Heat burned through his body. And since he’d been waiting for something, he noticed the tiny increments that built in his gut before expanding through his nerves. It felt like a small fire burning low, except that the base of his spine fired with a kind of electric pulse. Each beat shot up his spine, pounding in increasing strength. Up his spine, down his legs…. His muscles contracted in response. His back arched, his arms went wide, and his head jerked backward as he tried to scream.
It reached his brain faster than he expected, and once it was there, his mind whited out, although he felt the glow of a thousand suns right in the center. And once he saw that, felt that, knew it as something gloriously special, it all collapsed. The heat, the power, the joy—everything inside him fell apart. And when it reformed, he stood on four legs. His face was reshaped, and his backside moved as never before.
“Crap,” Nero said from somewhere above. “I hope he fits in my car.”
He wasn’t going into any car. He was going to run and bound and smell things. He was in the woods as a wolf, and the power in his body was glorious. So he tensed his muscles—
And collapsed.
He stood and leaped away, except only his back legs moved. His front went lax and he dropped his nose into the dirt. He focused all his attention on what muscles worked how, and he completely failed.
And that was how Nero and Josh got him to the car. And then some movie-star gorgeous guy looked him in the eyes and told him to sleep.
Chapter 3
MEANWHILE IN MICHIGAN, LADDIN QUITS WULF, INC.
“YOU CAN’Tbe serious. They were just rabbits.”
Laddin looked up from where he’d been staring out the window at the Michigan woods. He was in Captain M’s office, delivering the bad news in the firmest possible way. “It wasn’t just the rabbits,” he protested, but she cut him off.
“You can’t leave Wulf, Inc. because you ate a bunch of rabbits. The woods would be lousy with furbies if we didn’t keep the population down.” The woman was his trainer and also the administrator in charge of all the combat packs at Wulf, Inc. She’d been with him from the moment he’d been brought into headquarters as a werewolf, and she’d wasted no time in making use of his talents. Not just his ability to blow things up, but also his tendency toward OCD. Everything in its place, and all that. She’d set him to organizing her office workflow, and he’d taken to it like a duck to water.
Oh hell—that was another creature he’d eaten the last time the moon shone bright. Apparently he was the kind of werewolf that lost its mind every full moon and ate anything that ran, flew, or hopped.
“You have to get past this, Laddin. You’re a predator now. And predators—”
“Eat bunnies?”
“Yes.”
“No.”
She shook her head. “It’s hard going through life hating yourself for what you are.”
Been there, done that. He used to hate himself for his deformed hand—a birth defect that becoming magical hadn’t fixed. But he’d made peace with it, so he had to believe he’d find a way to survive without eating living meat.
“Look, it’s not just the rabbits. Nobody asked me if I wanted to be made into a werewolf.”
She shifted uncomfortably in her seat. This was a major problem with Wulf, Inc. They couldn’t tell people they had the werewolf gene before they activated it. The Paranormal Accords said as much. And so Wulf activated the gene and then hoped the person would sign up with the organization afterward. It was ass-backward, and everyone knew it.
“Even if we could have asked you—and you know we’re not allowed—you wouldn’t have believed a word of it.”
That was probably true, but it didn’t matter. “Do you know why I worked in Hollywood?”
She frowned. “I’ll bite. Why?”
“Because I liked pretending to be part of the action without actually being in it. I’m a couch superhero. I’ll cheer on Captain America, but I sure as hell don’t want to actually fight the Nazis. I don’t schlep through the jungle in search of Dr. Doom, and I sure as hell don’t want to go face-to-face with any demon. I’m sorry, Captain M, but you activated the wrong guy.”
She leaned forward. “This doesn’t make sense. Two weeks ago you were jonesing to go out into the field. What happened?”
He’d eaten a bunny and realized it tasteddelicious. And if that hadn’t been bad enough, he’d been the one responsible for packing up the belongings of Nero’s dead teammates. That had been a major eye-opener. He’d seen their entire lives in their things. They’d been cut off from their families because they couldn’t talk about the paranormal, they lived in the daily practice of violence, and at the end of it all, so few people remembered them. Not the ones they’d saved, who didn’t know what had happened, and not their families, who hadn’t spoken to them for years. Only the organization mourned—for a few weeks—before it restructured, activated new recruits, and created new combat packs with the survivors.
“I don’t want to be a killer, even of bunnies.”
“We’re protecting the world. You don’t have to be on the front lines.”
He nodded. “I love the work you’re doing.” Wulf, Inc. took out genuine baddies, and he had no problem with that. But it was still “eviscerate this” and “disembowel that” everywhere he looked, which made his wolf side want to roll around in the blood too. But he was a man first, and he didn’t want to split open anyone’s gut. Not when he could buy plastic-wrapped chicken breasts at the grocery store. “I just don’t want to be part of it.”
