The book is out today! Woohoo!!!!!!!!!!!!

If the frightening cat didn’t scare you off, it’s available here: http://www.dreamspinnerpress.com/store/index.php?cPath=55_274

The book, not the cat.

2 – Stay Human

Holden wasn’t surprised Rico was dead. If anything, he was surprised he had lived this long.

Rico was one of those stereotypical hustlers. Meaning he had a drug habit that could keep Columbia solvent for a year, and would make Amy Winehouse say, “Enough for you.” He was also neurotic as hell, and probably bisexual, although he said he was straight. While Holden knew him, he was one hot mess, and not in a good way. Did they fuck once? Yeah, maybe, but they’d been wasted at the time. Rare for Holden, pretty much constant for poor Rico. (Whose real name was David.)

Rico and Tika (yes, it kind of rhymed) were a couple on and off for what seemed like forever. Yes, they were both hookers, but that was a job, and if you were gonna have a relationship with a hooker, you couldn’thave any sexual jealousy hang-ups. Although it did happen; supposedly what broke Rico and Tika up at least once was someone’s inability to stand the other sleeping around. He’d heard from Rico it was Tika, and he’d heard from Tika it was Rico. It was possible they were both right.

He expected Tika to tell him it was a drug overdose, or some sort of drug related incident, which is why he was shocked when she told him he was bludgeoned to death, his head beat in with a heavy object. Holden couldn’t believe that, because shooting was more likely in a drug deal gone wrong, with stabbing and potential strangulation on the far end of it. Bludgeoning? Weird.

He didn’t tell Tika any of this, as it didn’t matter, because she still kept talking. Her story was rambling and discursive, but he gets everything he’s supposed to: Rico did a little time in prison himself, but they stayed in touch, and they were back in an “on” phase of their half-assed relationship when he went missing Friday night. Well, not missing, he just wasn’t home when he was supposed to be, as he’d went out for a bottle of tequila and was supposed to be right back. She wasn’t worried initially, she figured he got waylaid, as he often did (he had the attention span of a Golden Retriever with brain damage, which he usually blamed on crack) and didn’t really think about it. But when Saturday came around and she hadn’t heard from him – no text, no phone call – she started asking mutual friends if they knew where he was, figuring he’d relapsed. (His attempts to “go straight” were usually only half-hearted, and lasted only as long as the court dictated.) But no one had seen, partied with, or heard from him, and by Sunday she made inquiries to the police, who were less than helpful, and why not? Rico was a known frequent flyer, who spent more time transient than in an actual place of residence. These were guys who got up, walked away, and disappeared with great frequency. They seemed to think he had abandoned Tika – again. This time with her tequila money.

It was possible, even though they were getting along, and she chalked it up to that, until she heard about the body found dumped near an industrial waste facility near Tukwilla. Rico, as it turned out.

There were a number of questions, not the least of which was Tukwila – who the hell would go to Tukwila? Well, he was dumped there, and it was possible that was all the place was good for. But who had killed him? The time of death was apparently somewhat inconclusive, with him being dead anywhere between twelve and thirty six hours before he was found. Huge gap  there – again, why? The cops weren’t able to pull much from the scene either, although considering it was a waste dump and just the dumping spot, not where he was killed, there wasn’t a whole lot of uncontaminated evidence you could pull from such a place anyways. She felt there investigation was half-assed at best, probably because of who he was and his social strata.

She’d heard, from friends of friends, Holden was now “slumming with” (ha!) a private detective, and she was hoping he could look into it. She didn’t have a lot of money, but she was working a steady job at a consignment shop and could pay him in installments. He knew just from hearing this he’d get absolutely nowhere so fast he’d get dizzy from it, but he also felt a little bit of guilt as well. Because he knew Rico, because he knew Tika, and he could hear she was really broken up about it. And fuck the cops, he already knew they wouldn’t break their backs looking for someone who took another burn out off the street. Shit. Weren’t there good old days when he didn’t have a conscience?

He told her to save her money because he didn’t think he’d get very far, but he promised to make some inquiries and see what he could dig up, but he warned her that he would most likely get nothing. In cases like this, when there was a distance between place of murder and the body itself, as well as time, things got muddled fast.

After hanging up, he thought he needed Roan’s police contacts, but he didn’t know any of them, and what was the likelihood they would talk to him anyways? He’d never been in the brotherhood of cops; case in point, he was on the opposite side, the bad guy’s side. He was an enemy combatant.

Well, Kevin might talk to him, soft touch that he was, but he didn’t know his number, and he wasn’t about to bug Dylan for it. So what was left?

Well, if he couldn’t go to the cops, he had no choice but to go to his fellow enemy combatants. He knew people Tika didn’t know, mainly because she didn’t know the male hustlers all that well. He did. He knew their drug dealers, their pimps, their extorters. He knew many of the things that hid under rocks when the sun came out, and couldn’t be found in the light of day.

It was night now; it was getting late. If he was going to do this thing, now was the optimum time.

With a sigh, he levered himself off the sofa, turned off the set, and went to change into worn jeans, a second hand t-shirt (advertising Dick’s Drive-In, of course, a shirt rich in double entendre), scuffed sneakers, and a brown leather jacket that was so old it was soft, and so big it obviously wasn’t his. Street gear.

Time to hit the old corners, see if anyone he knew was still alive.

****

There was no getting around how dreary a hospital was, even if it was a research hospital – like this one was – and you tried to find ways to amuse yourself. Dylan could feel depression sinking low on his shoulders, weighing him down, threatening to push him through the floor.

When Rosenberg offered to buy him dinner and have a talk with him, he agreed, mainly because it would get him out of this place for a while.

They went across the street to a casual restaurant that seemed to serve a lot of doctors, but oddly didn’t have much in the way of health food. He made do with a salad and a baked potato as Rosenberg had a chicken sandwich and told him about a new vaccine they were working on that had a lot of promise. It seemed to disrupt the RNA of the cat virus, preventing it from multiplying, but they hadn’t done any Human trials yet. Still, she thought this might be the way forward, although when he asked if this would help Roan at all, she shook her head. “We’d probably disrupt all his RNA. That ain’t good.”

Because the virus was so much a part of him? That was the implication. Roan probably wouldn’t have liked to hear that.

She started gently prodding him, all but saying “Go home before you lose your mind”, but he pretended to be oblivious to it. He knew he should, but perversely he didn’t want to. He was going to stay here, get Roan to wake up, and then beat the shit out of him for being so passive-aggressive about all this. He wasn’t a passive aggressive type, he was an aggressive type, so why change tactics now?

She was almost done with her sandwich when her beeper went off (doctors still had those?) and while looking at it she cursed extravagantly and apologized, but she had to go. Seeing the look on his face, she promised it wasn’t Roan, but a guy with a panther strain who was suffering a number of complications (of what she didn’t say). He was left behind to finish his salad in peace, but he really wasn’t interested in eating. It wasn’t a very good salad anyways.

He decided to finish his iced tea, though, and that’s what he was doing when a man came up to his table. “Toby?”

His Panic nickname. He looked up, curious, but it took him a surprisingly long time to place the face. It was a blond man, lean build, in a striped rugby jersey and khakis, only wearing an earring in one ear, a plain platinum ring. It took him a moment to place the face, and it was the fact that he was wearing the one earring that threw him off. He used to have multiple piercings, but he must have let them heal over, including the one in his eyebrow.

“Matt?”

He nodded, and quickly said, “Don’t worry, I’m not gonna go all Fatal Attraction on you. I’m really sorry about that.”

Yes, the last time he’d seen Matt Skouris, he’d shown up wasted at Panic, accusing him of stealing Roan away from him and calling him many choice names. Roan told him he wasn’t interested in Matt and never had been, put him in a cab, and sent him home. It was the last either of them had seen of Matt in years, although Roan had received a phone call from Matt, apologizing for everything and saying he was going back to rehab.

Dylan was so weary he couldn’t even work up the slightest bit of concern about this. Matt looked at the bench seat across from him with eagerness, and Dylan nodded, giving him silent permission to sit down. Matt did, pushing aside Rosenberg’s unclaimed dish. “I sent Roan an email, a couple of them, but then I found out there might have been a reason he wasn’t getting back to me beyond him still being pissed at me. How’s he doing?”

“He’s … stable,” he said, unable to think of what else to say. Yes, he was stable, he’d been stable for a while. There’d been no change at all. “So how was rehab?”

Matt winced, as if that was something he didn’t want to think about. “Okay. I’ve been sober for a year.” He looked at him curiously, as that math didn’t work, and he admitted, with an embarrassed roll of his shoulders, “The first rehab didn’t take. I lapsed kinda hard afterwards. But after that I got in a good program, so … yeah.”

“Good, that’s good,” he said, then added, somewhat awkwardly, “My name’s actually Dylan, by the way.”

He nodded, with an anemic smile. Matt had gone back to the clean shaven look, which gave him an oddly innocent look. His eyes were blue – real color, or colored contacts? He couldn’t say right now – and he was clean shaven, which suited his thin, twink look. He didn’t look quite as pubescent as he had the last time he’d seen him, as hard living and time had aged him a little. Still, he didn’t  yet look his age. “I thought it was, but I couldn’t remember, so I figured to err on the side of caution.” The waitress came by and asked if Matt wanted anything, and when he said no and she moved on, he continued nervously. “So I saw that article on Roan, in Culture Shock? And I thought maybe I oughta get some closure there. Kyle thought I should.”

“Kyle?”

“My, um, boyfriend. Partner? Partner sounds weird, like we’re part of a law firm, but boyfriend just sounds juvenile. I never know what to say.”

“Roan would probably have several possibilities, and only half would be obscene.”

That made him smirk. “Yeah, probably. Also, that was a hellavu pic with that article. Is he getting hotter as he gets older or what?”

“He’s not aging poorly,” he agreed. He didn’t add except health wise and possibly psychologically, because they both knew that, and it was kind of a downer anyways. Matt seemed to be waiting for him to say more, volunteer something, but he wasn’t about to say they got married for legal purposes. He wasn’t sure it wouldn’t upset Matt, and he had no idea if Matt would believe it was for legal reasons.

Finally, Matt sat back, scratching his arm through his blue and green sleeve. He was done waiting. “I asked around, as I saw someone tried to torch his office. What asshole did that?”

He was forced to shrug. “The cops are investigating, I don’t know how far they’ve gotten. But ever since he stopped the Grant Kim shooting and got everyone’s attention, our life has been turned upside down. Hate groups are actively stalking him and me, in more numbers than ever before. I think they get the idea that he’s different from the rest of them. I mean, beyond infected and beyond refusing to be embarrassed by it. I think they suspect … god, how do I even put it?”

“He’s more human than human?”

“You know, if Roan were here, he’d tell you that’s from Blade Runner, and he’d probably be flattered.”

Matt smiled, a sickly little grin that seemed to be the complete embodiment of melancholy. “Still a nerd, huh? Nice to know some things are consistent.” After a pause, he added, “I know he’s not … I know he can … in case you were worried I didn’t know. I do, I saw it once.”

Roan hadn’t mentioned that, but then he tried not to talk about the fact that he could shift so easily into a change, that the lion could overwhelm him and take over as soon as he took his foot off the brake. “Really? Can I asked what happened?”

“Oh, it was that time that crackhead was stalking me. He and his friend attacked me, and Roan arrived to break it up. Those wastoids were such idiots they thought they could get the better of Roan just ‘cause they had a gun and eighty pounds of muscle on him. I have to admit I was scared for Roan there for a minute, he was really taunting them.”

“That’s his fighting technique. He waits for someone else to make the first move, and if he can make them do something stupid, all the better. Although the stupidest thing you could do is get in a fight with him in the first place.”

“Yeah, and I guess now I can see the wisdom of that, but at the time it was just terrifying. Anyways, they made him mad, y’know? Hurt him, kinda. And he started … well, I don’t know how to describe it. I don’t even know what I saw even now, you know? But his eyes kinda got this weird look in ‘em, and he sorta, like, had this Bruce Campbell chin all of a sudden, except his mouth was bleeding and he looked like he had more teeth than he had before. And he roared. I mean, holy shit, it wasn’t someone pretending to roar, it was an angry lion at the zoo kinda roar, and everybody who heard it musta shit their pants, ‘cause it was loud and scary. You never expect to hear that up close.”

“It’s scary,” he admitted, remembering the first time he really saw Roan’s partial change up close and personal, and felt a flush of shame at how he reacted. “The first time I saw it happen, it caught me off guard. I was a little freaked out by it.” And it wasn’t just the physical change, although that – and the sheer violence of it, the way the bones snapped like gunshots and blood poured from his nose and mouth like he was being internally torn apart (which was more or less true) – was a huge part of it. But there was a part of it that he could never quite articulate or explain. It was like something else was taking over Roan. Not the lion, but another aspect of Roan, another part of him he kept hidden – a part hidden for damn good reason. It was his dark side given form, something so savage the lion would have been scared away. That’s what bothered him most of all, perhaps; that there was this part of him that seemed to be the lion, but was it really? He wanted to think it was, but he wasn’t sure he bought it completely.

“Yeah, well, who wouldn’t be? It’s fucking freaky. People aren’t supposed to be able to do that, y’know? But Roan is such a stubborn bastard he doesn’t even obey the laws of physics.”

Dylan chuckled. It was funny because it was true. Matt did work with Roan for a long time, and he felt bad for him. Yeah, he wanted something from Roan that he couldn’t give – Roan was just never going to love him, no matter how much Matt wanted that – and he overreacted to the start of their relationship, but Matt wasn’t a bad kid. He tried really hard, and he did help Roan when he needed him the most, whether he knew it or not. Things just ended badly, as things sometimes could. It wasn’t fair, but it was life.

Matt sat forward, resting his elbows on the table. “Is he ever getting out of the hospital?”

A fair question, but one that made him flinch. “I don’t know,” he admitted, suddenly feeling cold. If he’d been asked before he was greeted by the lion, he’d have said yes, but now he didn’t know for sure.

It was all on Roan. And it all depended on whether he wanted to bother with the world anymore or not. That was not a bet he was silly enough to make.

He was finishing his tea when his cell, which was set to vibrate, hummed in his pocket. He took it out and looked at the display, and his heart sunk as he realized it was Doctor Rosenberg. She never called him, so the fact that she was was horrible news. He answered it with a slightly breathless, “Yeah?”

“You need to get over here now,” she said, as if he hadn’t figured out that bit for himself.

“What’s happened?”

“Just get here,” she replied, and he thought he heard a commotion in the background before she hung up.

Matt was looking at him wide eyed across the table, perhaps reflecting his own alarm. “What’s going on?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted, standing up. “But lately I never know.”  And sometimes, he clung to ignorance being bliss, or at the very least an ability to sleep at night. But he wasn’t admitting that to Matt. Or, quite frankly, anyone ever.

There were some things people just didn’t need to know.