“Just expel it?” he asked, gesturing vaguely.
Bing nodded. “At Wulf, Inc., they taught me that energetic possessions are easy to dispel. Every person is a sovereign being.” He smiled and shrugged. “We use a poem to help us remember. It goes, ‘I am a sovereign being. My mind is my own. My heart is my own. My body is my own. No matter what happens in the world, my mind, my heart, and my body are my own.’”
“Cute,” Walter said, not really meaning it.
“So repeat that,” Bing said. “And add that you want Monkey gone. Kick him out.”
Walter thought for a minute. Inside, he could feel the alien energy squirming as it resisted. He felt tugs in his arms and legs as the muscles twitched in reaction. He had given the Monkey energy control of them, and now it did not want release him. And frankly, Walter wasn’t sure he wanted to let it go.
He’d never be able to move like that again without Monkey. And he certainly wouldn’t feel the ebullient energy that made him think nothing he did was wrong—or if it was, no one would dare defy him.
It was heady stuff, and he wasn’t ready to release it. Especially since Monkey wasn’t in charge. He was. He could let the energy have control or lock it down at will.
“Walter?” Bing asked. “Are you expelling it?”
“Um, sure,” he answered. “Or I will in a minute.”
“Walter, this is serious.”
“Yeah, it is,” he said as he rounded on his once best friend. “But if I kick Monkey out of my head, then I won’t have any knowledge left of the paranormal, right? I’ll have no way of telling if you’re lying or not.”
Bing recoiled, obviously startled by Walter’s sudden anger. “I won’t lie to you,” he said. “We made that pact long ago.”
“Yeah, we did. But you never said you were a freaking werewolf!”
“I wasn’t one then.”
Walter folded his arms, refusing to bow to logic. “Tell me everything. Right now. How you became a werewolf, where you’ve been for the past eight weeks, and why the hell you didn’t call me. I’m not doing anything—sovereign or not—until you answer my questions.”
Their gazes clashed for a moment in a silent struggle—Walter demanding answers, Bing shuttered in silence. Then Bing gave in, leaning against the card table in the most slovenly position Walter had ever seen him take.
“Okay,” he said. “You win.”
He had? He did! Elation burst through him. He’d won an argument against Bing, the one who usually stonewalled until Walter caved. “So? What happened?”
“That last day in Los Angeles, I’d walked away to think about what was happening to me, to us, to our company. Then, all of a sudden, I was changed into a werewolf and taken away. Six weeks of training later, they brought me here to help fight the mess at Lake Wacka Wacka. Now I’m assigned to cleanup.”
“Lake what?”
“That’s what we call it. The place with the—”
“Black hole of death.” He’d heard about it in the news. The whole world had been watching it. That was how they’d been able to rent this land for his movie so cheap. Nobody else wanted to convert a barn on a nearly dead farm about to be destroyed by a black hole into a stage set. No one, that is, except Walter. “So it’s stopped now, right?” The nearest edge of the hole had been a couple miles away. By some predictions, the whole set would have been filled with cyanide gas within the week. But that hadn’t happened.
“It’s done,” Bing confirmed. “It’ll take some time for Mother Nature to restore what was poisoned, and the mystical energy is still thick throughout Wisconsin, but yes, that danger is gone.”
“Well, that’s good,” he said, his mind spinning in a thousand directions at once. The Monkey energy latched on to the wordsmystical energy. Walter sensed he was thinking of all the ways he could draw on that power. Walter, on the other hand, was forcibly blocking the idea while trying to imagine what it would have felt like to suddenly, unexpectedly become a werewolf. And both heandMonkey were noticing how good Bing looked leaning against the makeshift desk. He’d always been gorgeous, but there was an extra leanness to his face now that gave it a more, well, wolfish appearance. His arms had always been powerful, but now they were thick with bulging muscle. As were his legs. And that was nothing compared to the display of rippling abs Walter could see beneath his thin T-shirt.
“Aren’t you cold?” Walter abruptly asked. Bing was standing there in loose jeans and a thin shirt in April. Walter had already kicked on his portable camping heater, and he was still wearing his heavy robed costume.
Bing shook his head. “Werewolf metabolism. I’m fine in all sorts of weather.”
Of course he was. “So why didn’t you call me?”
“I couldn’t at first. And then later….” Bing blew out a breath, one that caused his thick black hair to ripple across his forehead. “What was I going to say? ‘I’m a werewolf now’? I wasn’t allowed. I figured you were busy making the movie—which you are—and that you were better off without me.”
Walter nodded. He heard honesty in the words. But Monkey heard something more. There was an echo of loneliness in Bing’s statement. Walter had always assumed that a guy as gorgeous and talented as Bing could have anyone he wanted with a snap of his fingers. In fact, he’d seen it whenever they’d gone out in public. Even if the LA crowd didn’t know how famous Red Wolf was in China, they gravitated to Bing’s good looks, his easy smile, and the confidence he exuded like a heady perfume.
And damn it, Walter did too.
