been in the other hand.

Her red flag went to half-mast. A big part of her had hoped he'd just ask her for something normal, like directions, maybe, or help jumpstarting his car. Strangers don't go to other strangers and ask to sit at their tiny little tables when others are free.

"I don't recommend it," she said, being as mild-mannered as possible. "They're very small tables."

"They really are," he agreed, "But this is the one you're at. I'm going to sit," he added conversationally.

Her heart sank. The internal monologue of curses continued, and she pushed her phone into her pocket so that she could spring up and run as soon as she had a reason to do so that wouldn't leave her looking incredibly suspicious. Not that that was worth much now – he clearly knew who she was, or at least believed she had done something wrong already. Great, now she had to wonder if him being at the diner yesterday had been a coincidence, either.

He actually did sit, to her surprise, and put down his file on the table so he could use both hands to dry off his rinsed apple. She tried to remember if she'd seen another person with him at the diner. She didn't think so, but that would be the only explanation for why a fed about to apprehend her would make himself vulnerable by sitting down. Not only could she more easily get a jump on him, but she could more easily flee.

"What was the point of asking for permission if you were going to ignore the response?" She asked tetchily. She hated when cops did that. Every cop who'd ever arrested her used the tactic at some point. She didn't know if it was a way of trying to be polite or of just emphasizing how powerless she was supposed to feel, but it always pissed her off.

"Who comes up to strangers' tables and just grabs a seat without saying anything?" He asked her rhetorically, sounding bemused with the very notion of such behavior. "Please don't do that," the man added, looking pointedly to the hand curled around her juice cup. "This suit is dry-clean only."

She kept her face as blank as she could while giving him his credit for noticing the tension in her casually laid hand, and also for realizing what she had been considering doing. Aspen supposed if it were such a burden on him to get juice on his clothes, she could always just dump the juice on the carpet before swinging the cup itself at his head. It was too light to do any serious harm.

The number of times she had interacted with cops had gotten out of hand in the past, not counting friendly, cooperative encounters, like her visits with Jody and Donna. Aspen had learned something from each run-in and arrest. Henriksen had inadvertently taught her that telling someone about the supernatural world in a bid for lenience or cooperation was playing with fire. All they gained from him knowing the truth was his dismissal and later insistence that they were psychotic, which increased the intensity of his pursuit. The cops in Baltimore, on the other hand, had taught her that telling a story scrubbed of the supernatural could also be dangerous unless she knew exactly what was going on and could predict the outcome of those lies. Basically, she was damned if she did and damned if she didn't, so Aspen kept her mouth shut and cased the dining room and adjoined lobby, searching for the second and possibly third fed who would cut her off if she fled from this one. There was no one. Even the other guests eating breakfast had left, and she doubted the college girl reading a textbook behind the front desk was an undercover agent.

"There's no one with me," the fed announced after taking a bite out of his apple and studying her response. "Well – that's not true. My partner's in the car. But I told her to let me handle this."

She raised an eyebrow while she thought. Assuming she could take him at face value, she had no idea where his car was parked or if his partner would be poised to start a vehicular chase. There was no way in this crowded suburb for that to be anything but a terrible option. She could run and disappear through the properties of businesses and residences, but if they'd tailed her to the motel, they most definitely knew her car information, so she couldn't double back. Plus, this fed would still put out the BOLO on her car, and the odds of making it back to Lebanon with her recognizable, uncommon car, much less all the way to Sioux Falls to swap vehicles, were slim with feds after her. If it weren't for the contents of her trunk, she might be willing to reluctantly take the loss and avoid the up-to-date mugshots, but it would be a pain to replace some of her arsenal and her most valuable weapons, angel blades or those fashioned out of melted ones, weren't replaceable unless another uppity band of angels went rogue and needed killed.

Maybe Castiel would come if she called. He tended to come for her as soon as he could. There was a chance he'd be busy, though, and wouldn't be able to fly her out of Thornton before the police had new, more recent photos. And if she had to call Castiel for a rescue, Sam and Dean wouldn't let her hear the end of it. After all, they'd been opposed to her striking out on her own from the beginning.

Well, fuck me. She exhaled and raised her juice to drink some of it. If they towed her car, they might have a warrant to break into it. Cas could sneak her into an evidence locker and retrieve her stuff if that happened, and it would be much less of a kerfuffle than needing to be flown out of the city altogether. She'd have to risk sprinting for it and leaving her car behind.

"I'm curious," the man said, leaning forward with his elbows on the table. "What are you thinking right now? How to get away or how to take me out?" He actually did look like he was curious, and… fascinated? Oh, great. With her luck, this was one of those psychological specialists.

She took her time finishing her juice while she decided what to say. "I'm trying to decide which door your car's parked outside of." The front would be obvious. But that could be a bluff, and they were parked out the back. Or they could expect her to expect a bluff and be parked out front anyway. It was a coin flip. Then again, she could try to reach the emergency exit on the wrong side of the building from her assigned room. That might have better odds.

"Mm. I'd tell you, but I don't think you'd listen to me if I did," he offered, taking another bite of his apple.

Aspen nodded that he was right, she wouldn't. It had, by now, occurred to her that if he believed she were a dangerous criminal, it would've been a weird choice to approach her while civilians were finishing their breakfast just a few yards away. If she were violently reactive, she could've taken advantage of them. So he was after her, but not for the reasons Henriksen had been.

"What is it you think I did?" She asked, wanting to know how much manpower to expect, and if her current fraudulent credit card had been flagged.

"Oh, what didn't you do?" He asked, giving her a smile that looked enthusiastic and more genuine. "Been to Heaven, been to Hell, tag-teamed Horsemen with a crossroads demon." Aspen snapped her eyes to his face, but he wasn't watching her for a reaction. His eyes were bright as he listed some more exploits. "Fought with angels – who knew that was an option? Practically directed Hell Hazers 2. And the time travel! I can't believe there's time travel!"

How in the hell could he know those things? Aspen knew her eyes were huge and she'd lost this game of poker, but seriously, what? She barely even remembered the stupid horror movie. That had been years ago, she, Sam, and Dean had hunted ghosts on the production set. And – while she knew exactly what he was referring to with the Horsemen, she'd done that with Crowley, not a-

Oh. His information wasn't up to date. She tightened her lips into a scowl. There was only one source of information in the world that had all six of those things he'd listed in one place, much less linked to her, and it was conveniently published before Crowley had taken over the throne. Chuck's stupid books. The books that somehow still had a loyal fanbase, though luckily she rarely if ever encountered those fans and they never recognized her from the book illustrations, which weren't very accurate to begin with.

"What, Supernatural?" She laughed uncomfortably. That was fine. Anyone would be uncomfortable if they were accused of being a character in a book. "Look, you realize those are wholly fake, right?"

"Please don't," he said disappointedly – and then jarred her by using her real name. She was still picking her jaw up the floor when he continued, "I mean, the general public still thinks so, and that's good, that's what we want. But you and I both know better." He stopped and chuckled. "That was so rude of me, wasn't it? I didn't wait for you to tell me. Phil Coulson, agent of SHIELD."

He leaned back to get into his pocket and offered her a folded set of fed creds. Aspen eyed them suspiciously even as she reached for them, at this point so gobsmacked that she was going along with it because she had no idea where else to even begin. She unfolded the creds to show his picture to the side of his name. She'd never seen a SHIELD badge before. She'd never been high enough on the radar of anyone important enough for SHIELD to come after her… or at least, she hadn't thought so.

"Where did you get that name?" She demanded, looking at him and hoping she was as intimidating as she thought.

"Oh, you don't go by that anymore?" The answer dawned on him immediately when he looked at her face. "Of course not. No, that makes sense. Alright, what are you going by now? Is it Nova? Brooke? River? You sure do like your nature names. Am I way off? Should I keep guessing?"

Before, the huntress had felt nervous and frustrated by her hunt getting derailed. Now, for the first time in a long time, a human person was evoking genuine fear in her chest. Her legs felt itchy, wanting to run not because it was the best option but because she was afraid by how much he knew. Those were all fake identities she had used in the last several months. Clearly her fakes had been compromised.

"I'm Aspen," she said, giving him a hard glare.

"Aspen. See?" Coulson said approvingly at how her name was in line with his observation. He saw the look on her face and shook his head. "I'm getting this all wrong, aren't I? Damn. I didn't mean to start us off this hostile. You're not in trouble for anything. Not with SHIELD, anyway."

The weird thing was that she almost, almost, believed him. Although she definitely felt hostile, he didn't. He was acting more like they were comrades. The way he'd talked about the things she'd done didn't feel like he was trying to intimidate her by summarizing a dossier, but more like a friend excitedly hitting the hightlights reel.

"If I'm not in trouble then what's with the ambush?" She asked rebelliously.

"Ambush?" Coulson asked with an amused smile. "This looks like an ambush to you? This is breakfast."

The frightening thing about SHIELD was that so little was known about them. Nowadays, since the Battle of New York, it was common knowledge that SHIELD was working out of the human realm, but unlike hunters, they dealt with the extraterrestrial and more often, you suspected, with particularly dangerous people and technology. The government tended to believe that they needed to exclusively control anything more dangerous than a gun (unless it was profiting the military-industrial complex, that was). Regardless of what they dealt with, their reach was extensive and their resources inestimable. The world was accepting aliens, but not the supernatural, and hunters took that as the affirmation that they needed to stay the hell away from the shadowy, supposedly heroic division.

Every bit of her wanted to beat it and get the hell out of Dodge, but Coulson's knowledge of her aliases made her feel compelled to stay and learn exactly what the other side knew of Team Free Will. "How did SHIELD get so obsessed with an underground occult series?" Aspen questioned, crossing her arms. The agent was right. If SHIELD wanted to ambush her, she would know it.

"We didn't, at first," Coulson said freely. "It took until a couple years after the publishing house went under for us to even pick them up. But one of our agents got to reading them with his kids, and as he kept reading, he started recognizing things. Missing persons cases, deadly phenomena we'd never been able to explain.

"Don't think we're crazy, we didn't immediately leap to this conclusion." He chuckled and had another bite of his apple while Aspen listened. "We all figured this Carver Edlund guy was using cold cases and weird stuff as inspiration. 'Til, of course, we realized that from the cases we did know about, it wasn't public information. We spent months searching for leaks and hacks before we had to really consider that Edlund wasn't just playing connect-the-dots with monsters. So, on a hunch, we started looking up the main characters."

Aspen swallowed. Now she saw where this was going. Cases could be coincidences, explained as inspiration and corruption and hacking. But it was impossible to live on the planet without leaving a paper trail, and Team Free Will had been creating paper trails for decades. With both sets of clues in hand, uncovering the mystery suddenly didn't seem so farfetched.

"Nothing came up on the main character until we ran her fake IDs," Coulson said, eyes twinkling like he was teasing her. "Then suddenly we've got tracks stretching back nearly ten years. Real business taxes and audits from the Roadhouse, which burned in 2007. A real trail on a real family from Lawrence, Kansas. I'm all for a dedicated artist, but Edlund couldn't have been doing all that himself."

"Mug shots," Aspen muttered, seeing it coming together.

"And facial recognition," Coulson added. "Once we knew who you were, getting your birth name and quietly flagging your new fakes was child's play. We've been keeping tabs on you since Sam - who's alive, by the way, I have to ask you about that – jumped, Dean settled in Indiana, and you and Cas split ways. Not gonna lie, it was a big deal at the office when you four got together again." He smiled.

She gritted her teeth, trying to keep in mind that Chuck hadn't been able to get financing to publish anything after the Apocalypse-that-wasn't. SHIELD had no way of knowing fully anything had happened since Sam jumped into the pit. They may have tracked her around, but they couldn't have been physically stalking her or Castiel would have made them, which meant they knew she was hunting but chose to stay out of the way.

"Why are you showing your hands now?" Aspen challenged, the tension in her tight muscles bursting to ask why now, and why at all; why track her without engaging.

"As opposed to sooner?" Coulson clarified. Aspen made a rigid shrug because that was as good a place to start as any. The man nodded thoughtfully. "Your books-"

"They're not mine," she growled.

"-Made it pretty clear that you'd avoid law enforcement at all costs, and since you were still working, SHIELD decided it was best for everyone if we stayed in the background."

"What would be best is if SHIELD butted out of the picture altogether," Aspen retorted.

"I thought you might say that," Coulson said regretfully. "Unfortunately that's not an option."

"It is absolutely an option, but you government types are incapable of minding your own damn business," she snapped.

"Now that's a bit of rhetoric I'm not touching," Coulson commented lightly, finishing his apple and putting the core down on a napkin. He wiped his fingers of the juice and opened up the folder he had brought with him. "But to answer your question, why now, it's more of a request than a duty."

He took out a small pile of mostly letter-sized papers. She could see they weren't all the same size and thickness, but the ones on the bottom weren't so thin that she could get an idea of what was on their right sides. The agent peeled back the top two sheets, made a sound of recognition, and pulled out a piece of photo paper from the stack. He put it down on the table, turned it around, and pushed it towards her.

The woman in the picture was hard to miss. That flaming hair wasn't common to begin with, and it certainly contrasted with the skintight body armor suit she wore. And the Black Widow was one of Dean's celebrity crushes, not that he would ever admit to it. What was more interesting was the grainy quality of the figure behind her, whose feet seemed to blur out of existence and existed in a more monochromatic palette than the world around it.

The picture was taken from a high angle like a security camera, and while she had no idea where it was taken, she could see what looked like a security panel on the wall right below where the frame cut off, meaning it was a secure location. It was unlikely to be easily accessed and doctored, and something told her SHIELD would have found out for themselves if it had been. As little as Aspen wanted to do with SHIELD, her interest was piqued by the ghostly apparition behind the Avenger.

"A moment after this timestamp, Agent Romanoff was thrown at the window so hard it smashed out. One of the Iron Legion suits caught her a few stories up from the ground. As you can imagine, the team had a lot of questions, especially once they checked their security footage." The conversational way that Coulson was telling the story felt altogether too comfortable for Aspen. The only people she was used to comfortably chatting about ghosts with were fellow hunters.

"Had, not has. They worked it out," the hunter inferred.

"With explanations and guesswork," Coulson allowed. "Agent Romanoff had been sent flowers by an apparent fan tied with human hair under the potted soil. It sat in the mail room, we suppose, biding time until she came within reach."

"Did you identify the ghost?" Aspen asked, curious in spite of herself.

Coulson nodded, not surprised that she asked but pleased that she was showing an interest. "Carolina Varga. She died in a car crash in Hungary pursuant to one of Agent Romanoff's investigations. Evidently her sister was a medium with misplaced blame."

"Hm." The idea of receiving mail from strangers at all creeped her out, and this story wasn't helping. "You burned the hair?"

"Just like you did in Provenance." Aspen rolled her eyes at the name of a Supernatural book. Coulson leaned forward a bit with hunched shoulders and dropped his voice. "Between you and me? I always thought those dolls were going too far."

She refused to be brought off topic. She still felt cornered, and now she was angry at the revelation that SHIELD had been keeping tabs on her silently for years. "What does any of that have to do with me?"

Coulson, disappointed that she didn't engage with him friendlily, leaned back in his chair to sit as he normally would. "Now that they know what's out there, they want to learn to fight it. But if we know anything from Ghostfacers, it's that learning without a damn good hunter instructing is a bad move."

After groaning about yet another book reference, Aspen caught on quickly to what he was hinting at and shook her head furiously. "No. No way. I'm not a teacher and I'm not working for the Avengers." She liked hunting alone. Okay, well, she preferred hunting with a partner. But she definitely liked doing things her way, low-key and safe, and there was no higher-key way to hunt than with Earth's Mightiest Heroes, or whatever they were calling themselves.

"Don't think of it as employment," Coulson objected encouragingly, but had to hesitate for a couple of seconds while he thought of other terms for it. "Think of it as… a gainful partnership. What's the worst that could happen?"

"Death," she said flatly. "Death all around." Hunting with someone incompetent was even worse than hunting alone, and as far away as she might want to be from the Avengers, she also didn't want them unable to prevent the next alien invasion or nuclear strike on New York.

The agent winced. "Other than that."

"That's not enough for you?"

He sent her a polite smile again, but the mood had shifted. Aspen knew she'd let him down. He'd hoped the friendliness and openness would get her guard down and she would agree, but that hadn't worked, so now he was stuck with his rehearsed sales pitch. "Shelter. Partnership. Resources." Coulson summarized with a tilted head. "On SHIELD's payroll, you'd never have to hustle seedy bars and back-alleys again. We know where you are and what you're doing anyway," he added pointedly. "You might as well get something out of it."

Coulson dropped his papers along the edge on the table to straighten them out and added the security still onto the top. Then he tucked them back into the folder while Aspen stared at him with as neutral an expression as possible. He pushed the file under his arm and picked up his trash as he stood.

"Room 17," he said to her, eyes flicking up briefly, then nodded goodbye. "Think about it."


The government is bad news. They can't be trusted.

Neither can anyone else, so what's the difference?

The difference is you can't drag the government into a dark closet and shove a gun in its face until it backs off when it crosses the line.

But resources are resources. Namely, greater access to weapons, magic resources, and money would all be great help in hunting. Getting firearms and ammo when hers were damaged or destroyed was increasingly challenging as the years went on. It was a pain to have to call Cas, or hope for a workaround to pull through, when a necessary spell called for a rare pollen that only grew in the remote Albanian forests during the summer solstice or whatever. While credit card fraud and hustling worked, they didn't lend themselves to much comfort, and there were instances when a credit bureau caught on and her card didn't work and she had to get the hell out of the area before police were tipped off.

But SHIELD… SHIELD were powerful. Not angel powerful, and Aspen had handled angel. But in a way, the power differential between herself and an angel neutralized the moral dilemma of killing one when she didn't get her way. If she had to kill an angel, it was because that creature was willfully allowing or contributing to harm against people and Aspen truly had no other choice to prevent that harm except for extinguishing the willful power. She supposed the same could be said in some contexts with humans, but the problem was that humans had recourse. Sticky, nasty recourses that would end with Aspen unable to help anyone.

Except if they did put her on death row for not falling in line, or locked her up for the same, then how helpless would she really be? Aspen had friends in some awfully high and awfully low places. She recalled her timeline in her head. SHIELD knew about angels, but unless Chuck had started adding illustrations in his books – which, by that time, he would have known better than to share important information like Enochian – they wouldn't know how to ward against them. Castiel, Hannah, Gabriel – anyone who was friendly could bust her out with less than a finger snap.

… But they would learn about wardings. And likely a lot of other information, too. There were some things she truly wouldn't mind more people knowing about. Salt and anti-possession charms would be for the benefit of everyone, hunters included. But other things, like Enochian sigils and real magic, were best kept closely-guarded trade secrets. Hell, Team Free Will kept some of those secrets guarded from the larger hunting community.

Historically, keeping intelligence a secret was… not wonderful. Aspen winced. She knew this. She criticized governments and intelligence organizations specifically because she believed that old white men didn't deserve to make all the major decisions in the world simply because they kept everyone else in the dark. So when she acknowledged the bit of hypocrisy that was present when she said, even just to herself, that there were things she wouldn't share, it made her feel uncomfortably close to being in a philosophical debate.

But then she thought about Coulson's proposal again. It wasn't that she share everything with everyone. It was that she teach the Avengers, specifically, how to hunt. She didn't know much about them, but she did know that if the Black Widow had been successfully killed by a ghost – which seemed to have very nearly come to pass – then the world was a scarier place. Aspen could kill the supernatural any day. Hell, she could even take on the Asgardian asshole who brought the Chitauri to the Earth in the first place – it wouldn't be the first time she'd fought a Norse god. But to take on an entire alien army? That was way above a hunter's paygrade. No, they specialized in supernatural apocalypses, not extreterrestrial ends-of-days.

How much did they really need to know, anyway? Clearly, they needed to know the basics. Salt, iron, anti-possession. The huntress shuddered at even the thought of someone like Tony Stark being possessed by a demon. The man had some of the most volatile energy and weapons tech at his fingertips, not to mention geopolitical and economic influence over the world. But did they need to know the most sensitive of information? No. If ever they needed to speak Enochian, or handle a real problem like Death or an actual Devil's Gate, they could pass it along to real hunters. Namely, Team Free Will, probably the only hunters still alive who'd meaningfully interacted with those big-ticket supernatural sideshows.

Aspen groaned loudly and dropped down onto her bed. The mattress was bouncy enough that it made her pop up and rock on the covers. She covered her face in her hands, trying to focus. What was she doing? Talking herself into it, or out of it? She couldn't even call a lifeline for help – Sam and Dean would fall on distinct sides. She knew the pros and cons, and she knew which brother valued which ones more highly. She'd be the tiebreaker in the end regardless.

We know where you are and what you're doing, anyway, Coulson had pointed out. Aspen balled up her fists. That was beyond infuriating, but there was truly nothing she could do against a network so expansive as SHIELD. When it was angels, Cas carved some sigils into her ribs. It had burned like a long shot of whiskey, but it had been worth it. Here, there was no equivalent. And she couldn't just threaten them away or kill them off until they left her alone. Moral issues aside, there were simply too many agents, officers, and henchmen.

There was a limit to how much they knew about what she was doing… but what if they tried to learn? Aspen still believed they had more tech than anyone knew about. Modern spyware could be pretty good as it was without dipping into the SHIELD vault. The cat was out of the bag. They knew about hunting. She had a feeling that if she didn't agree, then they'd approach another hunter who would. The woman strongly suspected that the Avengers usually got what they wanted. In which case, that hunter might not be as good. (Aspen had a bit of an ego, but being a hunter was just about everything she had to her name, and sue her, but after preventing multiple catastrophic supernatural events, she felt she'd earned the chip on her shoulder.) Or might blab about things that didn't need blabbed about. Worse, get a big head about working with superheroes and make a public problem for the hunting community.

The more she thought about it, staring at the uneven popcorn ceiling, Aspen realized that it wasn't as black and white as she wanted the decision to be. She hated even considering it seriously. She knew she didn't trust Coulson. Why should she?! And yet… she had the safety net of angel friends. That risk wasn't a great enough one to immediately offset the potential benefits. If she made the wrong choice, a lot could weigh on her shoulders.

If she agreed, then she would have resource security the likes of which a Winchester could never so much as dream of. More altruistically, she would be responsible for training the world's superheroes into more capable protectors, able to intervene in supernatural dangers on others' behalves and keep themselves safe until the next major geopolitical crisis. She'd also be in greater control of what exactly they learned about this side of the world that they didn't belong in, where being manipulated by the wrong person could – and, on occasion, has – set Lucifer free, literally. And it removed SHIELD from the shadows of her life. Good luck stalking her in the shadows when she was spending her days with their most public agents!

The risks weren't as steep as they first appeared, but there was certainly a cost to pay all the same. The last thing she wanted to do was legitimize the damn books or make the supernatural more widely known than it already was. People already made enough stupid choices. If people knew ghostbusting was real, then even more Ghostfacer idiots would get themselves killed or mess with magic they didn't understand to exact revenge or have their dreams handed to them. She also didn't want to make herself more vulnerable to SHIELD by placing herself right in their laps (even if it was perhaps a losing battle). Was she jeopardizing the security of other hunters in the process? Could her principles handle swapping from a secretive hunter to a freelance consultant to a powerful intelligence agency? Last, but certainly not least, of the big questions was whether SHIELD could be trusted at all to responsibly utilize any information that she imparted. That was to say, if she taught an agent something with the potential to help or harm, who was to say that information would safely stay in the hands of those who'd use it beneficently?

So, then… which was more weighty? The risks or the rewards?


To cooperate with Coulson, go to Chapter 2.

To ditch Coulson and hunt alone, skip to Chapter 3.


A/N: Thank you so much for reading! This is just the introductory chapter to a choose-your-own adventure story I'm working on. I decided to post this and see how it's received. If the answer isn't great, then I'll shorten my story plans. Just wanted to get this out there first before spending a ton of extra time on a big story no one is interested in reading.

What do you think? Love it? Hate it? Let me know!