He tried to calm him, but he did a half assed job, and wasn’t good at it at the best of times anyways. So he told Matt he’d call some of his friends in the force and see if he could find out anything. It didn’t exactly calm him, but it gave him an easy out. As soon as he hung up, Roan sighed and hung his head, feeling a headache coming on. He opened the nightstand on his side of the bed, pulling a bottle of Excedrin out of the drawer, and dry swallowed three of them. Sadly he went through quite a bit of Excedrin, and while he preferred washing them down with liquids, he didn’t always have that option.

Pier twenty seven. That was on the run down side of the waterfront, wasn’t it? A popular spot for a lethal version of the pump and dump, as in “pump a bullet in ‘em and dump ‘em in the water”. Why would a little rich girl like Callie be anywhere near there? Of course the obvious answer was she wasn’t there; she was simply dumped there. She’d been killed somewhere else, perhaps somewhere nicer.

Okay, no - he was jumping to conclusions. Maybe she wasn’t murdered. Maybe it was an accident. (Oh yeah, sure. She got in a car with some strange men, and then accidentally died. That was plausible.) He punched up a familiar number, just now starting to hear the water drain in the bathtub.

After a couple of rings, the phone was answered. “Murphy, homicide,” a clipped voice said.

“Hey Dropkick, I’ve got some info for you.”

She sighed, a reaction only partially exaggerated. “Oh god, here comes trouble. What do you got, Angus?”

“You just fished a vic off pier twenty seven? Young Caucasian female. Partial i.d. as Thora Bishop?”

She tapped her keyboard for a few seconds. “We don’t even have a partial on that one, just speculation until we get a confirm from the relative. Don’t tell me she’s one of yours.”

“Yeah. If it is Bishop, she went missing the night before last, pulled into a car on North Avenue; I’ve got an eyewitness.”

Murphy made a noise of disappointment as she did a computer search. “I’m not pulling up a missing persons report.”

“Because it wasn’t reported. The family were afraid it would leak to the press. A friend of Thora’s hired me to look into it.”

Her reply was a disgusted groan this time. “So these are the Thorp Chemical Bishops then?”

“Yep.”

“Seriously, who gives a fuck? If the girl went missing under suspicious circumstances, why didn’t they report it regardless of whether the press would get it or not?”

“I was wondering that myself. Can you tell me anything about the body? Method of death?”

“It’s not really a homicide case, it’s just suspicious due to its location, and the coroner probably only got the body within the hour. You know damn well autopsies don’t move that fast.”

“But initial impressions were made, yes? Did the body appear to be in the water a while? Was she dressed? Was the body visibly injured? Come on, Dropkick. And don’t tell me you didn’t see it - you know who in the station did.”

An impatient sigh was followed by a “Hold on a sec.” After several long seconds, the bathroom door opened and Paris came out, hair partially wet, clad only in black silk boxers that clung sexily to his damp skin. Yes, he was too skinny, had lost a lot of muscle tone, but he was still a good looking man, still broad across the chest and shoulders, his legs long and strong. So what if he had inexplicable bruises and skin so unnaturally pale it almost looked translucent sometimes? He was still beautiful to him; he’d always be beautiful to him.

Paris gave him a questioning look as he searched for clothes, and he quietly signaled that he’d tell him once he was done. Par just nodded. It was nice having this kind of wordless communion with someone. He tried not to dwell on it. Finally Murphy came back on the line. “She was in the water long enough to discolor and bloat a bit, but not long enough to be significantly nibbled by fish. She was dressed, and there was no obvious wounds or blood. She didn’t appear to be harmed. That do ya?”

“Call me once the autopsy report’s in, okay?”

“That is so against S-O-P.”

“But you will?”

She grumbled. “Yeah, yeah. You’re lucky I owe you one.”

As soon as he hung up, he told Paris what had become of Callie as he stepped into his jeans, and Par frowned sadly, pausing as he pulled a thermal undershirt out of the drawer. “God, that’s terrible. Are we headed to the crime scene?”

That startled him. Why would Paris think that? “No. There hasn’t even been a positive ident of the body yet. If it’s not her, we’d look like idiots, wouldn’t we?”

Paris just stared at him for a moment, as if not sure what to say, then pulled a dark blue sweater on, using that as an excuse to turn away. Just by the set of his shoulders he knew Paris wanted to say something, that Roan had said something wrong, but he couldn’t imagine what, and Paris had clearly decided to let it go. He almost asked, but decided he didn’t want to know. The way the sweater hung off of him made him, for a single moment, feel like crying, but it passed. It was a feeling Roan lived with more often than not these days.

On the drive to the university medical center, they talked about the case, and what my have happened to Callie, what it could mean if it was her, then talked about whether it would snow or not, if those dark clouds on the fringe of the horizon were snow clouds. Paris insisted that being Canadian, he’d know better than him. The music filled the rest of the silence, and Par eventually leaned against him, resting his head on his shoulder as he drove. Roan put an arm around his shoulders, and wondered how a cynic like him had come to this, come to have his heart break in eight thousand little pieces a day at a time.

The medical center was a sprawling collection of buildings amidst lawns as sculpted and green as a golf course. Inside the Kesselman Wing, after talking with a painfully cheerful young receptionist, they waited in thinly padded chairs in a lobby with large windows, letting in lots of cold winter light, and a television they both ignored sat in a far corner in a wooden entertainment center, flashing pictures and lights that meant nothing.

They were escorted into separate exam rooms at different times; Paris first, him about five minutes later. The doctor who took his blood pressure and all the other routine shit was a young Indian man who was already starting to lose his hair; his black hair was thinning enough in the front that he was already brushing it forward over his forehead. He’d probably be totally bald by thirty five.

After taking a blood sample, Roan was sent back out to the lobby, where he expected to see Paris waiting for him. He wasn’t. He talked with the receptionist, whose name was Sarah, an attractive young woman with skin the color of coffee and a dazzling smile that seemed brighter than muted light of the lobby. She smelled of some vanilla perfume, but it wasn’t so strong that it was overpowering. She told him that sometimes the doctors around here worked at their own pace, and she’d check to make sure everything was okay. It was then that he felt his cell phone hum in his coat pocket, and the vibration actually startled him for a moment, as he’d forgotten he’d left it on in any capacity. Well, at least he’d remember to turn off the ring; the latest ring tone Par had inflicted on him was David Bowie’s “Cat People Theme”.

Roan had no intention of answering it, but as he returned to one of the lobby chairs he took it out to see who was calling. There’s no way it was Murphy with an autopsy report, but maybe someone else at the pier had seen something she hadn’t mentioned. But it wasn’t Murphy calling; it was Gordo. He hadn’t heard from in a while, so he was almost surprised to see his number. He answered out of curiosity.

Gordo didn’t even give him any foreplay. “You busy right now?” His voice sounded drawn, tense.

“Not particularly. What’s up?”

“We have a really weird situation developing here at the base of Washburn Road. If you can beat the SWAT team here, I’d appreciate it; I’m not sure I want to see a Human/cat bloodbath on the six o’clock news tonight.”

“What’s going on?”

“A homeowner seems to have a nest of cats in his abandoned barn, that’s what. We can’t even get close to it, hence the wait for the SWAT team.”

“A nest? Cats don’t nest.”

“Tell these cats that. I think they’re mostly cougars, but I haven’t seen them all. It’s … you have to see this, McKichan; you have to tell us what the fuck this means.”

He rubbed his eyes, wondering if he had the option of actually saying no, but his curiosity was getting the better of him, as well as a vague sense of guilt - the SWAT team probably wouldn’t even try and tranq them first. They’d just shoot them because it was more expedient. But he couldn’t leave Paris here. “What’s the ETA on the SWAT team?”

“Twenty minutes. As it happens, there’s a nut holding his ex-wife and her boyfriend hostage downtown, so they’re occupied.”

“Okay. I’ll … see if I can beat them.” He hung up, and instantly called Diego. It was Wednesday, right? That was one of Diego’s days off. He worked nights and weekends, and generally had afternoons and a couple weekdays off; he was deliberately odd and enjoyed it, which was how the two of them hooked up in the first place. Being weird was almost the only thing they had in common. When he picked up, he asked him right off if he could come down to the university medical center and pick up Paris. Because this was Paris and he’d mentioned “medical”, Dee stowed his usual attitude. “Is he all right?”

“He’s fine, we’re trying to get into these medical trials.” He hastily scribbled a note for Par, apologizing for his sudden absence, but he knew all he really needed to write was “Gordo” and Par would understand. “Gordo is having a cat emergency, I have to go. How soon can you get here?”

He heard the odd noise of a videogame being paused in the background. “Uh … six minutes, if traffic is good.”

He added that to the note, and held the phone away as he thanked Sarah for holding on to the note until Par came out. He talked to Dee on his way out to the car, still worried that Par hadn’t come out yet. He almost asked Dee what it might mean, but he already knew, didn’t he?

What if Par was too sick to be in the trials? What then?

He wasn’t going to think about it, mainly because he couldn’t. He’d deal with it if and when it occurred. In fact, even though he couldn’t get a decent station out here, he turned up the radio just so the music would drown out the possibility of thinking.

The head of Washburn Road was cut off by a hastily erected police cordon and manned by a couple of bored looking blues, but once he got of the car and flashed his card, the female cop, who looked a bit butcher than her male companion, obviously had been briefed by Gordo as she almost automatically waved him through without a glance at it.

He walked up the poorly maintained road, enjoying all the rural space for its temporary existence. Already all this former farm and grazing land was being bought up by developers for “exurban” housing developments, and while he smelled a strong scent of cow shit, he wondered when the last time there were cows here - a year ago? More?

He walked past a long, low slung ranch house at the end of a gravel drive - the mailbox read “Thurman” - past a split rail fence, until he found the assault weapon armed cops and two members of the kitty crimes division - Gordo and Seb - standing with them beyond the fence, looking at an old barn, whose red paint had faded to a hint of fleshy pink. The big door was ajar, although everything beyond it was swathed in shadows.

But he smelled them, didn’t he? A fierce stink of cats who had marked their territory; it made the hair rise on the back of his neck, and he had to suppress the instinctive urge to growl. Definitely cougars; maybe one or two others - it was hard to tell.

As he came up to them, both Gordo and Seb glanced at him, while the cops in body armor, holding their assault rifles as uncomfortably as U.N. Peacekeepers, gave him strange sidelong glances and stepped back. “You smell ‘em?” Gordo asked, apparently catching the flair of his nostrils.

“Yeah. What’s the approximate number? I think I’m smelling about a half dozen.”

Far behind him, he heard one cop mutter, “Did he say smell?”

Gordo shrugged expansively. “Your guess is probably better than ours. We were called by the homeowner, who had moved from this properly several weeks ago and had come back to give it a once over, to make sure he hadn’t left some equipment behind. When he approached the barn, he suddenly found himself confronted by several cats, including a cougar who mauled his arm pretty badly before he was able to get in his car and call 911 on his cell. We thought it was possible we were dealing with wild cats as much as infecteds, but this grouping behavior … that’s not normal.”

“And the cougar I saw had an odd build for a wild one,” Seb interjected coolly. When did he not say something coolly? “Also the coloring was off.”

“They’re definitely infecteds. I take it you haven’t approached?”

“We did try initially,” Gordo told him. “But as soon as we were within fifty feet of the place, they all started comin’ out, growling and snarling. We retreated, and they seemed to do the same thing.”

“More odd behavior,” Seb noted.

“Not necessarily - they may have smelled the gunpowder on you. God knows I do. They may not be Human right now, but they haven’t totally taken leave of their senses.” He looked at the barn and sighed, fairly certain he could see the chatoyant glimmer of eyes in the dark. “I’ll go in, calm them down. Hold off the SWATs.”

“You got your piece?”

He shook his head. “I’m not armed, but I don’t want to be. They’ll smell it and freak. I need to confront them as just me. That’s enough.”

Gordo stared at him with great dubiousness. “Look, I know you got something on all of us, but -”

“I will dominate the pack or I won’t, but I have no need to shoot them,” he reassured him. “If worse comes to worst, I’m a lion - I’m bigger than a cougar.”

Gordo snorted, as Seb handed him what looked like a flare gun, but was actually a form of modified tranquilizer gun that the kitty crimes unit carried in their cars. He did take that with a grateful nod and stuck it behind his back, in the waistband of his pants. It only had three “shots”, so its usefulness was limited, but if you took down key members, three could be all you needed. “You can’t turn the lion on and off, Roan.”

Okay, that confirmed that he and Dropkick hadn’t exchanged notes and no one had sent Gordo the video of him and Paris … or they had, and he just assumed it occurred in the correct part of his viral cycle. “It won’t let me die at the fangs of cougars,” he told him, easily climbing over the waist high split rail fence. “That’d be too fucking humiliating.”

The body armored cops either didn’t know who he was, or had never heard of “Big Gay Roan, the kitty fag” back at the station, because there was quite a murmuring coming from them. They mostly thought he was an idiot approaching the barn alone without a weapon, which made him want to turn around and shout that he was the weapon, but he couldn’t be concerned with them. There was a pride of cats in there, and he already got the sense they wanted him nowhere near them.

This was good, though. Ever since he grew out of pre-adolescence, he was never afraid of a fight. If anything, he prided himself on his instinct to fight, no matter how hopeless or pointless it was; he always wanted to go down swinging. Going quietly was something other people did. He didn’t win every fight, not back then, but at least he left scars, little reminders that fucking with him was a mistake. Now that he learned to manipulate the virus, the lion in him, he had no concerns at all about winning a fight - he would, one way or another. But he’d also come up against an enemy he couldn’t fight, one he couldn’t beat, and the sheer helplessness of it all made him furious, terrified. His lover was dying, and all he could was watch. He hated it, he hated himself for his uselessness, and he wished that death was a physical presence, a guy in a black robe holding a scythe - he’d kick that fucking bastard’s ass right up into his shoulder blades, and take great pleasure in ripping its head from its body with his bare hands.

In lieu of that, these cats would have to do.

He was growling low in his throat as he neared the barn, the smell of the cats pungent and overwhelming, and finally a cougar came out to edge of the door, growling at him in return. He could see what Seb had meant about its build being off - it seemed a bit more squat and square than most real cougars, and its tawny coat of fur had a slightly muddy tinge to it. Its lips pulled back to reveal rows of thin, sharp teeth, its eyes as yellow as a traffic light, and its growl grew to a low roar. Roan matched it in volume, roar for roar, never looking away from its eyes. He could feel his muscles starting to tense, some shifted, but not in a major way … not yet. But they would. How far he went would depend on how hard he held on to his temper.

They just stood there, the protector cougar in the doorway and him outside the barn, and it lowered its head, tensing, and roared louder, taking up a defensive stance. Roan roared back even louder, a partial scream, the force of it scouring his throat raw, and the cougar’s ears twitched back in annoyance. If it didn’t acquiesce, he’d have to force the issue.

It was all quiet behind him. No one was speaking - he wasn’t sure any of the police behind the fence were even breathing.

Finally the cougar looked away and went back into the barn, almost a grudging invitation. Roan walked after it, keeping his shoulders loose, feeling his muscles as sleek and hard as steel beneath his skin. He was ready for anything, and part of him was hoping for a fight. He had a lot of pent up frustration to get out.

The barn still had the faint scents of horses and hay, although the scent of cat and mildew and bat guano was so strong they were hard to discern. The only light came from the open hatch in the hayloft and a couple of holes in the roof, so there was more shadows than illumination. But still he could see that he was surrounded by about seven cats of various sizes, all cougars save for one, who may have been a pretty sad, battered leopard, small enough to have been either a child or a very petite woman. Most had been laying down, but as soon as their eyes focused on him, as soon as they caught the scent of a man who wasn’t quite a man/a cat who wasn’t quite a cat, they were all on their feet, their growls a low rumble like the distant warning of an earthquake. The bigger ones began to pace around him, circling him like sharks, their paws scuffing up small clouds of dust that threatened to make him sneeze. He was growling back, keeping it low, something he could feel, and trying to work out who was the pack leader. In this dark, noisome barn, all the cougars looked roughly similar, and there was no way to work out their coloring unless they stepped in a dusty shaft of light.

He crouched down to be at eye level with them, catching their eyes as they passed and making them look away, their low growls so constant Roan couldn’t distinguish his from theirs. He smelled fresh cat blood, saw dark marks on the packed earth, and realized one of them was hurt. That added a level of instability, because if they’d been hurt by the men outside, they’d be extra agitated.

He sensed their low level rage, the confusion he dragged with him and his unusual scent, and he finally snarled to up the ante, to get a reaction. Finally the muddy cougar and the battered leopard let out snarling roars in response, the cougar nearing him, breaking the circle. It stalked close and he met it eye to eye, snarl for snarl. Neither were willing to back down, but one of them was going to have to. Roan felt his jaw shift, felt his hands curl like he had claws, and he fought to hold it back as he sensed the other cats gathering around him, preparing to either fight or flee depending on how this turned out. The fact that the alpha cat hadn’t yet ceded to him was troubling, because by now it should have. Something was weird with these cats, beyond the obvious. This could be trouble, although he couldn’t even find a small corner of his mind where to be concerned about this.