So what did they have? A bunch of dead bodies, three killed one way, one another away, all in the same house, and all chewed on by the same cat, who presumably jumped out the back window and yet didn’t leave a path in the backyard. A magical cat, and a magical killer. He hit the steering wheel in frustration and started the car, just to get the hell out of here.

He stopped by a Starbucks, which he shouldn’t have done because he couldn’t see how anyone could justify charging so much for coffee or tea … but those green tea lattes were so good; goddamn the Starbucks corporation! They were in it with Microsoft, some kind of Seattle hegemony determined to wring every cent out of you. (He liked to entertain wild conspiracy theories from time to time, solely for their entertainment value. Paris had once thought up a great one involving grunge music, flannel shirts, and sexually frustrated loggers, but he couldn’t remember how it went now.)

By the time he got home he called “fag hag” Randi Kim and asked her if she could check out all known financial records for DeSilvo and Henstridge, and if she went extra legal that was fine, she just wasn’t to tell him. Randi not only had connections across all financial institutions, but she had a cousin who worked for the IMF - well connected didn’t even begin to describe Randi. But of course she wanted something for the info, so he had to promise she could come over to dinner one night. Why she wanted to come over to dinner at their place he had no idea - why was that a prize? So she could stare at Paris while he ate his mashed potatoes?

Oh - come to think of it, yes, staring at Paris was always a prize.

Speaking of which, Par was up and working on the plywood reinforcement to broken sliding door. He’d called some people he knew to get an estimate on replacing the glass, but apparently the cheapest estimate was in the thousands. So he was shoring up the plywood for now, until they could save up for that additional expense. Because it was so hot, Paris was wearing nothing but his cargo shorts, and the hammer he wore through one of the loops was pulling his shorts down until they were just barely covering his firm little ass. Roan watched a bead of sweat trickle down his lovely long spine, and thought he should really throw him in the shower and get in with him.

Pheromones - all it was. He could ignore it. He could, seriously, honestly. (As long as Paris stopped parading around him all sweaty and half naked and muscular and … oh shit, he hated this part of the viral cycle.)

He went upstairs so he’d stop looking at Paris, and got down to work on his computer background checking Tweaks. His real name was Anthony Andersen, and Roan couldn’t believe it when his birth certificate said he was thirty two. He looked like he was in his mid-forties at least; he looked like fucking hell for his age. But drugs could do that to some people.

Another shocking thing was he had been married and divorced, and had two kids, the youngest being four years old. Tweaks was a college dropout who used to work for a software company until he apparently discovered the waning edge of the rave scene, and first experienced ecstasy and meth. It was all downhill for Tweaks from there, as he lost his job and his wife in subsequent order, as well as his expensive condo in Lakeside, trading it in for that dilapidated house right by the railroad tracks in the middle of bumfuck nowhere. Tweaks had a spotty employment record after that, usually just doing odd jobs, most at minimum wage, all well below his experience level. With his resume he could have done a hell of a lot better, but that meant actually putting effort into it, and actually agreeing to show up to work on a regular schedule. He owed child support into the double digit thousands at the time of his death.

He was arrested several times for disorderly conduct as well as possession of drug paraphernalia, but somehow he never got nailed for drug possession itself, so he managed to keep some of his wits about him as far as that went - or he had the special luck of the intensely stupid, which Roan knew existed. His last arrest was six months ago, when he was run in for public intoxication after cops busted up a rave at a house in Edgewood (he was probably just stupidly high, but it was probably easier for the arresting officer to nail him on a public intoxication beef).

And that’s when Roan’s heart skipped a beat. The arresting officers? Hank DeSilvo and Mitchell Henstridge.

No fucking way.

He stared at the computer screen for a moment, willing the words to change back into what they were, not what he wanted to see, but they didn’t. DeSilvo and Henstridge were the last to arrest Tweaks; now two of them were dead by cat, and the third was presumably on the run. What the fuck ..?

Now he investigated the house in Edgewood. It was owned at the time of the party by a guy named Edgar Rodriguez, but had since been taken back by the bank that held the mortgage since he defaulted shortly after the rave. Rodriguez had moved out of state as well, relocating to Florida. Coincidence? Perhaps; his record was clean.

But now he had a connection between Tweaks, DeSilvo, and Henstridge. Still, it was what a prosecutor would say was circumstantial at best - so they arrested him, so what? Eight different cops had arrested Tweaks in his brief life as a junkie, and DeSilvo and Henstridge had arrested hundreds of people in their time as cops, DeSilvo alone possibly thousands.

Yet his gut, his detective “instinct” (as Par liked to call it) was absolutely screaming. This meant something; this had to. No way was this just coincidence. He had tied the three men together for a very brief period in time, and now death seemed to be tying them together again. That had to be something.

What the fuck had happened in that house in Edgewood? If he could find Henstridge, he could ask him. But oddly enough, he didn’t trust him to tell him the truth.

He had finished making a note of the rave house when Paris came upstairs, complaining, “Now I thought those lascivious looks you were giving me earlier were going to add up to something.”

“They weren’t lascivious, they were … distracted.”

“Don’t be a tease; it doesn’t suit you.” He ducked into the attached bathroom and came out toweling off the sweat. “You have that look on your face.”

“Lascivious, is it?”

“No, it’s your “I’ve-blown-the-case-wide-open” face. So what did you discover, Sherlock?”

“A connection between DeSilvo, Henstridge, and Tweaks.”

“Who’s Henstridge?” he asked, sitting on the end of the bed. It looked like he’d pseudo made the bed, which meant he just spread the blanket over the top and figured good enough.

“DeSilvo’s partner. Oh, and what did you do to Eli? He grabbed Guy and scampered to the police.”

Paris chuckled, a sly grin breaking across his face. “I told him he either threw himself on the mercy of the cops, or we were gonna be over there pre-sundown and drag him back here, so he could share a cage with me.”

Roan stared at him, hoping Paris was joking, but he clearly wasn’t; his clear blue eyes sparkled like diamonds. “You threatened to eat him?”

“Not in a good way.”

Roan rubbed his eyes, and wondered what kind of lecture he’d get from Guy next time he saw him. That was assuming Eli told him what happened - maybe he wouldn’t. Guy hated him openly, Eli treated him with smug contempt, but both of them seemed unsure how to feel about Paris. Did his beauty or charm - or both - make him hate proof? Or did Paris so kill them with (patently false - although they never quite caught on) kindness that they put him in the “okay” category? Maybe they just dismissed him; maybe he didn’t even register on their radar. (Although Roan was willing to bet that he did now.) “You think you know a guy, and then he does something like this.”

“Oh, come on. I knew it would work because I know exactly what Eli thinks of us. He thinks we’re a couple of weird and potentially dangerous gay boys who don’t deserve the “gift” of infection, and are living proof that his god occasionally makes no sense, especially since his god hates fags.“ He paused. “Wait - do the cat worshippers hate queers?”

“I don’t know, I can’t say I’ve read their entire playbook. But it’s a safe assumption, since nearly all religions do.”

“Yeah, figured. Doesn’t it just make you feel so special?”

“I’ve always felt special. Being handled like nuclear waste for most of your life can do that to a person.”

“Shall I go get the violin?”

Roan flipped him his middle finger and Paris just chuckled, the sly grin never leaving his face. Actually he appreciated Par never letting him slide down into self-pity, but telling him that would only encourage him. After a moment, Paris asked, “What about the case you’re actually being paid for?”

Again, he never let him get away with anything, but that was good. Annoying as shit, but necessary; much like medicine, it was good for him, no matter how bad it initially tasted. “I may be close to him. That woman at the Hatch house acted way too hostile, and Nelson wasn’t home, so I intend to go back tonight and see if I can get him after work. If neither of those leads pan out, I only have to wait until the weekend.”

“Why?”

“Marley has weekends off, and that’s when she usually joined Danny at the church.”

It took him a moment, but he got it. “You’re going to tail her.”

He nodded. “See if she leads me to him.”

Paris stood up and stretched, deliberately showing off his nicer than average torso, all lean muscle that he genuinely worked to get, as opposed to those strange people who spent huge chunks of their day in loud, depressing gyms. And he hated him all the more because he could work in a steel mill for ten hours a day for a year and never look like that. It just wasn’t fair. But then again, Paris‘s odd mix of hard work and vanity had probably saved his life; all the doctors speculated that he only survived the tiger strain because he was in peak physical condition. Anything less, and the stress of the change would have killed him. “Isn’t that a bit weird, you tailing a teenage girl?”

“Tell me about it. I already feel like a stalker, and I haven’t done anything yet.”

The turns life took sometimes could give you whiplash.

******

Once he had Paris safely locked in his cage for the evening, he placed a call to the Nakamuras, but only got their home answering service. The message he left was honest, that he hadn’t found Danny yet, but he was confident he was still in the city and he was on the verge of finding him. He told them to call back if they wanted further details, but he honestly wasn’t sure how much he’d tell them if they did. Did he have the right to violate Danny’s privacy by telling them about his fascination with kitty culture and the church? Yes, his parents probably had the right to know, but Danny was on the verge of adulthood, and probably felt infringed upon by his parents enough. If he wanted to tell them , he could, and they should really hear it from him, not a private detective. He thought Danny’s obsession was idiotic and dangerous, and yet it felt almost like “outing” someone, and again that wasn’t something he was inclined to do.

He showered and changed into clean clothes, which made him feel marginally better, and then drove back out to the Hampstead Arms. The heat still rose off the pavement in shimmering waves even as the sky turned a deep blood orange beyond the inverted cracker box shape of the building, making it look more dingy and ominous than it actually had in unforgiving sunlight. A racially mixed group of kids played in the cracked parking lot, most of them in between seven and ten, and they all gave him dirty looks. He wanted to ask if it was his face, his clothes - what was with people giving him unaccountable dirty looks? His tattoo wasn’t visible, he wasn’t carrying his gun, and it certainly didn’t read “dirty fag” on his forehead, as he had checked before he left the house. Maybe it was just this part of town; maybe they equated a stranger with trouble.

He knocked on Nelson’s door, the surface marred with peeling paint, and he saw the glass peephole darken as Nelson looked out it. In a strangely quavering voice, he asked, “What do you want?”

“Mr. Nelson, I’m Roan McKichan, a private detective working on a missing persons case related to the Church of the Divine Transformation. May I speak with you a moment?”

There was no answer, and for a moment he thought he best step to the side so in case he was getting his shotgun the first shot would go wide, but after a long moment he opened the door a crack, the inner chain lock still securely fastened. “I haven’t done anything wrong,” he hissed, his voice an angry whisper. He was a slightly bloodshot brown eye staring out of a face yellowed slightly with nicotine and liver problems, his hair so short it was almost shaved to a nub, a stain of black hair like mold discoloring his scalp. He smelled ill; Roan could actually smell a certain sickly, vaguely rotten odor coming from him that was by no means a good sign.

“I’m not accusing you of anything, Mr. Nelson,” he said smoothly, producing the photo of Danny from his pocket. “I’m just wondering if you’ve seen this boy at the church lately.”

“Did you find out about me on that website, is that it?” he continued in angry, breathless whisper. “I don’t know what you people want from me, I served my time, I -”

“Sir, I’m not here to harass you. I simply want to know if you’ve seen this boy.” He kept his tone soothing and low, like he was talking to a spooked animal. By web site he assumed he meant ones of those that cheerfully listed the names and addresses of everyone declared a sex offender; there were so many he really had no idea which one he meant.

That one eye glared at him over the chain for several long seconds, and then he looked down at the photo, which he stared at for several seconds. “I dunno. I can’t tell the Asian kids apart.”

Charming. He had to keep his poker face on firmly to keep from grimacing, rolling his eyes, and asking how the weather was in 1952. Roan pocketed Danny’s photo and pulled out one of his business cards, which he held out towards the crack in the door. “If you see him, I’d appreciate a call.”

He reached through the crack and snatched the card away like it might come alive and bite him. “I didn’t do nothin’,” he protested. “I’m leavin’ the kids alone.”

Roan nodded, glad but not convinced that this was truly a decision made by him. “Is it cirrhosis of the liver?”

The eye seemed to get higher as he stiffened in shock. “What?”

“What you have. It’s a liver disease, right?”

Roan heard him swallow hard, a dry click in his throat, and that single accusing eye shined wetly with something akin to regret. “Liver cancer. H-how did you - ”

“I’m a detective, Mr. Nelson,” he replied blithely, turning and walking away. Chemotherapy would explain his unfortunate haircut.

In the car, he made a mental note to cross Nelson off the list. He was too ill to be a threat to anyone at this rate, although just barely. He was convicted of molesting a boy, and he lived in an apartment building full of kids in the same age range as his victim. And he was “reformed“, huh? Maybe that just meant he jacked off while watching them from the window; either way, if he had been in full health, he might have felt it was his civic duty to warn the parents to watch their kids more closely.

So, he could smell cancer. That was just fucking creepy. He decided he was never going to mention that to anyone and hope that this was a complete fluke, something that would never happen again.

Roan was only about to start the car when the opening chords of Pete Townsend’s “Rough Boys” started, startling the shit out of him and making him drop his keys. He quickly deduced it was his cell phone going off, as Paris had clearly fucked with his ring tone. He liked a plain, simple ring tone, something professional, but Paris lived to monkey around with it. Since Paris had put “Rough Boys” on his phone before, he had to ask him why, and Paris claimed the song reminded him of him. He was not rough trade! Okay, yeah, he was kind of butch, but he wasn’t a leather daddy. He decided he should just take it as a compliment - kind of - and let it go, but he had uninstalled it from his phone. Clearly Paris had reinstalled it. But it could have been worse. Paris’s ring tone varied lately between “Michael”, Franz Ferdinand’s ode to homosexual lust, and “Let The Wind Erase Me” by Assemblage 23, a bouncy piece of electro-beat-pop that wouldn’t have been out of place in a gay nightclub. The only gayer things he could have had were show tunes or something by Clay Aiken.

He was a little surprised to see that it was Sikorski calling him. “What’s up, Gordo?”

“You doing anything right now?”

What a weird reply. If it had come from anyone else, he might have suspected it was a bad come on. “Just work. Why?”

“We need you to come by the station and get a bite print from Winters’ for us. Vasquez is in Toronto.”

“What?” He put the phone down and leaned his head against the steering wheel, barely repressing the urge to head butt it until either his skull or the wheel broke. It was standard practice for all police department voluntarily (or involuntarily) restraining cats to get a “bite print” from them, since most were as unique as a Human bite print. The problem was usually only a certified handler could do it - the union wouldn’t let a cop do it - and as a rare “cat handler”, Annie Vasquez did all the “cat business” for every police department on this side of the state. Since she sometimes had her hands full, he was personally asked by Chief Matthews to become certified in case “filling in” needed to be done within the precinct. Much to his chagrin and horror, getting certified was sitting through a three hour class - it had been harder to get his detective license. “Why the fuck is she in Toronto?”

“Some kind of conference. It’d take us a couple of days to get someone from the university, ‘cause they seem to be all on vacations.”

How nice to know he was the last resort. “Fine. But I want Stovak gone; I ain’t dealing with that piece of shit right now.”

He grunted an agreement. “We already got him the fuck out of here. God, whatta piece of work. I just wanted to stomp on his head until it broke like a hollow chocolate Easter egg. “

“He seems to have that effect on people.” The Guy effect seemed to be direct opposite of the Paris effect: repulsion instead of attraction. He sighed and glanced at his watch, aware that he honestly had no timetable for visiting the Hatch house. “Fine, I’ll be right over. Oh, and there’s something you should know - DeSilvo and Henstridge were the last officers to arrest Tweaks, six months ago.”

Now Gordo sighed right back at him. It was almost a contest. “So? Do you know how many cops have arrested Tweaks in his lifetime?”

“Around here? Eight: Jones, Alvarez, Thun, Martinez, Scott, Jackson, DeSilvo, and Henstridge. I refuse to believe it’s mere coincidence when both DeSilvo and Tweaks were killed by the same unidentifiable cat.”

The pause on Gordo’s end was so long it threatened to stretch into eternity, and he could feel the disapproval coming in waves over the phone line. “How the hell do you know that?”

“I can’t reveal my sources. But look at it this way - I’m doing the work for you. All you have to do is reap the glory.”

“Reap the glory?” He repeated in disbelief. “God, you are so gay sometimes.”

“I’ll be right there. Hide the homophobes.” He shut off his phone - Pete Townsend was not startling him again - and started the car, which had heated up about twenty degrees while he’d been talking. While Gordo didn’t like that he clearly still had access to police files, he probably wasn’t going to make a big stink about it, because he honestly did like other people to do his work for him sometimes. He wasn’t lazy, he was just usually juggling a dozen active cases at once.

Roan was personally just sorry he wasn’t wearing his Pansy Division t-shirt. Whenever he had to turn up at the cop shop he liked to wear it or a similarly “gay” shirt, if just to make everyone uncomfortable and piss them off. He got almost more shit for being gay than for being an infected when he was on the force, and the sheer ignorance of it all made him want to start tasering officers at random. The more they sneered and made their little jokes, the more he fought back by being as blatant as possible. Deny who he was to make them feel more secure in their own masculinity? Fuck them. He had no intention of being like Robinson over in Vice.

Kevin Robinson was a good cop, and being on the vice squad was an unpleasant job, but he seemed unfailing sanguine about it all. He never went out of his way to harass Roan, which put him instantly in the minority, but he wasn’t overly friendly to him either … until after work. And then he was a kind of awkward friendly, always looking over his shoulder to make sure no one saw him with the gay guy. He invited him to a barbecue he was having at his place one weekend, it was just a “welcome to the neighborhood” kind of thing for some people who had moved in on his block, and Roan went out of sheer curiosity. No one had ever invited him to one of their do’s before, except the lesbian cop on the homicide squad.

There were no other cops there, just him and Kevin, which was pretty weird since cops generally socialized with other cops (who else was there to socialize with on their time schedules). As the thing wound down, they sat at a picnic table in Kevin’s back yard - he had a fairly sizable house for a man who lived all alone with two cats and a dog , but apparently he’d inherited it from his uncle - and Roan watched Kevin pick at the label on his beer bottle as he admitted he was gay and kind of wanted someone he could talk to that would understand. He said if he came out it would just kill his mother, and he knew the shit that Roan was taking at the precinct and didn’t want that to happen to him either. He claimed to not be “that brave”.

Roan pitied the guy that day, and still did. He lived alone in a big house with few genuine friends - no one who knew the truth about him at any rate - living a life of quiet, lonely desperation, with the underlying fear that he might get outed if he crossed any sort of lines. How did he live that way? He didn’t get it; he had no idea how anyone could be that hard on themselves just to make other people happy.

Kevin was a quasi-friend, as he still wasn’t sure how friendly he could be with Roan (he was always looking over his shoulder), and never in public. But he was very good about giving Roan access to the police computer system. He should probably invite him over to dinner when they had Randi over - that wasn’t public, and he’d probably fall head over heels in love with Paris on first sight. Maybe that would encourage him to get out of the closet.

The sky had turned a pale shade of indigo by the time he reached headquarters, a “modern” sprawling cinderblock complex that managed to look oppressive and depressing as all hell in spite of efforts to make it “friendlier” by adding ornamental trees in little concrete islands around the parking lot, with bright white rocks that seemed to glow in low light. If your life was going well, you wouldn’t be here; a precinct house could never look friendly enough to overcome its basic function of locking people up.

Inside it was busy, with the usual assortment of perps in various stages of sobriety and belligerence, almost rivaling the assorted disbelief and belligerence of people here to bail someone out or accompanying the newly arrested. The assortment of smells was unpleasant and nearly overwhelming. But a couple of the cops looked up and scowled, recognizing him, and Gordo appeared in the doorway of the corridor leading to the “special” cells, and waved him over. He cut through the crowd, only the people who recognized him bothering to hurry to get out of his way, and joined him there.

As soon as the door closed, sealing off a great deal of noise and smells, Gordo bitched, “I thought you’d be here five minutes ago.”

“Traffic is hell this time of night. So what type of cat is he?”

“Leopard … I think. He’s spotted.”

“That’s a leopard all right.” That was kind of a shame; he’d really been holding out hope that Eli would turn out to be a house cat or something; maybe a skunk.

He followed him down a cool corridor of easy to hose down cement, although the air was redolent of that curious odor of industrial soap, vomit, body odor, and piss, with the lingering tang of cat; many different ones, all blending into a sharp, indefinable stink.

A metal door opened into what could best be called an antechamber, with a concrete floor and industrial white painted walls, and a guard’s observation post, where a pudgy uniformed woman sat, observing the cell block on the monitors. Each cell was separated from others by soundproofed portable walls, but the cats could still smell each other and generally spent their nights (or days) pacing in agitation. A quick glance showed that six of the twenty available cells were occupied, five by cats in various states and one by a woman curled up in a fetal position on the floor, one who had probably just metamorphosed out of her cat form. Also in the room was Sikorski’s usual partner, the almost abnormally calm and stoic Detective Sebastian “Seb” Estes (if he was white, he could have very well been Joe Friday), a guy from the tech branch he only knew as Allen, Officer Jeremy Brown, a cop he knew (and loathed ), and the Chief herself, Julia Matthews. Chief Matthews stepped forward, and gave him a courteous if slightly strained smile. “Thank you for coming in, Roan.”

“Anything for you, Chief.” And she was yards better than McClarty, who retired ahead of a minor scandal involving all those “good” families whose rebellious offspring’s names he kept off the books. The first female chief of this particular precinct, she ran a really tight ship, as if appearing as anything less than a ball buster might open her up to charges that she was too “weak” to run the place. She was on the far side of forty, her almond brown hair cut almost military short, her uniform seemingly so starched and tailored you could have cut yourself on its crisp edges. She was above average in height, almost six feet tall in flats, and fairly solidly built; she claimed that that’s just “how Montana farm girls turned out“, but Roan knew that was just deflective self-deprecation. She was a good cop; he didn’t hold it against her that she asked for his badge after that whole Jenkins’ incident, and she always seemed shocked that he didn’t resent her for it. But how could he? She was simply doing her job, and he had already concluded that he couldn’t remain on the force. It seemed like a momentary lapse of reason that he ever even became a cop; he suspected he only had because people told him he couldn’t.

Little Allen - not an insult; at barely five five he was the shortest person in the room - stepped forward with what looked like a thick, square dustpan on the end of a pole, the dustpan coated with a thick layer of a whitish-orange compound that smelled of antiseptic, filling amalgam, and plaster. “You know how to use one of these, I presume? You -”

“Yeah, I know the drill,” he said, taking it from Allen. The dustpan thing was the “bite plate”, the thing he had to make Eli the cat bite so they could get an accurate bite print. The stuff set pretty fast and tasted nasty, so after a cat bit it it was more than likely to let go quickly, but there had been instances where the cat tore the whole thing to pieces. You had to be careful - which was also why it was on a long pole, so you didn’t have to get too close to the bars. “What cage is he in?”

“3-B,” the female officer at the observation post reported, sounding so bored she could have been half asleep. The name patch on her uniform shirt said Stahl. “Go in, take a right; he’s the second one down.”

He nodded, and headed to the metal door plastered with all the warning signs in English and Spanish. “Got it.” Stahl hit a button that unlocked the inner door with a mechanical clank, and then he was within the small maze of cat cages, the tiny wing smelling like a disreputable zoo. The door clanked shut behind him and locked with an ominous thunk.

As he walked the aisle around the cages, he remembered bringing Paris here when he was homeless and living in his car, on the verge of a shift but having nowhere to go. Paris was just getting his sanity back, his self, and he told him he hated police stations and hospitals, he hated places where there were so many people he could hurt if things went wrong. Roan had to soothingly talk him in here, and promised him he would watch from the monitors and make sure he didn’t get out and hurt anyone; he promised he’d watch him all night. Roan had no intention of doing so, because even a tiger had no hope of getting out of here, and certainly not into the heart of the station. But as soon as his shift was over, he did come back, and the poor schlub on watch duty was more than happy to cede the chair to him. He told himself he just wanted to see what an actual tiger looked like, if they looked like the ones you saw in zoos, and yes, they did, or Paris did at any rate. He was the most magnificent cat he’d ever seen in his entire life, as well as one of the largest - no wonder he was worried about hurting someone.

He did end up watching him all night. He just hadn’t meant to.

As cats went, Eli wasn’t that big, just as he wasn’t in real life. He was a lean, almost scrawny leopard, wheat colored fur short, his spots mere suggestions on his thin coat, ghost echoes of circles like the rings of enlarged moles. His lean, almost vulpine shaped head turned towards him and he snarled, stopping his restless pacing to run snarling at the bars, reaching a paw through to try and swipe at him.

Roan was too far back for the cat to even get close to scratching him, but he swore he could almost see Eli’s arrogance in those yellowish eyes, something more Human than cat, and something in him bristled. “Back down, Eli,” he snapped. “Be a good loser for once.”

The cat looked up at him and snarled, black lips pulling over ivory teeth, and Roan snarled back, the growl rising easily to his throat. He crouched down so he could be at eye level with him, and the cat’s ears went back flat against its head in what could very well have been confusion, if cats were even capable of that. Roan felt his snarl and growl become one, a thrumming like the engine of his bike, and the leopard charged forward again with a roar, and Roan roared right back, stopping it in its track.

It was a roar, although it was also half angry scream, and it scoured his throat raw the moment it was pushed out. But the growl continued throughout it all, and Roan didn’t know how. He didn’t know a lot of things, actually. He was feeling oddly dizzy, almost detached from himself, and he felt his anger like a physical entity inside his own body, making his muscles bunch together beneath his skin, smooth fibers flowing into hard knots. He leaned forward on his hands, now on all fours, closer to the cage than he should have been, and somehow he roared once more, the force of the noise making blood well up in his throat, as he felt the muscles in his back tense, the hair on his neck bristle as his lips pulled back and revealed his teeth to the cat, growling as he moved forward slowly towards the bars of the cage.

The Eli leopard backed up, its posture one of submission, but that wasn’t enough for him. His blood pounded in his ears as his head seemed to swim in its own internal fog, and he could feel his muscles become liquid steel as the anger rose inside him, drowning his vision in red as he realized this cat had to die; he wanted to feel its warm blood gush in his mouth as he ripped open its throat, and -

What the fuck?!

It was an effort of will to reassert himself over the beast in his system, the one rising up to take him over, and he nearly threw himself backwards, shoving himself away from the cage as he panted for breath and finally stopped growling. What the fuck was that? What the fuck was that?! His own blood was coppery in his mouth, his throat ached as if it had been rubbed with a steel scouring brush. His muscle shifted back into their usual places as -

- his muscles shifted?

He looked at his hands, almost expecting to see fur and claws, but they were just hands; he could see the black curl of his Leo tattoo and his ghost scar, and he could see his hands were shaking. His whole body was quivering, and again it was an effort of will to make it stop, and it was almost painful since his muscles wanted to spasm. He felt like he was coming back to himself, but he had no idea where or when he had gone. He didn’t even remember dropping the bite plate.

His head spun, swam, and he felt almost unable to deal with his own thought processes. Was he going to become ..? Was he going to change? That was impossible; the change couldn’t be forced, it couldn’t be controlled or made to happen outside the viral cycle. It couldn’t happen; it had never happened.

(He felt the muscles move. He didn’t roar; he couldn’t make that noise. The second one wasn’t even remotely Human. He had no idea where all that rage had come from, or why he was so mad.)

His first urge was to run, to get as far away from here and cats as he could, to barricade himself in his house and try to hold on to his humanity against an enemy that lived inside his own body, in his own head, but that was such a chickenshit reaction he was ashamed of it. He swallowed down his own blood, the very act of swallowing making him wince in pain, and he picked up the bite plate as he got up to his knees and shoved the thing sideways through the bars, only turning it level once it was inside. “Come on and bite the thing, you stupid cat,” he grumbled, and his voice was gravelly hoarse, painful to listen to.

The leopard had laid down on the floor of its cage, its head down on its paws like a person in a guillotine waiting for the blade to come down. He jabbed the plate at its face, annoying it, and finally it raised its head and bit the thing, but it was strangely perfunctory, with almost no aggression in it at all. After he pulled the plate out of the bars, it resumed its submissive posture, its tail twitching in mild irritation.

Roan used the wall to get back to his feet, and as he walked back to the exit, he saw something that horrified him to his very core: the other cats were all in submissive postures. The lion, the panther … he had a feeling if he walked the entire block, they would all be that way. They had somehow all heard him, or smelled him, or … no, no, he couldn’t deal with this. It suddenly felt as if the air was thickening, the walls closing in on him.

The door unlocked mechanically several seconds after he’d reached it, almost as if no one had wanted to let him in. As he stepped inside the antechamber, he saw a sea of faces all staring at him in abject horror, standing as far back from him inside the room as possible. Even Stahl was standing up from her station, although duty dictated she couldn’t move anywhere.

He shoved the bite plate in Allen’s hand, who nearly flinched away from him as he did so, and finally Gordo asked, the shock making his voice reedy, “Roan, what the fuck was that?”

Not sure he could keep his poker face intact, his vocal inflections flat, he still managed to spit out, “I had to establish dominance. I guess I’m done here.” He quickly left the room and no one challenged him, no one made to follow, and he simply plunged through the crowd outside, elbowing people aside as he tried to leave the building as fast as he could without breaking into a run. His heart was pounding triple time, a beat that seemed to reverberate inside his head and his eyeballs, and he wondered if this was a heart attack. He wondered if he’d mind if it was.

He barely made it back to the Mustang before he doubled over and vomited on the asphalt.