by Kathy Lyons
“Amazing. Relaxed. Goofy—”
“About becoming a werewolf.”
Josh’s face scrunched up. “It’s too soon for me to feel anything. I don’t know what it is yet.”
“You don’t have to know it before you have feelings about it. When I first changed, I felt like power incarnate. The wolves I was with encouraged me to feed that power with hunger and lust. Now that was an orgy.” And a feast, but he didn’t like thinking about that part. It wasn’t his proudest moment, but then he’d been seventeen, angry, and had contracted the lycanthropy virus. That was a recipe for excess of the worst kinds.
“Sounds like a story. Tell me more.”
Nero shook his head. “We’re supposed to be talking about you.”
“Well, I don’t have feelings until I have things to compare them to. So tell me your conversion story, and I’ll tell you if that matches mine.” At Nero’s doubtful look, Josh threw up his hands. “You can emphasize your feelings, and I’ll say yay or nay if that matches mine.”
It was a solid way to get to the point, but Nero didn’t like talking about his wolf beginnings, mostly because he didn’t like thinking about the kid he’d been. It was like looking at the before pictures of a renovation project. Here was the house in all its disgusting, broken-down glory. And here is the home now that’s got a solid foundation, a good roof, and some truly exceptional plumbing. Why look at the before picture? Why not stay with the now and maybe consider the future? The past belonged in the past.
But part of the protocol that he’d written was to listen and follow the new recruit’s lead. He could hardly discard his own plan of action just because it made him uncomfortable.
“Fine,” he said with a disgruntled frown. “But I’m not doing it naked.” If he had to follow professional protocol, then he for damn sure was going to do it dressed.
Josh sighed. “If you must.” Then he stretched his hands over his head with a grin. “But don’t expect me to hide all this glory from you. I mean to tempt you back to bed.”
Of course he did. And of course it was a serious temptation. “So you know, werewolves have above average hearing, even in their human form. Everyone on this floor probably knows what we were doing.”
Josh’s eyes widened at that, and no wonder. The idea made Nero squirm too. He gave it even odds that Captain M was going to have a serious conversation with him about trainer/trainee professional distance. But then again, if she had been against it, she likely would have stopped him long before they got to afterglow. Josh had been the one to come on to him, and according to the protocol, the trainee was king (or queen) as they worked out their new identity.
Meanwhile, Josh pulled his hands back to his sides and then sat more upright on the bed. He didn’t cover up, but he wasn’t flaunting himself anymore either. Nero pulled on sweats, sat down on his desk chair, and stretched his bare feet out on the bed to come within inches of Josh. He ached to touch the man—even in so small a way—but he held himself back. He wanted to leave the possibility open and allow Josh the choice of whether they touched again or not.
“I grew up in Florida,” he said. “First in Miami, but after my mom ODed, my sister and I were sent to my grandparents in Jacksonville.”
“Whoa.” Josh sat fully upright. “That’s quite a beginning. How old were you?”
“Nine. My sister was six. It made for a rocky start, but my grandparents did the best they could. I knew a lot of people who had it worse.”
“And there are starving kids in Africa. Doesn’t make your experience any better or less painful.” Josh stretched out a hand and squeezed Nero’s ankle, and damn if that didn’t make Nero’s whole body warm. “I’m sorry.”
Nero smiled, taking a moment to feel the heat of Josh’s hand and the warmth of his gaze. Then he had to force himself to keep talking or get lost in the sweetness of the moment. “My teen years were awful. Gramps and I always fought, and Gram didn’t know what to do with me. She had her hands full with my sister, who went through more phases than the moon.” He arched a brow at Josh to show him that he could make moon jokes too. Josh quirked a brow at him but stayed focused on the story.
“What phases?”
“Goth one day, preppie the next. Punk, pink, retro, and I don’t even know what. Gram said she was searching for her own identity, but I thought she was trying to drive us all crazy.”
“This her?” Josh grabbed the one family picture he had in the room. All the others were of his team, but there, half-forgotten on a stack of books, was a framed photo of everyone at his last football game. Gramps and Gran looked as usual—like they belonged in the fifties—and his little sister, Rachel, had been in her studious phase, complete with fake glasses and a high bun. It hadn’t lasted more than a couple of weeks, but the persona had gotten her through midterm exams, and so he supposed it had served its purpose. Anyway, he stood in the middle with a big grin as he looked at his cheerleader girlfriend, who was taking the picture. She’d dumped him right before Christmas break, but he’d had fun with her before then. So that made this one photo the frozen moment when everything had been good—or at least, it had seemed so—until everything went bad.
“That was a good day,” he said. He’d lost his virginity that evening, so honestly, it had been a great day.
“What are they doing now? Do they know that you’re… that you….”
“She’s just started in Miami as a forensic analyst.”
“Cool! Real-life CSI.”
“And no, they don’t know.”
Josh nodded as if he expected that. “What do you tell them?”
He swallowed. “They think I’m in jail for murder.”
To his credit, Josh didn’t even flinch, but he did take a moment before he quipped, “Well, that’s not what I expected you to say. Care to elaborate?”
Not really, but he did it anyway. “It was right after high school graduation. We all went down to Miami to have fun on the beach. The police told my family that I killed my best friend in a bar fight and am now in a special rehabilitation program oriented at teens.” He shrugged, though the movement was forced. “That was ten years ago.”
“So what really happened?”
It was gratifying that Josh didn’t seem to have any doubts that the official version wasn’t the truth. Nero wished he had the same faith. “We got into a bar fight with werewolves. He was killed, I was bitten, and then….” He shook his head.
“Orgy?”
He shook his head. “I remember burning up, like waves of heat inside and out. I think I went rampaging as a wolf with their pack, but I don’t remember much of it.” Thank God. “I woke up hungry somewhere in the Everglades. We ate, had sex, and ate some more. And then Daryl’s team showed up.”
Josh nodded as he became more animated. “I read that case file, but it didn’t say much. The team stalked and killed most of a group of lycanthropes. It listed three new recruits, and you were one of them. That’s it.”
“That’s because there was nothing else to say. We were given the choice: join up or die. I joined up, as did Raoul and Vanessa. Raoul tapped out as soon as he proved he had control. He married into one of the southern werewolf packs and is doing great. Vanessa didn’t handle things as well.”
“Couldn’t give up the… taste? The report said that most of the pack had to be put down because they’d never live without blood. Those were the exact words: ‘Never live without blood.’”
He knew. He’d read the file. “That’s a known problem with the lycanthropy virus. There’s nothing like the taste of blood. It’s like life on our tongues, and….” He shook his head. “Sometimes we become addicted.” He constantly watched himself for that need. The good news was that demon blood tasted nothing like human, so he and his team specialized in the nonhuman problems. Or they had.
“Was that Vanessa’s problem?”
“No. She had the other problem.” The same one that sometimes haunted him. “What she did—what we did—befo
re we were stopped….” His gaze canted away until he was looking out at fluffy white snowflakes drifting lazily down. “I was lucky. I don’t remember much beyond flashes.” Blood. Screams. The taste of raw flesh. “She remembered it all, and she couldn’t live with it.”
“That bad?”
“Yeah.” His gaze went back to Josh where he sat with a serious expression. “She killed herself a year later.” Another body in the lousy human-to-werewolf transition statistic. “It’s something to remember when you meet a virus werewolf. We all have an ugly history behind us. I was fortunate enough not to remember it.”
“Probably not something you want to tell Grams and Gramps, huh?”
Nero’s lips curved up. “Yeah, probably not.”
“But don’t you want to tell them something? They probably think you’re a psycho felon or something.”
“I am a psycho felon as far as the world is concerned. I pled guilty to a judge in on the woo-woo secret and was sent to the frozen tundra known as Maine. I can’t tell them the truth, and I sure as hell can’t explain away the body count from the bar fight.”
“But you could tell them you’re alive. That you’re doing well.”
“And then what? Meet them for coffee? Share Thanksgiving dinner with them?”
“Yes. Why not?”
“Ask me that again after your first home visit.” His expression softened. “This secret is hard to keep. It’s easier to let them think I’m behind bars somewhere.”
Josh snorted. “Easier on you, maybe. Look, my dad’s an ass, but I still can’t let him think I’m dead. And I like my mother—most times—so don’t think I’m going the prison route.” He flashed a mischievous grin. “I’ll tell them that I’m living with my hot ex-felon gay lover. That’ll horrify them enough that they won’t speak to me for a year.”
He knew Josh was joking, but Nero had heard worse cover stories. And the longer Nero sat there soberly considering the possibility, the less cheeky Josh’s expression became. Eventually the guy tilted his head and let his blond hair fall messily over his eyes.
“I’m joking. I’m not telling my parents that.”
“Fair enough. But you’ll have to think of something.”
“Actually, no, I won’t. Look, so far, I’m on a long weekend. It can be explained away by a really bad flu.”
“We talked about this. You can’t go back to your former life.”
“Why not? I get that you need to solve the fire bomb problem. I’m here for that. But I can close up stuff on campus normally. The last experiments won’t take too long. And then I’ll write it up in my dissertation and be done. I can say I got a job—which will be true—and then I’m all yours.”
“You’re not safe in public yet.”
“I’m a fast learner.”
Nero arched a brow.
“Put a guard on me. Chain me up in my apartment. Whatever—”
“You act like your schooling is important to you, but you haven’t done diddly on it for a year.” Josh opened his mouth to argue, but Nero wasn’t going to let him run from the truth. “You think I didn’t look into this? I called the head of your lab and pretended I was going to hire you. I wanted a recommendation, and you know what he said?”
Josh’s face was ruddy with embarrassment, and he didn’t speak. Just shook his head.
“He said you were delaying, not getting anything done. That maybe a job would be the kick in the pants you need.” He spread his hands wide. “Consider yourself kicked. Come work for us now.”
“I’ve worked for seven years to get my PhD. I’m not dropping it like I couldn’t hack it. Yeah, so maybe I’ve been screwing around, but I’ve got incentive now. Trust me, I can get it done.” Josh straightened up. “It’s a reasonable request. You can’t expect me to drop everything when I don’t have to.”
“It sounds reasonable if you have no idea what it’s like to be a werewolf. It took a year before I felt like a person and not a freak. And by that point I’d realized how impossible it is to talk to anyone outside of the mystical community. Trust me, you’ll have zero interest in meeting up with someone from your former life.”
“Not Savannah. And not my family,” Josh countered flatly.
“You’ve changed at a level you can’t even comprehend,” Nero insisted. “They won’t understand, and you can’t explain it to them.”
Josh snorted. “I can go all scary. Rawr!” He bared his teeth and put his hands up as fake claws. “So that’s freaky weird, and I get that I’ll have to learn how to control it, but it shouldn’t tank my life.”
Nero shook his head. “It hurts, Josh. It hurts to not be yourself around the people who should love you most. It hurts them, and it hurts you because you have to lie all the time.” Nero tensed in his chair, seeing that he’d have to prove to Josh that he’d changed in a fundamental way.
“Maybe for you, but I never talked about myself or my work anyway. They think I’m a major screw-up. Let me take the time to finish my PhD, show them that I’m not a complete waste of space.”
“It won’t work.”
“Why not?”
Nero didn’t bother arguing. He pounced instead.
One second he was sitting in his chair. The next he had burst forward, catching Josh on the shoulder with one hand and on his throat with the other. His grip was tight but not bruising, and he flattened the newbie on the bed with his body weight.
For about two seconds.
Then Josh reacted. He had to give it to the guy. Josh had some basic martial arts skill behind his moves, but most of his response was pure instinct. Josh exploded with movement. He twisted and kicked, biting what he could get ahold of and scratching what he couldn’t. It was like his first moments out of the cage two nights ago, only he had more thought behind his attack, which made it twice as vicious.
He held nothing back, and Nero had to use all his skill to keep them both from getting hurt. Eventually he let Josh pin him to the bed.
“Got you!” Josh crowed. He was grinning at his success, his body was slicked with sweat, and his erection was thick and hard where it pressed against Nero’s. His head dipped and his mouth split wide. Nero didn’t know if he was going in for a bite or a kiss. Didn’t matter. He wasn’t allowing either yet.
At the moment Josh was off-balance, Nero flipped him over. He couldn’t have done it without his greater weight or Josh’s inexperience, but he used that to his advantage, and suddenly, their positions were reversed. And while Josh was still gaping in shock, Nero engaged his brain.
“Feel powerful, Josh? Like any minute you’re going to throw me to the floor and take out my throat?”
Josh grinned and spoke with a low growl. “Fuck yeah.”
“Ever felt like this before? Violence simmering in your blood, hot with the instinct to attack? There’s joy too, isn’t there? You know you’re big and bad. That most people are sheep to your wolf, and you can take them out whenever and wherever you want.”
Josh didn’t answer except with a hungry gleam in his eyes. Then he surged forward. Nero had been expecting it. He’d felt the quiver in Josh’s muscles a split second before the attack, but even so, without training or a wolf’s reaction time, he might have been overpowered. Josh was that good. Eventually Nero had to resort to a headbutt to keep the guy contained. And while Josh howled and Nero fought the stars in his own vision, Nero pressed his point.
“Ever feel like this before? Think back to who you were one month ago. What do you think of that guy?”
“Timid fucker too scared to live.” The words came out in a snarl.
“What about now? Are you scared?”
“Not in the least.” Then, for emphasis, the guy thrust his groin forward. He shoved his hot, thick dick straight up against Nero’s. Yeah, the guy had a hard-on for this type of power. Physical dominance with a side of hunger and lust. Every wolf did. The virus lycanthropes had it the most, but every wolf felt this, and Nero couldn’t resist rubbing his own throbbing erection
against Josh.
He meant to continue speaking. Fuck, he intended to stay rational and really engage Josh’s brain. But Josh’s scent was everywhere, and Nero loved this kind of sex play most of all. Hot, hard, and fast. And once he started thrusting, he couldn’t stop.
Neither could Josh.
They worked against each other, rubbing below and biting above. He had on sweatpants, but that was the only clothing either of them wore. Nero used one hand to shove his sweats down, and then they were head to head, chest to chest, and dick to dick. He fisted them both and squeezed.
Josh’s howl cut off into a groan of pleasure. Nero groaned too as they began pumping together. Then Josh wrapped his hand around Nero’s, squeezing tighter as they thrust faster. Heat built in his spine—his skin prickled with it and his hair stood on end.
Yes!
The excitement of it burst through the dam at the back of his spine. He erupted in spasms while pleasure entwined with pain grew into one glorious explosion of carnality. Josh came at the same time. He threw back his head and howled again. A crow of delight and power.
They stayed that way for who knew how long. They both kept pumping out semen like a tidal flood. And even when the well was dry, they both kept thrusting as the pulses continued. Wet, hot, and still hard.
Glorious.
It took a long time for Nero to gather his scattered wits. He’d had a point here, hadn’t he? Oh, yeah. He waited until he was sure his words would be steady, and a little longer to see the contraction in Josh’s pupils that meant he was back from heaven. And then Nero spoke, his words clear and not very gentle.
“Is this something you would have done a week ago? Howling sex? Would you even have allowed a man to do what I did a half hour ago? Split you open and jam himself inside you?”
He watched as Josh’s gaze narrowed. He thought for a moment that Josh would deny the change, but the guy was too smart and too honest for that. “No,” he finally rasped. “This is new. This is….”
“Powerful. Raw.”
“Awesome.”
“Yes.”
Nero eased back enough to impress his next words onto Josh. “Now imagine you’re at the dinner table and your asshole of a father starts calling you weak. You’re a screw-up because you hide in a lab and don’t do shit for real work.” Josh’s father owned a factory that made special heat-resistant fabric. It was one of the many reasons Josh had been on the top of the recruit list. But though the business pulled in a shit-ton of money, the family lived like laborers of the heaviest, hardest kind. Josh’s sister was an Army medic, and his brother was a fireman. Everyone worked physically demanding stuff except Josh, who had gone into academia. His hands were soft and his shoulders narrow. He binge-watched the SyFy channel and put his leisure time into cosplay. “What are you going to say to him?”
