BLACKTOP MOON

CHAPTER 7: SOMETHING OUT OF THE ORDINARY

I did not sleep that night either, which was starting to become a pattern, but this time it was not paranoia keeping me awake, it was the sheer impossibility of what Mabel had told me sitting on my chest like a stone I could not shift no matter how many times I turned it over.

Curses were not real. Bloodlines were not real. And yet I had watched a man's face rearrange itself into a wolf's the day before, and I had felt Ronan's hand burn warm against my skin like there was a furnace running under it, and somewhere in the last seventy two hours the word impossible had quietly stopped meaning anything useful to me at all.

Around two in the morning I gave up on sleep entirely and went looking for the garage, because working with my hands was the only thing that had ever made grief bearable, and grief was the only emotion currently simple enough for me to hold onto without it splintering into something bigger and stranger.

Ronan was already there.

He sat on an overturned crate near a half stripped engine, jacket off, sleeves pushed up, forearms resting on his knees, staring at nothing in particular with the kind of stillness that told me he had not slept either. A single work light hung above him, throwing his face half into shadow, and he looked up when I came in, something in his expression easing slightly, like my presence answered a question he had not asked out loud.

Couldn't sleep either, I said, more statement than question.

Haven't slept right in eight months, he said. Since your brother came through those gates asking questions I couldn't answer honestly, and every night since I've replayed exactly which answers I should have given him instead.

I sat down across from him on an empty toolbox, close enough to talk quietly, far enough that I could pretend the distance between us meant something more than proximity. Tell me about him, I said. Not the file version. The real one. The one you actually knew.

Ronan was quiet for a long moment, turning a wrench over in his hands without using it for anything, like the motion itself was the only thing keeping him steady enough to speak. He was funny, he said finally. Funnier than he had any right to be given what he'd already found out by the time he got here. Kept making jokes right up until the moment things got serious, like humor was armor he could put on faster than anything else he owned.

That sounds like him, I said, throat tight enough that the words came out rough.

He asked about you constantly, Ronan said. Worried about what would happen if he didn't come back and you went looking for him anyway, said you were too stubborn to leave anything alone once you decided it mattered. Ronan's eyes came up to meet mine, steady, guilty in a way that made my stomach drop straight through the concrete floor. He was right to worry.

I wanted to be angry at that, wanted the old familiar fury to rise up and give me something solid to stand on the way it had for months, but what came instead was quieter and worse, a grief that had room now for more than just loss, room for the terrifying possibility that somebody here had actually cared about my brother instead of just using him for whatever the curse needed.

Something moved in the shadows near the garage bay door, quick, low to the ground, and every instinct Danny ever drilled into me went taut at once, old habits snapping back online before conscious thought caught up. Ronan was on his feet before I finished registering the movement, body angled between me and the door in a single fluid motion, posture shifting into something coiled and ready that had nothing casual left in it.

Stay behind me, he said, voice dropped into a register I had not heard from him before, low and rough at the edges, and the shape in the shadows resolved into eyes, low and yellow and watching us with a patience that made my skin crawl, definitely not human, definitely not one of Ronan's people either, because every muscle in his body had gone rigid with a kind of alertness reserved strictly for enemies.

We're not alone out here, he said quietly, not taking his eyes off the door. And whatever that is, it isn't Ashborn.