Chapter 1: IGNITION
Death tastes like copper and gasoline.
I know this because I remember dying—the semi truck running the red light, my Honda folding like origami around me, the steering wheel crushing my chest while the windshield became a thousand knives. I remember the exact moment my heart stopped. The darkness that followed. The specific nothing of a life ending at thirty-four with nothing to show for it but two divorces and a drinking problem.
What I don't remember is waking up.
One moment: nothing. The next: a body that wasn't mine, lungs that worked when they shouldn't, and a ceiling covered in wood paneling and rock band posters.
I sat up too fast. The room spun. My hands—broader than they should be, callused, wearing a ring I'd never bought—caught the edge of an unfamiliar mattress. Sheets tangled around legs that felt younger, stronger, fundamentally wrong.
The smell hit next. Cheap cologne, cigarette smoke, and something underneath that—teenage boy sweat, the kind that comes from working out too hard and showering too little. My stomach turned, but not from nausea. From wrongness. From the bone-deep certainty that I shouldn't be here, shouldn't be breathing, shouldn't be anything at all.
I made it to my feet. Crashed into a dresser. A mirror hung above it, catching morning light through blinds that needed cleaning.
Billy Hargrove stared back at me.
The face was unmistakable. Dirty blonde mullet, sharp jaw, blue eyes that the original owner had used like weapons. I'd watched this face sneer its way through two seasons of television. I'd watched it get possessed by an interdimensional parasite. I'd watched it die, impaled and screaming, in a shopping mall in Indiana.
"No." The voice came out wrong—deeper, rougher, Billy's voice. "No, no, no."
I gripped the dresser edge. The wood creaked under my fingers. Stronger than I should be. Everything about this body was stronger than I should be.
Memories flooded in like water through a cracked dam. Not mine—his. California, 1984. San Diego. A red Camaro that was the only good thing in his life. A father who—
My chest tightened. Something built behind my sternum, spreading outward like a coal catching fire. Heat crawled down my arms, pooled in my palms, and then—
Flame.
Orange fire danced across my fingers. Three inches tall, maybe four, flickering like a candle in a breeze. It didn't hurt. The skin underneath stayed pink and whole, completely unbothered by the impossible thing happening on top of it.
I screamed. Shook my hand. The fire died, leaving behind scorch marks on the bedsheet and the acrid smell of burnt cotton.
For a long moment, I just stood there. Staring at my unmarked palm. Waiting for the agony that should have followed spontaneous combustion.
Nothing came.
I touched my palm with my other hand. Warm, but not burned. Not even red. The fire had lived on my skin like it belonged there, and the only evidence was the damage to the sheets.
Okay. Think. Process. I was dead—that part was certain. The accident on I-95 had happened. I remembered every detail with crystal clarity: the semi's horn blaring too late, the impact throwing me sideways, the specific sound my ribs made when they broke. I'd been thirty-four years old, middle management at a company I hated, drinking my way through a lonely existence in a studio apartment that smelled like failure.
Now I was seventeen. In 1984. In a body that belonged to a fictional character from a Netflix show that wouldn't exist for another thirty years.
And apparently, that body could make fire.
I looked around the room with new eyes. Mötley Crüe poster on one wall—"Too Fast for Love" tour. I'd owned that album in my old life. Iron Maiden flag over the bed. Dumbbells in the corner, a weight bench shoved against the window. Clothes scattered across the floor, all tight jeans and muscle shirts designed to show off a physique I hadn't earned but would have to maintain.
Billy's room. Billy's life. Billy's father downstairs, waiting to—
"BILLY!"
The voice cut through the floor like a knife. Deep. Commanding. The kind of voice that expected immediate obedience and punished anything less.
Neil Hargrove.
The borrowed memories went haywire. Belt buckles. Closed fists. The specific way Neil's lip curled before he swung. A thousand small humiliations designed to break a boy into something manageable, something controllable, something that wouldn't embarrass him in front of the neighbors.
Heat bloomed in my chest again. My hands warmed without permission.
Stop, I told myself. Not now. Control it.
The heat died down. Reluctantly, like a dog being called off a hunt.
"BILLY! Get your ass down here!"
I caught my reflection again. Billy Hargrove's face, but something different behind the eyes. Something older. Something that remembered dying and wasn't afraid of a middle-aged bully with anger issues.
I knew things. Dangerous things. I knew Neil Hargrove was an abusive monster who'd spent years breaking his son into a weapon he could aim at the world. I knew Susan, his wife, enabled him out of fear and exhaustion. I knew Max—the redheaded stepsister currently somewhere in this house—was going to become one of the bravest kids in Indiana, if she survived her family long enough to get there.
I knew this family was months away from moving to Hawkins. I knew Hawkins was a year away from hell. I knew Billy Hargrove was supposed to die in 1985, skewered by the Mind Flayer while protecting a girl named Eleven.
That wasn't going to happen. Not to me. Not anymore.
I grabbed a shirt from the floor—Metallica, black, tight across shoulders I hadn't built—and pulled it on. The fabric stretched in ways that felt alien. This body was built for violence, maintained through hours in the gym and genetics that didn't quit. My old body had been soft, desk-job comfortable, dying slowly from processed food and cheap beer.
The Camaro keys sat on the dresser. Billy's wallet next to them—twenty-three dollars and a California license with a birth date that made me seventeen. A room key on a plain metal ring.
I pocketed everything. Tools for survival in a world I didn't understand yet.
The Mötley Crüe poster caught my eye again. Vince Neil's sneer, Tommy Lee's drumsticks, the whole ridiculous excess of early eighties metal. I'd loved this band in my old life. Still had the vinyl somewhere—probably crushed in the wreck along with everything else I'd owned.
Small comfort. Tiny thread connecting who I'd been to whoever I was becoming.
"COMING!" I shouted back, and the voice that came out was Billy's but the anger behind it was all mine.
I flexed my fingers. No flame appeared, but the heat was there, waiting underneath the skin. A pilot light that never went out. A weapon I didn't understand but was going to learn.
Neil Hargrove wanted his son downstairs. He was going to get something else entirely.
I opened the bedroom door. The smell of coffee and bacon drifted up from below, mixed with the particular tension of a household that had learned to walk on glass. Somewhere down there, Susan was probably making breakfast with mechanical precision, trying not to draw attention. Max was probably hunched over cereal, waiting for the day's first cruelty.
My hands warmed again. I let them.
Time to meet the monster.
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