17 – Spark

Before Gordo and Seb were given their walking papers to leave the scene, Roan heard a familiar voice arguing at the barricades, and went to find Rainbow trying to get in. Roan got the cop to let her past, but he knew that was a mistake almost instantly, as he had to stop her from rushing up to the door. No one could go in right now.

So Rainbow ended up clinging to him and sobbing until his shirt was soaked with snot and tears. He still felt bad for her, as he always felt bad for Rainbow. There was just something about her, about her naive sense of belief and peace, that made his cynical side shrink back and take a seat. She wasn’t a cynical opportunist or a teenager looking for a thrill, or a spoiled brat looking to shock her parents by joining a religion they would disapprove of. She honestly believed this bullshit, she wanted to be a part of something bigger than herself, and as much as he wanted to begrudge her that, he couldn’t. It’s not something he would have chosen for himself, it wasn’t something he could completely understand, but there was no malice in this, no judgment of others; she just wanted to belong to something. And he had to give her that.

Eventually a female paramedic came over – he didn’t recognize her, but Roan got the sense she knew him – and led Rainbow away from him, giving her a sedative and sitting with her on the back bumper of an ambulance, extending as much comfort as a sympathetic ear could give. He wrung out his shirt as much as possible while still wearing it, and Gordo and Seb agreed to keep him in the loop. They also agreed to check out his white supremacist angle.

When he got back to his car, he just sat there a few minutes, staring at nothing, wondering what bothered him the most about this. He wasn’t sure, to be brutally honest. He hated the church and all it stood for, but did he want some psychopath to murder them? No, of course not. But he did hate them. This was the very textbook definition of mixed feelings.

He checked his phone, in case Grey called to report they were under siege (or, more likely, Tank had beaten someone half to death with the coat rack), but it was only Fiona who had called him in the hour (had it really been that long?) he’d been at the church. She told him he might want to stop by, as she found something he might like to see.

With Hatcher not answering his phone calls, he asked Fi, when she called to ask if he was okay, to look into the site for him. He sometimes forgot, but dominatrix wasn’t her first career. She used to work at Microsoft; she had some serious computer skills, only recently displaced by her whip handling skills.

She lived downtown, in a shabby chic apartment block known as Sunrise Terrace. She was on the third floor, in apartment 318, and as he knocked on the green painted door, he realized this was the first time he’d ever seen where Fiona lived. That seemed like an awful oversight on his part.

He heard a couple of locks being thrown before she opened the door and said, “Come in you – what the hell happened to your shirt?”

“I got sobbed on.”

She blinked at him for a moment. “Well, that’s not the worst thing I thought of.”

He didn’t dare ask what that was.

Fiona was dressed in a loose navy t-shirt advertising Aero Leather, black sweatpants, and orange Crocs, suggesting she wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Her apartment was only a three room one, but not too small, and over the scent of recently heated up cinnamon rolls, he smelled a cat. “Um -” he began, but he didn’t have time to finish.

“Don’t worry, I shut Mandy in the bedroom.”

“Mandy’s your cat?”

“She is indeed. I didn’t know if she’d freak out on you or what, so I thought it best we didn’t find out. Now who sobbed on you?”

“Rainbow.” At her look, he was forced to explain. At least he got a chance to look around her place while talking. The combined living room kitchen area wasn’t overly neat, it had a lived in look, but the clutter was just low level enough to be homey. She had your typical good quality thrift store couch and coffee table, a TV on a stand (that was supposed to be a nightstand, but what difference did it make), and a bare bones Ikea desk where an Alienware computer set up dominated the surface, with an extra (?) hard drive stack on the floor beside the desk, and small neon lights of red and blue flashing inside the rectangular metal tower. What appeared to be a Bose style CD/MP3 player sitting on the kitchen counter was softly playing Tori Amos. A dominatrix who listened to Tori Amos? Oddly enough, that sounded about right. “You a gamer?” Alienware was mostly a gamer’s computer, or at least that was his impression.

“Used to be. Rather than kill my ex, I killed trolls. But lately I haven’t had the time to game, and besides, I couldn’t give a shit about my ex anymore.” He assumed she meant her ex-husband, a person she didn’t talk about at any great length, she simply said “the ex” like he was a near fatal disease she once caught. “Can I get you something? I have diet soda and tap water; pick your poison.”

“I’m okay. Thanks, though.”

“What about another shirt?”

“Better not. Dylan smells a woman on me, he’ll get crazy jealous.”

That startled a short, sharp laugh out of her as she sat at her desk in front of the computer. She had a really nice desk chair there, high backed padded leather, and that alone told him how much time she spent on the computer. “How are you doing, by the way,” she asks, as her fingers flew over her sleek, ergonomically designed keyboard. “I felt bad about calling you, but after I found this out I felt you’d wanna know.”

“I’m fine. It wasn’t the first time someone’s tried to kill me.”

“He tried to burn down your house.”

“He scorched my porch. Which almost sounds like a Doctor Seuss title.”

“How’s Dylan?”

“He was a little shaken up, but I think he’ll be okay. So what did you find?”

She looked up, her tight red ponytail swishing back with authority. “Well, I looked around for the owner of the domain name of that snuff site, and I eventually discovered – through means that might not be legal – that it was bought by Visionics Limited.”

He chewed that over for a moment. No, time wasn’t improving it. “What the fuck kind of name is that?”

“I know. But it’s a shell company, a phony thing made up by Dermot Cook.” She paused and looked up at him dramatically, like that was supposed to mean something.

“Who the hell’s Dermot Cook?”

“Robert Hatcher’s original business partner. The two had a big falling out, and Hatcher bought out his share of the business a couple years ago.”

“So the porn site is Cook’s new business?”

“No, he’s dead.”

“What?”

She turned back to her computer and called up a Wikipedia page. “He died last year. Dropped dead of a heart attack on a treadmill. Can you imagine that? Dying in a gym while exercising? Fuck that. I’d rather die face first in a pie.”

He was down with that, although he wasn’t a huge fan of pie. (Unless it was Shepard’s pie, then maybe.) “This is Wikipedia. You can’t trust -”

She jumped ahead to the Seattle Times’s webpage, and the huge obituary they ran for Cook. Okay, now he believed it. “He bought the domain name when?”

“For the snuff site? Six months ago.”

“From before he died?”

“No, hon, six months ago.”

Yeah, okay, that didn’t make sense. “Who’s the head of Visionics Limited now?”

“No one. It’s a dummy corporation.”

He knew Fiona wasn’t trying to be irritating, but this kind of was. Would it kill her to just spit it out? “Who’s in charge of Cook’s estate?”

“No one.” Her blue eyes gazed back up at him expectantly, as if she was hoping he would make sense of all of this. “His family was gone, he was an only child, he never married or seemingly had a serious girlfriend. I think he was closeted gay or asexual. Anyways, his will stipulated that all his money be shared between six different charities.”

“So the Visi-whatever the hell name is up for grabs.”

“Technically. Although not a lot of people know about it.”

Roan considered this all carefully, feeling he was getting closer to something big and ugly. “Hatcher had to know about the shell corp.”

She bit her lower lip in thought. She wasn’t wearing make up right now, but she was still attractive in a warm, open way that you really wouldn’t anticipate from someone with a foot locker full of whips and nipple clamps. “You’d think so. But you don’t think the snuff site is his, do you? Why would he hire you if it was? He wouldn’t want this coming out.”

“How would it? He hired me to look for Jordan, not for the owner of a snuff site.” A couple of things seemed to suddenly pop up in his mind, like corpses finally rising to the surface of a stagnant pond. “That’s why he’s been ducking my calls. He can’t find the owner of the site ’cause it’s him and he doesn’t want me to know. Bet the server isn’t in Romania either. Son of a bitch.”

“But if Jordan’s run off to find the snuff film location, wouldn’t he know?”

“Hatcher’s a busy guy. I bet he’s not hands on with the site; in fact, he may just profit from the fucking thing, and someone else runs it. Someone who wouldn’t know Jordan on sight, especially if he gave them a phony name.” Did that sound right? No, none of this would ever sound right, but it felt sickeningly plausible. Was that how Jordan found the site in the first place? He found the name somewhere amongst his dad’s stuff and checked it out, and discovered he liked it. But he never let his father know he was in on his dirty secret. It allowed him to hide in plain sight from his father, and who would look for him on a porn site? Certainly not Hatcher.

“Then …” she began, turning back to the computer screen. She sounded like she didn’t know what to say. “Are we dead? Is he gonna have us killed ’cause we know his dirty little secret?”

“You watch too many bad movies. Killing us would just bring more attention to the problem he’s trying to sweep under the rug.”

“So how would he sweep us under the rug?”

She locked eyes with him, and he felt something loosen in the pit of his stomach. A man like him would delegate, would get someone – someones – with no connection to him whatsoever to take care of the problem.

Like white supremacists? He suddenly wondered how you went about hiring a gang of them, and how much it cost.

If Hatcher got this ball rolling, he didn’t care how much money and power he had. He was going to kill the bastard.

16 – Bride of the Elephant Man

It was probably a good thing he wasn’t tired, as there was no sleep that night.

They gave their statements to the cops, and the firemen made sure  the fire was indeed out. Roan saw for himself that the damage to the porch was slightly worse than he thought. The entire door was charred, the paint blistered on the jamb where it wasn’t burned, and the pine near the front door had several branches burned to black stumps, needles curled in on themselves. He told Dylan they’d have to hit Lowes in the morning and get themselves a new door. He was trying to distract Dylan, who was still miserable, and now shivering in spite of the blanket a kind fireman gave him to drape over his shoulders. Roan sat with him against the side of his car, arm around his shoulders, occasionally whispering encouragement to him or just giving him a quick, surreptitious kiss. He wasn’t a fan of public displays of affection (straight or gay – he’d been tailing cheating spouses too long to have any romantic notions left), but he sensed that Dylan needed it right now, the reassurance and the comfort. He was cold too, but didn’t care.

The cops, as he guessed (especially since it was Thompson and Bragg as the arresting officers), ignored everything the guy ranted about before shoving him in the back of the prowler. It was an open and shut case of asshattery, what with the rifle and the gasoline can in the front cab of the truck, and his constant ranting references to “faggots” and “freaks” and “abominations” (all guaranteed to get you viewed as the crazy asshole they arrested about seven times a day), and Thompson just ignored him until suddenly he told him to call Fox News and walked away from the patrol car, shaking his head in disgust. “I know I can’t treat ‘em differently, but I hate that shit.”

“What shit?” He didn’t think it was anything the perp said, as he hadn’t changed his tune (second verse, same as the first), but he doubted the basic injustice of this harassment was getting to Thompson now (especially since he still insisted on calling him Batman).

“He’s got a swastika tat,” he said, and slapped his upper arm, where the tattoo presumably was.

And that little bit of information sent his synapses firing. Swastika tattoo? And Sander Lewis did time in Idaho, home of the Aryan Nation compound? “Oh holy fuck,” he exclaimed. “They’re white supremacists.”

Thompson snorted. “Nazis? Yeah.”

“No. These guys who have been harassing me? That’s the connecting thread. They’re white supremacists.” And he hoped the fact that two black police officers had arrested that bastard was making him choke on his own bile.

Thompson smirked faintly. “They know you’re white, right?”

“I’m gay and infected. Both of those things – infected edging out gay – make me a pariah to them. I’m honorarily not white.”

“Lucky you.” Thompson then edged closer, and indicated Dylan without pointing at him. “Ain’t he Mexican?” he whispered.

“Mixed.”

“Could they be after him?”

He shook his head, and filled Thompson in on everything, starting from the attempted stabbing incident in Panic to getting in a fight with Dylan to now. Thompson listened with an ever deepening frown, and finally said, “Maybe you should talk to Chief Matthews. If you’re really being targeted, you might be able to get some protection.”

He meant police protection, which ran the gamut from random prowler patrols to a marked car sitting outside his house for several hours each day. He honestly didn’t like either idea, but said, “Yeah, maybe I should talk to her.” He didn’t need protection. But Dylan? He was worried about Dylan. He’d resent being tailed by the cops, though, being protected. He may have been a cop’s son, but his father did murder his mother – he had no great love of cops.

He decided not to worry about it at the moment. As Thompson and Bragg drove off with the offending Neo-Nazi and the fire truck following in short order, he wondered why a bunch of racist fuckheads would suddenly take up a campaign of arms against him. Hate him, sure, but actively try and hurt him? Why after all this time?

He asked Dylan if he wanted to go somewhere else and spend the night, go to a hotel, and he angrily refused, saying those fucks weren’t scaring them out of their home. Which was good, as that was the response Roan was hoping to hear.

Dylan was still in a kind of shell shocked mood, stunned by his own rage, so Roan just talked to him, trying to reassure him, and held him. He wasn’t even sure what he was saying half the time, but he was pretty sure Dylan wasn’t paying attention either. Eventually Dylan fell asleep, as the sky was starting to shade to a paler violet, and he just stared at the ceiling and wondered. He was accustomed to someone out there – some person, unknown to him or known – wanting to kill him at all times. He knew the hate was out there, he knew it occasionally manifested, and he knew some of that hate wasn’t even personal. He became a symbol, a representative of every single infected who walked the earth, everything that was wrong with the world and his kind, his sub-human kind. Some people who might consider killing him or might actually try and kill him didn’t know him at all; he was just a handy target. He accepted that when he first joined the police force and would get anonymous phoned in death threats, find notes shoved in his locker promising to skin him alive. He long ago made peace with it, with the fact that his death could be sudden and at the hands of a stranger, and now more than ever was confident in his ability to beat them back (because the haters were ironically kind of right – no, he wasn’t totally Human, and yes, that should really bother them). But was it fair to drag a civilian into this? At least Paris hadn’t been a civilian; he’d been an infected too, knew all about the fear, revulsion, and weirdly homicidal hatred that a medical condition (as alien as it was) could cause. But Dylan? This kind of hatred was new to him, and he didn’t deserve to be subjected to it. But how did he send him away?

When he was sure he wouldn’t wake him up, he slid out from beneath him and went downstairs to check out the damage the fuck had done with his rifle. Glass would have to be replaced and he’d have to spackle and repaint a couple of walls, but he’d probably be able to get money for the windows from the crime victims fund, and it really wasn’t as bad as it could have been. The Modest Mouse song came and went through his brain again, and he realized he was starting to acquire a skill for dodging bullets, both literal and metaphorical.

He had some toast, popped a codeine, and checked his phone messages, glad he’d turned the ringer off when they went to bed, because his call messaging box was full. He deleted all the messages from reporters wanting statements, and saved messages of concern from Gordo, Seb, and Dropkick, all of which were recent. Dropkick probably put it best when she asked, “Fuck Angus, whose corn flakes did you piss in?” He wished he knew. He might take it back.

He considered going out to the hardware store and getting what he needed to sheet up the windows (temporarily), fix the walls, maybe buy another small tree to put near the door, but he realized he didn’t want to leave Dylan alone. After thinking about it for a few minutes – would he really opt for police protection? Even though Dylan would loathe it? – he called another number. With a yawn, Scott answered, “You do know what time it is, don’t cha?”

“Need a favor.”

“More tough guy work?”

“Yeah.” He then told Scott what transpired late last night, and soon he heard him covering the mouthpiece of the phone and repeating parts of it to Grey in the background, who went from sounding barely conscious to deeply unhappy in the space of a couple of minutes. He told him he needed some guys here to just kick back and keep an ear out for trouble while he was gone – and it might be work he needed on and off for the next couple of days. “Good thing for you we’re out of the playoffs,” Scott replied, and said they’d be there as soon as they got dressed.

That turned out to be in about ten minutes. Grey and Scott both came over and marveled at the damage done to the front of the house, which looked even worse in daylight. “Tell me you killed him,” Grey said.

“No. But Dylan almost did, so maybe that counts.”

They said Tank was on his way – it seemed he got laid last night (good for him) and nobody knew where he was, but he finally answered his cell phone – and while Richie was too hung over to be of much good, he left Jeff a message on his cell. Grey and Scott were discussing whether to bring Troy in on this, a “benchwarmer”, a guy who was on the team but played so little Roan couldn’t remember ever having seen him,  but they described him as an “old school bruiser” which was presumably good for guard duty. Roan wasn’t sure they needed so many guys (at least not yet), but Scott, acting in full captain mode, said it was good to have enough guys so anyone could fill in at a moment’s notice.

Seemed weird, but wasn’t it weird to have a hockey team protecting your boyfriend? So he agreed the idea was sound. He asked them to be quiet and not wake up Dylan, and then asked that they call Gordon instantly (he gave them his cell number) if any trouble started. They agreed, but Grey did so with a kind of unsettling smirk, a kind that said ‘I’ll call the police as soon as I’ve beaten them into a chunky red smear‘. Which was fine with him; Grey had already beaten one of the Aryan Moronhood before, and round two was unlikely to have a different outcome.

He left them going through his DVD library, and arguing over what they wanted to watch (Scott wanted to see Slap Shot, Grey wanted to see The Venture Brothers, and both volunteered disappointment at not finding gay porn, but Scott joked you always kept your “porn drawer” out of the living room – making him wonder if Scott had just given away where his porn was, and if his porn was all straight, which he doubted). Although you’d think watching TV would keep them distracted from guard duty, Roan didn’t see the problem – these guys loved to fight. They wouldn’t give up an opportunity through inattention. As he was leaving, he wondered why he should trust them, as really they were just acquaintances (and Scott had come on to him pretty hard – in fact, kissing him probably went over the “come on” line), but he did have the oddest feeling that at some point they’d all become good friends without realizing it. He still wasn’t sure how. Why a bunch of young (mostly) straight boy jocks wanted to be friends with him was still utterly baffling. (Except, of course, he was a “superhero”, wasn’t he? Some people may have seen that as pretty cool.)

At the home improvement behemoth he picked up all the stuff he needed, and in the paint section (just aisles and aisles of cans – did anyone need this many varieties of paint?) he found some paint on its own stand alone shelving, apparently color “mis-mixed” paint being sold for five or ten dollars a can. He noticed one had a daub of paint on the lid (signifying the color inside) that was a kind of warm reddish-brown with a hint of orange. It looked almost exactly like that “Autumn Spice” color Paris had wanted to paint his office. He bet Dylan would like this color, and how would it look in the living room?  So he grabbed it and added it to his cart. Why not? Try and use the disaster to make some improvements.

He had just finished loading up his car when his cell went off. Checking it, he saw it was Gordo before he answered it. “Yeah?”

“You need to come down to the church,” he said, his voice sounding strained. “Divine Transformation. You need to see this. We may need you for crowd control.”

Roan could hear sirens in the background, people talking in raised, stern voices. “What’s going on?”

“You weren’t the only person targeted,” he said cryptically, and broke the connection. Not a single bit of that sounded good.

On his way to the scene he put in a quick call to the house. Everything was fine, they were all watching the Venture Brothers (Tank had apparently arrived), and they were being careful to keep it down so they didn’t wake Dylan. He wondered if it was okay if Tank made some toast, and he told him to go ahead and help themselves to whatever, although he’d appreciate it if they left Dylan’s vegetarian stuff alone. As Roan expected, that got a big chuckle from Grey. (Yeah, like those big jock boys were vegetarians.) They were not so much bodyguards right now but babysitters, but he didn’t care. They would keep Dylan safe. One attacker might be able to get past one of them, but all three, including enforcer Grey and crazy ass Tank? Never. Not unless they brought sub-machine guns, and that was more unlikely than someone bringing a rocket launcher to a knife fight.

It turned out police cars blocked off the street down to the Church of the Divine Transformation, so he had to double park in front of someone’s house on the next block and walk in, and even then he had to weave his way through clots of rubberneckers and reporters. Some of the reporters recognized him, and asked if he knew what was going on, if he had any comment, if he knew anything about the shooter. That confirmed his worst fear before he got to the front line of the cordon. One of the cops on the other side of the sawhorse recognized him and waved him through, as he slowly but surely saw the scene for himself.

Crime scene tape blocked off most of the front yard, although an ambulance had backed up on the main lawn, blocking most of the view from the front end of the street. Roan could smell blood, death, and cordite, hear the buzz of bees and flies periodically drowned out by the crackle of police radios and the low discussions of paramedics and evidence technicians. Camera flashes burst through the open door of the house turned church, and in their brief light he could spot liquid dark splashes of what could only be blood in the foyer. Gordo and Seb were loitering near the side of the stairs leading up to the wrap around porch, and from the sheer number of other cops walking around, he assumed homicide was in charge of the investigation, and while Gordo and Seb may have been the initially responding officers, when it became clear this wasn’t a “kitty crime” they got shoved off.

He walked up to them, and didn’t even have to ask. Gordo started telling him. “A gunman came up to the door of the church at seven thirty eight this morning and started firing. He killed three and injured five before he was shot by the church’s part time security guard. He’s en route to the hospital, but he was critical, he’s probably not gonna make it. There’s a possibility he’s a disgruntled cat or something, but after what we found in the front seat of his car, we don’t think so.”

Seb had it, sealed in a see through plastic evidence envelope. Even from here, he could see written in blocky, almost elementary level letters on a scrap of white notepaper ALL ABOMINATIONS MUST DIE.

“I hate to say it, but you got lucky last night,” Gordo went on. “Or maybe you’re just so damn scary, that asshole couldn’t commit to trying to kill you face to face.”

“You’d have ripped his face off,” Seb noted. “Maybe he was a smarter breed of idiot.”

Roan nodded, slightly distracted. It could have been purely a coincidence, but he didn’t think so. He’d bet everything he had this guy would turn out to be a white supremacist too.

So why had they declared war on infecteds? And why now?

15 – Wish

Roan wouldn’t have minded talking to Hatcher this time, but of course he got the bastard’s answering machine instead. He ended up calling him three times that day, only to get nothing but machine. Was he off on holiday or something? No client technically had to let him know when they were jaunting off to Vegas, but it was common courtesy, especially if you were looking for their son. But he was wondering a lot about Hatcher right now.

When they got home from the bakery, he checked his email, and while almost thoroughly entranced by the spam message with the header “Become a porkmaster general” (there was the new title of his autobiography, displacing Tanning Salon Pervert), he realized Luis had emailed him. It was a very simple email, with only a name in the message: Sander Lewis. The man Dylan got into a fight with at Panic, the one who seemed to have baited him for unknown but possibly sinister reasons.

He called Kevin, but got his machine. (Was it his day for machines?) He asked him to run this guy through the system, see if he had a record or if he could in any way be connected to Charles Crosby, the guy who tried to stab him in Panic. It was a long shot in theory, but he was beginning to sense a pattern. He wished whoever was after him would show themselves, make themselves known, but that was the strategy, wasn’t it? They knew they couldn’t take him on directly, so they hid. It was a good strategy, but already it was starting to unravel.

He took phone calls from a concerned Fiona and Dropkick, assured them he was okay, and while he was itching to get out and do a bit more pavement pounding, he backed off for Dylan’s sake. He wanted him to take it easy, so, damn it, he supposed he owed him that much.

He shaved off his beard (god, that was a relief), caught up on some backed up television, and made spaghetti for dinner, as he could make spaghetti without fucking it up too much. By this time, he got a call back from Kevin. He couldn’t officially link him with Crosby, but Lewis was definitely known in the system. He did time for assault in Idaho, and had a handful of arrests for various minor things, from public drunkenness to disturbing the peace to vandalism. He was what Kevin called a “little shit”, a guy who would probably spend his life in and out of the system, but most likely never for anything major unless he escalated. Right now, he just appeared to be a middle echelon douchebag. Maybe that should have been reassuring, but it wasn’t. Hadn’t Crosby done time for assault too? He asked Kevin to double check where they had done time, but no, they’d done time in different states – Crosby in California and Lewis in Idaho. Still, wasn’t that odd? Two men, known for their violence, attack him and Dylan on different days in the same place. There was something off about this, but he couldn’t nail it down, couldn’t name the equation that would make this make sense.

Dylan’s black eye was getting better too; the bruise had mellowed to a reddish color with undertones of green and yellow, which Dylan described as a “fruit salad throwing up on my face”. Roan assured him that all black eyes seemed to go through that phase, as he was intimately familiar with black eyes (and an entire variety of bruises, contusions, and cuts). At least it didn’t hurt as much as it had before.

While Dylan did his yoga, Roan worked the heavy bag in his office, challenging himself with two tasks: not to knock the damn thing off the chain rig, and not to let the lion out the least little bit. Dylan said next time he’d work the heavy bag if Roan did the yoga. He agreed, but wasn’t serious.

They had time to discuss over dinner whether or not they should tell anybody about the domestic partnership bullshit. It wasn’t like they were getting married or anything – it was just for legal purposes. It was a business transaction, more or less, a relationship boiled down to its most base form: I have stuff, you may share my stuff, a judge can’t say you can’t have my stuff if I die. That’s all marriage was too, even if the fundies wouldn’t admit it. (Nope, nothing to do with having kids either; marriage was, at its root, a way of inheriting real estate, and no born again could obliterate its capitalist foundation if they tried.) He didn’t think it mattered one way or another, Dylan figured they could probably tell close friends without making a big deal about it, but then he wondered if anyone would try to get them a gift, and how awkward that would be. Although stuff was always nice, neither of them actually wanted to deal with the bullshit of a “fake wedding” present. And although neither intended to dress up for what was basically going to a government office to sign papers, Dylan still made him promise he wouldn’t wear his “Stabby McKnife” t-shirt (the one which had a cartoon knife with feet happily exclaiming “Hey Kids! Put me in your enemies!”) or his Murder City Devils one. Dylan would have preferred all his rock t-shirts stay at home, but he realized some of those were the least silly ones Roan had.

Oddly enough, while they were watching Doctor Who, Dylan apologized for “freaking out and running off”. Roan tried to stop him, but he insisted he had to say it. He also added that he was deeply ashamed that Roan had honestly scared the shit out of him in his partially transformed state. Although it made his heart hurt a little to hear it, he had to give Dylan credit for being brave enough to say it. He got very Buddhist on him by saying, “But it’s you. I don’t care if you’re fully transformed, it’s still you, and I have to be mature enough to see that. You are not the shape of your body; you are you, with or without fur. It’s up to me to ignore the outer shell and just see who you are.”

He picked up Dylan’s tea mug and sniffed it. “LSD or ’shrooms?”

”Don’t try and make a joke out of this. I’m being profound here.”

“Profoundly full of shit?”

Luckily he’d said this just right, and Dylan laughed, giving him a gentle elbow in the ribs for being a jerk. But Dylan had no idea how close he’d come to poking him in what was for him a profound identity issue: was there a different between him and the lion? He felt like there was when he was actually wrestling with the beast, but other times he wasn’t sure. He was the lion and the lion was him, and they all lived together in a yellow submarine, or some bullshit like that. He didn’t know. He wasn’t even considering the virus in this, but maybe he should have, especially considering how the virus was altering him. (Or was he altering the virus? Fuck it, he wasn’t stoned enough to contemplate this.)

It was a peaceful night, kind of boring, and it ended with them watching the Colbert Report in bed. Dylan nodded off, half propped up against him, and he held him for a while, stroking his soft hair (always fun – how come his hair was always so silky? He must have been born with it), trying to imagine what it must have been like to be a perfectly normal person dating a person like him. He couldn’t do it. He could barely live with himself as is. Imagining himself as genuinely normal was a bridge too far.

Very carefully, he slid out of bed without waking Dylan up, and went to do some work on the computer. He’d slept for about a day, and just wasn’t tired.

The fact that Hatcher hadn’t gotten back to him about the owner of the server shouldn’t have struck him as suspicious, because Hatcher was just the type of asshole who would have given him a phony name rather than nothing at all and risk him using alternate channels if he was up to something. But Jordan being found on a website he clearly used often? That meant something. Did Jordan seek out the site location? How could he have known it was in Washington? There was no clue to location – a basement is a basement, whether in Berlin or Bellingham.

Unless Jordan recognized someone in a clip. Or investigated the site himself? How good were his computer skills? Even if he was only half as good as his dad, that put him years ahead of most people. Had Jordan discovered the location, and then when he discovered Brittney and Darren were fucking around on him, did he run off to join the snuff circus? It sounded slightly implausible, and yet, teenage boy? Definitely could have done something that stupid. Even as a teenager he might have done something that dumb, and he’d been a total nerd. All teenagers were stupid, but there was something about having a Y chromosome that added an extra level of danger to the mix, a layer of self-destruction and total immolation that most females might actually pull back from.

He went back to the flash drive Hatcher had given him when he hired him, and combed through the info again. What did he miss? He was suddenly certain there was something vital here that both he and Hatcher missed. The telephone plea from Jordan took on a chilling new significance. Did he decided he couldn’t murder someone or just didn’t like it? Either way, he didn’t think there was any quitting a snuff film set when the snuff films were genuine, and you knew who the bodies were if not where they were buried. Would they be stupid enough to kill Hatcher’s son and film it? If Jordan was dead, he kind of hoped so, just so there was ample evidence that these fuckheads deserved everything that was coming to them.

The house was dark because it was late, with only the lights outside on, and the glow from the computer monitor not visible, which probably made the house a nice target. Only because he wasn’t listening to anything on the computer or his iPod did he hear what happened.

It was a gentle noise really, glass breaking from a distance and a strange, soft “whoomp”. But the smell hit his sensitive nose almost instantly: grain alcohol, gasoline, fire. He was on his feet and headed for the window when he heard a loud pop outside, and a more immediate noise of shattering glass. A glance through the blinds showed a brief flash of muzzle fire before glass shattered again. Someone across the road, firing a gun at his house. Flames were boiling on the porch, small now but impressively bright.

He shook Dylan awake, and gave him the telephone handset. “Call 9-1-1. Someone’s thrown a Molotov cocktail at the house, and now they’re shooting at it.”

“What?” he asked, muzzy but awake enough to be startled. Another booming gunshot – rifle? Definitely rifle – woke him up even more, and he sat up straight. “You’re serious?”

“Sadly.”

As he darted out the bedroom door, Dylan called out, “Where are you going?”

“To shove that rifle up his ass.” He ran down the stairs and went out the back door into the backyard, which was eerily peaceful, although smoke and cordite tainted the air, giving it a sharp tang. He hopped the fence and crept around the side of the house, letting the lion come out enough to give him everything he needed: better night vision, sharper senses, power infusing his limbs as his muscles twitched and hardened, changing shape and flooding him with adrenaline to counter the pain. He could already taste blood in his mouth.

The asshole was in a Ford pickup, a beater that wasn’t a rental. Part of him that was still Human enough marveled at the stupidity, but maybe he thought they were gone, or so deeply asleep that even this wouldn’t wake them in time to catch a glimpse of the truck or the plate. Roan made no mental note of the plate, because the lion wasn’t any good at number recall, and besides, he wasn’t letting him get away. The guy must have realized he had pressed his luck, because he stomped on the gas and wrenched the steering wheel, pulling him off the soft shoulder with a squeal of burning rubber.

But Roan was already running, across the lawn and onto the edge of the road, and that’s where he lunged, jumping for the truck as it did a U-turn and started back the way it had come.

He landed feet first in the flatbed, with a big enough of a noise that the driver turned, startled, and glanced out the window in time for Roan to kick it in, sending safety glass flying around the cabin. The man fishtailed the truck but Roan hung on, a growl in his throat as the man tried to swing his rifle around one handed, and Roan grabbed the stock and made the man eat it, smashing it brutally into his face. His nose snapped and blood spurted as he let out an aborted cry of pain and the truck slewed off the road, slamming into a thick tangle of blackberry bushes as tall as the truck itself. If Roan had been standing he might have been thrown forward off the truck, except he was already wedged in the window, trying to crawl into the cab.

The man had realized the danger as soon as he was unable to yank the rifle out of Roan’s hand, and as soon as the truck came to a jolting halt, he blindly scrabbled for the door handle and all but fell out of his truck. He attempted to run, but Roan quickly pulled out of the cab and pounced on him with an angry roar, tackling him and throwing him to the gravel berm.

He was a nothing man, doughy with thinning brown hair on an almost comically round scalp, a full face that probably turned beet red when he was drunk, an anonymous sack of meat in a world full of anonymous sacks of meat, cigarette smelling dirtbag. He could have been anywhere between thirty and forty, with fifty ruled out simply because he wouldn’t have been physically capable of doing this.

He struggled and attempted to pull out a handgun, but Roan grabbed his wrist and with a simple squeeze crushed all the tiny bones in it; he could feel them popping under the skin like bubble wrap. Now he screamed, and since he was on his back, partially choked on his own blood from his broken nose.

Roan meant to question him, ask him what the fuck he thought he was doing, but all that came out was a loud roar, and he squirmed beneath him, trying to both buck him off and avoid the blood dribbling from  Roan’s mouth, but he had his knees dug firmly into his ribs, pressing his full weight into the base of his spine and his pelvis. “Freak motherfucking faggot get offa me!” he shouted, and the several words almost blurred into one. The fear stink coming off of him almost blended in with the gasoline.

Roan concentrated until he could speak, but he still did so while growling, unable to suppress that much rage. “I should infect you,” he snarled, the words like gravel in his mouth. The man’s eyes widened in fear, bloodshot blue, as pale a smog choked sky. “Make you what you hate.”

“N-no-”

“You come to my house, attack me at my house, attack my boyfriend -” the growl drowned out the final words, so he had to have a second pass. “ – you better hope the cops show up before I rip your throat out.”

He let the blood dripping from his mouth splash dangerously close to the sluice of blood from the man’s broken nose, the one currently pouring into his mouth, and he continued to writhe, trying to get away from him but unable to. He gave off a strong scent of urine as he pissed himself.

“Roan, get off him,” Dylan said. He heard his footsteps slapping on the asphalt as he walked up the street.

“No.”

“Get off him so I can get a clear shot,” he said, and Roan looked up to see Dylan standing there, still dressed in nothing but his boxer shorts, but now aiming Roan’s Sig Sauer down at them. This surprised Roan enough that the growling died down in his throat. Dylan pulled back the slide casually, as if he’d been handling guns all his life, racking a bullet in the chamber, and he recalled that Dylan fled to Buddhism for peace away from his own violent tendencies. He was a cop’s son – he knew how to handle guns. And the look in his black eyes was one he’d never seen before, hot and hard as slivers of volcanic rocks, burning like they were going to destroy the world.

He came closer, aiming the gun down at the man beneath him. “If I kill you will you finally leave us the fuck alone?” he asked, his voice low and cold. “Is death the only thing that stops your kind?”

The man’s eyes had a wild look, like a cornered animal, and he still kept squirming, trying to get out from under Roan. “Get him offa me.”

Dylan knelt down, and planted the gun barrel on his forehead. The man instantly fell still, his eyes as wide and shiny as new silver dollars. “A plea for mercy? Really? Oh yeah, I’m a fag, I’m supposed to be wimpy and let you off, huh? Piece of shit motherfucker, you won’t leave him alone, will you? You won’t be happy until he’s dead. I’ll kill you first.”

This startled Roan enough that he came back to himself a bit more. “Dyl,” he said, without growling, even though his jaw didn’t feel quite right. “I’ve got him. It’s okay.”

“It’s not okay. He tried to burn down our house. These fuckers aren’t going to leave you alone.”

The police siren he thought he heard moments before was now growing louder, as was the even louder fire engine siren. He watched a muscle in Dylan’s jaw jump, saw the slightest tremor in his arm as he tried to get a hold of his own voluminous rage. Roan thought he had a corner on the market? Not at all.

“It’s my gun, I’m licensed to carry it. Give it to me before the cops get here.”

“I really want to kill him,” Dylan admitted, half angry, half despairing. Not a threat, but a simple statement of fact. This was when the guy shit himself; Roan could sadly smell it. “Why don’t they leave you alone?”

He had managed to shove the lion almost completely down now. Everybody had a breaking point, and it was kind of startling to learn that he was Dylan’s. “Because they don’t. But we have to be stronger than they are. Hon, give me the gun.”

His arm was really trembling now, and it seemed he was fighting himself not to pull the trigger. Unshed tears made his eyes glisten. Roan gently put his hand on his, and slipped it around the gun. The sirens were almost on top of them.

Dylan slid his hand out from under his, ceding the gun to Roan, but as he stood up he kicked the guy in the side of the head just as tires crunched gravel behind them. “This the moron?” A familiar voice, dripping with cop authority, asked. It was Thompson, and Roan figured he should be glad it was a cop he knew.

The lion was gone from his face; he felt it. He wiped the blood off his mouth and stood up, tucking the gun  in the back of his sweatpants (the only clothes he was wearing; he’d almost forgotten he was barefoot until he stepped on a sharp piece of gravel). “He threw a Molotov cocktail on my front porch and then fired several rounds into my house, breaking windows. The rifle’s in the truck.”

“How smart was that?” Thompson asked, looming over the man. He already had his cuffs out, but hadn’t bothered with drawing his weapon, maybe because he saw how injured he already was. He flipped him over onto his stomach and pulled his hands behind his back. “Fuckin’ with Batman at his own house. Man, you’re just askin’ to get your ass beat.”

“He isn’t Human!” The guy yelled, the police being here actually giving him his courage back. “He couldn’t ‘ve reached my truck, but he did! And that faggot put a gun to my head! He -”

“You have the right to remain silent,” Thompson interjected, firmly and loudly. “I suggest you start usin’ it right now, dumbass.”

The fire truck roared up, but it was unnecessary, because he could see for himself the fire was out, and could smell water in the gasoline smoke. Dylan must have put out the blaze with the garden hose before joining them with the gun.

Roan turned to see Dylan with his back to all of them, his posture unnaturally rigid. Roan went up to him and took him in his arms. “Dylan -”

He turned and clung to him desperately, burying his face in the side of his neck. Roan felt tears on his skin. “What did I almost do?” he asked, sounding like he was in agony.

“It’s okay,” he reassured him, stroking his neck. But it wasn’t, although not for the reason Dylan would have guessed.

He’d never seen him so angry. And while he was sure now he should get Dylan to leave him for the sake of his own mental health, Roan was also fairly sure he couldn’t possibly love him more.

What did you do with a dichotomy like that?