Matt gave him a look that suggested he agreed, but had been verbally beaten down. “They think it will get out to the press and become a media circus. I talked to Callie’s Aunt - her name’s Hannah Noyes - and at first she wanted to go to the cops, but then she reconsidered it. I even had to talk her into hiring you; she was afraid you’d leak it to the press. I had to vouch for you, tell her you weren’t the type to do that.”

Roan sat forward, scratching his head as he thought. Something wasn’t adding up here. “Who would care? I mean sure, the Bishop’s are rich, and there was the whole Thorp Chemical thing, but they just aren’t that big of a deal. The Winters’ have kicked them off the scandal sheets, Eli being an infected cult leader and all.”

Matt shifted in his seat again, and it was clear he hated being in the middle of something. He may have led a rather dramatic life, what with the drugs and the stalkers, but Matt was one of those guys who didn’t like conflict. He disliked conflict so much it made Roan wonder what his childhood was like. “I know, I said I didn’t think it was likely, but … she’s family, y’know? And the only one who’d talk to me - the only one who seemed to care. I had to play along. Callie always said that Hannah was the only sane one in her family, the only one who gave a damn about her.”

He opened a small notebook he always kept on his desk and wrote down the name Hannah Noyes on the left hand side, and the name Thora Bishop on the right hand side. He was going to make a list of the family members and connect them all in a daisy chain. It might lead somewhere, it might not, but it would help him keep track of all the players. “How old is Callie?”

“Seventeen.”

He looked at Matt sharply. He was expecting maybe nineteen at the outset, but not seventeen. “She’s that young?”

Matt grimaced. “She’s pretty fucked up. She told me she’s been anorexic since she was twelve and her dad called her a butterball. She started using at thirteen. It started with diet pills, and snowballed from there.”

The name Adam Bishop popped into his head, and he wrote it down above Hannah’s name. He recalled it from the newspaper coverage of the Thorp Chemical controversy. That must have been Callie’s/Thora’s father. “There’s no chance she’s run off?”

The look he gave him said “No, dumbass” better than words ever could. “She had her own place, which she wouldn’t leave most of the time ‘cause of her agoraphobia. She has money - if she wanted to take off, she could and come back. Why call me in a panic? If she was simply leaving, she’d have told me. Hell, she’d probably invite me along with, like she did to her cousin’s wedding.”

“You took her to her cousin’s wedding?”

“A couple months ago, yeah. Oh, and you know what was horrible? The groom hit on me.”

Roan stared at him. “No he didn’t.”

“He totally did! He cornered me in one of the bathrooms - and my god, you should have seen this house; it was a fucking mansion! The bathroom’s were bigger than my first apartment! Anyways, he said he knew I was gay, he could tell supposedly, and he thought it might be fun to have a little … fling before he was tied down, y’know? God, I was horrified. He must have thought I was a total slut or something. Also, he wasn’t that good looking. Rich, sure, but he should have spent some of his money on a nose job and liposuction.”

Now he could see why a guy would randomly hit on Matt; now he looked really good. Of course, if he still had his “club kid” look at that time, then the guy was not only a total skeeze but possibly a child molester, as Matt looked barely legal without the beard. “Who were these people? How are they related to Callie?”

“Oh! The cousin was named Crystal … god, something. I’m sorry, they weren’t very close, she just felt she had to be there, y’know, to keep up appearances and show she wasn’t dead yet. The guy was named Cody Ginter - now that I remember, ‘cause Callie told me he was some big noise on the East Coast, but I’d never heard of him. Also, as I said, he hit on me, and I never forget a guy who grabs my dick, especially when I don’t want him to.”

He wrote Cody and Crystal Ginter at the very bottom of the page, not figuring them into the mess yet. “To show she wasn’t dead yet? You don’t mean that literally, do you?”

Matt ran a hand nervously through his hair, ruffling it only the slightest bit. (He must have used quite a bit of product on it.) “Well … kinda. She’d heard from Heather, Hannah’s daughter, that either her parents or her brothers started a rumor that she was dead. She wanted to show she wasn’t.”

Roan sat back, wondering why he wasn’t surprised. He wished he wasn’t so cynical at times, but the world seemed to conspire to keep him that way. “Her family wanted her dead?”

“No! I mean … I don’t think so. I don’t really know. I mean, to hear Callie talk she seemed pretty convinced that they’d have been happier if she o.d.’d fatally rather than survive to end up in rehab, but she was kinda … a drama queen, y’know? After a guy was late for their date, I spent an hour talking her out of killing herself.”

He rubbed his eyes, took a deep breath, and wondered how heartbroken Matt would be if he turned down this case. “So what you’re telling me is she’s an unstable, troubled teenager who wouldn’t mind getting back at her family?”

“What? No! I mean … maybe. I don’t know. Am I?”

“Basically yes. Has she ever disappeared for any length of time before?”

“No, not that I know of. Look, as I said, she’s fucked up, but I don’t think she’d fake her own disappearance. Please, just find out what happened to her.”

The personal appeal for help. Damn it, it was his weakness. There was no way Matt could have known that, but briefly he was a little resentful of it. Then he asked for more information on Callie/Thora.

She was barely sixteen when she ended up in rehab, after an interesting overdose of Percodans and cocaine. He said it wasn’t a suicide attempt but just an “over-enthusiastic” attempt to “balance herself out”. She’d also been hospitalized on at least one occasion due to her anorexia, although he didn’t know when. She didn’t have a job; she had simply been living off her trust fund while taking college courses on line. He pulled out a snapshot and gave it to him, saying it had been taken last month and given to him by Hannah.

Good lord, she was a stick figure. She was so thin she looked like a head on top of a broom. She was painfully thin, Calista Flockhart “tie-her-down-it’s-getting-breezy” skinny; she was wearing a scoop neck top in the photo and it allowed him to see a collarbone standing out in relief, protruding through the skin like it was trying to get out. Her face was narrow and nearly skeletal - she didn’t have enough fat in her face to have cheeks - and her eyes seemed sunken. But her lips seemed artificially plumped, her hair dyed to a hay color and so straight it may have been ironed, not so much falling to her bony shoulders as positioned there. She had small breasts, but they were still startling on a body so free of fat - they were either artificial, or she was wearing a push up bra. No way in hell were those breasts natural. “Has she had plastic surgery?” he wondered. She may have been attractive in a cold, artificial way, but all he felt for her was sorry. He wanted to sit her down and buy her a sandwich, much like he did for Paris when they first met. (He was as skinny then as he was now, wasn’t he? But back then he’d been trying to die; the irony wasn’t pleasant.)

Matt snorted as if that had been a funny question. “Oh yeah. Nose job, chin job, collagen, boob job. I think she even had some work done on her ass, although maybe she was joking about that. Hard to tell in an e-mail, y’know.”

He stared at him in disbelief. “She’s seventeen years old.”

“I know. She got the boob job as a gift on her sixteenth birthday. She got the nose job for successfully completing rehab.” He said it flatly, but there was dry disapproval in Matt’s tone. He thought it was pretty sick too.

“Who the fuck are her parents, Michael Jackson?” He dropped the Polaroid on his desk, shoving it aside, and knew it was wrong this early in an investigation to just hate the parents, but he did. Either they were over-indulgent parents who let their young daughter do whatever the hell she wanted, or they were fucking monsters who thought that the best way to deal with teenage awkwardness was with a scalpel, but they were total assholes no matter the case.

Her parents were actually Adam and Celestine Bishop; her brothers were Adam Bishop the Third (although he was called Jay by the family) and Joseph, both older, and she had several aunts and uncles and cousins, but she only had regular contact with Hannah. Hannah, though, had been estranged from Celestine (her sister) for several years, although Callie never told him why. Callie lived in Stonehaven, an expensive condo complex, and her condo was on the ground floor as she was afraid of heights. (What neuroses didn’t this woman have?) That led him to ask Matt if he had a key, like he had a key to Ashley’s place, but he said he didn’t, which led him to ask how he knew her apartment was trashed. After a little hesitancy, he admitted he’d gotten in through the bathroom window.

Roan groaned in disgust at his stupidity. “You broke in?”

“I know, I know, but I didn’t break anything, that window’s always been wonky -”

“That’s not the point. You’ve left your fingerprints everywhere. You’ve been arrested before, yes?”

Matt didn’t want to answer, his eyes seemed to dance around the room like he wanted to look at anything but him, yet he finally gave up with an air of surrender. “Well, kinda. The charges were dropped.”

“Doesn’t matter. You were fingerprinted, right?”

He squirmed uncomfortably in his chair. “Yeah.”

“Then if I get my friends in the force to dust the place, your prints will be all over. It’ll look like you did it.”

Matt groaned, and let his head fall back as he grabbed his forehead. “Fuck! I didn’t think of that. I just wanted to see if there was any clue as to where she might have gone or who might have been after her, y’know? I never really think of myself as a felon either, ‘cause I’m not. I mean, yeah, I got arrested once for obviously tweaking in public, but my dad bein’ my dad, he got the charges dropped. I’m Robert Skouris’s son - that apparently carries some weight amongst the cops.” He fell silent for a moment, but before Roan could take the conversational reins again, Matt looked at him with infinitely sad eyes, making him look like a wounded little boy. “That was the last time I saw him, and mainly I just saw his back as he walked away. When I came out, at sixteen, he stopped talking to me; it was like he found it too painful to be in the same room with me. He moved out of the house. Mom said it wasn’t my fault, they’d been having problems - well, new problems - but I dunno. When I called his office, I was put on indefinite hold, and if I called his house, he’d just hang up on me. I didn’t call him when I got arrested, I called Mom - I guess she called him to fix it, and he did. But he did it for her; he just gave me this look, y’know? Like he wished I was dead.” He sniffed and rubbed his eyes. “Aw hell, queens and their daddy issues, huh?”

“If he can’t handle your sexuality, it’s his problem,” Roan pointed out. “Fuck him if he can’t handle it. Don’t let him make you feel bad.”

He half smiled in a pained way. “You don’t have parental issues, do you?”

“I don’t have parents. I was a foster kid.”

“Oh. Sorry.”

“Don’t be. The longer I’m in this job, the more I get the feeling I dodged a bullet.”

They got back on track, although he now wondered if Matt and Callie had bonded over issues of parental rejection: him because he had the audacity to be gay, her because she had the audacity to be mentally ill. In both wealthy families, that was probably seen as being the equivalent of being a serial killer … or a hippie. Whichever was worse in their estimation. The Bishops lived in Avondale, which was no surprise - Eli Winter’s parents used to live there too, and Tom Winters still did; it was where the very wealthy lived, with waterfront views and unspoiled old growth making a natural barrier between them and the great unwashed. Hannah Noyes lived in Harrow Hill, which was the second place slot for the wealthy around here; it wasn’t as exclusive, and it was slowly going to seed as those wealthy were old money getting older, and all the new wealthy were filling out the ranks of Avondale or the luxury condos going up downtown near the waterfront. He wondered how long it would take for every one of those people to look at his wardrobe and just assume he was the “help”.

But the first person he had to talk to was the supposed witness to Callie’s “disappearance”, the bartender at Panic. Sadly, Matt only knew him by his nickname, “Chi-Chi” - oy vey, that was one of the reasons why he hated gay bars - and Matt began to describe him as a “really cute Asian guy” when Roan got up from his desk and opened the door. “Par,” he asked. “The bartender nicknamed Chi-Chi at Panic - who is he?”

Par, who was clearly playing Tetris on his computer, sat back and thought about it for a moment. “Oh, that’s Eric Chiang. Into leather daddies. Why?”

“No reason. Thank you.”

As soon as he closed the office door, Matt looked up at him in wonderment. “How did he know that?”

“Everybody hits on Paris - everybody. He generally remembers their names when they offer it.” Once he sat back down at his desk, he entered the name Eric Chiang in his database, and it turned out there were a couple of different Eric Chiang’s around here. But one lived on Calvin Street, and that was pretty much a “gay” neighborhood - you couldn’t walk fifty feet without getting a rainbow flag in the eye. It was also one of the neatest streets in the downtown corridor, with swept sidewalks, window boxes exploding with riots of begonias and geraniums and zinnias during the appropriate seasons … but surely that was just coincidence. As was the “adult novelty store” on the neighboring block.

He wrote down the address and phone number, and figured he should give Eric a call first. Also, when he paid him a visit, he probably shouldn’t be wearing his leather jacket - there was no point in giving him false hopes.

After watching him write things down for a few moments, Matt asked hopefully, ”Are you taking the case?”

“I’ll see if I can find out what happened to her. But I’m making no promises here, Matt. She sounds like a serious head case, capable of almost anything, and the family doesn’t sound that great either. I don’t like getting involved in family things - they always end badly.”

Matt levered himself out of his chair, looking absurdly grateful. “Thank you. I … we appreciate it.”

Roan stood, just to be polite, and didn’t know what to tell him. He didn’t have high hopes about this case; in fact, he had an awful feeling, ever since looking at Callie’s photo. It wasn’t just that she was too skinny, although he did feel like notifying the Red Cross about her - there was something desperate in her forced, capped teeth, bleached smile, something like a swallowed scream. There were shadows in her eyes, and they weren’t all physical. She’d been crying for help for years and years, and no one ever really noticed. The only person who did - too late to be of much help - was a former junkie turned barista turned masseuse, a guy she only knew from rehab, and that was just too sad for words.

As he came around the desk to escort Matt out, Matt suddenly hugged him, fiercely enough that he thought he felt his ribcage creak. “Thank you,” Matt murmured into his shoulder. “I’m kinda afraid it’s me, y’know? That everyone around me just …” He didn’t finish the sentence, but he didn’t have to. First Ashley, and now Callie. He suspected that Matt, in spite of his obvious physical attractiveness, was very lonely. He had probably been used and tossed aside by a lot of men; everybody loved to go out of their way to stomp the shit out of the eternal optimist.

Roan patted him on the back awkwardly, and noticed, since they were so close, that he smelled like mousse, Calvin Kline cologne, fabric softener, and … something a bit more chemical, coming through his pores. He held him back at arm’s length, and looked him in the eyes (those blue eyes were contacts - were the brown eyes real, or were they contacts too? Suddenly he wondered if he’d ever seen the real color of Matt’s eyes). “Matt, are you using again?”

He looked deeply confused. “What? No. Why would you ask that?”

“I’m smelling something chemical on you; medicinal.”

“Medicinal?” He repeated, his blond brows dropping down in confusion. “I can’t think why that would be … unless … my therapist has me on Norpramin. Are you smelling that?”

“Could be. What is it?”

“An anti-depressant. Prozac did nothing for me, and Xanax gave me a headache. I feel a lot calmer on Norpramin, less like I have ADD.”

Roan nodded. “You seem calmer.” He really didn’t like therapists throwing happy pills at everyone, but they did seem to help some people. They seemed to help Matt, which was good. Obviously he’d needed some kind of help.

As Roan moved past him towards the door, Matt said, “That’s weird. I didn’t think Norpramin had a smell.”

“Everything has a smell, especially when it’s processed through the body.” He’d come back out into the main office, and Paris heard that, which made him smile charitably at Matt.

“Is he giving you the “how I smell things” lecture?”

Roan scowled at him, but there wasn’t much heat behind it. It was nice to see Paris so animated, so happy. “It’s not a lecture.”

“It’s fascinating really,” Matt said, being kind. “I never thought about how we smell things, and how much different it must be for you guys … umm, I mean for Roan. You don’t have the super smell thing, do you?”

Paris shook his head, still smiling. “Nope. The perfume counter at Macy’s holds no terror for me. Well, beyond the usual.”

“Lucky bastard. Rub it in, why don’t you?” It was his usual response, stripped almost bare of sarcasm.

Matt and Paris exchanged a little small talk before Matt left, and Roan assured him he’d call as soon as there were any developments. Once he was gone, Paris said, “Goddamn, puppy grew up hot, didn’t he? We should ask if he’s into threesomes. Oh hell, if you’re involved, he’ll say yes so fast you’d think his pants were attached with Velcro.”

“Very funny. Who called?”

“Oh, that. Now that was weird.” He picked up the note he made and looked at it, even though it was unlikely he needed to. “It was a woman - sounded kind of old - who said her name was Doctor Petra Rosenberg. Now there’s a name for you, huh? Anyways, she said it was imperative, see, I wrote it down,” - he did; he had “imperative” in quote marks and everything - “that you call her as soon as possible. She said you’d know what it was about.”

Roan took the note with her name, “imperative”, and her phone number on it, and scowled down at it in the hopes it would explain itself. Didn’t happen. Did the name Doctor Rosenberg sound a little bit familiar?

“So are you finally giving in and getting that sex change or what?” Paris teased.

Roan flipped him off, which only made Par laugh.

He wandered back into his office with the note, and finally a little bell started to ring in his head. Rosenberg. Didn’t he have a doctor named Rosenberg when he was a kid? She worked for the state; she was one of the first to specialize in infecteds and their medical conditions. This had to be her. He tried to bring up a mental image of her, but all he really got was the same white coats with anonymous faces that he always saw when he thought of all the doctors who had tried to treat him when he was growing up. There was some association with her name and tortoise shell glasses, though.

Why was she calling him now? He tried to remember the last time he’d seen her, and figured it must have been about eighteen or nineteen years ago. How “imperative” could it be if there was a nearly twenty year gap between her last seeing him and her calling?

Still, just looking at the name on the post-it note made him feel uneasy, the coffee churning sourly in his stomach. What had she just figured out about him? The timing was both suspicious and ominous, what with Paris’s condition deteriorating and his own just getting stronger. The use of such an old fashioned word as “imperative” also set him on edge. Did people ever whip those out except when they were freaked?

He was tempted to crumple up the note, but didn’t. He knew he should call, but he wasn’t sure he was brave enough right now.

It was awkward, as he had to shinny through the narrow window and get down into the bathtub, but he was glad he was still pretty thin, and had done enough yoga to contort himself without pulling something. He belatedly wished he’d brought a flashlight, but he was new at this whole “breaking and entering” thing, and on top of that he was never that organized to begin with.

He carefully drew back her shower curtain, which depicted colorful tropical fish of all kinds swimming in an ocean too blue to be real, and he quietly creeped to the door, which was ajar. He peeked out and saw a light on in the bedroom (its door was open as well), but the front room looked empty, so he ventured out.

You could usually tell if a place was occupied, although he couldn’t say how. It was just one of those things, a sense that there was another warm, breathing person near you, a kind of sixth sense that everyone had. That sense was telling him he was alone here, which he kind of expected, but it was still a bit creepy. He really had no right to be here, not like this, but he knew something was wrong. Callie wasn’t answering her phone, and after what that bartender told him, he was really worried that something awful had happened to her. She should have been safe at Panic, and he had no idea what had gone wrong, or who could’ve wanted to hurt her. Sure, she was screwed up, but weren’t they all?

His eyes had adjusted to the darkness, and it was obvious now that he had not been the first uninvited visitor in the apartment.

The front room was totally trashed. Her glass topped coffee table was laying on its side, her shell shaped candy dish upside down on the oatmeal colored carpet and the M&M’s that used to be in it were scattered across the floor like confetti. Glossy fashion magazines were splayed open and strewn about like discarded fliers, while junk mail that she never bothered to open laid like broken tiles beside them. Judging from the indents in the carpet, her leather sofa had been shoved back as well.

Oddly enough, her Bose stereo system and flat screen t.v. were untouched. Thieves would normally take things like that, wouldn’t they?

He went to the bedroom, and things were no better in there. He could see her computer sitting on a desk, the hard drive, scanner, printer, and iPod dock all untouched, and the light in the room was coming from the bedside lamp, which had been knocked off its table and was now laying on the floor. Save for that and an open drawer on her nightstand, everything else looked perfect: her bed was made so that the wine colored duvet looked as taut as the surface of a trampoline, her mirrored closet doors shut tight, reflecting all the clean emptiness in her expensively appointed but rather sterile bedroom.

Of course everything in this place had an expensive but rather cold, sterile look to it, because Callie was a rich girl, and she had a whopper of a case of OCD. She was one of those neat freaks, one of those kind of people who had to scrub down an entire kitchen if they found a single hair in the sink. She tried a whole bunch of medications for it, but nothing ever worked, and her own obsessions drove her crazy, enough that she took to using more illegal drugs to try and kill the impulses she could barely live with. It also helped her anorexia, or at least the pot did; the pot at least made her eat.

She never would have left her place like this - never. She couldn’t even sit down if the chair wasn’t in exactly the right spot.

Something had happened to her, he knew it in his gut, something awful.

But the problem was, he couldn’t think of a single person besides himself who would care.

***

One of the biggest problems of working with the person you were in a relationship with was the arguments that occurred when one was sick but refused to stay home.

Roan had reached the point where he wasn’t going to argue with Paris anymore, mainly because it never got him anywhere, and it just made both him and Par upset. Par insisted he wasn’t sick, which was technically true, but he wasn’t well. Again, the last transformation had taken a lot out of him, and it was shocking how skinny he was now. His heart problem kept him from working out too much, at least until he got his weight back up, and it was a constant struggle for him to gain back weight in time for the next cycle to begin, no matter how many fattening foods they kept giving him. Paris compared it to racing uphill in a hurricane - it wasn’t a race he was ever going to win. He used to be nearly two hundred pounds, most of that muscle, the kind you’d think an athletic, broad shouldered man would have. Now he was closer to one hundred and fifty (to be generous), his handsome face lean enough to have an almost feral look to it. His clothes, once perfectly suited to him, hung limp and baggy on his frame. He was cold a lot and had taken to wearing lots of fleece and layering his clothes, the latter of which had the added benefit of making him look a bit more solid. Paris had enough vanity that he chose his clothes carefully, and he had had his hair cut in a mid-length, casually shaggy way that accentuated his sharp cheekbones and sensuous eyes, made him look like a male model, not only healthy but alluring. But he tired easily nowadays, and he had almost no energy at all, so that’s where his carefully crafted illusion ended.

And it scared him. Holy Christ, it scared Roan so badly he could hardly stand it. Paris was getting weaker, getting another day closer to dying, while he had never been stronger in his life. It was like he was a vampire, sucking the life out of him, even though that wasn’t exactly what was happening. The tiger was burning Paris from the inside out, consuming him, while he and his lion had reached some kind of equilibrium; they had reached a détente, as if aware how much they depended on one another to survive. He wished there was some way he could talk to the tiger in Paris, get it to understand that killing its host was counter-protective … but it didn’t work like that. The tiger wasn’t really doing it; the physiological trauma of it all was breaking down Paris’s body. It could no longer tolerate having its bones broken, its metabolism abused, its muscles and ligaments torn. As a virus child, his body had adapted to this insane abuse from the beginning; this was still a shock to Paris’s system, a shock that only got worse with repetition.

Things had gone downhill so fast. Just yesterday Paris was working on the Mustang, still his hobby of choice, but coming in from the garage he looked oddly flushed. When Roan commented on it, he said he was just “overheated” and needed a drink, but he stumbled on the way to the kitchen and Roan swear he fainted; he was limp when he caught him. But after a second of holding him up Paris straightened as if by reflex and claimed that he hadn’t fainted, he was just “woozy”. It was bullshit, they both knew it was bullshit, but Paris refused to admit it. And he decided to just let him have it because he was weary of playing the role of the nag.

He’d avoided coming in to the office for days, so Paris had no reason to as well, but he just had to today. He was done with his usual adultery cases and had accepted a job to do some background checks, and he needed to access his computer at work. He was hoping to sneak in alone, but of course it didn’t work that way. He really thought Paris should have stayed home and slept, but Par felt differently. He still refused to be “babied”, and sometimes he could get downright surly about it.

Sometimes Roan wondered if Paris kind of hated him now. He was so obviously healthy and Paris was so obviously not. He supposed he’d hate himself if he were in his position, at least in the back of his mind.

The drive to the office was relatively quiet, and Paris nursed his coffee as Roan drove, the radio on and filling the silence. Winter was starting to come in and let itself be known in air cold and sharp enough to scour the lungs, a layer of frost glistening whitely on the grass and glazing the edges of the windshield. Until the heater really warmed up and filled the car, they could see their breath like vapor trails in the frigid air.

Roan had dressed warmly but casually in a heavy blue plaid flannel shirt, black wool trousers, and his fleece lined bomber jacket, and he knew he didn’t look much like a private detective, but fuck it - he didn’t expect to see any clients today. It was cold, and the holiday season had a tendency to scare off the suspicious spouses, or at least deprive them of the money to hire a private detective. Around New Year’s was a bit of a boom time, though.

Looking at his outfit, Paris had joked he looked more Canadian than he did. Paris was wearing lined jeans and a loose gray cashmere blend sweater over a long sleeved t-shirt, with a lightweight blue parka over it all, and a gray watch cap pulled down over his forehead. His haircut was so good that it could survive hat hair, which Paris said came from knowing where to find the good gay hairstylists in the city. Roan couldn’t help but point out that it also helped that the guys found him insanely attractive and wanted to jump his bones right in the chair, and with a slightly smug smile, Par admitted that never hurt.

By the time they reached the office, Paris apparently decided to pretend that their brief but fraught argument this morning over whether he should come in or not had never happened, as he pulled out his set of keys, opened the door, and asked him what kind of coffee he was in the mood for. Roan decided to play along, and told him anything that had enough caffeine in it to kill a rodent would be fine.

As Paris started the coffeemaker going, Roan opened the blinds, letting in the icy cool light of day, and noticed that the bright bouquet of daisies, dyed in a rainbow of artificial colors, some also painted with glitter, were still alive. “Goddamn,” he cursed, inspecting the flowers up close. The blue plastic dollar store vase they sat in on the back filing cabinet was the same, but you could buy a truckload of those and easily swap them out. It wasn‘t above Randy to do it either. “I swear, Randy is sneaking in and replacing these damn flowers daily. She’s doing it on purpose.”

That made Paris chuckle faintly. “You really think she wants to annoy you that much?”

“I don’t like flowers; I don’t see the point of them outside a garden. And these damn things won’t die. How long have they been here?”

“Uh … god, is it almost ten days now?”

“I think so. And they’re still going. So either she’s replacing them and denying it, or we have undead flowers.”

Paris smirked at him. “I think I read somewhere that daisies can last as cut flowers for a long time. This is probably just proof of that.”

“No, I still say it’s a conspiracy. Somebody’s fucking with me.” He went ahead and turned the thermostat up, a bit beyond what he normally did. He usually liked to keep it warm but still fairly brisk in here, mainly so he didn’t nod off during interminable background checks, but he didn’t want to make Paris miserable. He had almost no body fat to help keep him warm anymore.

“Driving you insane with flowers? That’s a rather passive aggressive approach, isn’t it, when forcing you to listen to a Josh Wink album will do the same thing quicker.”

“Yes, but you’re the only one evil enough to try that.” Even though it was an unspoken rule that they keep home stuff at home, not bring it to work, looking at Paris was just breaking his heart this morning. He wasn’t cut out for this shit; he wasn’t. He was bad with people, and he was worse with loss.

Roan went up and put his arms around him from behind, and Paris leaned back against him with a sigh. “I’m sorry about this morning,” he told him, giving him a quick kiss on the neck.

“So am I. This is just so stupid. I want to have as much of a normal life as long as I can, okay?”

See, if he put it that way, it sounded perfectly reasonable. The bastard. As if he didn’t feel bad enough already. “I love you, you know.”

“I know. That’s why I don’t put you through a wall.”

“Bring it on, pansy,” he teased. He held him and wished somehow he could give him some of his strength, transfer it by osmosis, but that didn’t seem to work. Nothing seemed to work, and if he thought about it too long, he’d get too depressed to even get out of bed in the morning.

The phone rang, a noise that seemed shockingly loud, but it was their cue to go back to “work mode”. Paris did so easily, slipping out of his arms and moving to his desk to answer it, pulling off his watch cap and dropping it on his desk before lifting the receiver. And yeah, his hair still looked great. Why couldn’t hairdressers ever want to fuck him? If that was how you got a decent cut, he had to work on that.

The call was from Dennis Caldera, wanting to hire him to do some work on a case of his. On top of suspicious spouses, most of his other work came from lawyers and businesses, so he wasn’t too shocked to hear from him. In fact, Dennis was his very first client, and helped him get a toehold in the private investigations marketplace. Roan didn’t kid himself, though - yes, Dennis was a nice guy (for a lawyer), and a decent Human being (again, for a lawyer), but the reason he hired him in the first place was because he was gay. And Dennis, being gay himself, liked to keep business “in the community” whenever possible, and it wasn’t like there was a plethora of openly gay private eyes around here.

He’d just gotten the first of the background checks out of the way when he heard the front office door open. The door to his inner office was slightly ajar, so he assumed it was just Randy come to see if the flower torture was working - or maybe Braunbeck offering them holiday gorp - until he heard Paris gasp in surprise, “Oh my god - just look at you!”

Curiosity made him get up and look out the door.

At first he almost didn’t recognize the man, but when recognition finally clicked, he was just as shocked as Paris. There was a lean but obviously fit young man with stylish but slightly spiky blond hair and a close cropped golden blond beard framing a youthful, handsome face, with watery blue eyes and a tasteful silver stud in his eyebrow piercing. It was that and the four slender gold rings and fake gemstone studs in each of his earlobes that gave his identity away. “Matt?” he asked.

Wow, he looked … different. He’d added about twenty pounds of sleek muscles to his frame, so he no longer looked like a string bean, and the close cropped beard and mustache combo made him look less fey and more masculine. In fact, he had no idea a blond guy - usually not his type - could look that attractive. He was wearing battered black Converse sneakers, black sweatpants, and a brown leather jacket over a dark blue sweatshirt, making him think he stopped by on his way to the gym or on the way back. He grinned openly at the both of them, although his eyes seemed riveted to Paris. “I was about to say the same about you, man! Look at you! Love what you’ve done with your hair.”

“Love what you’ve done with you. You’ve been working out.”

He glanced down at the floor, his smile slightly sheepish as he blushed faintly - it was too easy to see on the fair. “Yeah, well … I had to do something to keep the cravings from driving me crazy, y’know.”

Paris eyed him sympathetically. “Drugs?”

Matt nodded, still not looking up from their industrial blue carpeting. “Yeah. It got kinda bad there for a while, but I got through it.”

“How long have you been clean?”

He looked up as he thought, as if trying to see inside his own head. Even his personality and demeanor seemed more thoughtful, quieter than when Roan had first met him. Maybe almost being killed by a stalker had that effect on him, or maybe he’d finally given up caffeine. “Uh, wow, I guess it’s almost been a year and a half.”

“Hey, congratulations.”

“Don’t ever let anyone tell you it’s not fucking hard, ‘cause it is.”

“I know what you mean, brother. After I discovered I was infected, I spent almost two entire years in a bottle. In fact, I’m still not sure how or when I got over the border. But detoxing wasn’t too bad for me, ‘cause I was in a hospital at the time, and drugs made it better than it should have been.”

“I feel left out,” Roan admitted.

Paris rolled his eyes. “This one’s so squeaky clean you’ll plotz. He has no fun at all.” He added a knowing wink to that.

Matt finally looked at him and smiled, and tried to give him a quick, surreptitious once over, only Roan caught it. Still hadn’t gotten over the puppy dog crush, had he? “You look good too. Hey, are you wearing a ring? I never figured you as a jewelry type.”

“Oh. Well, it’s a wedding ring, so apparently I’m obligated to wear it, or I’m sleeping in the garage.”

Matt’s eyes got wide as silver dollars as he looked between him and Paris, and must have finally noticed the same type of ring on Paris’s hand. “Holy shit, you guys got married?! Wow! Congrats! I didn’t even know that was legal in this state.”

“It’s not. We got married up in Canada. It’s more a symbolic gesture than anything.”

Paris cleared his throat, grinning somewhat evilly. “He has a thorn in his paw about it because he thinks I conned him into it.”

“You got me drunk.”

“Oh please! You were barely tipsy. The spite idea really appealed to you.”

“You took advantage of my weakness.”

Now he was grinning broadly at him, and he looked better than he had in days. “Crybaby.”

No matter what Paris claimed, he did ply him with a lot of pale ale that night - and he had to admit that the place Par took him to had some great microbrews - and convinced him that them getting married would piss a lot of people off. The rings they had weren’t traditional by any means; they were little silver metal snakes biting their own tails, forming a circle, that they bought in an open air market in Vancouver’s version of Chinatown. They were manly, and, as Paris cheerfully pointed out, wonderfully phallic, so of course they had to get them. They were also only twenty bucks a piece, so how could they say no?

Paris’s parents were pretty surprised, but Roan thought they handled it well, considering. They did seem like very nice, decent people, and certainly Paris’s sisters were impressive: Annie wasn’t just a lawyer, but a Human rights lawyer, and Dee was a medical examiner (!) in Toronto. It was easy to tell that, only son or not, Paris was the black sheep in this studious family, and he clearly enjoyed that. His infected status never came up the whole time they were there, though, and Roan didn’t push him. They were invited back any time, and Roan sensed that they mostly meant that.

And Roan had to occasionally complain about the whole married thing, so Paris didn’t see the truth of the matter: that he married him because it seemed like that was what Paris wanted, and he’d do anything for him if he thought it would make him live an extra day, an extra week … anything. He really didn’t care what. If he actually thought it would help, he’d sacrifice a goat to Ba’al - that’s how desperate he was.

Matt was looking between them, as if not completely certain if they were kidding or not, and Roan decided to give the kid a break - he probably wasn’t used to the way they joked with each other. “We’re legally married in Canada. Here, we’re dirty, filthy outlaws, and somehow a menace to all straight people everywhere.”

“Which keeps things hot,” Paris said, with such cheerfulness that Roan had to fake a cough to hide a laugh.

Matt smiled, apparently getting that joke. “Is that why you haven’t been to Panic lately? The guys were starting to get worried about you. They actually discussed reporting you as a missing person, if only they knew your name.”

“Hey, I’m married now. I have to become a fat, cold shrew. I don’t have time to go have fun anymore,” Paris answered, still clearly enjoying himself. Of course the real reason he hadn’t been to Panic was because he’d been too sick, but he wasn’t going to tell him that. “But I’m touched the guys miss me.”

“I’ll let them know you’re snubbing them for being a bunch of loser nellies.”

“Ooh, do that! But only if I can watch what happens after that.” The phone rang again, and Paris exchanged a surprised look with him before he picked up the receiver. Business was positively booming today - unless it was a process server making sure they were on site before visiting. That had happened before.

Roan took the opportunity to ask Matt seriously, “Did you just drop by to say hi?”

A slightly guilty look flashed across his face, and Roan wondered how good a junkie Matt could have been if he had never mastered the poker face. His emotions were all right there, out front where everyone could see them, and he had no idea how he managed to survive so long in this world. “Umm, no. It’s funny, ‘cause I was always trying to think up a good excuse to see you guys, but a reason kinda fell in my lap while I was still thinking about it.”

“Oh?” He hoped his crackhead stalker wasn’t out of prison yet … although it would be fun to kick his ass again.

“Yeah, I, um, wanted to hire you.”

He raised his eyebrows, and resisted making the obvious dirty joke. “Really? Well, I guess you’d better step into my office.” He led the way, wondering what Matt could possibly hire him for, and how precisely he could afford to on a barista’s salary. He suspected he’d have to let him down gently.

Once inside the office, he gestured to the lonely chair in front of his desk, and shut the door quietly, deciding to cut right to the chase. “I’m not cheap, Matt.”

“Oh, uh, I know, I saw your web page. Nice job on that, by the way.”

“That’s Paris’s baby, tell him that. I just know what I need to know about the internet and no more.” By the time Roan had taken a seat behind his desk, Matt was sitting as well, as ramrod straight and anxious as a third grader called into the principal’s office for reasons unknown. “What’s the problem?”

Matt looked briefly confused, as if he wasn’t sure what the question was referring to, and then he seemed to understand he was asking why he wanted to hire him. Learning he had married Paris had really thrown him, hadn’t it? Poor kid. He almost felt bad for him. “Um, a friend of mine from my rehab group has gone missing, and I was hoping you could find her. Or at least find out what happened to her.” He reached into the pocket of his leather jacket and pulled out a folded check. “This is your initial fee and expenses, I believe.”

He took the check and looked at it, noting both the number of zeroes and the still youthful scrawl of the handwriting across the check. “Yes, that’s a good start. But how on earth can you afford this, Matt?”

He could see the play of emotions across his face, and knew then that Matt had to be the world’s worst liar. There was actually something refreshing about that; the world was so full of liars, himself among them. “My family’s not exactly poor. I mean, emergency doctors don’t make much, but my dad’s a malpractice lawyer, and believe me, he’s rolling in it. Also, I gave up the barista gig and decided to try and grow up a bit. Although I don’t know if working at a spa is growing up exactly, but at least it pays better.”

“A spa?”

“Yeah, Avalon Spa, you know that place near the mall?”

“Oh, right. What do you do there?”

Again the nervous glance at the floor, and the small flush of color rising up his neck. “I’m a masseuse. Which I know sounds as phony as hell, but I’m licensed and everything. Also, my clients are women - the only men at Avalon are the ones on staff. And while I’ve got nothing against women at all - I’d have had no friends in high school if it weren’t for women - I find them as sexually attractive as roadkill possum.”

Roan had to swallow back a laugh. “Don’t tell them that.”

“Oh, god no! I’d never get any tips then.”

At least he wasn’t the male hustler kind of masseuse; he had that going for him. Of course he had no idea how much they made, but the fact that he had to be licensed probably put him a pay grade above barista. Still, he had a sense there was something he wasn’t telling him. “So this is all your money?”

A nervous glance, and when their eyes locked, something in Matt caved, and his shoulders slumped appropriately. “Well, actually … her Aunt is chipping in on this too. But I’m not supposed to tell you that; she doesn’t want it getting back that she hired you.”

“Why?”

He shrugged, rolled his shoulders a bit, squirmed slightly in his chair. “She doesn’t get along too well with her sister, Callie’s mother, and she’s afraid this could make things worse, y’know.”

“Callie - the missing woman?”

He seemed to feel better with this topic change. “Yeah, Callie Stone. Well, not really, that’s just the name she’s been living under. Her real name’s Thora Bishop - gee, I wondered why she changed that, right?”

Bishop - that last name sounded familiar, although he couldn’t immediately say why. “Tell me about her.”

Matt was more than happy to oblige. He met Callie/Thora in the “Willow Springs Therapeutic Recovery Center”, which was an exclusive, private rehab clinic for the children of the wealthy (proving that Matt was right when he said his family had money). Part of Willow Springs’ outpatient recovery program was that the group you were put in with met twice a month on an outpatient basis; a sort of exclusive AA program. Callie had been in for abusing prescription drugs and coke, and was also an anorexic who weighed about eighty nine pounds when she was brought in, and often had to be fed through a stomach tube. Her parents were also concerned about her OCD problem, which had led to her washing her hands until they bled.

The girl was pretty fucked up, which was why Matt gravitated to her. He said he always sympathized with the deeply screwed (which may have led to his crackhead stalker problem, but Roan wasn’t going to bring that up now), and Callie kept to herself a lot, even in group therapy, although eventually she began to confide in him. Not a lot, but enough that he realized her family - the Bishops of the Thorp Chemical concern (that’s where he recognized the name: there was controversy all last year about Thorp buying a few thousand acres of formerly federal forest to build a new chemical manufacturing plant)- were fucked up in quiet but elaborate ways. They exchanged e-mails once they were out of rehab, and plans were made to get together, but Callie developed a mild case of agoraphobia and never could manage it. They were never great friends, although Matt suspected that he was the closest thing she had to a confidante, which made him feel bad for her. He played that role a lot, but he figured he was the “safe gay guy” for most of these conflicted women.

Yesterday he got a phone call from her, and she sounded near hysterical, and the first thing that struck him as weird was that it was obvious she was calling from outside - quite a feat for a person with agoraphobia. She was really scared; she was sure there were these guys following her, and she was afraid to go home. She wouldn’t call the cops - according to her “It wouldn’t help,” - but he was at work and it was too far away from where she was to be of much use to her, and sending her to his apartment when he wasn’t there and she had no way to get in wasn’t something she was up for. So he told her to go to Panic and he’d meet her there as soon as he could, banking on the fact that most likely her pursuers were straight men who wouldn’t enter a gay bar in a million years, and besides that, the bouncers were gym queens with an excellent sense of gaydar - no straight guys were getting past them even if they tried. (Roan’s opinion of Matt went up a notch; that was very clever of him.)

But when he got there, she was nowhere to be seen, and the bouncers hadn’t seen any woman matching her description. One of the bartenders thought he may have seen her, though. He told Matt he was out in the alley having a smoke break, and he thought he saw, on the street, a woman matching her description being helped into a silver sedan type of vehicle. He remembered it because she was so skinny; he thought maybe she was a junkie of some kind, someone who spent more on drugs than food. He thought she looked passed out, but he wasn’t sure.

Matt knew she had a couple of brothers, and hoped that maybe they’d picked her up, as far fetched as that was. He went to her place, and said it was “trashed”, and she was nowhere to be found, which really scared him. He was now certain something terrible had happened to her.

“Have you reported this to the police?”

Matt shifted in his chair, sitting up a bit straighter, his eyes suddenly troubled. “No. The family asked me not to.”

Roan opened his eyes to complete darkness, and he would have started panicking, except this dark place was familiar. He also felt warmth, strong arms around his chest, a body conformed to his, breath against his neck. He was at home, in his bedroom, the clean smell of Paris’s skin confirming the identity of the man spooning him. But how the hell did he get here?

The last thing he remembered was … what? It took a moment for him to recall being in Mia DeSoto’s car. Okay, right, she crashed the car to try and kill him. And then … what? His memory felt scattered, fragmented - he only had a solid feeling of dread.

He moved to look at the digital clock on the nightstand - it couldn’t have been a dream, could it? No way; that thing with Mia was way too weird - and that’s when Paris stirred. “Finally awake, sleepyhead?” he murmured, giving his a small kiss on the back of his neck. “I thought you were going to sleep until the weekend.”

Roan saw that it was just after midnight, but he couldn’t believe it. Wasn’t it just sundown when he got in Mia’s car? “What happened?”

“You don’t remember?” He nuzzled his neck, an affectionate gesture that could become amorous with repetition. Roan was suddenly acutely aware he smelled like cat, and wondered what his pheromone level was.

“I remember Mia trying to kill me. I assume she didn’t succeed.”

“No, but not for lack of trying. She could have hurt you badly.”

“How much did I transform?”

Paris hesitated, lightly stroking his abdomen with his fingertips. “All the way.”

“Oh shit.” That was the worst possible scenario: full transformation out of cycle. He was now officially the biggest freak possible. Just call him Roan, the Cat Faced Boy. “Why am I here now? Did they tranq me?”

“No, I talked you down.”

“What?”

So Paris told him, and it sounded so surreal he would have thought that Paris was teasing him if his sense of humor was that cruel. There was no way in hell that could have worked, and also, it was fucking nuts. “Why the fuck did you do that? I could have killed you!”

“No you wouldn’t.” He sound so calm and so certain.

He rolled over to face him, wondering if Par had decided to start taking Prozac or some other kind of mood stabilizer. “How can you say that? In cat form, I’m a big dumb lion.”

“No you’re not. Do I really have to explain you to you?”

“Probably.”

His eyes had adjusted enough to the dark that he could see Par’s sly, bittersweet grin. “Infecteds like me get invaded by the cat and the virus alike. We go through life alone, and then suddenly we have another thing inside us, something that overwhelms us and takes us over. We have to learn to live with this, this other, no matter how much it hurts, but it occurred to me that you virus children have things much differently.

“From the beginning, the cat has to learn to live with you as much as you have to learn to live with it. You know how Michael Henstridge is more often a cat than a human, and no one can figure out why? What if that’s the way he wants it? He’s too brain damaged to say, but that doesn’t mean he can’t impose his will on the cat, and maybe he finds life easier and less painful as a cat than as a human. And if that’s true, if he can will the cat, why can’t other virus children? Okay, you can’t break the virus cycle, that’s a given, but what if the cat really isn’t that separate? What if its an integrated aspect of you? Most virus children are too ill or too damaged for this to be investigated in any meaningful way, but not you.” He touched his face, and Paris had such big hands that his palm covered just about all of his cheek. “See, when you told me you could force a partial transformation, it got me thinking. Yes, it’s a purely physical process, and it has to be jump started by pain or adrenaline, but you can switch it off. And that’s the key.”

“Umm … I was with you until now.”

“How do you shut it down? When you let it start, you stop it after a certain point. How?”

This was what he both loved and hated about Paris. He knew him better than he knew himself, and such a thing could range from touching to downright creepy. This seemed to fall in between both of those extremes. “I just … force it to stop before it goes too far.”

“Force. In other words, you will it to stop.”

Yes, exactly. This felt like a “D‘oh!” moment. “You’re going to make me hit you, aren’t you?”

“Bring it on, pansy.” He lunged forward as if he was going to bite off his nose, but just kissed the tip of it instead. “Look, I’m not saying you can totally dominate the cat at all times; I’m just saying the cat has to make as many accommodations for you as you do for it. And I was counting on it when you were in your transformed state. Would it make you feel any better if I said I’d never try that if you were in the transformational stage of the virus?”

“A bit. But you risked your life on a supposition.”

“Not a supposition; I risked it on a belief that you were stronger than the cat. And I was right. So no more busting my balls about it, okay?”

Roan ran his hand through Paris’s hair and smiled, wondering what he’d ever done to deserve someone like him. And how he could understand something so naturally, something he should have got but somehow didn’t. Everything he said made a curious sense. Maybe Paris really had missed his calling as a detective. “You scare me sometimes.”

“You scare me too, so we’re even. And before I forget, Murphy wants you to know that you’re no longer on this case, and if you even try and resume investigating any of this, she’ll throw you in jail so fast your ass will get windburn.”

“Ah. I guess I should have expected that.” It wasn’t the worst thing that happened; that had to be learning he could fully transform out of the viral cycle. But didn’t he always suspect he could? If he could force a partial change, there was nothing stopping him from a full change. It was just unforgivable that he’d had to learn it in front of Murphy and a crowd full of strangers. He was just lucky Paris was there to get him under control and keep him safe, and lucky that Paris was a hell of a lot smarter than most people gave him credit for. Even him. “She’s going to want all our case notes, isn’t she?”

“Yep. She said she’d swing by about nine tomorrow to pick ‘em up.”

“So we have less than nine hours to fool around?”

Paris smiled seductively, his sky blue eyes sparkling with mischief. “Looks like it.”

“Damn. We’d better get started.” He drew his face to his and kissed him passionately, letting Paris’s body swamp his. He knew he should worry about the public transformation and all the fallout sure to come, but he just wasn’t up to facing it right now. He’d face it in the harsh light of day when he absolutely had to, but if he could avoid it for a while, he would.

Sometimes denial was a fun place to be.

****

Pull one piece out of a group dynamic, and the group could fall to pieces. That’s what happened, but not quite in the way Roan had expected.

He assumed Mia took care of Jordan on some level, and she did, but what he hadn’t considered was that Jordan looked after his sister as well. He must have known about her fragile mental state, and in his drive to protect her, he destroyed everything. The best intentions and all that.

Murphy had arrested Mia on suspicion of vehicular assault. At first Mia claimed that he had grabbed the wheel and done it while they were struggling, but while Paris was in the back seat of her car, searching through his bloody and shredded scraps of clothing for his Sig Sauer, he found the micro-cassette recorder he’d been using to document his conversation with Mia. Rewinding the tape and playing the last bit of it for Murphy, they all heard Mia’s obvious threat and no sound of a struggle, so Murphy slapped the cuffs on her and suggested she might change the charge to attempted homicide. Mia apparently had a bit of a meltdown as she was thrown in the back of a cruiser, screaming bloody murder and attempting to kick anybody within reach. She was such a commanding loon that rather than keep her in a holding cell, as soon as she was processed she was taken to Greenwood for observation (the hospital for the criminally insane).

She had the gall to call Eli to bail her out initially, but when he showed up at station house with Stovak, Paris told him that Mia was in with the group killing off infecteds, and was deliberately trying to frame him. Stovak went off on one of his anti-gay rants, but Eli was convinced enough to turn around and leave without even attempting to see Mia. Needless to say, she was never bailed out.

Jordan, being held on the bench warrant, heard about this and was pretty upset about it. Murphy took advantage of this, pointing out anything that he could tell her might help clear the charges against Mia, and he reluctantly took the bait. He confirmed that Mia knew Noah Hammond and that he didn’t like the kid because he was “weird”, although he couldn’t say precisely why or how she knew him. But he thought he was a paranoid “gun nut” type, although Mia claimed he wasn’t. Still, Jordan bought the gun found in his tool kit - he claimed it was only for “protection”, since he worked around “damn cats” all the time, and had nothing to do with Eli - from Noah. It was a street gun, the barrel filed down and the serial number gone, and while the ballistics tests cleared it in the “kitty killings”, the bullet looked like a good match for one discharged in a convenience store robbery three months ago. Jordan said he’d only owned the gun for a month, and besides that, he did have a good alibi, as he was working at the Church that day, in full view of a lot of people. But it gave Murphy enough cause to bring Noah in, and get a warrant to search his place for more illegal weapons.

Noah denied all of this, but the cops did find a couple of other “hot” guns in his apartment, as well as a couple of interesting things: a computer with a surprisingly capacious hard drive, and a UPS man’s uniform. They also found a scrap of paper with the names “Patrick, Christa, Melissa, Ashley, Kelly” written on it, with the first four names crossed out. (Kelly was never identified, but the fact that her name wasn’t crossed out was a positive sign.) His computer was so clean it was squeaky - Noah apparently knew his stuff, and gave that thing a computer enema, leaving no trace of anything - but there was little doubt that he was the hacker, they just couldn’t legally prove it. Not that they needed to; not only were the guns reason enough to hold him, but he had no alibi for the day of the robbery, and no one believed his excuse that the UPS uniform was an “old Halloween costume”. Murphy didn’t really believe he did the robbery, but she was willing to have him charged with it if they couldn’t get any murder charges to stick.

Noah refused to give up a “client” list of people who bought guns from him, but some solid detective work turned up the name of the Campbells. When questioned about knowing Noah Hammond, they denied it, and denied even owning a gun, but Murphy pegged them both as liars, and her partner, Dubois, decided to stake out the house for a bit, and since he actually had an in-law that lived in the Campbell‘s neighborhood, he had a perfectly legal reason to be there. He saw Reese carrying a satchel to his Range Rover before driving off rather late at night. He noted Reese was speeding and driving a bit erratically, so he notified a black and white that stopped him only a couple of blocks down the way.

This is where they lucked out in a big way: Reese failed a Breathalyzer, and he seemed so agitated that the cop arrested him on the spot. In the leather satchel that Dubois noticed? A gun - the same gun used by the killer. It was a perfect ballistic match. Reese had been on his way to dump it.

And that was that. The group all started attacking one another, blaming the others for the killings, and Murphy played them like violins. Tim, who must have seen the writing on the wall as soon as Mia was pulled in, had fled town - so quickly, he had abandoned his family. There was an APB out for him, though, since Reese had fingered him as a co-conspirator. Roan had heard a rumor that Amy was working out a deal to sell her husband and Noah up the river in exchange for a much milder charge, but Murphy refused to confirm or deny that one.

Humanity First wasn’t dead; far from it. It sunk below the radar once more, but in some wacky places on the internet they were branded as “heroes of humanity”, along with Reese, Amy, Noah, and Tim. Somehow Mia was left out of the equation, which figured. Jordan was working hard to get her declared mentally incompetent due to insanity so she would remain in the hospital and not face prison, which most people seemed to think was best; most people thought her sane days were behind her. Eli had intended to press harassment charges against Jordan, but Murphy convinced Eli to drop it, mainly because Jordan was suffering enough. Roan assumed blackmail was involved, because Eli wasn’t known for his generosity of spirit.

Speaking of which, Murphy seemed happy to pretend his transformation hadn’t happened, and he decided to leave it be, although he lived in fear of the day when she and Gordo compared notes and figured out something was wrong with him. Paris was a little peeved that Murphy and Dubois were getting credit in the media for breaking the case, but behind the scenes Murphy did give them credit when possible. That reporter who talked to Paris about the Nakamura case called them up again, apparently having heard the scuttlebutt that they were involved in this one too, but they refused to talk to him about it.

Luckily, by the time the case was nearing what would surely be a lurid media circus, he and Paris took some time off to go to Vancouver so Par could reconnect with his family. Paris had pretended he wasn’t a nervous wreck about this, but he obviously was. In some attempt to calm him down, Roan made a small vacation of it.

They drove up, as the border wasn’t far, and they listened to The Tragically Hip all the way there, in some attempt to get in the mood. They’d been to Canada quite a few times, but mostly on runs for prescription painkillers they really couldn’t get in the States without a lot of hassle, and beer. Or, as Paris liked to call them, “the staff of life”.

They reached downtown Vancouver on a cold but clear early afternoon, the sky a high blue between buildings, and Paris had dragged him to a Tim Horton’s because he insisted he had to try the “Timbits”. The place was steamy warm, and smelled of coffee, soup, and pastries. “I know how it sounds,” he claimed. “But they’re like crack. You’ll love them.”

Roan stared at him from across the table of their tiny window booth, and actually found it hard not to smile. He was nervous, sure, but Paris also seemed energized, as if being back in his hometown was good for him. “There’s two things wrong with that statement.”

Paris didn’t kick him under the table, but nudged his leg in a way that implied he’d get a kick next time. “Oh come on, we all know you’re fearless. Don’t prove the rumors wrong.”

“You know I’m a bad cop. I don’t like doughnuts.” He didn’t; he generally found them way too heavy, and had no idea how people could scarf them for breakfast. This included Paris, who could positively inhale a raspberry cream cheese Danish like it was nothing. “Or crack, for that matter.”

“Timbits are not just doughnuts; just you wait. Now, stop stalling and tell me what you want to drink.”

“Can’t I order a beer here? I thought this was Canada.”

“Be a good boy, and I’ll take you to this brewpub I know about in Victoria for dinner. There’s a pale ale you’ll kill for.”

“Don’t make me kill again, Par.”

That made him chuckle, which was what he was hoping for. Paris scrubbed his hands across his scalp and leaned back in his seat, favoring him with a fragile smile. “What the hell was I thinking by taking you home with me?”

“I assume you were high at the time.”

He grinned and shook his head, looking away to briefly watch other people order their overpriced coffees and leave, and Roan sensed the shift in his mood before he glanced down at the table, clasping his hands together nervously. “Ah shit, I don’t know if I can do this.”

He almost made a joke about the difficulties of ordering frou-frou coffee in a foreign land, but he knew he was talking about going home again. Roan had had to cajole him into calling Annie back and arranging the time of his visit. Paris had seemed to swing back and forth between nervous excitement and total hysteria at the prospect of the meeting ever since. “You can. You remember what Annie told you; they all want to see you. They miss you. How great is that to have people who miss you? I’m jealous. Most people are glad to see me leave.”

“But if they’re expecting the old me …”

“How likely is that? You told me they were smart people. So many years have passed; they know that time doesn’t stand still. They won’t expect you to be the college student who walked out the door and never returned.” He reached across the table and put his hand over his. “You’re going to be okay. Take it slow, and remember you don’t have to tell them anything you don’t want to right now. I’ll back whatever you say.”

He flashed him a frail smile. “I know. Thank you. I just … how do I put it exactly? Mom, Dad, remember how I was such a ladies man in high school? Well, I was seeing guys on the down low the whole time. I’m bisexual, but the love of my life is a man, and oh, people seem to be always trying to kill him, possibly because he’s an irredeemable smart ass. Also, I’m infected, and better yet, it’s the tiger strain, so I’m a dead man walking. What’s new with you?” He let his head fall to the table with a dramatic thump, just barely missing their hands.

Roan stroked his hair, wanting to say something comforting, but not sure what. Going for the joke was always easier. “You could say “Hi” first.”

Paris just moaned miserably, not in the mood for jokes right this second.

“They’ll probably just be glad to see you after all this time. You can just say you want to catch up with them, and you’ll explain your missing years later. Don’t worry so much; no one’s expecting you to blurt out your sordid life story as soon as you get in the door.”

He had a feeling he would respond to that, and he did. He lifted his head and looked at him curiously. “Sordid?”

“Oh yeah, totally X rated. I really would advise that you not tell your mother about your college foursome unless you think she’d be really cool with it.”

“Foursomes, plural.”

He stared at him. “You’re making that up.”

“I swear, I’m not! I told you I was a man whore. If it had a pulse and was reasonably attractive, there’s a very good chance I’d sleep with it. Do you know how many cases of the clap I got in a three month period? The pharmacy just had a standing prescription of tetracycline for me. It’s probably a shock that it took me so long to get infected, as I was just asking for it.”

Roan took his hands away from him like he suddenly just realized he was a venereal disease farm. “Remind me to burn our sheets when we get home.”

Finally Paris laughed, his shoulders losing some of their tension as he slumped back against his seat. “You knew I was a reformed whore when you started seeing me, so you can’t claim you’re shocked now.”

“I don’t know if I’m horrified or slightly jealous. I’ve led such a vanilla life, and you’ve actually attended an orgy, which I assumed died off with the Roman empire.”

“Orgies are really overrated. You can only enjoy them while high, and once it wears off, you realize how many people there have flabby asses and pinched faces, and it loses some of its luster.”

“I really do hope this is a comedy bit, ‘cause I’m starting to lean towards horrified.”

“And you call yourself a gay man? Sister, please.” Paris gave him a big, smart ass grin which was dazzling in its brightness. It lit up his whole face, making him look painfully handsome. He could see why people were eager to invite him to an orgy. “You know what we should do? We should get married. Just think of the reaction of my folks when I tell them I’m married, and then introduce you as my husband. After that, telling them I’m infected would be a drop in the bucket.”

“You can’t be serious.”

“What? Why not? I’m still a Canadian citizen.”

“You know how I feel about marriage. I don’t know why it exists; I’ve seen anything but misery associated with it. Hell, I make a living on broken marriages, on spouses who cheat and lie to one another, who break pre-nups and cat around town with the Dallas Cowboys or their cheerleading squad, or both. I mean, if gays want to be as miserable as straights, fine, let ‘em marry, but I think it’s a disaster no matter the gender.”

Paris was still grinning. “You’re such a romantic.”

“You just want a reason to get yourself a Cowboy. Or a green card.”

“Just think of how many people we’ll upset if we come home and claim we got married in Canada. Eli would probably have a stroke, and Stovak’s head would explode. I bet Doctor Braunbeck would stop offering us gorp.”

“That’s no fair. You know I l do most things out of spite.”

“I know! And this would be the ultimate act of revenge.”

He was serious, wasn’t he? Weird. But time wasn’t on Paris’s side, and that’s why he pressed him to reconnect with his folks. Roan tried hard not to think about it, but his last transformational period had probably been the worst one yet - Paris lost way too much weight (at the end of the cycle, he looked like a starvation victim), and the pain was so bad they had to up his drug dosage to levels so ludicrous he ended up sleeping most of the day. He even missed three days of work after the cycle was over; Roan thought he should have the whole week off, but Paris refused. He was just starting to look like his normal self again.

He didn’t want to think about this. He didn’t want to think that Paris’s assessment of himself as a “dead man walking” was correct, but he knew it probably was. He didn’t know how much time he had left now, but it probably couldn’t be measured in years. He couldn’t imagine life without him in it, and yet he knew realistically he was going to have to prepare himself for just that.

How did you do that? How did you brace yourself for the most important person in your life dying on you? And that was the tragedy that almost everyone faced at some point in their life. He just thought it would never get to him because he’d tried so hard not to let anyone get that close. He preferred being alone, he really did … only now he wasn’t so sure. He kind of hated himself for it, and on top of that he hated himself for hating himself over it. He just couldn’t win.

Roan looked at him and wondered where they would go from here, and if there would be any light at the end of the tunnel before it collapsed on top of them.

Too bad there was really no such thing as a happy ending.