Bing dropped his head back against the seat. He probably didn’t realize it, but his hand lay in a tight fist on the armrest—close enough that Walter could take it in his own hand because the Yaris he was driving was really small.
“They’re really cute, you know?” Bing said. “I thought the winged ones were funny. I thought kangaroos were cute.” His lips curved in a weak smile. “I thought werewolves were sexy.”
“They are.”
Bing shook his head. “Werewolves are people, no more or less sexy than anyone else.”
Which meant that Bing was of the über-sexy variety.
“And the kangaroos fight like demons. They’re fast, they kick hard, and they don’t stop. At least not when the jockeys are directing them.”
“How long were you fighting them?”
“From that first fight at the lake until yesterday.”
A week. No wonder he looked exhausted.
“But they weren’t like the fair—” Walter cut off the wordfairiesat the last second, but Bing understood his meaning.
“We were running support for the people trying to solve the demon problem. We weren’t supposed to be in on the action, but then Bruce and Laddin got in trouble with a group of winged ones. I ran there to help, but they caught me. I couldn’t move, couldn’t fight. I had no control of anything except what they made me do.”
A shudder of horror slid down Walter’s spine. Did he dare ask? How could he not? “What happened?”
Bing shuddered. “They forced us to give answers nonstop.” He looked at Walter. “Laddin did a tutorial on explosives. Yordan started quoting the Bible. But I….” He looked away.
Walter squeezed Bing’s fist. “Get it out. What did you say?”
“I talked about how things felt. How proud I was to be selected into Wu’s dojo. How hard it was to keep working when I was exhausted. How I lived and died on his approval.”
“He’s an asshole—”
“And how it felt to kiss Kong for the first time.”
Well, that shut Walter up quick.
“And how I felt when I lost my first competition, when I was disowned by Wu, when I was put in a cage as a werewolf.” He looked over at Walter. “When I thought I’d never see you again.”
Walter had no response to any of that. He could see the waves of emotions in his friend. Pain, joy, pride, and loss. It was a wash of everything mixed together, and it devastated Bing. That shredded Walter.
“That must have been awful,” Walter said. Bing was a private guy. He barely admitted to feeling emotions at all. To have them all exposed like that would have been truly hellish. “I’m sure everyone understood.”
Bing looked away. “I spoke in Chinese. Nobody knew what I was saying but me.”
Okay, that threw Walter for a loop. “Then why—?”
“Answers,” Bing said. “Laddin explained explosives because that’s what the F people needed. Yordan quoted the Biblebecause it means something to him. What kind of answers are my feelings?”
“Feelings are everything. They’re the reason we do what we do.”
“I act because I have responsibilities. I honor my parents, my heritage, the teachings I follow, if not the teachers. Feelings have nothing to do with any of that.”
“You’re talking about your identity,” Walter said. “Who you are.”
Bing nodded. “I suppose so.”
“But you lost all of that when you became a werewolf. You lost your family, your heritage, your teacher, and your career. What is left but your feelings? And then the winged assholes took that from you too.”
Walter said the words because he was a think-out-loud kind of guy. But as he listened to himself, a lightbulb went on in his head. Suddenly he understood how very rudderless Bing was. All those things people clung to as stable bulwarks of life—job, heritage, career—had been stripped away. Even his own body was alien. And then everything he felt had been exposed to a bunch of paranormal assholes.
