He went back to his car and pulled out his HK P2000 SK from beneath the seat, clipping the holster to the waist of his jeans and putting on his jacket so it concealed the weapon from view. He wasn’t worried about a cat seeing it - they could smell it anyways, and wouldn’t care - but about people catching a glimpse of a strange guy with a gun and calling the cops on him. Nothing sent a cat fleeing like screaming sirens and flashing lights. He made sure the safety was off and he had a full clip before snugging the gun in the holster.

He took a good, long look up and down the street, hoping for some sign of where Eli might have gone. If he’d changed around the same time as Paris (and since the transformation was based on viral cycles, that was the poorest bet you could make), he’d had two and a quarter hours on him; over two hours in which he could have struck out and hunted. He probably wasn’t anywhere near here anymore.

Or, he could have been just around the corner. Cats were inherently unpredictable, especially the Human transformed variety. The one thing you could count on was they always came home to their territory before the virus cycle ebbed and they became Human again. The general assumption was they started to feel bad, and retreated to where they felt safest, and for whatever reason, that was where they first found themselves. So he could stake out the church and simply wait for Eli the cat to come back, but he just knew he’d fall asleep due to boredom before he did. Truth be told, he was exhausted - the lack of sleep yesterday was catching up to him, and his forty minute nap gave him a brief second wind that had already petered out. He was just too old for all nighters, especially two days in a row.

But he wasn’t giving up yet. He just picked a direction and started walking, hoping he’d find some sign that a big cat had been that way. If it marked its territory along the way he’d catch a scent, but otherwise olfactory cues wouldn’t help him now. Out in the open, in a (mostly) residential neighborhood close to a busy street, there were too many competing scents for one to stand out. Well, maybe car exhaust, but that was no help at all, and too much of it gave him a headache.

He tried to give off a “fresh meat on the hoof” vibe, but that was hard to judge. The night was quiet, save for its usual noises - the strangely arrhythmic thuds of a bass heavy car stereo in the distance, the faint barks of dogs, the noise of a television bleeding through the walls of a house he walked past, the blue light almost strobing in the darkened window. He was catching no hint of big cat, seeing nothing helpful, and while he was trying to radiate a “tasty victim” aura, he really didn’t know if he could. He slowed by big hedgerows and beneath overhanging tree branches, places where a big cat could lurk and hide. “Come on big boy, come and get me,” he muttered, no longer one hundred percent sure what block he was on.

Oh wow - had he just said that? There wasn’t a gayer thing to say on Earth … well, besides “You know what this room needs? Chintz!” And frankly he wasn’t gay enough to say that under any circumstance, unless he was being a smart ass.

Eli wasn’t anywhere near here. He had run off, possibly out towards Tweak’s place - and could he be responsible for that? It was possible, but frankly anything was possible there. He would insist to his dying day that that crime scene didn’t make sense, no matter what the medical examiner concluded.

He knew he could stake out the church, wait for Eli the cat to come back, and simply shoot him in the head. While it wasn’t legal for police officers to shoot “transformed Humans” without attempting humane capture first, civilians could shoot a transformed in an open, public area without any penalties. It was considered a manner of public safety - the public couldn’t be expected to have the major league tranquilizers and stunning equipment that the cops had access to, and they had a right to defend themselves and other people. It was controversial, especially since rednecks put together posses that did nothing but drive around all night and look for cats to shoot, but Roan knew he could use it to his own advantage; he could murder Eli, and he wouldn’t even get a slap on the wrist. It was a thought he mulled over as he walked back towards his car.

He knew he could kill a person - a cat - if he had to. He joined the police force however briefly, and if you couldn’t pull the trigger, you never got through training. It could be boiled down to Star Trek crap, mainly “the needs of the many outweighing the needs of the few”. He also knew, thanks to his illustrious childhood, that there were simply some people who honestly deserved to die; there were some people who had no raison d’etre besides causing misery and pain to others. Oh, he knew the arguments - who was he to judge a worth or a life of a person, blah blah blah - but he also knew, from his own experiences, that there were some people that life would simply be better off without. It was cold, cruel, possibly psychopathic, but it was how he felt, what he sensed to be true. If life was made up of many kinds of people, there would be some in this vast ocean who were simply predators or parasites, remoras who existed only to drain the life from others. All they could do was destroy.

Not that he would ever back wholesale murder, or even the death penalty when it came to that, but he knew of at least a couple of people it would have been worth going to jail for. They were probably still alive, unless someone else got them, but he knew if he ever ran into those people again they’d better hope he wasn’t armed.

He walked back to his car without being followed or stalked, and as he got in, he took off his holster and tossed it into the passenger seat. He had a free pass to get rid of Eli once and for all, a get out of jail free card plopped in his lap. Would he use it? Would Paris forgive him? That was the big one, the killer - Paris would know it was cold blooded; he’d know he staked him out to exterminate him.

He had some time to think about it; if Eli was new to transforming, he could have four to six more active days before the virus went back into dormancy. It would give him time to consider whether he wanted to add murderer to his résumé or not.

******

Coming back from a transformation was akin to regaining consciousness after being hit and dragged by a train. Or at least Paris imagined it to be so - he’d never been hit or dragged by a train. But it seemed appropriate somehow.

He had to lay there for five minutes after he came to, feeling his muscles spasm and tasting coppery blood in his mouth, before he thought he could bear the pain enough to move. He wasn’t strong enough to stand, so he had to crawl to the cage door, and after two tries managed to unlock it. There was no way to describe the pain; he felt like he had been pulverized, tenderized to within an inch of his life by the biggest meat hammer in existence. His muscles were probably as tender as veal.

Ro had left a first aid kit just outside the cage door, out of swiping distance. It was one of their medical kits, though, which meant instead of band aids and gauze it was full of painkillers and hypodermic needles - Paris liked to call it the Courtney Love edition. He had to rest between opening the case, fishing out needle, and loading one up, all actions that shouldn’t have been exhausting and yet somehow were, especially when you were in so much pain your hands couldn’t stop shaking and your eyes couldn’t stop tearing up, and your muscles decided to have spasms that made your whole body tremble like you were an unstable fault line.

Paris reflected on the general irony of him being such an expert at shooting up as he stabbed the needle into his thigh and depressed the plunger. He used to hate needles, and he still did really, when he wasn’t in so much pain, but at times like these he loved the needle. The needle was his friend now; the needle made it all stop. He lay on the cool concrete floor of the basement as he waited for the drugs to fully take effect, waited for that slow, warm wave to engulf him and carry him away to a tropical, forgiving sea.

He just laid staring up at the ceiling, feeling fantastic - maybe that’s why Courtney was such a big fan of drugs - and finally pulled himself up slowly, using the base of the stairs to help him climb up to his feet. He still felt strangely loose, like all his joints had been dislocated and his bones replaced with rubber, but the good thing about the drugs was he didn’t care.

He went straight to the downstairs bathroom and took a shower. The sense of smell was always strongest for about an hour afterwards, and he could never stand the rank, musky smell of himself. Ro always said he didn’t smell that bad, but he was just being kind, because for a little bit he had a near feline sense of smell, and he couldn’t believe Ro could stand to be in the same room with him.

He felt lightly buzzed, relaxed, like he could go lay down or maybe just go out drinking, maybe go listen to some singer songwriter who’s having problems with her boyfriend. But his stomach didn’t so much growl as roar, and he had to go have a bite before his stomach started digesting itself.

Paris turned the t.v. on for some welcome noise, and he got the BBC world news, which was always infinitely depressing, but that Dhaljit Dhaliwal was a hottie - if someone had to tell him there was another war in Eritrea, she was the easiest on the eyes, and that voice was like liquid silk. She could announce the end of the world, and he’d still get a boner.

Ro was home - the Mustang was in the driveway, and his bike was still in the garage - but since he heard nothing upstairs, he figured he was sleeping. Sunlight glowed like radiation beyond the curtains, and it was already incredibly warm; it’d probably be in the 90’s again. He hated heat waves, but there was nothing he could do about it but whine and turn on the air conditioner.

He ate two frozen croissant breakfast sandwiches he nuked in Chiquita the microwave, a breakfast burrito, an Australian toaster biscuit, and a slice of cold pizza with a can of cold, overly sweet coffee. He reminded himself of a pig in a trough, but it wasn’t his fault he was always left ravenous after a transformation. He did wonder how many preservatives and grams of fat, salt, and sugar he just ingested, but did it matter? The virus would kill him long before his arteries would clog.

He went upstairs to get some clothes, and he discovered Roan sacked out on the bed, laying on his back with half of the tan suede like comforter on the floor, the other half tangled around his legs. He was so deeply asleep that even turning on the A.C. didn’t wake him up, so Paris figured he must have only gotten to bed a couple of hours ago.

Ro had left a yellow legal p ad on the nightstand on his side of the bed, and Paris glanced at it. Sometimes Ro left him notes if there were developments in a case, and he was hopeful, because maybe if he solved one case, he could concentrate on the other. The note was only partly for him, though - the rest of it was Ro clearly making notes for himself, things to do or keep in mind when he was awake:

Connection: Eli to Tweaks? Eli to DeSilvo? Eli to both?

Follow up: Did DeSilvo steal from drug busts? Is this significant to his death?

Eli was rumored to have a drug problem in college. Coincidence? Something else?

Who infected Eli? How much of the church is now infected? (Rainbow clear - Guy missing. Significant?)

Need: Migraine strength Excedrin, microwave popcorn, AA batteries, paper towels, pineapple orange juice

There was something a little jarring about finding a shopping list beneath all these names of suspects. Roan could really multitask, he had to give him that.

But the most startling thing was the first. Not Eli being infected - really that was only a matter of time if he was at all serious about the “holiness” of transformation - it was what Ro had written after that: Haven’t done anything yet - weighing options. What options were there? Calling the cops and reporting him as an unrestrained infected in a transformation cycle, or … what? Shooting him?

Oh holy shit.

This was Roan thinking out loud, and as a consequence drawing him into the debate. If Ro had honestly wanted to kill Eli, he could have done it and just claimed that he was menaced or something (although he found it personally a bit hard to believe that there were any cats out there with the balls to menace Roan), and Paris would have believed him simply because he would want to believe him. But the thing he really admired about Ro was his brutal honesty with himself; he could lie as much as the next person, but he never believed his own bullshit for a minute. The fact that he even bothered to mention it pretty much meant he wasn’t going to … probably. Still, he now knew what he was going to do today.

He picked up the comforter and draped it over Roan, pausing briefly to look down at his scar. Since he wasn’t wearing a shirt and was laying on his back, it was quite visible. Even though most transformed lost their scars during transformation, Ro still managed to hold on to three which he called “ghost scars”: they were all so pale they looked white, slightly raised as if in relief. The two most visible were the smallest ones, one on the back of his hand and the other on his face, slightly subsumed by his eyebrow, while the most often hidden scar was the largest, a white line that started at his left shoulder and snaked along beneath his collarbone, tracing an irregular line towards the hollow of his throat. Paris tried to imagine what could cause a scar like that, and all he could think of was a knife, but Ro had denied that was the cause. But he never said what the cause was, and only by precision wheedling did Paris ever get him to admit the one on his hand was due to an iron. He didn’t talk about his scars any more than he talked about his childhood, although he’d picked up enough bits and pieces to figure out it was hellish. The thought that someone did this to him as a child infuriated him - he wanted Ro to name names so he could go and kick their ass, even though Ro was more than capable of doing the ass kicking now. He pulled the blanket up to the scar, and then kissed him gently on the forehead, trying hard not to wake him up. His eyes didn’t stopping moving beneath his eyelids, so he took that as a good sign.

Paris finished getting dressed, grabbed his keys for the Mustang, and left the house, happy to have a mission no matter how grim it was.

He probably shouldn’t have been driving considering he was on twice the maximum dose of an illegal painkiller, but he felt oddly sober - probably because he was still in an incredible amount of pain. Pain was a great equalizer. He drove carefully anyways.

The thing about Eli - the thing he never told Roan - was that Paris felt that he was his own evil twin. He was a reasonably good looking guy with lots of charisma (well, Paris knew he was better looking, but why kick a man when he was down); but whereas Paris devoted himself to hedonism, Eli had actual ambition, and devoted himself to building a cult. He got people to worship both him and his own beliefs, no matter the fact that his beliefs were quite openly nuts. Perhaps this is what would have happened to Tom Cruise if he didn’t go into acting.

Anyway, Paris knew that his charisma - what his own grandmother called “the charm”; she claimed it ran in the family, although it skipped a person here and there - was a weapon of sorts. He never had problems getting dates, getting laid, and he had no idea what other guys complained about. He could get anyone he set his mind to, and he used to think he was quite special, but then he met Eli, and he realized he was just in a small minority of people who contained enough charm to be dangerous. And the more they believed they were special, the more they bought their own bullshit, the more dangerous they were. Eli had hit a special level, a plateau that few could reach; he was a cult of personality now, insulated in his own greatness, confident in his near godhood, and now that he had gotten himself infected, his people were probably going to worship him directly and forget about the rest of it. It was all pretty fucked up; actually, it used to be fucked up. Now it was so fucked up there was no adequate phrase to cover it. And none of this would be so bad if it was a small thing, even regional, but thanks to the web he had an internet empire, and he was head of the biggest kitty cult around. He was power, and he was trouble from several different angles. Even if Ro legally killed Eli in his kitty form, Ro would probably be assassinated by an angry follower.

By the time he reached the church it was pretty quiet, and he found a place to park right out front. Getting out of the car, he noticed he’d accidentally put on one of Ro’s t-shirts, his Clash one. Normally Ro’s shirts were a bit small for him, but his Clash shirt was oversized, so it was just about a perfect fit for him. He still couldn’t quite get over that - a cop into punk. It seemed wrong somehow, but he bet he could chalk up some of it to Ro’s contrariness. He never liked to be what anyone would expect.

Rainbow was sitting on a wicker chair on the far right side of the porch, working on her laptop, enjoying the early morning heat. She looked up as he came up the stairs, and she gave him a brilliant smile, which he returned, cranking up his charm. She had dark crescent moons under her eyes, suggesting she was sleep deprived. “Paris! How good to see you.”

He heard the ‘without your damn boyfriend’ in that, and he had to swallow a laugh. It was unfair of him to use the charm on Rainbow, but he really did think of himself as Roan’s “guy Friday”. What Ro couldn’t get by smarts or muscle he could get by guile or charm. He couldn’t actually pay Ro back for saving his life, but maybe he could make a small contribution when possible. “Good morning to you too. I was wondering I it was possible for me to get a private conference with someone.”

She put her laptop aside and stood up, and he pretended not to notice the hopeful gleam in her eyes. A “private conference” was just talking one on one with a “counselor” here; it was the first step in indoctrination, in joining this wondrous cult. And he bet Rainbow would have loved to get him in a private conference. “Oh really? That’s fantastic! I know you’re quite special, Paris, and we’d be honored to have you.”

Quite special? Oh yes, he was tiger strain - also known as the “suicide cat”. No one knew why a tiger strain was worse than any of the others, but it was, and as far as he knew, he was the only living tiger in the tri-state area. What an honor; he felt like he should have a sash and perhaps a tiara, waving to bystanders from the back of a convertible. “I just have a request, if you’d indulge me.”

“If I can.”

“I want the consultation with Elijah.”

Her thrilled little smile faltered, cracked slightly, and she made strange motions with her hands, like they were fluttering birds trying to escape. Finally she just wrung them tightly together. “I … um, that’s perhaps not …”

“Oh, so Mr. Lehane wants to talk to me, does he?” Eli said, appearing at the door. He was wearing a button down robin’s egg blue shirt, sleeves rolled up and buttons open at the collar, and loose khakis that were quite baggy at the knees and probably only held up by the thin alligator skin belt around his waist. Paris could understand - you were never quite prepare for the drastic weight loss the first transformation caused. That’s why some people trumpeted infection as a “weight loss miracle”.

Eli was lean anyways, so he couldn’t afford to lose too much more weight. He had the fake bake tan that was probably airbrushed on him daily, giving him a healthy - if oddly artificial - glow, and neatly swept back blondish brown hair that looked effortlessly styled in a way that probably cost him about two hundred dollars. His eyes were a watery pale blue in a high cheekboned face that was a bit too severe to be classically handsome, but he was good looking in an icy, slightly Eurotrash way. He claimed to be six feet tall on his website bio, but he was actually only five ten; Paris looked down at him easily, and in more ways than one.

Although a wicked smile curved Eli’s bloodless lips, he never broke challenging eye contact with Paris, even as he came out on the porch and said, “Why don’t you give us a minute, Rainbow?”

She hesitated, looking between them nervously. “A-are you sure, sir? I’m not sure -”

“I’m fine, Rainbow. It’s okay.”

She seemed doubtful, but she did go inside the church, closing the door behind her so they had some privacy. Once she was gone, Eli said, with fake casualness, “So Roan sent you out, huh? Odd choice.”

“He didn’t send me out here, Eli, I came on my own. Thought I’d welcome you to the club. And give you a warning.”

Eli tried to raise an eyebrow at him, but he couldn’t quite do it. It was tricky. “A warning? You?” he snickered derisively. “It doesn’t work when you’re known to be the guy who hates confrontations.”

“Ah. See, that’s what I love: generalizations. They do give me such an edge. Here’s the thing, Eli - I do hate violence, as a general rule. Physical.” He gave him a cold smile that never hit his eyes, and felt so false he was surprised it actually held. “But emotional violence, psychic violence? Love it. Bruises heal, bones set, but that kind of injury could last forever. When I wanted to hurt someone, I simply slept with their girlfriend, boyfriend, sister, brother, mother … hell, father even, possibly all, depending on the person and circumstances, and then I let them know about it. See, what you and other people seem to forget is I’m a completely manipulative bastard; there isn’t an angle that I can’t play. And I’m not going to let a good man go down for you.”

Eli was still eyeing him with humor, but something unsettled was starting to creep into his expression. Paris was being honest, and Eli must have recognized that, also being a manipulative bastard. They were evil twins and all, at least is spirit. “What’s that supposed to mean? Is that some kind of threat?”

“That wasn’t, no. But this is: tonight, turn yourself over to the cops. Tell them you’re infected and in the high part of the cycle, and you have no cage. They’ll have to put you up in a cell as a public service, and you’ll be safe for the night. Oh sure, they may question whether you have an alibi for yesterday and the day before, but even if you did nosh on all those people, we both know you’ll be down in Florida golfing with O.J. within the week. You’re too rich and too well armed with lawyers to go down for any crime but white collar; you have a pass. You’re good. And it’s better than the alternative.”

He looked deliberately bored and hostile, crossing his arms over his chest. His pupils were a bit too wide, suggesting that he too was high on painkillers. “Oh, here’s the threat. I was starting to nod off.”

Paris walked towards him slowly, staring him down, putting his size advantage to good use. “Roan and I will come back here about five-ish, and you’d better be gone, Eli, or we’re coming to take you home with us. See, my idea is you share my cage with me.”

He looked like he was about to make a smart ass remark, probably based on sexuality, when the reality of what he was saying - and who was saying it - sunk in. He tried to beat back the horror in his eyes, but the drugs were slowing his reaction time. “You - you can’t be serious. That’s murder -”

“No it’s not. It’s law of the jungle, survival of the fittest. Do you think your cat can beat a tiger?” A rhetorical question: the tiger strain was the most deadly, but the tiger itself was the most deadly of the cats. Now he was so close to Eli he was invading his space; he couldn’t just reach out and touch him, he could pick his fucking pocket. Eli was forced to look up to keep eye contact, and he was fighting his own body posture so he didn’t seem like he was cringing. “Perhaps I’m overestimating the appetite of a tiger, but I can’t imagine there’d be much of you left, and once we dump the assorted kitty parts left, there’s a very good chance that the cops will simply assume you were an unrestrained cat who got bested by another, and won’t even attempt a DNA match. You’ll probably become a legend, a mystical figure - dropping off the face of the world like Aimee Semple-McPherson. You’ll probably convince them you really were the second coming of Jesus or whoever the fuck it is you’re claiming to be. You’d become more in death than you ever were in life. Which is a bit of a pisser, but at least you won’t be here to enjoy it.”

Eli had paled, even beneath his spray on tan. It took him a moment to find his voice. “Y-you’d never do that. It’s still premeditated -”

“No, it’s not; legally, it’s not even manslaughter, because neither of us are technically men once transformed. You know cops don’t care if one cat kills another. It’ll come down to Roan’s word, and do you really think they’ll disbelieve him if he says I broke out of my cage in tiger form and got into yours? Face it, Eli, you’re fucked. If you don’t want me crapping you out for the next week and a half, then turn yourself over to the cops and take your lumps like an actual Human being for once.” He was staring down at him, his chest almost touching his, with Eli backed against the wall. He had nowhere to go, and he had such a size and experience advantage that even if Eli attempted to shove him back it wouldn’t do any good; he’d never succeed. “Where’s your faith, Eli? Don’t you think the best cat’ll win?”

Eli took a last hopeless jab at dignity. He looked him square in the eye, setting his jaw, and said, “You couldn’t live with that.”

“Oh, you’d be surprised at what I could live with.” If it was Eli or Roan, Eli just didn’t have a chance, no matter what he had to do. Just to have a dramatic exit, he growled, but it didn’t come off how he anticipated. Namely, there were still some lingering aftereffects of the cat; the growl that came out of his throat wasn’t even remotely Human. It was deeper than even Roan’s growl, not so much inhuman as monstrous, something that vibrated through his bones and seemed to rattle his brain. Eli’s eyes seemed to pop out of his face; he was just as startled as he was, too much to even attempt to hide the fear. Paris was freaked too, but the drugs made him so lethargic it never got through.

He turned and walked away, confident that Eli had gotten the message. Yes, he could buy and sell the lot of them, he could sue them into indentured servitude, but even he wasn’t willing to face off with a tiger. Man, talk about a ball-less wonder. Some evil twin he was.

Halfway down the front walk he turned to see Eli glowering at him, but when Paris caught his eye, it seemed to startle Eli out of his hateful reverie. What, was he afraid of him now that he remembered what strain he was? Pussy. “You didn’t just think I was a pretty face, did you?” He tossed his car keys up in the air, and without looking, snatched them out of the air as they came down, a sudden movement that made Eli twitch nervously. Paris gave him a big, insincere smile, and turned away for good.

Some people just needed to learn the hard way that there were limits to his good graces.