Roan woke up with a start, sitting up, ready to pounce. On what he wasn’t sure, but he was sure there was something requiring his attention.

But only when he was crouched on the bed did he realize he was in a hospital room, and he had no less than three IVs in his arm. Also, his brain was fuzzy like he’d had way too much Vicodin, and he was mildly achy.

It all started clicking, especially when he saw Dylan asleep in a cot not too far away. And he was just asleep, he was out but still breathing, which was a relief. He hadn’t hurt him … physically  … yet. God, that was a thought he hadn’t wanted to have. But for some reason he was afraid he had hurt him.

Realizing he looked like an idiot, he sat back down, tucking his bare legs back under the scratchy sheets, and he looked at the various monitors around him. Was he okay? He should be an expert at reading all these machines by now, but half the time he never paid any attention.

Roan ran a hand over his head, and was amazed at how short his hair was. Did they give him a buzz cut? But it felt really soft, new, and with the familiar dead tooth ache in his body and the scratchy five o’clock shadow on his face, he knew he had recently transformed. He should have hurt more, but that explained why his brain felt like it was lost in a pea soup fog – they pumped him so full of drugs William S. Burroughs would have been jealous.  He probably wasn’t meant to be functioning yet, but panic and anger (in lion or human form) could push him past any barrier.

Looking at the books and sketchpads around Dylan’s cot, he got a really bad feeling. How long had he been here? “Dyl,” he said, and realized it was his quiet, middle of the night voice. Was it appropriate? It looked dark out the windows, but the metal mesh could have made a heavily overcast day look like night. “Dylan. Can you hear me?”

He stirred, let out a “don’t bug me” groan (you knew you were in a relationship too long when you could easily interpret each other’s grunts and groans), and then suddenly raised his head. He sat up, clearly shocked, and looked at him. It seemed to take Dylan a second to really see him. “Roan?”

He nodded. “Yeah. What happened? How long have I been out?”

Dylan sprung off his cot and rushed to his beside, crushing him in a violent hug and very nearly entangling himself in his IV lines. “Oh god, I thought I’d lost you for good.”

“I’m sorry,” he said into the side of Dylan’s neck. Roan felt tears slide down his skin as he hugged him back fiercely, Dylan trying to hide a sob in his shoulder. The smell of Dylan, the warmth of his body, was so familiar it was instantly comforting, and they were like that for several minutes, while Dylan tried to stop crying, and Roan tried to keep himself from tearing up. Dylan in tears always got to him. He then pulled away and kissed Roan’s face, his forehead, his cheeks, finally his mouth, like he’d been away forever. It probably felt that way.

Dylan finally told him he’d been out for about a week. Which was bad, but not as bad as it could have been.  Dylan also let him know that, once he recovered from his general happiness of him being conscious again, he was going to beat the shit out of him. That was fair enough.

Roan was starving, his stomach felt like it was trying to digest his internal organs, and he didn’t want food, he needed it, now. After convincing Dylan he was up to the trip down to the cafeteria, he got dressed, and carefully removed two of the IVs from his arm (he had to keep one; Dylan said it was off if he didn’t keep at least one). Dylan then led him down to the cafeteria, where he was the only one trailing an IV behind him, but no one much cared.

Yes, it was hospital cafeteria food, but it struck him as some of the best food he ever had. He wolfed it down like there was no tomorrow. He had two pre-wrapped sandwiches, but only by the time he was eating the third did he bother to look and see what was in the sandwiches. Looked like turkey, sad pieces of lettuce, and some kind of anonymous cheese. He didn’t care. They needed mustard, but he couldn’t care less. Partial transformation just beat the shit out of your metabolism, and he felt like a parakeet, trying to eat twice his weight in food as fast as possible. Dylan watched him with the kind of world weary annoyance and affection that could only be adopted by the long suffering spouse. He reminded him to chew every now and then, as he told him the lion had came out in his skin, not once but twice, Dylan just looked weary. Roan would have called bullshit, except he knew Dylan wasn’t lying to him. He still seemed a little freaked out by it, and Roan couldn’t blame him. That would freak him out too; if he ever found himself conscious in a lion body, his mind would probably snap like a pretzel. According to Dylan, Rosenberg had no idea what it meant.

Roan chugged down his second glass of atrocious iced tea, and started in on a pre-packaged brownie, as he thought he should mix sugar and carbs in with his protein. Actually, what he needed was a pizza, something dripping with cheese, grease, and pepperoni. As soon as he thought of it, he asked, “Do you think we can get a pizza delivered here?”

Dylan just stared at him, his dark chocolate eyes giving nothing away.  “At what point do you barf or do we watch your stomach explode like Mr. Creosote?”

“Never. I seem to have hollow legs.” Actually he kind of wished that was the truth.

Just like he wished he didn’t know what the lion coming out while in his body meant. But he did know, didn’t he? Or at least he suspected its meaning. What he could do the lion could do – he could force a change, and maybe the lion could too. Or, in this case, force it to stop. But only when he wasn’t around to put up a fight. So in a technical since, he had custody of his body, but if he didn’t watch it, he was going to be kidnapped and flown off to a country with no extradition treaty.  Or something like that.

Okay, so he was crazy. Roan could only hope it was the good kind of crazy.

****

Scott had no idea why he was still up, watching a movie he wouldn’t be watching if it wasn’t so late and he wasn’t so bored.

It was probably his laziness ganging up on him again. Hockey season was over, for the moment, and he had time to go off his diet and the training grind and just veg like a normal person. For about a week and a half.

Then he’d have to start training again, and back off on the junk food a bit, as he couldn’t afford to get too out of shape. There was a slim chance he could get picked up by someone during the summer trading season, and did he really want to show up with a newborn beer gut and a bit of a wheeze? He had to be in top form.

Grey had no problem with this. Grey would probably roll in around ten in the morning and kick him out of bed, telling him a jog would  be good for him, and he shouldn’t complain since it was only a mile. Grey seemed to enjoy exercise, he seemed to get something out of it, but then again, Grey was always weird. If he hadn’t been a hockey player, he’d probably be a personal trainer or something, someone who gleefully tormented the out of shape for fun and profit. But since he was built like Frankenstein, exercise probably was fun for him.  Get those dead body parts movin’.

Scott shoved a handful of the caramel popcorn in his mouth, and winced as he chewed. It looked like caramel, it was sticky like caramel, but it tasted like sweet chemicals. Horrible shit. But here he was, still eating the stuff, probably due to boredom and being tired. It wasn’t waking him up, though, nor was this film, which had reached ludicrous new heights every fifteen minutes or so. He still had to see how it ended, even though he knew the white guy hero would probably think of some stupid way to kill the beast, and end up with the woman with the weird hair helmet. But he wanted to see how they killed the thing, and he bet it would be pathetic. Sprinkling it with hot sauce, slamming it in a car door, smooshing it with an oversized tissue? The stupid options were endless.

He yawned and stretched out on the couch, wondering if he should risk one more beer. It didn’t go with the horrible popcorn, but the real issue was it would put him to sleep. He was perilously close to sleep as it was. He should just go to bed. Scott was still trying to decide when there was a knock on the door.

He heaved himself off the couch, and asked, “Tegan kick your ass out?” Tegan wasn’t the brightest woman he’d ever met, but she was smart enough to be unable to stand Grey sometimes. Scott gave it three months, tops.

Although it could have been Grey forgetting his keys again, it turned out to be Holden on the doorstep, leaning against the frame. “Nobody kicks my ass without paying in advance.”

He had a bruise, slowly cycling through shades of mauve and purple, growing beneath his left eye, and it looked like he had blood on his pants. “Holy shit, were you in a fight?”

“Fight makes it sound like the other guy had a chance,” Holden replied, with his usual cool humor. Scott helped him inside, as he was limping a little, and once he got him sat on the couch, he asked, “What happened?”

Scott went back to shut the door, and then detoured into the kitchenette to grab a bag of frozen peas from the freezer,  while Holden once again used a lot of words to say  not much of anything. Holden said it was just part of the case he was working on for Roan, and he wasn’t at liberty to go into details with client confidentiality and all. Except he could say that the  guy who he beat up was a total scumbag who deserved worse. “If you wanna give me his name, Grey and I could pay him a visit.”

“Nah. He’s probably gonna need dental surgery, so he’s out of the game for a while.” Scott came back and handed him the bag of peas, which he looked at with a sarcastic raised eyebrow. “Dare I ask what you expect me to do with this?”

So many things came to mind, but Scott said, “It’s for your eye. It’s more comfortable than an ice pack.” What did he find so attractive about Holden? He wasn’t his usual type at all. Physically Roan wasn’t either, but he could understand that, because the guy was a stud. How many real life superheroes did you meet? He oozed machismo and a kind of exotic appeal that he bet even a few straight guys would go for.

But Holden just oozed sex, a kind of dark charm that suggested he’d fuck your brains out if you were lucky, and kill you if you weren’t. He could also turn it off and on, like a faucet, which added a creep factor to it, and should have been a turn off. How did you know when any of this was real? And while he was attractive, he wasn’t overwhelmingly handsome; he wasn’t the second coming of Brad Pitt. Yet there was something about him that made you take a second look, made you stare. Maybe it was just trying to figure him out, as if the puzzle of him was in his eyes, and if you could just be close enough to him long enough you would figure it out and he would make sense. But maybe that was just him projecting.  He didn’t understand Holden, what motivated him, and he wasn’t sure he ever would.  Maybe that’s why he was so attractive.  He was a continuous, unending mystery.

Holden held the bag of peas up to his bruised eye, and let out a slight hiss of pain through his teeth. “I knew coming here was the right idea. Who better to handle black eyes than a hockey player. Bet your brilliant with dental emergencies too.”

“Wow, I haven’t heard that one before,” he replied, undoing Holden’s jeans.

Holden stared at him with his one visible eye, smirking slightly. “You aren’t even buying me dinner first?”

“I want to take a look at your leg, smart ass. How’d you hurt it?”

“Kneeing the guy in the face.”

Scott clicked his tongue. “If you don’t watch it, that’s a good way to break a bone in your knee.”

“Gee, how would you know that, being such a good boy?” he replied with sarcastic humor.  “It’s not like you’re a hockey player or something.”

Scott gave him the finger before yanking his jeans down with a bit more force than necessary.  Scott couldn’t help but notice he was wearing red boxer briefs which looked so incredibly sexy on him, but he ignored that and looked at his right knee, which was a bit puffy and a bit reddish tinged. He touched it gingerly, trying to avoid the bruise. “If there’s a real sharp pain, let me know.”

“It’s a dull ache,” Holden replied. “It actually feels like a pulled a muscle or something.”

“Hmm.” He was far from a trainer, but he’d become a minor expert on leg injuries just by observation. The fact that Holden wasn’t screaming in pain from him grabbing his knee cap was probably the best sign in this situation. “It’s possible. You definitely bruised it.” He started taking off Holden’s shoes, and expected another comment. He wasn’t disappointed.

“No means no, cowboy.”

“You should get in the tub, soak that knee. It’ll bring the swelling down.” Holden’s telling silence made him look up, to see Holden grinning at him in an offhand, goofy sort of way. “What?” Scott asked defensively.

“Has anyone ever told you you’re fucking adorable?”

“You have. I think this makes it several times now. I’m beginning to think it’s an insult.”

That softened Holden’s expression, and Holden sat forward and touched his face, grazing his cheek lightly with his knuckles. “No, never. I just can’t believe your real sometimes.”

What did you say to that? Scott wanted to say he felt the same way about him, but he didn’t know if the way he meant it was precisely a compliment, so he decided to just say, “I have dirty laundry that attests to my reality.”

“Don’t we all? People could die off tomorrow, and all that would be left to prove we existed would be dirty laundry and Styrofoam coffee cups,” Holden replied, sitting back and letting Scott pull his jeans off. He got a close up look at the blood, and grimaced. His first thought, as callous as it was, was that he’d never get this stain out.

He wadded up the jeans in a ball, so no blood would get on their stuff, as Holden limped to the bathroom, shedding his shirt along the way. At least his shirt hadn’t appeared bloodied, but it was dark, and flecks of blood wouldn’t show up easily. He also knew this from experience.

Scott hung around to see the end of the movie before he turned off the set. In the end, they dropped a “small” nuclear bomb on the creature(!), even though it was only in a desert two miles outside the city. Still, no buildings were destroyed, no one was evaporated by the shockwave, and fallout? What the hell was that? What a magnificent piece of crap. He would have blamed Ed Wood for this, except it apparently wasn’t an Ed Wood film. Who knew it was so easy to make a truly epic disaster of a film?

He heard the water running as he went into his room to find some sweats for Holden to wear, and wondered if his were big enough. He was a jock, sure , but Holden was pretty broad across the shoulders. Not Grey big, but a bit bigger than him. Still his sweats were oversized, so he didn’t worry about it too much.

As Scott walked to the bathroom, he wondered what he knew about male prostitutes, except certain neo-cons and evangelists had an insatiable love for them. That was all he knew about them, come to think of it. You just naturally assumed they were all abused as kids, and were all addicted to drugs. The fact that neither of these things applied to Holden made him a true puzzle. That and he seemed so smart, too smart to be doing this for a living. Was he doing this just to be contrary? It seemed a long way to go just to say “fuck you” to the world. But then you add this whole sidekick to a superhero thing into the mix, and things just got too fucked up for words.

He knocked on the door and waited for the okay before coming in, putting the sweats on the top of the toilet tank. “You’re gonna want to wash your clothes before you go out in daylight. Or maybe burn them. This guy was still alive, right?”

Holden chuckled, but in a dark, almost sinister sort of way. He was laying back in their acrylic plastic bathtub, the water still coming in at full blast even though the tub was half full. Since he was naked, Scott could see he had no other bruises, so the fight probably was as one sided as he said he was. And that was yet another oddity of Holden, that he could fight as well as he apparently did. His size was a help, sure, Grey proved that sometimes size was the only difference between a sissy slap fight and a devastating shot heard ‘round the world, but without some ability size wasn’t enough. Had Roan trained him? (Shades of Batman and Robin – a comparison Holden hated, especially since “Batman is a normal guys with a lot of money and tech. Roan isn’t normal, isn’t rich, and has no tech. The comparison would send a comic nerd into a tizzy.” Scott felt Holden had revealed himself as a comic nerd by that statement, but kept the observation to himself.) “I wouldn’t come here if I’d killed someone. I wouldn’t want you getting nailed as an accomplice after the fact.”

“Thanks.” The fact that he had actually considered this made Scott nervous. How dangerous was this guy? He sat on the closed toilet lid, and noticed the steam coming from the tub. “You know, you should be soaking the knee is cooler water.”

“What, and risk shrinkage? Fuck that. Besides, warm water is nice and relaxing.” He settled back against the back of the tub, putting an arm behind his head, adopting a sexy smile. “My knee feels better already.”

He bet. “So where did you learn to fight?”

“From watching hockey.” At Scott’s scowl, Holden snickered, and admitted,” Various places. When I played baseball, the coach encouraged me to do a little boxing, strengthen my arms, and then when I was on the street, I picked up some other things by watching other guys, and trial and error. Fighting isn’t rocket science, it’s just learning not to hurt yourself while hurting someone else. “ He sat forward and turned off the taps. “Isn’t that how you learned?”

“More or less. I took up sparring during the off season, mainly to get my excess energy out and as exercise I could bother to do, but as I started moving up the amateur hockey ranks, I learned some from the older or more experienced defensemen.  There may have been a couple wingers, but defensemen seem to know the best tricks.”

“Maybe you could teach me some sometime.”

Scott sighed and shook his head at a grinning Holden. “Do you ever say anything that doesn’t sound like a come on?”

“I do, all the time. It’s not my fault if you think it’s a come on.” He gave him an innocent look, but after a moment’s struggle couldn’t keep a straight face and laughed.

“You know, I really thought you weren’t coming by tonight.”

That seemed to sober him up;  Scott watched his mirth die away like a light on a dimmer switch. “I wasn’t. But the thought of going home … I dunno. I didn’t want to. “

Scott’s first thought was teasing him, as surely Holden would have done the same thing to him, but there was an alien vulnerability in his expression that made him look Human for once.  Not the world’s slickest, untouchable bastard. Something happened tonight, and it wasn’t the fight.  Something had gotten under Holden’s skin, although the likelihood he’d ever mention it was near zero. Then again, would he? Talking was for other people; talking was what his girlfriends made him do.  The good thing about having a boyfriend was you didn’t always need to talk. Scott moved to the side of the tub, and knelt down before grabbing the back of his head and kissing him, just to see how he’d react.

Holden kissed him back, a wet hand on the back of his neck, water dripping down his back. Holden had this way of kissing him that felt like he was almost trying to consume him, eat his face off like a zombie, but it wasn’t actually a bad thing. It told Scott that he was done with talking for the night, that he wanted to do something much more interesting. And that suited him just fine.

“Rico was picked up by a john last time you saw him?” Holden asked, not sure if he should believe him.

Newt nodded, taking a deep drag off his cigarette. “He wanted some rock. I didn’t, I mean, what the fuck would I want rock for? Last time I used it I thought my skin was gonna fall off, you know? Besides, I was fine with coke and X, which pretty much does the same thing when you use ‘em together, ‘cept your skin doesn’t feel like it’s gonna fall off.”

Holden nodded, like that made perfect sense. He actually wanted to get up and punch him, but how would that do any good? Besides, he wasn’t sure why he was losing his temper with him now. Had the pot finally wore off? “Where does the john come into this?”

“Well, we were near the bus station, you know? We were both broke, he’d spent his cash on a bottle of tequila, and we had no way of getting any more right then. I had no interest, I had all the drugs I wanted, but he couldn’t live without some rock. So he figured what the hell, do a trick, get some cash. It wasn’t too long before he got picked up. He was supposed to meet me back here, but he never showed up.”

“Do you know who picked him up?”

He shook his head, exhaling a stream of smoke. “Nope.”

“You see what he was driving, what he looked like?”

Newt gave him a half hearted shrug, paying more attention to the television screen, where someone was wiping down a stove top to the utter amazement of an easily entertained audience. “Just a beaten up white pick up truck.”

“What make?”

“You mean type? I dunno. Probably a Ford.”

Great. This was as good as no information at all. “Never seen him before? Not a regular?”

He shook his head and shrugged, too stoned to give a shit. “Dunno man. I haven’t done a street job in a while. I’ve been working as a mule.”

“Did you recognize anyone working the strip that night?”

Newt finished the cigarette, smoking it down to a nub no bigger than a Tylenol. He stabbed it out violently in the top of the Coke can. “Wasn’t a lot of people out there then.” He paused briefly, considering his surely fragmented memories. “Maybe Jewel was there. Across the street.”

“Maybe?”

“It was dark, I didn’t pay much att -”

Newt’s answer was cut off by a scream from a neighboring room, full of the kind of ragged pain and terror that made them both jump.

Automatically, Holden jumped up to his feet and headed for the door, shoving the spool aside and getting pissed off at Newt’s pointless paranoia.

Out in the parking lot, he found a guy with bad skin and prison tattoos trying to haul a bloody, screaming woman back into his unit. She was wearing the mandatory hooker uniform of a miniskirt and a halter top, and he wondered if this asshole was a pimp. He had the greasy look of one. “Shut up, bitch!” he snapped, like the classy guy he obviously was. “I told you not to fuck around with me -”

Holden stormed across the lot, something ugly welling up in his gut. He hated pimps. “Get your hands off her, motherfucker!”

The guy looked up with a deep, murderous scowl, his eyes like bullet holes in a corpse. He had the woman – a girl really; she probably wasn’t older than seventeen, a junkie newbie recently turned out – by the hair, his fist tangled in it like a net. “Fuck off, faggot.”

Holden was barely aware that Newt, still standing in the doorway of his room, snickered. “Oh man, yer gonna get it now.”

Roan would probably have advised him not to make a move first, as Roan seem to prefer people commit to a plan of action before he showed them how utterly stupid it was, but he was too angry to be logical or even care. As soon as he reached the guy he threw a punch. The guy must have seen it coming, but he was too drunk or stoned to move fast, and Holden clipped him on the jaw. It snapped his head back, but the guy threw the girl into the nearest parked car, which she landed against with a sickening noise, and kicked Holden.

He was going for the groin but came up short and kicked him in the thigh instead. It still hurt, still made him stumble back a step, and the would be pimp stepped up to deliver a punch of his own, which connected squarely with Holden’s left eye.

This wasn’t his first time at the rodeo, though. He already knew the punch was coming, and decided to take it, because it gave him an opening. While he was throwing his punch, Holden decided to kick him. So while he landed the punch, Holden kicked him in the nuts at almost the same exact moment. And he was kicking a fucking field goal.

While the force of the punch made Holden reel back and see stars, followed by amorphous blobs of dark spots dancing in his vision, the pimp let out a short, sharp shriek, almost like a little girl, and grabbed his balls, doubling over and slumping back against another car. Even though his vision was still blurry, Holden forced himself forward and took advantage of the pimp’s doubled over state to grab him by his greasy head and ram his knee straight into his ugly face. Holden did it a couple of times, feeling a pain in his knee as well as a warm rush of blood down his pantleg as he knocked a few of the pimp’s teeth out. Holden then shoved him to the asphalt, ignoring the pain in his leg, and gave the pimp a kick in the ribs. “Beat on someone your own size, you ugly fuckhole.” He spit on him, just for a good measure of contempt.

The pimp was panting hard, but he managed to roll up to all fours, and spit out a mouth full of blood before saying, “You’ve made a big fucking mistake -”

Holden kicked him in the head, sending him collapsing to the parking lot. “No, you have, motherfucker.”

“No fights!” Sivan exclaimed, waving a large handgun as he came charging out of his office. “No fights here! You take it away!” At the sight of Sivan with a gun, Newt disappeared back into his room, and Holden couldn’t blame him.

Holden held up his hands, dipping his head in acknowledgment. “It’s cool, it’s over. I’m gonna go, okay?”

Sivan nodded his head like his neck was a spring. “Fine, you go then. No fights.”

“No fights,” Holden agreed, backing away. He looked at the beaten girl, and said, “I know somebody who could help you escape from this bastard. Wanna come with me?”

She looked at him suspiciously, through bruised eyes. “Who the hell are you?”

“A man whore who hates pimps. You comin’ with me or not?”

She still seemed dubious, but her options were non-existent, so she trailed behind him as he walked back to his car. Well, limped. His knee still hurt, his face hurt, and he thought he might have tasted blood. But other than that, he felt fantastic. Jessie mostly dealt with kids trapped in sex slavery, but he wasn’t one hundred percent sure this girl was legal. Either way, Jessie would help her.

Maybe that was the only good thing he could get out of this whole situation.

****

Although Fiona knew what to expect, she was still kind of surprised.

Rainbow had called her that afternoon. Calls to MK Investigations were being forwarded to her number since Roan was “indisposed” (that was the official line for now, even though Fiona thought it was somehow Edwardian in its vagueness), and a nervous Rainbow asked if she could come by and talk, as she wanted to talk about something she wasn’t comfortable discussing over the phone. She thought that was weird, but since Roan had always said Rainbow couldn’t be more harmless if she was a declawed kitten stuck up a tree, Fiona gave her her address. It might not be her address for very much longer anyways.

Tank had asked her to move to Boston to be with him. It wasn’t that she didn’t like Tank, because she did, more than she thought she would. He was a bit crazy, but in a good way, not in a “I’m gonna kill all of you!” sort of way. He didn’t even mind her being a dominatrix, nor did he expect her to bring her work home with her either. He spoke a lot of French, but you couldn’t have everything.

She just couldn’t picture being a hockey girlfriend, or the girlfriend of any pro athlete really. She wasn’t a blonde supermodel type, she didn’t have fake breasts and she wasn’t skinny, nor was she the type to stay at home while he was away fucking groupies. But to be fair to Tank, that kind of woman didn’t seem to appeal to him. If you couldn’t hold your own in a bar fight, he didn’t want to know you, and that pretty much held for women as well as men. That left him a small pool of women to draw from, and supermodel types just couldn’t make the cut. (Well, maybe Naomi Campbell, but she was probably the only one.)

And it wasn’t like she could just pick up and move to a city where she didn’t know anyone. Okay, she could … and she wasn’t without skills. Beyond her dominatrix gifts, she still had her programming skills, and she could always go back to doing some web designing.

But if she left now, she’d feel like she was abandoning Roan, and she couldn’t do that. She would have liked to talk this over with him, but he actually was “indisposed”. He hadn’t regained consciousness yet, as far as she knew. Which reminded her, she needed to drop by the hospital tonight, maybe drop Dylan off a sandwich. He probably hadn’t eaten since she last saw him.

Nine o’clock sharp, there was a meek knock at her door. Rainbow was essentially the hippie stereotype, in a lilac peasant blouse, a long rainbow colored skirt, and a dark blue knitted shawl. (Hand knitted? Maybe.) Her dark hair was curly like a grown out perm, and she had it gathered behind her in a ponytail as thick as a horse’s tail. There was something homely and fragile about her, and you instinctively wanted to protect her. She could see why Roan always had a soft spot for her, even though she was one of those kitty cult people.

She sat Rainbow down, gave her some chamomile tea, and slowly pulled the story out of her. It had to be pulled, as it was disjointed, and she had a tendency to wander all over the place. But from what she could gather, Rainbow was worried that the Church’s new leader, James Campanelli, was doing something terrible.

Since Eli’s death, it seemed like there had been a revolving door of leaders for Divine Transformation. James had only recently taken over, as the old one had died during his last transformation. Rainbow was not a fan of James’s aggressive style, and there were rumors that he had a cabin up in the woods, and that certain members were invited up there on certain weekends, and he had a side internet business connected to it. Rainbow was nervous and vague, and it was all Fiona could do to get something concrete she could work with.

Apparently the rumors had it as some type of “fight club” for cats. Only these were generally fights to the death. She wouldn’t have believed that was true, except one of James’s assistants showed up at the church one day with a bandage on his ear. Apparently, the earlobe had been ripped off, but he told several different stories about what happened, and none made any sense.

She didn’t want to go to the police for several reasons: she didn’t trust them, what if word got back to James, what if they raided the church and people got hurt? She wanted none of that. She was hoping Roan could check it out, find out if there was any truth to it, because if anyone was going to find out the truth, it was Roan. Fiona had to give her that, because few were better at it.

She didn’t have a web address for her, but that was okay, because as soon as Rainbow was gone she did her own search to see if she could turn up any domain names or sites owned by Campanelli. She found two, one which wasn’t being used yet, and another you needed a credit card number to enter. Which didn’t bode well.

Holden was the assistant investigator, and she could hand it off to him, but she was reluctant to do so. This was cat business, and as tough as Holden was, he would be fucked going up against some angry transformed all by himself. (A gun would help, but he’d still be at something of a disadvantage.) Roan was the king of the jungle, and he should have no problem subduing cats; it was what he did, sometimes without intention.

But he had to regain consciousness to do it, and she didn’t know if he ever would. So what should she do?

She decided to crack Campanelli’s site and find out. She’d let whatever she saw on there guide her to her next move. She just hoped it wasn’t fetish porn … although Holden would probably be good at handling that.

It suddenly occurred to her how weird an agency MK Investigations was – run by a cat guy, who employed a part time dominatrix and a hooker who fancied himself a vigilante. In that case, there was no one better to handle this kind of shit.

Again, as long as it wasn’t fetish porn. That would suck.

Roan found himself standing in a hospital hallway, sure he should be somewhere, but not one hundred percent certain where that place was. He turned to find a lion waiting at one end of the hall, its face framed by a huge fluffy fall of mane. It was growling at him, and he shook his head and gave it the finger while turning away. “Like I’d be scared of you. “

At the other end of the hall, there was a man standing there. It took Roan a minute to recognize him, but he looked like a younger version of himself. He didn’t really look like that, did he? His face was leaner than he thought, although his hair was a slightly lighter shade of red, lighter than it had ever been. But this was a dream, he knew that, and things didn’t always make sense in dreams. “Maybe you should be scared,” his other self said. “You’re losing the fight.”

“What fight?”

“You’re not even trying, are you? Since when did you become such a pussy?”

He sighed, wondering if he could actually punch himself. Would it hurt? Would he care? “Go away. I talk to myself enough.” He turned towards the door he saw in his peripheral vision, only to find it was gone. There was just a smooth, unbroken wall. He touched it, feeling stucco, but there was no seam. He turned, only to find that his second self and the lion exchanged places. “Just fuck off already,” he told the lion, and turned to face himself. He – the other he – was sitting in one of those outdoor patio chairs that cafes sometimes had, something that looked like wrought iron filigree that was either freezing cold or too hot, and invariably one of the most uncomfortable things you could sit on beyond a chair full of spikes. The table he was sitting at was a wooden end table, though. “You do know how stupid this all is, don’t you?”

Roan glared at him. “ Talking to myself? Yeah. What’d you do to your hair, you stupid fuck? You tryin’ to go for a junior Carrot Top look?”

His other self didn’t appear amused. “Aren’t you tired of all this sad sack bullshit? You used to be better than this. What happened?”

Roan turned away, not about to get in an argument with a smart ass like himself, but there was the lion, still growling at him. Huffing a sigh through his nose, he picked up the lion. It felt as light as a paper doll. “I told you to piss off.” He then tossed the lion aside, a piece of garbage. He heard a thud of impact, but didn’t bother to see if it had landed on its feet.

The hallway became a narrow corridor, and as he turned a corner, he almost walked straight into his younger, other self. “If you can repel the lion that easily, why don’t you? Oh, I get it. You’re afraid of yourself, not the lion. How distressingly Freudian.”

“You think I won’t hit you, is that?”

His younger self smirked in a really irritating manner. “Oh, I know you will. You enjoy beating yourself up almost as much as everyone else does. You’re taking all the sport out of it.”

He didn’t think about it, he just threw a punch, and it would have hit his other self square on the jaw if he had been standing there, but he had disappeared in a blink. “You’re so predictable,” his younger self said, shaking his head in exasperation. He was now standing farther away, arms crossed over his chest, somehow outside on a sunny sidewalk now. Damn it, he hated dreams.

He closed his eyes and focused on waking up. He wasn’t sure it would work, especially since this wasn’t technically a nightmare, but it was worth a shot.

“You really think that’s gonna work?”

He sighed heavily, and opened his eyes. “Fine, smart ass, say what you’re gonna say so I can wake up.”

His other self shook his head sadly. “I’ve already said it. You already know it too. You’re being an obtuse idiot because it’s easier. Since when have you taken the path of least resistance?”

“Since the path I took didn’t matter in the least.”

“Is it old age that’s made you such a coward? Don’t blame Paris again. You always knew he was going to die.”

“Yes, that makes the pain less, doesn’t it?” he snapped, tired of this. What, like he didn’t know he’d become pathetic, that he’d given up? He knew all to well he had. He wasn’t even a hundred percent sure why now, except the will had just gotten sucked out of him. Yes, Paris was the main reason, but he wasn’t all of it. It just seemed like he was fighting a battle that was pointless, and all he was doing was wearing himself out. The haters would win, because they always won, and he got tired of beating his head against the same walls.

Roan just scowled at his younger self, and wondered if he killed himself in a dream if he’d actually die. It might be worth the risk to find out.

****

Holden had just reached the Night Owl when he felt his phone start vibrating in his pocket. He wasn’t going to answer it, especially since it was Scott, but by the sixth ring he had a change of heart. “Yeah?”

“Ever heard of a film called “The Beast With A Thousand Eyes”?” Scott asked, without preamble.

“Um, no. Why?”

“It’s on channel 22 right now, I’ve been watching it … it’s kind of mesmerizing in its awfulness. I think the monster is a puppet with papier mache on it. And as far as I can tell, it has three eyes at most, unless the rest are on its butt or something.”

“That’s gonna happen. Is there a reason you’re calling with a movie review?”

“I’m bored. I thought maybe, if you weren’t doing anything, you’d like to come over. We could watch the movie and try this new microwave caramel popcorn that somehow ended up in our kitchen.”

“Ew! That sounds disgusting.”

“I know, right? Grey doesn’t cop to buyin’ it, but he must have. I didn’t.”

“Isn’t Grey there?”

“Naw, he’s at Tegan’s tonight.” Tegan was Grey’s current girlfriend. He knew this because he had been around Scott way too much.

And that was the problem. He’d been around Scott way too much. He didn’t want a relationship, he couldn’t handle one, and this was starting to feel like one. It was both frightening and strangely comforting, which was even more frightening. But he liked listening to his voice, so he settled back against the car seat and closed his eyes. “I’m working on a case right now.”

“Anything exciting?”

“God no. It’s never anything exciting.” He thought he heard screaming in the background. “The monster eat someone?”

“It’s trying to. Mainly it seems to be humping the ground as a means of locomotion.”

“Now that’s a great date.”

Scott snorted humorously. “Not humping the ground, no.”

“Hump whatever you can get, that’s what I always say.”

“Oh really?”

“Well, with some obvious restrictions.”

Scott chuckled, and took a drink of something, probably a beer. Holden could barely recall first meeting Scott. He thought he was cute, but was overwhelmed by Grey’s gentle giant persona and the weird vibe he was picking up from Tank (which turned out to be totally justified, and yet not, as he was simply assuming a defensive posture, it was just that Tank’s idea of a defensive posture was total insanity. And that was brilliant). He just assumed Scott was a typical jock. Even Grey turned out not to be typical in any sense of the word; in fact, he still didn’t get him at all. Except Grey could be fearless, ‘cause who was going to fuck with him, and he could see why he idolized Roan, macho asshole that he often was. After a moment, Scott said, “I should be up for a while. So if you wanna drop by later, feel free.”

“What if Grey comes home?”

“What if he does? He won’t care.”

Normally he would call bullshit, but Grey was so oddly laid back he really did bet he wouldn’t care, as long as they didn’t fuck in front of him. And even then he might not care as long as they didn’t block his view of the television. “I don’t know how late I’m gonna be out tonight.”

“Well, keep it in mind. Maybe we can meet for a drink one of these days, huh?”

“What, like a date?”

“Nah, just a beer.”

“Maybe.” They were talking about a date, it was just that neither of them would admit it. Oh well, why not? It was probably easier to pretend.

Holden hung up and got out of the car, heading towards the night manger’s office. It was funny, but after all these years, Sivan was still the night manager. He was a squat but gaunt man with skin the color of a caramel macchiato and an indefinable accent that was almost as comically thick as his mustache, which was definitely a pornstache to be proud of. He was quick to anger but also quick to calm down, which was a good thing since it wasn’t always clear what he was angry about. He was a fighter, though, or had been at some point; his thick sausage fingers had callused knuckles, the type you could only earn through years of punching heavy bags or people. There were rumors that he used to be a “freedom fighter” back in his original homeland, but no one was sure where that was, as apparently every time he was asked he gave a different answer. That led to rumors he used to work for the mob – someone’s mob – but he was too old to be an enforcer now. He was cheerfully crooked though, happy to take money and look the other way when drug deals and prostitution took place in his parking lot, and being as mysterious and grizzled as he was, no one was brave enough to rob him.

Holden slipped him a twenty, and Sivan told him what room Newt was in, without once looking away from his portable television, which seemed to be showing a Japanese game show involving scantily clad girls and lizards. (Surely that made sense to someone.)

Newt’s room was farthest away from the office, which made sense. The Night Owl was a bunch of single units laid out in an almost perfect U shaped formation, and Newt’s room was basically the bottom of the U, the cornerstone that connected the two arms. He knocked on the door, and wondered what he would say if Newt had a client.

After a moment, he heard stuff shifted away from the door (Newt was paranoid, and often piled stuff up in front of a door, whether he could lock it or not), and Newt flung the door open wide. He stared at him a long moment, his pupils so wide you could have driven a truck through them, and finally said, “You’re not the pizza guy.”

What was Newt on? He was standing there in nothing but blue striped boxer shorts that couldn’t have been his (Newt often liked to freeball it), showing a long, lean torso that was almost concave, a tattoo of a bright green lizard over his left pectoral, and a small reddish-purple bruise visible near his right hip. His chest was naturally hairless, save for a bit of barely visible fuzz in the center of his torso, which Newt always attributed to being half-Filipino. But since Holden had met some hairy Filipinos, he wasn’t sure what to make of that.

Newt’s hair was dark and wavy more than curly, but right now it was a lank rat’s nest of a tangle, and the smell of sweat coming off him seemed to indicate he hadn’t showered in a while. “Dude, it’s me, Fox.”

Newt stared at him once more, clearly tripping balls and barely holding on to the Earth. Holden was about to give up and come back another day, maybe when he was slightly more sober, when he suddenly exclaimed, “Oh. I thought you’d joined the Marines.”

He wasn’t kidding, otherwise he would have laughed. “What?”

Newt scratched his head with dirty fingernails. He not only had a club stamp on the back of his hand, but it looked like he had a tattoo on the underside of his wrist. It just said Fuck in thick black letters. “Oh, wait – I mean an escort agency. I don’t know what I was thinkin’ of. C’mon in, want some acid?”

“You’re doing acid?” That would explain a lot. Since Newt had retreated from the door, scratching his ass and revealing a new tattoo (a small spider on his back, in tramp stamp location at the base of his spine), Holden had come in, and was almost overwhelmed by the funk of the room, which smelled like body odor, burnt wires, and mold. It was dark, the only light a silent television playing flickering pictures of what appeared to be an informercial. The covers had been pulled off the bed and lumped up on the floor, like a nest for a large bird, while empty booze bottles and orange juice cartons were scattered across the stained carpet like land minds. He had to look around carefully for a place to step.

“I think so.” Newt paused. “Or was that yesterday? Fuck if I know. What month is it?”

“June.”

That startled a laugh out of him as he sat on the stripped mattress and picked up a lit cigarette from where it had been balanced on the top of a Coke can. It looked like a regular cigarette, but the exceedingly acrid smell of it told Holden it had been laced with something more potent than tobacco. Holy fuck, he wasn’t dabbling in angel dust now, was he? “I promised my mother I’d start rehab in June. Good thing I didn’t specify the year, huh? Could you put that back up against the door?”

Holden turned, and saw one of those huge wooden spools, the type they rolled up industrial cables on. “Where the hell did you get that?”

“Side of the road. Or somebody’s yard, I dunno. It was here when I woke up.”

Holden shook his head as he shoved the heavy thing back up against the door. He’d accuse anyone else of lying, but not Newt. He’d probably killed more brain cells than he’d ever actually had – the fact that he wasn’t a drooling vegetable just showed you how physically resilient he was.

His real name was Shawn, and he was from somewhere in Texas (location varied, just like it varied for Sivan). He was twenty five going on eight hundred and seven, if you considered how much mileage his fun adventures in drug abuse must have added to his life. That lizard tattoo was supposedly where he got his nickname from, but Holden always figured it was really from the movie Aliens. That little girl the aliens couldn’t manage to kill was called Newt, and drugs hadn’t figured out a way to kill Shawn yet either. One monster was as good as another.

“How you gonna let the pizza man in?” Holden wondered.

Newt looked at him blankly. “Pizza man? You ordered a pizza? Thanks, dude.”

With a heavy sigh, he sat on the end of the mattress, and fixed him with a scornful look. “If I ask you about Rico, will you remember anything that actually happened, or didn’t happen three years ago?”

Newt gazed at him with those blown pupil eyes, his irises a mere suggestion of hazel, and said, “Why, did that john kill him?”

Holden stared back at him, wondering if it could possibly be that simple.

By the way people were scrambling about in the otherwise sedate lobby, Dylan knew something had gone horribly wrong. He just bet Roan had something to do with it.

He was right. He took the elevator up to Roan’s floor, and was almost immediately greeted by a metal security door, where Rosenberg and several butch orderlies, some with drug guns that looked distressingly like sniper rifles, were waiting as if preparing for a siege. Rosenberg looked at him and opened her mouth to speak, only to be silenced by an angry roar, loud enough that she winced and most of the orderlies cringed. The two biggest orderlies were peering through bulletproof glass windows into the IU – also known as the “infected unit” – and one of them muttered in Spanish, “I didn’t sign up for this shit.”

Dylan moved beside Rosenberg, and asked, with an even mixture of disbelief and weariness, “Roan got out?”

“He was number two.”

“Number two?”

“Remember that problem with the panther infected that cut my dinner short? Before I even got here he escaped his room, transformed. A twelve oh two – emergency evac – was called while they got the cat wranglers up to drug him, but before they could move in, Roan burst out of his room and got into a roaring contest with it. The panther tried to attack him, and he threw it behind the check in desk. It’s still making noises, but I think it’s hurt, as it ain’t coming out of there. I’d say its given up, but Roan isn’t accepting surrender.”

“Wasn’t he drugged?”

The big orderly closest to him, a Hispanic built like a bouncer but with a more military style buzz cut, snorted and said, “Fuck yeah man, he had enough Phenobarbital in him to put down a pair of bull elephants. He shouldn’t have gained consciousness ‘til Christmas.”

Oh god, Roan and his drug tolerance. Surely Rosenberg knew of his pill popping, but apparently his tolerance was greater than anyone had imagined. “Well, shit. He survived elephant tranquilizers; I guess that means he can survive anything.”

Even though Dylan had been speaking to Rosenberg, the orderly looked at him funny. “He’s had elephant tranqs?”

Rosenberg chose to ignore him. “I’m hoping maybe you can disrupt him.”

“How?”

“Talk at him, or, more probably yell at him. He may recognize your voice, and it’ll throw him off enough that we can fill his ass with new tranqs.”

“What?” Dylan couldn’t really believe what he was hearing. “He hasn’t recognized my voice once.”

“This is a stress situation,” she said. “His adrenaline is up, he’s frayed. I’m hoping you can get in through the edges.”

As a theory, it was interesting. Viable? Probably not. “No offense at all, but that’s a sucky plan.”

“Tell me about it, but it’s all I got. You got anything better?”

Dylan nudged the bouncer orderly aside and looked out the bulletproof portal into the ward beyond. There was Roan, crouched on top of the reception desk, completely naked, IV tubes snaking out behind him, still attached to his arms and making his blood ooze out in long crimson trails on the white floor. Of course he still looked human, save for the odd way the muscles in his arms, chest, back, and legs bulged and twitched, like they were undergoing simultaneous but separate spasms. But he hadn’t transformed, not one bit. Save for his eyes, which had that flat lack of humanity in them; they were pure animal, all inarticulate rage. He was snarling loudly, lips pulled back painfully to reveal darker than average gums and shorter than (lion) average teeth, although his canine teeth did kind of look pronounced. Then again, lately, they always looked kind of pronounced. He could still remember kissing him a couple weeks’ back and cutting his tongue on one of them.

“No, I guess not.” He felt an unaccustomed swell of anger towards Roan, and looked around for whatever released the security door. He found it and threw the latch, but the burley orderly grabbed him and held him back.

“Let him go,” Rosenberg ordered. And for an elderly woman, she could give you orders like a drill sergeant. “Just open the door a crack, Dylan. Miguel, aim your gun through it, and when you have a clear shot, take it.”

“Through a crack in the door?” he complained. “What the fuck am I, a sniper?”

“Just try.”

“Let me talk to him first,” Dylan said, although he knew almost immediately “talk” was wrong the word. He shouldered open the door a crack, and angrily shouted, “Roan, stop this now!”

Roan cocked his head, looking in his direction, but he wasn’t quite looking at him. He wasn’t sure the lion’s vision was good enough to make him out, or if it at all cared.

“Are you making a point, is that it? You’re stronger than the lion, so this means you’re doing this on purpose! Give it a rest, Roan, you’re embarrassing yourself!” He didn’t know if any of this was true, but Dylan felt a sort of grim satisfaction shouting it.

Now the lion was interested. He jumped off the check in desk, landing easily on his feet, and started stalking towards the door. As slender as he was, naked, tattooed and scarred and dragging tubes leaking blood, he should have been pathetic, but he was truly frightening. It wasn’t just the growling, although that helped, and the hard look in his eye, although that was most of it. He was actually stalking, walking in a way that was partially stiff although occasionally fluid, a gait just not built for the body that was using it.

“I can’t get a shot,” the orderly complained. “Unless you want me to drug his ankles.”

“Ankles would do,” Rosenberg told him.

“Stop it Roan, now! I mean it! This has gone far enough!”

Roan’s snarl ratcheted up several notches in volume, and the way his upper lip curled so dramatically, it looked like he was tearing his mouth with the force of it. “Damn it, Roan, stop!” He screamed it, so angry he was actually starting to cry. He didn’t realize it immediately, he just felt tears on his cheeks, and knew his eyes weren’t just watering from the orderly’s aftershave. (Although it was pretty powerful.)

Amazingly, Roan froze. Something like confusion passed over his face, a fast moving cloud of an expression, but for a moment the lion wasn’t dominant. He seemed to be wavering unsteadily on his feet for a moment, and then his eyes rolled back in his head and he collapsed to the floor.

Dylan shoved open the door all the way, intending to go to Roan, but the beefy orderly grabbed him and held him back, while the other one, a thinner white guy who was almost seven feet tall, moved on ahead, aiming his drug gun down at Roan. He wasn’t moving. “Let him go, get the panther,” Rosenberg said, although it was actually an order.

Reluctantly, the orderly took his hand off his shoulder, and went to the check in desk. Dylan and Rosenberg both went to Roan, who was being watched carefully by the giant orderly. She put a hand on his neck, searching for a pulse, while Dylan wasn’t sure whether to slap Roan or hug him. It didn’t matter, as he seemed to be out cold again. Even his muscles had gone back to being still.

“Pulse is erratic,” she reported. “I think he’s okay, we just really need to stop the bleeders.”

The bouncer orderly shot the panther, and the pneumatic hiss and clunk of the drug gun made Dylan start. He’d learned to hate that noise as much as a gunshot.

Rosenberg patted him on the back, and said, “Good job, kiddo. He heard you.”

But did it do any good? He looked down at Roan, still and pale, blue veins pulsing faintly beneath adrenaline flushed skin, eyelids looking bruised. Dylan didn’t need to ask Rosenberg if he was comatose again, because he already knew the answer.

He honestly wondered if Roan would ever wake up again. It was all he could do not to start crying even harder.

****

How long ago was it that he was sharing a joint with a hockey player, watching a science show? Holden couldn’t remember right now, but he was having a curious sense of déjà vu. Although sitting on a roof sharing a joint with an Asian transvestite hooker wasn’t really the same thing at all.

His initial scoping of his old corners turned up no one familiar, until he ran into Ravyn, and she seemed surprised to see him. After ribbing him about going “big time” on all of them, she said she was taking a break as her feet were killing her, and invited him to join her. Her place to go and smoke in peace turned out to be the roof top of a seedy bar, which had a single floor transient hotel just above it. To access the roof, they had to walk through both. The dive bar was straight oriented but little attended, and the bartender, an older bald guy with a head surely as wrinkled as his ball sack, seemed to not really notice or care about Ravyn passing through the bar, suggesting he was used to it. They encountered no one in the hallway of the hotel, although Holden smelled mildew, cigarettes, burned soup, and despair, suggesting someone was staying up here. He wondered how long they’d last before they committed suicide, because this was pretty much the last stop before death.

Upstairs, the roof was a mess of gravel, peeling tar paper, bird shit, and cigarette butts, as others apparently used her rooftop getaway at times. And it was her until she took off the wig. Ravyn was very serious about this; when he was in female drag, he was a she, Ravyn. When the guise was off, he was a he again, simply Alan.

Ravyn popped off her shoes, dramatic but cheap heels, and sat down against the emergency stairwell doorway. Holden joined her, mainly because there wasn’t much else to do. She pulled a short but fat blunt out of her padded bra, and once she lit up, she seemed to just assume he would be joining her. He took a toke, mainly just to be friendly, but the stuff was heavy duty and hit him hard; he felt momentarily dizzy. Maybe he hadn’t eaten enough beforehand.

After some minor chit chat, catching up on each other’s sordid lives, he got to what he wanted to ask: all about Rico. She’d heard what had happened to him and, much like him, was surprised Rico had lived so long. She hadn’t seen him for maybe eight months, so she wasn’t a great witness and he was probably wasting his time with pointless nostalgia. But then she said, “You should ask Newt. If Rico was out partying, it was with him.”

“Newt’s back? I thought he was in jail in Vegas.”

“Eh, that was just a drunk tank thing. It got blown out of proportion.” Ravyn took another toke and offered him the joint, but he shook his head, taking a pass.

Newt was a fellow street kid, generally a hustler, but sometimes a low level drug mule. He was the Hunter S. Thompson of hustlers, but only if you considered the character of Hunter S. Thompson in the Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas movie and not the writer. He took so many drugs he seemed to be perpetually stoned, even when he was sober. He’d rewired his own brain with serious substance abuse, and it wasn’t just a miracle he was alive, but a miracle he hadn’t been involved in some kind of multi-state crime spree where he died in a hail of bullets. That was still on the table, and if you were betting on Newt’s death – and some surely were – that had to be the lead vote getter. He wasn‘t violent, but he was a perpetual fuck up who was inherently unpredictable. “Where’s Newt staying now?”

Ravyn snorted before releasing the smoke through her nostrils. “Knowin’ him? Under the viaduct or in someone’s bathtub. But what I’ve heard is he’s been crashing at the Night Owl motel.”

Holden groaned. The Night Owl. What a shithole. You didn’t even have to rent the room by the hour, you could get it in twenty minute intervals. “The one on Franklin?”

“One and the same.”

“He’d be better off under the viaduct.”

Ravyn laughed more than was warranted, indicating she was really fucked up. Well, her feet probably didn’t hurt anymore. “Yeah, I think I once got crabs from the bedspread there.”

“I think everyone has.” He got to his feet, and took a deep breath to try and clear the cobwebs away. “I’m gonna go see if he’s around. See you around, huh?”

She gave him a strangely sad look. “No, honey, don’t. Didn’t your preacher daddy teach you about Lot’s wife? Once you escape, you should never look back. Fox, you should just get the hell out of here and count your blessings that you were smart enough and fast enough to do it. There are no happy endings here. I’m sorry for Tika an’ all, but even dead, Rico may have ended up one of the lucky ones. No good is gonna come from pokin’ around.”

As depressing as that was, he knew she was probably right. But he had started this, and he felt compelled to finish it, or at least try.

It was just one step up from being completely useless.

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.

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.

Things could be weirder, but Holden was kind of glad they weren’t, because he thought his head might explode.

When he arrived at the hospital with Scott, they found Dylan looking like he hadn’t slept for days (possible), and so weary he didn’t even comment on the fact that they had arrived together. When he told them the lion had woken up but Roan hadn’t yet, Holden understood why he looked so tired and frazzled. What did that mean, exactly? Dylan was afraid it meant something went wrong during the surgery, but Holden had another idea, one that made him angry enough to want to go into the room and punch Roan.

Roan was hiding.

The fucker had just given up. He decided he didn’t like what he was anymore and shut down, letting the lion run amok. He pulled Scott aside, and whispered to him to keep Dylan company while he went and visited Roan. Scott obviously had questions, but he asked him to trust him and he agreed.

Scott poured on the charm and got Dylan to agree to go have a decent cup of tea with him (there was a Starbucks down the street – of course there was, as it was a law in Washington State you could be no more than five minutes away from one at all times), and as soon as they were gone, he snuck into his room. (He wasn’t a hundred percent sure anyone was supposed to be in there, so he wanted to make sure he wasn’t intercepted by an overzealous nurse.)

There were signs Dylan had been sleeping here, from the cot in the corner covered with blankets to the sketchbook sitting on the floor beside it, the cover smeared with charcoal. Roan was laying in his hospital bed, out cold, surrounded by all his bleeping machines, not perfectly bald but almost, his head covered with a rusty red fuzz like dried blood. He looked more human with his hair trimmed back so violently, but that was a funny thing to think, because he hardly looked inhuman with it.

Whatever. It didn’t really matter now anyways. He took a deep breath, gave himself a moment to feel awkward about talking to an unconscious man, and just got down to business. “You think I don’t know what you’re doing, Roan? Really? What kind of an asshole do you take me for? I don’t really care if you give up and hide behind the lion all day long, that’s your choice, but I hope you rot on the guilt of what you’re doing to Dylan and every other one of us stupid motherfuckers who care about you. And don’t think I’m picking up your slack, ‘cause fuck you, I have my own life to lead, and I’m not a detective. You are, so wake the fuck up and get on with it. You wanna feel sorry for yourself? Fine, but do it at home like the rest of us.”

He started walking away, but he was angry now, and realized he had more to say, so he turned back. “You think I haven’t just wanted to give up and die? I have, millions of times, but then I remembered my parents, the violent johns, the evangelicals who would like to kill all the gays, and I realize I have to live, if only to piss them off. That’s what you have to do too. You have to live to piss off all the infected haters out there, fight back for those who can’t. And do it fast, ‘cause I’m on the verge of beating the shit out of you. Especially since you’re in no position to fight back. It’s the safest time to beat you senseless.” Of course he couldn’t actually hit him, because it would be just his luck to hit him and bring the lion lunging out at him. He’d be the first man mauled to death by a lion in human form. He’d get a posthumous place in the Guinness Book of World Records.

This time he did walk away, but he decided to put a final boot in his ribs before he went. “Oh, and I think Scott and I are dating now, or something like that. I dunno; I don’t really do relationships. You want anymore details, you’re gonna hafta wake up and ask. Chew on that for a while.” On the back of everything else, it was weak, but it was the only ammo he had left.

Dylan and Scott weren’t yet back from the Starbucks, so he went to join them. Scott had convinced Dylan to share a brownie with him, and when Holden joined them at the table, Scott broke off a piece of his brownie and gave it to him. “Watchin’ my carbs,” he said, in a manner that Holden knew this was his way of getting Dylan to eat something. Holden played along, because Dylan looked so exhausted, not just physically, but emotionally and probably mentally. As much fun as Roan probably was in bed, the agony of being his husband probably wasn’t worth it. He was lightning, and in his shadow all you got was burned.

Scott tried to get Dylan to go with them to the Del Toro film festival, but while Dylan was a fan, he felt he had to return to the hospital. It was like watching the poor son of a bitch slink off to his own execution, and he felt bad for him. He knew Dylan didn’t trust him, but he couldn’t really blame him. He couldn’t define his relationship with Roan in any way; it wasn’t an affair, but he knew a side of Roan that Dylan really didn’t, so in a way it was. Dylan married Bruce Wayne, but he didn’t know a single thing about Batman.

Oh fuck – bad metaphor. This made him Robin. So, Hulk and … no. Iron Man? No. Wolverine? No. Goddamn it, didn’t any other superhero have a sidekick?

A lack of anything better to do led to him going to the film festival with Scott. It occurred to Holden the last time he was in a theater, he snuck in to get some sleep in relative safety. He couldn’t remember the last time he came to a theater to see an actual film.

They were good movies, and Scott was good as his word, buying them sodas, popcorn, nachos, and Gummi Bears, as Scott turned out to really like Gummi Bears (actually all kinds of Gummi candy, but all the theater had was bears). Holden accused him of liking Jell-O too, and Scott made the gross (but endearing) admission that his grandmother used to feed him hot liquid Jell-O when he was sick, and when he got a cold, he still craved raspberry Jell-O “punch”. Really disgusting, and yet it seemed to suit him somehow.

There was a certain unreality that hit you after you were up all night watching films. When they came out of the theater with dawn painting the sky several vibrant pastels, Holden felt slightly high, as if he’d stepped out into another world, perhaps one better than his own. He hoped so.

Holden intended to drive Scott home, but he said he just wanted to sleep now, fuck going home, so they ended up sleeping at his place. That’s all they did; not only were they too tired to have sex, but they didn’t really undress either. They just collapsed on his bed and went to sleep almost immediately, and Holden knew that was a sign he was getting older. He preferred sleeping alone, he didn’t like anyone impinging on his space and often found it difficult to sleep when sharing a bed, but he had no trouble this time. Still, when he woke up with Scott’s arm around him, he was momentarily disoriented. But he was conscious enough to reach for the phone, his Fox cell, and he knew who was calling him because of the specialized ringtone.

Yes, he had a specialized ringtone for every client. (Hell, he had a specialized ringtone for Roan too on his regular cell, although he probably wouldn’t like to know it was “Wolf Like Me” by TV On The Radio.) Since it was “London Calling”, he knew it was Trevor.

Trevor’s real name was Graham, and yes, he was British. He’d been a client of his for a long time, almost two years, and he was probably his favorite client, because he wasn’t bad looking (not handsome per se, but not unattractive, and trim and in good shape) , he was generous, and he always treated him with respect. This was a business arrangement, he knew it, and he acted like it was, which Holden rather liked. It felt like they were on even footing, like they were equals, and to be brutally honest, he always felt like he was above most of his clients in some way. That probably wasn’t fair, but it helped his self-esteem immeasurably.

Graham was, like Scott, bisexual, and in the closet about it. He had a wife and two kids, and they had no idea about his proclivities, as he kept his “urges” stifled at home. But on the road, he decided to let it out, figuring it was unlikely it would ever get back to his family. He traveled a lot, therefore he didn’t have too much pent up urges. Holden had no idea who he worked for or in what capacity, although he had the idea he was an executive of some sort. He liked that, as he honestly didn’t care where his clients worked or what they did, or even about their families. He wasn’t a therapist, although he was treated that way quite a bit. Graham didn’t treat him that way; sometimes he mentioned problems with a colleague or a client of his own (a business client, not someone he was sleeping with for money), but not often. They traded lots of small talk, current events, odd little things. Graham had started asking him for book recommendations for flights since he liked the first book Holden had recommended to him, which seemed funny. “Why am I reading this? Oh, my rent boy said it was good.” From Graham, he’d learned enough about British politics to make him wonder if he was involved in it in some way.

Graham had caught an earlier flight, and was in town right now. As Holden rubbed sleep from his eyes, he told him he’d be there in twenty minutes. After hanging up, he noticed it was almost two in the afternoon, so at least he’d gotten some sleep.

Scott was still sleeping, the deep “drooling on the pillow” kind, and while he felt like he should tell him to do his damn laundry if he was going to drool on his pillow, he figured they’d both gotten worse things on the sheets. He’d live, it was just the idea of it.

He showered quickly and got dressed in loose fitting jeans, a loose blue t-shirt, and his black Converse sneakers. Graham didn’t require him to dress like a cartoon hustler, all tight clothes and package enhancing underwear, because they were far beyond that now. There was something oddly comfortable in the whole arrangement, even though it was still a purchasing agreement.

He didn’t need to take anything besides the usuals (condoms, lube, Viagra), because Graham was also very vanilla.  You’d think he’d be into kink (where he got this idea the Brits were kinky he had no idea – Monty Python?) but he wasn’t.

He considered leaving Scott a note, but why? It felt weird. So he simply wrote “Had to go” on a Post-It and stuck it on the bathroom mirror, where he was sure to see it. He kind of hoped he wouldn’t be here when he got back, because there was only so much togetherness he could take in a day.

When he arrived at the Sheridan Hotel, he found Graham in his room, eating a light lunch of tomato bisque soup, a fancy ass cheese plate, and some artisan bread along with a beer he declared “absolutely terrible” (he was very chauvinistic about Britain having the best beers).  Still, he invited him to join him, and since he hadn’t had any breakfast, he did. The soup wasn’t bad, but he really loved all the grapes that came with the cheese plate; Graham didn’t eat grapes, as he thought they were awful for some unfathomable reason.

It was a pleasant afternoon, familiar, comfortable – that word again – and free of any attachments, which may have been the best part of it. He came out after showering to find Graham ironing his shirt. He’d never seen anyone iron anything, but Graham was kind of fussy about his appearance, which was probably the most stereotypical thing about him. Holden got dressed, but kept an eye on Graham as he stood there in his pale blue boxers and a thin, close fitting white undershirt he called a “vest”, ironing his white dress shirt. He was forty nine but looked about forty, his brown hair cut short and neat, the lines around his eyes still within the window of time when they’re refined looking and not sad. He was ironing edges so sharp they looked like they could draw blood. “You’re the only person I’ve ever seen iron,” he admitted.

Graham glanced up at him, not stopping, and scoffed. “What, your mother didn’t iron your clothes when you were a child?”

“No, I don’t think so. She hated laundry. We had a cleaning lady most of the time.”

That made him set his little travel iron aside – yes, it was his iron; Holden had seen him unpack it from his luggage – and stare at him with something like wonder. “You had servants?”

“Just the one. What, you were expecting a dirt poor refugee?”

“No, but … it’s a little surprising.” He chuckled to himself as he slid on his iron warned and flattened shirt, and Holden prompted him. “What?”

“You are a mystery to me, Fox. I suspect you’re much more clever than you let on.”

“Me? Nah. I’m only as clever as I need to be.”

Graham had this way of looking at you that said he didn’t quite believe you, but he’d play along. His eyes were such a pale hazel they were almost another color entirely, something like weak tea, and had such an intelligence in them you knew you didn’t want to argue with him if you could at all avoid it. “If you say so.” It was while he was stepping into his assuredly expensive slacks that he said, “I was wondering if you’d like to accompany me to Las Vegas the weekend of the 27th.”

He had just finished zipping up his own jeans, and was caught off guard. “What? What for?”

“Oh, I have some dreary conference there, and last time I was bored out of mind. What is the appeal of gambling? Do you know?”

“It’s the lure of money for nothing. If you can call blowing your last hundred bucks on a slim chance nothing.”

“Ah, is that it? Anyways, I thought you could come along as my assistant. You’d be free to do whatever you want while I’m attending the conference, but I’d hope you’d be available afterwards. “

After all this time, still coy with his wording. It was a habit of his he just couldn’t break. “You’re not gonna tell people I’m only there to lift your luggage, are you?”

That made him genuinely laugh, showing he was aware of the latest “homophobe really a big fat homo” scandal. At this point, Holden thought everyone should collectively agree that those who rabidly hated gays were clearly gay themselves, and totally ignore their self-hating bullshit. Everyone would be better off. “God no. I’m not that pathetic, am I? You’re clever enough to actually be my assistant. I know for a fact you’re smarter than the latest intern in the office. Dear lord, you can hear pebbles rattling in his skull when he shakes his head.”

Holden himself didn’t like Vegas. He went once, and found it sordid, but not in an enjoyable way. Skeevy, like an eighty year old priest who can’t stop pawing you. He chalked it up as one of those straight people things he’d never understand, but the fact that a bi didn’t get it either made him feel better. (Although he was a fussy Brit, so maybe that lessened the impact.) “When you say weekend … you mean the entire weekend?”

He nodded, neither mussing his hair or rumpling his collar. “Yes, the twenty seventh and the twenty eighth. I’ll take care of the plane ticket and lodgings, and of course your meals are on me.”

“On top of my usual fee?”

“Of course.”

“That’s quite a bit of money.”

“I can afford it, and you’re worth it. Can you do it?”

It wasn’t the first time a client had requested more than his usual time. He actually required extra if someone had wanted him to spend the night, and some had actually paid it. But two days in a row? Weird, but again, not unheard of. It was two weeks away, and he had nothing going that weekend as far as he knew. If any other clients called that weekend, he’d just tell them he was busy. It was weird, but he liked Graham and knew he wasn’t a freak, just very probably lonely and wanting someone he knew and trusted. “Yeah, I’m sure I could. Just let me know the time I should show up at Sea-Tac.”

That made Graham grace him with a genuinely sweet half smile that he wouldn’t have expected from a man of his age and station. And while Holden smiled back, he found himself once again wondering how his life could be so fucking weird.

****

On his way home, he realized he hadn’t been shopping for a while, so he stopped to get a few things. Now Holden felt weird being in a store, behaving like a normal person, But he was a normal person, wasn’t he? He just happened to be a prostitute and a freelance vigilante sidekick to a lion guy. Nothing abnormal about that. Christ, he should start doing acid, just so stuff started making more sense.

It was early evening by the time he got back home, and Scott was gone, like he expected. He left a note that simply read “Call me”, and he wasn’t sure if he would or wouldn’t.

He tossed a frozen dinner in the microwave, and while it heated poured himself a glass of gin, the only glass of gin he was going to allow himself tonight. He was going to limit his intake, see if things got any clearer. He doubted it, but he wanted to make sure.

He watched television, but without any awareness of what he was watching, mindlessly shoving food in his mouth, not one hundred percent sure what he was eating. His best guess was some kind of meatloaf. He should have read the box more carefully.

He decided to check his phone messages, and that’s when the phone rang. He had a long moment where he mentally debated letting it go to call messaging, but on the fourth ring he answered it. “Yeah?”

There was a small noise, somewhere between a gasp and a sigh, and that was enough to let him know it was a woman on the other end of the line. “This Fox?”

“Yeah,” he replied warily. Did he know this voice?

There was a sniff before she replied, “It’s Tika, ‘member?”

“TIka …” he scoured his memory, glad he hadn’t had enough alcohol to blur everything. “Shit, Trey Tika?”

“That’s me.”

“Holy fuck, girl, where you been? Last I heard, you were doing a nickel in Purdy.” Purdy was the home of a women’s prison, and Tika had been no stranger to it. She was one of the working girls – nee common streetwalkers – he knew in his early days. Her nickname was Trey, and was somehow related to her love of wigs, but he was never sure how and always felt too stupid to ask. The male and female prostitutes rarely fraternized, but they got along fairly well.

“Yeah, I got out last year. I’ve been tryin’ to stay clean …” she trailed off, sniffing again. Either she’d been crying or doing a bump. “”Look, I need your help. Rico’s dead.”

You know what? He hadn’t had enough gin to deal with this right now. Fuck sobriety; it was highly overrated.

Dylan waited until Doctor Rosenberg showed up before telling anyone what happened, mainly because he didn’t want anyone busting in with guns blazing. Not that that was likely to happen, but even a small possibility was too much of a possibility.

Once she arrived, he told her in confidence what happened. For a moment, she stared at him over her glasses, perched on the end of her nose. “The lion woke up in his body?”

“Yes.”

“How is that possible?”

“I was hoping you could tell me.”

She huffed a sigh through her nose before rubbing her eyes like she was in pain. “Goddamn that little pisher, he’s always thinking up new ways to complicate my life.” Once she stopped pinching the bridge of her nose, she reset her glasses, and walked over to the nearest nurse’s station. Dylan followed, but kept an eye on the door of Roan’s room. Not that he could get out, but he didn’t want anyone accidentally going in.

She picked up the phone, hit a button, and said, “Gonna need you to bust out the cannon and get up to room 25-IU. Make it a high dosage, as this guy has a tolerance.”

As soon as she hung up, he repeated, “Cannon?”

She waved a hand dismissively. “What we call the drug gun. We gotta liven up the place.”

“You don’t need to send a sniper in. Just give me a needle, I could probably get close enough to him to jab him.”

“Seriously? Even though he was growling at you?”

“It was only growling. If it’s the lion, it may not know how to get around in a bipedal body.”

For a moment, her stare was relentless. “And you just came up with that, huh?”

He glared back at her. “I think it would have attacked me otherwise.”

“Based on what?”

“Based on the fact that it’s a lion, and I don’t think it’s interested in playing backgammon with me.”

She didn’t seem amused, but this wasn’t a laughing moment. Except Roan would probably say it was, although he would say that about everything, therefore he wasn’t a good source of opinion.

Finally she settled for shaking her head. “Kid, you’re not a nurse, you’re not vetted by the hospital, the lawsuit potential is just too huge, setting aside other stuff like reason and common sense. So thanks but no thanks, I’m leavin’ it to my sniper.”

He would have argued with her, but he had no grounds if she was going to take a legal angle. So he let it go, at least for now, although he felt a slight sinking in his stomach when the orderly arrived with the tranquilizer gun propped on his shoulder. He would never get used to people shooting Roan, but maybe that was a good thing.

As he went about putting Roan down, Dylan had to ask Rosenberg, one more time, “What does it mean? Will Roan ever wake up?”

“Kiddo, I really don’t know. But I’m gonna kick his ass if he doesn’t.”

“Get in line,” he sighed. Again, Dylan found himself in the position of wishing he had nothing to do with Roan, and being afraid Roan would have nothing to do with him. Was there any way to win with this man? Would he ever know for sure?

Oh Buddha, why couldn’t he have fallen in love with a less complicated man?

****

There was no point in putting it off any longer. Using Roan’s records, Holden called up Aunt Abby, and braced himself for the torrent of bitterness. Luckily, he had his camp bitchy attitude locked and loaded. Did she think she could out bitch a gay man? He wanted to hear that.

As soon as she answered – her voice clipped, short, hard edged – he launched into his spiel. “I’m Holden Krause, calling for Roan McKichan, and I’m letting you know we’re terminating our services.”

There was a moment of tense silence before she replied, “What?”

“We’re cashing the check for work done, but our contract is null and void, because you lied to us. We’re really not pleased with that.”

Again, another pause, but he could sense her growing fury. He was good at spotting fury, he had a lot of experience with it. “Who the hell are you, and what the hell are you implying?”

“I’m an associate investigator, because you are not worth Mr. McKichan’s time anymore. We know Tyler Edwards was impersonating your nephew, and you know where you fucked up? Having him beaten. Too many witnesses. Next time, hire smarter thugs.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Can the bullshit, sister. We know you can’t afford the money you’ve been spending without skimming … or help from your very rich daddy. How much do you want me to divulge here? Because I could get into specifics.” That was partly true. He talked to Randi Kim after visiting Roan’s office and finding it cordoned off by crime tape, with a good part of its front charred black. (It was mostly surface damage, though, nothing that couldn’t be fixed with a cosmetic Band-Aid.)

Randi admitted to him, over a quickie nosh at a taco truck down the street, that she had been avoiding Roan since her brother Grant was arrested. She knew the fact that he was still alive and hadn’t been shanked in prison yet was all courtesy of Roan, but she hadn’t quite worked up to seeing him. Roan occasionally left her phone messages, by now never expecting her to call back. She felt weird around him now, and couldn’t say why, except she felt guilty, angry at him and grateful at the same time, and not sure their friendship could ever go back to where it was before all of this. When she heard he was in the hospital, though, she supposed she should make amends. He told her that might be a good idea, and in return, she looked up a couple of financial records for him.

Abby’s voice, already cold, took on an even frostier edge. “You’re lying. Financial records are sealed.”

“Yes, unless you know somebody who doesn’t mind breaking the law, and you’d be surprised how few lawful people I know. By the way, if you’re near your computer now, go ahead and look up the Seattle area Craigslist, personals section.”

“Are – are you fucking insane?”

“Fine, be that way. Let me read you the ad: ‘Adam Jepson – your father is looking for you in the Seattle area now. Leave as quickly as possible.’ Just posted that an hour ago. It’ll run for a week, in every section I could post it in. It’ll also be in the Stranger and the Times too. If he saw it right away, he could already be half way to Vancouver by now. Got any family in Canada?”

“You stupid … I paid you to find him, not send him deeper into hiding!”

“Under false pretenses. That’s not how we do business.”

“You fucking asshole. I’ll sue you!”

“Will you now? Please do. I’d love to see your family drama dragged into open court, ‘cause maybe then the truth will come out. But I really wouldn’t go the revenge route on us or Tyler Edwards. Money can buy you a lot, honey, but it can’t buy you protection from the likes of us.” Yeah, the Human lion and the vigilante hooker – she didn’t have a prayer.

He then hung up on her, closing the phone even as he heard her blustering. He’d called her on his trick phone, his Fox phone, one used by his clients only. It was impossible to trace; star 69 would get you nowhere, it didn’t show up on caller ID. He didn’t want anyone having his number who didn’t intend to use it for its specific purpose. No suspicious wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, or coworkers would ever track him down. He prided himself on being impossible.

He did wonder what was going on in the Jephson family. Was Vernon Jephson actually looking for his son to harm him? Is that why he split? Roan seemed to imply as much in his notes. It wouldn’t surprise Holden either, as families could fuck with people worse than any maniac stranger ever could. He knew that personally.

He changed into slightly more respectable clothes, deciding to pay a visit to Dylan at the hospital, see how Roan was doing, and let him know that whenever Roan woke up, he could tell him the Jephson case was closed. Well, for now. There was no telling if something would come back to haunt them, or if Roan would be inclined to peek under more rocks.

He’d seen in the paper that Lee’s body had finally been found. He recalled going back that night, cleaning up the blood. He didn’t need to get rid of the knife or the crossbow (or his wallet), because they were gone by the time he got back. Funny how that worked. Nobody called the police, no one reported the body, and he wasn’t at all surprised. The paper seemed to assume the body was that of a transient, and he wondered if they’d ever discover the truth. They might not bother to look.

Not that he read the paper anymore, besides the Stranger. It was just he visited a client this morning, and he got the paper in his hotel room. Holden read it while Henry was in the shower. It was really weird, because for a moment, he felt a genuine disconnect between who he was at that moment and who he was when they went after Lee. He could feel the schism inside him, the two different people that shared his skin. It wasn’t a proper split personality, just the roles he decided to play: hooker and vigilante. Which was the real one? Was either of them real? He honestly didn’t know. Roan had a reason to be split in two, but he didn’t. He really didn’t like to think about who he actually was, because the very nature of the question was solipsistic and boring, way too close to that narcissistic touchy-feely stuff they peddled on all varieties of daytime talk shows. He was just a person. A weird person, but a person, and to think more about it was to invite trouble.

He was shrugging on his jacket when there was a knock at the door. By now, it was becoming a familiar knock.

With a weary sigh, he opened the door on Scott, who immediately held up a green colored flyer. “Guillermo Del Toro film festival at the Grand,” he said, with no preamble. “Wanna go with me?”

Holden scowled at him, and took the flyer. It listed three films: Cronos, The Devil’s Backbone, and Pan’s Labyrinth. He recognized one of those names. “Spanish horror films? Really?”

“What? I’d go with Grey if he was here, but he’s not. So you wanna go?”

“I’m the back up plan?”

“C’mon, don’t be that way. I hate goin’ to movies alone. Come with me, it’ll be fun. You could probably use your cultural horizons expanded anyways.” He gave him a teasing little smile, but he wasn’t letting him off that easy.

“Oh, so the suburban jock is telling me I need my horizons expanded.”

“You’re sexy when you’re pissed off.”

Holden glared at him, and tried very hard not to laugh. Scott was just grinning at him like an idiot. “This is six hours plus of movies.”

“I know, it goes all night. There’s nachos and Red Bull on me.”

The joke there was too good to let go. “On you? Where on you exactly?”

That made Scott laugh. It was an open laugh, unselfconscious, and it reminded him why he liked him, beyond him being as sexy as all hell. “We’ll hafta figure that out on the way.” Scott’s clear blue eyes scanned him, looked him up and down, and noticed the clean corduroys, dark red shirt, and classy leather jacket. “You got a date?” He asked without jealously, just curiosity, which was another thing to like about Scott. Holden didn’t need possessive, didn’t need any hetero-normative bullshit impinging on his job, and Scott, who still kept his options open when it came to women, didn’t want him to infringe on his ability to date either. So they were even.

“I was just going to the hospital to see if Roan has woken up yet. Wanna come with me?”

All humor fled Scott’s expression. “He’s still not awake?”

Holden just shook his head. “Physically he seems to be okay, but … brain surgery, you know? Anything can happen.”

He nodded solemnly in return. “If you think they wouldn’t mind me stopping by, I’ll go.”

“Dylan probably needs all the moral support he can get.”

“From us, it’s immoral support, right?”

“What a horrible joke. Now I’m not sure I wanna be seen in public with you.”

He grinned at him again, all charm and teeth. “Bitch, bitch, bitch.”

“You better not be calling me a bitch, bitch,” Holden replied, pulling out his keys. Scott took that as his cue to step back, so he could come out and close the door behind him.

Now what did this mean? This pseudo-relationship he had going with Scott … he didn’t understand it, and he really didn’t want to understand it. It was a bit of fun that was starting to get out of hand, but the worst part of it was it didn’t feel that bad. It was kind of nice to have sex when he wanted to, not because he was paid to do it, and he was kind of surprised that he had any sex drive at all. He was pretty sure he’d completely sublimated his desires to suit his job. Should he be worried that he hadn’t, or should he take it to mean he was as human as anyone else?

He loved how the questions never stopped coming. Maybe one of these days, he’d get some answers he liked.

****

The End (for now)

P.S.: All these chapter titles were These Arms Are Snakes songs. See, I dedicated this story to them for a reason …

Yes, that’s Roan, as imagined by the cover artist. He’s kind of hot. Love the tight shirt (okay, that’s more Paris than him, but I won’t quibble.)

Also, I have a short story in Dreamspinner’s upcoming “Making Contact” science fiction anthology. I think that’s got an August release, but don’t quote me.

And, in recognition of all of this, I have another mix collection. Because why not?

The good thing about being at the university hospital was Rosenberg was the queen bee, so whatever she wanted, she got. This was good for Dylan, because as soon as she dubbed Roan stable enough, she had a cot put in his hospital room, so Dylan could stay with him if he wanted. Since he found himself up at night since Roan ended up in the hospital, unable to sleep and watching more cable television than was probably healthy, he’d ended up staying here ever since.

The cot wasn’t comfortable, and Roan’s machines bleeped loudly, but he slept better here than at home in the house that wasn’t even his home. Rosenberg encouraged him to bring stuff in, to make it more like home, and while she didn’t say it was for Roan, it was. Just like she didn’t say he was in a coma, but he was.

At first it was deliberate. After his surgery, they induced coma to reduce pressure on his brain and ease the healing process, according to her. Was it still an induced coma? He doubted it. But it was better perhaps. After all, they shaved Roan’s head for the brain surgery, and he was sure Roan would hate it. But the funny thing was he already had dark red fuzz growing in, making a shadow on his scalp, and even one of the nurses had commented that was weird. “I’ve never seen hair growing in so fast,” the nurse, whom he now knew as Leona, had commented when she came in to check Roan’s vitals. But Roan had a fairly impressive beard too, and the last time Dylan had seen him he’d been perfectly clean shaven. It was the partial change of course, the one that had almost killed him. Since he knew Roan would hate it, he spent the afternoon carefully shaving his face. He’d never shaved someone else’s face before, but he thought he’d done a pretty good job.

Dylan brought his iPod, the book that Roan had been reading (well, one of them – he usually had more than one going, and you could find them scattered all over the house, books with tiny scraps of paper sticking out of them, ad hoc bookmarks), a blanket from their real house, and he sometimes played Roan’s iPod for him, or read aloud from the book. It made him feel better, like he was doing something, like he wasn’t completely useless. While Rosenberg encouraged this, said it was good for Roan, he did get complaints about Roan’s iPod. But of course he would. Sometimes he wondered if Roan actually liked this music, or if he only listened to it to piss people off. Seriously, who had all the Mr. Bungle albums on their play list and genuinely meant it?

One morning, while he was folding up his blanket, Doctor Rosenberg came in and asked him to join her for a cup of coffee. She made it clear it wasn’t a suggestion but an order, so he went with her to the cafeteria. He got a tea while she got a coffee, and she also got a Danish. She offered him one, but he didn’t feel hungry right now. “Are you eating at all?” she asked, dumping a sugar packet into her coffee. “It’s been three days, I don’t think I’ve seen you eat once.”

“I have,” he said, and suddenly wasn’t sure. Surely he must have or he’d be starving by now. “I’m okay.”

“Work?”

“I quit.”

She gave him a mildly scolding look, like his Aunt would probably give him. “Is that wise?”

He shrugged, stirring his tea. He contemplated adding sugar to it, but there was probably no way of making it palatable. “Jamie told me I was welcome back at Panic at any time, so I figure I’ll start doing crunches again and I should be okay.”

“Crunches?” She made a negative noise. “Better you than me, kiddo.”

“So how have the tests come out? I assume some must be back by now.”

She nodded, but he sensed some hesitation. He was getting to know her pretty well now, even though she didn’t share much about herself. In some respects, she was a less dickish, elderly female House. Without the limp and the pill addiction (he was assuming that last bit – he’d seen no evidence of her pill popping). “The biopsy’s back. I can tell you he doesn’t have cancer.”

He let out a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding. “Oh god, what a relief.” He paused long enough to sip his tea, and find it almost too bad for words. “Should I read something into you not using the word benign?”

“Wow. Are you just that good, or have you been around Roan too long?”

“A bit of both, probably.”

She nodded grimly, gnawing on a chunk of Danish like it was a piece of radial tire. “The tumor isn’t cancerous. But I don’t know what it is. It’s full of viral DNA.”

Dylan ran that sentence over again in his mind, to see if it made any sense at all. Was it just him? “Um, what?”

“Yeah, that was my feeling. We didn’t find cancerous cells, but we found the virus, which we couldn’t make sense of. I’ve sent the results to Doctor Pang, this oncologist I know over at Fred Hutchinson, I’m hoping he can tell me what the fuck it means.”

“Is this good news or bad news?”

She shrugged in a way that seemed to suggest that she wished someone would take over for her. “Fuck if I know. Again, not cancer, so that’s a positive thing.”

Dylan looked down into his murky cup of tea, which he suddenly realized was the color of diseased urine, and he pushed it aside. “Since when do viruses create tumors?”

“Normally they don’t.”

“So you have no idea what this could mean?”

She sighed heavily. “Honestly no. You hafta understand that no one’s lived with the virus as long as Roan has. Setting aside his virus child start, no one’s lived with this thing for thirty plus years. The only understanding we have of its life cycle is in laboratory animals and computer models, and those are imperfect at best. This is new territory for everyone.”

He’d heard this before, and was certain Roan had heard it all his life. How awful it must be to be a test case, an anomaly, the only living Petri dish around. “What does this mean? Can you just guess?”

“I hesitate, ‘cause it’s just speculation. I mean, he could turn into a fucking unicorn for all I know.” She exhaled heavily, a kind of sigh, before telling him, “I think this is a secondary stage of the virus.” At his questioning look, she went on. “We don’t know its true life and death cycle. All we know is it kills the host body by eventually overwhelming it, altering it to the point that Human survival is impossible. We’ve never had a case where the body continues to adapt. The virus has a near perfect home in Roan, but what that will cause the virus to do we don’t know.”

“You’re implying intelligence here.”

“I know, and I don’t mean to. But this virus seems to thrive on adversity, which is why making any kind of vaccine for it has been a pipe dream at best. It’s not coming up against anything in Roan’s body that it can’t seem to handle, therefore the response will be unpredictable.”

“But the weak spot is his brain.”

She grimaced as if her coffee tasted as bad as his tea. “His body has proven to be resilient, almost as resilient as the virus, which may not be coincidence. But his brain just can’t have that kind of bounce back, although it’s trying. Still, can you imagine the toll it must take on him? Well, hell, I guess you can, you live with him. Poor bastard.”

How was he supposed to take that statement? He decided it was probably best just to let it go for now. “So you think the virus has made his body so resilient? I’m taking that’s what you implied.”

She nodded. “Part of the reason he’s survived so long is that the virus has almost fully incorporated into his DNA. He’s the perfect host because it has helped make him the perfect host. But there’s limits. He’s still human underneath it all, and there will always be a conflict. But what the result of that conflict will be I can’t say.”

“Except death.”

This time she didn’t really grimace, it was more of a twitch at the corner of her mouth as she looked away, at the entrance to the cafeteria. He didn’t blame her for looking, it sounded like two people were about to come to blows over who was to blame for the accident. (What accident he couldn’t say – they could have had the decency to start their argument here.) “Eventually.” She looked back at him, her hazel eyes locking on to his like she was trying to will him to believe what she was saying. “But not now. You know Roan, he’s not going without a fight, and last time I checked, he hadn’t ripped out his IV’s yet.”

He couldn’t argue with any of this, and yet a certain sense of despair was slowly overwhelming him, creeping through his body and diffusing like ink in water. He was so tired, and it wasn’t just physical. “So why hasn’t he woken up?”

She made a negative noise, a kind of clicking with her tongue. “’Cause the bastard doesn’t want to.”

Yes, that was the truth he’d been dreading all this time.

****

Holden couldn’t remember the last time he was in a train station. There wasn’t much call for it, as he was usually dispatched to the skuzzy well of everyday humanity that was the Greyhound bus station. But Oliver wanted to do something different. Maybe he thought it would help him escape.

But he found the kid, trying to hide his identity with a dark blue stocking cap pulled over his head and translucent gray sunglasses over his eyes, but he actually looked like he was trying to conceal his identity. The thing about going incognito was you weren’t supposed to look like you were incognito, or you fucked the whole thing up. Well, Oliver may have been a good actor, but clearly he needed a costumer.

Holden flung himself into the plastic chair beside him, and looked over at him with a professional, hard smile. “Hey there, where you headed today?”

Oliver looked nervous behind his tinted glasses, but he didn’t recognize him, mainly because he’d never seen him before. “Umm, Eugene.”

“Oregon? Awesome. Got cold feet, huh?”

Did he finally get it? A fleeting sort of nervousness appeared in his eyes. “What?”

“I’m Holden Krause, I’m an assistant investigator with MK Investigations.” Oliver started to get up, but Holden put a firm hand on his arm to let him know he wasn’t going anywhere. “Don’t. I could have you arrested if you I really wanted to, so let’s not make a scene, okay?”

“Arrested?” he replied, his voice pitched to a whispering hiss. “No you can’t. I haven’t done anything wrong.”

“I could nail you for identity theft and fraud, and I can make it stick. And that’s if I’m being nice. Do you want to know what I can do if I’m feeling mean?” He met his eyes, giving him the deathly cold stare he had perfected on the street. Life in the lower strata of society was very Darwinian – the weak were beaten down, consumed, destroyed. To show weakness was to invite exploitation and death. To be an alpha male, a predator, one who destroyed rather than got destroyed, you had to appear as psychopathic as all the other beasts. Holden could do that so easily, it was frightening.

It worked. Oliver seemed to shrink back in his chair, as if trying to disappear into the plastic. “L-look, you’ve got the wrong idea -”

“Roan, in his notes, seemed to think you were lying about something, but he couldn’t figure out what. You got lucky, ‘cause he’s sick and not one hundred percent, but you fucked up by having an argument at the Marriott. See, I have friends in hotels all around Seattle, and someone overheard you. Shall I repeat the key points, or do you want to knock off the bullshit?”

He sighed, deflated, looking away as he muttered, “I didn’t wanna do this, okay? I just needed the money.”

While Holden did indeed have friends at most hotels, including the Marriott, no one had overheard anything of substance. This was a bluff, but he was confident he could sell it, and indeed he had. After all, what they had heard, combined with Roan‘s suspicions, had led Holden to believe Oliver wasn‘t Oliver. But who he was and why was up for grabs. “So why the beating? Did you go off script?”

He tried to sink down in his chair, but he could only go so far because Holden refused to let go of his arm. “I figured the guy didn’t trust me. I thought the gig was up and I oughta get outta here before he lioned out on me or something. That’s what it’s called, right, what he does? Lioning out?”

He decided not to answer that, because it wasn’t any of his business and didn’t matter anyways. “Abby got wind of it? How?”

Oliver – or whoever he was – shrugged. “I’m not sure. I think she had one of those guys watching me.”

“Who were they?”

He shook his head. “Relatives of hers. Nephews, cousins, something like that. You’d think she could have sent one of those overgrown assholes to pretend to be Oliver if they were already here.”

“But they don’t look like him, not like you do.”

“I had to dye my hair, get it cut … I used to have a goatee.”

“Where is Oliver Jephson?”

“Cancun.”

Holden nodded. He’d already asked around on campus at the U-W, and discovered that Jephson was indeed supposedly in Cancun with a couple other people. But he wanted to see how honest this guy was going to be with him. “And who are you precisely?”

With a disgruntled sigh, he said. “Tyler Edwards.”

“Okay, Tyler, why did Abby hire you to pretend to be her nephew? Why does she want to find Adam so badly?”

What Tyler told him was what he pretty much expected: Abby found the photo online, not Oliver, and wanted to discover if this was indeed Adam, but she wasn’t about to upset Oliver, especially if it wasn’t actually Adam. So she hired him to pretend to be Oliver for the purposes of hiring a Seattle area detective to find out for sure, and Tyler felt a kind of personal connection to this, because his own father left when he was five, and even though he could have had a relationship with him, he chose not to. He remarried, had another family, and forgot all about him.

While Holden was tempted to play the world’s tiniest violin for him, he figured it was best to stay on topic. “And this didn’t strike you as at all fishy?”

He looked at him like he was crazy. “She wants to find her brother, and doesn’t want to hurt her nephew. How is that weird?”

“Oh, I don’t know … maybe the fact that she had some family members beat the shit out of you when you tried to back out?”

He squirmed in his hard plastic chair, looking around uncomfortably. There was a surprisingly long line at the check in counter, and the windows looking out at the surprisingly scruffy train tracks let in a good amount of light. Too bad there was nothing to see but dingy tile floors, and a TV set high on the wall playing CNN, for no obvious reason. Holden gave himself a moment to wonder why anyone gave a shit about news channels, and figured it was one of those straight white people things he’d never understand, like Family Guy and leaf blowers.

“Okay, that I didn’t get,” Tyler muttered.

“And that’s why you’re leaving? You don’t want to be treated to another beat down?”

“No. It’s just …” he rubbed his mouth, sat back up so he didn’t fall out of his chair and slide onto the floor, and shook his head. He was a cavalcade of tics, all raw nerves and fear. “What d’ya want me to say? Okay, yeah, I know somethin’ ain’t right here, okay? I’m goin’ home.”

“Where she knows where to find you.”

That made him pause, chewing his lower lip as he thought about it. “Oh. Shit. But she’s not gonna do anything to me. I mean … that’s just silly.”

“As silly as getting guys to beat you up?” That made him do a slight double take. That hadn’t occurred to him? “Why don’t you crash at a friends’ place for a couple of days? This should blow over by then.”

“What should?”

Holden was forced to shrug. “Whatever the hell this is.” Roan, in his notes, had named Adam’s father as suspicious, and said he didn’t like the hostile vibe he was getting from Abby. Now it made sense: she was looking for Adam, probably on behest of her (their) father. They couldn’t be looking for him for anything good. How would Roan handle this? Better yet, how would he handle this?

He supposed he was about to find out.

****

Dylan had taken to sketching in the hospital room, mainly because he didn’t feel like watching TV, and reading was something he did for Roan, not himself. Oddly enough, he felt he had stumbled upon something.

He was simply doing pencil sketches, but picking odd subjects: the IV bag and stand, with an off center window (covered with a retractable metal grate – this was a room for an infected after all). A stack of books on the floor. The end of the hospital bed. He suddenly realized there was a stark beauty here, a sort of visual loneliness that still had a kind of appeal. Maybe it was just him, but the fact that they were perhaps the most depressing still lifes he’d ever seen made them likable to him. Perhaps this was why he was never going to make a living as an artist. Still, he liked them, they made him feel better, and he got so absorbed in doing it that time passed quickly. He figured Dee would come check in on him again, see his sketchpad, and have him removed by force, but maybe that was for the best.

He was so absorbed in shading the curtains just so that at first, when he heard the noise, he thought it was a car in the parking lot. Except you couldn’t really hear the cars this high up, not well at any rate, and the sound was very close. It was then his mind finally made the connection: not a rumbling car engine, but a low level growl.

He looked up, startled, to see Roan looking at him. Except it wasn’t Roan.

He hadn’t changed, he was still Human … save for his eyes, which seemed wrong. There was something flat and animalistic about them, devoid of emotion and intelligence. He was growling low, a warning more than anything, but it still made his skin crawl. “Roan?” he asked.

There was no response, but there wouldn’t be. He got up slowly, and walked just as slowly to the door, despite his urge to run. Roan had once told him that big cats wanted you to run, so the best strategy was to leave slowly, never turning your back. It seemed logical, but in the heat of the moment, it was hard to ignore the screaming in your own head.

Roan didn’t move a muscle, but his eyes tracked him as he moved, with an unseemly hunger in them. At the door, Dylan asked one more time, “Roan?” But there was nothing, no familiarity, no response, just the constant growling.

Dylan shut the door, which closed with the same pneumatic thunk that all reinforced doors seemed to make. He leaned his forehead against it and sighed, not too concerned about what anyone in the hallway was saying to him.

So the lion woke up, but Roan hadn’t yet. What did that mean? Somehow he thought it couldn’t be anything good.