Now came the hard part: talking about the disaster that had killed his team. Over the past five and a half weeks, they’d discussed everything but that. The minute Josh brought the subject up, Nero found a way to distract him, usually with sex or a wolf romp in the woods. Eventually Josh had learned to avoid the subject, though he knew Nero daily tracked the expansion of what he’d dubbed the Wisconsin Cyanide Hole. He said he was looking for data on the creature. Plus, he occasionally slipped and made a reference to some deal with a fairy. He’d immediately deny having anything to do with those magical bastards, but Josh knew he was lying. His voice lost its resonance when he lied, but Josh hadn’t pushed. He knew how delicate the subject was.
So instead of talking with Nero, Josh had studied the images, Stratos had dug up every weird fable or tale relating to demons who could blow fire, and Wiz had given him a crash course in magic.
“It works like this,” Josh said. “Plasma fire eats living tissue the same way fire eats wood.”
“We know that—”
“But we didn’t realize that it concentrates on tissue, burning in one direction, until it eats up the fuel. Then it continues on in the same vector.”
Nero stared at him. “What?”
Josh grimaced. There was only one way to explain this. He squeezed Nero’s foot. “Do you think you can look at the pictures of the blast radius? After your team—”
Nero tapped twice on his computer and the images popped up. Which meant he had them cued up and available whenever he wanted them. At Josh’s surprised look, Nero shrugged.
“Yeah, I look at them. Whenever….” He sighed and his gaze wandered over to that stack of team pictures still piled in the corner.
“Whenever you start to feel happy?” Josh asked. “Like you could move on without them?” He knew he was a temporary body for Nero, a way to feel good while still grieving. And maybe they’d grown to be friends. He certainly felt friendship—and a whole lot more—for the guy. So it hurt to realize that every time Nero started to move to a different place emotionally, he purposely dragged himself back into despair. They’d never grow to be more than friends if Nero kept himself stuck in his grief.
Nero’s gaze snapped back to Josh. “I need to kill that demon.”
“And will that make you feel better?”
“Yes.”
“You know it doesn’t work that way. Revenge—”
“It’s not revenge, it’s a second chance.” Nero picked up his laptop and dropped it on the bed between them. “Now show me want you want me to see.”
What he wanted was for the guy to feel better, but obviously that wasn’t happening. So with a grimace, Josh tapped through the images until he found the one he wanted. It was the picture of a black ash smear in the vague shape of a wolf and the silhouette of greenish grass behind him.
“Coffee.”
Josh nodded, knowing that the smear had been the werewolf codenamed Coffee. He pointed to the image and explained what he’d figured out. And it had only taken him weeks of staring at that stupid patch of grass when everything else had been scorched earth. “I couldn’t figure out why this grass was still alive when everything else was dead. But then I realized that the fire concentrated here, where there was fuel.” He pointed to where Coffee’s nose would have been. “It continued down this way.” He stroked his finger down the length of what would have been Coffee’s body. “And then burned outward from his tail, leaving this part untouched.”
He looked up at Nero’s face, hoping to see understanding there. Instead, the man just shook his head. “I don’t—”
“Try this.” He started tapping on Nero’s laptop, pulling up his own files from the server and then scrolling through them as he talked.
“This is how the fire burned from the instant of explosion.” He tapped a key and showed a slow-moving progression of the blast, complete with arrows. “See how it concentrates over everyone’s body, burns through them, then continues on in a narrow point from the back side?”
He looked to Nero. Shit, the guy was about to lose it. Watching in slo-mo as his entire team was decimated had to be brutal.
“Never mind—” he said, but Nero grabbed his hand.
“What does it mean?” he rasped.
“That the fire concentrates over tissue and leaves what’s underneath it untouched. So the grass here is clean. And here. And here.”
He pointed at every single gray-greenish patch. They were all hard to see because the heat of the fire had torched the grass, but it looked different in those vague smears. Like the echo of a shadow. And it had led to his realization.
“Okay, now look. If we put a dense tissue in front of Coffee, angled up and back, then the fire will burn—”
“Over him.”
Josh added a heavy, thick arrow-shaped thing to the simulation and set it directly in front of Coffee like a shield. Sure enough, the fire burned through the arrow, then sheeted over Coffee, leaving the wolf scorched but alive.
“It’s a one-shot deal, of course. Once the compound is consumed, there isn’t any more protection.”
