Bzzzz!
The next electric shock carried into Nero’s body, but it was nothing compared to what Josh must have felt. The wolf scrambled to get his feet under him, but he didn’t have the coordination. Nero did, and he pulled himself aside barely fast enough to avoid losing a kneecap to Josh’s bite.
Bzzzz!
Gelpack got him again, and this time Josh’s wolf body rippled in agony from the impact, but he wasn’t jerking away. Instead, his head was coming around and his lips were peeled back from his very sharp teeth.
Bzzzz!Bzzzz!
Nero got his feet under him. His breath was quick and tight, but his hands were steady as he grabbed a pistol from the locked cabinet on the far wall. He didn’t want to do this. God damn it, he didn’t want to kill someone who’d just had the misfortune of being born to the wrong family tree. But he didn’t have a choice.
Josh was rabid. There wasn’t a choice.
Bzzz! Bzzzz!
Nero raised the pistol. He took a breath and sighted Josh, only to see the wolf body begin to shimmer. Nero’s heart pounded and his brain screamed to pull the trigger, but he didn’t do it. Not yet. He couldn’t—
Josh resolved into a human form with pink skin and dark red welts on the side.
“It’s telomere-ace, fuckface,” Josh bellowed. Then he launched himself at the cattle prod. He got ahold of it and ripped it through Gelpack’s gelatinous hand. Nero’s finger twitched on the trigger, but there was no time to save Gelpack.
“Josh, no!” he bellowed, but it was too late.
Chapter 6
JOSH RAMMEDthe cattle prod hard into the gut of the bastard who had been torturing him with it. He shoved it straight into the weird-colored creature and pulled the trigger with a vengeance. He saw the voltage go through the thing. Ripples of burnt color expanded outward from the point of the prod, and the smell was… unsettling. Like burned marine life. But he didn’t care and he sure as hell wasn’t going to stop. Fury rode him in rolling waves of hatred as he jammed that fucker with—
A Mack Truck tackled him. The cattle prod went flying, his bare feet left the concrete, and he landed on his hip, then shoulder, then head hard enough to make his brain rattle. It didn’t matter. He was fighting even before his consciousness caught up to what had happened. Every cell was punching or kicking or biting. If it could move, it was attacking.
Except the truck was fucking huge and the weight was suffocating.
His arms were pinned first, and his hips immobilized. Legs were trapped next, and when his vision cleared enough for him to focus, he saw the weird asshole holding the cattle prod. And all the while, someone was screaming, dogs were barking, and the Mack Truck was saying his name. Over and over.
“Josh, calm down. Josh! Ow! Joshua!”
He didn’t stop fighting. He couldn’t. The fury inside him was too hot for him to rest. But he didn’t have the strength. And though in his mind he might be Wolverine, slashing and bashing his captors, in reality, his body strained to no effect. He gasped for air, his muscles twitched as he still commanded them to fight, and in the background a woman was screaming while dogs were barking.
“Josh, calm down,” the truck was saying. The words came out breathless, and he had some satisfaction that he’d tired out the guy. “You fight like you’re possessed.”
Yes, he did. Always.
“Gelpack, you okay?”
“That was an unusual experience. Should I have experienced pain? I do not have nerves yet to transmit sensations.”
The guy huffed out a breath, dropping his weight more fully on top of Josh. “Be thankful you don’t. Hell—” He turned and looked at something to Josh’s right, then did a double take. “The girl changed back to human. Call Wiz to help her and sedate the other wolves. We can’t handle them right now.”
Josh turned his head enough to see what his captor was looking at. What he saw shocked him into momentary stillness. Cages. Rows of cages, three with barking wolves and one with a naked redheaded woman clutching her head and screaming. She must be the girl they were talking about. He’d been so busy fighting that he hadn’t registered the noise.
God, she had a set of lungs on her. Good. He hoped she was loud enough to bring in the cops, but somehow he doubted it. This had all the freezing-cold feels of an underground laboratory. And didn’t that just make all his body parts clench tight.
“Send us back to Earth,” he said loudly. “It’s not right to experiment on us.”
He felt the truck pull back, and Josh focused enough to see that it was the big warrior guy from the convention, the one with the Roman name. And he was frowning at Josh.
“What are you talking about? This is Earth.”
“He’s not.” He jerked his chin at the see-through guy in board shorts. And what the hell was that red smear in the middle of his chest? It looked too bright to be blood, but then how would he know what blood looked like inside a guy who was made of Jell-O?
