9 – The Unshakable Demon

Roan hadn’t sought out an argument with the cops, but he kind of ended up in one anyways.

He viewed the paw prints, but scenting the room he only caught the scent of blood and death. And there was something about the paw print, its placement, the way the blood soaked into the impression of the pads, that struck him as false. He was trying to imagine a large cougar – it would have had to have been a large cougar – standing here, in the position required to leave the print, and he couldn’t imagine why the cougar would have stood in such a position … and only left a single print. There may have been others, partials, but they didn’t take.

There was a bit of an argument, enlivened by the fact that no one was sure how someone could leave fake prints anyways, but he eventually headed back into the kitchen, where he realized that fifth blood scent was bothering him. He knew why after a couple of seconds – it was too faint. All the blood was heavy, except for one person’s, which was just a trace. At this crime scene that made no sense, so he decided to ignore the bullshit and follow it.

There was a trail to follow. It wasn’t always visible, but he could smell it if he crouched down, close to the ground. Gordo thought he was losing it, but followed along with Seb, staying back a respectful distance. Roan followed the scent out into the backyard, through a broken fence, and eventually, coming over the crest of a very tiny hill, he knew exactly where his trail would lead, or at least get lost. “Empty it,” he told them, pointing at the small but deep drainage area in front of the power sub-station. It glittered in the gloomy night like quarters in a gutter. “You’ll find bodies.”

Gordo and Seb looked at it with wonderfully stoic cop expressions. “Were we following a corpse?” Gordo wondered.

Seb shook his head. “We were following the killer, weren’t we? He cut himself.”

Roan nodded. “Or someone cut him before they died. It’s a man, or a woman with so much testosterone she must have nascent balls. But not an infected. An infected in cat form wouldn’t carry someone out to the water anyways.”

“No, a cat wouldn’t bother,” Seb agreed.

“It might. Leopards can sometimes drag prey up a tree,” Roan pointed out.

They both scowled at him. Okay, he probably hadn’t needed to say that. Still, he felt he had to, just to be a smart ass.

By the time they got back to the scene, there was far more press, and a few more cops too. As he walked to his motorcycle, a couple of the press people got up in his face and asked, “How many cats did it? Was it a group?”

The light from a video camera nearly blinded him, and he gave the unseen filmmaker an evil frown. “There were no cats involved in this crime. Go chase another ambulance, will you?”

“Why are you here if cats aren’t responsible?” a female voice accused.

“’Cause someone fucked up.” There – he’d guaranteed that footage wouldn’t end up on the news.

He drove home running through the gory scene in his head, wondering who would stage something like that. Kill four people, splatter their blood all over the walls, dump two bodies but leave two partially dismembered at the scene, then stage a couple of paw prints … why?

He suddenly wondered if any of the cuts could have been made with a tile cutter.

No, that guy was still locked up, if not in transit to California. But how interesting that these things occurred so close to one another. Could be coincidence. Should he count on that?

At home, Dylan was gone to work, and it was later than he thought anyways; he’d spent longer at the scene than he’d realized. He took a bath and tried to wash the scent of blood off of him, which lingered even though he hadn’t gotten any on him. It was probably all in his head.

Was someone targeting cats again, but in an entirely new way? He was an obvious infected, being rather “out” about his status (and his gayness), so if they wanted a cat target he’d be ideal, and Panic would be a good place to find him. And if they wanted to ramp up common sentiment against cats even more than the Grant Kim case – which was still a powder keg – a big ugly slaughter would do it. It didn’t feel perfect, but there was enough truth to it that it seemed like solid ground. Yet that was incredibly troubling, wasn’t it? It meant that Charlie the tile cutter wasn’t working alone.

After his bath he went downstairs and nuked some of the food Dylan had made earlier, because gruesome scene or not, he was still hungry. His head was starting to get that slow ache that it sometimes did before a migraine sank its talons in his brain, so he popped a couple of more pills after eating a couple of forkfuls of vegetarian rigatoni. It was good, but he had to nuke some Italian sausage he had hidden in the fridge, because the leftover lion urges wanted flesh between his teeth. Sometimes there was nothing for it but to indulge it.

After eating the exhaustion hit hard, so he went to catch some Z’s, and even though he didn’t take anything heavy, he slept right through a phone call from Hatcher. According to the message he left, that web site he asked about was hard to track down, but the server was somewhere in Romania, which was common for sites trying to get around certain legal restrictions. He was trying to find out the real name of the owner, but the bastard was tricky. He also volunteered that he assumed this meant he’d discovered Jordan’s fascination with internet porn. So Hatcher was aware of it? Did he know about Brittney and Darren too?

He was contemplating whether to call him back or not when he heard an unfamiliar car in the driveway. He looked out the window to see a beaten up old hatchback the color of mold green and primer grey, which hardly seemed like a threatening car, but he knew who it belonged to as soon as he saw a whisper thin man with expertly coifed hair get out of the driver’s side. It was Luis, and honestly, shouldn’t the “Save a horse – ride a cowboy” bumper sticker been the giveaway?

He ran downstairs, and managed to open the door just before Luis and Dylan reached it. He smelled blood and saw Dylan at the same second. “What the fuck happened?” he blurted, swallowing back a growl of rage.

“It’s a good thing I’m looking for a job, ’cause I think I just got my ass fired,” Dylan admitted, clenching bloodstained teeth. His left eye was swelling shut, and discolored by a bruise that was mostly dark burgundy, slowly shading towards a livid purple. His upper lip was nearly bisected by a bloody cut that was just starting to scab, and there was an abrasion on his cheek that would probably turn into a minor bruise in the next couple of hours. A dribble of blood was visible on the navy blue Seattle Falcons t-shirt he wore (hey, they got them as freebies, so why not).

“Oh, that pendejo deserved worse,” Luis insisted. “Too bad your straight hockey friends weren’t there tonight. Although I swear I’ve seen that one before.”

“The one that looks kind of like a darker Matthew Mitcham?” Dylan replied. Roan wished he knew who that was. At Luis’s nod, he said, “Oh, that’s Scott. I wouldn’t be surprised if he was in Panic before.”

“He’s gay?” Luis asked, with an awful lot of hope.

“Switch hitter,” Roan told him, scowling at them both. “Now who the fuck beat you up?”

“Actually he did the beating,” Luis told him. “You’d have been proud of him, honey. You should see the other guy.”

“You probably will see the other guy if he presses charges,” Dylan admitted sheepishly. He slipped past Roan and into the living room like he was trying to escape an awkward situation. Like it was going to be that easy.

“If he presses charges, you press ‘em right back,” Luis argued. “I’ll say he threw the first punch, and I can get a whole bunch of people to back me up.”

“Is anyone going to tell me what happened?”

Luis gave him a funny look, which he didn’t quite get the meaning of until he said, “Nice undies.” Roan had forgotten he was sleeping in his Homer Simpson boxer shorts. Oh well, at least he wasn’t naked. Then his eyes focused on his chest and arms, and he asked, “Wow, you got a lot of tats. Some of these are new, aren’t they? I didn’t think you had that much ink.”

Roan ignored him, and not just because he didn’t want to talk about it. Dylan had flopped on the couch and leaned his head back, eyes closed, seemingly tired. Roan went to the kitchen to get an ice pack, and proclaimed, “If someone doesn’t start telling me now, I’m calling the cops myself.”

“This total fuckhead queen started badmouthing infecteds,” Luis said, finally getting back on topic. “I mean he sounded all Glenn Beck crazy, like infecteds should all be in camps and shit like that. And he said … well, shit, I didn’t hear all of it. Just enough to know there musta been gay nazis at some point.”

Okay, Luis had deliberately derailed his own answer. Why? Because Dylan must have told him not to mention something to him. And what could that possibly be? Roan sat carefully on the edge of the couch and gently put the ice pack on Dylan’s bruised eye. While he was careful, Dylan still let out a small hiss of pain through his teeth. “He mentioned me by name, didn’t he?” Roan guessed, looking down at Dylan.

He opened his one good eye and looked up grimacing. “If I say no, will you call me on it?”

“Yes.”

He closed his eye and groaned. “I just snapped, okay? I think this week has been harder on me than I’ve been willing to admit.”

“The guy said you were a freak,” Luis cheerfully supplied. From the way Dylan tensed, he’d really been hoping that Luis would keep his mouth shut. (Shouldn’t he have known that Luis wasn’t the type to keep his mouth shut? Even Roan knew that, and he barely knew the guy.) “He said you were inhuman and the fact that you weren’t locked in a lab somewhere was political correctness run amok.”

“Please,” Dylan groaned, but Luis totally ignored him.

“He said you were giving us gays a bad name ’cause now everyone thinks all gays are infected, and you’re just a freak of nature who -”

“Shut up!” Dylan snapped, with so much anger that Luis looked like he’d just slapped him. It stunned Roan too, mainly because Dylan wasn’t a huge yeller. (But then again, when did he smack a bitch for talking smack?)

“Well, sorr-ree,” Luis said, with an edge of sarcastic bitterness. To complete this, he crossed his arms over his narrow chest and cocked his hip, although since Dylan was laying down on the couch he didn’t see this. “But he asked what happened and I was telling him.”

“It was just hater bullshit,” he snapped back, his anger waning but still obvious. “And it’s fucking disgusting to hear it coming from a gay man who should know damn well what it’s like to be stereotyped.”

Roan patted Dyl’s arm, kind of touched he’d give up his Buddhist principals to punch out a bitter queen for him. “There’s bigots in every race, creed, and orientation. Idiocy is universal.”

“I know. But still … disappointing.”

Roan could only nod, although very little that people did shocked him anymore. He was so fucking jaded it was a minor tragedy. He got up and skirted the couch, holding his arm out towards the door. “Thanks for bringing him home, Luis.”

He got his not so subtle invitation and nodded. “Dylan, if they fire you, I’ll quit. Fucker needed his head smashed in.”

“I sunk to his level,” Dylan replied, sounding disappointed in himself.

“No way. You can’t sink lower than the sewer,” Luis replied. All he needed to do was give a sassy head wobble and snap a Z formation in the air, and he could have been any gay friend in a sitcom or bad movie. Still, Roan kept that thought to himself as he escorted Luis out , and even though he was only in boxer shorts and it was fairly cold, he stepped outside and briefly closed the door behind him. “What’s his name?”

Luis gave him a measured look. “You gonna beat his ass? Honey, you could break that fuckhead in half with your arms tied behind your back. Hell, if you just spit on him he’ll probably faint in terror.”

“No, I’m not interested in that. I’m just wondering if something’s going on.”

“What do you mean?”

“I almost get stabbed in Panic the night before. Now someone picks a fight with my boyfriend there. Hell of a coincidence, don’t you think?”

Luis’s thin eyebrows quirked up. “Oh, hey, now that you mention it … shit, yeah, that does seem kinda funny, doesn’t it?” He frowned in thought, and after a moment said, “I don’t know his name, but I can find out.”

Roan had figured as much, which was why he asked him. Luis might have been a standard template for a Latino party boy twink, but it was exactly that kind of presumed harmlessness that got people to drop their guard. It also helped a lot that he loved to gossip, because people often traded it one story for another – gossip was like a barter system, and he was king of the market. “Thanks. Email it to me, okay? I’ve got a website, MK Investigations, just email me from there. If Dylan finds out -”

Luis held up his hand. “Oh, I know. And I’d get the brunt of it, ’cause he’d expect you to ask, but he’d also expect me not to tell. So keeping this on the DL is cool with me. Now go inside before your balls freeze off.”

He must have noticed him shivering. Well, that kind of thing was hard to suppress. “Thanks.”

Luis waved at him as he headed towards his car, but Roan ducked inside without saying anything except commenting to Dylan, “It’s fucking freezing out there.”

“He didn’t tell you his name, did he?”

He couldn’t have heard them, they were whispering, so Dylan had just guessed. He knew him too well. “No.”

“Good. I know he’s a blabbermouth, but he can keep a few secrets.”

Roan returned to the couch, but he sat on the floor leaning against it, so he could put his head on Dylan’s chest. Dylan put an arm around him reflexively,and his cold fingertips on his back made him shiver again. “So did you leap over the bar, or -”

Dylan groaned in embarrassment. “I am the world’s worst Buddhist.”

“Everybody slips. No one’s perfect.”

“I think I knocked one of his teeth out. Or loose anyways. It was awful, Ro. It was like I found this place inside of me that just wanted to crush his head like a beer can. I almost wanted to lose control, you know? It was like this black well of rage, and it … it almost felt kind of good to let it go.”

“Anger is human. We all have it. You just handle it better than most.”

He stroked his back idly, not responding to that, and they were quiet enough that they could hear the ticking of a clock. Which was funny, because he wasn’t sure they actually had a ticking clock in the house, but he’d heard it before, so they must have and he’d simply forgotten about it. Finally, Dylan asked, “How do you fight it, Roan? How do you keep from giving in completely?”

He almost felt like pointing out he was inhuman, but Dylan probably wasn’t in a joking mood.

Eventually he coaxed Dylan upstairs, where he cleaned the blood off his face and got him to take half a Vicodin for the pain. Dylan had said all he was going to say about the fight for now, so Roan let it go. He’d get it out of him later, when he was more in a mood to spill his guts.  He laid with him until he felt asleep, the half a Vicodin kicking in big time, and then he got up and made some phone calls.

First he called Gordo. He got his call messaging, and he figured he was asleep by now anyways, but he told him he was convinced that there was a new anti-cat hate group operating in the city, and it had ties both to his (would be) assault and the murders that had just occurred. No, he had no name for him, but he was determined to find one.

The sun was now up and the rain had disappeared, at least for now. He got dressed and scarfed down an English muffin while glancing at the paper, aware that he was probably the only person in a twenty mile radius that got the paper delivered to his house anymore. The killings had made the front page, and yes, cats were named as a possible suspect when Roan knew for certain that wasn’t true. It was possible the cops were keeping that to themselves for now to give the real killer a false sense of security, but it would only increase anti-cat sentiment.

For a moment he figured it was too early, and then he figured fuck it, it wasn’t like he kept normal hours anyways, and took the bike out to Holden’s place. He had to bang on the door twice, but finally he answered the door, yawning extravagantly, dressed only in powder blue boxer briefs. “Wow, you’re up early,” he said, scratching his belly and holding the door open.

“I haven’t heard from you, which usually means you’re up to something.”

“Little ol’ me? But I’m so sweet and innocent.” At Roan’s skeptical look he grinned maniacally. “Man, even I can’t believe that.”

“So what’s going on?”

“You first. Was that really a cat killing?”

“No. Now it’s your turn.”

Holden invited him in for coffee, but then remembered he didn’t drink coffee too much. Roan accepted a soda, but only for the caffeine.

Holden told him he found out Coyote’s last gig was arranged via Craigslist, so he worked at hacking Coyote’s email address. It took a while – much longer than he expected, in fact – but he finally got through and found email messages from the guy he supposedly met, who identified himself as “Billy”. He arranged to meet Coyote at a Burger King over on South King Street, where he’d pick him up and take him to the “film site”. It was the last email Coyote got that wasn’t spam.

Holden looked on Craigslist for the exact ad and couldn’t find it. So he responded to the same email address that Coyote had responded to as if he was answering the ad. Roan glared at Holden for all the good it would do. “You did this without telling me?”

“I was going to,” he responded indignantly. “I’m just bait. I’m going to need back up to spring the trap.”

He raised an eyebrow at that, but shook his head in disgust. Yes, Holden was a surprisingly good detective, but damn if he didn’t like to insert himself into the most dangerous situations possible. “Have you gotten a response?”

“Just last night,” he replied proudly. “Sent him the link to my escort page so he could check it out, and make sure I’m not a cop. I expect to get another email shortly, arranging times for the meet.”

Oh yes, his escort page. He almost forgot about that, but the escort agency he worked for did have a website, and a page devoted to each hooker, along with photos of them in various states of undress (although not full nudity – that you had to pay for). He hadn’t seen Holden’s in a long time, but what had struck Roan was the amount of fiction on the page, all devoted to serving the john. Holden’s name was listed as Fox (of course, as no real names were used), and he was described as a sweet farm boy who came to the big city and became just a bit wicked (he was into light BDSM as the dominator). Supposedly he was from Minnesota, when Roan knew he was actually from Lynnwood. But when you paid as much for an escort as the agency clients, you were paying for a fantasy as much as anything else.

Roan rubbed his eyes and wished he’d taken an extra Codeine before coming here. “We need to work out a plan.”

“What plan? I go to the meet and go with the guy. You follow. At the site, we beat the ever living shit out of these assholes, and if you’re willing, kill them and bury them in cement.”

“Okay, you know how many holes there are in that plan? We don’t know how many people are involved in this, we don’t know where you’re going or what they’ll do to you on the way there. We’re flying totally blind and you could get hurt.”

“I don’t care. These fuckers killed Coyote. I want them to mess with me; I want to show them exactly what happens when they target the wrong victim.” He sat forward on the sofa, elbows on his knees, a slightly maniacal look in his eyes. “I’ll take pain as long as I can give it back.”

Now there was a new fantasy category – hooker vigilante. He bet some people would pay big bucks for that.

8 – Falling Sky

Roan let Darren know that bringing the cops in on this was against his best interests, and that surely his daddy’s people knew how to take care of everything without official involvement. Darren seemed to get that, but it was hard to tell, as he was so fucking terrified of Tank that he would have agreed to anything. This was doubly funny because Darren was taller than Tank by at least six inches, but it was attitude, and Tank was just exuding it at near toxic levels. Who on earth would mess with this guy? Even if it was just a front, it was a good one.

They left just as the big Samoan and several other security guys of similar builds (like large appliances) arrived, and Grey put himself forward, as if daring them to grab him. He was a sports guy, not as big as them but semi-famous locally, giving him an edge, and it made them pause. “There was a misunderstanding, but it’s settled,” Roan said, walking down the hall. Tank followed, saying something in French. Tank would tell him in the car that he said, “Suck my jock, assheads.”

“Shame if the club lost its license,” Grey said casually. “Him being underage and all. If someone called the cops, this could go real bad, don’t you think?”

“You’re barred,” the Samoan said darkly. “Don’t come back.”

“Wouldn’t if you paid me,” Grey replied, with a small, contemptuous smile.

Darren had told Roan little, but enough. Jordan found compromising photos of Darren and Brittney on Brittney’s cell, and after a brief scuffle, Jordan stormed off. Darren and Brittney (supposedly) hadn’t seen him since. Roan had already decided he needed to talk to Brittney, he just needed to decide on a plan of action. If she was staying at the Brewsters, it wouldn’t be easy.

In the car, Grey asked him, “Learn what you wanted to know?”

“Pretty much. Are you guys afraid of anything?”

“Root canals,” Grey offered.

“Being eaten by sharks.” Tank said, settling in the back seat.

Roan glanced back at him to make sure he was serious. He was. “I saw Jaws when I was six,” he explained. “I never got over it.”

Well, okay, that might do it.

“Wow, sharks are a huge problem in Quebec,” Grey noted sarcastically. “You musta been terrified all the time.”

Tank leaned forward and flicked Grey on the back of the head, which only made him chuckle as he started the car. For a moment, Roan was almost jealous of their friendship. He wasn’t sure he’d ever met two straight guys who were so close.

They were on the road, driving towards his house, when Tank said, “It’s okay, you know. Everybody loses control now and then. It’s hard to ride the line of being passionate about what you do and being mental about it.”

It took Roan a moment to understand what he was talking about, and then he got he was referring to him breaking the arm and leg of that bodyguard. He rubbed his eyes, trying not to let on how embarrassed he was, and admitted, “I don’t know what happened. I shouldn’t have been that strong.”

“You forget your own strength,” Grey said, with the kind of casualness that suggested he’d experienced it many times. “You overestimate the other guy’s strength and you just paste him. I’ve been in that boat, believe me.”

“Rhody’s concussion,” Tank replied.

He nodded. “Rhody’’s concussion. I felt so shitty about that. You never want to see a guy carried out on a stretcher.”

They didn’t understand. He really shouldn’t have been that strong. It wasn’t the same – Grey just hit a guy far too hard. Roan hadn’t realized his muscles had started shifting, that he was beyond Human strength. But he wasn’t about to explain it, mainly because he wasn’t sure how. “Isn’t that your job, though? Enforcing?”

“To a degree. But you never want to hospitalize someone. That’s just thuggery.”

Hockey was subtler than he thought.

After a moment, Tank noted, “For ex-military, they were kinda crap.”

“They underestimated us,” Grey explained. “You do that, you’re just asking to get your ass kicked.”

They dropped him off at his house, and he walked in to find the lights on and the rich smell of Italian cooking coming from the kitchen. “Oh, you’re back,” Dylan said. He was putting things away in the kitchen. “I didn’t know if you would be home for dinner, so I ate already. But I made enough for you.”

“Thanks, but I’m not hungry.” He was actually, but he didn’t feel like eating right now. How could he have started a change and not felt it? Changing hurt; it also hurt made his mouth bleed, neither of which happened. He hadn’t taken that many pills, and besides that, the painkillers never really did much more than take the slightest edge off. Only really pure opiate derivatives numbed the pain, and not that well and not for long.

Something new was happening to him. He woke up out of breath the other night, now he was changing with no warning. Was this it? He was going to die in some freak ass way.

He noticed Dylan looking at him with a raised eyebrow. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. I’m just trying to figure out where to go from here.” He knew Dylan would be dubious, so he told him what he’d discovered, that Jordan had been two timed by his best friend and girlfriend, and that’s why he ran off. But with Brittney probably hunkering down in the Brewster compound, he wasn’t sure how to contact her.

Dylan kept working, cleaning up the kitchen diligently. He wasn’t a slob like him; he always cleaned up his work area. “Well, there’s school.”

“She’s been skipping.”

“Oh. Crap.” But after a moment, he said, “She’s a trendy rich girl, isn’t she? She’s gonna shop, go out with her boyfriend.”

“Yeah,” he agreed. “Wonder if I can narrow that down to specific areas.” She had a Facebook page, she probably had a Twitter feed, maybe she’d tell him where she’d be. That would be insanely helpful of her. “Yeah, maybe I can.” He went to the kitchen to get a drink, and put a hand on Dylan’s shoulder as he put dishes in the sink.

“Where were you anyways?” Dylan wondered.

“Questioning Darren. I get any phone calls?”

“Nope. Expecting any?”

“Nope.” He’d hoped Holden would have called by now, but he was definitely up to something. He was going to have to pay him a visit. He wrapped his arms around Dylan and rested his head on his shoulder, pressing his body against his, wondering if he should apologize. Dylan wasn’t even thirty, and here he was saddled with a dying freak.

“Why do I get the feeling you’re not telling me things?”

“Because I’m a secretive bastard.” He kissed the side of his neck, enjoying the taste and scent of his skin, and he could feel the heat and pulse of his blood beneath the flesh. The urge to tear into it with his teeth was still strong, but it was amazing how he could ignore it now and the urge no longer bothered him. He knew it should have, but somewhere along the way it had ceased.

He had to feel his skin, so he slipped his hands beneath his shirt, running his hands over Dylan’s flat stomach, and he felt so warm and good. He missed him, and he would miss him, if he was at all capable of missing things when he was dead (which he wasn’t, but he was feeling generous at the moment). “How long ”til you’re due at work?” He wondered, kissing the curve of Dylan’s jaw, working his way up to his earlobe.

He groaned, reaching behind him to run a hand down his back, and said, “A couple of hours, you dirty old man.”

“Who’s old?”

Dylan shrugged him off, just enough to turn his head and kiss him, a strong, hungry kiss that surprised him with its intensity. Dylan had missed him too, huh?

Less than an hour later, they were laying on their bed, trying to catch their breath, sweat cooling on their skin. Roan saw a sliver of light painting the ceiling, as the bedroom curtains weren’t totally closed and the porch lights were on light sensors and came on immediately at night. “You ever gonna tell me what’s wrong?” Dylan asked. He had his head on his chest, arm draped over his abdomen, leg crooked over his. Roan stroked his hair by habit, wondering how his hair always felt so soft.

“What? I thought that went well.”

“Don’t you dare make a joke of this.”

Okay, so the sex was only a temporary distraction. He should have known it wouldn’t last forever. Roan knew he was in a bit of a bind here, as he had promised Dylan if he came back he’d be totally honest with him. Fuck. He considered what he would say, he didn’t honestly know, so he was a little surprised when he heard himself say, “I’m scared.”

Dylan propped himself up on his elbow and looked down at him in concern. “Of what?”

“Disappearing. Of the lion coming out and never going away.”

He frowned, gently brushing hair off his forehead, his dark eyes full of touching concern. “That’s not going to happen.”

“I’m beginning to think it could.”

“Why?”

Yes, great question. Could he tell him the truth? That he meant to just beat a guy senseless and he ended up mauling him, crushing his arm and snapping his leg like it was made of pretzel sticks? That the change seemed to seize him suddenly and he hardly felt it? “The rules no longer apply to me, Dyl. I could -”

The phone rang then, making them both start. By the second ring, Dylan said, “I bet it’s for you.”

“Probably. I wish it was good news for once.” Reluctantly he reached over to the nightstand and snagged the phone by the fourth ring. “Yeah?”

“I need you at 725 154th Street, off Hill Road,” Gordo said, with no preamble. “The faster you get here the better, ’cause it seems the press has already got wind of this.”

“Hey, you’re back on the job,” Roan replied, honestly surprised. As far as he knew, there were two kinds of cops, those that couldn’t wait to get the hell out of there, and those that wanted to stay on the job until they died. Gordo was one of the latter, those crazy son of a bitches who became their job.  He was on medical leave under protest, and must have finally convinced everyone he was fine to return to the cat crime squad. “How you doing, Gordo?”

At the sound of the name, Dylan kissed his chest, sighed, and rolled off the bed. He knew a call from Sikorski was never good. Roan watched him walk to the shower with envy. “Don’t you ask me that,” Gordo snapped. “I’m tired of answering that question. Now move your ass. Time’s wasting here.”

“How bad is it?” There was something in his voice that told him it wasn’t just people worrying about him that was pissing him off.

“Probably the worst scene of the year. Now stop stalling and move it.” He hung up abruptly, but Roan was sort of expecting it by then.

He rolled off the bed himself, stopped in the bathroom to have a piss and throw the condom away, and tell Dylan he was off. Dylan told him to be careful, which struck Roan as funny. The crime was over; all that was left was the clean up of the bodies and the identification of the cat that did it. But he appreciated the sentiment.

He got dressed hastily, careful to not grab a t-shirt that was in any way silly (no need to be disrespectful at a murder scene), and didn’t care that he probably smelled like sex and sweat. They expect him to show up any time of day or night, they were going to have to live with him as is.

He was starving, though, so he stopped in the kitchen to wolf down a croissant and wash it down with a Diet Pepsi, which he also took his Percocet with. He went out to the garage, grabbed his motorcycle helmet off the workbench, and wheeled the bike out.

It was drizzling now, a piddly sort of rain that did no good at all except fuck up traffic. Luckily, since it was now past ten, traffic wasn’t bad enough to be really fucked. It took him ten minutes to reach the site, and down the street from it he saw the cherry red lights that indicated a police presence that was never good. Even at this time of night, in this weather, there were rubberneckers, people trying to get a glimpse of death and misery over the police tape and shoulders of beat cops roped into playing guards. There were some people he vaguely recognized from the twenty four hour local news channel, and as he parked his bike across the street and crossed to the scene, the reporter shouted at him, “So it is a cat crime scene.”

“No, it’s a gay one,” he shouted back, wearily crossing a cracked parking strip and sodden lawn. “Disco balls all over the place.”

Another guy close to the reporter, one he didn’t recognize, stage whispered, “Is that true?”

He must have worked for Fox News.

You knew when you approached a doorway and found a rookie blowing chunks in the rosebushes that you were in for a fun scene. Of course the smell had already hit him, the meaty smell of spilled blood, coppery and hot, the shit smell of death, and it made his gorge rise and his stomach growl simultaneously, the lion making itself known in the hair rising on the back of his neck and the growl welling in his throat. He felt muscles tensing all up and down his body, ready to feast or fight, whatever presented itself first.

Sikorski met him at the door, with a snarky, “Took you long enough.” Technically he looked better than he had when he last saw him, but the heart attack had taken a toll on Gordo. He was never really fat, so now he looked gaunt, his cheeks hollow, giving his face an unintentional ghoulish look. He looked his age now too, which was saying something. He stepped back, and said, “Welcome to Blood Castle.”

Easy to see what he meant. Blood slathered the living room of this single level manufactured home like someone decided to paint with it, but then decided to just throw the stuff around instead. Arterial blood had arced up the side wall, splattering the television, while a blackish red puddle pooled around the coffee table tipped over on its side, almost obscuring a severed hand from view. Great crimson skidmarks seemed to extend out into the next room, while dribbles of brighter, redder blood smeared the kitchen tile. Seb was standing with one of the forensic techs in the far corner, discussing something in an evidence bag. It looked like a chunk of random flesh.

Amongst all this blood and death, it was hard to determine nuance, but he could if he focused, and oddly enough the Percocet helped there. It not only calmed and numbed him, but it kept his brain from racing around, trying too hard. “Why do you think this is a cat killing?” he asked.

Gordo raised his snowy white eyebrows at him. Pre-heart attack, they were silver. “We found a paw print in the back bedroom and in the kitchen. We’ve got it tentatively identified as a cougar, but we wanted confirmation.”

Roan shook his head, and advanced carefully towards the kitchen, staying on a plastic runner someone had put down to keep people from tracking blood out on their shoes. “How many victims?”

“We found two in the bedroom, but all this blood seems to indicate a third -”

“Four victims,” Roan told him. Blood was blood, but everyone’s smelled just a little different. In the kitchen, he caught a whiff of something new. “Make that five.”

“Five?” Gordo’s exclamation was one of horror, not disbelief. Roan had come through too many times to be disbelieved on these kind of things. “Where the fuck are the bodies? No way a single cougar could have eaten that many people.”

“No way indeed. This is a frame job.”

“What?”

Roan looked at him and shook his head again. “It’s all uninfected blood I’m smelling, all pure Human.” And one of them had sweetish smelling blood, indicating diabetes, but he felt that level of detail was far too fucking creepy to ever admit. “No cat has ever been here.”

Some of the techs still working paused and looked at him, with the same kind of bewilderment that was on Gordo’s face. “Bullshit. We found paw prints.”

“Two. Planted. Shit, Gord, look at the way the blood’s splattered. If a cat did this, it had to hit a major artery every time it bit someone. This is a set up. Someone slaughtered this family and wanted people to think a cat did it.”

Gordo’s look was stark and hot with doubt and anger, but he wasn’t really angry with him. He was just angry at the idea that someone would conceive of such a thing, and that he didn’t grasp it immediately. “Who the hell would do that? And why?”

Excellent questions. Roan was wondering about that himself.