In the midst of a world wide pandemic, three best friends decide that they'll break the quarantine just once because they missed one another. After all, nothing bad could happen in just one night? All they wanted to do was hang out, maybe binge a sh...
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Ronald was flipped over someone's shoulder. He let out a long groan from the pain in his back and stared up at whoever the dude was that pinned him down.
"That hurts." Ronald huffs out as he pulls himself up in a sitting position. He looked over at Gerard who was just watching him get his ass beat. He wasn't able to get any information from his friends, so Allison said she'd tell him what was going on as soon as he was free. But Ronald felt as though he'd never be free from this intense training.
"The pain reminds you that you're human." Gerard says calmly as he approaches him, "You need to get better faster."
Ronald rubbed his back, "I'm trying."
"Not hard enough."
Ronald wanted to cry because this was going to be too much. He didn't know what he got into, or what he was basically forced into. He wiped his mouth when he noticed Chris and Allison walking down the stairs to the basement.
"You said you wanted me to bring him along." Chris says calmly to his father, "I've come to get him."
"Alright. Ronald, go."
Ronald was happy to get the hell out of that basement because he felt like he didn't even have friends. He was barely allowed out now because the second he was done with class, Gerard was bringing him home to train. Which hurt. This training hurt. A lot.
Allison gave him a small reassuring smile since she could see the small blotches of bruises on his back from under his tank top. Chris and Allison waited for Ronald to dress appropriately to go out of the house. Ronald looked at himself in the mirror without his shirt on at all the bruises. He looked like he was being abused. And it could look like abuse.
Ronald was dressed and followed Allison and Chris to the hospital. He had paid one of the workers to let them look at the bodies. Ronald wasn't exactly thrilled but he knew he needed to play along with everything.
"Hmm." Chris read the tag on the foot, "This one, Sean. Sean was killed by this thing Gerard says is a kind of shapeshifter. It hasn't been around for centuries."
Ronald looks at the body under the blanket and remembers the look of the kanima, "The thing you shot outside the club the other night."
"South American legend we know of calls it the kanima." He waited for a response from the two teens but they only nodded in understanding. So he continued, "This one, Jessica. She was smothered to death after giving birth. The police think it was done by someone else. We think it's a person who's controlling this other shapeshifter. That means two killers, Allison, Ronald. One human, one not. You know, the question I had after Gerard first told me about our family- 'why us'? He quoted me Winston Churchill. 'The price of greatness is responsibility'. Personally, I think it's more about knowledge. What we know, the truth, we know about the world, that makes us responsible, for a young couple, their newborn daughter, anyone that doesn't have the power to defend themselves. Are you starting to get it?"
