Roan knew exactly where he had to go, but his stomach growled very loudly, objecting to all the coffee and bad feelings he’d had up to this point, and he decided to grab a bite to eat on the way back home.

Stopping at a fast food place was such a risky proposition that he could only use the drive through windows, if that. The smell was too much for him; there was just too many people in and out, too much rancid cooking grease, too much smell of processed foods and cleaning supplies. It made him vaguely nauseous and sometimes gave him a headache. Of course, reading “Fast Food Nation” had much the same effect, but that was just happy coincidence.

At the drive through window, he decided to order extra food on the chance that Paris was up and about. Technically the drugs should have kept him down until next Thursday, but the change had pretty wacky effects on your metabolism. For instance, he felt like doing so much desk work was making him soft and pudgy, but it’d be gone after his next change. You could be twenty five pounds overweight, but after your time, you’d be ten pounds underweight. He was shocked that no one had advertised being infected as a weight loss plan … but come to think of it, someone probably already had. People were just so fucked up it was incredible.

He hated people who talked on their phones, did their hair, texted their friends and ate a four course meal while they were supposed to be driving, but he was so hungry he went ahead and ate his chicken sandwich while driving home. He never took his eyes off the road, though, so he didn’t feel like too much of a hypocrite. The landscape slid by in an almost featureless blur, slowly transforming from concrete grey to grass green as he moved out of the city and deeper into the surrounding countryside.

Everything seemed unchanged at home, the engineless GTO still parked in the drive, the lawn still slightly overgrown and weedy (they didn’t use herbicides or pesticides, mainly because the smell killed him, no matter how minor the concentration), but as soon as he killed the engine, he heard a faint, rhythmic banging coming from around back. He was glad he got the extra food, but he was also unaccountably nervous, as he had to figure out how much Paris knew before deciding on how to lie to him. That was always the toughest part about bullshit - deciding what people were willing to buy. Everyone had a limit, a level that they could accept, but if it was crossed you were screwed. There really wasn’t much of a talent to lying; it was simply figuring out what people wanted to believe and giving it to them.

The front door was unlocked, so he walked in and wasn’t surprised to see a large plank of plywood where the shattered sliding glass door was. He waited for a break in the hammering before yelling, “Honey, I’m home.”

Paris stuck his head around the plywood after moving it slightly. It seemed to be only nailed to the side of the doorframe at the moment. Paris had knocked any remaining jagged shards of glass out of the frame, and vacuumed up what had fallen on the carpet. Thank the hardware gods for Shop-Vacs. “Ooh, do I smell food?”

“Yeah yeah, come on chowhound,” Roan said, shaking his head.

Paris was dressed at least, in khaki cargo shorts (he had his hammer in one of the loops on the right side leg) and a plain blue t-shirt, looking remarkably bright eyed and alert considering he’d been in a drug coma when he left him.

Paris looked good; far too good than should have been allowable without plastic surgery and extensive air brushing. He had clear blue eyes in a face too finely featured to be rugged, but too masculine to be called pretty. His hair was deep black and seemingly always glossy, like a pelt, although when he’d first met him his hair was lank and dull, and his face mostly hidden by a scraggly beard. But even then he’d found his eyes slightly mesmerizing, glowing with a bit more than simply madness. He oozed charisma like some people oozed sweat, and sometimes he seemed so alive it was almost overpowering, almost frightening.

Since he was originally Human and not born infected, not a virus child, there was no way the cat could have any influence on the person (or vice versa), but Roan sometimes wondered if tigers were different. Something about Paris seemed too powerful to be merely Human. But maybe it was just his imagination.

Everyone found Paris attractive; he was a secret weapon in getting people to talk. People who would never talk to him would be relaxed around Paris, be charmed, and suddenly they’d start telling him things they wouldn’t tell anyone else. While it was true women were best at ferreting out information like that - it was a psychological thing - apparently a handsome bisexual was the next best thing.

Paris was also five years younger than him, although sometimes he felt like he had twenty years on him. There was no way a guy like Paris would be with a guy like him if he hadn’t met Paris when he was at a personal nadir; Roan didn’t fool himself there. He also figured he would leave him eventually, find someone more good looking (man or woman) and a bit less jaded, but Roan decided to enjoy things while he could.

Roan had sat on a stool at the breakfast bar, and Paris came over and joined him, taking the stool beside him. Roan shoved two of the brown paper bags over towards him, because most of the food was for him. (The change gave you a huge appetite on either side of it; that was part of the metabolism wonkiness.) “So where’ve you been?” Paris wondered, pulling out wrapped cheeseburgers and noshing on a fry. “Was there an appointment I missed?”

“It was last minute,” he lied. “Thanks for fixing the window.”

“Oh, shit man, I did that. I should fix it.” He ate a couple more fries, then said nervously, “While I was getting ready to go to the hardware store, I heard there was a … an incident a couple miles from here, and -”

“It was a cougar.”

“What?” His tone of voice was split between disbelief and hope. This would be an easy sell.

“Sikorski called me in to see if I could help, but it didn’t matter too much. The print guy got a pretty solid paw, and it was a cougar.”

Paris sighed in obvious relief, his shoulders sagging as the tension fled. “Oh thank god. I thought I killed somebody.”

“Nope.” Paris bit into his cheeseburger with gusto, even though Roan caught a faint scent of slightly overdone toast, and he saw the bottle of ginger pills on the counter near the toaster. Both the drugs and the change could leave you feeling nauseous, so that’s why he always had a bottle of ginger pills in the kitchen - it was a vital part of his (and Paris’s) recovery kit.

There used to be an acupuncturist with a clinic across the way from the office, and he became good friends with the main practitioner, Mei Ling, who told him that ginger pills would cure nausea faster than anything on the market. He thought that was homeopathic bullshit, but he was actually desperate enough to try it once, and he was shocked to discover she was right; it worked better than Dramamine. Just because of that, he gave acupuncture a shot when his headaches came back, and it actually seemed to help. Mei Ling had to close up shop a couple months ago and move to San Francisco to take care of her aging Aunt, which he was sorry about, as he liked her. Sure, her English was a bit broken, but she seemed extremely tolerant, and knew lots of obscure things. He liked people who knew weird things, just because it seemed to hint at some odd inner life.

Before Paris could ask more about the dead man, Roan told him about the Nakamura case. Paris listened intently, although he never stopped eating, and at one point got up to get a soda from the fridge. Paris tossed him an iced tea, and Roan wondered if the fact that he’d had too much caffeine was obvious.

As soon as he was done, Paris took his seat, cracked open his soda, and decided to play devil’s advocate. “This is all supposition, you know. Maybe he was a bit obsessed with infecteds, but ran off to join the Hare Krishnas.”

“Or the Jehovah’s Witnesses,” he replied, playing along.

“The Evangelicals.”

“The Mormons.”

“The Shakers,” Paris insisted, raising his eyebrows in a comic manner.

Oh no, he wasn‘t laughing now. “The Scientologists.”

“Oh shit, you win. I can’t top that.”

Roan pumped his fist in sarcastic triumph. “Mock holy Xenu if you want, but you won’t believe how much claiming you’re a Scientologist gets you out of conversations.”

Paris snorted a laugh in remembrance, and almost choked on a fry. “I remember when you told that guy that, as a Scientologist, you celebrated Christmas differently. I thought he was gonna have you arrested.”

“Which one was this?”

“The one where you claimed to dance naked around a pyre where you burned the remains of a sacrificial chicken.”

“Oh, right, and ate the still beating heart of a baby goat under a gibbous moon. Right. I thought I was particularly inspired that night.”

Paris chuckled, shaking his head. “You just have contempt for every one and every thing, don’t you?”

“Not every thing,” he protested. “I have no problem with Terry. Well, today.”

Terry was the name of the toaster. All their appliances had “Hello, My Name Is” adhesive nametags slapped on them, with the appliance “names” scrawled in the boxes in Magic Marker. The toaster was Terry, the blender was Bob, the stove was Frank, the microwave Chiquita, the refrigerator Steve. This was all due to the fact that he loathed nametags.

Roan had a friend, Phil, who was in charge of a large detective/private security firm in Springfield, and a client wanted Phil to provide security for a big software expo. But Phil didn’t have as many people as he wanted to cover the floor, so he hired him and Paris as “floaters”, incognito security that circulated with the crowd. All the crowd wore stupid ass nametags, though, and as they were supposed to be just like everyone else, they wore tags. Roan hated it, and when he got a chance he pocketed a whole bunch of blank nametags, although to what end he wasn’t sure. But one night, slightly drunk and insanely bored, he slapped them on their appliances. If people ever asked about it, they claimed that since they couldn’t have pets (they might accidentally kill and eat them - there was no therapy to cover a trauma like that), they kept the appliances. Paris would often get in the spirit of it, baby talking to the toaster and stroking it like a cat. ”Would snookems like an English Muffin?” It was times like that that he worried he had warped Paris in some way, but a sense of humor was never a bad thing.

He idly wondered if Paris had kept any of the numbers he got at the software expo. Although he was working and not actively flirting, over the course of the two day conference he ended up with eight phone numbers, mostly men. Paris could be dangerous if he aimed his charm square at you.

After a moment, Paris stopped laughing, and got strangely sober. He knew what was coming, and didn’t look forward to it. “If you think this kid really did run off to get infected, you know where you hafta go.”

Roan sighed, painfully aware of where and who he was referring to. “I know. I was trying to work up to it. You know I have the insatiable urge to beat that bastard’s face in with a tire iron; it takes me a while to rein in my homicidal impulses.”

“Ro, come on. I know you hate him -”

“Hate? That’s too mild a word. I despise the drunken episode that led to his goddamn conception, and I despise his brother for not bashing his head in with a fucking shovel when he had the chance.”

Paris sat back and stared at him, bemusement clearly visible in his expression. “And you don’t think that’s a bit … dramatic?”

He knew he was just trying to be teasing, but he wasn’t in the mood. “You’re not gonna tell me you can actually stand that fucker, are you?”

Paris frowned at him, like he should have known better. “Of course not. I’m not sure anyone sane likes Eli. I mean, how could you? He’s like a television evangelist without a show.”

He wasn’t sure he completely followed that metaphor, but okay. Eli was Elijah Prophet, a/k/a Eli Winters, leader of the cult that called itself the “Church of the Divine Transformation”, the premiere kitty cult. (Roan thought that was a perfect name; it sounded great in the sentence ”The FBI raided the Church of the Divine Transformation today…”)

It was well known, and it was more blatant than any other kitty cult, mainly because Eli was an heir to the rather large Winters real estate development fortune, which he split with his more respectable and notably embarrassed brother Tom. Anyone who said there was no such things as class distinction in America was living in a dream world, and Eli was living proof - not only were the rich different, they apparently had different laws applied to them. Eli had a taste for underage girls, everybody knew this, and his cult seemed to attract quite a few of them. But oddly enough, in spite of rumors and a police investigation, he’d never been charged with a damn thing. Roan had always wanted to nail that smug fucker with something - anything - but had never been able to do so.

Until now?

Paris slid off his stool, and said, “Why don’t I go change? I’ll come with you.”

“No, it’s fine. I can handle this myself.”

“I’m sure you can, but I think I’d better come along, if only to keep Rainbow distracted.” He then leaned in close over his shoulder and smiled, turning on the full wattage of his charm. This close it was almost palpable. “Besides, if it comes down to it, I can always say he threw the first punch.” Paris then gave him a kiss on the forehead and walked away, so confident in his ability to sway him that he didn’t even look back.

Roan sighed and shook his head at his own pathetic reaction. He should go by himself, but he already knew he wasn’t going to. He idly wondered if things would have been any easier if he’d been heterosexual.

His cell phone buzzed impatiently in his pocket, and he dug it out and checked the number to decide if he should answer it or not. Son of a bitch: Sikorksi.

Maybe it was good news; maybe forensics turned up something that pointed definitively away from a tiger. And maybe Eli really was a divine messenger.