Yeah, but everyone else wasn’t cut from the same cloth as Josh. Nero had gone to the conference, expecting to meet a stammering guy with thick glasses and bad acne. Instead he’d met a funny guy with a flirtatious smile who wasn’t in the least bit fazed by two big costumed baddies trying to make him an offer he couldn’t refuse.
Josh had laughed and let them sit in the front row. Nero had half hoped the guy would make good on his threat to kick them out. That would have delayed them, and Josh could have at least finished his act, but they had a timetable to keep and couldn’t wait.
“Cheer up,” Wiz said as he peered behind him. “He’s not dead yet. No signs of rejection or fever. With any luck he’ll wake up healthy and hale just in time for Gelpack to scare the shit out of him.” He turned to the alien with a grin. “Can you eat something especially bloody and forget to wear a shirt? That always makes an impression.”
Gelpack answered in an honest deadpan. “My digestive system is not up to meats yet. But I will try some red Jell-O.”
“Perfect,” Wiz said with a grin.
Great. If the werewolf curse didn’t kill Josh, his new teammates surely would.
Chapter 5
NERO FELTa weird kind of euphoria. It might have had something to do with being up for three days straight, but it was more likely because every single one of the new recruits had survived the transformation to wolf.
Every single one, including a surprise recruit, thanks to Gelpack. Nero didn’t understand what the alien had done, but it had worked. Wiz said he made adjustments to the activation spell. Words, tones, something that seemed completely insignificant to Nero but apparently made a world of difference. He’d also insisted that the recruits be brought here to the cage room in the basement as soon as possible instead of closer interim facilities. Good thing too, because two of the recruits had spiked fevers and gone into seizures within an hour of getting to Michigan. Everyone had written off the wolves then, because once the seizures hit, there was nothing anyone could do. But Gelpack had stared at them for an hour and the wolves had eventually settled.
It was a flat-out miracle, and Nero would never again speak of the gelatinous alien as anything but a blessing, even if he was now sitting in board shorts and nothing else in front of Josh Collier’s cage. Worse, he had taken Wiz’s suggestion seriously and there was a bright red Jell-O smear where his stomach should be in his otherwise tannish-clear body.
Gross.
“I came as soon as I could,” Nero said as he walked into the huge concrete room of steel-reinforced cages. He noted with pleasure that four of the five wolves were sleeping deeply. That was the most healing thing for them. It was the fifth who had him concerned.
Josh Collier. The charming blond-haired geek boy was now a black timber wolf with white along his lips. That made his snarling, growling fury all the more frightening because the white made his teeth look bigger, sharper, and scarier. Nero had seen his fair share of furious wolves, so Josh shouldn’t scare him. He shouldn’t, but damn it, this wolf radiated rabid fury like he’d never seen. Hatred burned through his burnt orange eyes, and even the drool looked malevolent. Then he noticed that the steel bars of the cage were bent.
“Did he break his cage?” No wolf should have the strength to do that.
“No,” Gelpack answered. “He bent the bars. They should not break. He is too near exhaustion to finish the task.”
Really? Josh didn’t look exhausted. He looked tense, blindly furious, and—
Wham.
Nero flinched as Josh rammed the cage bars. He’d leaped straight into them with claws extended at Nero and jaws that latched on to the bars like they were a filet mignon. And when he couldn’t crush them, he shook his head, growling and pulling on the metal as if to tear them apart.
The sight was bad enough, but the sounds…. Guttural animal hatred formed into an endless roll of snarls and growls. Not a single bark or howl. That would be too polite. And Nero had no doubt that if the bars broke, Josh would make those same sounds while ripping out their throats.
“How long has he been like this?”
“Since he woke several hours ago.”
Hours? Oh hell. He searched the creature’s eyes, hoping for a sign of sanity, some spark of human rationality beneath the animal hatred. He found nothing, which meant Josh’s mind was gone. The brilliant chemist was lost to the beast.
“What does Captain M say?”
“To euthanize him. No one has come back from this level of fury before.”
Even though he’d already guessed that, the words sank like a stone into his gut. He’d done this to Josh. He’d been the one to select him for the team, to stand by while Wiz activated his DNA, to plan every second of the operation that brought Josh to this rabid animal state.
His stomach cramped like a vise and he dry-swallowed to fight the pain. It didn’t help. Nothing would help, especially when he added the mental image of putting a couple of bullets into the wolf’s brain. God, he didn’t want to add one more death to his already black soul. Meanwhile Gelpack kept speaking, his voice the same monotonous underwater burble that he always had.
“Her orders are there.” Gelpack pointed to the clipboard attached to the misshapen cage. Nero didn’t have to read them to know they told him to end Josh’s life as quickly as possible. It did no good wasting resources on someone who would never come back, not to mention the danger to everyone in keeping Josh alive.
“Isn’t there something you can do?” he asked. It was a vain hope. Gelpack would already have done it if he could, but Nero was looking for any possibility, no matter how small. “You stabilized the other two.”
“Your minds are a mystery to me. That is why I am here.”
Nero pounced on the distraction. “You’re here to study our minds?”
