PROLOGUE
the curse of hollow creek

   HOLLOW Creek, Kentucky is the kind of place where the air itself remembers.

   In August of 1996, the town's mine collapsed, burying twenty-three men beneath stone and silence. Only one girl crawled out alive. Dixie Rae Ward— sixteen, bruised, and bloodied— emerged into the light, carrying with her the screams of the men who never made it.

   Ten years later, the town still hasn't forgiven her for surviving. They call her cave rat, they cross themselves when she passes, and as the sweltering heat of another July bears down, whispers rise with it— the dead miners are restless— their souls clawing at the veil. Every summer near the anniversary, people begin to vanish. And this year, it has already begun.

   Dixie works nights at the Hollow Saloon, where the beer is warm, the gossip mean, and every pair of eyes knows her name. She hides her deep scars beneath sharp words, flirtation, and defiance, but guilt has its claws deep in her. She is both the town's outcast and its obsession— too beautiful to ignore, but too cursed to embrace.

   When two strangers roll into Hollow Creek— brothers who carry their own burdens of blood and grief— they're drawn to Dixie like moths to flame. They see what the town will not— that she is tethered to the mine's ghosts, somehow bound to its hunger. And the anniversary is coming.

The mine waits.

The dead stir.

And in the summer heat, Hollow Creek will bleed again.

________

qotd: who is your favorite
character in supernatural?