Page 1 of Ronen (Sweet Alps Legacy #1)

Chapter One

Ronen

My hand hovered over the light switch, as a sound that shouldn’t have been there prickled my hearing. Turning slowly, my eyes peered into the darkened stacks of the library, not seeing anything that looked out of place in the dim shadows.

The sound came again, the faintest swoosh against the hardwood floor, and I wished my nocturnal eyesight was nearly as good as my hearing was.

Despite being mostly nocturnal creatures, honey badgers didn’t have the greatest night vision.

They made up for it with extra-sensitive hearing and scent.

That and being complete ferocious little badasses.

It was that part of my nature that urged me to run straight into the stacks and confront whoever thought they could invade my space.

A soft hissing sound had the hairs all over my body standing on end, even as I moved into the darkness.

Heart pounding, sweat broke out across my body in a chill, though I didn’t understand why. Snakes didn’t scare me. Even in my human form, I was virtually immune to their venom, though my honey badger form handled it even better.

Shift, my mind urged, but something held me in my human skin. I didn’t know what it was, but I knew I shouldn’t–couldn’t–shift.

“Who’s there?” I demanded, coming to the end of the stack and stepping from between the shelves.

The snake moved faster than my brain had time to register, and I heard it rather than saw it slithering at a rapid pace in the shadows.

Its black body was barely more than a blob, before it wrapped itself around me, rearing its hooded head above my face.

Its mouth opened, showing rows of sharp fangs, dripping with venom.

My nostrils flared, and I swore I picked up a musky, foul scent in the air that hadn’t been there before, but it also may have just been part of my fucked up dream.

Shift! I screamed silently to my shifter side, calling on my badger, who refused to show himself.

The king cobra held me in a vice-like grip, trapping my arms to my sides with its thick body.

It was the biggest snake I had ever seen.

Its hooded head was massive, the body around me thicker than my forearm.

Clearly this wasn’t a normal snake but a shifter.

My head reared back as its head moved closer to mine, trying to evade it.

Its slitted, reptilian eyes held mine in almost a hypnotic trance.

Fear–my fear–surrounded me. My heartbeat thundered in my ears, drowning out any other sound. Sweat trickled down my temple, making my dark hair damp. Cotton filled my mouth, and all I could see were sharp fangs getting ever so closer.

It spit then, its venom splashing my face and droplets flying into my eyes. I cried out at the burning pain assaulting my eyes. I couldn’t see, between the pain and my eyes watering, but I felt its breath, felt it rearing back and readying itself for another attack .

Sharp fangs clamped onto the side of my neck, sinking into my tender flesh, and releasing its venom into my body. Slowly, it uncoiled its length from me, and my knees gave out. I fell to the floor in a heap, body convulsing, knowing I was going to die in the middle of the stacks.

With a strangled scream that echoed in my ears, I sprang up from the sound sleep I had been in. Heart pounding, I gasped for air, blinking the sweat from my burning eyes. Was the sting from my sweat, or some leftover part of my dream?

Hands shaking, I grabbed my phone, checking the time.

Just after midnight. Quickly I tried to type out a text to my cousin, Charlie.

Growing frustrated with my bungling fingers, I took a deep breath, letting it out slowly.

Three more times of that, and my heartbeat was somewhat back to normal, and my limbs were no longer trembling as hard.

Me: You busy?

If she was with a client, she might not answer me for hours, despite her shop closing at one a.m. Clients' pieces often ran over, or if Charlie got bored and she decided to take a last minute walk in, she sometimes was there well past closing. She had a habit of getting caught up in cleaning up after, and didn’t always remember to check her phone.

Since moving in with our elderly grandmothers, after our grandfather’s death last spring, she was doing better about keeping her phone close and not on silent all the time.

Our grandmothers, Mary and Maeve, were getting up there in years, and even though neither of them thought any of us should worry about them, we did it anyway.

Losing Grandpa Allen had been an unexpected blow, and I swear, it had aged both of my grandmothers.

Or maybe I realized just how old they both were now, and that they weren’t actually invincible like I had imagined them to be.

Now all of us grandkids made a concentrated effort to keep our phones on and to make sure to check them often.

Running a hand through my sweaty hair, I shivered as the night air hit my bare skin. Pulling the blankets up higher, I snuggled into the warmth of my bed, trying to settle my agitation from the dream.

It was the same dream I had been having for months now, in some variation or another.

It always involved a king cobra and me, not being able to shift.

As a honey badger shifter, snakes didn’t scare me, not even the biggest, most poisonous ones.

Their venom could do little to no damage to me, and in my shifted form I was an aggressive, ferocious fighter. Even with snakes much bigger than me.

But there was something in the dreams that had terror filling me. Some unshakable, unknown thing that was causing me to lose sleep from them.

Why couldn’t I shift in them?

And why the fuck was I dreaming about king cobras? To my knowledge, Sweet Alps had a few snake shifters–mostly rattlers–but certainly not any cobras. Having virtually the same dream, on repeat, was making me jumpy as fuck though.

And I didn’t do jumpy.

Charlie: It’s been a slow night. What’s up? Why are you awake, Ro?

Me: Bad dreams. Wanna work on the piece?

Charlie: You okay? And, is that even a question? Of course I do .

I ignored her question asking if I was okay.

My best friend didn’t need to know my bad dreams had been keeping me awake for weeks now.

Charlie would mean well, but she would inadvertently let it slip to one of our cousins, or her dads–my uncles–or, worse yet, the grandma M’s. No one, least of all me, needed that.

As the baby of the family–by barely a day–I was already at a disadvantage with my family, even though I was a more than capable grown man.

Me: Be there in twenty.

The urge to hop on my classic Harley Roadster was strong, but not even I was reckless enough to get my bike out in the middle of January in northern Cali. We’d been slammed with a winter storm just a few days ago, and the ground was covered in a blanket of white and ice.

Throwing on some sweats, I took a minute to run my fingers over a couple of the rubber ducks aligning my dresser in a straight line.

They were of various colors and some had on costumes, made to look like superheroes, or even other animals.

I wasn’t even sure why I kept them, or who kept leaving them on my Jeep.

Sure, it was a Jeep thing that had been around since before I was born, a way for other Jeep owners to acknowledge one another and to put a smile on someone’s face.

The idea was to pass them along when you encountered another Jeep.

Or to display them along your dashboard for others to see.

I did neither. Instead, I had them in a line on my dresser, where I could see them every day. They had started showing up about a year ago, and for a reason I couldn’t figure out, I kept them. The colorful pieces of rubber made me happy to look at and I liked starting my mornings seeing them .

Heading out to my garage, I started up my trusty Jeep Wrangler. Twenty minutes later, I was entering Charlie’s tattoo shop, the bell over the door announcing my arrival.

Eighties hair metal was blasting from the speakers, and Ezra, the other artist in the shop, nodded his head at me. Tossing out a “Sup?”, he went back to the client’s piece he was working on, not waiting for me to respond.

Making my way to the back to where Charlie’s workspace was, I pulled my shirt over my head before she had a chance to look up from her phone. When she did, she told me bluntly, “Ronen, you look like shit.”

Spreading myself on my stomach on her padded table, I flipped her off. She leaned over me, and I felt her eyes assessing my back, before she ran a finger down one side. “I’m gonna work on this part, adding more reds and purple.”

Nodding, I told her, “Do whatever. I just need to get out of my head for a little while.”

“Mmmm,” was her non-committal answer, as she snapped on a pair of clean gloves, cleaned the area, and got her gun and the ink ready. “Have you decided on the eye color yet?”

Rubbing my cheek against the padded table, I kept my body relaxed. “Not yet. It will probably be the last thing we do.”

The quiet hum of the tattoo gun instantly soothed me, and I felt myself start to relax for the first time since I had woken up.

The first bite of the needle piercing my skin was like a healing balm to my soul.

I let my mind drift to nothingness, as Charlie added color to the piece that took up the entirety of my back and some of my hip.

Because the design was so big, and the location of it, Charlie only worked on it a few hours at a time.

The initial outline had taken a couple of hours in the beginning, and she had refused to start the colored detailed work until I had healed.

She usually told me when we were done, as I could keep going for longer than she deemed safe.

But since she was the boss when it came to my tats, I didn’t argue with her. Much.