by Kathy Lyons
“Pauly used to chase his tail. Like you, he loved being in his wolf body.” Josh twitched, and Nero correctly guessed his thoughts. “Of course I know that you love it. No one chases snowflakes for two hours unless they love it.”
Had it been two hours? He didn’t realize. He barely felt it, with all his fur, but Nero must be freezing. Except the man looked completely fine with the temperature. It brought a healthy pink to his cheeks.
“He’d been turned a month and spent most of it as a wolf. Then he started chasing his tail, trying to chew on it. Said it itched.” He grabbed hold of a handful of Josh’s fur and shook it. It was an affectionate gesture, and Josh was surprised by how much he enjoyed it. “You can guess what happened. He had fleas. By the time we figured it out, he had infested the house. We had to fumigate the whole place. God, was Carla ever pissed.” He glanced back at Josh. “She and her twin, Wes, own the mansion. They’re your distant relatives.”
Really? Josh perked up and tried to remember the pair from his research, but couldn’t hold the thought as Nero kept talking about Pauly.
“Of course, we started calling him Fleabag. He hated it, but no one changes their handle here. No one. It took him two years of secret negotiations and bets. Those are the rules. Everyone has to agree on a name change. For two years he won bets, did chores, and swore us all to secrecy until he had the votes. I was the last to fall. The guy beat me at shots. I have forty pounds on him, but he drank me under the table.” Nero chuckled. “As soon as I sobered up, he called a vote, and one by one, we all had to agree for him to change his handle. We still haven’t figured out his new one. I’m pushing for Fleabitten, but Mother’s partial to….” His words faded away and that gentle burrowing into Josh’s fur stopped. Every part of Nero had frozen.
It took Josh a moment to figure out the reason, and then he felt stupid for not realizing it earlier. Fleabag Pauly was dead. As was Mother and the rest of Nero’s team. He’d been talking like they were off on a mission or something, not dead and gone.
For a few minutes Nero had forgotten his pack was dead, and now that he remembered, he was frozen in shock. As a human, Josh wouldn’t have known what to do. As a wolf, instinct drove him to crawl closer to Nero, to nuzzle the man’s neck and gently lick his face. Nero allowed it for a moment, long enough for Josh to taste salt and to feel a grief so deep, it permeated the very air they breathed.
Josh whined. He had to give sound to the despair. He would have howled if he’d had the breath, but lying so close to Nero kept his throat closed.
It was his sound that jolted Nero back into the present. He abruptly jerked away from Josh while shoving hard with his arms. “Don’t get all cozy with me. You’re not a dog, and I sure as hell didn’t pick your mangy ass up at the pound,” he snapped. “Get inside. You need to eat, and I need a hot shower after freezing my ass off while you chase snowflakes like a moronic puppy. You need to figure out that fire bomb now. I can’t believe I let you waste time outside.”
The words were like a slap to the face. Hell, he couldn’t have hurt Josh worse if he’d kicked him, even though Josh knew that Nero’s reaction came from pain and grief. He was acting out like everybody did when they hurt. It didn’t lessen the sting, and it sure as hell tainted the joy of the afternoon.
So Josh expressed that in the only way he could right then. He leaped to his feet and barked at Nero. And when the guy jumped back in surprise, he followed up with a few more barks in frustration. Fucking hell, he needed his words right then. But he couldn’t wrap his head around what he’d say as a man, so he kept barking, as if that made everything clear.
And maybe it did, because Nero’s expression softened. He rubbed a hand over his face. “You’re right. I’m being an ass.”
No, that wasn’t at all what Josh wanted to say. Nero had been an ass, but it came from pain. Josh knew that. He’d wanted to help, but Nero wasn’t about to let anyone comfort him. Hell, that had been obvious from the first moment he’d allowed Josh to go ballistic on his face. Still, the pain of that ached inside. Nero’s laughter had brought light to a part of Josh that had been dark. And now Nero’s pain made that place inside weep. Josh wanted to give Nero some comfort, but the man was not willing to let him in.
Nero turned away and trudged heavily back to the mansion. Josh tried to change that. He barked again, but Nero ignored him. Then he rushed forward and danced in front of the guy, inviting him to play. He even spun around and tried to catch his tail. It was all he could think to do, but none of it worked. Nero simply patted his head and opened the door into the mansion.
“I’ll get you some food. You need to eat all of it and drink a bathtub’s worth of water. I’ll show you the wolf door so you can pee outside.”
What? No way. He was going to use the bathroom like a man. Except when he tried, he couldn’t get back to his human body. Oh shit. How did he—?
“I know you want to go back to human right now, but stay wolf for a bit. There’s a lot you need to lock in about being lupine. You think it’s obvious, but some pups have trouble. Learn it now. And eat as much as you can. You know how hard it is to eat once you come back to human, so get your calories in this way. The wolf door is right here.”
Josh wanted to argue, but he didn’t have a voice, and Nero was throwing information at him fast. He listened with as much focus as possible on how to open the wolf door. There was a keypad designed for wolf noses, since a palm reader obviously wouldn’t work, but it was pretty hard to press with the tip of his nose. It made him cross-eyed and headachy.
“I’ll heat up the food for you, and no, it’s not dog chow. It’s my own mixture of ground beef, vitamins, and some leafy greens. I made it so it’d be easy on your stomach, but my guess is that after a couple days, you’ll be able to chow down on almost anything.”
A couple days? Josh barked sharp and loud at that, but Nero waved him off.
“Yes, a couple days. You need it. You can get back to your research after you’re fully vested as a wolf.”
Josh snorted.
“It’s not bullshit,” Nero responded. “Yordan is pushing Bing for his own reasons. Mine tell me that you need to get time and calories as a wolf.” Then he sighed. “But maybe, if you do everything I tell you to today, I can help you come back to human tomorrow. I really need a way to defuse that fire bomb, Josh. And I need it soon.” His eyes took on a distant look. “Remember that lake where the blast happened? Lake… hell, I only remember it as Lake Wacka Wacka. Captain M says that it’s poisonous now. Everything in it’s dead. Cyanide is in the water somehow. We’re going to blast it to see if we can kill the demon that way, but it’s not 100 percent certain it’ll work. We can’t even find the thing.” He focused back on Josh. “Figure out how we can survive that fire blast. Then everything can go back to the way it’s supposed to be.”
Josh released a low growl of frustration. What Nero was wanted was impossible.
“I need you to try. Try hard.”
Josh chuffed his agreement.
“But not today. You need the time as a wolf, and I….” Nero shook his head. “I need the break too. I just… need a break.”
That, more than anything else, made Josh give in. Nero’s pain was real and raw. Right now he needed to grieve, not play dog-sitter to a new wolf. And sure, it cut that he didn’t want Josh to help, but sometimes a guy had to lick his wounds in private.
So Josh didn’t argue. He mastered the use of the doggie keypad. He ate all his ground beef and greens. He even went outside and figured out certain other mechanics behind a bush. But while he looked at the cloudy sky, he ached for the Nero who had helped him chase snowflakes, tugged on a stick with him, and rubbed his ass. Because right now, damn it, his tail itched.
Hell, he was never going to live it down if he got fleas.
Even worse, he couldn’t even tell Nero the joke because the man had gone into his bedroom and shut the door tight.
Chapter 18
NERO SAT at his desk, st
aring at a picture of his team at the last barbecue. He was torturing himself—he knew that. The memories were painful and wonderful at the same time. He missed them. He missed who he was when he was around them. And he really wanted to introduce them to Josh. They’d like him. They’d tease him mercilessly, and he’d probably do something to the food to turn everyone orange, and just like that, he’d become part of the pack.
Except there was no pack right now, and he was lost without it.
A knock sounded on his door. “Not now,” he growled out.
The door opened anyway, even though it was locked. Only one person could do that, and he was the last alien Nero wanted to see.
“Not now, Gelpack.”
“This is the appointed time.”
Nero frowned. “We don’t have an appointment.”
“It is the appointed time. And Captain M told me to remind you that this is the arrangement. I kept the new recruits alive—”
“Not all of them.”
“—and you must talk to me about feelings.”
“Fine. I’m feeling like you need to get out of here.”
“You need not concern yourself with my safety. In fact, Captain M said that I should offer myself as your punching bag.”
“Great idea.” Nero launched himself out of his chair, leading with his fist. He went right through Gelpack to thud painfully against the door. Then he damned himself for being an idiot, because he’d known that would happen. The vaguest residue of something remained on his throbbing hand, and behind him, Gelpack simply reformed without the fist-sized hole. Well, he’d wondered if surprise made a difference against the creature. Now he knew it didn’t.
“Fine,” he said, all the fight going out of him. “What do you want to know?”
“I wish to discuss your feelings.”
Oh, goody. “What about them?”
“Please describe them to me right now. Include as much physical description as you can.”
“I’m feeling the clothes on my body. They itch right now.” He was in his softest sweatpants, but they still bothered him. Everything bothered him right then.
“I’m feeling angry at you because I want to be left alone.” Except he’d just been alone and realized that steeping himself in misery wasn’t doing anyone any good.
“I’m feeling like my hand better stop throbbing soon or I’m going to have to shift, and I’m too tired to do that. And that’s another thing,” he said as he glared at his bed. “I’m feeling so fucking tired, even my hair needs to rest.”
“How does hair feel tired? There are no nerves in hair to feel—”
He sighed. “It feels heavy, okay? Like each hair is pulling my scalp down and I’m too tired to stay upright.”
“Why don’t you lie down?”
“Because whenever I do, I get antsy.” Fitting words to action, he stretched out on his back on the bed and stared at the ceiling. “Happy now?”
“I do not experience happiness as you do. That is why I am here: to learn how you experience it.”
“If I knew that, then I’d be happy, wouldn’t I?”
“Would you?”
“Of course I would. No one wants to feel crappy.”
“But you knew your hand would hurt after you punched through me to the door, and yet you did it anyway. What actions usually bring you happiness?”
Playing with his packmates. Eating a ton of burgers at a barbecue. And Mother’s potato salad. One bite of that and he was in heaven. “Killing that fucking demon.”
“And how will you feel when you accomplish that? What will your happiness feel like?”
He imagined destroying that gun-toting, neon-blooded asshole. He pictured himself ripping out its throat, shooting its head into a zillion pieces, detonating an atomic bomb on its ass. But every time he destroyed it, it popped right back into his head. He saw every detail of the emotionless, killing thing, from its dead eyes to the steady hold it had on its gun. He’d hamstring it, disembowel it, and then decapitate it before pissing on its remains.
And still it would pop up in his brain, alive and whole as it burned his entire team to ash.
“Quiet,” he said. “It will feel like quiet.”
“Thank you for your answer,” Gelpack said as his arm seemed to ooze around his body to open the door. It was a disturbing sight. “It is a common one, and so I believe I have found a pattern.”
Nero lifted his head. “What?”
“Many of your colleagues have said that happiness comes from quiet. And yet you all live such noisy lives.”
Wasn’t that the truth? “So what do you conclude from that?”
“That happiness comes from quiet and noise both, in the right balance.”
“It has to be the right noise,” Nero said. “And the right quiet.” It had been utterly silent after his team had died. He’d been in the in-between state when the blast happened. Then he’d reformed onto the scorched earth and heard absolutely nothing.
“How do you know which is the right one?”
Nero felt a cynical smile twist his lips. “By whether or not it makes me happy.” Let the Jell-O guy figure that one out.
But instead of being confused, the alien nodded as if that made total sense. “Thank you for sharing your feelings with me.” Then he opened the door and left. He should have shut it behind him, but some human protocols were lost on the alien. Or maybe it was because there was an enormous black wolf waiting who shouldered his way inside the moment the alien passed.
“Josh,” Nero said. He was about to tell him to go away, but he couldn’t quite form the words. Instead he stated the obvious. “You heard every word, didn’t you?”
The wolf dipped his head.
“You’re not going to leave me alone, are you?”
Head shake, no.
“Fine.” He got up and headed for his computer. “Then you can sit right by me and watch while I see if that demon has started eating Wisconsinites again.”
It took forty-eight minutes for Josh to change back to human. Nero felt the temperature drop in the air and knew immediately what was happening. He turned fast enough to see the golden shimmer right before Josh reformed as a man on all fours.
“For the love of God, watching you at a computer is like watching a toddler trying to do advanced math. Get out of the way.” He grabbed on to the desk and hauled himself upright before pushing at Nero.
Normally Nero would refuse to vacate the chair out of stubbornness, but Josh was about to feel dizzy from shifting and needed to sit. So he jumped out of his seat and guided the man into it. And then before he could say anything, Josh put his hands to the keyboard and started typing. Nero tried to follow it, but windows kept popping up and then disappearing faster than he could follow. He gathered that Josh was coding something, but he didn’t have the skills to understand it.
“I’ll get you some soup.”
“I don’t need it,” Josh grumbled.
“Watching you learn how to be a werewolf is like watching a toddler trying to cook dinner. You’ll eat what I put in front of you or I’m taking away your screen time.”
Josh turned to stare at him, his fingers momentarily stilled. Then he nodded. “I’ll code, you get food. Deal?”
“Deal.”
Then a female voice came loud and annoyed from the main living space. “You guys know that I can code and cook you both under the table, right?”
Nero looked back at Josh, who tightened his face into an “as-if” expression. Then, as one, they said, “Challenge accepted.”
A moment later Josh went back to typing and Nero headed to kitchen. Stratos glared at him as he passed, her hand gripping a pen where it rested on Yordan’s paperwork pile.
“I can’t help you,” he said softly. “Wiz has to—”
“Fuck you,” she snapped. Then she abruptly closed her eyes and exhaled. “Sorry. I’m pissed, and I hate this. I hate everything about this.”
Nero was about to say something, but Gelpack be
at him to it. He hadn’t even seen the alien in the room, but the guy straightened up from a chair and came to stand in front of Stratos.
“It is time for your appointment,” he said. “Explain ‘pissed’ to me in as much detail as possible.”
Stratos gaped at the gelatinous being, and for a moment Nero thought she would throw a punch. Instead, she stood up and got nose-to-nose with the alien. Then she bellowed, “Arg!” right in his face.
And Nero laughed—straight-out laughed—surprising everyone in the room, himself most of all. How the hell had he just found the right balance of quiet and noise?
Two weeks later, Josh blew up the lab.
Chapter 19
JOSH COULDN’T breathe, but that was only because he was coughing so much. He blew out weak puffs of air filled with the horrendous stink of chemicals fried into vapor or ash or whatever the crap it was that he was breathing.
A face came into view, which was startling really, because his eyes were watering so badly he couldn’t see anything. But then Nero appeared in a blurry kind of way, as did the man’s words through the high-pitched whine he’d been ignoring.
“Shift, you pyromaniac. Get human, right now!” Nero had that alpha note in his voice, so Josh struggled to comply. He’d really rather just lie here and keep trying to hack up a lung. But that was becoming too painful, so he might as well fix it.
He gathered his energy and moved back into his human body. It was a smooth transition now, thanks to lots of practice. And within a few eternities of effort, his body reformed and he could take a full, deep breath.
Then he started coughing again. Shit. Whatever was in the air stank enough that it made his human nose shudder in horror. What was that…?
Oh hell. He remembered. What stank was his new fire-resistant compound that had indeed kept his test dummy from being fried by Stratos and Laddin’s favorite flamethrower. In fact, it had worked perfectly… up until the whole thing destabilized and went kaboom.
