With the waiting game begun, he went back to his clients, the Nakamuras, and sat with them a while. Danny was still out cold, but his vitals were starting to look better, so the doctor figured he’d be conscious in another couple of hours. She didn’t think there’d be any permanent physical damage.

Gordo found him eventually, and told him no one had found Henstridge yet; no one seemed to know where he was. Gordo still wasn’t sure about his theory, but he told him - in a hushed voice, in case someone wandered by - that he’d make sure Henstridge would be brought in, and when he was, he’d make sure he was there. “We both know the reason I put up with you is because you do have the sharpest instincts of anyone I’ve ever met. So … if you say you think Henstridge is the guy … okay. We’ll look at him hard.”

This was clearly a painful admission from Gordo, and he supposed he should have been touched, but Roan was too tired to muster it. “Are you hittin’ on me?”

Gordo scowled at him, shaking his head. “You just can’t keep from being a smart ass, can you?”

“Snarky is my default setting.”

He sighed heavily, a fatally put upon man. “So I’ve noticed.”

Although there were some questions about trespassing and excessive use of force, he was essentially let go; after all, as Seb so helpfully pointed out, according to the law, anything short of death was permissible in self-defense - and death was acceptable in some cases. Hatch was hardly dead, just hurting (although probably not nearly enough).

He’d left the Mustang on Hatch’s block, but Gordo and Seb offered him a lift home, and he figured he’d take it. He and Paris could head out tomorrow on the bike and pick up the Mustang - maybe they’d encounter a local “action news team” , and they could say something unconscionably filthy on the air. It was always fun to piss off someone with plastic hair and nothing better to do.

It was odd riding in the back of an unmarked police car, but at least Gordo gave him his gun back so he didn’t feel totally like he was being run in. He mostly nodded off in the back, vaguely listening to Seb and Gordo talk to Em at dispatch, and was looking forward to simply crawling into bed with Paris and sleeping for three days. Except Paris wouldn’t be there yet, would he? The sun was starting to come up, the sky’s fragile blue giving way to a pale blush dotted with thin, blue-grey clouds, and he figured Paris had just changed back or was soon going to. He’d be happy he solved his cases, although then that meant they had to start worrying about the bills again.

His eyes were half-open as they turned the corner down his quiet, rural street, and he saw, parked on the soft shoulder of the road across from his house, a silver Subaru Outback. “What the fuck?” he exclaimed, sitting up, totally awake now.

Seb was driving, and while this exclamation did not make his driving suffer in any way, he glanced at him in the rearview mirror as he pulled the car smoothly into the driveway. “What’s wrong?” His voice almost had an inflection; that was near panic for Seb.

“That Outback,” he said, hastily getting out of the car. “It belonged to a suspicious guy that was here the other day,”

“Suspicious how?” Gordo asked. “Nutball?”

“I don’t -” The replied died in his throat as he took a step towards the house, and caught the scent of blood. He had the instant mental image of Paris laying on the floor of the cage, his head punched in one side, collapsed due to the force of a bullet pulverizing part of his skull, in a pool of blood like a collapsed shadow. His heart was trip-hammering, and he knew he should approach with caution …but it all disappeared in a sudden flush of rage, his vision tinting red as the muscles knotted inside his skin, and as he ran for the house he shouted, “Paris!” Only later, when his throat hurt, did he realize that the scream turned into a roar.

He didn’t open his door even though he could have; he was too enraged to think clearly, the beast surging out on a wave of desperate emotion. He slammed a flattened palm against the deadbolt and it shot out through the door, cracking like spun glass, the metal bouncing across the floor as he kicked the door open, braced to pounce on the first thing that wasn’t Paris. He could almost feel the hot blood of the intruder in his mouth already.

He was smashed across the face with the rank, meaty smell of blood, and he saw that the basement door had been ripped off its hinges and was partially covering the body of a man sprawled out on the floor at the foot of the stairs. It wasn’t Paris; he knew that from the smell of his blood before he was even able to rein back the beast enough to focus on the body.

He was dead; he smelled like shit and decay already. His throat had been torn out, his skull punctured and face scarred by teeth marks. His right arm, extended away from his body, was held on only by the bone and a few straggly bits of sinew. There was a gun just beyond his curled fingers, and dark blood had pooled around him like a fallen shroud. He felt a dark sense of triumphant that the stupid fucker had encountered the tiger and not Paris, the prey suddenly rendered predator in front of a man not prepared for it.

Anger mingling with relief and panic, he felt a bit more in control of himself, and looking around the room spotted Paris curled up by the back door, blood so completely slicked down his naked back and torso that it looked like he was wearing a red shirt. He scrambled to him as Gordo and Seb came in the door, and one of them - he honestly didn’t know which, and didn’t care - exclaimed, “Jesus Christ!”

He grabbed Paris in his arms and curled himself around his upper body, fighting back tears as his nose confirmed that the blood wasn’t his; none of it was Paris’s. His pulse, thready and rapid in the aftermath of the change, pounded away in a steady rhythm, and Roan felt almost dizzy with relief. For a second there he thought he was gone; he thought he was dead. He tried to swallow back the lump in his throat and realized he was trembling now, partially out of adrenaline overload and partially out of the fact that he just realized that he had been more than ready, willing, and able to kill someone with his bare hands. It never even occurred to him to draw his weapon.

He was aware that someone was standing nearby, just far enough away to give them some semblance of privacy, and just by the scent of his cologne - it was faint and he didn’t recognize it at all; it smelled of wood smoke and pine, with a hint of cigar - he knew it was Seb. “Is he all right?”

“He’s okay. He‘s only out due to the change,” he replied, his eyes tightly shut, his voice gravelly. He stroked Paris’s sweat soaked hair, and was glad he wasn’t conscious yet. How would he explain this? The last time Paris woke up in someone else’s blood, he had a nervous breakdown.

“Oh my god,” Gordo gasped. He heard the rustle of Seb turning towards his partner, and Roan risked opening his eyes to look. A couple errant tears spilled out, but they stopped. Gordo was crouched next to the body, just beyond the penumbra of blood, and he was holding two driver’s licenses that he must have pulled out of the coat of the victim. Gordo looked up at them, blue eyes weary with the general horrors of humanity, and said, “It’s Mitchell Henstridge.”

Roan wiped the tears away with the back of his hand, and tried to figure out how he had become a loose end that needed tying up. Had Henstridge known he was investigating him? He must have. He must have worried he was getting close, and what the fuck was two more murders on top of the five he’d already committed? Once you killed at least two people, it was unofficially a “spree” anyways.

He laid Paris down carefully on the floor and grabbed the throw off the couch, covering him, as Seb called in for a meat wagon and the rest of the “cat” investigative unit. Roan had intended to go to the ground floor bathroom and get Paris some fentanyl (he didn’t give a fuck that they were here; Paris was really going to need it), but he stopped as his nose got so accustomed to the smell of blood and death that he could now smell something else: a cat. A cat he’d never smelled before, one that didn’t belong. “Fucking hell, his son’s still here,” he snapped, heading for the stairs.

Gordo stood up, drawing his service weapon, and asked, “You can smell him?”

“Yeah, upstairs.”

As he started up the steps, Gordo moved to follow, but he looked back down at him and shook his head. “I can get this.”

“If he’s the cat that’s been killing people …”

“Remember what happened at the station? If he’s a cat, I can handle him.”

Gordo frowned, but his eyes seemed to darken with newfound knowledge as he thought back to what happened at the cat containment unit, and he understood now what Roan only was starting to understand: the cats were afraid of him. He smelled half-cat, half-human, and they just didn’t know what to make of him. He was the alpha male by default, because he was a strange mutation that couldn’t fit into their limited frame of reference. Gordo nodded reluctantly, but kept his weapon out, pointed at the ceiling. “You need help, shout.”

Roan nodded and went up the stairs quickly and quietly, unconsciously shifting his weight to the balls of his feet. He closed his eyes, taking a deep breath, following the scent trail to the room besides the bedroom that they sarcastically referred to as “the library”. It was just a storage room for random crap that they hadn’t found a place for yet, but mainly it was full of Roan’s books; boxes and boxes of books. He knew of this great used bookshop on Pike Street that he could spend hours in, just perusing the stacks and finding hidden gems. He always went in there intending to buy only one or two books, and invariably left with a bag full of them. Paris used to joke that he should just open his own damn used book shop in the house, if only to free up the room.

He slipped into the bedroom and then the connected bathroom, taking out a medical kit and loading up a hypodermic with painkillers, so practiced at it by now he could do it faster than Dee ever could. He hesitated, filled a second needle, and tucked them both in his pocket before returning to the library.

There was a window on the far wall, across from the door, and as he shoved the ajar door all the way open he was greeted by the smell of fresh air stirring around the scent of slowly moldering books. Mitchell’s son had jumped out, perhaps because it didn’t want to face a tiger. It had cut itself on the glass, he could smell a faint trace of blood, and that was enough for him to track it.

He went to the pane and looked out, but the backyard was clear. Glass sparkled below like water, and before he realized what he was doing, he’d jumped out the window and landed easily on his feet in the grass. The boy’s scent was easy to pick up, and he followed the faint smell of blood towards the copse of trees at the back of the property.

(Had he just jumped out the fucking window?!)

When he’d found this place, the copse was the second reason he wanted to buy it. Being far from Human neighbors was the main attraction, but this copse, full of towering pines and thick underbrush, huge ferns that were almost waist high and tangles of blackberry bushes as tall as a man, was an attractive cat hideaway. It was full of small animals that development had chased out of their old homes, and it could - in theory - provide enough distraction for any big cat that might have broken out of the house. It was small hope that they’d be distracted enough by a possum to forget about hunting Human prey, but he had odd moments of living in hope.

But he found Henstridge’s son Michael by the dried up creek, laying underneath the hollow of a blackberry bush, his injured leg still sticking out from under the shrub. He was still in cat form, and as Roan knelt down and pulled a hypo out of his pocket, he saw why no one had been able to identify his bite pattern.

Michael Henstridge was like no cat he had ever seen in his life. His fur was short and camel colored, but he had an awkward, lanky body, almost more like a cheetah’s than any anything else. But his head had the broader, flatter shape of a panther, and considering his age, he was a lot larger than he would have expected, almost the size of your average panther. But he wasn’t an average anything; he almost looked like some kind of cat hybrid. Although one of the most bizarre and troubling things was the black nylon collar around his neck - it looked like a shock collar, the kind you might use on an obsessively barking dog.

He stabbed the hypodermic in a vein in its leg, and Michael looked up at him, ears flattening, but Roan aborted his growl with one of his own. “It’s over, boy,” he snarled. “Stay down.”

For a long moment he stared into uncomprehending yellow eyes, and then the cat laid back down, the drugs taking hold of its system as powerfully as for any human.

Or at least that’s what he told himself. He hated to think that, on some level, Michael understood him.

According to Dennis Caldera, a criminal lawyer that Roan worked cases for occasionally, Henstridge’s death wasn’t so much self-defense as it was a classic “asking for it” scenario: he broke into a house with a gun and a dangerous cat, clearly intending harm. The fact that he was partially eaten by the resident cat only meant the possibility that karma existed was better than ever. In fact, Henstridge’s death was basically classified as “death by misadventure” - no one even considered pressing charges against him.

Maybe he didn’t feel bad about it because the bastard was coming to kill him and Roan. And because god knew what a fucked up job he did on his own son.

Michael Henstridge was an infected, and a pretty odd one. A little digging found that Anita Henstridge had been infected by tainted blood given to her in a transfusion after a car accident in her first trimester of pregnancy, when the two of them were living in Chicago. The hospital had ended up infecting several patients in a similar manner; there was a huge class action lawsuit that was settled out of court, and by the time the lawyers got their cut of the money, all the survivors blew through their meager leftovers quite quickly. By the time the Henstridges’ had relocated here, their money was gone.

Michael Henstridge had several problems, beyond just being infected and having polycythemia vera. He was something of a flip side to most infecteds, meaning he was more often cat than Human, reverting to Human form for only about a week out of every month. And when he was in Human form, he still acted like a cat. He walked on all fours - it was difficult to get him to stand unless he was trying to reach for something - and growled, yowled, and snarled; he didn’t speak. He did understand some commands, though, mainly stay, down, no, and sic. Clearly he had some serious brain damage, but there was some question has to how much of it was made worse by Henstridge “conditioning” his own son. Michael was in a special hospital upstate, where they were trying to figure out what they could “fix” and what was permanent. He hadn’t been charged with his role in the murders, because he was a minor, because he was brain damaged and because he was going to spend the rest of his days locked up in an institution anyways. How did you convict a boy who was mainly a cat ?

Henstridge had a second identity established, Peter French, under which he’d been renting a ramshackle house not far from Tweaks on the East Side. There was a small pond on a neighboring property, and a search of it turned up a machete that was assumed to be the murder weapon used to kill the kids at Tweaks’s place. Roan had said there were some things left at the house that indicated that Mitchell honestly thought he was “protecting” his son, that he was taking care of him in some way, but Paris couldn’t quite wrap his mind around that psychotic reasoning. He trained his son to a leash - how was that doing the best for him exactly? How was training him to kill on command beneficial? Bizarrely, he thought Roan may have actually felt a bit sorry for Mitch, although he was still glad the fucker was dead.

And Roan. He wondered how and if he should try and get him to talk about what was happening to him. He heard from Diego what he’d done to Hatch, just as he saw for himself what he’d done to the deadbolt on the door. Paris worked on doors, he knew how hard deadbolts were to break, and Roan had punched it out - in one single piece. There was a break in the door where the lock had been engaged and forced out. The strength needed to do something like that was supernatural, and if you combined that with how he broke Hatch’s arm, it added up to an interesting picture. Namely the cat was bleeding into him more and more - but did want to acknowledge that in any way? No, he was keeping it to himself, as if denial could somehow keep it from happening. Paris just went along with him, pretended he didn’t know, but he wasn’t sure how long he could keep doing it. Yes, he was an excellent liar if he didn’t say so himself, but he was sure not talking about it was slowly killing Roan. He’d found him up some nights, pacing or staring out at nothing, once even trying to see if he could read a book in the dark (did that work? He was kind of curious), but he had a variety of lame excuses, from too much caffeine to insomnia. Roan had to know he knew too, but he hadn’t banked up the courage to say it. How funny was that? The bravest man he knew afraid of talking about what was happening to him.

Paris had already decided what he was going to do. He was going to make him a nice dinner one night, and then simply tell him he knew. Yeah, that was a hell of a way to ruin a nice dinner, but that was how they did it in the Lehane family, damn it - it’s what always made Christmas so interesting. Recriminations and presents.

Sikorski had come around shortly after the entire incident, once they had scrubbed all the blood out of the carpet and rehung the basement door, and brought them a bottle of wine, saying he’d never brought Roan a housewarming present. Sikorski tried very hard to be nice to him, which made Paris instantly suspicious, and even Roan hadn’t known what to make of it, but Paris was relatively sure he eventually figured it out. He felt bad for doubting Roan or using him (half dozen of one, twelve of the other), and also it got through his thick, straight head that he and Roan genuinely loved each other. It was probably a weird thing for the terminally straight to get, but hey, his boyfriend punched out a deadbolt for him and almost became a lion on demand - would Sikorski’s wife have done that for him? (Assuming she could.)

Sikorski also brought up a point that awed him somewhat, and that was if Hank had grabbed his Remington before going outside - instead of his sawed off shotgun - Roan might have never taken an interest in the case, and Ro had to admit that was probably true. It just struck him as an odd weapon for a cop to have, and Paris couldn’t help but feel a little bit of pride. That was what Roan was great at - finding the one little flaw, the one little thing that didn’t quite fit, and blowing cases wide open.

He still didn’t trust Sikorski; he still used Roan. But maybe he judged him too harshly otherwise. At least he was trying.

The money remained a question mark, the answer to which had probably died with DeSilvo, Henstridge, and Tweaks. Randi had confirmed that Tweaks was in debt up to his eyeballs and wasn’t getting the Cayman Island gift baskets like Hank and Mitch, but since Metropol had disappeared as mysteriously as it had showed up, leads had dried up quickly. Roan had two theories, both of which were plausible enough: during the bust of the house in Edgewood, DeSilvo and Henstridge found a whole bunch of money (perhaps Tweaks, desperate to keep another more serious charge off his lengthy record, lead them to it, or was simply present when they found it) that was clearly ill gotten gains, and took it for themselves. Unsure how to best launder it and wanting to keep suspicion off of them, the account was set up in the Cayman Islands, and they pulled out small amounts on a monthly basis, just enough not to garner attention. Or conversely they found something incredibly illegal at the Edgewood house, and knowing that Edgar Rodriguez had the cash or the capabilities of getting it, blackmailed him into paying them hush money. Rodriguez denied any knowledge of the cops or a Cayman Island account, but the cops in Miami were still investigating him. Roan had told him if it was Rodriguez, he’d covered his tracks extraordinarily well. They would probably never know what precisely happened at the Edgewood house. That ate at Roan a lot - he hated mysteries even he couldn’t solve - but he was learning to let go.

The Nakamuras were so pleased by the job had Roan had done for them that they gave him a five thousand dollar bonus. Roan had actually tried to refuse it (!), but the Nakamuras insisted he keep it, so he did. It went very far in home repairs, so they were able to get the house secure again in no time. Danny was okay, although he’d seemingly suffered amnesia possibly due to constant exposure to ketamine (or because he didn’t want to deal with it), meaning he didn’t remember exactly what had happened to him. But the hard drives had an awful lot of incriminating evidence; in fact, it seemed Hatch was trying to get into the online porn business, and he’d had a couple of more underage victims on film that the police were having a hard time identifying (mainly because Hatch didn’t film too many faces). But between child pornography , kidnapping, rape, and ketamine possession charges, Hatch wasn’t going to see the light of day for a long time. And Roan hinted rather darkly at what other convicts did to pedophiles in prison, so it wasn’t a huge shock that Hatch’s lawyer was trying to get him sentenced to a special sex offender’s treatment center, although the state was resisting so far.

The Hatch case had gotten MK Investigations a lot of publicity, even though Roan had made it clear he didn’t talk to reporters and wouldn’t, and once when Paris did it just for the sheer lark of it, Ro got really pissed off. He didn’t want to be a “sideshow”, the infected detective, and Paris couldn’t help but wonder if the new thing he was going through - the changes, the cat traits lingering behind longer now - had made him want to retreat even further from the world. Was he afraid he’d end up like Michael Henstridge, more cat than Human? That wasn’t going to happen.

Okay, no, he had no basis for saying it, no proof he could give Roan, but Ro wasn’t brain damaged, and if he was going to change into a cat permanently wouldn’t he have done so by now? He honestly thought Roan was simply growing into his abilities, which he’d never bothered to explore before. He bet he could do a lot of things if he wasn’t so afraid of himself and what he could do. Sometimes he just didn’t get Roan at all; if he was him and he found out he could have super strength and shit like that, by god he’d be out there using it. He’d be ripping off bank vault doors and juggling Volkswagens and just really impressing the hell out of extremely attractive people as well as trying to swing a movie or t.v. deal. Just call him Super ManWhore.

At least business was really good now; everybody wanted to hire them. They had cases backed up into next month, although Roan was very careful about weeding out clients who simply wanted to hire them for the novelty factor. He once angrily tossed out a guy who turned out to be a reporter, just trying to be sneaky.

Paris weeded through the newspaper, finding the only section he bothered to read - the lifestyle section - before heading to the basement. He was supposed to go out with Randi tonight, but he decided he wanted to spend the night at home. Randi and him usually went out to clubs, and Roan knew about it, but he didn’t mind, because he trusted him.

Okay, maybe he didn’t, he just knew that if Paris cheated on him he could smell the man or woman on him, no matter how well he showered. That was the problem with being with someone with super smelling, although it least it kept him honest. (Of course the fact that he would probably kill anyone else he slept with kept him monogamous as well; was any sex safe enough when the tiger strain was like playing Russian roulette with a fully armed semi-automatic?) Besides, he had a good thing going here; he wasn’t going to screw it up by fucking around. He had a feeling his fucking around days were long past gone.

When Roan was in the high part of his cycle, he and Randi would hit the town, mainly going to gay clubs (which Roan hated) and the occasional straight clubs, generally just to dance and drink and have a good time. Also there was a continuing attempt to get Randi laid, but so far it hadn’t really paid off, to the point that she preferred going to the gay clubs with him. While she hated being a “cock blocker”, she’d made a whole bunch of new gay male friends, although she claimed that most were just friendly with her in hopes of eventually getting to nail him. He didn’t know if that was true or not, but they were generally nice guys, although not necessarily his type. (Which was funny, because pre-infection, almost everyone was his type if he was high or drunk enough.)

Randi sounded a little disappointed when he called to cancel, but she said it was okay; Lost was on, and she could stay home and watch it. Besides, she wasn’t sure she was in the mood to watch him get hit on by gorgeous guys she had no hope in hell of nailing unless she got a sex change. Maybe tomorrow night (for going out, not getting her a sex change. That seemed more like a weekend thing).

Paris left the new basement door open, so the CD he put on the stereo could be clearly heard. It was Death From Above 1979’s “You’re A Woman, I’m A Machine”, which was a recent album that Ro liked a lot in spite of its “flaming heterosexuality” (ah, he never did stop being a smart ass). Paris went down the steps and sat in the center of them, a good distance away from the repaired cage, but still within the general eye line of the lion inside.

Roan in cat form always looked spectacularly regal. He was laying down in the pose of library stone lions everywhere, his deep green eyes a striking counterpart to his ochre fur and his large, luxurious mane, partially shot through with the dark reddish brown hair that Roan’s mother had named him after. (It took him a stupid amount of time to realize that Roan’s mother had named him after his hair color; roan just wasn’t used much as a descriptive term anymore, except in relation to the color of horses. It made him wonder about Roan’s mother, what she was like to know that name, to give it to her son.)

“Just so you know, I changed your ringtone again,” Paris told the lion conversationally. “It’s a Pete Yorn song that makes me think of you, so of course you’re going to absolutely hate it. And I’ll be the first to admit that that “sister” line is not only gender inappropriate, but even in correct context just totally creepy. I have no idea what possessed him to write that, unless he was just desperate for a rhyme. I mean, it’s icky.”

The lion just stared at him, oozing the lazy, arrogant disdain that only lions seemed capable of, its tail flicking with impatience. Sometimes he wondered if Roan was actually semi-aware in there; sometimes he liked to annoy him just in an attempt to prove it. If Roan, after changing back, went and deleted his ringtone, it’d be proof positive that he retained some kind of awareness. Paris unfolded the “lifestyle” section, and glanced at the day’s scintillating headline. “Gray Is The New Black. Seriously, who comes up with this shit? And who cares? Good lord, there’s so many wrong things about this I don’t even know where to start. And if you were here, I know you’d say “Why do you read that stuff if it pisses you off?” and I’d say “Because sometimes I like to complain about things that have no consequence whatsoever. Sometimes I like to think about silly things that aren’t life and death.” You know what my favorite part about these imaginary conversations between us is? I always win the argument. I’m ten for ten, baby!” He pumped his fist in the air in triumph.

The lion continued to stare at him with Roan’s green eyes, its tail flicking once more. The oddest thing? Roan rarely growled at him. Oh he supposed he would if he went right up to the cage, he might make a lunge at him, but as long as he kept his distance he just regarded him with what seemed to be haughty indifference. It was almost a ’We both know I can kick your ass, so why go through the motions’ kind of deal. And that kind of attitude seemed more human than cat, although he supposed that was debatable.

Paris opened the newspaper and looked inside, looking for something new to complain about, and maybe a movie they could go see on the weekend when his transitional phase was over. He glanced up at the cat to see it continuing to watch him in a way that could have been annoyed, or one that was almost - dare he even think it? - somewhat affectionate. “Isn’t it nice to spend a cozy evening at home?” Paris asked , flashing the cat a big, slightly sarcastic smile.

The lion’s tail twitched once more, and he figured that as answers went, that was good enough.

The End

I anticipate a sequel, if only to see how far Roan’s cat abilities go. That’s just too good to pass up.