“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.

The cops had been here for ten minutes, along with the meat wagon and a useless ambulance, and finally the man he was waiting for came out of the house, looking slightly dazed. “How do you find them?” Sikorski wondered, coming up to him. “That’s one of the worst kitty crime scenes I’ve seen in a long time.”

“Me too. They’ve been in there what, about a day?”

Sikorski shrugged, squinting as he looked back at the house. “I think so. It’ll be up to forensics to give us the final verdict, though.”

Paris had given him one of his ultra strong mints, the kind that made his eyes water and his nasal passages sting, but it only covered up the taste of rot in his mouth, and hardly did anything about the smell clogging his nose. When he got home, he was seriously considering inhaling Scope to see if it could burn the smell out of his sinuses. “I hope the maggots didn’t eat away too much of the evidence.”

“Doesn’t matter much now, does it? The way the bodies were torn up, I think we’ll be lucky to get a partial bite imprint.” When he turned his gaze back on him, Sikorksi was dead serious. “I mean it, Roan - how did you find this?”

The broiling sun was making it feel like the sweat was being forcibly expressed through his pores; the sunlight felt as heavy as a burden. He rolled up the sleeves of his casual white dress shirt, one of the handful of shirts he always wore when meeting new clients. He’d probably have to burn this one too. “I told Officer Stanhope -”

“The whole story, down to approximate times,” Sikorksi interrupted. “You’re a cop’s wet dream; if only all our witnesses were so accurate and attentive to detail. But I don’t want the official report, Roan, I just want to know how the fuck you ended up here.”

That almost sounded like a rhetorical question, like what was the meaning of life, or why did people over sixty always leave their left turn signal on. He sighed, not really want to go over this again. “I was following a lead on a case, like I said.”

“Parents who want you to find their runaway kid. How often do you look for runaway kids?”

“They’re rich and desperate. They think there’s something fishy about his disappearance.”

“Is there?”

Roan shook his head, wishing he’d brought sunglasses since the glare was making his eyes water. “He was a pressured kid, perfect, he probably couldn’t take it anymore. The problem is, it seems he got fascinated with kitties at some point. His parents don’t know that, though.”

Sikorski groaned and briefly closed his eyes, as if in pain. “Shit. How can smart kids be so stupid?”

“Stupidity comes along with puberty. Even the smartest can’t escape it.”

“Even you?”

Roan weighed whether to answer that question or not. Instead, he answered with sarcasm. “You wouldn’t have to ask that if you were ever a teenager, Gordo. But your people are grown in pods, right?”

“Ha.” He paused briefly. “Was he in there?”

“The kid? No. He’s a seventeen year old Asian male, and that type of victim was missing from the murder demographic.”

“Could he have done this?”

The billion dollar question, the one Roan kept asking himself. “The time frame doesn’t match.” Which was kind of a lie. Although it was extraordinarily rare, there was one or two cases where people had transformed as little as five days after infection, but it was even rarer than surviving the tiger strain. Still, if he ran out and got himself infected that very day … it wasn’t completely impossible.

Sikorski glanced back at the house as some of the forensic techs came out to confer with the coroner. Paris was still talking with a cop named Ferlinghetti by his patrol car, but Paris had never set foot inside the house, so there really was no need for him to talk to him this long. Was he flirting with him? Jesus, he just couldn’t turn it off, could he? He shifted his attention back to Sikorski before he noticed he was watching Paris. “What did you touch inside the house?”

Ah, back to formal police questions. “Nothing. I visually confirmed the victims as dead - well, visually and nasally, but they never ask about that, do they? - saw the egress point, and came out to wait for the patrol cars, the first of which arrived approximately seven minutes later. I did break down the door, but I had to confirm that there was no one still alive on the premises. If the chief wants to slap my hand about it, fine; I’d do it again in a heartbeat. Civilian safety is paramount in situations like this.”

Gordo smirked slightly. “You packing?”

“My HK is in the car, holstered under the driver’s seat.” Although he doubted there’d be much call for guns in his line of work - private detectives only needed weapons when they spun off into personal security; the movie and novel shit was just that, shit - he did have two to his name, and he usually carried one in his car (or on his person if he was using his motorcycle) on jobs, just in case the improbable happened. His favorite was his .40 caliber Heckler Koch P2000 SK, compact, lightweight, low maintenance and low trouble (which was also how he liked his men, so it was a bit of a mystery how he ended up with Paris). He was carrying a taser too, but there were no regulations about or licensing for those - well, not yet.

Gordo nodded, but he was still smirking. “You know, when I tell people one of the toughest cops I’ve ever known is a gay infected man, they never believe me.”

“Then leave out the gay part. Look, any physical evidence you find tying me to the scene will be minimal; maybe a stray hair. I avoided stepping in the blood and spilt milk too. I know how not to taint a scene.”

“Oh, I know. But you are aware you’re technically a civilian now, yeah?”

“I’m an infected, Gordon. I never feel like a civilian.”

He clearly didn’t know what to say to that, so Sikorski looked obscurely grateful when one of the forensic techs summoned him over for a talk. Roan just wiped the sweat from his brow and wondered when it would be considered kosher to go. He really wanted to go burn his clothes.

Paris finally came back, and proffered a bottle of water. “It’s warm, but it’s what he had in his patrol car.”

He took it with a grateful nod, but as he twisted the cap off, he asked, somewhat sarcastically, “Are you always this manipulative?”

Paris gave him a brilliant smile as he leaned against the hood. “Hey, I can’t help it if I play people like a cheap Casio. They just make it too easy.”

“You missed your calling as a criminal mastermind.”

“Who said I did?” He winked at him, then added, “C’mon, I’m your femme fatale … only, not femme.”

“Well, I’d hope not. I’d never get it up then.”

Paris made a strange noise as he snorted a laugh and then desperately tried to hide it, as laughing at a hideous crime scene really wasn’t a very good thing to do. Roan had to swallow his own smirk, but having the water to drink helped a great deal. It was inappropriate to makes jokes right now, but actually many cops and techs who worked violent crime scenes did; it was gallows humor, laughing so you didn’t cry or scream. There was only so much horror a person could take; you had to have some kind of outlet.

Sikorski went inside the house again, and the other cops seemed to be ignoring them, so Roan figured it was as good as any time to go. Certainly Sikorski had his number if they had any follow up questions. They got in the Mustang, which was as hot as a toaster oven, and drove off, with no one apparently caring.

They headed back home in silence, Paris using the radio to fill the void (oh, Roan would have given his left arm for a decent punk station, or at least something different - canned pop made him irritable and depressed), until Roan voiced what was bothering him. “I’m missing something.”

Paris, who had been leaning against the passenger door, letting the wind from the open window cool the sweat on his face, looked at him with surprise. “What? Did you drop your wallet or something?”

“No, I mean about the case. I get the feeling there’s something staring me in the face, but I just can’t see it for some reason.” He slammed his palm on the steering wheel. “Son of a bitch, I hate feelings like this.”

“Maybe you just need to get your mind off it, distance yourself,” Paris suggested. “You know if you try and force it you can never get it, and then you just get more frustrated and crabby.”

“I do not get crabby,” he snapped, aware that sounded crabby. Fuck.

He was right, and he knew it, but it irritated him to know he was missing something, and not have his mind instantly acquiesce and churn it up. Damn thing. “Fine,” he said reluctantly. “How do you just suggest I get my mind off things? Oh, wait - did I really ask that?”

Paris leaned over and squeezed his thigh, giving him a sly smile. “You really are distracted, aren’t you?”

Yes, apparently he was. But not for much longer.

****

There was nothing like sex to make you hungry and tired, even if you’d seen something that you thought would keep you awake and keep you from eating anything forever. If only it could cure diseases instead of spread them, it’d be damn close to a panacea.

Once they got out of the shower, Roan dozed off, but he jolted awake when he thought he heard the buzzing of a thousand flies.

It was just a noise on the television, and not even a hum; nothing even close to the buzz of hundreds of blood craving flies. Well, okay, a bit close - an American Idol winner.

He grabbed the remote off the nightstand and hit the mute button. He’d have thrown the remote at Paris - he had to turn the t.v. on? - but he wasn’t here. Listening hard, he heard him downstairs talking to someone. The pizza guy; Paris had talked about ordering a pizza before he nodded off.

He glanced at the alarm clock on his side of the bed, and figured he’d been asleep for about a half hour. Perhaps it should have helped, but he just felt logy and more tired than before. This was pretty unprofessional, he was supposed to be working … but on what? His clues had dead ended, in the most sadly literal way imaginable. Danny might not even be in this state; he could be in Canada, Mexico - hell, he could be in Australia. A runaway rich kid with cash, who had a week on all of them. He could be almost anywhere.

For some reason, that sparked a thought.

It was too obscure to be helpful, and his brain was still fogged, but he got up and walked over to the computer he had set up in the corner on a small desk - an informal “work area” since he still had to repair the floor in what was essentially his study - and booted it up. While it came on line, he pulled on a pair of boxer shorts, and turned down the air conditioner.

He had a vague idea, and he followed it. Entering the address of Tweaks’s place, he compared it to the address of DeSilvo’s place: according to MapQuest, they were separated by two point seven miles. A cat could have easily covered the distance in a night. But that was insane! There were lots of places between point A and point B, and there’s no way a cat as seemingly bloodthirsty as this one would avoid so many targets in between.

“Oh dear,” Paris said, coming in the room. He held a pizza box in one hand, and in the other had the four pack of the far too expensive microbrew that Roan found to be the only beer he could tolerate. It was a pale ale, surprisingly light, and it didn’t smell or taste like piss, which is what most beer tasted like to him. “Working again? You do stop at some point, don’t you?”

“I was just trying to make sense of something.” He went to the online white pages and typed in the name “Marley Hanson”, the name of Danny’s friend. He got a phone number, and rather than wait much longer, he got up and grabbed the portable phone, punching up the number. He motioned to Paris to be quiet as the phone rang, and a rather young sounding woman picked up. “Yeah?”

Charming. “Hello, I was wondering if Marley Hanson was there?”

“Who’s this?”

“My name’s Roan McKichan, I’m a private detective hired by the Nakamuras to find Daniel. I was hoping to talk to Marley about him.”

“Oh.” The girl paused thickly, and he thought he heard a stereo playing in the background. Coldplay - the most innocuous band since Al Stewart. It wasn’t bad music, it was just so aggressively vanilla that blandness was the only objection you could make about it; music as plain, boiled oatmeal. It probably kept you regular. “Well, um, Danny’s not in trouble, is he?”

This was Marley? He was expecting a boy, but okay - why not a girl? Marley was kind of an odd name, but then again, he was named Roan. He had absolutely no room to talk. “No. His parents are simply worried about him, and I have reason to believe they should.”

“What d’ya mean?”

“Are you Marley?” He only asked for official confirmation.

She sighed, in that special way of teenage girls - you could just hear the implied eye roll in it - and admitted, “Yeah.”

“I think Danny may be in danger.”

“Why?”

“I can’t talk about this over the phone. Perhaps we can speak in person?” A gamble - she might not take the bait. But he preferred face to face interviews, as it was easier to tell when people were lying, when they were hedging or fudging the truth a little. Only a sociopath or a psychopath didn’t have some kind of tell, some little tic that gave them away.

After a very long pause, she said, “Umm, I dunno. I gotta work tonight … I guess if you stop by Poison I can talk to ya for a few minutes.”

“Poison?”

“Y’know, in the mall? My shift starts at six. If you wanna show up around seven thirty or so, it’s kinda slow.”

“Sure, I’ll see you there.” Once he hung up, he asked Paris, “Is there a place at the mall called Poison?”

Paris was sitting crosslegged on the bed, the open pizza box beside him, a slice in his hand (pepperoni and olive). He took a swig of beer to rinse down the bite he’d just taken, then said, “Uh huh, it’s one of those trendy young adult stores. Why? You need a nipple ring?”

“That’s where Marley works.” He sat down on the bed beside him, and grabbed a slice of pizza from the box. Paris handed him a beer, and while he almost refused it, he figured fuck it. One of these beers wasn’t going to affect him, and frankly, after that scene at Tweaks’s place, he could use a beer.

Paris gave him a lopsided grin. His hair was still damp, still clung to his face in a way that had to be deliberate; it made him look like a model in some kind of pretentious perfume ad. “Oh joy. You’ll love it there.”

“You think I don’t know sarcasm when I hear it?”

“When we leaving?”

“She said after seven thirty would be good, so -” Suddenly he realized that that was around sunset. “- um, I guess I’m going solo.”

Paris’s humorous smile collapsed like a soufflé in an opera house kitchen. It was so sudden it was like he’d never been smiling at all, and he got a slightly distant look in his eye. “Oh … yeah … good luck with that.” He tore into his pizza slice like it was a hunk of crusty bread.

Paris only had a couple hours until his transformation. Roan wasn’t going to leave him this time; he was going to make sure he got down to the basement in time and was safely contained. There’d be no chances of an accidental release this time; he’d make sure he was safe.

Roan reached over and touched Paris’s face gently, brushing his fingertips over his cheek, and he closed his eyes and leaned against his hand, just for a moment. “I always miss you when you’re not with me.” The frightening thing - well, frightening as far as Roan was concerned - was that was almost always true. It was like his world had been monochrome before this vibrant, Technicolor man had come into it. Paris was everything he wasn’t, and filled a void he hadn’t realized he had. Of course he drove him absolutely crazy sometimes - not in a good way - but that was the really weird thing about love. What attracted you could eventually irritate you, and vice versa. He wished things were a bit more orderly and logical, but they never were.

Paris glanced at him, lips curving in the slightest hint of a smile, and he teased, “Why detective, that sounded almost sappy.”

“Don’t push your luck,” he warned with mock sternness.

The phone rang then, totally ruining the mood. The mood was killed even more when he glanced at the caller ID: Sikorski again. He gulped down half his beer in two swallows - he just knew he was going to need the alcohol - and only after he was ready answered the phone. “Did you put out an APB on me?” Roan was only half joking - he was an infected at a crime scene. It didn’t matter that no transformation happened that fast; he’d be a natural suspect.

“I think you’re in the clear,” he replied, but all the lightness was missing from Gordo’s tone. Roan knew that was a major warning sign. “We got a partial bite mark from one of the bodies, and it didn’t match any … except one. One we got very recently.”

Roan felt his stomach fall, turn to stone. Oh god, his first suspicion was right, wasn’t it? “You don’t mean …”

Eventually he hit pay dirt in the form of a pimply fifteen year old with pink spiky hair and a nose ring, making Roan wonder what kind of idiot parent let a kid this young get a nose ring. “I think I’ve seen that kid, like, hangin’ around Tweak’s.”

“Tweaks?”

The kid scratched his face and looked around, as if making sure no one was seeing him talk to the narc. Light glinted off gold nose ring, and Roan had to suppress the urge to just rip it out of his nose. “Yeah, he’s like this guy who lives near the, um, tracks, y’know, down in the East End. Like everybody crashes at Tweaks when they’ve got no place else to go.”

Oh, so he was one of those - a guy with a crap house where he let teens he didn’t know stay over. Obviously a druggie - Tweak indicated a “tweaker”, someone into the meth or ecstasy scene - who was either trying to fit in with a crowd he had outgrown, or simply wanted to take advantage of. Either way, he probably had a sheet of minor crimes as long as his forearm; not a major league bad guy, just a loser that teenagers would think was “cool” for about three years, then they’d wake up and see the crabs and smell the spilled bong water.

“Can you give me something more to go on? Address, phone number, guy’s real name?”

Nose Ring just shrugged, looking past him as if he was already bored with the conversation. “I dunno, never really thought about it. It’s like at the end of Noble and Westerly.”

He was vaguely certain of the location. The East Side was actually relatively rural, and the only Westerly Road he knew of was a couple miles’ down from his place, so that would have put Tweaks at the butt end of the East Side, closer to him than to the Church. But that part of the East End was - no shock - a haven for meth houses. “Like, thanks,” he said, with sarcasm that seemed to miss Nose Ring entirely. If he had said “like” one more time, he was going to punch that kid in the stomach.

Paris was still hogging the dance floor with his harem of admirers, but Roan shoved his way into the inner circle, and simply stood there, enduring death looks from teen girls in too much lip gloss, until he finally caught Paris’s eye. He simply jerked his head towards the door, then turned and fought his way through the crowd, leaving the auditorium. Roan went out a side door, so he didn’t have to run into Rainbow or Smithers again. He realized he hadn’t gone to see Eli, but fuck it; he could always come back and kick his ass later.

He was out in the car, using his laptop to figure out exactly where Noble and Westerly met (there were so many people using wi-fi connections in their own homes, you could just borrow anyone’s connection for web surfing), when Paris finally got out to the car, slipping into the passenger seat panting and breathless. “Damn,” he gasped, lifting up the hem of his t-shirt and using it to wipe his sweaty face. “I forgot what a work out that is. Got a lead?”

“Yeah, a kid thought he recognized Danny as one of the kid’s hanging around a crash pad.

owned by a burn out named Tweaks. I’m just confirming the address.” After a moment - and a peek at Paris’s wonderfully flat stomach out of the corner of his eye as he continued to use his t-shirt to mop up sweat - he asked, “You didn’t brush off your jeans, did you?”

Paris’s wry look didn’t go away; in fact, it was starting to get really annoying. “It’s kind of cute, you know. To know you actually have some kind of insecurity somewhere.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” He tossed the laptop in back seat, and suddenly regretted asking. “No, forget it, we have to - “

Paris reached over and grabbed his chin, turning his face towards his. He scooted closer on the seat too - boy, these Mustangs had more seat room than you’d think. “You are so funny. You do know I love you more than I’ve ever loved anyone, right? Well, admittedly, I never really loved anyone before, but saying that blunts the impact. I know you’ve got the whole had boiled detective thing going on, but I know what you’re really like. I know that under all that armor you’re the most decent man I’ve ever met. You’re my hero.”

He slid Paris’s hand off his face, and looked out the windshield. All this “relationship talk” made him feel deeply uncomfortable. Showing emotion was a weakness, and he really didn’t like showing it in any place that might be considered public. It was hard enough in private. “Why don’t we talk about this later, okay?”

Paris sighed, but was still smiling. “Your way of avoiding it. But it’s true, you know. Everybody in the world had given up on me, myself included, and who comes along and gives a damn? A complete stranger; you. And I know the game, you know. People want something from me, I want something from them, it’s a fair exchange. So when you didn’t want anything from me I couldn’t figure it out. You know how hard it was for me to believe you didn’t have an angle? God, you weren’t even trying to get into my pants - I had to make the first move. For all your misanthropic bluster, you just want to help people, to keep them from getting hurt. You’re the bravest, sweetest man I’ve ever known. And you’re cute when you blush.”

“I am not blushing,” he protested, but before he could get really mad, Paris kissed him. Paris was a born manipulator - and he didn’t mean that in a bad way, he just was; to some people, it came as easily as breathing - and this was probably more of that, but he was one of the greatest kissers he’d ever encountered. His lips were soft, and he tasted of those wintergreen mints he popped like candy, even though they were strong enough to make Roan’s eyes water.

Roan tangled his hand in Paris’s downy hair, and became aware that he didn’t want to stop. His mind was sliding off towards realms that had nothing to do with the case at hand - either case - and that was bad because he was still on the clock. It was Paris’s increased pheromone load - or at least that’s what he wanted to believe. Normally he wasn’t this unprofessional.

He pushed Paris away gently and caught his breath. “We have a case here,” he said, by way of explanation.

He gave him a sensuous smile, full of promise, and quirked an eyebrow. “You know what they say: all work and no play …”

“Pays the bills.” He dry washed his face, and tried to fight down his own desire. What was an immediate turn off? He imagined Stovak, and that did it; he was better than a shower in liquid nitrogen. “God, did I just sound like someone’s Dad there?”

Paris sat back in the passenger seat, apparently conceding his point. “A bit, yeah. Throw in a “You goddamn kids, get offa my lawn!” and you’d sound like my grandpa.”

He mock shuddered. “Shit. I need to get a life before I start pulling my pants up to my armpits.”

“What I’m looking forward to is seeing you in black socks and sandals.”

“If I ever do that, you have my permission to shoot me in the head.”

Paris saluted, grinning brightly. “Aye aye, ese.”

Roan started the car and drove off, heading to the side of town that wasn’t so much bad as just pathetic. But since Danny was a rich kid from one of the best neighborhoods, the East End would probably seem exotic, like walking into a Diane Arbus photo. (If he even knew what that was.)

Paris turned on the radio, fiddling with it until he settled on a Franz Ferdinand song, and Roan found himself glancing at him out of the corner of his eye, watching the sun make his hair shine.

He was envious of Paris’s innate brazenness at times; he honestly didn’t give a shit what anyone thought about him. Once they started dating he’d told him the whole sordid details of his life, which would have made a fabulous memoir. He was a good kid with good parents, growing up in a wholesome suburb of Vancouver, and a star player on the football team as a teenager, dating the hottest girl in school, Darcy, a cheerleader (of course). Publicly. Privately, he was also dating his best friend’s older brother, a closeted homosexual named Brent, who was the lead singer and guitar player of a garage band that honestly thought he liked girls. He juggled Darcy and Brent for two years - from sixteen to eighteen - and no one ever found out; no one even had an inkling, including Brent’s younger brother, Paris’s best friend. (He said they made an excuse for him being at their house so much by claiming Brent was giving him “guitar lessons”; and Paris actually did learn a chord or two, but inadvertently). In his senior year he switched from football to basketball, because all the football players were using steroids and he refused to use anything that “shrunk his junk”, but he was good enough at it that he got a scholarship to college based on his athletic prowess. In the meantime, he said the sex was much hotter with Brent, but then again, he was a musician (Paris seemed to think that made a difference, but Roan wasn’t sure why). He was pretty sure that they were both in love with him, but Paris said he never loved either of them, and he really didn’t know why.

He broke up with both of them by the time he got to college, and he continued his juggling ways, going out openly with women, fooling around privately with men. It wasn’t that he was ashamed of it - or so he claimed - he just felt it wasn’t his place to break a perfectly good womanizing athlete stereotype. Of course, when his loose ways caught up with him - when he was deliberately infected by a woman with the tiger strain and a grudge against slightly whorish men (one of whom apparently infected her) - his “perfect” life completely fell apart. But since he went “a bit nuts”, he never did discover what the actual fallout was; he dropped out of college and out of life, and hadn’t spoken to his family since before his infection. That was Paris’s one weakness, the thing that made him balk, become inexplicably afraid - his parents. Roan had tried to get him to call them, drop them a letter or an e-mail, let them know he was okay, but he wouldn’t. He never got him to tell him why he wouldn’t; he claimed he had a happy childhood, that his parents and his sister were not the type to be cruel, but he just “wasn’t ready” to talk to them. Roan got the sense that he was afraid of facing their scorn and shame, that they’d kick him out officially and Paris wasn’t ready to face it. But if they were as kind as Paris claimed, they wouldn’t do that. So was Paris needlessly afraid, or was he lying about his relationship with his parents?

Roan knew precious little about family relationships. His mother died shortly after his birth, he had no idea who his father was, and he spent his life in and out of state homes and foster homes, although the latter was rare - who wanted to raise some freak child, even temporarily? Those that did take him in briefly were only in it for the money, and were usually pretty nasty towards him. One couple reinforced a broom closet as a type of jail cell and kept him in it all the time, even when it wasn’t his time of the month. They also once burned him with an iron; he still had the ghost of a scar on the back of his right hand, a two and a half inch diagonal line thicker than your average scar. He couldn’t remember what he had supposedly done to deserve that.

What a pair to draw to they were, huh? Neither of them really had a template for a healthy relationship, so how they’d managed so far was a bit of a mystery. Part of him expected something to go wrong eventually, but he tried not to concentrate on it for some stupid, superstitious fear of causing it to happen. After all, look what happened to him and Connor.

It was a twenty five minute drive to the East End, and you could see the transition from afar, as buildings became fewer and farther between, broken up by weedy vacant lots, trailer parks with names like “Ponderosa Glen”, and sad little strip malls, all of which looked like they’d been covered with a thin layer of yellowish grime from the nearby factories. Even the sky began to take on an odd, faintly yellow tinge, like an old urine stain on a discarded mattress, and Roan wanted to just turn the car around now. No good could come from a place like this; this was a Bruce Springsteen song kind of place, the kind of place you ran from and never looked back.

Eventually he found the house that must have been Tweaks’, and Nose Ring hadn’t been kidding about it being just beyond the railroad tracks; they were so close to the house it might as well have been in his front yard. Tweaks’ house was the type of pre-fab split level that was popular twenty five years ago, and whatever color it used to be, it was now the grimly color of curdled cream. The paint was peeling, the windows so dirty they could have been soaped, and in the wide, dusty patch of dirt that made up the front yard was a very battered looking Toyota Corolla, and a Mazda with a busted out windshield and a missing left rear tire. The house sat alone on an acre of weedy, overgrown meadow, separated from a paper processing plant by a scraggly copse of pines about two acres to the northwest. Getting out of the car, Roan thought he could smell dioxin on the wind.

“Wow, this place looks fucking depressing,” Paris said, getting out of the car and joining him in gazing at the house. “I want to slit my wrists right now.”

“Crash pads rarely make Architectural Digest, “ he said, walking up to the water stained front door.

He was about five feet from it when he smelled the blood.

Roan stopped and held out his arm to stop Paris. “What is it?” Paris asked.

“Call 911,” he told him, resuming his approach to the house. He was taking deep breaths, parsing the smells, and beyond the heat baked earth and smells of mildew, the smell of leaking motor oil, there was the sickly sweet, unbearably meaty scent of rotting flesh.

Paris stiffened, all humor gone from his expression and his voice. “What? Why? What do I tell them?”

Roan had to make a decision, and do it now. Possibly taint physical evidence by busting in and searching for possible survivors, or wait for the meat wagon when someone could be inside, alive but barely hanging on? There really wasn’t much of a choice. “Tell them we have a possible homicide here, and maybe some injured as well. Do it now - the cops always take their fucking time coming to this part of town.”

“What do you smell?”

“Blood. Death.”

“Death?”

“Don’t ask, just do it,” he ordered, then backed up and ran at the front door, turning his shoulder towards it before he hit. If the door was unlocked, he’d feel like a right asshole.

As it was, it wasn’t. There was a crack of wood as he hit the door, as the jamb inside splintered and gave way, the door swinging open with some reluctance. As soon as he was inside the messy house, he was almost overwhelmed with the smell of blood, rot, and shit, and heard a loud, constant buzz. Roan tried not to touch anything with his fingers as he wandered through the house, tasting death in the back of his throat. He found the first body in the hall, half way inside the bathroom doorway, their lower half severed messily from their top half, although it was hard to tell beneath the undulating blanket of black flies covering the body, the source of the loud hum. The body looked like that of a young Caucasian female, and her visible flesh was discolored enough that he knew she’d been dead for some time.

The next bodies were in what was probably a bedroom, although there was no bed per se, just sleeping bags spread over a floor peppered with crumpled fast food wrappers. One of the bodies was that of a lanky black teen, his guts spilling out like someone had turned him into a Human piñata, and the second body was that of a young Asian female, her head connected to her body by only the slenderest ribbon of sinew. Her blood was splattered all over the walls and the boarded up window, dried to a dark, dung colored brown. Flies swarmed on them as well, ignoring him as they feasted on this banquet of flesh. If he was correct about the body positions, the boy had tried to protect the girl, and both had died anyways.

The fourth body was in the kitchen, propped up in a sitting position against the refrigerator, a fallen gallon jug of milk adding a sour stink to the general miasma of death. This was an older Caucasian man with brittle, thinning hair the color and texture of wire, most of his throat and the top of his chest reduced to bloody shreds of meat currently covered by flies and a couple of wasps. As he walked past what must have been the body of Tweaks, he saw a wasp crawl over one of his milky, open eyes.

The kitchen window was broken out, which was how all the flies and the wasps got in. But Roan looked out to confirm a suspicion, and he got it. There was no broken glass in the house at all; it sparkled in the overgrown grass of the backyard like ice.

Whatever had killed them had been locked inside with them, and had gotten out the only way it could, by breaking through the window. And he was afraid of just who it might have been. But he couldn’t think that; he had no proof.

Just because Danny was tentatively identified as being here didn’t mean he ever was, it didn’t mean he’d been infected and already transformed. It could just be a terrible coincidence.

But Roan had never trusted coincidences, and the more there were, the harder they were to believe.