I really enjoyed Rebecca Dessertine's last Supernatural novel "One Year Gone" (read more here). She's not writing the next Supernatural tie-in novel, but Christa Faust has written "Coyote's Kiss", which takes place between the season 6 episodes "Caged Heat" and "Appointment in Samarra".
Sam and Dean head to Mexico in the novel. Here's the official description: "A truck full of illegal Mexican immigrants slaughtered with supernatural force is found by the side of a road. Trying to find answers, Sam and Dean are plunged into the dangerous world that exists along the Mexican border. They encounter a tattooed, pistol-packing bandita on a motorcycle who seems be everywhere they go before they get there. Xochi Cazadora draws them into a whole new world of monsters..."
Below is an excerpt, courtesy of Titan Books.
Stay tuned for our official review of the book. In the meantime, if you'd like to learn more, you can find it on Amazon
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Excerpt from "Supernatural: Coyote's Kiss"
Border patrol officer Manuel Léon didn’t know what to make of his new partner. Charlie Himes was a decent guy, but very guarded. Didn’t joke around. Didn’t say a single word that wasn’t directly related to the job or responding to a specific request. He was the only black guy on the Tijuana River ATV team and he was also the oldest by a good ten years. Léon was the youngest. They were a Mutt and Jeff team, Himes tall and wiry and Léon short and stocky. Their CO called them Rocky and Bullwinkle. But despite their differences, they’d been working pretty well together for these past four days. Himes been showing Léon the ropes along the river, and although Léon might have preferred to partner with someone he could kid around with a little every now and then, Himes was a crack shot, had a black belt in Brazilian Jiujitsu, and held the highest arrest record in the unit. He was in better shape than most guys half his age. Léon could do worse.
Their designated section of the Tijuana River was barely what you’d call a river. It was more like sludgy trickle of toxic chemicals and raw sewage that ran along a wide cement channel littered with dead dogs, burning tires, and discarded needles. The stench was overwhelming, but that never stopped people from wading through the filth to try and make it to the American side. Himes claimed that you got used to the smell after a while. Léon wasn’t sure if he believed that. There weren’t enough showers in the world to wash the memory of that smell out of Léon’s head.
It was just after midnight when they spotted a trio of junkies squatting and huddled together on the American edge of the river. Male in an illegible death metal T-shirt and dirty jeans. Long, tangled hair and lurid red Kaposi’s sarcoma legions on his arms and face. Two females. One overweight and painfully young. Childish, pink-and-black T-shirt featuring a bad knock-off of Hello Kitty. Way too much bloated belly exposed between the hem of the shirt and the saggy waistband of her torn pink leggings. Faded pink hair, with a good six inches of black roots. Maybe sixteen, tops. Dead, hopeless eyes. If she was sharing needles, and who knew what else, with her male companion, she was probably already HIV-positive. Léon hoped she was just fat, and not pregnant. The second female wore a hooded sweatshirt, hood up and curly black hair spilling out from around its edges. Jeans and dusty hiking boots. What skin was visible was corpse pale in the harsh sodium lights. The first two were totally absorbed doing something furtive with their hands, probably prepping their heroin, but the second female sat stone still and seemed to be watching the border patrol agents. Léon couldn’t see her eyes under the hood, but she gave him the creeps.
“Paid diversion,” Himes said as they pulled their ATVs up on the lip of the channel.
“Paid?”
“Smugglers pay junkies to shoot up along the river,” Himes told him. “Divert our attention away from their operations.”
Himes lifted the visor of his helmet and raised a pair of compact binoculars to his eyes to get a closer look at the action. He watched the junkies for a silent minute, then handed the binocs over to Léon. Léon pushed up his own visor and scoped the trio for himself, adjusting the focus and zooming in on the male junkie’s hands.
Sure enough, he was dumping something from a tiny plastic envelope into a metal bottle cap. The chubby girl was pressed up against him, holding a disposable lighter and a syringe. She had sparkly glitter polish on her bitten nails, and a cheap ring shaped like a star.
“Should we try to apprehend them?” Léon asked.
“We can try,” Himes said. “But they’ll probably run back over to the Mexican
side.”
side.”
“So, what?” Léon said. “We just watch them?”
Léon was zoomed in so tight that when something suddenly happened, it just looked like a fast shuffle and blur. He lowered the binocs, squinting at the three junkies. Now there were only two of them. They were both laying face down in the oily sewage, rivulets of crimson feeding out into the sluggish current. The chubby girl didn’t seem to have a head.
“What the…”
He turned to Himes and saw that the second female was standing right beside them, between the two ATVs. She was inexplicably nude. Impossible, but not any less possible than her running all the way up to the top of the steep concrete bank in the half a second it took Léon to lower his binocs. Her chin and chest were slick with gore. Her eyes did not reflect any light, just swallowed it all and gave nothing back. She was holding something, something that Léon’s baffled brain translated as a dirty red mop. But when he saw that the mop had streaks of pink, he realized what he was really looking at. It was a human spine with the head still attached, clotted pink hair brushing back and forth against the naked woman’s bare toes.
Léon looked at his partner. Crack-shot, bad ass Himes. Highest arrest record on the team. He didn’t draw his weapon. Didn’t take action. He was just staring at the woman with a drowsy kind of dread, like a suicide on a ledge, looking down. Like he knew what was coming. Like he deserved it.
When the girl dropped the spine and leapt on Himes like a hungry animal, Léon scrambled sideways off his ATV, thought processes utterly short-circuited by what he was seeing. It would have made sense to punch the gas and speed
away, but he wasn’t thinking. Couldn’t think. All he could do was stumble backward, hands up and head shaking in endless, wordless denial. Because the woman was changing, form and substance flickering like a fire, bleeding off into the air around her as she tore into Himes with raptor claws and a thousand jagged teeth dripping glistening venom like rattlesnake fangs.
Léon tripped and fell on his ass as what used to be a woman threw back what used to be a head and screamed. That sound, that agonized, furious scream, was the single most terrible sound Léon had ever heard. Then something happened that was so strange, stranger even than all the other madness of the previous impossible moments, that Léon could feel his mind snap like a broken bone. In a way, it was almost a relief, not to have to try and make sense of anything anymore. Because there was no way to make sense of what he was seeing.
The sky around the woman’s head was unfolding. The earth was torn wide open like Himes’ corpse and things started to fall upward, twisting like trash caught in a high wind. There was a blinding flash and a burst of excruciating pain like a plane crash inside Léon’s head and then the woman was gone. So were the two ATVs and Himes’ body. So was the lower half of Léon’s body. Everything from the navel down was gone, neatly severed and bloodless for a surreal moment. Then, the blood came in a dizzy sickening rush, flowing down into the oily river and mingling with the blood of the dead junkies. Léon thought he heard the buzz of ATVs, backup on the way, but it didn’t matter. It was too late.