“Thoughts and emotions are unknown to me. I studied for a hundred of your years to learn your language.”
“A hundred?” he said weakly. “How old are you?”
“Without bodies, we do not age. I am the only one of my kind to attempt a body, so perhaps I will age now too.”
Nero didn’t have a response to that and had nowhere to go except back to Josh. “Have you tried talking to him?”
“I have tried many forms of discourse. Most recently I have been reading his paper to him. Captain M said to expose him to familiar human things that will engage his mind.”
It was standard protocol, and Nero scanned the list Gelpack had made of all the things he’d tried. Every line item was followed by the wordsno noticeable effect. He also glanced at the array of Josh’s personal items scattered on a table beside Gelpack.
Walking over to it, he tried to see if there was anything that would help Josh. They had his suitcase and backpack, all of which had exactly what he’d expect. Tees with emblems or sayings that Nero didn’t recognize. Something was “shiny,” someone was from the Colonial Squadron. The jeans were worn soft, the socks worn old, and the toiletries cheap. His backpack wasn’t any different. There was a spiral notebook with diagrams of his big show and a laptop that they hadn’t opened because it was his and they were trying to respect his privacy as much as possible.
Nothing. Not even the crumpled receipts were interesting. A grocery store receipt for generic cereal and Campbell’s soup. Another one from Target for needles and thread, presumably to sew those shiny pockets into his wizard’s cape.
“What happens when you read his paper?”
Gelpack lifted the printed paper in his hand and began to read. The words were strange enough, but in his weird voice, they were downright creepy.
“To confirm that the defects of NOB mutants result solely from telomerase binding deficiencies, we performed primer extension assays with a series of chimeric proteins—”
“Okay. Never mind.”
Josh hadn’t reacted at all to the string of words. If anything, the creature’s eyes had glazed over as much as Nero’s had. Frowning, Nero ran through everything that had been in Josh’s file. The guy’s social media had been minimal, his family tree, all the way back to the ancestor with the werewolf gene, was useless, and even his grades, which had been excellent in the sciences and lackluster in liberal arts, couldn’t help.
“Wait a minute…,” he murmured as he looked back at Josh’s threadbare socks and the generic chips on his IGA receipt. Everything indicated he lived a stripped-down, impoverished lifestyle. Nero hadn’t thought it odd because that had been his own life before lycanthropy bit. But Josh’s father owned his own business making Volcax for the government. Though it sounded blue-collar, it was actually a multimillion-dollar company that was run like a fine-tuned watch. He knew that the Collier family’s income was in the top 1 percent. Josh had attended Harvard at full-price tuition. From his sister’s Facebook pictures, Josh ought to be wearing designer jeans and shopping at Whole Foods. Instead, his sneakers were ripping in two places, which sure as hell would be cold in the winter. Obviously the guy was living on his graduate stipend from the University of Michigan. He’d bet that not a cent was taken from dear old Dad.
Josh wouldn’t be the first guy to have an overbearing father. Maybe Nero could reach him that way. So he turned to the glaring, growling wolf and spoke in his sternest tone.
“Joshua Dyer Collier, look at you drooling on yourself and destroying your cage. I spent all that money sending you to a fancy school, and what do you do—?”
Josh went insane. Where before he’d been simply growling and chewing on the cage, now he slammed against the bars over and over again. And when those didn’t break, he howled with rage loud enough to make the other wolves stir in their unconscious state.
Nero’s insides stiffened, his body tightening unbearably every time Josh hit the cage bars. Which would break first? Josh or the bars?
Gelpack spoke above the din. “I do not believe this violence is a good sign.”
Maybe not, but then again, it was certainly more of a reaction than anything else they’d seen. He decided to keep going.
“Four years at Harvard and now how many at Michigan? You don’t have a trade, you certainly don’t work for a living.” He winced at that. He didn’t know anything about higher education, but he did know about being the lowest grunt on the pay scale. He would bet anything that PhD students were the slaves of the academic world. “You’re just lazy, freeloading off of my money. You will quit playing around at school and learn a real trade. Now change back to human and talk like the man you claim to be.”
The frenzy in the cage doubled, then redoubled. Josh was a whirling blur as only a werewolf could be. He thrashed at the cage on all sides, including the top and bottom. He snapped at the bars and exploded upward to try to break the lid. The sounds he made were no longer identifiable. Snarls or growls were indistinguishable from yips of pain or howls of fury. It was all one explosive disaster, and Nero saw blood and spittle fly from the bars. And still he couldn’t stop.
“Good God, what adisappointmentyou are!”
The cage broke.
One of the hinges snapped and Josh bashed at the weakened side until the seam split. One slam to break the hinge and a second to burst through.
Shit, shit, shit. Nero was about to die.
There wasn’t time to react. And after being up for three days, Nero didn’t have the reserves to go wolf. All he could do was step in front of Gelpack and hope the alien would become goo instead of die like Nero was about to.
Josh hit him square in the chest and they tumbled backward into the table of belongings. Nero got an arm up and felt a flash of pain as it got shredded. He kicked Josh in the ribs, knocking the wolf sideways, because this wasn’t his first wolf-on-human fight. Josh was back before Nero could draw breath, and it was all he could do to dodge in time to save his face.
Bzzzzz!
The cattle prod. Gelpack had it in hand and was shoving it in Josh’s near side. The wolf yelped in pain and slammed sideways. Nero’s legs fouled the wolf’s footing and the two ended up tangled together on the floor.
