Chapter 2: Ro
The phone was a live wire in her hand. Dean’s voice, tinny and tense, crackled through. “Situation? What kind of situation? Aria, talk to me.”
Ronan’s world narrowed to the device at her ear. No. No, no, no. His panic was a metallic flood in his mouth, sharper than the pain in his side. Every instinct screamed to bolt, but bolting would confirm everything. Instead, he lurched forward, a pained, stumbling movement. He didn’t growl. He pleaded. A high, frantic whine tore from his throat as he shoved his head against her knee, trying to push the hand holding the phone away.
Aria staggered, her eyes wide and fixed on him. She understood the panic, but she misread its source. “It’s outside,” she said into the phone, her voice low and tight. She put a hand on his head, not to pet him, but to hold him still. Her touch was electric and awful. “The thing that was at the door. It’s still in the parking lot, I think. It went after some newcomers.”
“What thing?” Dean’s voice hardened. “Aria, descriptions. Now.”
Ronan pressed harder, nosing desperately at her wrist, her stomach, anything to disrupt the connection. His mind raced, uselessly forming words his muzzle couldn’t shape. Don’t tell him. Please, Ari, just hang up. We run. We hide. Don’t say it.
“I don’t know for sure,” she said, and Ronan felt a spike of desperate hope. It died instantly as she continued, her gaze sweeping over him, clinical and assessing. “Animalistic. Strong. Tried the door and the wall. It… it smelled wrong, Dean. Like rot and wet dog. But… different.”
She was describing a skinwalker. She was handing Dean the blueprint.
“Skinwalker,” Dean concluded, his voice grim. “Damn it. Okay. Are you barricaded? Silver won’t cut it. You need to get to the car. Now.”
“I can’t,” she said, and her fingers tangled in the scruff of Ronan’s neck. The gesture was possessive. Protective. “I’ve got the dog with me. He’s hurt. He can’t run.”
“The dog?” Dean’s incredulity was palpable. “Aria, forget the damn dog! Get your ass to the Impala and get out of there. We’re two hours out. Sam’s already mapping your route.”
Two hours. The number was a death sentence. In two hours, Dean would be here. Dean would look at him with those hunter’s eyes, and it would be over. Ronan’s whines turned into a low, continuous rumble of distress. He pawed at her leg, his claws catching on the fabric of her sleep shorts.
“I’m not leaving him!” The words burst from her, fiercer than she probably intended. She took a sharp breath, controlling herself. “Dean, listen. This dog… he protected me. He challenged it. He stood between me and the door.”
The line was silent for a beat too long. Ronan could picture Dean’s face, the slow, dangerous narrowing of his eyes. “Dogs don’t challenge skinwalkers, Aria,” he said, each word deliberate. “They run. They piss themselves and they run. What aren’t you telling me?”
This was it. The cliff’s edge. Ronan saw the conflict warring on her face—the hunter versus the girl who’d just had her universe cracked open. He did the only thing he could think of. He collapsed.
It wasn’t entirely an act. The stress and the pain merged into a wave of genuine dizziness. He let his legs buckle, dropping to the floor with a heavy thud, letting out a sharp yelp as his injured side hit the ground. He lay there, panting, his eyes rolling back to show the whites, a picture of pathetic, failing agony.
“River!” Aria cried, the phone forgotten for a second. She dropped to her knees beside him, her hands fluttering over the bandage. “Hey, stay with me. It’s okay.”
“Aria! What was that?” Dean barked through the phone.
“It’s the dog, he’s crashing,” she said, her voice fraying at the edges. Her fingers probed the bandage, came away dry. The wound was holding. She paused, her hands stilling on his fur. She looked from his panting mouth to his half-lidded eyes. He was watching her, pleading in every line of his body.
He was begging her to shut up. To stop.
And she heard him.
“Dean, I have to go,” she said, her voice suddenly flat. “I have to stabilize him. The thing is gone for now. I’m safe. I’m locked in.”
“Do not hang up on me, Aria Reyes.”
“I’ll call you back in ten. I promise.” She didn’t wait for a reply. Her thumb found the button and ended the call. The sudden silence was deafening.
She slumped back, sitting on the carpet, her back against the bed. The phone clattered to the floor beside her. For a long moment, she just stared at Ronan. The only sound was their breathing—his ragged, hers shaky and controlled.
“You’re not crashing,” she stated, her voice hollow.
Ronan held his position, the vulnerable belly-up pose, but he stopped the exaggerated panting. He just looked at her.
“You were trying to get me to hang up.” It wasn’t a question. “You understand every word we’re saying.”
He slowly, carefully, righted himself, wincing at the real pain the movement caused. He sat before her, head lowered. A nod. One slow, deliberate dip of his muzzle.
Aria brought her knees up to her chest, wrapping her arms around them. She looked small, swallowed by the too-large band t-shirt. “You recognized the bracelet.”
Another nod.
She pressed her forehead to her knees. A single, silent sob shook her shoulders. When she looked up, her green eyes were glassy but dry, burning with a ferocious intensity. “Ronan. If that’s you… you blink twice.”
He didn’t hesitate. He closed his eyes. One. He opened them. Two.
The air left her lungs in a whoosh. She reeled back as if struck. All the color that had returned to her face drained away again, leaving her paper-white. “Oh, god.” She scrambled backward until her back hit the dresser, putting the entire width of the room between them. The confusion was gone, vaporized by the terrifying, confirmed truth. “It’s really you.”
He wanted to close the distance. He wanted to curl around her and absorb her shock. But he stayed where he was, a statue of guilt and fur.
“How?” The word was a razor. “Why? For two years, Ronan. We looked everywhere. We thought you were dead. We thought you were gone.”
He had no way to answer. He just looked at her, all his grief and shame screaming from his eyes.
She processed it in visible, painful waves. The horror. The betrayal. Then, the dawning, awful comprehension. Her gaze snapped to the door, to the splintered wood. “The thing outside. It’s like you.”
A solemn nod.
“It’s why you were hurt. You were fighting it.”
Another nod.
Her mind, that brilliant, hunting machine, was connecting dots at lightning speed. “And you don’t want Dean to know.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “Because he’ll kill you.”
Ronan lowered his head until his chin touched the shower curtain. It was the most profound affirmation he could give.
The muffled sound of a car engine starting in the parking lot broke the spell. Then a shout, cut off abruptly. A door slammed.
The other one. It was still here. And it was hunting.
Aria was on her feet in an instant, the girl receding, the hunter taking full command. The emotional cataclysm was shoved into a locked box. She grabbed her duffel, upending it onto the bed. Salt. Iron. Silver knife. Her pistol.
“Can you fight?” she asked, not looking at him. Her voice was all business.
Ronan pushed himself up. He tested his weight on his injured leg. It held, shaky but functional. He gave a short, sharp bark.
“Okay.” She grabbed a fresh shirt and yanked it on over her band tee, then shoved her feet into her boots, not bothering to lace them. “We can’t stay here. It’ll come back, and next time it’ll bring the wall down.” She looked at him, and for a second, the mask slipped. “Can you… change? Would that help?”
He shook his head violently. The shift took time and energy he didn’t have. It would leave him vulnerable, naked, and human in a fight where teeth and speed were the only currency. And worse, it would show her the full truth—the mechanics of his monstrosity.
“Fine. We go to the car. My car.” She moved to the window, peering through a corner of the filthy pane. “Clear. You ready?”
He nudged her discarded lavender cardigan with his nose. It was still stained with his blood. She understood, snatching it up and holding it out. He took the fabric gingerly in his teeth.
“Good thinking,” she muttered. She paused at the door, her hand on the ruined knob. Her eyes found his. The storm was still in them, but it was channeled now, focused into a single, white-hot point. “We’re not done talking about this.”
He knew they weren’t. He also knew that if they survived the next ten minutes, that conversation might destroy him more completely than any silver blade.
She yanked the door open.
The parking lot was a pool of ink, the broken neon offering no light. The cold night air hit them, carrying the coppery scent of fresh blood. From the far end of the motel, near room eleven, a dark shape was hunched over something lumpy and still.
The shape lifted its head.
It was vaguely canine, but wrong. Its proportions were off, legs too long, spine twisted. Patches of fur were missing, revealing slick, grayish skin beneath. Its eyes reflected the distant security light like dirty pennies.
It saw them.
With a wet snarl, it abandoned its prey and began to lope toward them, its movement a spidery, disjointed gallop.
“Go!” Aria yelled, sprinting for the Camaro, fumbling for her keys.
Ronan ran beside her, every step a jolt of fire. He could hear the thing gaining, its breath a rhythmic, ragged huff. He glanced back. It was twenty feet away, saliva stringing from its jagged teeth.
Aria hit the key fob. The Camaro chirped, its lights flashing. She wrenched the driver’s door open. “Get in!”
Ronan leapt, hurling himself over her and into the passenger seat in a chaotic scramble of limbs. Aria dove in after him, slamming the door shut just as a heavy weight thudded against the window.
The skinwalker pressed its distorted face against the glass, its muzzle smearing dark fluid. It snarled, the sound vibrating through the metal of the door.
Aria didn’t scream. She shoved the key in the ignition. The engine roared to life. “Seatbelt, you idiot,” she gasped, slamming the car into reverse.
She stomped on the gas. The Camaro shot backward, throwing Ronan against the dashboard. The creature was flung aside, rolling across the asphalt with a yelp of outrage. Aria cranked the wheel, tires squealing, and jammed the gear into drive. They fishtailed forward, headlights sweeping across the motel, illuminating the grisly scene outside room eleven for a horrible second before she aimed for the road.
She didn’t look back. She just drove, her knuckles white on the wheel, her breathing coming in short, sharp gasps. Ronan huddled on the seat, the cardigan still in his mouth, watching her profile in the intermittent glow of passing streetlights.
After five miles of silent, reckless speed, she finally spoke, her voice raw.
“My phone’s back in the room. Dean’s going to lose his entire mind.” She swallowed hard. “And you… you have a lot of explaining to do.”
Ronan rested his head on the center console, close to her hand on the gear shift. He didn’t have the words. He only had the truth, heavy and terrible between them, racing down the dark highway with a monster at their backs and an even more terrifying reunion looming ahead.
The truth sat between them like a third passenger, a suffocating silence punctuated only by the hum of the Camaro’s tires on asphalt. Aria stared straight ahead, her hands at ten and two, but her eyes kept flicking to the dark shape huddled on the passenger seat. Every few seconds, a tiny tremor would run through her bottom lip before she clenched her jaw against it.
“You need to tell me what’s happening,” she finally said, her voice stripped bare. “That thing back there. Why is it after you?”
Ronan lifted his head. He dropped the bloody cardigan onto the floor mat. He couldn’t speak, but he could communicate. He shifted his weight, wincing, and deliberately faced her. He held up his right front paw, then tapped it once against the dashboard.
First.
A confused frown knit her brows. “First? First what?”
He huffed in frustration, a plume of breath clouding the window. He needed her to understand. The stakes were too high now. He lifted the same paw again, then used his nose to point out the window at the dark, passing forest. He made a low, guttural sound in his throat, trying to mimic a snarl, then tapped the dashboard again.
First… one of them. Out there. Me.
“Another skinwalker?” she guessed, her gaze sharpening. “You fought another one?”
Yes. He nodded, a sharp dip of his muzzle.
“When?” Her voice was all hunter now, seeking tactical intel. “Tonight?”
No. He shook his head. He lifted his paw, tapping it three times against the seat. Then he pointed a single claw at his bandaged side.
Aria’s eyes went to the white gauze, already spotting with fresh red. “Three days ago,” she whispered. “That’s when you got this.” Her knuckles whitened on the wheel. “You killed it.”
The statement hung in the air. Ronan didn’t move. He didn’t nod or shake his head. He just looked at her, his blue-gold eyes holding a depth of weary horror that no dog should possess.
She understood. “You didn’t want to.” It wasn’t a question.
A low whine escaped him, full of remorse and exhaustion. He laid his head back down on the console, his snout inches from her clenched hand on the gear shift.
“But you did,” she pressed, needing the puzzle pieces. “Why? Was it defending territory? Were you… in its way?”
Ronan closed his eyes. The memory was a film reel of gnashing teeth and snapping pine branches. It hadn’t been about territory, not really. It had been about hierarchy. The old alpha, a twisted creature who went by the name Klyde, had ruled his patch of woods through fear and rot. He’d seen Ronan not as an intruder, but as fresh, young meat to be broken or consumed. Ronan had just wanted to be left alone, to vanish into the trees and starve in peace. The fight had been forced upon him.
It had been ugly, desperate. More a prolonged, gruesome brawl than a clean hunt. And in the end, with Klyde’s neck under his jaws and a primal scream echoing in his skull that wasn't entirely his own, Ronan had made a choice. To live.
When he’d ripped out the alpha’s throat, something had passed into him. A cold, heavy awareness of the other twisted lives skulking in the territory’s shadows. They’d felt the shift. They’d known. And they’d either submitted or scattered.
All except one.
“The one back at the motel,” Aria said slowly, piecing it together. “It was part of his… pack.”
Ronan nodded, opening his eyes. He raised his head and gave one definitive, slow nod.
“And it wants you dead because you killed its alpha. Because you’re the alpha now.” Her voice was flat with the awful logic of it. “And you don’t want it.”
A violent shake of his head. No. He wanted none of it. Not the title, not the poisonous respect, not the feral, mangled creatures who now looked to him for direction. He just wanted to stop being hungry. He wanted to stop being this.
He wanted her to look at him and not see a monster.
He watched her absorb it all—the involuntary coup, the target on his back, the pathetic reality of his cursed existence. Her expression cycled through horror, pity, and a swift, protective anger. “Okay,” she breathed out, a plan solidifying behind her eyes. “Okay. So it’s persistent. It’ll keep coming. We can’t just outrun it. We need to lose it, or…”
She trailed off. The alternative was unspoken. They needed to kill it.
A brutal, scraping thud slammed against the rear driver’s-side door.
The Camaro swerved violently. Aria swore, fighting the wheel. Ronan was thrown against the door, a sharp spike of agony blooming from his wound. In the side mirror, a distorted shadow clung to the car, clawed fingers digging into the window seam.
“It’s on the car!” Aria yelled, her foot slamming the accelerator.
The engine roared. The thing outside shrieked, a nails-on-chalkboard sound of rage. Another impact, this time on the roof. The metal above their heads dented inward with a sickening crump.
Ronan’s world narrowed to the pounding above, the smell of Aria’s fear-sweat, and the screaming need in his own marrow. He couldn’t fight like this. He was too slow, too injured, too canine in this shape. They were a steel coffin on wheels.
He looked at Aria, her face a mask of fierce concentration as she tried to swerve the creature off. He saw the silver knife glinting in the well between the seats. Useless to him now.
A choice crystallized, desperate and clear.
He threw himself into the footwell of the passenger seat, a cramped, dark space reeking of old fries and gasoline. The shifting process wasn’t graceful. It was a bone-breaking, tendon-snapping realignment that felt like being turned inside out and sandblasted.
Aria heard the wet, crunching pops over the road noise. “Ronan? What are you—?”
A guttural, human scream tore from the footwell, raw with pain. The sound of her name in a voice she hadn’t heard in two years, cracked and broken.
“Oh god,” she whispered, her eyes darting from the road to the convulsing shape curled beneath the dashboard.
The thing on the roof paused, intrigued by the new, human sounds of distress. It began to tear at the metal, peeling it back like a tin can.
Ronan’s body unfolded. The fur receded, melting into skin. His limbs lengthened, joints realigning with sickening clicks. The blue of his human eyes bled back in, erasing the gold. He was naked, shivering, and slick with a cold sweat, curled in the impossibly small space. The bandage on his side was gone, revealing a thick, sutured gash across his ribs.
He looked up at her, his black hair plastered to his forehead. His face was the one she’d kissed, the one she’d mourned, now etched with a pain that went far deeper than the wound. He was eighteen and looked a thousand years old.
“Ari,” he croaked, the word a confession and a apology.
She stared, her breath caught in her throat. The car wavered, drifting toward the shoulder. The creature on the roof shrieked in triumph, its claws finally breaking through.
“Keys,” Ronan gasped, his voice rough from disuse. He uncoiled, human hands bracing against the dashboard. “Now!”
The command, so familiar yet so alien, snapped her into motion. She fumbled the keys from the ignition, tossing them to him just as a clawed, bony hand smashed through the peeled-back roof, grabbing for her hair.
Ronan moved. He didn’t grab the silver knife. He shoved Aria down toward the wheel, covering her body with his own. The claws slashed through the air where her head had been, catching his bare back instead.
Four lines of fire scorched across his shoulder blades. He shouted, but didn’t flinch away. He reached up, through the torn metal, and his hands found not fur, but a wrist.
Human hands. Against a monster’s limb.
He hauled downward with every ounce of strength he had left, fueled by a new, alpha-borne fury he despised. The creature, caught off-balance, was yanked partway through the hole. Its grotesque face, all yellowed teeth and milky eyes, snarled inches from Ronan’s.
“You don’t touch her,” Ronan growled, his voice thick with a power that wasn’t entirely his own.
He let go of the wrist. Before the thing could retreat, he grabbed the silver knife from the console. He didn’t stab. He slammed the hilt into its gaping mouth, shattering teeth.
The creature recoiled with a howl, dislodging itself from the roof. It tumbled over the back of the speeding car and hit the pavement, rolling in a cloud of sparks and torn flesh.
Ronan collapsed back into the passenger seat, breathing ragged, blood sheeting down his back. The cold night air rushed through the torn roof. He looked at Aria, who was pushing herself up from under him, her green eyes wide with shock and a dawning, terrible understanding.
He was here. He was human. And he was bleeding out on her rose gold leather seats.
“The wheel,” he panted, nodding toward it. The Camaro was drifting, aimless.
She scrambled back into position, grabbing the wheel and steadying their course. Her eyes stayed on him, stealing glances between the road and the naked, wounded boy beside her. The boy who was, and was not, her Ronan.
He watched the empty road behind them in the side mirror, waiting for the twisted shape to reappear. It would. It would keep coming. Because he was the alpha, and it wanted the crown it thought he’d stolen.
And now Aria was locked in the car with him, caught in the middle of a war he never wanted, racing toward a brother who would see only the monster, not the boy trying to hold it back.