“Of course I would. No one wants to feel crappy.”
“But you knew your hand would hurt after you punched through me to the door, and yet you did it anyway. What actions usually bring you happiness?”
Playing with his packmates. Eating a ton of burgers at a barbecue. And Mother’s potato salad. One bite of that and he was in heaven. “Killing that fucking demon.”
“And how will you feel when you accomplish that? What will your happiness feel like?”
He imagined destroying that gun-toting, neon-blooded asshole. He pictured himself ripping out its throat, shooting its head into a zillion pieces, detonating an atomic bomb on its ass. But every time he destroyed it, it popped right back into his head. He saw every detail of the emotionless, killing thing, from its dead eyes to the steady hold it had on its gun. He’d hamstring it, disembowel it, and then decapitate it before pissing on its remains.
And still it would pop up in his brain, alive and whole as it burned his entire team to ash.
“Quiet,” he said. “It will feel like quiet.”
“Thank you for your answer,” Gelpack said as his arm seemed to ooze around his body to open the door. It was a disturbing sight. “It is a common one, and so I believe I have found a pattern.”
Nero lifted his head. “What?”
“Many of your colleagues have said that happiness comes from quiet. And yet you all live such noisy lives.”
Wasn’t that the truth? “So what do you conclude from that?”
“That happiness comes from quiet and noise both, in the right balance.”
“It has to be the right noise,” Nero said. “And the right quiet.” It had been utterly silent after his team had died. He’d been in the in-between state when the blast happened. Then he’d reformed onto the scorched earth and heard absolutely nothing.
“How do you know which is the right one?”
Nero felt a cynical smile twist his lips. “By whether or not it makes me happy.” Let the Jell-O guy figure that one out.
But instead of being confused, the alien nodded as if that made total sense. “Thank you for sharing your feelings with me.” Then he opened the door and left. He should have shut it behind him, but some human protocols were lost on the alien. Or maybe it was because there was an enormous black wolf waiting who shouldered his way inside the moment the alien passed.
“Josh,” Nero said. He was about to tell him to go away, but he couldn’t quite form the words. Instead he stated the obvious. “You heard every word, didn’t you?”
The wolf dipped his head.
“You’re not going to leave me alone, are you?”
Head shake, no.
“Fine.” He got up and headed for his computer. “Then you can sit right by me and watch while I see if that demon has started eating Wisconsinites again.”
It took forty-eight minutes for Josh to change back to human. Nero felt the temperature drop in the air and knew immediately what was happening. He turned fast enough to see the golden shimmer right before Josh reformed as a man on all fours.
“For the love of God, watching you at a computer is like watching a toddler trying to do advanced math. Get out of the way.” He grabbed on to the desk and hauled himself upright before pushing at Nero.
Normally Nero would refuse to vacate the chair out of stubbornness, but Josh was about to feel dizzy from shifting and needed to sit. So he jumped out of his seat and guided the man into it. And then before he could say anything, Josh put his hands to the keyboard and started typing. Nero tried to follow it, but windows kept popping up and then disappearing faster than he could follow. He gathered that Josh was coding something, but he didn’t have the skills to understand it.
“I’ll get you some soup.”
“I don’t need it,” Josh grumbled.
“Watching you learn how to be a werewolf is like watching a toddler trying to cook dinner. You’ll eat what I put in front of you or I’m taking away your screen time.”
Josh turned to stare at him, his fingers momentarily stilled. Then he nodded. “I’ll code, you get food. Deal?”
“Deal.”
Then a female voice came loud and annoyed from the main living space. “You guys know that I can code and cook you both under the table, right?”
