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.