16 – Temporary People

Roan felt like a moron, and wondered if Dee had lied about giving him Demerol and gave him something else, something that made him as maudlin as a drunk. Dylan remained as sweet as he always was, comforting him and soothing him. When Roan admitted that he felt like he should be doing more for his people, Dylan rightly asked, “Which ones?”

A good point. He was always in the middle of a reverse tug of war, with the gays saying, “You have him,” and the infecteds replying, “No, you have him.” But he always said he didn’t want to be a member of any group that would want him, so at least he could belong to either with a clear conscience: neither wanted him.

He meant infecteds, but sure, gays too. He did nothing for anyone. Dylan pointed out that wasn’t true, that just by being the first infected to join the police force he’d been a trailblazer and broken down a lot of doors, but how much good had it done? There weren’t any other infected cops that he knew of on the force right now. And openly gay? Well, he knew of one downtown, not counting Dropkick, but he knew many more were still in the closet. It was a Pyrrhic victory at best.

A combination of drugs and post transformation crash made him tired, but his hunger (also a post transformation symptom) let him know he was going to be up for a while. So he called for a pizza and noticed he had a couple of messages on the machine already. In fact, if he hadn’t turned the ringer off for the phone, he might have noticed it going off almost nonstop. (He discovered this when he turned the ringer back on. Dylan answered the phone a couple of times, and after reporting he had no comment and didn’t wish to speak to the press, they just turned the ringer off again.) He kept smelling blood and thought it might be psychosomatic, but then he realized his pants were soaked with it. He stripped them off, a bit relieved to see the blood hadn’t soaked through to his skin. Rather than put on pants, he figured fuck it, that being down to his boxers was good enough. Dylan didn’t care; he’d seen so much worse.

Dylan decided to go downstairs and check on what was happening on the news, and Roan decided to stay upstairs and try and get some work done. A joke, since he was still incredibly stoned and not really in a good head space for it, but he was convinced he could try and force himself to go there. He blasted Pansy Division, mainly because it sometimes helped.

He assembled everything he had about Jordan on a computer file. It basically boiled down to ’spoiled brat’. In that case, he probably would have run off to Tijuana or something, was having the time life of his callow life with cheap hookers and tequila. Could he convince Hatcher he needed to take an all expenses paid vacation down there to find him?

The pizza guy came, but Roan hadn’t heard him, so Dylan, dressed only in a green tank top and matching yoga pants, brought him his large pepperoni pizza (he was going to eat all of it and Dylan didn’t feel like pizza, so he didn’t feel bad about it). “You know, there’s this guy on the news saying you’re a hero.”

“What kind of attention whore is he?”

“He said a cat tried to attack him and you caught it. He said you were fighting two cats at once.”

He paused to consider that as he opened the pizza box, and the smell of grease, tomato sauce, cheese, and processed meat hit him face first and nearly made his stomach turn inside out with need. “Oh, he must have been the fuckhead that opened the door. He wasn’t in any danger he didn’t put himself in with his sheer idiocy.”

“Is that how you got so scratched up?”

He shrugged, but he had the excuse of having about half a slice of pizza in his mouth. (He was so hungry, he wanted to shove a whole piece in.) Once he’d finished chewing, he said, “It was a combination of things. Mainly I got angry and lost control. I had to constantly fight myself to stay focused.”

Dylan had brought him a can of root beer, which he took with a grateful nod. Yes, root beer was disgusting and sickly sweet, and yet he really liked it. Dylan sometimes looked at him like he was crazy, but he humored him, just like he humored his carnivorous ways. “How much did you change?”

Oh shit. Talk about a question he didn’t want to answer. Luckily, he could give him an honest answer. “I dunno. Too much.”

Dylan nodded, and looked distracted enough that Roan asked between mouthfuls of pizza, “What’s wrong?”

He sighed heavily and sat on the end of the bed. “They said there was a near riot by the Arcadia building. Twenty five people were arrested.”

“That’s not what’s bugging you. Well, not everything.”

“I gave my notice at Panic today. I’m not going back.”

“Not because of me, I hope.”

“No. I’m not sure it’s safe there anymore. Best to pack it up and try somewhere new.”

“Your fan club’s gonna miss you.”

This made him smile faintly, staring down at the carpet. “My fan club is horny drunk men. They’ll miss me for approximately ten seconds, until the new guy with the pecs passes through their field of vision. Then they won’t be able to pick me out of a line up.”

“I’ll still be your number one fan.”

He looked up at him, giving him a genuinely amused and adorable smile. “You’d better be.” He paused briefly, then added, “Should we check the dressings under your shirt, Rambo?”

Roan looked down, and he could kind of seem the irregular lumps of bandages, but not well. “Ah. I bet I can’t blame an ill fitting bra, can I?”

“You can, but I know damn well you’re not a cross dresser.”

Roan took off his shirt, and Dylan got up and went to the bathroom, emerging from it with gauze and medical tape. Dylan did his best to take the bandages off carefully, but Roan had a reasonably hairy chest, so there was just no way to do this painlessly. At least the Demerol (or whatever) was still working.

He’d done a decent job using the partial change to heal himself, as his chest didn’t look like ground chuck anymore. It was still bad enough to make Dylan grimace, though, and two of the gauze pads Dee had slapped onto him were saturated with blood and needed replacing. “Maybe I should do it,” Roan told him. “Infected blood and all.”

“I don’t have any cuts on my hands,” Dylan replied, with a brief but fussy frown.

“Still -”

“I’ll be careful,” he snapped. And to give him credit, he was. Dylan was always careful and always gentle, and let out an empathetic hiss of pain when he had to pull the tape off his chest hair. (With the hair, of course. At least growing hair had never been a problem for him, especially when a transformation was involved. As proof, even though he shaved this morning, he now had about a two day’s growth of beard on his face thanks to his partial transformation.) Dylan cut the gauze and the medical tape very carefully, and said, more to himself than anything, “I guess I’d better get used to this. These are the kinds of skills you need when your boyfriend’s a superhero.”

“Don’t you start that shit.”

“Oh stop kidding yourself, hon. You’re the closest thing to a superhero in this world and you know it. See, a real superhero wouldn’t be lauded and loved; a real superhero would be seen as a freak and threatened with lawsuits at every turn.”

“Shit. Put it that way, and you have a point.”

“Of course I have a point. I have a BA and an unemployment check. I know everything.” He then flashed him a brilliant smile, and Roan couldn’t help but grin back.

“Can I call you my boy wonder?” Roan teased.

“Only if you like sleeping on the lawn.”

“Ah. And it’s too soon for you to have an unemployment check, you’ve just left.”

He gave him a self-deprecating kind of smirk. (It was possible. Roan had seen it several times.) “A boy not so wonder can dream.”

If he was a superhero, he was a super lame one. But hey, someone had to be Aquaman. And who would want to be Superman anyways? Red underpants over blue tights? No one was that gay, not even Paul Lynde.

He finished his pizza sitting in front of his computer, wearing boxer shorts and bandages, wondering if all superheroes ended up like this, when he decided to check on his many phone messages before the damn thing filled up. Anyone who identified themselves as a reporter got their message instantly erased. He had nothing against the press, he just had nothing to say about the incident today or in general. Except Arcadia sucked, but odds were they wouldn’t print or show that.

Dee had left him a very simple message. “See Doctor Rosenberg soon, or I’m going to talk to her myself.” And that was it; he hung up. Did that mean he’d seen the numbers Shep had written on his glove and didn’t like them?

The call from Dropkick was slightly more interesting. “If you’re finished being a cat wrangler, call me back. I’m think our hooker killer is a serial.” And then she just hung up.

Well, he had to return that call. He did, and luckily he caught her at her desk. “Has another body turned up?” he asked. It’s the only reason why she’d jump to the conclusion that the killer was a serial.

“Yeah,” she sighed wearily. She sounded tired. “I started searching for fairly recent murders that shared many of the same characteristics as the previous one, and I found a really sad one. Seventeen year old girl, possibly raped, strangled and found in a drainage ditch off some abandoned government land outside of Spokane two months ago. Probably an illegal, as she was never identified by anyone, and they weren’t able to find anyone in the databases matching her fingerprints or description.”

Roan closed his eyes and laid on the bed, rubbing his forehead. The Demerol was finally wearing off, as he felt a dull ache deep in his head. “Not a hooker.”

“Not to anyone’s knowledge, but in the same general category of disposable people. A person no one would miss or look too hard for. Fits the general profile of such a bottom feeder killer.”

“Yeah, it does.”

She scoffed, and he heard a soft, dull noise in the background. Did she throw some paperwork on her desk? “They pawned the case off on some overloaded detective who did all he was supposed to do, and absolutely not one thing more.”

“So it’s a cold case.”

“If she was a seventeen year old white girl, maybe someone would have given a fuck.”

“Now now, we’re not supposed to play the race card. Or the sexuality card. Or the gender card. What cards can we play?”

“Do not pass go.”

“That’s it? I was hoping for Community Chest at least.”

She sighed again, long and low, but afterwards, she said, “I wish you were back on the force, Angus. For a crazy asshole, I think you were the sanest one here.”

“Holy shit, are things that bad?”

“It seems like it sometimes. Ignore me, it’s been a shitty day.”

“Tell me about it.” The pain in his head was getting worse. It felt like the slow motion explosion of a migraine. The problem with that was migraines usually gave more warning. Still, his partial transformation could have fucked up the schedule.

“Yeah, how was that cat thing? I heard you got scratched up pretty bad.”

“I’m fine.” He really didn’t want to talk about it anymore.

“Yeah, macho man, you always say that.”

“Like you don’t.”

“Yeah, well, I’m a woman. We always handle these kinds of things better than you wimpy men.”

“Sexism! I could have your badge.”

“You can have it.” After another frustrated sigh, she said, “It’s been a day for crazies. I got called out to a scene first thing this morning – it’s probably on the news, if you bother to watch it – where a guy took a shotgun to his family in a mobile home.”

“No.” More of sympathy than disbelief. He had little trouble believing it occurred. “Bad scene?”

“Four kids under thirteen, his wife, and then himself. It looks like the ten year old tried to fight back and escape through the bathroom window, but she never had a chance.”

“Jesus.” He rubbed his eyes, which now had the dull, hollow hurt of a migraine. This fucker was coming on fast, like it was just waiting for the drugs to wear off so it could jump into the fray. “So what excuse did this dirtbag fuckjob leave behind?”

“Well, from what I can tell, he thought his wife was cheating on him. Did I mention he married her when she was fifteen and pregnant? He was twenty two at the time.”

“I’m gonna go out on a limb here and guess controlling, abusive, immature bastard.”

“Also guess unemployed and eighty pounds overweight and yeah, you’ve got a good picture of him. Fuck, I hate this job sometimes, you know? It’s not about catching the bad guy, it’s about picking up the pieces and throwing them away. The worst part was the false hope we could pillory this guy, you know? A neighbor called it in, ’cause they thought they saw a body through the window – nobody heard the gunshots; a shotgun in a fucking mobile home park and yet no one fucking heard the thing – but the guy was gone, and I thought maybe I’d get to string the bastard up by his balls, show pictures of his ten year old’s head splattered across a shower curtain until every juror wanted to beat him to death with the gavel … but then the fucker’s car gets spotted by the highway patrol in a lot behind a bar. He killed himself there, god knows why. And now I have all this disgust and I have no one to vent it on, I just have pictures of entrance wounds and exit wounds, when there was enough of a body left to call it an exit wound, and I have these emails and phone messages left by the killer that show me what a selfish, immature, hideous prick of a man he was. Fuck.”

“Know what helps? Working the heavy bag. Or any punching bag really. Go now, hit the gym, beat the shit out of an inanimate object until you’re ready to drop.”

“Like I don’t fucking know that?” She made a noise of frustration, one he was very familiar with, and he let her have a few seconds. Finally, she said, “Sorry, yeah, I probably oughta.  My victories feel smaller and smaller.”

“I know the feeling. It happens to us ex-cops too, if it’s any consolation.”

“It’s not, but thanks.”

There was a long silence, but it wasn’t awkward. It was the silence of two people who really wanted to help people, and often found themselves wondering why. Why would anyone want to help people when they were so fucking awful? You had to ask yourself that question a hundred times, and maybe Dropkick sometimes came up with an answer. Roan knew he almost never did.

Dropkick broke the silence once more, clearly trying to get her mind off the wholesale family slaughter she had to sort out this morning. “Can you ask Holden and his hooker pals about any customers they have in the military, or maybe amongst truckers? I’m thinking our serial will be amongst them, since if I’m right about Jane Doe, this guy travels.”

“Yeah, I was wondering about that.” Spokane was in Eastern Washington, and Coyote and Karen worked here, on the Western side. But there was that serial killer in the military – was he Air Force? Roan couldn’t remember – who killed mainly in Eastern Washington, but had a couple of known victims in Western Washington when he was stationed here. There was also a trucker serial killer, although he spread his handiwork along the I-5 corridor from California, through Oregon, and to here, pretty much leaving investigators an obvious clue to his profession. “I know Holden’s had a military client or two, one gave him his dog tags. I’ll see what he can find out.” He didn’t tell her it seemed to be a porn site that was doing genuine snuff films, mainly because it sounded like something out of a Dennis Cooper novel. Also, because the Feds would have to be brought in, and they might escape. Well, no, they’d probably get caught. But Roan didn’t want them caught. Did he want to kill them? He didn’t know. His impulse was to hurt these fuckers, hurt them for seeking out and killing some of the most vulnerable adults (near adults, if Jane Doe was indeed a victim) and filming it for the sexual gratification of equally sick motherfuckers.

But if Jane Doe was one, how did that work? A snuff film site didn’t travel, didn’t change locations …

… or did it? Why was he assuming they were doing this only at one place? Why did he assume anything when he had so little to go on?

“You’re not gonna do your usual thing, are you?”

“What’s my usual thing?”

“Getting your own brand of revenge instead of turning him over to the correct authorities. That ring a bell at all, Roan?”

“I deny that. Since when have I ever gotten revenge on anyone?”

She snorted derisively. “You can play the game, you know how to rig the system. You may not do anything actionable, but come on. How weird is it that all the guilty parties you finger end up … punished?”

“I’m the Punisher now?” Wow, his head was really bad right now. He was trying to keep things light, but the pain was really throbbing, becoming nuclear, sending hot filaments through his grey matter. Jesus, he could have used Dee and his Demerol right now.

“I hope not. What a shitty film.” After a brief pause, she asked, “Are you okay? You sound funny.”

“Bit of a headache,” he admitted. “Probably oughta go now.”

“Yeah, okay. But Roan, about the usual thing … maybe it wouldn’t be so bad this time around. Take care of yourself.” And before he could say a word, she hung up. Wow, she must have had a bad day if she was giving him license to kill the bastards. She didn’t even know about the snuff film angle of all of this.

He needed painkillers, and he needed them now. He attempted to sit up, but the pain was so bad his head felt like it was filled with molten lava, and sitting up seemed like a pipe dream, something bizarrely out of reach. Oh no – something was wrong.

He rolled over on his side and gritted his teeth against the pain just as Dylan came in. “I was gonna run to the store, we’re out – holy shit, Ro? Hon, what’s wrong?”

“Oh fuck, Dyl, my head hurts so much,” he said, feeling like he was going to have to hold his skull together with his hands to keep it from bursting apart. “Can you get the Percocet? I’ll be fine if I have a couple of those.”

Dylan looked down into his face, and Roan could see the horror in his eyes. “You’re flushed, your eyes -” He didn’t finish the sentence, he simply reached for the phone and snagged the handset. He punched in a couple of numbers, so few that Roan knew he could only be calling 9-1-1. “I need an ambulance,” he said, keeping his voice as emotionless as possible.

“What’s wrong with my eyes?” Roan asked through gritted teeth. But in immediate retrospect, he realized he didn’t want to know.

He thought he’d been flirting with an aneurysm. But you know, he thought the danger was over. So much for wishful thinking.

11 – Troubled Son

Roan entered the fifth floor angry, and he wasn’t completely sure why. Well, maybe the helpless feeling of someone bleeding to death, of someone dying pointlessly for an honestly stupid cause. Insurance companies were bastards, they could only profit if people died, and people hated infecteds, so why would anyone else care if infecteds died? They wouldn’t. People hated insurance companies too, but the treatment of infecteds wouldn’t sway them one way or another. He wished it would.

On the floor he could smell panic, fear, blood, and cat, tainting the otherwise cold and business bland hallway, that still had faint traces of coffee, toner, and ozone. He let out a challenging roar, channeling his anger into the scream, but it didn’t work – it made him angrier.

There was a responding roar down the hall, and he heard claws clicking on the floor, running for him. He ran for it, wondering if this was Brandon, if this was the cat that had accidentally killed his own friend. He couldn’t hate it if it was, it wasn’t his fault, but that was logic and he was too angry to be logical. He ran towards the noise, still roaring, feeling the pain in his jaws, in his gums, tasting blood in his mouth and hearing bones crack in his cheeks. He thought briefly of dropping to all fours, of trying to summon the change so he could sink his teeth into its fur and rip the flesh off its bones, but he somehow managed to hold that back.

It was a lion charging down the hall towards him, and he roared another challenge at it, continuing to run towards it. Something made the animal hesitate, stop so suddenly its claws skidded on the shiny slick floor, and Roan almost didn’t stop, but then he was dimly aware that if he didn’t, the lion would run and he’d have to chase the damn thing.

They exchanged growls and snarls, the lion a squat one with streaks of mud brown through its ruffled mane. Roan felt the muscles boiling in his arms, the tendons stretching, the bones dislocating and cracking in his hands and feet. One side of the hall had offices and conference rooms with opaque glass inserts in them, and he was aware of Human sized shadows in his peripheral vision, people quarantined in their offices trying to see what was happening. If he saw nothing but shapes through the glass, that’s all they saw too.

The lion was confused, probably because he smelled like different kinds of blood, and Roan found himself distracted by his own internal fight. The last time he partially changed it hadn’t hurt at all, but he hadn’t been fighting it then. (He hadn’t realized it’d been happening, but that was beside the point.) Fighting it was nearly as painful as simply transforming.

The lion sensed the hesitation in him and lunged, which was fine with him. He caught its muzzle in one hand, forcibly shutting its jaws, and while its claws tore into his arms and chest, he punched it straight between the eyes, hard enough that he heard something crack in his hand. Or maybe its head – maybe both. But he was in too much pain to feel anymore pain; the circuits were overloaded and couldn’t accept any more signals.

He knocked the lion out. It sagged heavily in his grip, and he was the only one holding it up. So he dropped it, and he knew it wasn’t dead, he just hoped he hadn’t done any serious damage. But part of him didn’t give a fuck.

He heard himself growling but couldn’t seem to stop. Needles of red hot pain seemed to have settled in his eye sockets, and thin tendrils of it were worming their way through his jaw, down his throat, settling deep into his spine. He was aware that if he didn’t fight it, it might not hurt so much.

He didn’t trust himself to take the stairs, so he went to the elevator, and then had to take a few seconds to remember how to work it, how to use his hands beyond hitting or grabbing. He wondered how many IQ points he dropped when the beast took over, or if he could even remember how to talk. He was trying hard to see if he could, but his output was currently limited to growls and snarls.

The elevator had mirrored surfaces in it, and he saw himself, but he didn’t quite believe what he saw. It was him, kind of, but his eyes were all wrong, the pupils bloated and more oval than round, and his mouth … well, no. He wasn’t seeing things clearly, and that must have been it, because his lower jaw looked like it belonged to another creature entirely, certainly not a Human. Blood caked his mouth, covered his chin, and hid some of his teeth, of which there were too many, and some were pointing at broken angles. He attempted to close his mouth and couldn’t, his teeth clicking awkwardly and his jaw feeling dislocated. He’d cut his tongue – on his teeth? – and it hurt. His vision was kind of blurry up close, so he was convinced he wasn’t seeing correctly, he just couldn’t be seeing correctly, but the shock of it felt like cold water thrown into his troubled mind. He didn’t know what he’d seen in the reflection of the elevator door, but it looked like a freak, some kind of lame rejected demon from Buffy The Vampire Slayer.

The glimpse of … well, whatever it was he thought he saw threw him, enough that he hadn’t expected the lift to stop and the doors to open, but as soon as he smelled blood and cat his mind snapped back into focus.

There were two cats on this floor, a cougar and a leopard, and he shouted a roar that tore up what was left of his throat. He heard an incongruous soft pattering sound, and figured out it was his own blood dripping from his chin. The taste was so constant he stopped noticing it about two minutes ago.

There was a responding roar, and the leopard tore down the corridor to see what new cat was on its territory. Roan was happy to meet it half way down the hall, where it stopped upon seeing him, but still kept growling. They exchanged snarls until he heard the click of claws down a side hall, and Roan found that he was surrounded, with the leopard in front of him and the cougar behind him. He should have cared, but he still didn’t. He had opposable thumbs and they didn’t, which meant he’d always win, as long as he didn’t get stupid or change completely.

He stood with his back to the wall and crouched down, so he was closer to eye level with the cats, hoping he gave off the appropriately wounded air. He wanted them to close in, thinking he was wounded prey. He briefly wondered why they hadn’t attacked each other, but one was male and one was female. They were different species, sure, but the leopard female was bigger than the cougar male, giving the male more impetus not to get overly territorial. (Only tigers would attack their opposite gender members as a matter of course, but that was generally because tigers were the most territorial of all cats.)

The cats were falling for it, coming in warily, snarling and sniffing at him, when he heard an office door open.

Ah fuck. Why did people have to mess up perfectly good plans?

What the person intended he had no idea. Did they actually think he was in trouble? Did they think he was with SWAT? The leopard was closest and lunged for the person in the open door (all Roan saw was a dark suit – just the scent alone told him it was a man, but other than that he wouldn’t have known). Roan was forced to jump for it, screaming (roaring), “Shut the fucking door!” He didn’t know if what he intended to say even came out as words; he heard the roar, slightly modulated, but little else. He caught the leopard in mid-air, centimeters from the man, and the door slammed shut as he and the squirming leopard rolled down the hall, the leopard’s claws raking his chest and throat as he fought the urge to sink his teeth into its exposed neck and end it all now.

The cougar took this opportunity to lunge, but even though he was only peripherally aware of it coming in, a tawny blur, he somehow kicked it out of mid air and sent it flying down the hall as he sunk his teeth into what was essentially the leopard’s cheek.  Blood that wasn’t his for a change flooded his mouth, and the leopard squalled and squirmed away from him, gaining its feet but turning to face him as Roan got on all fours and spit out a mouthful of blood, growling at the leopard as it snarled at him, baring uneven teeth.

He’d hurt the cougar, so it came after him again like the stupid beast it was, and as it jumped he dropped and rolled over onto his back, so as the cougar came down on him he grabbed it and slammed it head first into the wall. It went limp almost instantaneously, and he tossed it aside before rolling back up to his feet.

The leopard was looking at him warily, growling low, but the fact that it hadn’t tried to attack him while he was dealing with the cougar told him she wasn’t as dumb as her male counterpart. “I don’t wanna kill you,” he snarled. “Stay down.”

The leopard was still growling at him, but it laid down on the floor, taking a submissive position. He pulled out the tranquilizer gun and shot it, although it took him a minute to remember how to use it.

He was stalking back to the elevator, aware he was bleeding more and still not caring, when Gordo’s voice came out of nowhere and startled him. “SWAT incoming.”

Okay, yes, SWAT were bad. He needed to get to the cats before them, or they’d simply kill them on sight. He had three of them, now he just needed to find the fourth.

In the elevator, he remembered how to talk, and said, “Got it.”

“Whoa,” Gordo replied. “Was that you, McKichan, or did a demon just come on the radio? What’s up with your voice?”

He didn’t answer. He’d figure it out or he wouldn’t.

The next floor – the sixth or seventh? He couldn’t remember, his mind refused to work that way – was empty of cats (couldn’t smell any, his roar brought no response), so he simply went up to the next floor. There, as the elevator door opened, was a panther in the hall, sleek black but kind of stocky, sitting facing conference rooms with their doors wide open. No Humans were here, meaning people were successfully able to evacuate or this floor just hadn’t been in use yet today, meaning whoever he was, this infected picked the wrong floor to hide out in.

The cat looked at him with empty hazel eyes and a twitching tail, and Roan came out of the elevator, growling, “Some people have no luck at all.”

The cat snarled and got to its feet, looking ready to fight or run, but Roan had enough awareness to pull the tranquilizer gun and simply shoot it. Proving that this poor son of a bitch had no luck in any form, the dart hit it right on the bridge of his nose. He was aware enough to recoil and try and knock the dart out with a paw, shaking his head, but the dart was in deep, and the drugs finally kicked in and laid it out.

Roan crouched down and concentrated on his sense of humanity. What was his sense of humanity? He focused on the pain – or at least tried – but that didn’t seem to be it. What was his humanity? Did he actually have any?

His tongue still hurt. An odd detail, but one he focused on, trying to bring himself back. He wondered if he should bite it or if the resurgent pain would make his cat side worse. A bit of a song ran through his head, almost mocking his current predicament – If I bite my cheeks long enough I figure I could chew right through the skin. You know, he just might be able to. He always thought that maybe in mid-transition he could rip the skin off his face and maybe find out if there was a lion under there.

Insanity. Insanity and These Arms Are Snakes lyrics. They went together so perfectly, no wonder he listened to them.

He was grasping at something – awareness, some sense of self, even if it was only a mocking sense – when he heard the elevator door open again. He could smell gun oil, body armor, hear the hiss and click of radios. He knew guns were aimed at his back, the clicks of firing positions being taken, as a super macho male voice barked, “You McKichan?”

He raised a hand and nodded, not sure if he could speak yet, the pain finding laser focus in certain parts of his body: jaw, teeth, hands, chest, eyes. He heard a familiar voice snap, “Would you let me through? Can’t you see he’s bleeding?”

Dee? Of course. There’s be more than one ambulance needed, and he probably guessed he’d be needed, so he either nagged, coerced, or got the okay to come along with the SWAT team.

“There’s the cat,” a voice said, butch but surprisingly female.

The macho voice from before said into his radio, “Floor secured up to the eighth. Advance agent found.”

Advance agent? Oh, was that him? Must have been. Better than kitty fucker, he supposed.

Dee knelt beside him, thunking down his heavy EMT kit. “You get caught by a cat? You getting slow in your old age?”

Roan looked at him, still snarling, but even though he thought he saw the briefest reaction in his dark eyes, his face remained stony professional, all business. The good EMTs made natural poker players, as they learned to keep all emotion from their faces. “Don’t you snap at me, mister,” Dee replied, using an antiseptic cloth to wipe the blood off his face. He examined the scratches on his face, and said, “Not too bad. Those should heal up good.” Dee lifted up his chin with his fingertips, and wiped his throat with the same cooling, stinging cloth. “Might need to get some surgical glue on a couple of these. Lucky it missed your windpipe.” He then frowned at him. “Why is your mouth bleeding?”

“Bit my tongue,” he grumbled, pretty sure he could talk now. He could, but it still sounded gravelly and inhuman.

“Let’s see.” Dee put a thumb on his lower lip, and he let him open his mouth. He got out his penlight and had a good look, squinting slightly. If his teeth still weren’t right, Dee gave no sign of it. “Goddamn, you took a real chunk out of it.” He rummaged in his kit and took out a small square of gauze, which he put over the cut in his tongue. “Nothing we can do about it, it’ll have to heal on its own. But knowing you, that’ll happen fast.”

The gauze tasted terrible, and he could feel it filling up with blood already, but conversely it made him feel a bit more sane, a bit more Human. Even having Dee here helped. Yeah, having your ex tend to you in a medical sense was off putting, but at least there was little he could do (or become) that would shock him.

Dee lifted up his shirt and clicked his tongue at all the bloody scratches on his chest, but that’s when Roan told him, “Don’t worry about it. I can heal.”

“Seriously? Your torso looks like ground chuck. I don’t -”

“I can, but not here,” he assured him, feeling more like Roan McKichan, human being, instead of Roan McKichan, lion.

Dee finally met his eyes. He hadn’t before now, which Roan only realized in retrospect. His eyes must have been more Human now, or Dee was at least confident they were. “Are you sure? You don’t look so good.”

“I’m in so much pain I don’t think I can move without screaming.”

Dee gave him a slightly dubious look. “You’re not just saying that for free drugs, are you?”

“I don’t need your drugs. I have better at home.”

That honesty got him a shot of something. He didn’t honestly know what, but after a couple of minutes he began to feel warmth in his hands and feet, and the edges of the pain smoothed, became smaller and more manageable.

Dee insisted on taping some big bandages to some of the worst scratches on his chest, so he let him as the pain continued to ebb, and finally he asked, “The guy in the stairwell, the one bleeding out. How is he?”

Dee shrugged. “He was stable when they loaded him. That’s all I know.”

Stable meant nothing; stable only meant he was still alive when they put him in the ambulance. But the way Dee said it seemed to imply “don’t get your hopes up” – stable was the best possible diagnosis for him. Asking for more was too much. You could only lose so much blood before you were honestly a lost cause. Roan knew that, and didn’t know why he cared.

Dee helped him up and helped him down to the street, where things were noisier and more cops had showed, their flashing red and blue lights bouncing off mirrored buildings in such a way that all they needed was a DJ spinning to make this an official dance party. He was aware of TV news vans, but they had been pushed back to a distance that must have pissed off many a cameraman and segment producer. He heard some arguments, some cursing, but since he focused on none of it it was kind of an angry white noise.

He balked when he realized Dee was taking him to his rig, but he told him, “I’m not letting you drive home on Demerol, and besides, there’s no better way to lose the press.”

Fair enough. He got into the back of the ambulance, where Shep was, and he exclaimed, “Fuck man, what happened to your shirt?”

An excellent question. Roan had just noticed it was pretty much just fabric tatters, held together by random threads and blood. As Dee closed the ambulance doors, he made a hand gesture of some sort to Shep, who nodded in understanding. Roan got that Dee had asked him to check his vitals without knowing how he knew that’s what he asked.

The Demerol – was that really what he gave him? – was kicking in big time, and it was very pleasant. So he laid back on the stretcher as Shep put a blood pressure cuff on his arm, and asked, “Saved the cats?”

“Saved ‘em. Don’t know why, but I did.”

“Cats are people too,” Shep said, with no irony. But it did sound kind of funny.

He heard Dee get in the front of the rig and felt them drive off as Shep looked at readouts and wrote some numbers in pen on his latex glove. Blood pressure numbers probably, possibly temperature, as he’d briefly put some machine on his forehead. “So am I dead?” Roan wondered.

“You still taking calcium channel blockers?”

Those were the meds he was given in an attempt to stave off another aneurysm. He had no idea if they were helping or not, but he took them. “Yeah.”

He nodded, still writing numbers on his hand. “You have an appointment with your doctor soon?”

He’d wanted to go see Doctor Rosenberg and ask her about that sudden change, the one he didn’t quite feel. Did that count? “Soon enough.”

“Good.” Laconic Shep was yet another good paramedic, one who didn’t give too much away, one who could beat you in a poker game with nothing but a pair of twos. “Rest and lots of fluids tonight, okay? No fighting, no serious narcotics. Understood?”

“Aye aye, captain.”

Shep raised a blond eyebrow at that. “Yeah, I guess you’re on the serious narcotics already.”

Oh, ha ha. The Nelson laugh seemed so appropriate right now, he wished he could do it.

He must have dozed off for a bit, because it seemed like a second later he was home, and there was a small argument over whether Dee should help him inside or not, but Roan insisted he was walking to his own front door, and finally Dee just let him. He watched him all the way though, arms crossed over his chest, his face as sour as an upset schoolmarm. Once inside, he shut the door and locked it, in case Dee changed his mind and decided he needed to go to the hospital.

Dylan was home, but the reason he didn’t meet him was obvious, as he could hear the water running upstairs. Shower or bath? Bath most likely.

Roan sat at the bottom of the steps and tried to force enough of a change to heal some of the scratches. It was extra hard, probably due to the drugs, but he felt an itchy burning in his chest as he felt a new pain knife into his jaw, and figured he’d pushed it as much as he could. Veins seemed to pulse in front of his eyes, little black capillaries that appeared and disappeared with every beat of his heart, and he knew he was done. Any further attempts, and he would pay for it dearly.

He still had bloody scratches on his chest and arms, and his hand still hurt (had he broken something?) but it was all something he could live with. He gave himself a few seconds of rest, then went upstairs.

In the bedroom, he tossed his coat in the closet and threw his shredded shirt in the garbage, grabbing a t-shirt out of the dresser and pulling it on. If Dylan noticed it was a different shirt, he’d just say he spilled something on the other.

He knocked on the bathroom door before walking in, where Dylan was relaxing in the tub. The air was warm and smelled strongly of the peppermint and eucalyptus bath salts he usually used after yoga class. He said it was a muscle soother, and Roan had no information to the contrary, so he let it go.

Dylan opened his eyes, and said, “Hey, I didn’t – holy shit, what happened to you?”

Roan caught a glimpse of himself in the medicine cabinet mirror, and while he was almost afraid to look, he still managed. He looked human, himself, with light, long scratches across his cheek and just beneath his eyes, one almost bisecting his lip where an older scar was. Dee had cleaned him up nice, and his partial change had closed some of the scratches up. But he was very lucky he didn’t lose an eye.

“Cat incident downtown,” he told him, and he was so tired, his legs so rubbery, he sat on the floor beside the bathtub. “Some protest gone horribly wrong. Had to get four cats out of a building.”

Dylan had sat up, and was now looking at him over the lip of the tub. “Are you okay?”

Stupid question. Of course he was okay, he was always okay. People died around him, other infecteds died, but he just wouldn’t go down. But who was it that was hanging on so hard – the human or the cat? Maybe neither; maybe it was just the virus. “No,” he admitted, and for whatever reason, he started crying. Why the fuck was he crying?!

He wanted to stop it, but the drugs had sapped him of all his will, and as Dylan reached out and brought him into a clumsy embrace, he was too stoned to fight it. He sagged into him, into his warm, wet skin, and wished he could be a normal human being.

10 – Breed

Technology was putting private detectives out of business. But at the same time, it was making their lives significantly easier. Case in point: the consequence of sharing too much information online.

Brittney did have a Twitter page, and she filled it with the most mundane things imaginable, often misspelled. But that allowed him to figure out where she was whenever she posted. (He refused, on principal, to call it “tweeting”.) A quick read revealed her to be at the mall, complaining about fashion (he thought – he honestly wasn’t sure; she was complaining about something), and a past read of her Facebook and Twitter page had revealed she favored the Bellevue Mall. So as soon as he read she was bitching about it, Roan rushed there, and hoped he could find her. Sure, he knew what she looked like, but it was a big mall, and she didn’t exactly say what shops she was in.

He got lucky and found her in the food court, texting as she drank a diet soda out of a cup nearly as big as her head. She looked like she weighed all of ninety eight pounds, lost in a thin turquoise dress that could have doubled as lingerie, and a pink leather jacket that barely reached her waist. Her hair was long and dyed to golden blonde, a pair of large black sunglasses perched on her head like an oversized barrette. She wore way too much make up, and seemed to be trying to look thirty, which perplexed him. Didn’t most straight men go for jailbait? So why try and look older, unless you were trying to get into a club?

He sat at her table without asking, and identified himself as she looked at him with an expression that was equal parts bored, sullen, and utterly blank. She interrupted him to say, sounding about two minutes away from a deep sleep, “You’re the guy Jordan’s dad hired, right?”

“That would be me.” He had to wrinkle his nose and hold back a sneeze, as her perfume threatened to both send him into a sneezing fit and trigger a migraine. He couldn’t identify it by scent, but oddly enough, he could smell the trace of chemicals in her bloodstream coming through her pores, in spite of all the warring food smells drifting over the food court. Prozac? An anti-depressant of some kind. Perhaps that explained her air of drugged ennui.

She blinked at him, eyelids smeared with faintly glittery purple eyeshadow like a metallic bruise. “You come with your goons? Darren said you had goons that attacked him.”

“They weren’t goons, they were hockey players.”

“What’s the diff?”

Ouch. “Hey. I’ll have you know Tank Beauvais is perhaps the coolest straight man I have ever known.”

That almost surprised a genuine reaction from her. “You’re gay? You beat up my boyfriend and you’re gay?”

There was a slight sneer to her voice that annoyed him. It seemed to suggest that all gay men were limp wristed hairdressers who would scream and faint if they saw a spider in the bathtub. That irritated him enough to reply, “I didn’t touch him. I didn’t need to, ’cause he collapsed like a Wal-Mart end table. I’m just trying to find out where Jordan ran off to.”

“I don’t know and I don’t care. Now leave me alone.”  She looked back down at her Blackberry and kept texting.

All the competing smells were annoying him more than she was. His sense of smell often fluctuated, usually due to if it was his “time of the month” or not, but since he no longer had a normal viral cycle, he had no idea why his sense of smell was stronger on some days than others. Probably still a viral load variance, but now inherently unpredictable since he could instigate a change at any time. Sharp odors – perfume, teriyaki, beef tallow, French fries, pepperoni, pho, cinnamon rolls, pretzels, overcooked chicken, icing, coffee, yeast, oatmeal raisin cookies, corn syrup, sered animal fat, garlic, a dozen different perfumes, colognes, hair sprays, gels, conditioners, deodorant, acne cream – all combined to make him alternately hungry and nauseous, with some scents traveling straight up his sinus passages and lodging in his brain like a bullet. He hadn’t taken enough painkillers before he came here, and he desperately wanted to swallow a couple more Vicodin, but not in front of this girl. “What I don’t get is why you’d fuck around on your boyfriend and take pictures of it with your cell.”

Now she looked annoyed. “I haven’t fucked around on Darren.” She considered a moment, frowning, and then said, “Oh, you mean Jordan. I didn’t take those photos, Darren did.”

“With your phone?”

She shrugged. “His battery was dead.”

Oh sure, that made a ton of sense. He rubbed his eyes, trying to will away the nausea. Did he have some Promethazine with him? He was pretty sure he did.

Brittney noticed his struggle, and must have thought it had something to do with her, because she said suddenly and defensively, “Jordan was a creep, you know. I had to change my email several times ’cause he kept hacking into them and reading my emails.”

That made him raise an eyebrow. In spite of the fact that he was being overwhelmed by smells, he knew she wasn’t lying. He hadn’t heard about this side of Jordan before. “He was controlling?”

She gave him a dead eyed stare that was both challenging and disinterested, a sort of bipolar look that only teens and true psychopaths could pull off. “He was a creep. And if he hadn’t run off I’d have dumped his ass. It was sorta flattering at first, but it got old.”

How could abusive behavior be considered flattering? At least he took after dear old dad. “He was good with computers then?”

Again that shrug, that look of bored disaffection. “Guess so. He talked about ‘em a lot, talked about setting up an internet business.”

“What kind of business?”

Another shrug. God, he wanted to throw her diet soda on her just to see if he could startle something genuine out of her. “How the fuck do I know? I didn’t care. Are we done? I have to meet Heaven at Hot Topic in a few minutes.”

“You have no idea where he could have gone?”

Again that starkly bored bipolar look. “No. Are we done?”

He sighed and slumped back in the hard plastic chair, aware that she had given him little worth the trouble of following her Twitter page and running down here. “Yeah, fine.”

She got up and left, not saying anything or giving him a backwards glance. He figured as much. How could she be so jaded so young? He tried to remember if he was. Maybe, or at least he was heading that way.

He decided to buy something to drink so he could have some pills, but while he was waiting in line, his cell vibrated in his coat pocket. A glance at the read out showed it was Gordo calling him, so he decided to go ahead and answer it. Maybe they knew who had tried to frame the cats for the murder. “Yeah?”

“How close are you to downtown?”

Roan was pretty sure he heard sirens in the background. Oh, this wasn’t good. “North or South?”

“North.”

“Pretty damn close.”

“Get to Stewart and 19th ASAP, and maybe you can beat the SWATs. We have a multiple cat incident inside the Arcadia insurance building, with several wounded, deaths unconfirmed, and a number of cats anywhere between three or a dozen – no one inside the building can decide on a number.”

“Oh fuck.” Arcadia. They’d been in the news lately for their underhanded manner in kicking all infecteds off their policies. They couldn’t technically discriminate, so they’d fine little niggling things to get people off their rolls and never pay for anything. They weren’t the only insurance company doing this – in fact, they were all doing it – they were just the most egregious. “How’d they get so many cats in a building?”

“How the fuck do I know, Roan?” Gordo snapped, sounding really pissed off. Not at him, not really, just pissed off at the situation. “Get here if you still have the power to control cats.” Gordo hung up abruptly.

He didn’t have “power” over cats, they were simply afraid of him. But maybe that was considered much the same thing.

Roan got out of line and ran for the exit as soon as he was clear of the crowds. The only way there could be a multiple cat incident in a place like an office building was if it was planned in advance. So basically this was a rampage, but done in animal form. Shit. Why did they have to do this now? People who didn’t already loathe them – a small number – would now.

He avoided as much of the bridge traffic as he could, and managed to reach the Arcadia Building within eight minutes. They had cordoned Stewart and 19th off to incoming traffic, so he parked over on Madison and ran around the corner. The cops had parked their cars on the sidewalk to make a cordon holding pedestrians back, but they also needed to access the scene and let the paramedics through, so there were spaces to let them through, and uniform cops on crowd duty, standing there to keep any unauthorized people from getting through. He didn’t recognize either cop he saw as he shoved through the crowd, but they must have recognized him, as they stood aside and impatiently waved him through, briefly splitting so he could squeeze past them. They weren’t the only ones who recognized him, as some man shouted, “Infecteds suck!” Roan didn’t glance back, he simply held up his middle finger, which earned some ill tempered grumbling and cursing from the crowd. One man had the decency to laugh.

Gordo and Seb were loitering in the shade of an ambulance. “Still making friends and influencing people?” Gordo asked sarcastically.

“People love me. Now what’s the situation?”

“Same as before. Cats loose in the building, an unknown number, but people have separately identified a cougar and a lion. Someone’s suggested an entire pride, but I’m not sure it works like that. Anyways, the lowest reported floor they’ve supposedly been seen on is the fifth, and all floors below have been evacuated. We believe some people maybe have been injured attempting to corral the cats.”

“Morons.”

“SWAT team ETA is seven minutes, so if you wanna try and save any, get to it.” While Gordo was talking, Seb handed Roan a tranquilizer gun, which he took if only to convince the SWAT guys that the cats were no longer a threat. He tucked it into the waistband of his pants as Gordo also handed him a radio. “Stay in touch. We’ll give you a heads up when they ingress.”

Roan nodded, and spun around, tensed, as something impacted the sidewalk behind him. It was a half empty Starbucks cup that spewed cold coffee all over the mica flecked sidewalk in front of the Arcadia Building. Gordo pointed into the crowd, and barked, “Arrest that asshole.”

One of the boys in blue plunged into the crowd, which parted uneasily, as the man who threw it yelled, “You fuckin’ cats are murderers! You should all be drowned!”

“Shut the fuck up!” Gordo snapped. Roan ignored it and headed into the glass fronted tower of Arcadia. Deciding he and Paris weren’t so bad had done wonders for Gordo’s sympathy towards infecteds.

Roan found himself in an eerily empty lobby, where signs of how much fucking money these people made were everywhere, from the marble floor to the mahogany reception desk and the super quiet air conditioning system that always kept the lobby just a couple of degrees above arctic chill. He could smell fear and panic, but it was quickly dissipating in the chilled air, and it was all Human. He smelled that no cats had been in the lobby.

How had they gotten in and where had they hidden? Someone used to be an employee here, or a customer who had been in the building enough to get a solid idea of its layout (perhaps on purpose). They knew where they could go and hide out until the change. And the change took about an hour, give or take a few minutes (not for him, but for everyone else), so they had to be places where no one would go during their change. This was a plan with a lot of “ifs” that shouldn’t have worked with so many cats, and yet it seemed to have worked. Was it an inside job? Did they have a current employee (infected or not) helping them? You’d think they’d have to.

Roan ignored the elevators and found the door to the fire stairs, which was hidden absurdly well. He felt like running, and that’s exactly what he did, pelting up the stairs like he was running a marathon. He barely felt any of the exertion, but when he reached the second floor and started up the third, a bit of a Clash song just floated through his head for no reason at all: “London calling to the imitation zone, forget it brothers, you can go it alone!” Now why had that occurred to him? It was either his subconscious attempting to be funny (or just entertaining), or a precursor to another aneurysm. (The last thing he genuinely remembered before feeling that deep, stabbing pain in his head was a These Arms Are Snakes lyric that just floated into his head for no reason. Either this was his brain’s fucked up way of trying to warn him bad things were a-brewin’ in his blood vessels, or just some random thing, a coincidence. At least it had good musical taste.)

He stopped dead as he smelled blood.

Now that he had stopped he could hear harsh breathing too, echoing in the narrow metal stairwell. It was above him, but not far. “I’m on my way,” he announced. “Can you hear me?”

At first he was sure the guy (it was a guy; you could tell from the blood) was unconscious, but when he was within view of the fourth floor landing, the guy said, gasping and weak, “You shouldn’t go up. I don’t know where they are.”

The man was infected, Roan knew that from the blood too. Panther strain. He was in human form though, splayed on the fourth floor landing, partially slumped against an exit door, bloody scratch marks on his face, arms, and torso, but most of the blood was coming from a neck wound that, while not spurting, was losing blood in copious amounts that couldn’t be healthy for anyone. A puddle had already formed around him, dying his jeans black. His t-shirt was previously black, but it gleamed wetly and clung to his torso like he was a model, except models usually weren’t drenched in blood.

He was an average looking guy in his early twenties, with the only odd thing about him being his strawberry blond hair and hazel eyes, as red hair and hazel eyes was an unusual combination. When his eyes locked on his, Roan thought he saw recognition in them, which was confirmed when he said, “Oh, you’re him.”

Before asking what that was supposed to mean – and his inflectionless, tired voice gave no tells – Roan pulled out his radio, and said, “Got a guy bleeding out on the fourth floor landing of the emergency stairwell. The area’s clear to this point, send in the paramedics.”

“Roger,” Gordo replied.

Roan tucked the radio into his waistband (which was getting crowded at this point, but fuck it), and then covered the throat wound with his hand, putting as much pressure on it as he dared. He should reach into his neck and pinch off whatever vein was leaking out so much blood, but he wasn’t a medical professional and there was a good chance he’d pinch off the wrong damn thing. Also, he would probably cause this guy pain, and he’d undoubtedly been in enough pain. There was blood on the stairs from the fifth floor, suggesting he’d dragged himself to this point or fallen. “Do we know each other?” Roan asked, sure they didn’t.

“No,” the guy confirmed. “But I know you. You’re Roan McKichan.”

He mispronounced his last name, but since he was dying, he let it go. “It’s my day for being recognized. What’s your name?”

“Ben. Ben Sawyer.”

“Well Ben, what happened? How are you the only members of the cat hit squad who didn’t change?”

All he had was his eyes now. His posture was limp, there seemed to be no strength in his body, and most of his face was obscured by blood. But his eyes, as tired as they were, still told him all he needed to know. He saw the denial, but then he saw the surrender, the decision to just tell him the truth. “We weren’t a hit squad.”

“So what were you? You had to know people might die.”

“Not if they weren’t idiots. We had nothing to lose, we’re all as good as dead anyways, and we figured it was time someone noticed what these greedy bastards were doing, letting our people die -”

“By killing some of them? Not smart.”

“No, we just wanted to bring attention to them.” He paused briefly. “You could.”

He ignored that. “What happened to you?”

“I dunno. I was supposed to change like everyone else, but somehow I didn’t. I mean, fuck, I’ve never had a cycle be so short. Why didn’t I change?”

“How long was it?”

“Three days,” he scoffed. “Three fucking days.”

That was the absolute least of a cycle. It didn’t happen a lot, it was rare, but it did occasionally occur. Obviously it did to this poor bastard. “One of your friends attacked you?”

“I thought I could leave without getting noticed, but I shoulda stayed put. It was Brandon, I think, but I don’t blame him for what happened. Shit happens.”

Roan wondered where the EMTs were, but thought he heard noises below them. They probably had trouble finding the door. Roan was kneeling beside him, and felt blood soaking into the knees of his pants even as it ran down his hand. The funny thing was there was so much blood in a person; you really had no idea how much until you had one bleeding to death right in front of you.

Ben stared at him, and Roan could almost see him falling somewhere deep inside his eyes. He wanted to sleep, and Roan knew he couldn’t let him, he had to keep him conscious. He could hear the EMTs pounding up the stairs, but they were taking much longer than Roan had. But to be fair, he wasn’t lugging equipment, and also he wasn’t quite Human. “You should be our leader,” Ben said.

Roan gave him a quizzical look. “Excuse me?”

“We need a leader. Most groups have them, but we don’t. And you’d be perfect.”

“I doubt it.”

“You would. Most normals are afraid of us because of what we could give ‘em. They’re afraid of you ’cause of what you can do to them.” His gaze was steady and strong – he honestly believed what he was saying. But that could have been the blood loss.”You’re dangerous because you remind them they’re just prey.”

Finally the EMTs reached the landing, huffing slightly. “He’s infected,” Roan told them. Both of them, a far too handsome man and a woman built like a fireplug, nodded as they put their kits down. Roan waited until EMT Handsome was ready, and then quickly removed his hand from Ben’s neck wound, where just a bit more blood spilled out before Gorgeous George put his gloved paramedic hand over it. He had a thick gauze pad too, but it would probably last only a few seconds before it was soaked with blood and utterly useless.

Roan stood up, and Ben’s hazel eyes followed him, even as the female paramedic shined a penlight into his eyes and asked him basic response questions. Roan felt bad for the kid, but there was nothing he could do for him now, and he still had friends upstairs. Which reminded him to ask, “How many?”

“Four,” Ben replied, still ignoring the EMTs.

Roan nodded and skirted them, heading for the fifth floor. “You’ve got blood on you,” Paramedic Sexy said. Bizarrely, he had a British accent, which he didn’t expect. But why not? Paramedics could be British. “It’ll draw the cats right to you.”

“Good.” He wanted them to come to him, to leave the Humans alone and respond to their alpha. It might be the only way to save them before the normals killed them all.