Roan had reached for his baton as the cat lunged, but as he pulled it out and extended it with a simple flick of his wrist, he realized they were too close to one another. He brought the baton around as the leopard was so close he could feel its hot breath on his skin, and the top of the baton didn’t hit it, the middle portion distressingly close to his hand did. He hit hard, although not as hard as he could have, and it went flying aside before its fangs could graze his skin or its extended claws tear his clothes. It tried to land on its feet, but momentum had shifted its balance and it flopped down on its side, shaking its head. He must have cracked it on the skull.

Roan barely noticed. His heart was racing, and the fact that a cat had actually gotten that close to him had triggered the response of the lion in him, and it was clawing the walls to get out. He felt as well as heard bones crack in his jaw as it partially transformed, sharp pain stabbing through his gums as fangs tore through the tissue from the inside, the taste of his own blood making the animal inside him even crazier. It was hard to fight himself and the leopard at the same time, but he didn’t see that he had much choice. “Stay the fuck down,” he snarled, the words slurred and barely Human through the constant growling. “I’m your only friend here tonight. Don’t make me kill you.” He gripped the baton so hard his knuckles cracked, and he could feel his muscles tightening beneath his skin, the pain in his jaw extending to dig hot spikes into his brain as he could suddenly see so much clearer in this dim light, the smell of blood exploding into a rich, warm scent that made his teeth ache to feel flesh tearing between them.

The lion was coming out. He knew it, and he concentrated as hard as he could to force it back, to take control. It had spent so long in the dark, now it had an overwhelming urge to run, to play (kill), and it was taking all his strength to hold it back. He wasn’t sure he could; he was no longer sure that he was the dominant one. He was weak and let the virus take him over, trying very hard to waste away into nothing, and now he was going to pay for it. His lion was dormant only due to boredom; its strength was undiminished.

The leopard was back on its feet, growling at him, sounding like a distant motor, and he screamed/roared, so loudly and so hard he tasted more blood as he tore up his own vocal cords. It was such an angry sound the leopard’s ears swiveled back, plastering down to its skull, and it slunk lower to the dirt. Frightened? Maybe now it was willing to submit. He snarled at it, his throat aching, the blood tickling as it trickled down his throat, and the cat lowered down until its belly was scraping the ground. It wasn’t preparing to lunge; it hadn’t adopted a totally submissive posture, but it was surrendering. So why wasn’t the lion pulling back?

The effort of holding back the change was killing him. A railroad spike of pain was shooting down from the top of his head, traveling like lightning down his spine, and coming to rest in his feet. It felt like his skin wanted to split from within, burst open like a piece of overripe fruit, and it was taking everything he had to hold it back. He could feel his pulse in his head, and it was way too fast.

“Paris,” he muttered, a word that was a growl. Paris knew he could will the cat long before he ever knew, and he’d be so disappointed in him now, losing ground to the beast within. And all because he let himself go, became weak, stopped caring about whether the cat took over or not. He tried to focus on Paris in his mind, use that to anchor him, anchor his will against the lion. He didn’t really know if it was enough.

He was aware, dimly, of the static crackle of cop radios, the soft thud of footsteps on grass, and knew the cat squad was here, held up only by their inability to find the cat. He used what little energy he had left to force the cat down, to get it to back off. People with guns were bad; they could be drugged or killed, and the cat didn’t want that, did it?

There was no reasoning with an animal, but he was beginning to wonder if there was any reasoning with him either.

When he thought he could, he took a deep breath, and shouted, “We’re over here!” His voice was so raspy, so gravelly, it was painful just to hear, not to mention use. He swallowed a mouthful of blood, and although his adrenaline was still up, his heart pounding and his head buzzing with white hot pain, he was pretty sure he was through the worst of it. He suddenly realized his shirt was soaked with sweat, clinging to him in a disgusting sticky way, and he smelled the hint of lion in his own sweat. Jesus fucking Christ, how close had he come? His jaw hurt, his head hurt, and the muscles in his arms were twitching. He would adrenaline crash soon and hard, and he wondered vaguely if his head would explode. It felt like it might right now.

It took the cat squad another two minutes to find them, and he wasn’t all that surprised by their thundering incompetence when he saw who was leading them. “You’re in the shot,” Nate Anderson barked, raising his rifle. It was the live fire one, not a dart gun.

“No I’m not,” he grated, his voice sounding not unlike gravel tumbling around an empty dryer. “It’s contained. Give me a drug gun.”

Anderson glared at him down the barrel of the rifle, deliberately aiming it at the center of his chest. Anderson was a good, All American boy that he was on the force with, he was Chief McClarty’s golden boy, and a member of a really severe evangelical Christian church that hated pretty much everything about Roan even before they knew he existed. Anderson took this as license to treat him as sub-human, and because McClarty protected him, there wasn’t anything he could actually do about it. After finding “God hates fags” written in Magic Marker on his locker, Roan cleaned it off and wrote, also in Magic Marker, “I hate your god”. Even though he wrote it on his own locker, he was called in McClarty’s office and warned about “offensive messages”, which was pretty funny since he thought “God hates fags” was pretty offensive too. In the end, it never mattered. Scandal washed McClarty out of office, and all his golden boys scrambled to disassociate themselves from him, and Anderson transferred to another department. What insane bastard decided to make a kitty hater head of a cat containment squad must have had one fucking sick sense of humor.

“It killed a cop,” Anderson said, and his pale blue eyes flicked towards Roan’s right hand. He had no idea why, except then he remembered that he was still holding the extended baton in a death grip. He was holding it so tight his hand was numb.

“It’s hurt, you fuck,” Roan grated, his voice sounding so rough he was certain he was going to start spitting up tissue any second. “They sent dogs after it. They did everything they could to drive this cat out of its head. Now gimme a fucking drug gun.”

“Step aside,” Anderson ordered. The body armored troops behind him, four in all, looked really confused. If a cat is contained or not an immediate threat, they were drugged and removed from the scene - you only shot them in self-defense or in the defense of others. Since neither situation was applicable, the plebes had no idea why their commander was so hot to kill the cat cowering behind Roan.

“Make me.”

Anderson snorted. “Stick against gun? That ain’t a smart choice, McKichan.”

“I’m faster,” he told him, and that was the truth. The lion was still close to the surface, and the nanosecond Roan saw Anderson’s finger twitch, he’d knock the rifle out of his hand and hopefully break a finger or two in the process. The weird thing was, Roan had no doubt he could do it. “You always liked to say I wasn’t Human, Nate. I’m willing to prove it.”

Roan didn’t blink. He stared right back at Anderson, the cool night air drying out his eyeballs, and Nate started to get nervous, the scent of fear starting to slip out beneath his hideous Aqua Velva. He tried one last gambit, but Roan knew he’d already won. In spite of his poker face, Roan knew Nate had blinked. “Why are you defending that fucking thing? It even hurt you.”

“No it didn’t.”

“You’re bleeding.”

Roan almost denied it, but he suddenly realized he was. The blood was leaking out of his mouth, it was trickling down his throat inside and out, and that might explain why his shirt was soaked. The change, even a partial one, was violent - bones snapped, skin tore, muscles warped. It was stupid to think the pain was the only remnant it left behind.

“Enough with this bullshit,” a woman said, one of the squad. She stepped around Anderson and off to the side, so she had a view of the leopard behind Roan, and shot it with a drug dart. She then glared between the two of them, and snapped, “Can we get done with the testosterone fest now?”

Anderson flashed her an annoyed look, but started to lower the rifle. “He doesn’t have any,” he told her.

Roan snorted in a mild, vaguely disgusted laugh. “I was about to say the same thing about him.” Anderson glared at him anew, but Roan simply looked at him with lazy contempt. He was the perfect personification of the type of people who made him want to give up on humanity entirely.

The woman wasn’t impressed, but then she shouldn’t have been.

He made sure the cat was loaded up without Anderson taking a cheap shot, and an EMT tried to get him to stop so he could take a look at him because he was bleeding. He insisted he was fine, but the EMT was persistent as they usually were, forcing him to yank his arm out of his grasp. Roan unknowingly growled as he did, and the EMT jumped back almost a solid foot. He should have known better than to grab him.

He took the bike back home, and vertigo hit him so hard he almost ditched it right before his driveway. He staggered into the house in full adrenaline crash, the pain in his head so great he expected his brain to start leaking out his ears. Maybe it was. Somehow he made it upstairs, and he collapsed on his bed, staring up at the ceiling as it spun with the world. One of these days they were all going to fall off, weren’t they? Or maybe it was just him.

He slept hard, aware only that he at some point had a dream that Paris was with him, sleeping wrapped around him like a blanket. That was it; nothing happened. He was just there, his warmth, his skin, the feel of his breath on the back of his neck, and it made him feel so much better. It did occur to Roan to tell him that he should have been the virus child, not him; Paris would have handled it better. He wouldn’t have been afraid of himself; he’d probably have learned to master the change early on, like he never did. But again, life wasn’t fair, was it? Sometimes people got things they shouldn’t have, and sometimes people survived who shouldn’t have.

He woke up with the taste of old blood in his mouth, sunlight streaming through the windows and a bird chirping loudly under the eaves, and something poking him in the leg. He sat up and looked at what it was, and saw it was his Sig Sauer in its holster. Well fuck, that was smart. Speaking of smart, his pillowcase was now smudged with blood. He got some on the sheets too.

In the bathroom, he saw how bad it was. Blood had come out of both sides of his mouth, leaving trails that had converged on his chin and ran down his throat, soaking into his shirt, which was now stiff with sweat and blood. He also had a full day’s growth of beard now too, another side effect of the partial change.

By the time he shaved, showered, and threw away his shirt, it was almost noon, and his stomach was tying itself in knots with hunger. He was glad no one had invaded his house this morning to make breakfast, maybe this signaled that they were finally going to stop treating him like an invalid, but right now he was so hungry he would have appreciated it. Roan suddenly felt a craving for meat, something he didn’t apparently have in the house, and he thought about the greasy, sloppy cheeseburgers they served at Gracie’s, and knew where he was going for breakfast. Or lunch, whichever.

Gracie’s wasn’t too crowded, but Roan wasn’t sure it was ever crowded. He didn’t recognize his waiter, who was a twenty year old Japanese kid, not bad looking, although he’d bleached his hair a shocking blond. He could have been a twink, or he could have simply been a trendy kid - if something existed in the gay community long enough, het kids usually adopted it at some point. Weird, but that seemed to be how things worked. Hell, lots of straight businessmen got manicures now, which frankly puzzled him, because here he was, incredibly gay, and he’d never gotten a manicure or even had the desire for one. Why the fuck would he care about his nails? Far from him to disparage his people - he let others go ahead and do that, which they did happily - but sometimes gay men were far too fussy for their own good. No one group should ever aspire to be Martha Stewart.

He ate his first greasy, sloppy cheeseburger in four bites, so he had to order another one, along with another iced tea. He was drinking both a Coke and an iced tea, which made the waiter kid - his name tag said Tony - looked at him funny, and say, with a hint of a smile, “Thirsty, huh?” Actually he was; he had no idea how much he’d bled last night, but he had a feeling he needed to mix getting his fluid levels up with his badly needed caffeine. The Coke was making his salivary glands hurt, but it was getting rid of the taste of blood in his mouth and throat.

He was eating his fries, glancing out the window, when he noticed Dylan walking down the street. He was casually dressed in loose black linen pants and a sleeveless grey shirt with some kind of faded logo on the front, and his hair was swept back and looked damp. Just coming from the gym? Maybe.

He was almost past the window of Gracie’s when he looked and paused, catching his eye. He raised his hand in a greeting, then pointed at himself and at the door. He was silently asking if he wanted him to join him or would mind if he did. Roan shrugged, then nodded, figuring he was done with the newspaper anyways.

Dylan came in and slid into the vinyl bench seat across from him, trailing a wave of oatmeal scented soap. Yeah, either he’d just come from the gym, or left his apartment - or someone else? - directly after a shower. “I’m eating burgers,” Roan warned him. “You may want to turn your head.”

He smiled faintly. “I think I can take it. You look very bright eyed today. Good night last night?”

That surprised him. No one had ever called him bright eyed before. “Uh, actually no, quite the opposite. But I do feel a bit better than usual. Huh. Weird.”

“Sometimes things are better after the storm. You survived it, so you feel pretty good about yourself.”

“Yeah, maybe.” That was weird. Dylan figured out he hadn’t wanted to talk about last night, hadn’t he? So he glossed right over it. He was extremely observant, which made Roan just a bit nervous. Speaking of bright eyes, Dylan’s were, and they read him with uncanny accuracy. Suddenly this didn’t seem like such a good idea. “So what have you been up to?”

“Oh, just playing racquetball with my brother-in-law.”

“People still play racquetball?”

“I know, it’s amazing, isn’t it? But if I don’t say so myself, I’m pretty good for a novice.”

“Well, you’re an archer. I’m sure you’ve got the hand-eye coordination thing down pat.”

Dylan stared at him from across the table, the playful light in his eyes dimming, and Roan realized he’d just tipped his hand and admitted he’d investigated him. Shit.

Just then, Tony showed up with his second burger and tea, and asked Dylan if he wanted something. Dylan asked distractedly for an orange juice, and Tony nodded and turned away, looking Dylan over for a long moment. Did he think he recognized him, or was he checking him out? Either way, Dylan didn’t notice.

As soon as Tony was gone, Roan said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean just to blurt it out like that.”

“It’s okay, I kinda figured you’d check me out. You’re a detective, right? Can’t help it.”

“No, I think it’s a personal problem on my part, to be totally honest. I’m a little paranoid.”

Dylan shrugged a single shoulder, and glanced out the window at the people walking by on the street. “I know the feeling. I guess, as much as we want to leave our childhood behind, we don’t quite, do we?”

Okay, he so didn’t want to talk about this now, and he had a feeling Dylan didn’t really want to either. Tony brought his glass of juice over and went off to help other customers, and Dylan hadn’t looked away from the window once. “You know what I do every Fourth of July? I take valium and go to bed with earplugs in. I’ve never gotten used to it.”

It took Roan a moment to understand what he was saying, but then he did, and he felt horrible for him. “Fireworks sound like gunshots. You heard the gunshots.”

Dylan finally looked back at him with a sickly forced smile. “How could I not? Our house wasn’t that big. I also saw the bodies. Sheba and I went to see what happened after the silence grew unbearable. We were able to keep Tommy from seeing it, though.”

“Jesus, Dylan. I’m so sorry.”

He shook his head, looking down into his juice as he grabbed the glass. “Dylan Shepherd is dead.” He looked up at him, that sickening smile still on his face. “He had to die, because nothing good was ever going to come of him. I just forget sometimes that he was a different person, and that I’m not him anymore. I prefer my life as Dylan Harlow anyways. Hell, I was almost in the Olympics.”

There were a couple of different ways he could have played this, but he decided to just go along with him and distance the conversation from “past” Dylan. He had no idea why he’d said that no good was going to come of him as Dylan Shepherd, but Roan wondered if maybe he’d had a juvenile record, if he acted out and got in trouble for it. As long as it wasn’t something major, it could have been purged from his files by now. And Roan knew he couldn’t talk, because he got away with some things as a teenager he knew he should have been arrested for, but he was never caught. “I was gonna ask you about that. How the hell does a person in this day and age become a professional archer? And why?”

Dylan smirked, and it seemed perfectly genuine and non-sickly this time. This was a more comfortable subject. “I picked it up at camp as a kid. It’s one of those stupid summer camp activities, but it caught me just as I was going through a Robin Hood phase, so I stuck with it. I was actually glad I flubbed the Olympic tryout; in fact, I’m pretty sure I fucked myself up ‘cause I was so nervous. Sheba talked me into it; I wasn’t sure it was something I wanted. But at the time, I wasn’t doing much except coasting through college.”

“You weren’t into art yet?”

“Oh, I was, but I didn’t take it all that seriously. I mean, it was doodles and cartoons. Everybody said I was good, but it was just something I did. I still have a hard time believing anybody would want to buy my work, but some do.”

“That’s cool. Do you sell them from a gallery or something?”

“Uh, kinda. I’m in an artists’ collective downtown. We have a loft space that we all chip in on, to both work in and sell our stuff. We like to call it a “private gallery”, although I’m pretty sure it fools no one. Still, people come in and look, and sometimes buy.”

That made him remember something. “You don’t happen to know a German glassblower who surfs, do you?”

His deep brown eyes lit up again, and Roan wondered anew if those were contacts. “You mean Gunter? You’ve met him?”

Roan laughed, mainly because the coincidence of it was nuts. “Paris and I met him last year before … he was very odd.”

“Oh, Gunter’s a trip. You know, I’ve known him for three years now, and I still have no idea if he’s gay, straight, bi, or what.”

“No way.”

“Seriously! He has lots of “friends”, boys and girls alike, but he doesn’t seem especially close to any of them, and he never talks about his love life.” Dylan shrugged. “I think he likes to make people guess.”

“Maybe it’s all the pot.”

That made Dylan laugh this time. “Yeah, maybe.” He paused to sip his orange juice, and then said, “For some reason, that reminds me of something. You work personal security sometimes, right?”

That was an interesting segue. Instantly he was suspicious, but he tried not to show it. “Sometimes, yeah.”

“I’ve just been hired to tend bar at part of this circuit party Saturday night, and I know the guy’s still looking for some security who can work the inside of the club. Would you be interested? It pays a thousand bucks.”

Roan was glad he wasn’t drinking then, or he’d have done a spit take. “For one night’s work?”

Dylan nodded. “Not even a full night, just eight pm to four am.”

“What’s the catch?”

“None. At least that I know of, beyond pretending that you don’t realize a good three-fourths of the guys there are stoned out of their fucking minds.”

“I thought circuit parties were on the wane.”

Dylan shrugged again. “Me too, but this guy’s a software billionaire who apparently really likes ‘em. He’s rented a warehouse space downtown, got some people in to renovate it, got the permits, and now he’s just getting the rest of the personnel together. Word’s already circulated at Panic about it, and I’m pretty sure it’s gonna be a packed house.”

Circuit parties were an offshoot of the rave scene that catered pretty much only to gay men, and usually involved more than one party going on in a general area. They were excuses to get really wasted and half naked with a group of usually younger strangers, and a grand excuse to anonymously hook up. He thought he heard they were fading in popularity - maybe it was due to the rise in sexually transmitted diseases, or the fact that it was really tough to get wasted every other night and do all those crunches, not to mention get up for work the next day after having been partying twenty hours straight and still in a bit of a K hole - but some people kept them alive. “So who’s this software billionaire guy?”

Dylan looked around for a moment, as if it really was a secret, and lowered his voice to a whisper. “Greg Kirsch.”

Roan had vaguely heard of the name, but had no fucking clue what he was supposed to have invented. He didn‘t give a shit either. “And he’s a big old mary, huh?”

He grimaced as he tried to stifle a laugh. “Yeah. And the funny thing is, I don’t know why it’s such a big secret. I mean, these permits are public record, right? He has some kinda party planner arranging everything. So why is he still technically in the closet? It should be the world’s worst kept secret.”

“Oh Dylan, I am charmed by your naiveté. Let me tell you why it’s not being screamed from the parapets: money, money, money. He doesn’t want it reported, so it’s not.”

Dylan stared at him for a very long moment, and then finally said, “I’ve never heard anyone use the word “parapet” in a normal conversation before.”

“It’s a gift.”

He chuckled good naturedly, and fixed him with a warm smile that seemed almost dangerously flirty. “So, do you think you’re up for the job?”

“What does it entail exactly?”

“Well, if I heard Chris right, you simply stand by in case a fight breaks out, or you have to bounce someone for obvious drug dealing, or clear the way if someone OD’s and they need to get taken out of the place.”

There wasn’t a lot of fights at circuit parties beyond an occasional spat between boyfriends, as they were for fucking not fighting. At least he wasn’t checking IDs at the door or patting people down in search of all the drugs that would undoubtedly be circulating. “Can I read between crises?”

Dylan chuckled faintly in disbelief. “You’d read at a circuit party? If you can actually see, yeah, I suppose so.”

“Fine. Have Chris give me a call and make an offer. If it gives me a night off from snapping pics of cheating spouses, I should take it.”

“Okay, I will.”

Roan figured he could use the money anyways, if only to pay Matt back for keeping the office solvent while he was too fucking depressed to get out of bed.

In the background, Roan could hear a television playing, and that - along with his cell phone number - confirmed that he was calling him off duty from home, meaning this was off the record - or personal. He seriously hoped this guy wasn’t coming out to him long distance. (Yeah, he’d been wearing a wedding ring at the station, but Roan was still wearing his own wedding ring too.) “I hope you’re not going to try and arrest me over the phone,” he said, just trying to break the tension.

Hansen chuckled politely. “Should I?”

“I’d prefer you didn’t. What can I do for you, Officer?”

There were noises once more in the background, the odd soft ones of someone settling in a chair. “It’s just Tyler right now. Can I call you Roan?”

“I suppose, since this is off the record.”

“You guessed that, huh?”

“Hardly a guess. You’re watching David Letterman, aren’t you?”

Not so much a chuckle as a sigh. “Is it that loud?”

“I have a good ear.”

“And good other things, according to your personnel file,” Hansen replied smoothly, and Roan was sure he was steering the conversation where he wanted it to go. “I had the distinct impression that you didn’t think the vic in room eleven was a suicide. Could you tell me why?”

So there it was. Was Officer Hansen uncertain about it as well? He must have been; he was now looking for something to support his irrational conclusion, and he was desperate enough to call a diseased PI for an opinion. He supposed being an ex-cop was the only reason he called him. “One reason was the set up, and the second reason will make you hang up on me.”

“Try me.”

“Seriously, you’ll think it’s bullshit. Have you read all of my file?”

“All I could get a hold of.”

Roan wasn’t sure which files he had, but he supposed he’d find out. He rubbed his eyes and sighed, figuring he should just dive in and get this over with. “Where was his stuff? Yeah, someone could have come in the open door and taken it all, but that’s just too convenient. And secondly, I smelled fear in the bathroom. Why would a man who wanted to kill himself be that fucking terrified of it? Being a little scared is understandable - what if you do it wrong, what if it hurts more than you expect, what if there is an afterlife of some sort? But that wasn’t little; that was big enough to be smelled over shit and piss and death in a sweltering room. That’s a powerful fear.”

Hansen was quiet for a moment, and Roan wasn’t sure whether he’d hang up on him as a complete nutjob or laugh and ask if he was joking. But finally he broke the silence. “What does fear smell like?”

He hadn’t expected that, but he was okay with it. Paris had asked him that once too. “Like vinegar and salt, with a hint of metal.”

“Huh. There’s a notation in your police file that you were ascertained to have a bloodhound level sense of smell. How’d they test that?”

“At a police lab. They had me sniff various compounds in sealed rooms, compounds that had been diluted down to something like one part per million, beyond the Human ability to smell it but at the level a trained bloodhound or bomb sniffing dog could pick something up. I got nine out of ten - they fooled me with an ether compound that smelled a bit like popcorn; I couldn’t identify it correctly, mainly because I’d never smelled it before.”

“Huh,” he said non-committally, shifting in his chair again. Roan bet it was a naughahyde recliner. “And that’s all ‘cause you’re a virus child?”

“That’s what I’ve been told, and I have no reason to doubt it.”

“Interesting. Does it hold up in court?”

“Not on its own. I can use it as suppositional to some more tangible proof, but because the defense or prosecution can’t call in their own smelling expert, it’s usually avoided.”

“Huh.” It sounded like he was tapping his fingers on something, maybe a beer can.

Roan was fed up with his passive-aggressiveness. “What didn’t you like about the scene?”

“I’m not really sure. It seemed to be pretty standard. The Calico Cat gets lots of suicides, accidental overdoses, shootings. “

“It’s where hope goes to die.”

He snickered. “That’s a - that’s a good way to put it. But I guess … yeah, his missing clothes made me wonder too.”

“That can’t be all,” Roan prompted. It was sad, but sometimes cops, especially if they were young, needed a bit of a push to be assertive, to go against the grain. He never had that problem, but then again he was accustomed to being unpopular. It may have been a cliché, but it was true: when you had nothing, you had nothing to lose. “The shower rod was an odd choice, wasn’t it?”

Hansen took the bait. “Yeah, that barely held his weight. You’d think if he was so scared, he coulda put a stop to it.”

“It’s a suspicious set up,” Roan agreed. “Can you get them to do an autopsy?”

“I already talked to my sergeant. I told him there was something not right about the scene and I wanted at least a tox screen, so I convinced him to go ahead and get an autopsy done.”

“Good for you.” So he was looking for someone to support his irrational decision, and since presumably his partner wouldn’t, he went outside his usual realm to the faggy detective. “ I don’t suppose you’ll let me know the findings.”

“Sorry, I really shouldn’t.”

“Just like you shouldn’t be talking to me about this?” It was a slippery slope of degrees - do one thing outside the bounds, and you could easily do one more. “Look, maybe you can do me a favor.” Roan launched into the story of Vance’s Ben Hicks identity in Fresno, and his fleeing of the apartment and the identity after the murder of Desiree Jones.

“That sounds suspicious,” he admitted.

“Can you find out if they ever solved the case, if they had any solid suspects? ‘Cause the articles I’ve read seem to indicate a no on both counts, but you never know what they leak to the media.”

“I can look into it,” Hansen said, with no reluctance. He sounded intrigued.

Roan thought he heard high pitched voice in the background, and Hansen covered the handset and said he’d be right there in reply. “The wife wants you in bed?” Roan guessed.

“You got super hearing too, huh?”

“No, I’m just a good guesser. You did the right thing with the Ladowski case, really.”

“From what I can tell, McKichan, you were a good cop.”

“I was a horrible cop,” he told him. “But I was a good investigator.” And that was the horrible truth.

Roan hung up feeling a bit better, both about himself and the case, and watched the rest of the Colbert Report before going upstairs to brush his teeth. He’d just started, thinking mint and green tea was the best tasting toothpaste ever (bless Dee and his occasionally frou-frou tastes) when his phone rang again. He went out and looked down at the caller ID on his upstairs phone, and was surprised to see it was Gordo. He figured he had an even chance that Gordo was either calling to bust his balls or ask his help, but he answered it before it went to the machine. “Yeah Gordo?”

“So it’s not a myth! Kevin was right - you’re back in the world of the living.”

He sighed, and bit back the answer that, all in all, he’d rather be in the world of the dead. “Now that you’ve gotten that out of your system, is there something I can do for you, or did you just want to start some shit?”

“Actually, I need ya to do something for me. You know the Autumn Hills Estates?”

He had to think about that for a moment. “You mean the suburban housing project down the road from me?”

“That’s it. We just got a call of a rogue cat on a rampage there, and the cat containment squad is about fifteen minutes out. We have one fatality, and one confirmed mauling victim. From the description, I’m thinking leopard.”

“Shit. What happened?”

“From what we’ve gotten so far, this whole thing started when a homeowner came out to find their Doberman had been eaten. One of his neighbors was a cop - off duty - who decided stupidly enough to go looking for the cat with his own drug gun.”

The phone up here was cordless, so he was able to wedge the handset between his shoulder and ear as he walked to his drawer and found his Sig Sauer and belt clip holster. When was the last time he’d handled either of these things? “Let me guess - he’s the fatality.”

“Got it in one. It’s assumed his shot missed,” Gordo replied, with the weariness of a man who’d heard this story too many damn times. “A woman who came home from work shortly afterwards was mauled, but dragged inside her house by her partner. We have one unconfirmed report of someone letting their pit-bull out to attack the cat, and the dog also being killed.”

Roan clipped the gun in its holster onto the waistband of his jeans, but wondered if he could actually shoot the poor son of a bitch. It sounded like everyone was doing whatever they could to rile and otherwise piss off the cat. “Anybody know why it’s so aggressive? Other than them trying their damnedest to make it angry.” He went to the closet and found his retractable baton. It was six inches in its retracted state, sixteen inches when fully extended, black finished steel so it didn‘t reflect any light and couldn‘t be seen in shadows. If you knew what you were doing with it - and he did - it was easy to put someone down with it. A cat? Probably harder, but it was either that or the stun gun, and as far as he knew, stun guns of a certain voltage hurt cats but didn’t put them down. He’d probably just make it madder.

“I dunno. I was hoping you could figure that out before the squad shows up to shut it down.”

He attached the baton in its holster on the other side of his waist. He felt like an Old West gunslinger. (Hey - Clint Eastwood.) Of course, most likely he wouldn’t use either; usually he could just calm a cat by reminding it he was the alpha. But if it was mad, sick, or injured, it might not give a shit. “I’ll be there as quickly as I can. Where was it last spotted?”

“Two hundred and first street, but there have been lots of false reports. Everybody’s paranoid now.”

“Where are you?”

“Caught in traffic on the freeway,” he complained in disgust. “Some drunk fuck in a minivan overturned in the middle of the road. There shouldn’t be a traffic jam after midnight.”

“Agreed. Call the cat squad and tell them I’ll be on site. I don’t want ‘em arresting me because I “interfered” in their action.”

“Got it. But they might wanna arrest you anyways.”

“I know.” He hung up and tossed the handset on the bed, which was still unmade. When was the last time he made his own bed? He couldn’t remember; before Paris’s death, certainly. Roan searched through the shirts and jackets hanging in the closet until he found one that Paris had worn on his last day, one that had been hung up and never washed. Roan brought the fabric to his face and inhaled deeply, breathing him in. This wasn’t a trace, like he smelled in the car, or on his ring - this was him in full. He could have been standing right here.

His throat closed up and he thought he was going to lose it, but he managed to hold on. He had to go and find that cat before the squad showed up to kill it, and it was all because of Paris. Because that poor leopard could have escaped his captivity accidentally, could be a person who didn’t know he was infected and transformed unexpectedly, or one who decided while Human to give suicide by cop a try. All except the latter (to his knowledge) had happened to Paris while he was alive. He owed it to him to save all that he could.

He grabbed a coat, but in retrospect he didn’t know why. Maybe to hide the weapons - old habit. But the cat would smell the gun, and it wouldn’t know about the baton until it was whipping through the air.

Thinking about it, he took off the gun in its holster, and tossed it on the bed. Let the other people kill it.

He grabbed the motorcycle, figuring it would give him a better view of the scene, and breaking some speed laws, he was out at Autumn Hills in about two or three minutes. It was a bland suburban housing project, all the houses the same shape on similar sized lots, all painted in varying drab earth tones that he imagined stuck to the “autumn” theme. (Where did the hills come in? There were no hills here.) The sound of his motor was one of the only noises, replacing the usual chorus of barking dogs, but he assumed they were all inside now. An entire pack of dogs would have a shot against a leopard, but a single one? Only if it was a really vicious one trained for dog fighting, maybe it would stand a chance, but he wouldn’t bet on it.

He found two hundred and first street, and killed the engine, putting down the kickstand and leaving it beside the curb of a house painted a color he suspected was called “pale dung”. He took a deep breath, slowly parsing the scents, trying to find the cat one. There were housecats he had to filter out as well, but he caught the rank, musky scent of a wild cat underneath it all … and blood. Was it the blood of something it killed, or was it bleeding? Was it hurt? That would explain the aggressiveness.

He closed his eyes and used scent alone to guide him, to pick a direction, and he was both lucky and unlucky that there was no breeze for the moment. Lucky because it wasn’t blowing the scent away from him, but unlucky because it wasn’t blowing the scent to him. Still, he found a scent trail and followed it, climbing over back fences and crossing yards, sometimes setting off motion sensing security lights. Lights burned behind blinds and curtains, and sometimes he saw them move, people staring out at the idiot, some of them probably grabbing their phones and camcorders on the off chance they got to see the moron get eaten and could get their amateur footage on the news.

Eventually he caught a whiff of fresh blood in the backyard of a darkened house, and as he jumped down onto the grass, he heard as well as felt the ground squelch under his boots. His eyes adjusted to the dimness and he heard a low but deep growl coming from beneath a half finished deck.

The grass was wet with blood in a trail leading to the deck, and he saw two eyes, chatoyant in the dark, moving as it crawled out from underneath. It was hurt, but he couldn’t yet discern where or how. Unconsciously he had dropped into a crouch and responded to its growl with one of his own. “I’m not gonna hurt you,” he told it, his voice low and mangled by the growl. “Stay down.”

But of course it didn’t. It was out from beneath the deck now, unsteady on three legs, favoring the fourth. It was a leopard, long and lean with irregular spots, its eyes yellow and its tail flicking so quickly it looked like a blur. He could see that the hair on its neck was standing up, and knew this was bad. It was hurt and angry and scared, and he had no idea if he could dominate it with his scent and presence alone. Its growl amped up to a loud warning, and he roared at it, a challenge as much as a warning. He hope it took it to heart. His jaw ached with the desire to change, his muscles bunching beneath his skin as the scent of fear and blood suddenly seemed intoxicating, making him slightly dizzy. The lion in him was itching to get out. He hoped the cat realized that and submitted.