Reborn Hunters: Dangerous Heiresses

The last thing I remembered was a rusty metal rod, the crack of my own rib, and blood filling my lungs. Oh, and Sammy howling on the floor of that stinking shed. Classic. For a bloke who’d died about fifty times, it should’ve been just another stop along the way: Hell, Heaven, or some godforsaken corner of Purgatory.

But instead of sulphur or the sound of angels singing, I smelled lavender.

The smell. Of fucking lavender.

It sat on my tongue. Sweet. Clean. Wrong. Death was supposed to smell like iron and smoke, not like somebody’s expensive soap. For a second I thought I hadn’t died at all—that I’d just blacked out and some well-meaning stranger had dumped me in a posh bed and left the window open.

Then I tried to breathe in properly.

My chest lifted too light. No barrel, no old break in the ribs, no familiar weight of a body that had been hit by cars and thrown through walls. Something else pulled when I inhaled. Soft. Unfamiliar. Sitting on my ribs like it had every right to be there.

I opened my eyes.

The ceiling was white, the plasterwork delicate, and beneath my back was a mattress softer than anything I’d ever slept on in fifteen-quid-a-night motels. Silk whispered against my thighs when I shifted. Hair—long hair—slid over my shoulder and across my throat, tickling the place where a day’s stubble should have been.

There was no stubble.

“What the—” I rasped, then froze.

A voice. It wasn’t my voice. None of that deep, gravelly rasp from cigarettes and cheap bourbon. What came out of my throat was thin and high, scraped raw, like a girl who’d been crying and hadn’t noticed yet.

The sound hit harder than the rod had.

I sat bolt upright. The room tilted. My centre of gravity was in the wrong damn place—too high, too narrow, like the floor had moved two inches to the left while I wasn’t looking. A dull, tight ache wrapped around my ribs. Not a bruise. Something fabric. Straps.

Cold sweat broke across my skin.

My hands. My calloused fingers, used to heavy metal and gunpowder, looked… delicate. Smaller. The knuckles weren’t split. My nails were neatly filed and coated with clear polish, catching the morning light like a joke I hadn’t been told.

I turned them over. Same green-eyed idiot’s panic, different tools.

I shoved a hand beneath the silk duvet, felt soft pyjama shorts, and moved my hand lower.

Nothing.

The empty space was neat. Smooth. Warm. No familiar weight, no scar on the left side, no proof I’d spent more than thirty years as Dean Winchester. Just a body that closed where it should have opened and opened where it should have been simple.

“No. No, no, no, fuck no,” I whispered.

The whisper was worse than a shout. It sounded scared. It sounded young.

I sprang to my feet and nearly went over. The floor was farther away than it should have been. New legs. Too long. Bare feet catching on a rug I didn’t own. Hair swung into my mouth. I spat it out, heart hammering so hard I could feel it in my teeth, and bolted for the nearest door.

Not a door. A bathroom.

A mirror. Huge, set in an elaborate carved frame.

A red-haired girl stared back at me.

With my fucking green eyes.

But with freckles across her nose. A mouth that was mine only in the snarl. And breasts. Small ones, sitting there in a thin white top like they weren’t the end of the world, but very definitely, for fuck’s sake, breasts.

I lifted a hand. She lifted it too. I touched the glass. She did the same, fingers shaking.

The worst part wasn’t the pretty. I’d seen pretty. Pretty got people killed. The worst part was the quiet recognition underneath it — that the girl in the glass wasn’t a stranger wearing my stare. She was the stare. Same old stubborn line between the brows. Same look I used to give Sammy when the job went sideways.

Only now it came with a pulse between my legs I did not have a name for, and a throat that wanted to cry if I pushed it.

Someone knocked on the bedroom door. Not a polite tap, but three short, heavy thuds.

“Dean? Are you in there?”

I froze.

The voice on the other side was female too, but there was something about the tone. That same painfully earnest Sammy note that usually gave me a headache.

I left the bathroom and yanked the door open.

A tall, gangly girl stood on the other side, with long chestnut hair and the expression of someone who’d just swallowed a rotten egg.

“Sammy?!”

I squealed it, because calling what came out of my mouth a normal speaking voice would’ve been a fucking lie.

She—or he, fuck, I was already losing track—hurried into the room, shut the door and pressed her back against it.

“Dean. Don’t shout. Please. My brain is already exploding.”

“Sam! Where are my balls?! Sammy, why are you a girl?! WHY AM I A GIRL?!”

“How the hell should I know?!” she hissed.

It was horribly funny, because Sam’s old habit of rolling his eyes had somehow survived the transformation and was now being performed by a pretty brunette in a pink dressing gown.

“I woke up five minutes ago! I haven’t even had time to think!”

“Then think! You’re the fucking encyclopaedia! Is this some kind of cursed dream? Demons? The Trickster having another laugh at our expense?”

Sam let out a heavy sigh. It came out sounding like the long-suffering sigh of a schoolgirl.

Then she walked over to the desk, like moving would make the facts line up.

“I’ve checked the room. Dean, this isn’t an illusion. I remember dying. And you should remember it too. But there’s… something else in my head. Other memories. It’s like they’re sitting there alongside the ones I already have.”

“What other memories?”

“Our new ones.” Sam rubbed her temples. The gesture was his. The wrists were not. “We’re called Deana and Samantha. We’re daughters of some local count. And Dean… sit down before you fall over.”

“I’m already about two seconds away from shooting myself. Speaking of which, where the hell’s my Beretta?”

“There is no Beretta here.”

My eyes went hunting anyway—drawers, wardrobe, under the bed. Habit. Sam pointed instead to an elegant wooden table by the window. A long, slender wand with a silver tip lay on it beside several heavy, leather-bound books, as if that was a reasonable substitute for nine millimetres.

“We’re in a world where magic exists. And our new family… we’re witches.”

I waited for the punchline. It didn’t come. Somewhere outside a bird went on singing, as if none of this was happening.

Slowly, I looked from the mirror to Sam, then to the silver wand.

“Witches.”

“Yep.”

“You mean the same sort of creatures we’ve spent our entire lives burning, shooting with silver and cutting into pieces?”

“Exactly.”

I covered my face with my hands.

They were soft. Smooth. Probably moisturised within an inch of their lives. No gun oil. No split skin. Nothing I could trust.

“God, I should’ve stayed in Hell. At least Lucifer never made me wear a bra.”

A loud, stern female voice rang out from downstairs.

“Deana! Samantha! Get down here immediately! Your ritual magic tutor is already waiting, and you’re still in your pyjamas!”

Sam and I looked at each other.

The name hit first. Deana. Like someone had taken Dean and filed the edge off for company.

“Well then, Samantha,” I muttered through clenched teeth, scanning the table for anything heavy enough to use as a weapon. I settled for a solid iron hand mirror and tightened my grip around it. Cold. Honest. Better than a stick with a pretty tip.

“Let’s go show the local witches how hunters from Kansas do things.”

I glanced at the wardrobe. A skirt hung there, dark and neat, waiting like a dare.

“Even if it means putting on that bloody thing.”