by Kathy Lyons
She arched her brows in question.
“I need to close out my past. And though today sucked rocks, at least I know I won’t be leaving my family in limbo.”
“But you’re still disappearing into covert land.”
He shrugged. “Not to them, I’m not. Nero outed me as gay.” He held up his hand to stop her from making a snap judgment. “He thought they already knew, and I know he was shocked by their reaction.”
“Still an asshole move.”
Josh couldn’t argue that. “So Mom’s going with the mental breakdown, and Dad’s chosen jailhouse conversion.”
“Oh my God,” she breathed. Then she looked at Bruce’s huge truck. “What about your brother and sister?”
Josh exhaled. “I don’t know. They both tried to help, but there’s only so much they could do.”
“Okay, so your siblings are up in the air, but I’m not. I don’t care what you’re doing, I expect an email address and regular communication. And you better get vacation time off for MoreCon every year.” She poked him in the chest. “Every single year.”
“Every year. I promise.”
“Okay. Fine, then—” Savannah cut off her words as her gaze zeroed in on Bruce. He was just now coming out of the house, and his steps hitched slightly as he saw her. Then his jaw tightened as he crossed to Josh.
“Hi, Bruce,” Savannah said.
“Hi, Savannah. Glad you made it before the shit hit the fan.”
Josh gaped at his brother. “Before the shit hit?”
Bruce nodded. “Mother’s called a prayer meeting. They’re headed over now.”
“Oh God,” Savannah breathed.
“To pray away my gayness?”
“To pray for you.”
Yeah. It was to pray away his gayness. “What about Dad?”
“He wasn’t going to make your doggie hoodies….” He looked at Josh. “This is some lame practical joke or something, right?”
“Sorry, it’s real. Unless the joke’s on me.”
“Well, that guy Nero made it clear that the money’s real, but only if the coats get made today. He offered Dad a shit-ton of money. And you know Dad’s greedy. And given that the other choice is a prayer vigil instead of EPSN—”
Josh straightened off the car. “Dad’s actually going to give us the Volcax? Are we headed to the factory, then?”
“Nero and Dad are,” Bruce said. “But maybe you and I could go somewhere else. Maybe have a beer.”
Josh frowned. Years of being duped by his older brother reared up in his mind. “You’ve never wanted to hang out before.”
Bruce shrugged. “We’ve never been adults before. And you’ve never disappeared, come back gay, and mouthed off to Dad before.” He grinned. “And for the record, I knew what ABD means. You’ve had it after your name forever.”
Was that a dig? If so, it was true. Hadn’t he been saying that same thing to Savannah? He opened his mouth to agree. There was no reason he couldn’t try to mend some fences with his brother before disappearing into Wulf, Inc. forever. But just as the words were forming, Nero burst out of the house, flashing his phone.
“Josh, we’ve got to get to the factory. The fairy says it’s now or never!”
It took a moment for Josh to reorient himself from family to weirdness, but he got there. Some fairy had probably located the demon, and Nero was hell-bent on taking the asshole down. Meanwhile, Savannah and Bruce were having trouble following their conversation.
“Is that a slur?” Bruce asked, understandably confused.
“Or a codename?” Savannah asked.
Given Nero’s attitude toward the fae, it was both, but he couldn’t say that. Instead he shrugged. “Classified.”
Meanwhile, Nero gestured to the car. “Get in. Your dad’s going to cut the fabric and then I’ll go—”
“Test it in a lab,” Josh interrupted. “It needs to be tested.”
“No time. Fit it on me and—”
“Make time,” Josh said as he squared off with Nero. “I’m the geek here. I’ll tell you when it’s ready for use in the field.”
“And I’m the boss. I’ll tell you where—”
“You ready to commit suicide? Because that’s what will happen—”
“—we test. In the field. It’s the only test that counts.”
“No way—”
“Damn it, Josh!”
His father’s voice cut through their argument. “You want this fool thing or not?”
They both turned and spoke with one voice. “Yes!”
“Then get out of my way!”
It took a moment for them to figure out what he meant. Sometime during their yelling match, his father had opened the garage door and was waiting to back his truck out, but Nero’s car was blocking him.
“Right away, sir,” Nero called. Then he hauled open his car door.
Josh rushed to the passenger side of the car and made it inside just as Nero turned the ignition. “You can’t do this without testing.”
Nero backed out of the driveway while Savannah and Bruce watched from the lawn. But then he had to pause on the street for Josh’s dad to back out and lead the way. And in that pause, Nero turned to Josh. His tone was level, his jaw firm, and his eyes hard.
“I’m going to do this with or without your shield and hoodie. So, do I wait for it? Or do I head straight for Wisconsin now?”
Josh cursed under his breath. And then he cursed even louder when he realized that Nero was waiting for his answer.
“Fine!” he huffed. “Wait for my dad to make two of them. We’ll go together.”
“Bullshit. You’re not trained.”
“And you’re not thinking straight.”
Nero acknowledged that with a grunt. Then he spoke, his voice low. “I’ve waited six weeks and five days.” He looked at Josh. “I know this doesn’t make sense to you. I can’t explain further, but the longer we wait, the worse it gets. So I leave tomorrow morning, no matter what.”
Josh winced. He could feel the determination in Nero’s tone. There was definitely something the guy wasn’t saying. Something important that had colored his every action since the very beginning. “It’s reckless to go out there alone and unprepared. I’ve read your mission reports—this isn’t you. You’re all about safety with your pack.”
Nero didn’t answer, and as the miles sped by underneath the wheels, Josh put the pieces together.
“You don’t think they’re going to let you in on the kill, do you? You think they’ll give the task to someone else.”
Nero shook his head. “No one else is going to drag paste-covered shields into combat, Josh. Or wear a hoodie. No one but me.”
“They will if they’re ordered to.”
Nero shrugged. “I don’t know. There’s a limit to what some of them will do.”
“I don’t care. That’s not your call and you know it. So what is really going on? Why does it have to be you, right now, taking stupid risks?”
Nero didn’t answer. And as they took the last turn before they hit his dad’s factory, Josh realized the truth. Nero hadn’t answered because he couldn’t. And yet he was still stubbornly, stupidly determined to go into the fight. Which meant his trainer, his lover, and his best werewolf friend was really fucked-up in the head.
“You need to tell me the truth,” Josh said slowly. He invested all his passion, his determination, and his love in his words. Nero had to know that he was serious. “You will tell me what’s really going on right now or I will delete the specs and destroy the shield. I’ll erase everything and you’ll have nothing.” He stared at Nero and saw the guy’s clenched jaw. “You’ve blown up my life, destroyed my relationship with my family, and I still fucking love you. So you will tell me what’s really going on or I’ll do whatever I have to, to make sure you survive. And if that means destroying the specs—”
“Do you know what the number-one rule in the Wulf, Inc. handbook is?”
It took a moment for
Josh to pull back from his tirade, and even longer for the words to make sense in his brain. “We have a handbook?”
Nero glared at him. “No, of course we don’t have a handbook. We’re werewolves!”
Right. “Sorry,” he said. “You were saying. The number-one rule is…?”
“Never, ever, under any circumstances, make a fairy deal.”
Oh crap. There was good reason for that rule. Fairy deals never, ever went the way they were supposed to. Anyone who had ever played D&D knew that.
“You have to understand,” Nero continued. “My entire pack was dead, the demon had escaped, and I needed to do something. Anything.”
Cold terror gripped Josh’s spine. “What did you do?”
Nero sighed. “I made a fairy deal.”
Chapter 24
NERO PULLED into a parking spot next to Mr. Collier’s truck, but he knew Josh wasn’t going to let him drop that bomb and just disappear, so he tried to minimize the damage. “It’s not as bad as it sounds.”
“It sounds like, in a moment of shock and grief, you did the one thing guaranteed to screw you over. And possibly everyone else too.”
Yeah, he’d considered that. Long after the fact, of course, but that was one of the things that kept him up at night.
“Enough with the stoic shit,” Josh huffed. “What—exactly—did you say? And I do mean exactly.”
“I don’t exactly remember.”
“Mother of—”
“Stop being so dramatic,” Nero snapped. “I’m not even supposed to be talking to you about this.”
“Screw that. Talk.”
Nero sighed. If only it was that easy. If he gave Josh the full details, then Bitterroot was going to make him pay. Period. But at the moment, Nero didn’t care. He owed Josh the truth. More than that, he wanted to tell him the truth. It was too heavy a burden to shoulder alone. “Bitterroot owed me a favor, so I called him and got a mulligan.”
“Bitter—you know—is the fairy?”
“Yes.” And obviously Josh already knew the dangers of saying a fairy name out loud. That’s why Nero hadn’t said the guy’s full name.
“And a mulligan is a what? You get to replace your team with someone else?”
“What? No!” He stared at Josh. “Where did you get that idea?”
“That’s what a mulligan is in gaming circles. You get to replace your hand with new cards and do the turn over.”
Nero’s eyebrows rose. Apparently there were some things the über-geek didn’t know. Score one for the sports reference. “A mulligan in golf is a do-over. A repeat. I’ll get dropped back in time—”
“Oh! An Omega 13 device.” And when Nero stared at him, Josh blew out a breath. “Galaxy Quest. We’ll watch it….” There probably wouldn’t be any more movies together, no matter what happened tomorrow. “Never mind. How does it work?”
“I’ll start up right before the attack, and this time I’ll save every single one of them and kill that fucking demon—”
“No! Don’t go and attack. It’s still suicide to go in with untested equipment.”
Nero watched as Mr. Collier unlocked the factory door and disappeared inside. How he longed to be done with this conversation, but he already knew Josh wouldn’t let him go so easily.
“A fairy mulligan has specific rules. We still have to attack. There’s not a lot I can change.” He looked at Josh. “But I can bring a weapon for each one of my team. Your design—”
“Is not a weapon!”
“Fine! Your plan and your tech will keep them alive. I just need them to survive the blast, then we can kill it. I know we can.”
“No, you don’t know that. All you know is what the demon did. Not what it will do after it shoots off that plasma blast.”
Yes, Nero had thought about that, but there was only so much he could plan for. “I saw the… creature afterwards. It was a pink blob and completely defenseless.”
“Except for the gun. Except for whatever demon powers—”
“Stop arguing with me, Josh. It’s done, and I’ve run out of time. I go tomorrow morning at dawn, whether I have your tech or not.”
Josh reared back. “Dawn! There’s no way I can make five shields in that time—”
“I need the one. I’ve been texting with Bitter. He says if I’ve got one, then he can duplicate it.”
There was a moment of silence as Josh processed that, but his mind obviously wasn’t where Nero’s was. “Fairies have cell phones?”
“Um, yeah. Of a sort.” He did not want to get into the technological weirdness of the fair folk. “Anyway, if we get one shield and one hoodie, he can make four others.”
“And what is he adding to them?”
“What? Nothing—”
“Bullshit.” Josh blew out a breath. “That’s incredibly stupid. Fairy deals—”
“It’s not like that!” Nero huffed, praying it was true. “Bitterroot owed me one. I helped him out once.”
“Time travel is not a small favor.”
“And what I did wasn’t a small favor either!”
Josh leaned back against his seat and stared blankly out the front windshield. “So it’s not an Omega 13, it’s a whole Star Trek reboot, dead planet Vulcan and all.”
Nero turned to him. “I have no idea how to answer that.”
Josh waved it away with a depressed sigh. “This Bitter guy owed you, right? He didn’t ask anything in return?”
Not exactly. Nero didn’t say the words out loud, but his face must have given the answer away, because Josh abruptly pointed at his chest.
“I knew it! What did you promise him?”
Nero’s hands fidgeted on the steering wheel. There was no going back now. He might as well tell it all. “After the mulligan, no matter what happens, I go work for him.”
“For how long?”
Nero didn’t answer. He didn’t like thinking about it, but if it meant his team survived, it was worth the sacrifice. It was worth a thousand times the sacrifice. He just hadn’t expected to meet Josh before he left the mortal realm for Fairyland. And he hadn’t expected to fall so hard for the guy.
But fairy deals had to be honored. The alternative was always worse, as in skin-burning-off-for-eternity worse. And that was one of the nicer possibilities. “How long?” Josh repeated.
“A year for every day that the mulligan stays available. Payable whether or not I use the portal.”
“But it’s been weeks.”
Nero nodded. “Six weeks and six days. The fairies have a thing for the number seven, so at seven weeks the portal closes, whether I use it or not, and either way—”
“You’re living the rest of your natural life in servitude to the fae.”
“Actually, it’s natural and unnatural. If I die before the contract is up, they’ll resurrect me as something….” He shuddered. “Something unpleasant, and I’ll keep going.”
“Wonderful.” The sarcasm was heavy in Josh’s voice, and Nero rounded on him in fury.
“Stop with the judgment already. I don’t need it, and frankly, you’re wrong. I don’t regret my choice for a second. Not a goddamned second. And I’d do it again if it was a hundred years for every day. They are my pack. I’d do anything for them. Anything.”
“Even give up the rest of your life—”
“Yes.”
“Give up a new pack—”
Nero winced. He hadn’t counted on finding friends, much less a new pack in the trainees. “Yes.”
“Me.”
Nero looked down at his hands. He didn’t have to say the word yes—they both heard it loud and clear in his silence.
“Well, I guess I understand why you broke up with me today.”
“We were never supposed to be a permanent thing. Even without the fairy deal, we would have gone our separate ways.”
Josh didn’t answer in words, but one look at his face told Nero more than he ever wanted to know about what the guy was feeling. Hurt and betrayal burned
hot in his cheeks. Pain shimmered in his too-bright eyes. But what was a thousand times worse were the words that Josh said next and the flat intonation in his voice when he said them.
“I loved you,” he said. “I don’t trust easy, and I certainly didn’t want to fall for the meathead trainer who blew up my life. But I loved you, and I would have done a lot to make this work.”
Nero’s throat closed down, tears and pain choking off his words. But Josh deserved some sort of acknowledgment, something to show that Nero appreciated his bravery in saying the words out loud. That was the kind of courage Nero didn’t possess. Because even though he felt it, he’d never let the word love slip out. Even in the past tense.
But he did love Josh. And if the lives of his packmates hadn’t been on the line, he would have done a lot to see things work out too. He almost said that now. He nearly found the strength to admit his own feelings, but he hadn’t missed Josh’s verb. He’d said loved. As in past tense. Josh had loved him, but he didn’t now.
So be it. But Josh still deserved something.
“Thank you,” he finally said. The words burned in his throat because they were so much less than he felt, and so miniscule compared to what Josh deserved. “I— That means a lot—” He kept tripping over his own tongue, and the right words wouldn’t come. “I’m sorry, so fucking sorry for how this worked out.” Or didn’t work out.
“Yeah,” Josh said into the increasingly cold car. “Me too.”
They both sat there a moment. Nero wanted to do something, to say something to bridge the space between them, but there wasn’t anything he could do. And then, as if they were still in sync, they both opened their car doors at the same second and headed inside.
“Let me handle my father,” Josh said as they made it to the shop door. “You just keep upping the money.”
“Deal,” Nero said.
“And stop making deals!”
Chapter 25
HIS FATHER was an asshole, and apparently a greedy one. Josh didn’t know how much money Nero had promised the man, but it obviously did the trick. His father looked at the wolf hoodie specs, pulled out a roll of Volcax, and started cutting. He sewed the single garment himself, using specially designed thread, and he even had the sensors and other tech on hand, which went into the appropriate pockets. And in all that time, he never said a word.
