by Kathy Lyons
“Dunno. Five? Six? They’re professional and casual. Allows me to dress up or down easy.”
For some reason that honest answer tickled Josh’s funny bone even more. His grin widened as he pointed to his empty bowl. “I finished the bone broth. I’m feeling better now.”
As expected, the guy’s expression relaxed and his shoulders eased. He clearly took Josh’s well-being to heart and was pleased by the report.
“That’s good. Give it another fifteen minutes and then try some real soup. Vegetables, definitely. Meat if you can handle it.”
Josh nodded, though an assessment of his stomach told him that heavy foods were out for the moment. Instead, he nibbled on another saltine and waited for his opportunity to learn more about his very interesting captor. It came about three minutes later, after Nero had pulled out carpet spray to douse the area where the soup had spilled, and while they waited for the foaming cleaner to do its work.
“So was Mother your… um… actual mother?”
“What? No. She was a werewolf on my team.”
“Was she anyone’s mother?”
He shook his head. “She never had kids, but she was the only girl here. She used to point at garbage we’d leave lying around or stains that we never cleaned up, and she’d say, ‘Do I look like your mother? Clean up your shit or else.’”
Intrigued, Josh leaned forward. “Or else what?”
“That’s what we asked.” He waited a moment, his focus distant and his mouth curved in delight as he no doubt wandered through his memories. “She said, ‘Or else I’ll leave my shit where you live.’ And she did. Whenever we didn’t clean up after ourselves, she’d shit on our stuff. Real turds, real stinky. We’d lock our rooms, put away our stuff, but if someone left a mess, so did she.” He looked at the floor. “Her nose was really good, especially as a wolf. If you left a mess, it was pretty easy for her to tell who’d made it.” He looked up. “We learned to pick up after ourselves, but we called her Mother as revenge.”
“I suppose there are worse names.”
“Lots. And she had her softer moments, for sure. But mostly she was this firecracker of a woman who gave as good as she got.” He turned away, his movements heavy as he opened a closet and pulled out an upright vacuum cleaner. “I miss her. She… died last week.”
“How’d she go?”
Josh didn’t think he’d answer. Nero was silent as he plugged in the vacuum and sucked up the mostly dry cleaner. He was quick and efficient in his work, finishing up and putting everything away in silence. But when it was done, he crossed to a desktop computer on a nearby table. A few clicks later, he pulled up a picture of himself with four other grinning people at a summer barbecue.
“This was my team.” He pointed to faces. “Mother and her partner Pauly. Cream and Coffee.” He touched each face with a shaking finger, but his voice remained solid. “We got word of a demon eating ice fishers in northern Wisconsin. An easy run by our standards, since most demons are stupid, violent things. Like putting down a rabid dog. They’re dangerous but not that smart. Everything started as usual, and we almost had the thing licked.”
As he spoke, he clicked through other pictures of his team. The summer barbecue was over, and now Josh viewed Halloween costumes, then nap time on the couch while someone drew a fake mustache on Coffee. Cream apparently loved waffles, and then Pauly mugged for the camera from a mountain summit. One by one, the images clicked through until the screen abruptly changed. Instead of grinning faces, he saw black, wolf-shaped smears in a blast zone.
“The demon had some sort of plasma fire. It killed them all in an instant. The only reason I escaped was because I was in the energy state between wolf and man, and even then, it was a rough ride. One second we were doing our jobs, the next—” His voice choked off. He couldn’t even say the words, but then he didn’t have to. Image after image on the screen told the story. They were all dead. He wasn’t.
“And the demon?”
“Still in the water somewhere. It needs to recoup, recover, reform. We’re not exactly sure. We’re looking for it, but we haven’t been able to find it.” Then his gaze lifted to Josh. “I’m going to kill it. Soon as I’m done with you newbies, I’m going back there, and I’m going to blow that fucker into tiny orange chunks. And then I’m going to piss on every smoldering inch.”
Josh watched Nero’s face, seeing the fierce determination screaming through every cell in the man’s body. If this were a movie, he’d be the first one to applaud. But life wasn’t a movie, and the good guys didn’t always win. All he had to do was look at the ash outlines on the screen to know that. It grieved him to think that Nero had nearly become one of those spots on the dead ground. And if Nero didn’t have something more than fury in his arsenal, then he absolutely would be ash if he went up against the demon again.
That’s what pushed him to poke a man who was so wrapped up in his grief that he focused on pissing over a demon’s remains rather than the steps up to that glorious end.
“So, um, what are you going to do differently so that you can urinate in glory?”
He’d expected Nero to blink and come back to himself. Instead, the man’s expression became laser focused on Josh, and his words were so clear and distinct that Josh felt the impact of the sounds like tiny pebbles against his sternum.
“That’s where you come in. That’s why we disrupted all five of your lives. It was a huge risk, but we had to take it—”
“Who you trying to convince?” Josh challenged, but Nero rolled right over him.
“We need a way to protect ourselves against magical plasma that burns. We need you to….” He took a deep breath. “I need you to get me close enough to take this bastard out. He was easy pickings until the boom. If you can get me through that plasma burst, I’ll destroy the bastard.” Then he slammed a fist down on his thigh, taking out his ferocity on his own body. “I think it was a one-time boom, or at least it’ll take a while to recharge. If you can find a way to protect us from the fire, then we can finish it. We can end this nightmare forever and go back to how things should be.”
His words were coming hard and fast, and Josh wasn’t immune to the resonance of challenge in every word. Nero’s voice rang like a clarion call asking him to save the day, solve the problem, protect the heroes, and be all that he could be in the service of good. Every video game he’d ever loved had a similar beginning.
But this wasn’t a game. Josh couldn’t ditch everything in his life to do what Nero wanted. Even though Nero was as hot and inspiring as a call to action could be, Josh was a slow one to leap. Savannah said he had commitment issues, but either way, he couldn’t jump in. He looked at his hands, not sure what to say.
“I don’t know anything about magical plasma. Hell, I don’t know anything about magic.”
“We’ll teach you what we know. Gelpack said he’d help, and Wiz loves talking to anyone who will listen about what he can do and how.”
Silence hung heavy in the room. Eventually Josh looked up. He couldn’t keep staring at the floor, but when he connected with Nero’s gaze, he saw desperation. Like the man was consumed with the need for Josh to say yes, to take the red pill and step through the looking glass. One little yes and everything would be Wonderland. It was the same passion Josh had seen in Nero backstage before life had gone sideways. And it was a thousand times more intense now that Josh had seen those ash outlines.
Yet he still tried to wiggle out.
“I’m not Einstein. You don’t throw people into a lab and say, ‘I need this. Invent it.’”
“Try.”
No. It was on the tip of his tongue. The whole thing was too much, too fast. Hell no would be a better answer. He was a geek from the Midwest whose most exciting moment in life before today was letting go of the handrail on the Batman roller coaster at Six Flags. Even his greatest moment of glory at MoreCon hadn’t happened. It had been upstaged by these guys.
They’d turned him into a wolf, then thrown hi
m in a cage. He’d been poked with a cattle prod, met an alien, and been jerked off by the wolf version of G.I. Joe. This was crazy. And yet the moment he formed the word no, another word came through his lips.
“Yes. Okay, yes. I’ll give it a shot.”
Nero seemed to deflate before his eyes. He exhaled in relief and gratitude as he abruptly became normal-sized. There was no more verbal resonance urging Josh to enlist in the wolf army. Just a big guy with a hole in his heart whispering the words “Thank you. You won’t regret it.”
Sure he would. Because that was the way with Josh. He usually regretted every one of his passionate impulses. And this was the biggest one of all.
Chapter 9
THE BIOLOGIST died while Nero slept. Given the odds, having only one of his five recruits die was a huge win, but it didn’t feel that way. To him it was one more body added to the weight on his heart. Worse was what Gelpack did in an effort to help.
“You did what to his soul?”
They were in the morgue, and Dr. Wesley Barren’s wolf body had been pulled out of the refrigeration unit. He looked stiff and cold, his lush brown fur seeming flat against his body. According to the chart, his organs had stopped working one by one in rapid succession. It happened more often than Nero liked to think about. They guessed it occurred when the mind refused to accept the wolf body and chose death rather than to exist as an animal, but no one knew for sure.
“I tied his energy to his bones,” Gelpack said. “Provided his sternum does not break, he will remain here in this dimension.”
Nero stared at the alien as if he was… an alien. “But he’s dead.”
“But you have ways to make the body function. Pacemakers and artificial bones.”
“Yes,” he said as calmly as he could imagine. “But that’s when the patient is alive.”
“What is death but when the energy leaves the body? I have prevented that.”
“But… not….” Hell. This was why they so desperately needed a doctor. It was so Nero could look to the medical officer and order him to answer. “We don’t know how to animate a dead body.”
“Wiz spoke to me about necromancy. Perhaps he knows how to perform the task.”
“What! Since when?” Then he abruptly shook his head. “Don’t answer. I’ll talk to Wiz, but I’m pretty sure he was speaking hypothetically.” He hoped. Unless it really was possible…. He stared at the corpse and tried to imagine what it would be like to have his soul trapped in a frozen, dead body. “Is his soul conscious? Does he know what is happening?”
“I cannot answer that. Indeed, I am most anxious to ask him about the experience when he reanimates.”
Nero opened his mouth, but he hadn’t the foggiest idea what he wanted to say. To buy time, he looked back down at the file and noticed a detail that Gelpack wouldn’t care about, but for humans, it was pretty significant. “He’s a devout Catholic,” Nero said. “I’m pretty sure the Pope is against living as a zombie.”
“Who is the Pope? I do not understand.”
No kidding. And Nero didn’t know where to begin.
“Do you wish to break his sternum? That will release his soul and he will die as usual. Though I am confused. You said of all the recruits, you most wished this one to survive.”
He had. He did. They desperately needed medical expertise. “We don’t want zombie doctors,” he said. Except in the realm of the weird, was a zombie all that awful? Assuming he could still work and function as a normal person. “Will he be… the same?”
“He will be able to eat other foods, not just brains.”
“That’s not what I was asking!”
“You are angry. I have miscalculated.” Gelpack twisted the wolf body such that the sternum was facing upward. “You must break his chest. I do not have the physical strength for such a blow. A quick strike with your hand or a mallet should be effective.”
“No!” Nero recoiled, revolted by the idea of slamming his hand—or anything—down on the wolf’s chest.
“I believe there is a vise in the garage—”
Nero held up his hands. “Stop! Just… give me a minute.” So many things crowded into his brain. Ethical considerations, religious doctrine, even the financial commitment to keep a guy on ice with no idea if they could bring him back to the living. But if they could… wasn’t it worth the risk? Better zombie than dead?
He had no idea what Dr. Wesley Barren would want and no way to make this kind of ethical choice in the moment. Which meant his best option was to kick the decision up the chain of command. “Don’t break it yet. We’ll keep him here and maybe the captain will know what to do.” He’d never been more grateful to be a grunt.
With that, he pushed the body back into the unit and sealed it. He prayed the guy didn’t get lost in the paperwork. Ten years from now, would someone open the unit and say, “Who the hell is this?”
Meanwhile, Nero rubbed his forehead and tried to focus on something more productive. “How are the others?”
“All awake, human, and eating under the supervision of their partners. I—” Gelpack cut off his words. If Nero had to guess, he’d say the alien was frowning, but it was difficult to say on a Jell-O face. Sometimes the guy’s whole body rippled when he stood too close to an air-conditioning vent. “I believe you should see them yourself. I did not understand their reactions to becoming human again.”
Great. Why couldn’t anyone wake up human and be grateful they weren’t dead? That had been Nero’s reaction. But then his last memory had been of a wolf clamping down hard on his shoulder while his bones broke. Waking up alive had been a complete surprise. Waking up as a wolf had given him a badass feeling that had never fully disappeared.
“I’ll go check on them now.” He paused as he looked at the alien, pushing to express his thoughts in words that even an alien could understand. “I’m very, very grateful to you, Gelpack. I know that you’re the reason most of them survived.”
“I am the reason they all survived,” Gelpack said with no apparent emphasis or ego.
He sounded like it was simple fact, which flat-out terrified Nero. He still didn’t fully trust the alien, and yet four new members of Wulf, Inc. were completely indebted to him. Or five, if you counted the frozen doctor.
“Um, well, I’m grateful.”
“You are welcome. Unless there is anything else, I will go make notes now.”
“Yeah. Go ahead.” And what he wouldn’t give to get a close-up look at Gelpack’s notes. “I’ll go find the others.”
JOSH WOKE achy from a deep sleep and did what he always did. He reached for his phone. There was email and news to read, a couple of games he liked to play to wake his mind, and all the myriad ways a smartphone could distract him from the things he didn’t want to think about. He knew exactly what he was doing. Hell, he’d developed avoidance to an art form. He even had journal articles uploaded to his phone so that he could dive into science when his personal life got too stressful.
Except he didn’t have his phone. Nero hadn’t returned it, which left him staring at the utilitarian brown curtains over his window and listening to someone humming as they banged around the bedroom next door.
Werewolf. The word whispered through his mind, and he resolutely focused on something else. But the sound of ABBA being sung badly next door was just making the anger worse, so he got up and headed for the shower. His bedroom had an attached bathroom with toiletries. He could focus on that.
Which only worked until he was clean. But coming into the bedroom reminded him that he’d left his luggage back in the cage room. Cages and howling wolves intruded on his thoughts, not to mention the cattle prod–wielding alien. Anger boiled up, acidic in his throat, but he shoved it all back down. The emotions were too raw for him to face. Better to think about getting dressed.
He found sweats in the dresser. He pulled the pants on and prayed they stayed on his narrow hips. The T-shirt was loose, but comfortably so, and he distracted himself by studying the werewo
lf image on the front, complete with sparkly white canines and razor-sharp claws. Two days ago he would have sneered that the image was anthropomorphized to a silly degree. The wolf had human-like biceps, broad masculine shoulders, and a glint to his eyes. But now that he knew werewolves were fact, the image was unsettlingly real.
Werewolf.
Was that who he was now? A testosteroned-up werewolf who could rip people to shreds at will? The idea appealed as much as it revolted him. Who wouldn’t want to be a big, bad wolf? How many times as a kid had he wished he could huff and puff and blow people into the next county? Or rip them to shreds like Wolverine did? And yet, as he’d grown older, he’d joined the ranks of people who made fun of bulked-up meatheads. He’d never been a Thor fan. He preferred Iron Man, the smartass geek who built a supersuit so he could fly and blow up the baddies.
He could not be like this souped-up image on the shirt. And yet as he looked at the werewolf in the mirror, he wondered how it would feel to be one of these people. Maybe he’d actually fit inside these sweats instead of tying the waist knot super tight like a kid wearing his daddy’s pants. Or maybe his big brother’s pants. His older brother, Bruce, would probably brag that the sweats were tight on him. Asshole.
Sibling rivalry was a familiar anger, and Josh hung on to that. He aimed his emotions at the imagined picture of his brother preening about in all his muscled firefighter glory. What an ass! He’d definitely fit in these sweats, which made Josh yank them off and throw them back into the dresser. He’d wear his jeans from last night. The pair that had been at his knees while Nero had jerked him off.
He stilled in the act of zipping up his fly while more emotions buffeted him. The image of Bruce wasn’t enough to hold his attention. Instead, his mind was caught by memories of Nero wrapping his big arms around Josh. He had thick, strong thighs that had cradled Josh’s hips. And his hand had felt like heaven as it pumped his dick.
Josh started to sweat. He needed to burn off these thoughts with a video game or internet research. Hell, even the news would work. He needed his phone. Which meant he needed to get back to the cage room. His stuff was there. And he needed to find out how Stratos and the other wolves were doing.