Maybe the problem was this was another male lion, one not inclined to fold, but also he could smell illness coming off of it – it wasn’t right in body or mind, and therefore not assessing threats correctly. The panicky people didn’t help either; their fear was sharp in the air, and it was making Roan salivate as much as the lion growling in the alley.

“Roan – “ Dylan asked pleadingly, visible in his peripheral vision.

“Get away!” He snapped, and as the lion took a step forward Roan took a step towards the cat as well, roaring a challenge that made its ears flatten against its scalp. It knew he was injured, but it also had to know he was still stronger than it was. Its mane was predominately black, making him wonder if it was a black haired man under the transformation, although such a characteristic wasn’t always a sure bet. He was a good sized guy, though, at least six feet, somewhere around two hundred and fifty pounds.

How had this happened? He was meeting Dylan for coffee before Dylan went to work – that was all. Innocent as could be. Then he heard a woman scream, a truly genuine scream of horror, and he came charging around the corner to find a man under attack by a lion, which had him on the ground and was gnawing his forearm like a turkey leg. Roan didn’t have a chance to finesse this, and of course he wasn’t armed, as he had closed up the office for the day. Not that it mattered – there was no way he’d open fire on a cat anyways, and certainly not with civilians around.

Roan did what he had to do. He charged the cat and tackled it, ripping it off the man and sending them both rolling out onto the street as he yelled at Dylan to get the man inside. Cats, being a hell of a lot more flexible than people, were hard to keep a hold of at the best of times, and this was a big lion, slippery with blood and its own fevered sweat. It twisted violently in his grasp as a car’s tire just missed their head by centimeters, and sank its teeth into his arm, tearing through the flesh like paper.

A mistake. By the cat, as he had been holding back his instincts quite well, but now with the pain ripping through his body, the cat instincts had broken out. He threw the cat bodily away, so hard that it hit a parked Lexus with an audible thud, making it rock on its shocks and leaving a huge dent in its side door. It landed unsteadily on its feet, shaking its head, as Roan struggled to hold in the cat instincts wanting to emerge. He felt his jaw shift, heard the bones crack, and tasted blood in his mouth as his teeth ripped through his gums, but the most troubling thing was he wanted to rip its fucking throat out. He could almost taste its flesh in his mouth, and he wanted it as badly as he had ever wanted anything. It was a desire so electric he wanted it to sweep him away.

He couldn’t let it, though. He fought it back inside him, only vaguely aware that Dylan was trying to get the crowd back, assuring them that “he” (Roan) knew what he was doing and could handle the cat. The lion was momentarily stunned by the impact and the conflicting smells of blood: blood from his fresh arm wound, and the blood of the man, who had been dragged inside a nearby barber shop, but the blood was still on the sidewalk, and smeared on Dylan. Roan instantly recognized the danger and growled, earning the cat’s attention, and it growled back, hair standing up along its spine.

Roan wasn’t sure what he was doing, but he lurched to his feet and charged the cat, roaring all the way, and while Roan knew he never would have done that had a shred of his humanity had control, somehow it worked. The cat turned and ran, heading for the nearest bit of cover, which was a dead end alley between a thrift store and a specialty bakery. It snarled and growled warnings, its eyes lambent yellow as it crouched behind an industrial dumpster, and Roan stood at the mouth of the alley, keeping an eye on it. It wasn’t a permanent retreat; the cat was sizing up its options, and if it was able to race past him, it could get to any of the people who were still looking on in spite of Dylan’s best efforts to warn them back. This was now a territorial thing between two male cats, a struggle for dominance before a fight that couldn’t possibly be fair. Yes, the cat had claws and teeth and speed, but he had strength and a peculiar animal rage that seemed far more dangerous manifesting in his Human form. He had hands and feet and both the knowledge and desire for a kill. The win was his the moment he decided to take it.

He was vaguely aware of an authoritative male voice barking, “Back, get back!” and then movement in the side of his vision, which made his muscles tense as the cat squad came, a tall black man in a black squadron jacket quickly taking aim at the lion and firing a drug gun cartridge at it. Even though it hit the cat in the front leg, it roared in pain and charged, and Roan shoved the man aside and caught the lion with an open palm to the side of its head, making it slam against the brick fronted wall on the left and come sliding down to the pavement, both the drugs and the impact combining to take it out of play.

“You don’t shove a -” another cat squad member began, sounding angry.

But the shooter was up and intercepted him before he could come within reach. “Torres, chill, it’s okay. That’s McKichan.”

Hearing his Human name seemed to bring him back to himself, and he closed his eyes and took several deep breaths through his nose, trying to make his lion go back into its cave.

“The cat guy?” Torres said in disbelief.

Someone else, someone on the other side of the street, commented to someone else, “Did you get that? I’ve never seen anyone move that fast -”

Oh shit, had someone captured him on a phone camera again? God, he hated those fucking things. Once he was sure his cat side had submerged to a reasonable level, he opened his eyes and visually scanned the nearby crowd, but they looked at him funny and he couldn’t tell who was the dick with the cell phone camera.

This cat squad was slightly more deferential to him, as their leader – the man who shot the cat, Moore – seemed to think he was pretty nifty. Moore mentioned meeting him as a rookie, but Roan had no memory of it. He was glad he’d left a good impression, though, or he might have gotten a gun butt in the back of the head.

The ambulance crew that arrived didn’t include Dee, which was actually a relief. He didn’t think he could deal with him right this second. Although they wanted to take him to the hospital for his arm wound, he told them he’d be fine, they could just wrap it up. This was met with frowns and suspicion, but they had no choice.

Once Dylan was done giving his statement to police, he came to see if he was okay. He was uninjured, but he had the man’s blood smeared on the front of his shirt – he’d picked a bad day to wear a white t-shirt. He was a bit unsettled, which was to be expected, but as much as he tried to shrug it off, he knew he had scared Dylan. Was it the roaring, fighting the cat, the partial transformation of his face? Either way, it was good for him to see this. He may have known the realities of him being infected, he may have known he transformed into a lion a few days a month, but he needed to know this. He needed to know other cats could bring out his inner lion; he needed to know pain and rage could do it too. He wasn’t a normal infected, he was a virus child, and that brought its own perils and problems. If he couldn’t handle it, now was the time to find out, before he got too accustomed to having him in his life.

Although Dylan didn’t seem to feel good about it, he told him to go ahead and go to work, he was just going to go home and do some paperwork, which was only a partial lie. He suspected Dylan was slightly relieved; Roan suspected he was as well.

Roan drove himself home, wondering how long he should wait until he searched YouTube for himself, and his cell rang. He let it go to voice mail, but he already knew it was Dee. There was some kind of mysterious EMT network that allowed one to tell him all about his occasional travails and treatments almost the instant they were done. He didn’t know how that worked, yet it always seemed to.

At home, he showered, getting the blood and sweat off, and unraveled the bandage around his arm. Although the teeth had torn through his flesh after biting, there was still a pretty good imprint in it, and blood still oozed from the deeper punctures. He threw on some sweatpants and went downstairs to his still unremodeled office, where he started to throw some punches into the heavy bag. It hurt his arm, but that was the point. Along with the physical pain, he concentrated on how he still missed Paris, how there were moments – just like this – where he longed for him with a physical ache, and that was enough to bring on the partial transformation. He felt it building, felt his muscles burn and twitch, his skin itch from underneath and grow hot as it too stretched and moved, and he watched with almost clinical fascination as muscles and subcutaneous fat reached out across gaps left by the teeth to reconnect again. Within five minutes, the only way you could tell the lion had bit him was by the blood still streaked on the pink, fresh skin of his forearm. Also, as soon as he called back the transformation, wrestled the lion back in its cage, it hurt. It hurt so badly it felt like his arm had been run over by a dump truck and set on fire, and his upper chest and face had been slightly mauled in the incident. But at least he wasn’t bleeding anymore.

He still felt horrible. It was probably thinking of Paris, of course. He’d been dead for two years now and he hadn’t been quite able to let him go. How could he? He’d been his husband and the one person in this world whom he could truly say was perfect for him; they had balanced each other out almost perfectly. Which was exactly why it couldn’t last, as things like that never did. You got a moment in the sun, but that was all – a moment. Good things never seemed to last beyond that.

He liked Dylan, he really did. He was intelligent and serene and had a good sense of humor, and there was no doubt at all that he was extremely attractive and seemed to like him for some unfathomable reason. And yet he couldn’t stop wanting Paris, missing him. Dylan was being patient with him, waiting for him to make the moves, but Roan was already convinced it would never happen. He wondered if he’d ever get the courage to tell him before he left in disgust.

The phone rang as he was about to start upstairs. He figured it was Dee calling him again to ask why he hadn’t called him back earlier, but as he glanced at the caller ID, he saw it was displaying Murphy’s number. Was she calling to taunt him about his latest cat fighting venture? She really wasn’t the type to do that. Roan picked up the receiver out of curiosity.

“Something I can do for you, officer?”

She made a small noise of a smothered laugh. “Well, aren’t you snappy? You should be in action hero mode more often.”

“I’m hanging up now.”

“Oh, don’t be that way. I heard you saved that guy’s life. So just take your compliments graciously, you negative queen.”

“I am not a negative queen,” he snapped, sounding pretty negative to himself. He sighed heavily, and collapsed on the end of the sofa. “What can I do for you, Murph? Besides be a punching bag.”

“Well, I have this favor I wanna ask you, but I’m afraid to.”

“Oh god, this isn’t one of those things where you’re gonna ask me for some of my sperm, is it?”

“God no! Keep your goddamn spunk to yourself!”

Roan felt oddly relieved. “Good. I mean, I am infected and a bad candidate, but if you believe Hollywood, all you lesbians are sperm hungry baby machines.”

“So I’ve heard. It’s news to me and Kim, but I imagine we’re out of the loop,” she admitted sardonically. She cleared her throat – he imagined her spunk comment was overheard and earned her a funny look, which she cut off with that sound – and after a moment, she said, “I’m afraid to ask you this because I know you’ll go off and investigate it yourself. And you can’t do that, as it’s a police matter. Do you get me, mister?”

Now he was curious. “Is this some cat thing?”

“No.” There was a long pause, and when she spoke next, she had dropped her voice to a low whisper. “You don’t know about this because no one in the media has picked up on it, but we seem to have a serial hustler beater in town.”

“What?”

“These hustlers – I think you guys call ‘em twinks, younger guys, kind of on the slim and feminine side – have been turning up beaten bloody and left in parking lots, on the sides of the road. They were reported by emergency rooms, and occasionally a statement was taken, but for the most part the hustlers gave fake names or got out of there before or when the cops showed up.”

That was understandable. Even female hookers weren’t likely to report beatings or rapes, for the same reason: who believes them? They also had a poor opinion and association with most cops and just didn’t trust them. If they admitted what they did, they could get arrested. “How many in what time frame?”

“Well, what we’ve got is five in as many weeks.”

“So he’s a busy boy.”

“Worse than that. The newest victim was found bleeding in a gutter on Tuesday night, very nearly beaten to death. His jaw was fractured in six places, he’s missing four teeth, his eye socket was shattered, and they had to induce a coma to keep his brain from swelling.”

Roan winced. “Jesus fucking Christ. He’s still alive?”

“He is, but barely. And get this – he’s fifteen.”

He groaned and sank back deeper into the couch. “Motherfucker.”

“He’s been ID’d as a fifteen year old runaway from Idaho, Michael Gilpin. He was new on the street, and claimed to be a seventeen year old named Eric; no one who has talked to us have claimed to know him.”

“But you think they’re lying.”

“I do. I also think our mystery john is decompensating fast. I think his next victim will be a murder victim.”

Considering Gilpin was almost beaten to death, he was willing to bet she was correct. “You’re homicide. I had no idea they had you working on future murders.”

She exhaled heavily, like this comment was a low blow. “They’re not. This is Wilson’s and Lozano’s case, but I’m doing Wilson a favor.”

“Which Wilson?” There were actually three cops that he knew of working out of that precinct with the last name Wilson, two white and one black, and none of them related to each other. He decided to make a wild guess. “Maya?”

“Yeah. She asked me if I had any street level contacts since she and Loz are having such a hard time getting any of the hustlers to talk to them honestly. I didn’t, but I did think of you.”

“’Cause the whores love me.” He said that with thick sarcasm, but really it wasn’t sarcastic at all.

“They do, Roan. They always talked to you. I’m hoping, since you’re no longer on the force, they’ll do that even more.”

He thought about that, leaning his head back and closing his eyes. The one thing he did as a cop – lousy as he was at it – was open up dialogue between some of the street people and the cops. He wasn’t sure why, except he didn’t see them as sad junkies but people who’d made poor decisions in their lives and were just trying to survive, which he couldn’t begrudge. Also, he was seen as an outsider even amongst his fellow cops: openly gay, openly infected. Pariahs had a tendency to recognize each other, and while they didn’t necessarily stick together, they did try and deal with each other honestly. Occasionally, arrested hookers would request him specifically, because they knew he wouldn’t rough them up or make backhanded remarks about them, and usually give them a cup of coffee. “So that’s the favor. Go talk to the whores and find out what they know.”

“We need to get this guy before he kills. Considering his pattern, we’re quickly running out of time.”

That made him open his eyes. “One a week. How many days do you think we have?”

“He hasn’t stuck to a strict seven day schedule, so it’s hard to say. It could be as many as five days, or as few as two.”

“Son of a bitch.” He rubbed his eyes, wondering why this day had turned out so shitty. “Where was the Gilpin kid found?”

“On Royal Avenue. We have reason to believe he had been selling his ass on Weston Boulevard.”

Which only made sense – you wanted to buy a piece of ass, you went to Weston Boulevard. “Okay, I’ll start there.” He wondered vaguely if any of the hustlers he knew by name were still working the streets down there.