Chapter 1: Burning Resurrection
[Abandoned Warehouse — September 2005, Night — Rural Nebraska]
Fire.
Not heat, not warmth—fire. Liquid agony pouring through every vein, every nerve, every cell. Ethan Cole's eyes snapped open to darkness and the smell of old rust and the sensation of his own skin cooking from the inside out.
His back arched off concrete. A scream tore from his throat—raw, animal, nothing human left in it.
What—where—
Memories crashed through him like a wave. The apartment building in Toledo. Smoke so thick he couldn't see. A child's screaming. He'd gone back in. Stupid, stupid, the stairwell was collapsing and he'd gone back anyway because that's what you did, that's what Rangers did, you didn't leave anyone behind—
The ceiling came down.
He'd died.
He was sure of it. The memory was sharp and absolute: crushing weight, lungs full of smoke, the last ragged breath that wasn't enough. Death had been quick. Merciful, even.
This was not death.
WE ARE BOUND.
The voice came from everywhere and nowhere. Inside his skull, behind his eyes, coiling through his thoughts like smoke through a broken window.
Ethan rolled onto his side, gasping. His hands pressed flat against cold concrete—warehouse floor, industrial, abandoned from the dust and debris. His body felt wrong. Right height, right weight, but the muscle memory was different. Civilian clothes instead of his usual cargo pants and boots.
Someone else's body.
The realization hit him like a rifle butt to the temple.
YOU SOUGHT JUSTICE. WE ARE JUSTICE.
"What—" His voice came out hoarse, cracked. "What are you?"
THE SPIRIT OF VENGEANCE. THE PUNISHMENT OF THE GUILTY. THE FIRE THAT CLEANSES.
The burning intensified. Ethan's hands flew to his chest, expecting to find charred flesh, but the skin was intact. The fire was inside. Something ancient and terrible had coiled itself around his soul and was making itself at home.
"Get out." He pushed himself to his knees. "Whatever you are—get out."
WE CANNOT. THE BOND IS COMPLETE. YOU ACCEPTED IT.
"I didn't accept anything!"
But even as he said it, something shifted in his memory. Not from his old life—from the last moments of this body's life, whoever it had belonged to before. A man dying on this same floor. Beaten. Broken. Crying out for justice that would never come.
And something answering.
The fire surged.
Ethan screamed again, but this time it wasn't just pain. His skin rippled. Orange light bloomed beneath his flesh, cracking through like lava through volcanic rock. His hands—God, his hands—
Flesh burned away. Muscle blackened and peeled. White bone emerged, wreathed in flames that didn't consume but instead crowned.
He scrambled backward, crashing into a rusted oil drum. His shoulder hit it hard enough to send it clanging across the floor, and the sound echoed through the empty warehouse like a gunshot.
Mirror. Window. Something—
A shard of broken glass caught the light from his own burning skull.
Ethan stared at his reflection.
A skeleton stared back. Fire instead of hair. Empty sockets filled with hellish light. The face of death wearing flames like a king wore gold.
The Spirit hummed with satisfaction inside his chest.
THIS IS WHAT YOU ARE NOW. THIS IS WHAT YOU WILL BECOME.
"No." The word came out wrong—deeper, resonating, not quite his voice anymore. "No, I'm not—I'm human—"
YOU WERE. NOW YOU ARE MORE. NOW YOU ARE VENGEANCE.
The transformation held for exactly nineteen seconds. Ethan counted them because counting gave him something to focus on besides the impossible reality of his own burning bones. Then, as suddenly as it had begun, the fire guttered out.
Flesh returned. Skin crawled back over muscle, muscle over bone. Pain spiked and faded, leaving behind a dull ache that settled into his joints like an old friend moving into a spare room.
Ethan collapsed onto his back, chest heaving.
The warehouse ceiling was corrugated metal, spotted with rust. Water stains mapped continents across its surface. Normal. Physical. Real.
Focus. Assess. Orient.
Ranger training kicked in despite everything. He forced himself through the mental checklist even as his hands shook so badly he couldn't have held a rifle if his life depended on it.
Location: Unknown warehouse, industrial area, probably rural from the silence. Condition: Alive. Physically intact. Hosting some kind of supernatural entity. Resources: Check pockets.
His hand found a chain around his neck—not dog tags. Heavy links, warm against his chest, pulsing with the same energy that had just turned him into a living nightmare. The chain had no clasp, no beginning or end. It simply was, circling his throat like a collar.
Jeans. T-shirt. Leather jacket. No wallet. No phone. No ID.
Great. Just great.
Ethan pushed himself upright, using a concrete pillar for support. His legs felt like overcooked pasta. The Spirit stirred lazily in his chest—patient, watchful, waiting.
What was this thing? Nothing from any briefing he'd ever received, nothing from any horror movie he'd half-watched on deployment. This was beyond demons or ghosts or any campfire story meant to scare boots.
He needed information. He needed to know where he was, when he was, and what the hell had happened to put him in someone else's body with a fire monster living in his ribcage.
Newspapers. He'd seen newspapers earlier, scattered across the floor near the entrance.
Ethan made his way across the warehouse on unsteady legs. The papers were old, yellowed at the edges, but not decades old. The dates were readable.
September 2005.
He blinked. Read them again.
September. 2005.
Twenty years. He'd lost twenty years somehow—or gained them, depending on how you counted. His last memory was 2024. Toledo apartment fire. Dying under a collapsed ceiling trying to save a kid he probably hadn't saved.
Now he was in 2005, in a body that wasn't his, bonded to something that called itself the Spirit of Vengeance.
This is insane. This is completely—
He stopped.
September 2005. Something about that date. Something important.
Ethan's hand went to his temple, pressing hard as if he could squeeze the memory out by force. His old life had included a guilty pleasure he'd never admitted to anyone—binge-watching a certain TV show about two brothers hunting monsters across America. He'd always told himself it was research, understanding the cultural touchstones his younger soldiers referenced. The truth was simpler: he'd liked it. The found family. The refusal to quit.
September 2005 was when it started.
The pilot episode.
Jessica burning on the ceiling. Dean recruiting Sam from Stanford. The Woman in White in Jericho, California.
I'm in a TV show.
The thought was absurd. Impossible. The kind of thing that happened in bad fanfiction, not to actual Army Rangers who'd done three tours in Iraq and finally died doing something decent for the first time in their miserable lives.
But the Spirit was real. The fire had been real. The face in the mirror—the burning skull and empty eyes—that had been real too.
YOU UNDERSTAND.
"Yeah." Ethan's voice came out flat. Empty. "I understand."
He understood that he'd died and woken up in a universe where demons were real, where angels walked the earth, where the apocalypse was a literal scheduled event rather than a metaphor for human stupidity.
He understood that he was carrying something inside him—something powerful and ancient and hungry—that wanted to punish the guilty.
He understood that Sam Winchester was probably at Stanford right now, studying law, not knowing that in a few weeks his girlfriend would burn and his normal life would end forever.
What he didn't understand was why. Why him? Why this? Why bond with some random dead guy in a Nebraska warehouse instead of—
YOU DIED WITH JUSTICE IN YOUR HEART. YOU TRIED TO SAVE THE INNOCENT. THIS WAS... NOTED.
"Noted by who?"
The Spirit didn't answer. Some things, apparently, weren't for hosts to know.
Ethan walked toward the warehouse door. His legs felt steadier now, the shaking fading to a low tremor he could control. The chain around his neck pulsed warm against his chest, a constant reminder of what he'd become.
Outside, Nebraska spread flat and dark under a star-filled sky. No city lights. No sound except wind through prairie grass and the distant call of something hunting in the night.
Somewhere out there, Sam Winchester was sleeping peacefully in his Stanford apartment.
Somewhere out there, Dean Winchester was driving his father's car, searching for a monster in California.
Somewhere out there, Yellow-Eyes was planning an apocalypse that would take years to unfold.
Ethan Cole—former Staff Sergeant, former private security contractor, former living person—started walking toward the distant glow of civilization.
He needed money. Clothes. Transportation. Information about this body, this time, this impossible situation.
And he needed to figure out what the hell he was supposed to do.
The Spirit settled deeper into his chest, patient as a predator watching prey approach.
YOU WILL LEARN. WE HAVE TIME.
That, Ethan thought, was exactly what worried him.
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