And every day his father would point out how the beatings helped him. He was strong and could punch like a Mack Truck. That made him a valuable member of the football team. He watched people carefully for signs of evil and created a strong pack of loyal friends. That served him well as a college quarterback. He learned to protect his mother and sister against any foes—even though no enemy ever appeared—and that was what drove him to firefighting.
All good things.
Except now that he was a mature man heading toward thirty, he realized he’d been a brute to his little brother. His pack of loyal friends in high school were more a gang of thugs than harmless kids hanging out after school. And though he had saved lives as a fire medic—a firefighter/EMT—he had never once seen signs of evil in his little brother.
Until today.
Today, when Josh had shown up unexpectedly at their parents’ house for Sunday dinner. He’d buffed out and had a handler, who was definitely spouting bullshit. Josh had not been in a hospital, as his parents had been told. And he certainly hadn’t been recuperating from stress, as that huge asshole Nero had said. No, his little brother was clearly still under enormous stress, and it was breaking him. Hell, he’d even blurted out that he was gay in an attempt to turn the conversation away from where he’d disappeared to for the past six weeks.
That alone had been bad enough, but then Josh demanded his father make a weird outfit out of Volcax—a heat-resistant fabric so secret Josh could be jailed for having it without approval from the Pentagon.
Bruce had no idea why his father agreed to make the clothing for his brother, but he understood the hard look his dad gave him on the way out the door. It said, without words, that Bruce was to protect his mother and sister. That his father was going to take care of Josh, one way or another.
That might have worked on Bruce if he’d still been nine years old. Only he wasn’t. He was twenty-nine, a firefighter, and old enough to decide for himself if his brother was evil.
Besides, his sister was just back from deployment with the Army. She had way more combat training than he did. So for the first time in his life, he decided to protect his brother instead.
He followed them. He saw Josh and his father go into the warehouse, presumably to make whatever weird outfit Josh needed. Bruce snuck in and waited, listening to their conversation and hoping to get Josh alone. It never happened.
Then he followed Josh to a hotel where Nero was waiting. He tried to catch his brother, but Josh went straight to Nero’s room while Bruce was still parking his car. Stupid, stupid. He was a firefighter, damn it, not a cop. What the hell did he know about deprograming someone from a cult? He’d been trying the gentle approach. He wanted to talk to his brother as a friend. Now he was thinking about busting in and abducting the guy. But given his brother’s new size, Bruce wasn’t sure he could take him unwillingly, and he didn’t think Nero would let Josh escape without a fight.
Which left him sitting in the hotel parking lot and fuming at his own incompetence.
“Sucks, doesn’t it?” a voice abruptly said from his right. “You’re trying to be a good guy for the first time in your life, but you haven’t the foggiest idea how. I can relate.”
Bruce spun in his seat, fumbling as he grabbed for the heavy flashlight that he kept close. It was his only weapon against the… ventriloquist dummy? Circus clown? Weird short guy covered in leafy greens who suddenly sat in his front seat. The guy had bright eyes and a hard cut to his jaw… and was also about three feet tall and wearing curly elf shoes on his tiny feet.
“How did you get in my car?” Bruce demanded. The question wasn’t at the top of his list of worries, but somehow it was the first stupid thing that came out.
The small person’s brows rose and lowered in an obvious taunt. “Figure out who I am and that’ll answer all your questions.” His voice was musical and laced with humor. And as Bruce stared, his hair turned from spinach green to tomato red. Oh shit. He was hallucinating! He always knew the chemicals in his father’s factories would fuck with his brain eventually.
Bruce looked around frantically, half searching for any other threats, half checking to see if his vision had gone wonky everywhere.
Nope. Everything looked just the same in this brightly lit parking lot. Everything except the hallucination sitting in his front seat. Only this didn’t seem like a hallucination so much as a clown dream gone bad.
“Okay,” he said, faking calm as best he could. “Who are you?”
“My name’s Jonas Bitterroot, and I’m the fairy indirectly responsible for your brother’s situation.”
“And what situation is that?”
“He’s a werewolf, and he’s about to risk his life trying to kill a demon. Only it’s the wrong timeline for him, even though it’s right for Nero.”
Not one single word of that made sense, except maybe one. “Werewolf.” His father had never explained the evil curse that was inside Josh. Not even when Bruce had been a stubborn teen who’d demanded real training in a dojo and not the daily beatings his father had given him. But he remembered his dad often saying, “Pretend you’re fighting a werewolf, a bigass dog with smarts. How would you defeat that?” Not once had he said vampire or ghoul or creature from the black lagoon.
