“So, um, what are you going to do differently so that you can urinate in glory?”
He’d expected Nero to blink and come back to himself. Instead, the man’s expression became laser focused on Josh, and his words were so clear and distinct that Josh felt the impact of the sounds like tiny pebbles against his sternum.
“That’s where you come in. That’s why we disrupted all five of your lives. It was a huge risk, but we had to take it—”
“Who you trying to convince?” Josh challenged, but Nero rolled right over him.
“We need a way to protect ourselves against magical plasma that burns. We need you to….” He took a deep breath. “Ineed you to get me close enough to take this bastard out. He was easy pickings until the boom. If you can get me through that plasma burst, I’ll destroy the bastard.” Then he slammed a fist down on his thigh, taking out his ferocity on his own body. “I think it was a one-time boom, or at least it’ll take a while to recharge. If you can find a way to protect us from the fire, then we can finish it. We can end this nightmare forever and go back to how things should be.”
His words were coming hard and fast, and Josh wasn’t immune to the resonance of challenge in every word. Nero’s voice rang like a clarion call asking him to save the day, solve the problem, protect the heroes, and be all that he could be in the service of good. Every video game he’d ever loved had a similar beginning.
But this wasn’t a game. Josh couldn’t ditch everything in his life to do what Nero wanted. Even though Nero was as hot and inspiring as a call to action could be, Josh was a slow one to leap. Savannah said he had commitment issues, but either way, he couldn’t jump in. He looked at his hands, not sure what to say.
“I don’t know anything about magical plasma. Hell, I don’t know anything about magic.”
“We’ll teach you what we know. Gelpack said he’d help, and Wiz loves talking to anyone who will listen about what he can do and how.”
Silence hung heavy in the room. Eventually Josh looked up. He couldn’t keep staring at the floor, but when he connected with Nero’s gaze, he saw desperation. Like the man was consumed with the need for Josh to say yes, to take the red pill and step through the looking glass. One little yes and everything would be Wonderland. It was the same passion Josh had seen in Nero backstage before life had gone sideways. And it was a thousand times more intense now that Josh had seen those ash outlines.
Yet he still tried to wiggle out.
“I’m not Einstein. You don’t throw people into a lab and say, ‘I need this. Invent it.’”
“Try.”
No.It was on the tip of his tongue. The whole thing was too much, too fast.Hell nowould be a better answer. He was a geek from the Midwest whose most exciting moment in life before today was letting go of the handrail on the Batman roller coaster at Six Flags. Even his greatest moment of glory at MoreCon hadn’t happened. It had been upstaged by these guys.
They’d turned him into a wolf, then thrown him in a cage. He’d been poked with a cattle prod, met an alien, and been jerked off by the wolf version of G.I. Joe. This was crazy. And yet the moment he formed the word no, another word came through his lips.
“Yes. Okay, yes. I’ll give it a shot.”
Nero seemed to deflate before his eyes. He exhaled in relief and gratitude as he abruptly became normal-sized. There was no more verbal resonance urging Josh to enlist in the wolf army. Just a big guy with a hole in his heart whispering the words “Thank you. You won’t regret it.”
Sure he would. Because that was the way with Josh. He usually regretted every one of his passionate impulses. And this was the biggest one of all.
Chapter 9
THE BIOLOGISTdied while Nero slept. Given the odds, having only one of his five recruits die was a huge win, but it didn’t feel that way. To him it was one more body added to the weight on his heart. Worse was what Gelpack did in an effort to help.
“You didwhatto hissoul?”
They were in the morgue, and Dr. Wesley Barren’s wolf body had been pulled out of the refrigeration unit. He looked stiff and cold, his lush brown fur seeming flat against his body. According to the chart, his organs had stopped working one by one in rapid succession. It happened more often than Nero liked to think about. They guessed it occurred when the mind refused to accept the wolf body and chose death rather than to exist as an animal, but no one knew for sure.
“I tied his energy to his bones,” Gelpack said. “Provided his sternum does not break, he will remain here in this dimension.”
Nero stared at the alien as if he was… an alien. “But he’s dead.”
“But you have ways to make the body function. Pacemakers and artificial bones.”
“Yes,” he said as calmly as he could imagine. “But that’s when the patient is alive.”
“What is death but when the energy leaves the body? I have prevented that.”
“But… not….” Hell. This was why they so desperately needed a doctor. It was so Nero could look to the medical officer and order him to answer. “We don’t know how to animate a dead body.”
“Wiz spoke to me about necromancy. Perhaps he knows how to perform the task.”
“What! Since when?” Then he abruptly shook his head. “Don’t answer. I’ll talk to Wiz, but I’m pretty sure he was speaking hypothetically.” He hoped. Unless it really was possible…. He stared at the corpse and tried to imagine what it would be like to have his soul trapped in a frozen, dead body. “Is his soul conscious? Does he know what is happening?”
