Oh shit, he knew better than this! He knew better than to leave a drink unattended and then finish it off, especially in a place like this. Looking out at the half naked men moving to the thudding beat under deep, colorful lights that seemed like signs of violence - bruise purple, blood red, cyanotic blue, decomposing green - he could almost believe he was looking at some kind of underworld gathering, a stag party in hell.

Roan knew he was disconnecting. His mind felt fuzzy, and his skin continued to prickle, but in a way that was pleasurable. Much, much too pleasurable; just a breeze against his skin verged on eye rolling ecstasy.

Ecstasy. Oh shit. This was ecstasy, wasn’t it? Or some chemical equivalent. He shouted for Dylan as the drug continued to make reality seem glassy, like a pond coated with a thin sheet of translucent ice. Dylan came over and started to ask what was wrong, but then he looked at his eyes and his expression transformed into a mask of shock. “Are you high?” he asked in disbelief.

“Who was near my drink?” he asked, holding on to the edge of the bar as if he might fall off. And he was afraid he might.

Dylan shook his head. “I don’t know. I was at the other end of the bar. Somebody drugged your drink? Was it a roofie?”

“I dunno. I think it might be something like ecstasy. I’d better get outta here.” He slid off his stool and tried to walk to the back, but he found standing and walking at the same time surprisingly difficult. Maybe because the floor seemed to be moving.

He leaned heavily on the bar, and Dylan slipped out from behind it - part of it opened, which Roan had hardly noticed before - and he quickly draped Roan’s arm over his shoulders as he put his own arm beneath them, and he didn’t so much help him into the back room as drag him. At least Dylan was pretty strong. “Cover for me,” he said to Luis before kicking the door shut, leaving some of the music behind, but only the treble.

There was an equipment locker shoved up against the wall, and Roan didn’t sit on it more than he collapsed, feeling the last of his sense drain away. Oddly, he didn’t have that much to lose.

“We have ambulances standing by,” Dylan said, and Roan belatedly realized he’d been talking for a while. “You know how these things go. It’d be easy to get some EMTs in here -”

“And have it get back to Dee? Fuck that. I’ll be fine.”

“Who cares about who it gets back to? If you’ve been overdosed -”

“I haven’t. Anyone who wants to kill me with drugs has a fight on their hands. I’m an infected - we have a drug tolerance that would make Keith Richards jealous.” He pressed the palms of his hands against his eyes, and watched the colors explode inside his eyelids with a strangely pleasurable feeling attached to each and every one. He knew he might be putting too much pressure on his eyes, but there was no pain. Only the pleasure center of his brain seemed to be functioning right now.

Dylan grabbed his hands gently and pulled them away from his eyes, probably worrying that he was inadvertently hurting himself, but his touch seemed to send an electric current through his arms, shooting up his spine and raising goose bumps on his skin. When had someone’s touch ever felt that good? Dylan crouched down in front of him, holding his hands between his, giving him a worried look. “What if I take you to the ER, huh? Get you checked out?”

Roan shook his head. “I’m fine, really. In fact, I can’t remember the last time I felt this good.” He slid his hands out from his, enjoying the friction, and realized what an idiot he had been.

Roan had never been good at the game, at picking up guys, which was probably why all his boyfriends - Connor, Paris, Diego - were really quite excellent at it. They played the game so he didn’t have to. All this talking with Dylan, even though it didn’t really seem like it … it was flirting, wasn’t it? No wonder everyone was under the impression they were fucking. They were giving off signs of interest, only he hadn’t realized it. Wow - some detective he was.

Dylan’s concerned look didn’t go away. “Okay, no. You know it’s the drugs.”

“That’s most of it,” he admitted, and grabbed Dylan’s face and kissed him. It felt much better than he could have ever imagined; it was like a straight shot of ecstasy right into his brain, electric and intense.

Dylan was shocked, and it seemed he tensed under the contact, pushing him away and holding him back at arm’s length. “Whoa. Okay, you don’t mean that.”

“Don’t tell me what I mean. You can’t say you don’t want me.”

He looked confused. “Roan, you’re completely stoned right now. The drugs make you horny, which is why everyone uses them in a place like this. It’s why you can often find an orgy in the bathroom by the end of the night.”

Roan grabbed him by the back of his head, his hair as soft as silk. Dylan did have really nice eyes, chocolate brown and almost feline in shape, deep and dark, suggesting something a bit exotic in his genetic background. Dylan grabbed his arm, but Roan knew he could easily overpower the normal Human if he really wanted to - no matter how muscular you were, you were still Human, and he didn’t have that limitation. “Did you know that attraction has a smell? It does. When you’re attracted to someone, there’s a shift in body chemistry, which is a shift in your smell. It’s subtle, no one ever really notices, but I can pick up pheromones. They taste like adrenaline, you know? Metallic. I know you want me, but the weirdest thing is, I didn’t realize I wanted you. I didn’t want to realize it. It’s like cheating on Paris.”

“Roan -” he began warningly, and Roan was picking up conflicting scents from him. Fear, lust.

“You shouldn’t be scared of me. I only want what you want.” He drew him back into a kiss, hard and passionate, and Dylan’s resistance crumbled almost instantly. He responded with a kiss as hungry as his own, and he felt bad for the kid that he never read the signals he was giving off.

That was one thing he didn’t get about heterosexuals. In most cases a man could accidentally hurt a woman, couldn’t he? He couldn’t kiss her as hard as he wanted to, for fear of inadvertent harm. But you could kiss a man as hard as you wanted and he could kiss back just as hard - there was no holding back. In most cases, you had a partner who could give back as good as they got.

He stood up, feeling a bit more sure on his feet, pulling Dylan up with him, and shoved him against the wall, the feeling of his hard, warm body far more pleasurable than it had any right to be. Dylan tasted like the mints he’d been chewing all night, a cool taste like ice water. Roan reached up under his shirt, as he had to feel his skin, and it was like sweet electricity running up his arms once more as he touched the long, smooth muscles of Dylan’s back. Sweat was pouring through Roan’s pores at such an alarming rate he could smell the drugs in his own bloodstream, and the scent was confusing, enough so that Dylan was able to push him back again, although not as far this time. “Okay,” he gasped, panting for breath. “Okay. Roan -”

“Don’t deny it,” he said. Had he growled? Belatedly, he thought he heard a growl in his voice.

Although Roan thought he smelled a spike of fear coming from Dylan, it didn’t show on his face. “I’m not. It’s just -”

“You want me.”

“Not like this.” He cupped his face gently in his hands, and looked him straight in the eyes. “Let me get you home, okay?”

The feeling of his skin on his remained electric, sending a shuddering pleasure through his nerves. “Fine. Let’s go to my place.”

He grimaced, almost smiling. “Damn, that did sound like a come on, didn’t it? Not what I meant.”

“I mean it,” he said, and then bit his neck. Not hard enough to break the skin, just hard enough to let him know he was serious, to let him know he was marked. Dylan let out a gasp of surprise more than pain, and he felt his fingers briefly tighten on his biceps. God, it felt good; even the smell of his fear was arousing.

He remembered leaving the warehouse only as a cessation of noise and smells, giving way to cooler night air that initiated a cascade of pleasure all its own. Who knew a temperature shift could feel this good? Blood pounded through his head, an echo of drums like machine guns, and his shirt was so wet with sweat it was like he just walked out of the bay.

(Somewhere, vaguely in the back of his mind, he remembered something about dehydration being a serious consequence of ecstasy, and some people actually dying from it while on the stuff. But only vaguely, and he didn’t really pay attention to it, as he couldn’t. His mind was pulsing with energy, and his skin was just one raw nerve.)

The drive home was a colorful blur of lights that felt like a caress. Dylan occasionally said something, mostly along the lines of “You still with me, Roan?” which he thought was a funny thing to ask. Where else was he going to go?

Dylan had to unlock his front door, because for some reason he had some problems with the key. “You need to drink something,” Dylan said, taking a minute to figure out where the light switch was.

“Beer’d be good.”

“No, you need water.” He headed to his kitchen like this was his place too, and Roan just leaned against the wall, amazed that this felt good. He now knew why people did ecstasy, even if it did burn your brain out faster than a Brady Bunch marathon.

Dylan brought him a bottle of water from the fridge, and asked, “Why are there nametags on your appliances?”

“I can’t have pets. I might eat ‘em.” He took the bottle from Dylan, painfully aware that he was standing arm’s length away from him, out of reach. “You really that scared of me?”

“I’m not scared of you, you’re just not yourself right now.”

He took the cap off the bottle and gulped the water down, the sudden cold feeling like the world’s best orgasm. Holy shit, what a great drug this was. He didn’t realize he was thirsty until he had the water, and now he was incredibly thirsty, guzzling the water like it was the last bottle of the stuff on the planet. He finished it off and gasped, suddenly realizing he needed to breathe, and when he could talk, he told Dylan, “I’m sorry.”

He shook his head dismissively. “You have nothing to be sorry for. The drugs -”

“No, not that. I’m sorry I didn’t realize I was kinda leading you on. Was I doin’ that to Matt too? No, I don’t think so in his case.” He felt unsteady on his feet, so he sank down the wall and sat on the floor, letting the empty bottle drop there. “I’m so fucked up. I’ve been fucked up since I lost him, you know? I’m not sure I know how to live without him. Isn’t that awful? How someone can just come in and upset your entire life.”

Dylan sat down on the floor, still remaining safely out of immediate reach, folding his long legs beneath him in an easy lotus position. He probably did yoga; it probably went along with being a Buddhist. “I’m not going to lie to you and say it gets easier, because it doesn’t. It’s just that you get used to it. The Human animal has an amazing capacity to get used to almost anything.”

“But you almost killed yourself.”

Dylan visibly flinched and looked away, a muscle twitching in his jaw. “You dug that up too, huh?”

“No. I saw your scars tonight.”

Dylan looked down at his exposed arms. In full light, they were harder to see; they were almost invisible. But now that Roan knew they were there, they were impossible not to see. “It wasn’t actually Jason that made me try it,” he muttered, his voice lowered to a whisper. “After his death, and after I got out of the hospital, I wasn’t sure I could function or even wanted to. But then I poured everything into vengeance; I wanted to make sure Steadman paid for what he did, hitting us and killing him. But as the court date kept getting put off, and the charges kept getting bargained down, I got obsessive and furious. That fucker was gonna do only a couple of years for taking all of the rest of Jason’s life away, and he never even seemed remorseful. As the hearing approached, I went out and bought a gun, and started to plan how I would get it in the courtroom and take him out. I had a friend working janitorial at the courthouse, so I had a way to get it in, and in my mind I had worked it all out. I could see myself killing him, blowing him away, his brains coating the wall like a Jackson Pollock. And that’s when I realized I was seeing my mother’s brains splattered all over the bedroom wall, and my father’s. I thought … shit, I was turning into my dad. I was a monster, just like he was. I just … it scared me so much, I couldn’t bear it. I grabbed the first thing I saw, which was an X-acto knife, and sliced my arms open. It was better to die than to be another monster like that. But Sheba found me before I totally bled out, and I was in the hospital when Steadman was sentenced, which was surely for the best. When I got out, I chucked away the Prozac and found Buddhism, hoping against hope that it would save me from becoming like him.” He rubbed his eyes like he was trying to hide tears, which was something Roan knew all too well. Even through the drugs, he could remember that self-loathing, that fear, that lingering stain of abuse.

“I was afraid of that,” he admitted. “I still am sometimes, that I’m gonna turn out just like my foster parents, the bad ones. But it’s not true. I’m not them, and you’re not your father. You’re one of the sweetest men I’ve ever met. And I have scars too.” He knew he could see the one that sliced his eyebrow in half - everyone could see that scar - but he peeled his shirt off, so he could see his largest scar, the one along his collarbone. Since he was sitting against the wall, he’d never see the bullet hole scar - more of a pockmark really - on his back, but that was a minor one anyways. “We all have scars. The ones you can see are easier.”

Dylan stared at him for a very long moment, his eyes eventually finding the long whitish scar made by the saw, and then moved slowly back up to his face. For a very long time, his expression was unreadable. “Paris used to talk about you all the time,” he said. “When he came into Panic. I always wondered why he never hooked up with anyone, and yeah, I was attracted to him too, although I knew better than to hit on him. After flirting for a while and getting too many guys’ hopes up, he’d sit at the bar and wax rhapsodic about you. God, he loved you. He told me that you had a brusque exterior that some people found off putting, but if they got to know you, if they got in under your armor, they’d fall instantly in love with you. I think I know what he meant now.”

Bringing up Paris now was disorienting. He missed him; he missed him so fucking much he didn’t know how he could stand it. But the drugs were filling in all those empty places, smoothing away so much pain that all he could feel now was need. “Stay with me.”

There was a long silence as Dylan thought it over.

****

Roan woke up with a pounding headache and a taste in his mouth like it had been reupholstered with dirty sweat socks. Since when did ecstasy give you a hangover? Maybe it was dehydration - he had absolutely no spit left.

He took a long shower, washing the drug stink off his skin, and took three Excedrin, considering vicodin and rejecting it. He’d had enough hard drugs for one weekend.

Vaguely, fragments of last night started coming back to him. Someone slipped him a mickey at the circuit party - god, how fucking embarrassing. He pulled on some sweatpants and went downstairs, his aching stomach now taking precedence over the pounding in his head, and he let his hair drip down over his face, enjoying the mere feeling of water. He was probably lucky he hadn’t fatally dehydrated.

Or maybe it wasn’t luck. He found a couple of empty water bottles just beyond the base of the stairs, as well as the shirt he’d been wearing last night, sweat soaked and discarded. That’s when he remembered Dylan, and froze. Oh shit, oh holy shit, did he fuck him? He desperately searched his aching brain for memories, but there weren’t many forthcoming.

There was movement on the couch, he heard it as well as saw it out of the corner of his eye, and looked to see Dylan stretched out there, the blue plaid throw half covering him and half on the floor. He was still wearing his clothes, although he‘d kicked his shoes off. Roan breathed a sigh of relief, although it belatedly occurred to him that maybe Dylan just got dressed before he decided to sleep it off. Seemed unlikely, though.

He padded quietly to the refrigerator and drank pineapple orange juice directly from the carton. He gulped down most of the quart without taking a breath - he couldn’t remember the last time he was this thirsty. He grabbed another bottle of water to have while he put the coffee on, and heard a sleepy voice say, “Good morning.”

Roan glanced at the clock on the microwave display before glancing at Dylan, who was sitting up and stretching his arms over his head. “Technically, it’s afternoon.”

“Is it?” Dylan dropped his arms and rolled his head like he was working kinks out of his neck. Maybe he was; there weren’t any pillows on the couch. “Well, parties take it out of you.”

“Yeah. Um … did we … ”

“No, we didn’t,” he said, getting up. “Can I use your bathroom?”

What a relief. “Knock yourself out.” This proved how noble Dylan could be, because he wasn’t sure, if the situation had been reversed, that he wouldn’t have taken advantage of him. He was an attractive man beyond a doubt.

As he went off, Roan searched around to see what he could nuke for a quick breakfast, but there wasn’t a lot. He needed to go shopping again, although this time he should bring a car. There were some croissants he nuked to warm up, and by that time the coffee was done and Dylan had returned. “What do you take?” he asked, gesturing at the coffee.

“On days like this? Way too much sugar.”

“Got it.” He searched the cupboards for a full minute before coming up with a couple of sugar packets that must have been leftovers from some fast food restaurant past. “This is all I’ve got.”

“I’ll take it.”

They sat on opposites sides of the breakfast bar and had croissants and coffee, and Roan realized he was shirtless. But Dylan didn’t seem to care.

They ate in silence for almost five minutes, and then Roan decided he couldn’t stand it anymore. “I’m really sorry -”

“Don’t,” he replied, shaking his head. “It wasn’t your fault, there was no damage done. So don’t be sorry. How do you feel?”

“Besides completely fucking humiliated? Better than twenty minutes ago, but not as good as last night.”

“I wouldn’t recommend doing ecstasy as a lifestyle.”

“Fuck man, don’t worry. It was fun for a while, but I need all the brain cells I have. Besides, I don’t like getting out of control like that. The lion could come out, and no good ever comes of that.”

Dylan studied him for a moment, and Roan knew now that he wasn’t wearing colored contacts. “Would that ever happen? You really seem like the stronger of the two.”

“Usually I am, but I have moments of weakness. You saw some last night. I’m … okay, I can’t apologize without you telling me not to, so I won’t. Assume it’s implied.”

He finished his croissant and his coffee and set his plate and mug aside. “What happens now?”

Roan considered pretending he didn’t know what he was talking about, but even Dylan wouldn’t believe he’d lost that many brain cells. He set his dishes aside, and folded his hands together on the breakfast bar. “I don’t know. What … what do you think?”

He didn’t have to think about it for too long. “I don’t want to be your rebound guy, Roan.”

He nodded, totally understanding that. “It’s not something anyone wants, no. I -” Roan paused as Dylan stood up and came over to his side of the breakfast bar, where he leaned down and kissed him.

It was a very chaste kiss on the lips really, but he kept the contact for a long time, and it just ached with tenderness. Something about it seemed strangely erotic. Roan let Dylan break the contact, as it was the absolute least he could do after last night. “I want more than that,” Dylan told him, his voice and expression both questioning and kind. “Is that possible?”

There was no other term for it really - he felt gobsmacked. After all that, he still wanted him? And for more than a quick fuck? Weird. It kind of scared him. “Give me time.”

“Absolutely.” He then gave him a gentle kiss on the forehead before quickly taking his place on the other side of the bar. “Do you want to finish getting dressed? I can drive you back to the parking lot so you can pick up your car.”

Oh shit, he’d forgotten all about that. That wasn‘t a great area of town either, so he hoped no one had ripped it off. “Oh, yeah. Thanks, I’d appreciate that.”

“No problem.” Roan was half way up the stairs when Dylan added, “Oh! Crap, I forgot to tell you last night. I found out Ginger Snapp’s real name. It’s Bryan Dodd; he used to work at the Blockbuster on Jameson Avenue. Is that a help?”

He looked down at him, and knew why he was scared. This shit was always scary, interacting with people, but even more troubling was the idea that there might be life after Paris. But there probably was, whether he liked it or not. “It’s a big help, Dylan.”

And Dylan was too, although he didn’t know if he’d ever tell him that.

How weird was this anyways? He wasn’t a horribly ugly guy, he knew that, but he’d never had to deal with someone who wouldn’t stop throwing themselves at him. That was Paris’s territory, not his.

Roan parked down the street from the club, and heard Matt’s voice as he was engaged in an argument with someone who was clearly at the end of their patience. When he was within shouting distance, he yelled, “Matt, knock this shit off!”

Matt turned, drunk enough to wobble, but he must have recognized him, because his open mouth clamped shut like his jaw was on a spring hinge. The guy he’d been arguing with was, judging from the ID hanging from his neck, one of the Panic security guys. He had bright blond, bleached hair, spiky straight, spray on tan skin, with piercings in his ears, lip, and nose. Just going from that, you’d think he was a twink, but he had the big, thick arms of a muscle queen, so he was like a strange hybrid of the two.

The muscle queen gazed at him skeptically. “This asshole your friend?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

The guy pointed a finger at Matt, and it looked like, just for a second, Matt was considering biting his finger off. “He’s banned for the next two months. Tell him that when he’s sober.” He had a slight speech impediment, but the tongue stud he was wearing explained that. It was probably new and he wasn’t used to it yet.

Roan saluted him, and after a moment, the guy accepted it with a grunt, and after giving Matt one more evil look, he turned away and stalked into the club. Music swelled and pounded out into the night with his entrance, and fell back to a distant echo as the door shut behind him.

Matt opened his mouth to speak, but Roan silenced him with a harsh shushing gesture. “No, Matt, you listen to me first. Do you want to work for me?”

The question seemed to stun him. “Huh?”

“Do you want to work for me? Yes or no.”

“Well … yeah. But -”

“Then you will get your PI license, and you will knock all of this shit off. We can work together as friends, but that’s it. I have made myself clear about this a thousand ways, some of them unconscionably nasty, and yet you persist with this. If you insist on doing so, we can’t work together at all. Do you understand me?”

Matt’s face was flushed, and his eyes had the heavy liquidity of the drunk. Roan could smell a sharp scent of wine and vodka coming from him like liberally applied aftershave. “Roan -”

“Do you understand me?”

“Yeah, but … I love you.”

“No you don’t. You think you do.”

“It’s the same thing!”

“It’s not. You hardly know me, even after all this time, Matt. “

Something in his face turned surly. “I know you’re a self-pitying son of a bitch.”

“Exactly, and why would you want a piece of that?”

He shook his head, and seemed aware that he had sabotaged his own conversational gambit. “No, I didn’t mean -”

“Matt, go home, and talk to me in the morning or the afternoon, whenever your hangover allows you to talk. We work as equals or not at all. And that means you don’t get insanely jealous of my friends, and you stay sober.” Roan knew he should feel bad for that last bit, but hell, he only popped a vicodin now and then to make himself numb. It wasn’t like the crazy addict past that Matt had told him all about, what with emergency rooms having to restart his heart and strap him down to gurneys while he freaked out. It was totally different.

Okay, so he was a big fucking hypocrite. It wasn’t the worst thing he’d ever been called, even by himself.

Roan heard a motor idle at the curb, and turned to see the cab he’d already called for waiting there. He grabbed Matt’s arm and led him over to it. “Tell the driver where you live, and go straight home. You’re in deep enough shit as it is.”

He looked disappointed. “You’re not gonna take me?”

“And give you a chance to throw a clumsy pass that would embarrass the both of us? Not on your life.” He opened the back door and held it open for him. “This is your last chance, Matt. You can work with me on my terms, or not at all. Think about it.”

Matt reluctantly got in, throwing him sulky looks that would have looked more appropriate on a fifteen year old. But Roan really didn’t want to keep babysitting a man who was old enough to know better, or at least should have been. He watched the cab drive off, and wondered if he’d have enough money to pay Matt back in one bulk payment.

He was still standing on the sidewalk, doing math in his head, when he heard the music swell loudly as the door was opened once more. A couple of guys spilled out, talking and laughing, but following close behind was Dylan, looking no worse for wear, and wearing an actual shirt, although it was a baggy t-shirt that looked like he borrowed it from somebody else. “Where’s Matt?”

“I sent him home in a cab. You okay?”

He nodded, hands in his pants pocket. “He’s a bad shot. Lucky me.”

But the wind was blowing towards him, and Roan picked up a hint of blood. He took a deep breath, parsed the scent, and took a closer look at Dylan’s right ear. “You have a cut.”

Dylan reached up, puzzled, and felt the cut, looking with surprise at the blood on his fingertips. “Huh. Can’t be that big. Did you just sniff me?”

He shrugged uncomfortably, glancing away. “Sniffed towards you, yeah.”

“You’re aware of how weird that is?”

“Yes. Sorry.”

“No, that’s okay. I just wasn’t prepared for that.” He then gave him a sly smirk, and asked, “You sure you’re not a vampire? ‘Cause that’d actually be pretty cool.”

He scowled at him sarcastically. “Vampires don’t exist. God, how gullible are you? I’m a werecat, remember?”

Dylan chuckled good naturedly at his weak joke, and glanced out at the street, giving Roan a better look at the cut on his face. It was small, probably just a fragment of flying glass that nicked him, but that was bad enough. Hell, Matt ought to be thanking Dylan for not having him arrested, because he could have easily. He even had an injury to show for it. “Look, I’m sorry about Matt. I have no idea why he thinks we’re involved. He’s fucking nuts.”

“It’s the place,” he replied, gesturing back at the nightclub. “You work at Panic, everybody assumes you’re a slut. It’s a real pain in the ass. Well, not literally. Not for me, at any rate.”

“So there are sluts working for Panic.”

“Oh hell yeah. Just not me.”

“You’re the stick in the mud.”

Dylan gave him the finger, and Roan laughed. “I prefer choosy.” He paused, and gave him a serious look. “Look, go easy on Matt. I mean, I know he flipped out for no reason, and he’s verging on insane stalker, but I think he really does care about you. He’s just kinda … screwed up.”

“I know. But I’m never going to be grateful in the way he wants me to be, so I don’t know what else to do with him, besides tell him to grow up and shove him out of a moving car.”

“Maybe you can think of a step before that. You’re smart.”

“I dunno. Shit like this makes me feel really dumb.”

Dylan shrugged, but his look was extraordinarily kind. “People rarely make sense. But you should see that as a good thing, since you’d be out of a job if they did.”

That was probably true, but as thoughts went, it wasn’t very comforting.

****

Matt must have been humiliated by his display, because he went to great lengths to avoid him.

Namely, he went back into rehab. Roan found a message on his machine the next afternoon, which was Matt apologizing profusely, and saying he’d talk to him more once he “got his head together”, and went back in to rehab for what Dee found out was a twenty day program. Dee was of the opinion that he should either fuck the kid or cut him loose - or both, in that order - but Roan wasn’t sure that was the way to handle this either. At least he had twenty days to come to a conclusion.

It was Saturday before he knew it, and he hadn’t gotten very far in the Tolliver case. He was finding it nearly impossible to track down the legal owner of “Diamond Escorts”, a woman (!) named Anya Markov. According to Randi, she did seem to exist in financial records, but the address on her records, which Roan checked out, actually belonged to a rental storage place. The owner of said rental storage place, Samir Husseini, seemed to not know who Anya Markov was, and neither he nor Randi could find a connection between them. Roan was half convinced that Anya Markov was an alias, but whose he had no idea. If Husseini was pimping out high class rent boys, he’d probably live in a better place than he actually did.

He had another lead, though. It seemed that Jacob did have a “semi-boyfriend”, a guy who occasionally did a drag act under the name “Ginger Snapp”. The problem was, no one knew “Ginger’s” real name, and Ginger’s last performance was in Portland over two weeks ago. Roan was having a hell of a time finding anything out about “Ginger”, but when he mentioned it to Dylan, Dylan promised he’d ask around the bar. Apparently there were some drag queen fans around the bar, guys who were into the scene, and it was possible that someone knew Ginger.

Roan arrived at the converted warehouse early, just to learn the lay of the land before he had to start patrolling it in semi-darkness. It wasn’t really a warehouse more than it was an airplane hangar, with a humungous dance floor that you could have parked a rather large private plane on, with some room left for a conga line. Risers had been added to the far right side and back walls to make stages for dancers and whatever else they had going on here (circuit parties often had odd acts for reasons he hadn’t been able to determine, but apparently acrobats weren’t unheard of; neither were strippers, go-go boys, or the occasional performance artist).

There was a bar on the left hand side that was about twenty feet in length and seemed to be a single piece of black Lucite, curved into a kind of parenthesis on its side. Behind the bar was a door leading to the back, where temporary rooms had been set up, presumably for the “performers” and tech staff. There were lighting rigs above, metal girders with gel lights that seemed to crisscross the corrugated metal ceiling, and a special riser only a few feet off the ground, full of various DJ equipment. A closer look at their surroundings showed hidden speakers. There were probably some up near the lighting rigs as well.

As it turned out, Dylan had shown up early too, and for much the same reason, although he just wanted to get the layout of the bar down before he was mobbed by a bunch of guy demanding drinks. Luis would be working with him tonight, mainly because he schmoozed his way into the party, so he wasn’t worried about being too overwhelmed.

It was odd to see Dylan behind a bar with a shirt on, but he took advantage of the change of venue to vary his wardrobe. He wore jeans that seemed genuinely aged and comfortable, and a yellow t-shirt with a big lion’s head on it, its mane flowing around it like hair, inexplicably wearing a pair of Human glasses. “I thought you’d like this one,” he admitted. “Also, it seemed just surreal enough for the evening.”

Roan had to admit he had a point. Roan also had to go into the back to find something he could sit on, since he didn’t want to stand at the bar like a loser all evening (the bar had no seats, as it wasn’t expected that anyone would want to sit down at any point). He eventually found a stool and brought it out, parking it at the far end of the bar where he’d have the best view of the room. Although Dylan was setting up the bar, he paused to comment on the paperback book Roan had brought with him, the latest Haruki Murakami novel, and it turned out Dylan actually knew who he was. They talked about him for a bit before the DJ arrived, the trim, good looking black guy from Panic, one of the regular DJs. Roan was fairly certain he knew his name, but couldn’t recall it.

He greeted Dylan with warm familiarity, and then mentioned he had to do a sound check, for levels and balance, so he asked them if they had any requests. While Dylan gave it more thought than was probably necessary, Roan suggested, “I Like Your Booty, But I’m Not Gay.”

That made the guy laugh, and ask, “Is that real?”

“Oh yeah, it was in the Aqua Teen Hunger Force movie.”

“I’ll have to look that one up.”

“You got the new Interpol?” Dylan asked him.

“Of course, yeah. I should have guessed.” He winked at Dylan, like this was some kind of private joke between them. Maybe it was.

“How about some Skinny Puppy?” He asked, just assuming he wouldn’t have any Pansy Division.

“The industrial punk band?” Roan nodded. “Yeah, I think I got some of them. Let me know if you hear a sound imbalance, ‘kay?”

For some reason, he patted Roan on the back in a friendly manner before loping off to the DJ booth. Roan looked at Dylan, and asked, “Old boyfriend?”

Dylan grimaced sheepishly, and went back to setting up the bar. “Not exactly.”

“And you told me you weren’t slut.”

He gave him a mock evil look, and went back to setting things up as music started pounding over the sound system, which was loud enough to almost stop his heart. The lighting techs started testing the lighting rigs too, which meant the true overheads dimmed and the colored gels started to turn on, splashing colors like neon paint across the cavernous dance floor, as well as turning on black lights that seemed to highlight stains left behind by the cleaning crew. It was between the testing of the red spots and the indigo ones that Roan finally noticed the very faint scars on the inside of Dylan’s forearms. Normally you couldn’t see them, they were very tiny, but something about the lighting made them appear very faint against his olive skin. Those were razor cuts, weren’t they? He’d tried to commit suicide at some point in his life. They weren’t the horizontal wrist slashes of the amateur drama queen either, but the full on horizontal arm cuts of the dedicated depressive. Well, he had admitted that he’d gotten semi-suicidal after Jason died, but he’d never admitted going that far. They all had their secrets, he supposed.

Roan was forced to give his book up for the evening when the overhead lights were killed completely, and the partiers started showing up. Luis showed up about an hour after they started letting people in, and Dylan wasn’t surprised, suggesting that Luis always showed up on his own timetable. He was a young, good looking Latino, but he was wearing a black mesh hustler style shirt and short shorts that always looked patently ridiculous on a grown man, and yet probably got him a shitload of tips. He did seem to be a hit with the guys.

In no time at all, the warehouse, which had seemed so cavernous when he arrived, seemed claustrophobic, as men filled it from one side to the others, the majority with their shirts off - if they’d even bothered to wear one at all. There was some muscle queen, built like Michelangelo’s David, who wore nothing but what looked like swimming trunks and an almost life-sized boa constrictor added to his chest and back in body paint. There was almost no ventilation, so it got hot and sweaty in there in no time, and that just encouraged more stripping. Which was surely the point.

Roan didn’t want to drink anything, as he didn’t want to be forced to go into the bathrooms and see the sheer amount of fucking and drug dealing going on, but it got so hot in there from all the bodies that he was forced to have something. Since he was technically on duty, he stuck to cola, but he figured he’d have stuck to non-alcoholic drinks at any rate, as he didn’t want to lose any of his inhibitions in a place like this. That was a disaster waiting to happen.

There were some infecteds here too. He could smell their musk mixed in with the testosterone in the crowd, although there were so many men here, so many strong competing scents, that he probably would have a hard time tracking them unless they neared him.

There was a wicker bowl on the bar, but while most would usually contain pretzels or peanuts, this one contained condoms. When he was hit on for the fourth time in the evening, this time by a guy in his early twenties with a bare chest that looked carved out of granite and wearing only low riding jeans and a nipple ring with a fake ruby in it, Roan told him point blank, “I’m infected. And I’m not the only infected here.”

The guy squinted at him as if skeptical, but his pupils were so wide he could have parked the Mustang in them. “You’re shitting me, right?”

Roan held up his arm and pointed at his Leo tattoo. “Yeah, I just have this for show. There are others here and I can smell them.” He grabbed the bowl full of condoms and shoved them into his hands. “Tell others and pass those out. Unless they really want to turn into a leopard or something.”

The guy just blinked at him for a moment or two, as if not comprehending any of this, but finally what was left of his synapses fired, and he wandered back off into the living mass of dancing bodies. He had no idea if he would follow his orders or not, but at least he had tried.

He noticed Luis staring at him with his pretty dark eyes. “You don’t fuck around, do you?”

“Not with other people’s lives, no.” Or at least he tried not to. He wasn’t sure how good his record ultimately was.

So far the night hadn’t been too bad. Within three hours, he’d only been forced to get up twice, once to break up a loud argument between ex-boyfriends and tell them to take it outside or get bounced, and the next time to separate two guys who seemed to be in an argument over one man’s boyfriend and whether he had been grabbed or not. Roan had been willing to let them go to their separate corners - the crowd was certainly big enough - but then the bigger guy, who was almost bear like in weight and size, shoved the other one hard, who was more of the skinny twink tribe, and Roan had to throw the bear out. He wasn’t going to go, but Roan got him in an arm lock and dragged him cursing to the door, to a tiny current of enthusiastic applause. He almost felt like part of the floor show.

By the time he made it back to his corner of the bar, he was sweating so much his shirt was sticking to him. He gulped down the rest of his soda while Dylan wandered down and said, “He was nearly twice as big as you! I thought you were about to get pummeled.”

“Are you kidding? I’m the bad ass detective. I floss my teeth with guys like that.” There was no point in mentioning that he could, at almost any time, call on his lion side to take care of any real threats. He didn’t need to know that.

It was about fifteen minutes later when he realized something was wrong.

It started small. He was sweating profusely, making him think all this combined body heat was getting to him, but then looking out at the floor of writhing men, he thought he saw the floor start to tilt, which he knew wasn’t happening. He rubbed his eyes, figuring it was an optical illusion, but when he opened his eyes once more, things still didn’t look quite right.

He felt a flush of heat, and with it came this odd sensation, not unlike a slightly prickly feeling under his skin, but it wasn’t a bad feeling. In fact, it was oddly pleasurable, sending an enjoyable shudder through his body that seemed to make his scalp tingle as he realized he had this wonderfully light, disconnected feeling in his own head, like his brain was suddenly filled with warming sunshine.