Chapter 10: Turning
The road dissolved into gravel, then into a rutted track that clawed its way up through the thickening pines. The Camaro’s suspension protested every rock and hole, the rose gold paint acquiring a fine, persistent layer of damp dust. Mist clung to the black-green branches, reducing the world to a narrow, winding tunnel. The only sounds were the engine’s growl, the crunch of tires, and the oppressive, watchful silence of the hills.
Sam’s coordinates led them to a rusted, chain-link gate spanning the track. A faded, weather-blistered sign hung crookedly: “Black Hills Sanctuary – Private Research Facility. Trespassers Prosecuted.” Beyond it, the track disappeared into a wall of fog.
Dean killed the Impala’s engine. The sudden quiet was a physical presence. Ronan got out, the mist beading on his jacket instantly. He didn’t breathe in the pine scent. He filtered it, dissecting it: damp earth, decaying needles, rodent musk, and there—faint, old, but unmistakable—the sour tang of penned-up fear and dried blood.
“This is it,” Sam said quietly, joining him. He carried a duffel that clanked softly. “Place has been dark for two years according to the grid. No power bills, no deliveries.”
“Smells like a charnel house with air freshener,” Ronan murmured, his eyes scanning the tree line. River was a silent, coiled spring in his mind, mapping the territory through shared senses. Two distinct trails. Human. Male. Three days old. They circle the perimeter. Guards.
Dean approached the gate, testing the chain and padlock. “Heavy duty. Not that old.” He pulled a set of lock picks from his pocket. “Sam, keep watch. Romeo, dial it down. Your staring is gonna start a forest fire.”
Aria came to stand beside Ronan. She wore a practical black sweater but had tied a pale lilac scarf in her hair, a splash of soft color against the gloom. She touched his arm. “You okay?”
“No,” he said honestly, his gaze never leaving the mist-shrouded woods. “This is a trap. It feels like a trap.”
“It is a trap,” Dean grunted, working the lock. “The question is, is it a trap for us, or for him?” The padlock clicked open. “Let’s find out.”
They pushed the gates open with a shriek of rusted metal. They moved on foot, the Brothers in a practiced, wary formation, guns drawn. Ronan walked just ahead of Aria, his body a constant, subtle barrier. Every few steps he’d pause, head tilting, listening to the silent conversation of the wilderness.
Wind from the east. Carries scent of metal. Oil. Machine shed. Half-mile. River guided him.
“There’s a building to the east,” Ronan whispered. “Not the main house.”
Sam nodded, adjusting their course. The trees began to thin, revealing a cleared area. The main lodge was a long, low log structure, windows boarded, porch sagging. To its left, a large, utilitarian metal shed, its roll-up door slightly ajar. The silence was perfect. No birds. No insects.
“Too quiet,” Dean muttered.
“He knows we’re here,” Ronan said. The certainty was a stone in his gut. This was a stage, and they’d just walked onto it.
A high, electronic whine pierced the air. It came from speakers hidden in the trees, feedback screeching into a deafening, distorted howl—not a natural wolf’s cry, but a twisted, synthesized imitation. It was followed by a voice, thin and amplified, crackling through the mist.
“John and Mary’s children. And you brought the prodigal weapon. How… sentimental.”
Silas Vex. The voice was cultured, old, and tinged with a profound, amused madness.
“Show yourself!” Dean shouted, spinning, gun raised toward the tree line.
“The weapon first,” the voice crooned. “Let me see my masterpiece. Let me see if the love took.”
Ronan felt it then—a surge of aggression that wasn’t his own. It came from the shed. A deep, answering snarl vibrated through the ground. Then another. And another.
The metal door of the shed exploded outward, ripped from its tracks. What emerged weren’t wolves. They were things. Twisted parodies of skinwalkers, their shifts incomplete, patches of mangy fur battling with weeping, human skin. Their eyes were milky with pain and rage. One dragged a limp, half-formed paw. Another’s jaw was misaligned, dangling slack.
“Failed prototypes,” Silas’s voice sighed over the speaker. “The transformation requires a specific… emotional catalyst. Rage alone produces only monsters. But love? Love makes a king.”
The creatures—six of them—fanned out, emitting wet, guttural growls.
“Aria, behind me,” Ronan said, his voice dropping into a register that was barely human. He felt the shift boiling under his skin, the itch in his teeth. River was chanting a single word: Threat. Threat. Threat.
Dean opened fire. The crack of the pistol was obscenely loud. One of the creatures jerked, a spray of dark blood flowering on its shoulder. It didn’t slow down. It charged.
Chaosis not a big enough word for what happened next.
Sam fired a sawed-off shotgun, the boom echoing. A creature reeled back, half its face gone. Ronan pushed Aria toward the relative cover of the lodge’s porch and let go. The shift was not a graceful fade. It was a violent eruption. Clothes tore. Bones cracked and re-knitted with sickening pops. In two heartbeats, where Ronan stood was a massive, ink-black husky, bigger than any natural wolf, muscles coiling like steel cable under a pelt of living shadow. River had the wheel.
He met the first charging prototype in mid-air. The impact was a sound of meat and breaking bone. His jaws closed on its throat and shook, a brutal, efficient whip-crack motion. He didn’t howl. He worked in silence.
Aria stumbled onto the porch, fumbling in her jacket for the small pistol Sam had insisted she carry. Her hands were shaking. She saw Dean backed against a tree, firing methodically. Sam was trying to flank the shed. And Ronan—River—was a whirlwind of black fury, holding the center.
She didn’t see the seventh one.
It had been hiding in the tree line, waiting. It was different. Sleeker. Its shift was nearly perfect—a huge, tawny-coated wolf with intelligent, cold hazel eyes. It moved with a predator’s grace, avoiding the fray entirely, its focus laser-locked on her.
Aria turned, sensing movement. She raised the gun.
The tawny wolf was already in the air.
It didn’t knock her down. It slammed into her, a calculated strike that drove the air from her lungs and sent the pistol skittering across the rotted porch boards. She hit the wall of the lodge with a force that made stars burst behind her eyes. Before she could scream, a powerful forearm was across her chest, pinning her. The weight was immense, crushing.
Human fingers, tipped with sharp, clean claws, tangled in her lilac scarf and yanked her head to the side, exposing the line of her throat. She smelled pine and a strange, wild cologne.
A face pushed into her vision. It was human, mostly. Handsome in a sharp, cruel way. Blonde hair fell over hazel eyes that held none of River’s fiery protectiveness, only a cool, appraising hunger. He smiled, and his canines were already elongated.
“Well, hello,” he breathed, his voice a rough scrape. “You must be the catalyst.”
“Get off—” Aria choked, thrashing.
“Cole,” he supplied, as if introducing himself at a party. His nose traced her jawline, inhaling deeply. “God, he did a number on you, didn’t he? I can smell him all over you. His fear. His devotion. It’s intoxicating.” His tongue, hot and rough, dragged a stripe up her neck. She recoiled, nausea rising.
Across the clearing, a shattering roar of pure, unadulterated fury split the air. Ronan had seen. A half-shifted prototype was torn in two as River literally ripped through it to get to the porch.
Cole chuckled, unperturbed. “He’s fast. I’ll give him that. But not fast enough.”
He looked directly into Aria’s terrified green eyes, his own gleaming with malicious purpose. “Silas wants his king under control. Needs leverage. Me? I just want a better pack. And the only way to make new skinwalkers is to bite someone.”
He said it with casual, instructional clarity. A statement of fact.
Then he struck.
His head ducked. His mouth, now fully wolven and massive, opened. It wasn’t a savage tear. It was a precise, surgical bite. His teeth sank deep into the meat of the junction between her neck and shoulder, punching through her sweater, her skin, her muscle with brutal efficiency.
The pain was not sharp. It was a colossal, white-hot pressure, a concussive blast of agony that swallowed sound, sight, thought. She didn’t hear her own scream. She felt it tear out of her, raw and silent. The world dissolved into the feeling of those teeth—foreign, invasive, claiming—anchored in her body.
He held it for three eternal seconds.
When he wrenched his head back, he took a piece of her with him. Blood, shockingly red and hot, Sheeted down her chest, soaking the pastel wool instantly.
Cole released her, licking his crimson chops. “Tell your boyfriend ‘welcome to the family,’” he smirked.
Then, in a blur of tawny fur, he was gone, vanishing into the mist-shrouded pines.
Aria slid down the wall of the lodge, her legs useless. The world came back in fuzzy, disconnected fragments: the metallic taste of blood in her own mouth, the shocking, deep-throbbed ache radiating from her shoulder, the cold of the wood beneath her.
She heard a sound—a wounded, apocalyptic bellow of rage and grief that shook the very boards she sat on. It was Ronan, howling her name.
Then blackness, soft and total, rose up and pulled her under.
The world shattered into a single, scorching point of pure need.
Aria.
Her name wasn’t a word in my head anymore. It was a biological imperative, a scream in my blood that overrode every other signal. The remaining prototypes became irrelevant obstacles, furniture to be destroyed. I felt bones snap under my paws, sinew tear in my jaws, but it was background noise. The only sound that mattered was the wet, ragged gasp she’d made before the silence.
I crossed the clearing in a blur of motion that felt like moving through syrup. Dean was shouting something. Sam was covering my flank, the shotgun booms distant pops. I didn’t care. I shifted back at the foot of the porch steps, the reversal of my structure a series of nauseating cracks and itches I barely registered. I was on my knees, naked and slick with other things’ blood, pulling her into my lap.
The sight of the wound stopped my heart.
It wasn’t a messy tear. It was a deliberate, deep puncturing, twin arcs of perfect, brutal impressions over the curve of her shoulder. Blood welled and pulsed with a terrible, steady rhythm. Her lilac scarf was a soaked, dark ruin. Her skin was already losing its color, a waxy pallor spreading from the epicenter of the violation.
“Ari. Baby, look at me.” My voice was sandpaper. My hands hovered, shaking, afraid to touch. “Look at me, please.”
In my head, River was a cacophony of shattered glass.
BLOOD HURT BITEBITE BITETAKENHEBITHERHEBITHE—
His panic wasn’t thoughts. It was a seismic event, shaking the foundations of my mind, a feedback loop of fury and terror so intense my vision doubled. I shoved him down, hard. Not now. I can’t lose it now. She needs me to be here.
“Ronan!” Dean skidded to a stop beside us, his face ashen. He shoved his jacket at me. “Pressure. Now.”
The practicality cut through the static. I bundled the leather and pressed it hard against the wound. Aria moaned, a faint, pained sound that was worse than any scream. Her eyelids fluttered.
“The bastard said ‘welcome to the family’,” Sam panted, joining us, his eyes scanning the tree line. “He made her. He bit to turn.”
I knew. I knew the moment I saw the precision of the bite. This wasn’t a mauling. It was a manufacture. The icy comprehension dripped down my spine, freezing the panic into something sharp and deadly.
Turning is painful as fuck and it takes hours if not days.
I know this first hand.
I remember the fever that felt like my marrow was boiling. The sensation of my own skeleton trying to tear its way out of my skin, reshaping itself into a foreign architecture. The endless hours of screaming until my voice broke, locked in a shed, alone and terrified of what I was becoming. The profound, cellular loneliness of it.
And that was without the poison of a forced bond, the violation of a bite given in hate, not… whatever twisted affection had fueled my own turning.
Aria was going to go through that. Because of me.
“No,” I whispered, the word a broken thing. I adjusted the pressure, my other hand cradling her cheek. “No, no, no.”
Her green eyes opened, hazy with shock. They found mine. “Ro?” It was a child’s whisper, confused and scared. “It… it burns.”
“I know, baby. I know it does.” I leaned close, my forehead touching hers. I could smell the coppery blood, her sweat, and underneath, the first vile, sour trace of another alpha’s claiming venom seeping into her system. It made River snarl and thrash against my restraint. “You listen to me. You’re gonna be okay. You’re the toughest person I know.”
“Cold,” she murmured, her body starting a fine, uncontrollable tremble. The shock was setting in. The real pain hadn't even started.
HURTS HURTS MAKE IT STOP FIGHT KILL THE BLONDE ONE KILL—
“Sam, the car,” Dean barked, all business. His eyes met mine over her head, and for once, there was no accusation in them. Just a grim, shared horror. “We can’t stay here. Vex is still out there, and his new friend might come back to check his work.”
“The nearest hospital is three hours,” Sam said, already pulling out his phone. “And what do we say? Animal attack? They’ll ask questions we can’t answer.”
“We’re not taking her to a hospital,” I said, my voice flat. The decision crystallized instantly. “They can’t help her. Not with this. They’d sedate her, strap her down, and she’d wake up in a cage somewhere, or worse, she’d change in a fucking MRI machine.” The image was a fresh bolt of terror. “We need somewhere safe. Quiet. Where she can… let it happen.”
Where she can scream without anyone hearing.
Dean didn’t argue. He just nodded. “The lodge. We clear it, we fortify it. It’s the last place they’d expect us to hole up.”
Aria’s tremors worsened. A full-body shiver wracked her, and a sharp gasp escaped her lips as the first true wave of pain cut through the shock. Her fingers clutched at my arm, nails digging in. “Something’s… wrong. Inside.”
“It’s starting,” I said, my heart cracking. I bundled her tighter, ignoring the sticky blood soaking through Dean’s jacket. I stood, her weight nothing in my arms. “We need to move. Right now.”
Sam led the way, kicking in the boarded front door of the main lodge. The interior was a tomb of dusty furniture and shadows. Dean covered our retreat, his gaze sweeping the misty clearing.
I carried her across the threshold, into the dark. Her breathing was becoming more ragged, each inhale a hiccuping struggle. I found a threadbare couch in what might have been a common room and laid her down as gently as I could.
“Sam, salt lines. Every window, every door. Dean, find blankets. Anything.” My commands were quiet, urgent. I knelt beside the couch, never letting go of her hand.
River was still screaming, a white-noise wall of grief. I opened the mental door a crack, just enough to let him feel the warmth of her skin under my fingers, the frantic but steady beat of her pulse under my thumb.
She’s alive. She’s here. We protect her through this. We have to be her anchor. You hear me? We have to be calm for her.
The psychic howl diminished a fraction, tempered into a low, desperate whine. He focused on the point of contact between my hand and hers, a single thread of connection.
Aria’s eyes rolled back for a second, her body arching off the couch in a sudden, rigid spasm. A thin cry was wrung from her throat. It was the sound of a nerve being lit on fire.
“The bite’s going septic,” Sam said quietly, hovering with a first aid kit. He looked helpless. “It’s not just infection. It’s… rewriting her.”
“I know what it is,” I snapped, then instantly softened. “Just… get the salt. Keep anything else out.”
Dean returned with a moth-eaten wool blanket and a cracked bottle of water from his pack. He didn’t speak. Just handed them to me.
Another spasm hit her, longer this time. Her back bowed, tendons standing out in her neck. Her teeth were clenched so hard I heard them grind. The pain was escalating, moving from the localized burn of the wound into a systemic invasion.
“Look at me, Ari,” I pleaded, smoothing her sweat-damp hair back. I soaked a corner of the blanket in water and dabbed at her lips. “Stay with me. Squeeze my hand. Hard as you want.”
Her fingers convulsed around mine, a crushing grip born of agony. Her eyes were wide, unseeing, fixed on some internal horror. “Make it stop, Ronan. Please, make it stop.”
That plea, her voice shredded with suffering, almost broke me. Because I couldn’t. I remembered begging for the same thing in the dark, two years ago, and no one could stop it for me either.
“I can’t, baby,” I whispered, my own tears finally breaking free, tracking through the grime and blood on my face. “I’m so sorry. But I’m right here. You’re not alone. You hear me? You are not alone in this.”
I kept talking, a stream of low, constant nonsense. I told her about her stupid, beautiful rose-gold Camaro. I told her about the time she tried to bake me a birthday cake and set off the dorm fire alarm. I described the exact color of her eyes in the sun, the way her laugh sounded when she was genuinely surprised. I painted a picture of her, of us, of a life before the teeth and the fear, holding it up like a shield against the hell unfolding in her cells.
Hours bled together. The light through the filthy windows faded to a deep, charcoal grey. Her screams, when they came, were the worst part. They weren’t loud. They were gut-deep, guttural things that she tried to swallow, that turned into choked sobs. Each one was a knife in my chest.
Dean and Sam moved around us like ghosts, reinforcing the perimeter, speaking in hushed tones. They brought more water. They watched, their faces grim masks of helpless sympathy.
During a brief, terrifying lull where she was too exhausted to scream, just whimpering and shaking, River pushed forward.
Our fault. Our scent. They wanted what we love. We are the poison.
He was right. This was the true shape of the curse, the final, elegant cruelty. It wasn’t just being the monster. It was being the bait, the trigger, the reason for the trap. My love for her was the weakness Silas Vex had weaponized, and Cole had been the delivery system.
“She’s gonna hate me,” I whispered into the dark, to River, to myself. “When she comes out the other side of this, and she feels what’s inside her… she’s gonna hate what I brought into her life.”
River had no comfort to offer. Only a vast, echoing sorrow that mirrored my own.
Aria’s body suddenly went rigid again, a different kind of tension. A low, animal groan vibrated in her chest, a sound that didn’t belong to her. Her head thrashed side to side on the musty cushion.
“The bones,” Sam said from the doorway, his voice hushed. “It’s starting with the bones.”
I knew. I could almost feel the phantom memory in my own limbs—the deep, interior aching, the feeling of long bones feeling too tight, too long, like they were preparing to split.
Her hand in mine began to change. The delicate bones under my fingers seemed to shift, to thicken ever so slightly. Her knuckles popped. She screamed again, a raw, endless sound that filled the dusty lodge.
I held on tighter. I kept talking. I told her I loved her. I told her she was going to survive this. I promised her, over and over, a promise I had no right to make but made anyway, because it was all I had left to give.
The night was long, and her pain was a living thing in the room with us. But I held her hand. I wiped her brow. I breathed with her, through every gasp, every tortured scream.
I was her anchor in the storm of her own becoming, even as the waves threatened to pull us both under.