“Fine, but most people will think you’re splitting hairs, “ Sikorski argued. “This is a cat who, in its first noted instance of appearance, is known to have killed five people in two different locations. You have to at least agree it’s a mass murderer.”

He groaned, and rubbed his eyes, pushing in on his eyelids so he could see the pretty patterns of spots dancing over his corneas. He wanted to say mass killer was more appropriate since murder essentially implied intent, but he knew that would sound like he was parsing semantics, being a “kitty sympathizer”. (He was in one sense, but not in another.) “Have you checked the areas between Tweaks and DeSilvo’s?”

Sikorski scoffed. “We’re looking to see if there were any notes of trouble in the surrounding areas, but that’s a hell of large area. Unless someone calls something in, we ain’t combing the area by foot. We are going to increase patrols tonight.”

“In prowlers? You know most cats stay away from road traffic.”

“Like we got the budget for foot patrols. If you’re worried about it, Roan, maybe you should get out there yourself.”

“Yeah, right, I’ll do that,” he grumbled, hanging up.

Paris touched his shoulder, rubbing it slightly. “Same cat?” It was hardly a question.

He nodded, leaning back against his touch. He gave himself a second to enjoy it before reality came crashing in, and killed any fun he could have possibly had. “Exact same. God, what’s the pattern?”

“Pattern? I thought only people with malice aforethought had patterns.”

He stared back at him. “Malice aforethought? Have you been watching Law and Order again?”

“I try not to, but it has a thousand spin offs playing on a hundred different channels. Even when you don’t want to watch it, you kinda do anyways. It’s going to be the law eventually, you know - watch Law and Order or be executed.”

He shook his head, and settled against Paris, wondering if he could bear to eat another slice of pizza. Recalling the crime scene had killed his appetite. “I know, but … there was something wrong with the scene. “ The more he thought about it, the more he realized it. The milk on the floor, the girl surprised coming out of the bathroom. “The kids were killed quick. A couple of brutal swipes or lunges, and that was it - evisceration, decapitation. But Tweaks … he was different.”

Paris tossed the remainder of his slice in the box, and closed the lid, giving him an evil scowl. “Jeeze, thanks.”

“Sorry, I’m trying to figure it out. Tweaks was … well, he was a chew toy, as far as I could tell. The cat must have killed him first, gnawed on him for a while, then heard the others Humans and went after them. But that doesn’t make sense. Why would it kill the other Humans when it could just leave? The window was right there in the kitchen where Tweaks was killed.”

Paris put his arm around him and shuddered. “Hon, I love you, but if you don’t shut the fuck up about this, I’m gonna break your jaw.”

Roan rolled his eyes. Paris could take gore as long as it was the phony Hollywood kind, or just graphics in a video game; the real kind turned him into a quivering mass of Jello. “Fine. It just didn’t look right. Something in the scenario was off.”

“Well, that’s what the cops are for, to figure out things like that. And you’re not a cop anymore, Ro.”

“You’re telling me to back off.”

“I’m telling you to let go. I know you can’t help playing hero, but there’s a limit. Let the cops do the job they’re paid for, and concentrate on the job you were paid for. Okay?”

“Now you’re telling me to follow the money.”

“Of course I am. I’m a gold digger.”

After they both took swigs of their beers (Roan finished his off, trying not to want a second beer), he asked, “Why’d you turn the t.v. on?”

“We both missed the Daily Show last night. Figured we could catch a repeat.”

“Oh, okay.”

“We really need a Tivo.”

“You buy it, gold digger.” He tried very hard not to think about the scene at Tweaks’s house, because Paris had been right. Danny’s parents were paying him to find out something about their son’s whereabouts if he at all could, not try and get involved in a police investigation. No matter that it was kitty related and made no sense; unless Sikorski asked him to get involved, he couldn’t.

It was surprising how hard that was for him to accept.

****

After the Daily Show, they cleaned the beer bottles and pizza box out of the bedroom, piling everything in the appropriate bags in the kitchen. While recycling had cut their garbage output and bill by a good segment, sometimes keeping track of all the fucking bags was a pain and a half, but what could you do?

Paris took it on himself to chatter happily about trivialities to try and distract him, talking about some new colors of paint he saw at the hardware store and how he thought maybe he could paint the living room and touch up his study in warmer, richer colors - Paris was as much a handyman as he was a mechanic, and very good at both. But then again, he worked at his Uncle’s garage on and off through high school, which is where he got his love of muscle cars. He briefly worked as a house painter one summer, which turned him off of exterior house painting for all time , but he didn’t mind interior painting. Apparently it was all a matter of degrees. But Roan couldn’t help but object. “I really don’t want a study colored “autumn spice”.”

“Oh, ignore the gay name - no offense. It’s this great, warm dark orange color, very regal, it’d look perfect with - oh shit.”

He turned away from the sink to see Paris leaning against the counter, bent over with an arm around his stomach, panting as if he just took a shot to the gut. “It’s starting early.”

Son of a bitch. That did happen sometimes, usually when you weren’t ready for it.

There was usually a rhyme and reason to a transformation cycle, but it varied from person to person. It was based on the virus’s own cycles rather than anything else, although most infected did transform around sunset, which led some to link the virus to the lunar schedule. (It was bullshit, but people were desperate to make sense of something as senseless as this.) Roan could smell it now, the change in his body chemistry, it made him smell more like a tiger than a Human.

He helped him to the basement as the spasms wracked Paris, his muscles jumping and seizing beneath his skin, and his pupils were already blown wider than a junkie’s pupils, his irises reduced to a hair thin line. The eyes were the first to change and the last to go back.

Their basement was a typical one, containing the water heater, the circuit breakers, boxes and boxes of stored crap they had no room for upstairs, and one thing that made it a bit different: a cage. A cube of steel bars, nine feet by nine, there was barely just enough room for a large cat to pace circles in it, and there was a key lock on it, simple, old fashioned, with the key hanging just beyond the lock itself. A person locked in the cage could get out quite easily, but an animal without an opposable thumb would be stuck - which was exactly the point.

He helped Paris inside the cage and then locked the door, hanging the key back on its hook. The basement had nothing but a poured concrete floor, but the cold surface was usually soothing during the opening salvo of the change, when it felt like you were on fire beneath your skin. Roan sat on the basement stairs and just talked, as they both found it comforting to try and fill this awful space with noise. Paris probably lost conscious about two minutes after he was in the cage, but Roan was talking for himself as much as for him.

Despite what the movies claimed - or edited trans-porn showed - the actual transformation process could take from forty five minutes to over an hour, with his kind, the virus children, usually taking the least amount of time. He talked about the case, his problem with the crime scene, but was unable to completely block out the noise of bones snapping, crackling like twigs underfoot, meshing and resetting themselves, becoming something else, as Paris’s spasming heels beat out a tattoo on the floor. He didn’t look at him because he couldn’t, he could bear watching it happen to someone he cared about, but he knew if he looked he’d see his flawless skin bubbling as if boiling, stretching and reforming, looking like it was melting as short, fine hairs pushed through his malleable epidermis. The shape of his face would change, the jaw breaking as it pushed out, distended, his mandibles widening and mouth bleeding as new teeth shoved their way through tender gums, and then his pelvis would break and reshape itself into something more accommodating to the legs of a cat. The closest that fiction had ever gotten to showing how painful and physical devastating this process was was “An American Werewolf In London”, but even then it happened way too fast, as if by time lapse photography. This process was painful, long, and pure torture to watch if it happened to someone you loved. The only saving grace was the process was so painful and traumatic that the changers lost consciousness as soon as it began.

After a while, Roan didn’t even know what he was saying; he was simply rambling, looking down at his own hands as he twisted them, his joints aching in sympathy for what was happening to Paris. Soon the sound of bones breaking under intense muscular strain gave way to the low, watery growl of a cat in pain, and he glanced up at the fully transmogrified Paris.

He was beautiful as a Human, and beautiful as a cat, but then again, was there such a thing as an ugly tiger? He was over six feet long, which was kind of “short” for a proper tiger, but since he was three feet high at the shoulder and around two hundred pounds, still broad across the chest, no one would ever call him small in this form either. His fur was orange and white with black stripes, but oddly enough, it was the same sleek, glossy black that Paris’s hair was, giving him an indelible mark. Amber eyes as fathomless and empty as an abyss glared at him from a broad feline face, and as the tiger got shakily up to its feet, its growl became far more menacing. No, Paris had no apparent consciousness in this form, no memories, and all the cat knew was that it hurt, it was penned up, and there was a man here who smelled like a rival cat. It would blame him for its circumstances, want to hurt him for the perceived pain and captivity. “I guess I’ll get ready to hit Poison,” he said, wiping the tears from his eyes with the back of his hand. He had no idea when he started crying, but he wasn’t really surprised. He stood up with the help of the safety rail. “I’ll let you know how it goes.”

The tiger roared and threw itself against the bars of the cage, wanting badly to get to him, to get to the thing that it thought hurt it, and its ivory fangs gleamed under the dim light from the naked overhead bulb. A cat as big as Paris could bite a man in half, rip his head off like it was nothing more than a fruit from the vine. And staring at the big, beautiful, enraged cat behind the bars, his lover transformed into mindless beast, he realized that was another problem too: no small cat would have been able to cut a person in half easily. But no big cat would have left a passage so unmarked; the overgrown grass in the backyard outside the window would have been broken in its path. There would be a trail, a visible passage, something showing where it had gone.

So what kind of beast were they actually dealing with here?

*****

Roan didn’t know why he didn’t like shopping malls. He wished he could say it was a big lefty thing, like he was opposed to the corporate murder of small businesses, but it really wasn’t that (although he was convinced big corporations would destroy the world a buzzword at a time). He just found most malls joyless places, claustrophobic and unappealing, generally full of crap he couldn’t imagine needing. Did someone actually get up one day and really look forward to shopping at the Gap? He couldn’t imagine.

He was trying to remain focused on his disdain, because it kept him from thinking about Paris, and about the murder scene at Tweaks’. He was suddenly wondering what they had overlooked at the DeSilvo scene, and if all the people in the house at Tweaks’ were actually killed by a cat, or if only Tweaks was, and the rest mutilated after death to look like they were killed by a cat. But that was nuts. And anyways, the coroner would soon prove that if it was true. He saw no evidence at the scene indicating any deaths were anything but killing by cat … and yet, the pieces still didn’t fit. Maybe they would never fit.

But he had to stop thinking about it. It wasn’t his case. And Sikorski was really just an acquaintance, not a genuine friend. He thought it was amusing to know such a macho queer who was also a kitty and had a “super smelling” ability, it was a lark to him, something funny to tell the wife over dinner, but he never got the sense he actually liked him as a person. He liked him as an oddity, a circus freak. He respected him as an investigator, though, and that was the only reason Roan tolerated him. He wondered if Gordo realized how lucky he was.

Poison was in the rough center of the mall, across from a gaming store and between a Claire’s and a Tower Records, and the music was so loud it sounded like Poison and the record store were having a contest. He wasn’t sure who was winning - Poison was blasting My Chemical Romance and Tower was responding with Kanye West - but Roan figured everyone’s eardrums and nerves were losing.

The inside of the store was actually fairly dark, lit with a neon scheme, showing off “rock” clothes that tended towards leather and goth, with some emo duds on the side. There was a counter in the center of the store for jewelry - hey, Par wasn’t be sarcastic; you could get piercings here - as well as makeup that would make a Cure fan swoon. There was a small rack of CDs against the far wall, and there were some in wire baskets on the glass topped counter that all seemed to be compilations of various sorts. (Ooh, did that one say homocore? He didn’t have that CD …)

There were two women behind the counter, one in her mid twenties with a chain connecting her eyebrow ring to one of her earrings, and a teenage girl with magenta hair cut in a kind of retro bob, wearing black lipstick and possessing eyes so smeared with black eyeliner that she looked vaguely like a zombie from a low budget movie. “Marley?” he asked her, and showed her his i.d. ”I’m Roan McKichan, we talked on the phone.”

She looked at his i.d. carefully, blue eyes narrowing like she didn’t have her contacts in. She was a little plump in the face, not unattractive, but she had squeezed herself into an outfit that was too tight and definitely not flattering. The top was some kind of black lace corset like affair, paired with a laughably short black miniskirt over plaid patterned tights. She wore a lot of chunky jewelry, mostly silver colored, including an Egyptian ankh dangling from her neck and several different charm bracelets that jingled when she moved her hands. Was she being retro or goth or retro-goth? He couldn’t decide. “Oh, yeah,” she said, chewing loudly on gum that smelled like apples. “I guess I can talk.”

He almost said ‘Over this noise?’ but thought better of it. “Do you know where Danny might have run off to?”

She shrugged, shaking her head, looking at a guy over near the rack of CDs. ”Naw. I mean, I know he wasn’t all that happy at home, but I didn’t think he’d just bail.”

The deliberate glance away was the tell; she was lying. She wouldn’t meet his eyes. “Why wasn’t he happy at home?”

Again the uncomfortable shoulder shrug, the glance away, but this time she looked back at him. “Y’know, his parents were just … on his case. He had to be perfect, y’know. He couldn’t get a B, he couldn’t let his grade point drop, he had to get into Harvard or Yale or some other place like that. He just wanted to hang out, y’know, go to a concert, but they wouldn’t let him. “

He nodded, doing his best not to sneeze. She was wearing a perfume that tickled his nasal passage, and was sharp enough that it felt like inhaling shredded glass. Was she into kitties too? He glanced at her jewelry, and saw she was wearing a necklace with a small silver jaguar on it, and one of her charm bracelets was full of cat figurines. “I’m not bad mouthin’ ‘em,” she continued, chewing her gum like cud. “I mean, they were cool to me an’ all, they weren’t mean, they never beat him or nothin’, they were just very … y’know …”

“Bourgeois? “

She stared at him blankly. “What?”

He could have given her the official definition, but he decided he didn’t want to be condescending or a dick. Marley was helping him more than she realized, and would help him even more, whether she knew it or not. “Uptight; conservative.”

That made her half shrug, half shake her head again. “Yeah, I guess.”

He pretended he just noticed one of the CDs in the wire basket, and picked it up and looked at it while keeping his arm flat on the counter, his wrist turned up so his Leo tattoo was plainly visible. “Your boss is giving me the stink eye,” he muttered. “Pretend I’m buying something.”

She glanced over at her manager, who was currently at the second cash register ringing up a purchase, and then turned back towards him. “Well, maybe you should go. I don’t - “ she did the slightest double take upon seeing his tattoo, and tilted her head to the side, as if making sure she was seeing what she thought she saw. She then leaned towards him, eyes as large and bright as new quarters, and asked in a hushed tone, “Is that a mark?”

Some kitties did go and “mark” themselves, literally advertising their affliction on their sleeve. That wasn’t why he had a tattoo, but it didn’t matter right now. He nodded, giving her a sly look as he lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “I’m a cat, yeah. I’m a virus child.”

“Really?” Her eyes were shining now. He was another boring adult when he walked in, but now he was suddenly exotic and appealing. “Cool.”

He thought of Paris’s breaking bones, and wanted to backhand her across the face. Not cool, not sexy, not exotic; painful, heartbreaking, agonizing. But if he was going to play this right, he couldn’t let his true feelings show. Instead he smiled in a slightly lecherous manner. “You ..?”

“Oh no, I’m not. But it’s kinda … I mean, it must be cool to just become something else.”

“You can’t imagine.” No, she couldn’t; none of these kitty wannabes could. “Do you ever go to the, um …” he looked around, as if making sure they were alone, and felt like a fool. He must not have looked like one, though, because she seemed to be buying it. “The church? Divine Transformation?”

A grin bloomed across her face, as sudden and stark as a bullet wound. There was such joy in it, such raw need, that it genuinely frightened him. No one should be so unhappy with themselves. “Are you kidding? We go all the time.”

There it was - we. Not she; we. As in her and Danny.