He stared at himself in the plastic mirror over the sink, hoping that he could see a shadow of what the others had seen. He stared deep into his own eyes, until he could see the thin, erose line of gold around his pupils, the only place where the green of his iris gave way, and he tried to see the lion lurking there behind them. He couldn’t see anything but himself, of course, but at what point was the separation? Was there one? He was beginning to think that it was a convenient excuse in his own mind, that there was no such thing as his desires and the beast’s desires - they were all one thing, and he only created the separation in his own head because it made him feel better.

He did the best he could washing the blood off his neck and out of his hair even though he couldn’t see it; he could feel it though, smell it, saw the water in the sink turn pinkish-red as he poured water over it. At one point a reasonably attractive Asian resident came into the men’s room, and when he was at an adjoining sink, washing his hands, he showed him the back of his neck and asked, “Did I get all the blood off?”

If it wasn’t a hospital, that probably would have earned him a much stranger look than he actually got.

Whenever he went out on a surveillance detail, even when it was unlikely anyone would spot him, he carried a duffle with him that he called his “recon kit”. It was full of plain t-shirts in various colors, windbreakers and light linen jackets, gimme caps and cheap sunglasses. Cheap disguise techniques, yes, but usually surprisingly effective. Unless there was something really striking about you, people just went on bare surface appearance, and as long as he covered most of his hair (occasionally someone commented on his hair color) and hid his eyes (he knew that green wasn’t exactly common), he was just an average joe, a nobody, someone you passed a million times a day without a second glance. Looking ordinary was a boon to a detective.

It was also a boon to a man who often got other people’s blood on him. He could dump the jacket and the shirt, exchange them for something in the kit, and he just had to hope he had no blood on his pants, and if he did, that he was able to get out of them before Paris noticed. He wasn’t going to tell him about this if he could at all avoid it.

Of course he had to answer a few questions, but Matt’s story that Sam - apparently Sam Merton, and Roan was relatively certain he had heard of a cop named Merton - was trying to kill him before Roan showed up was backed up by Sam’s full scale freak out in the ER. They had to give him a tracheotomy so he could breathe (okay, maybe he punched him a bit too hard), and as soon as he could he breathe, he got violent with a nurse and actually tried to storm off, picking up a scalpel and trying to stab someone with it. He was doped to the heavens and his arms and legs restrained so they could finish working on him - he did have a bullet wound, after all.

Leonard was such a wreck he admitted everything - including catching the cat that was nailed to Matt’s door - as long as the cops promised to keep “the freak” away from him. “What the fuck is he?” Roan could hear him screeching from the room down the hall. “He ain’t human!” He didn’t know what answers the cops gave him, if any.

Seb had recovered his Sig Sauer, and since it hadn’t been fired, he gave it back to him. Before he could leave, Gordo pulled him aside, into a quiet part of the lobby between the vending machines and a more private waiting room. Gordo looked uncomfortable for a long moment, as if he wasn’t sure how to say what he wanted to say, but Roan just let him squirm. He wasn’t going to help him - he honestly didn’t want to know what he was going to tell him. Finally, Gordo spit it out. “Are you … all right?”

He shrugged. “Coupla bruises; I’ve had worse.”

“No, I didn’t mean that. I mean …you’re in control, right? This isn’t your … it’s not that point of the viral cycle, is it?”

He didn’t want to say “that time of the month”, did he? Not to a man, at any rate. “No. Why? What did you see?”

Gordo glanced away nervously, rubbed his mouth as if he suddenly needed a smoke or a drink. When he looked back at him, it was with great trepidation. “You really have no idea what happened to you?”

“I felt it - I couldn’t see it.”

He sighed heavily, his breath reeking of coffee. “Well, your eyes, they were … something happened to the pupils. They were barely there and they weren‘t exactly round. And your face was … the veins were standing out on your neck and cheeks, and it looked like your jaw was … it didn’t look right. Your teeth looked … bigger. It’s hard to explain. It wasn’t too dramatically different, it was just … bizarre. I mean, you didn’t look like a wolf man or something, it was just … … incorrect. If you get what I mean.”

He remembered feeling the muscles in his face twitch, but he didn’t remember feeling the teeth change, or his jaw. But as long as his jaw didn’t break or dislocate, he probably wouldn’t have known if it had changed. If the lion’s teeth started to come out, he’d have felt the pain, tasted the blood … but he was gone on adrenaline, and he did taste blood, didn’t he? But he chalked that up to the choking. Had his jaw actually shifted? Had the teeth started to come out? The thought panicked him, mainly because he really hadn’t felt it. He had the urge to touch his jaw, but he fought it down. He saw it in the mirror - it looked normal, except suddenly he had some stubble come back. Maybe the hair growth came with the partial change.

Roan still didn’t escape clean. He was almost out the doors when Matt shouted his name. He turned with great reluctance, not sure what he was going to say, not sure he wanted to hear it anyways. He had fresh stitches in his cheek, but very slender bandages patched up the cut on his throat. His eye was now a deep purplish-black, swollen until the eye was half shut, but his fully open eye had the light glaze of good painkillers. Matt didn’t say anything as he approached, he just suddenly hugged him, nearly collapsing in his arms. “Thank you,” he said quietly. He was afraid he was going to start to cry, but Matt managed to keep it down to a couple of sniffles, the drugs keeping him on an even keel. When Matt let him go, he attempted to smile, but failed. Admiration shone in his eyes, and it made Roan‘s skin want to crawl off and find a nice, quiet hiding place. “I owe you my life.”

“No, you don’t,” Roan countered, not unkindly. “Just do me a favor, and stay away from the crack heads.”

He nodded, wiping errant tears away with the back of his hand. Matt looked at him with something akin to wonder; he was no longer freaked out by what he’d seen. Roan wondered if it was the drugs, the puppy crush, or a combination of the two. “I got that lesson, believe me. Look, if I can ever do something for you -”

“You’ll be the first to know,” he replied, quickly turning and heading for the door. He really didn’t want to face either gratitude or a come on at this point. “I know where you work.”

Matt waved at him as he went, and he felt somewhat bad for him. He bet Matt was just the type of guy who habitually dated fucked up men - he probably tried to “save” them, and then wondered why it never worked. If he thought he’d actually listen, he would have told him that you were lucky to save yourself in this life, but he didn’t think he’d listen. The co-dependant never did.

On the drive home he let PJ Harvey rage from him and The Dead Milkmen be snarky for him as he tried to clear his head and think of nothing, just let the music fill it. He dumped his bloody shirt and jacket in the first dumpster he saw, trading them for a clean green t-shirt and a dark windbreaker from the kit. Would Paris notice? It was possible, as he was the more fashion sensible between them, but he was hoping he could get away with it.

As it was, he caught a break. He got home to find Paris had fallen asleep on the couch watching television. As he came in, Par was sprawled loosely on the sofa, one arm draped over the side and touching the carpet, a rerun of South Park playing on the screen. That just reminded him that some of the cops - supposedly behind his back, but still rather obviously - used to refer to him bitchily as “Big Gay Roan”. That pissed him off so much that one day he just wanted to show up wearing nothing but pink satin hot pants and a t-shirt reading “Ass Bandit”. Of course he didn’t - like he’d ever wear satin hot pants! (He just didn’t have the legs for them) - but the “stairs” incident happened only a month later, so he never really got a chance to refine his plan.

He got out of his jeans and tossed them in the washer, glad Paris would never get a chance to discover the bloodstains, and went upstairs to shower and shave off the new stubble, as well as trim off about two inches of his hair, which also looked a bit longer and bushier than before (it could have been his imagination, but he just wasn’t sure).

He was okay - he was Human. And it was a very poorly lit area of the parking lot; maybe what Gordo, Seb, and Leonard thought they saw they didn’t really see. His pupils had probably contracted drastically due to the sudden brightness of the flashlights, and as for the veins standing out … sure, that probably happened when his muscles changed. It was easy to explain, and that thing with his teeth … no, damn it, he would have felt that, and there would have been more blood in his mouth. It wasn’t that the teeth changed when you transformed more than an entire new set grew in over the old - you essentially had two rows of teeth, more like sharks than cats. And it fucking hurt, and since it cut your gums to shit it always bled a lot. That’s why you always woke up after a transformation tasting blood, your gums as sore as if a dental hygienist with a pick and a grudge had just gotten through with you. Maybe his jaw distended slightly, which might look pretty weird, but there was no way that his teeth had started to come in.

Although it was odd to wake someone up to get them to bed, he did just that. Paris asked him how it went, and he told him an acceptable bullshit story about a sloppy crime scene but a relatively quick arrest. He also told him that the cops had discovered Matt had a stalker and that he and his friend had shot him out of jealousy or because he shoved Matt out of the way of the bullet. Either way, they were both in custody, and Par seemed so relieved by it that he felt guilty for leaving so much out.

But obviously not that guilty, as he fell asleep while Par was brushing his teeth. Adrenaline crash could be a dramatic thing.

He dreamed he was running, the street disappearing beneath his feet as if it ceased to exist the moment he was done with it, the view changing unpredictably from low to the ground to higher above, but his speed and his gait never changed. He loped past apartment buildings so tall they seemed to be propping up the canopy of the sky, which had the odd washed out blue half-light of a false dawn. The buildings soon gave way to open fields, although the stinging scent of wet asphalt, exhaust, and too many humans bedeviled him, haunted him like a bad memory, following him into the tall grass where their smell should have brushed away. His muscles stretched and his lungs pulled in air like bellows, but there was no tiring, no pain of exertion; only exhilaration, as if he was free from his cage at last. Finally there was the scent of water and earth, of compost and chlorophyll, but the smell of the human lingered. It was rank and fetid, sweat and blood and fear and sex and rage, and he realized dimly that the scent was clinging to him. He was the scent, and it disgusted him.

With no transition at all, he’d gone from the razor blade grass to a home, a staircase he climbed with the softest steps, and he realized that a new scent was pulling him, something familiar and welcome, something that made his stomach feel like it was full of fluttering birds. Once again he was simply there, standing over Paris, asleep on the bed, the sheets and blanket tangled around his waist and legs like a partially constructed cocoon. His flesh was warm, the blood beneath a slow but steady roar, and he put his head on his chest and listened to that heart thumping away inside its rib cage, something in its rhythm suggesting a desire to get out and run. Paris touched his face, ran his hand through his hair and held on, while lifting his own head and baring his throat to him. He kissed the skin, tasting the salt of it, feeling the pulse of a vein beneath his lips, and then bit deep, his fangs sinking into his neck and the blood roaring from him and into his mouth, slaking the thirst that had turned his own throat into sandpaper.

Roan instantly woke up, his own subconscious emergency eject system kicking in - he’d had enough nightmares in his life that he’d taught himself to wake up once his dreams turned terrible, although it didn’t always work as quick as he hoped - and he had to check that Par was alive and breathing and had an intact throat. Paris’s back was to him, curled up in a semi-fetal position, hogging almost all the covers (as usual), his breathing deep and regular.

He stumbled off to the bathroom, and stared at himself in the mirror over the sink, trying to will the animal inside him to make an appearance. It didn’t, but he knew that it was in there somewhere, a shadow behind his eyes. “If you touch Paris, if you hurt him, this is over,” he snarled to his own reflection. He made a gun of his thumb and forefinger and shoved them beneath his chin at just the right angle, so that if it were a real gun, pulling the trigger would have blasted off the top of his skull. “Bang - our brains all over the ceiling. Heal that, asshole.”

If he was wrong, if there was no actual beast, then he was simply talking to himself. But that was okay, as his other self clearly needed the message anyways.

Was he a lion who dreamed he was a man or man who dreamed he was a lion? Oh fuck it, he hated bullshit questions like that anyways.

***

When he woke up, the sunlight streaming in through the window and the birds singing so noisily outside he felt like roaring out the window to make them shut up, he had a single moment of panic, since he was alone. But the smells of coffee and toast were wafting up from downstairs, and any momentary fear that the beast was as naturally contrarian as he was faded away.

Roan wandered downstairs in only his sweatpants, deciding he’d rather see that Paris was genuinely okay and didn’t think anything was strange about him before bothering to get dressed for the day. What the hell was he doing today anyways? He could do some more checking on Barlow, maybe run that skip trace, but he had hit a dead end on leads as far as the killer went. Since all of this could be done on computer he didn’t need to show up at the office; he could just stay home in his sweatpants.

He had to admit it - sometimes this job was pretty damn good.

One of the most annoying things about Paris was that he was often a “morning person”, one of those people who were inexplicably awake and happy to be so, full of energy and pep even without an intravenous caffeine drip. Roan personally wanted to beat all those freaky people with a sock full of wood screws, so of course his boyfriend would turn out to be one of them - that was just how the world worked. Paris was as happy and chirpy as the birds outside, and had decided to make French toast for breakfast. He made gourmet style French toast too, perhaps reflective of his better than middle class background; no thin slices of regular white bread for him. He got actual baguettes and sliced them thick, so a single piece of his French toast was about the size of a pancake stack at an IHOP, and on top of that he dusted them with a cinnamon/nutmeg/powdered sugar mixture, and brought out the “real” maple syrup, which he always bought in Canada, because he said the American stuff was shit (“Vermont can kiss my ass”.) It was another thing Paris was inexplicably passionate about, but who really cared since his French toast rocked?

Paris told him a couple of interesting things during breakfast. Namely that a deliveryman had brought a coffee basket from the Starbucks this morning, which had a small note on it that simply said “Thanks”. He thought it was very sweet that he was getting gift baskets from the puppy, but he wondered if it wasn’t time to start dusting off the restraining order. Paris was just kidding, of course, but he really hoped Matt didn’t do that again.

The other interesting thing was the plate run on Barlow. Keisha had done it when she got in this morning, and it turned up the fact that Barlow had gotten himself a parking ticket over a week ago back on Pine Street. What was interesting about that? It was issued the day before Melissa Prescott was murdered - and she lived on Park Street, which was just over from Pine. Son of a bitch; they just placed him in the area prior to the shooting. He was sure that Barlow wasn’t doing any of the dirty work … but it didn’t mean he couldn’t scout. Still, it was circumstantial at best, and he could always claim he wasn’t driving the car; his wife or one of his kids could have been, or at least he could say that.

Which made him suddenly wonder how old Barlow’s kids were.

Paris didn’t know, so Roan interrupted his breakfast to go get his laptop and have a look. Tim had a ten year old daughter, Sierra, and a seventeen year old son, Troy. What did Troy think of his Dad’s anti-cat feelings? Was he sucked up in it too? Would Tim groom his own son as a “soldier” for the cause? It’d be interesting to find out.

Roan had gotten a bit complacent, though, and while he was helping Paris load up the dishwasher, Par gasped and grabbed him, turning his back towards him. “Oh my god! Where did you get those?”

He tried to look over his own shoulder, but was kind of limited. “Get what? Don’t tell me I have a tattoo.”

“I wish. These are some very ugly bruises.” He brushed his fingertips lightly low on his back, and Roan felt a tiny ache at even that gentle pressure. Oh shit, he should have worn a shirt - he forgot all about the kidney punches Sam gave him. (And why? Did he not piss some blood this morning? Jesus, sometimes he was a moron.) “Do they hurt? Who did this to you?”

“Well … I kinda helped apprehend my shooter last night,” he said, settling on a partial truth. “He didn’t go quietly.”

Paris let him go, if only to scowl at him. “And you were going to tell me this when?”

“Possibly never, if I could at all avoid it.”

The evil look he got from Paris presaged a lecture (he knew it by heart), but before he could start, the phone rang, and Roan lunged for it like a lifeline. He didn’t get saved by the bell often, but when it happened, he was glad about it.

It took him a moment to recognize the caller, who was on a cell phone with a semi-crappy connection. It was Juan Marquez, the exterminator who was Patrick Farley’s neighbor. He prefaced his statement with lots of hesitation, saying he thought of something but it was kind of stupid and probably not important, but Roan coaxed him into telling him what he had just thought of. “So yesterday there was a UPS guy at the apartment,” he said, with an almost constant crackle in the background. “And he parked his truck right out front, in what’s ‘sposed to be the fire lane. All the UPS and FedEx guys park there; they just run in and run out, so no one thinks too much about it, know what I mean? But the day before Patrick got capped, I came home from work and saw a UPS guy in the lobby, where all our mailboxes are. But I didn’t see a truck out front; I didn’t see a truck anywhere. They’re pretty distinctive, ya know, hard to miss, but there was just the guy. I thought it was weird at the time, but I really didn’t think about it until I saw the UPS guy yesterday. You said to call you if I thought of anything strange around the time Pat was killed, so I thought I should.”

“Thank you, I appreciate it.” And he really did: a fake UPS guy. Motherfucker, that was perfect. Who else could get slightly paranoid, stranger wary infecteds to open a door? And who, when asked if they saw someone strange, would ever report seeing a UPS guy? They weren’t strange, even if seen leaving a recent crime scene.

This was why you canvased people in person, in the hopes you could gain the trust of a good witness, one that would make your job infinitely easier. He asked Paris to put the scolding on hold while he called Murphy, and she was a little grumpy, as New Horizons was going to make them take them to court to get the list of clients. She asked him to go talk to them, thinking they’d be more amenable to someone like them. He decided to overlook the “someone like them” comment, the slight edge to it, as they were both a “them” in other people’s contexts, both being homosexual. Also cops (admittedly him formerly).

He was tempted to start chanting, “One of us, one of us,” but she sounded like she might have him arrested if he did.

After getting off the line with her, not committing one way or the other about talking to the New Horizons people, he started searching through their entire list of suspects - and honestly there were quite a few, including all the names of the Humanity First people they managed to uncover - and to speed up the process he divided the list in half, with Paris volunteering to do the other half. What he was looking for was someone who worked in any kind of mail delivery capacity: UPS, post office, FedEx, courier even. He didn’t think the killer just pulled the whole UPS angle out of his ass. Yes it was brilliant, but he had a feeling he knew that from personal experience, from the way people reacted in such a blasé manner to his arrival. If that didn’t pan out, he was willing to go to delivery professions of less “official” capacity - pizza guys and newspaper deliverers, if necessary - but he thought the connection would grow tenuous to the breaking point by then.

It would have been nice if he got a hit right away, but things like that rarely happened outside of cop shows. It took them hours of sitting in front of their respective computers, until their butts went numb, but they got two solid hits and a partial third. Reese Campbell, the copy shop manager who had hosted the Humanity First recruiting meeting for “Kevin”, had worked at the post office for six years before quitting and going off on the career path that led him to Kinko’s; Jordan DeSoto, Mia DeSoto’s brother (Eli’s quasi-girlfriend), worked at FedEx as a delivery driver before being fired for being drunk on the job (classy); Noah Hammond, Karen Hammond’s oldest son, worked as a bicycle messenger downtown.

So much for the lazy day half-dressed in front of the computer. These guys had all vaulted into the best bets category, and if any of them were expert computer hackers, that would pretty much cement them as the only suspect. The only one who had been on their radar at all was Reese; he’d discarded the DeSoto’s for now since he wasn’t terribly interested in getting in the middle of Eli and his bitter current girlfriend, and only Paris had followed up on the Hammonds in any respect.

They needed to get on these guys and start narrowing them down now. Roan called the Kinko’s and asked to speak to the manager; he put it on speaker, and as soon as a man responded, hung up. Paris confirmed that was Reese’s voice. So they knew where he was, and where Reese would most likely be for the next few hours. This left Jordan and Noah up for grabs.

Jordan was currently unemployed, although he apparently functioned as something of a handyman around the Church (a sop thrown by Eli to his girlfriend, surely), and Roan called the service Noah worked for, and confirmed he was working today. What was left now was checking these men out, staking them out and trailing them if necessary. Nothing too intensive, just enough to see if there was even a smidgen of possibility they were cold blooded murderers.

There was no choice in the matter. Roan knew he was too well known at the Church, and his hanging around would cause obvious consternation; Paris was generally liked there, and no one made a big deal about him working for a detective agency, whereas Eli and Stovak liked to point out Roan was a “failed cop”. Paris was the only one who could observe Jordan without too much suspicion. That left him chasing around the city after a bicycle messenger, and that was going to be a shitload of fun.

They worked out possible covers and stories, how often they were going to keep in touch, and Paris left first, giving him a quick kiss before grabbing his leather jacket and heading out to the GTO, with the warning that they were going to talk about last night later. (Roan was taking the bike, damn it, as it only made sense if he was going to be chasing after a guy on another type of bike.) Roan changed into nondescript clothes, shoving as much as hair up in his Toronto Maple Leafs cap as possible, and dug out a pair of deep black Ray Bans to hide his eyes. He couldn’t take the recon kit with him on the bike, so he was just going to have to do his best not to get noticed.

But he found himself wondering about something. Downtown area. It was a long shot, but sometimes they were all you had.

He called Matt’s apartment, and his roommate told him he was staying at a friend’s place because he was so freaked out about last night. But the roommate gave him the number of where Matt was staying (at the apartment of a woman named Candy), and he called it. It was Matt that picked up, and when he heard it was Roan he went from sounding slightly irritated to frighteningly cheerful.

Before he could get started on some digressive ramble that would probably sidetrack into profuse thank yous, he asked him if they got a lot of bike messengers at the Starbucks. Matt scoffed. “Are you kidding? Shit yeah, those guys are comin’ in all the time. Not that I’m complaining, ‘cause some of them look pretty good in those shorts, y‘know.”

“I bet. You know any by name?”

“Some of ‘em, yeah. They’re mostly straight, though, so it’s casual.”

“You don’t know one named Noah, do you?”

“No.” He paused suddenly. “But I think he’s that creepy guy that I sometimes see with Elvez.”

“Elvez?”

“Oh, that’s what we call him; I think his real name’s Adam or something, but we all call him Elvez ‘cause he looks kinda like a Spanish Elvis, y’know?”

Cute. “Is Noah a regular?”

“No, he never comes in. We see him standing outside the window with his bike, but it’s always Elvez who comes in. I don’t know why. I just figured that maybe he had some kind of dislike of Starbucks commercially, but would still drink the coffee if someone bought it for him.”

“But Elvez is a regular.”

“Fuck yeah; every single week day, although Noah‘s only with him about half the time. Venti skinny double shot espresso.”

“What time does Elvez show up? Does he have a regular time?”

Matt snorted humorously. “Of course he does. He usually stops in, like, at a quarter to one on the dot, unless traffic’s really shitty or he had a job way the hell on the other side of the city.”

He glanced at his watch, and realized he could actually beat Elvez there if he made tracks now. “Thanks, Matt. Oh, and thanks for the gift, but stop sending me stuff. I just did my job, okay? I appreciate the gesture, but it feels weird.”

“Your job? You’re not a cop. Since when is helping me part of your job?” Okay, that was a point for him. “Few people have ever stuck their neck out for me. I really appreciate it, y’know.” He paused briefly, then asked, “This stuff about that Noah guy - is this related to Ashley’s case at all?”

“You know I can’t tell you that.”

“Y’know that sounds like a yes to me.”

“Can’t do anything about that. Stay out of trouble.” He then hung up and dry washed his face before grabbing a brown canvas jacket and heading out to the garage.