It’s noisy, yes, but also surprisingly funny. This probably represents Roan’s sense of humor better than any other mix.

Considering the day he was having, the phone call from Holden wasn’t really surprising.

Dylan had already intercepted a phone call from Seb, who said Roan wasn’t answering his cell, and he figured Roan was pissed off at him. He didn’t say what had gone on, but he asked him to pass on a message, that the Chief wanted to see him as soon as humanly possible. As soon as Dylan hung up, he asked the air, “What did you do now, Ro?” He might as well ask the air, as he was just as likely to get an answer.

He’d come home – well, their temporary home – to change and catch a quick shower before reporting early for work. Alex had a sick kid and couldn’t work her shift, so he agreed to cover it. It was to be nice to her; he really wasn’t crazy about Silver or its clientele, but he knew why he was there.

He couldn’t deny that, every now and then, he resented being the partner of such a lightning rod figure, but he resented the people who hated Roan even more. Yes, he was controversial, outspoken, and sometimes he went out of his way to offend and challenge people, but his heart was in a good place. He wasn’t trying to harm anyone; he only wanted to help, or, at his worst, hit back for someone unable or unwilling to do so. Although sometimes he worried that he was becoming a vigilante, especially when teamed up with the morally dubious Holden. Still, that was Roan’s decision to make, if he wanted to go that path, and he had no right to judge him on that. Although he was kind of dying to.

But he couldn’t help but worry more about him than get mad at him, as much as he may have deserved it. Roan just didn’t look well, and he’d been hitting the painkillers pretty hard. He was fairly sure he was taking them because he was in actual pain, not because he was an addict who needed to keep his levels up to keep from getting the shakes. He hated the idea that he was in that much pain constantly, and he hated it even more that he wouldn’t tell him about it. But Roan was one of those macho types, and he seemed to need to get to the breaking point before admitting anything like that. Dylan felt lucky. He had his art, his yoga, his family, his slightly bizarre friends. Roan had his pills, his punching bag, and his extremely bizarre friends, which didn’t seem like a equitable distribution of helpful resources.

He was on his way out the door when he got Holden’s call. Holden told him Roan had come from a pretty bad crime scene with a migraine attack, and had taken some pills and zonked out on his couch. “Gonna let him sleep it off here,” Holden said. “He’s in no shape to drive.”

Dylan almost said, ‘You could drive him home,’ but didn’t. This was probably innocent, and he knew very well Roan’s migraine attacks could be violent, ugly things. But Holden could have brought him home, he just didn’t want to.

Still, nothing was going to happen, not while Roan had a migraine. If Holden wanted to be near him, fine, Dylan knew it wasn’t a contest. (And if it was, he’d won. So, too bad for Holden.) He told him to have Roan call him when he woke up, because he wasn’t going to pass on Seb’s message second hand. Also, he wanted to know exactly what Ro did to get him in shit with the Chief.

Since it wasn’t quite the evening shift, when things swung into high gear, Silver was kind of slow, leaving him lots of time to think. Hadn’t Doctor Rosenberg left a lot of messages? And saying nothing, which was fairly unusual for her. She basically just asked for Roan to call her, and when he picked up the phone, she said the same thing to him. ‘Have that bastard call me’. This wasn’t good. Something was wrong with him, wasn’t it? And Roan wasn’t telling him, probably because he was a macho asshole. Fuck! You know, getting involved with an infected, you should expect health problems above all, but somehow, being with Roan, he’d learn to expect death threats above everything else.

There was a middle aged man, doughy in that typical way (probably thirty pounds overweight), in a fairly cheap looking gray suit and navy tie sitting at the end of the bar, who’d been there since he’d started his shift. At first he’d shot him surreptitious glances, but now he was openly glaring at him from beneath dark eyebrows salted with dandruff, his thin lips curling faintly into a sneer. Angry drunk? Dylan was sure the next time he ordered a drink, he’d cut him off. Angry drunks were worse than sloppy drunks, but frankly all drunks were pretty bad.

When the guy waved him over, he went down to him to quietly and politely tell him there were no more drinks for him here, hoping to avoid a scene. But the man’s pudgy hand whipped out, snake fast, and grabbed his wrist, revealing he wasn’t drunk at all, just seething. “I know you,” he grated, in a voice like his lungs were full of gravel. “You were with that freak, that infected asshole who wants to infect everyone.”

His sausage fingers were digging into his wrist with surprising strength, enough that Dylan couldn’t pull his hand away. He instantly thought about reaching under the bar with his free hand and pulling out the ice pick. “Let go of my arm.”

“Fuck you, you infected piece of shit.” the man snarled, keeping his voice low but full of a surprising amount of hate. “You spittin’ in our drinks, huh? Trying to infect us?”

The worst part was this guy actually believed the shit he was spewing. Dylan could see it, and wasn’t even sure how you responded to this kind of insanity. And he should be an expert, considering his brother.

The man was grabbed by the back of his neck, but instead of it being Julio, the huge busboy who often passed for security, it was a really unexpected figure: Tank. He sat on the stool next to the man, and got uncomfortably close to his ear. “You feel that? You don’t want me to sever your spinal cord and leave you a vegetable, do you?”

The man was now sitting stiffly, his brown eyes bulging out of his head. Tank had something in his hand that he was pressing up against the nape of his neck, but Dylan couldn’t see anything. “N-no.”

“Okay then. Let him go.” The man did, and Dylan yanked his arm away. “Good boy. Now you’re gonna take out your wallet, leave a tip, and get the fuck outta here before my buddies show up and help me rip you to pieces, you pig fucking piece of shit.”

Part of the intimidation had to be Tank’s inappropriate closeness. He was almost sitting in this guy’s lap, and that violation of personal space had to be unnerving. Not for Tank, of course, who had one of his stony game faces on, one that suggested he was more insane than that man could ever hope to be.

He dropped some money on the bar with a shaking hand, and that’s when Tank violently shoved him off his bar stool. He stumbled, tried to keep his balance, but hadn’t been expecting it and fell on his ass.

By this time, Julio had come over, and grabbed the man as he stood up. “Problem?” He asked.

He was asking Dylan, but the man answered, indignant and still scared. “This son of a bitch has a knife! He threatened to kill me!”

Tank held his hands open, showing they were empty, as his expression was his usual deceptively mellow one, no trace of his game face at all, his eyes no longer burning with some insane internal light. “No. English not so good, but he ‘s, uh … grabby.” Tank’s natural French-Canadian accent had suddenly trebled in thickness. Oh, the crafty bastard.

“He threatened me, put his hands on me,” Dylan said, holding up his still reddened wrist.

“He, uh, grabbed my, uh, what you say in English, balls? I’m flattered, but no gay.”

“What?!” The man screeched, literally screeched, like an adolescent whose voice had yet to break. “I didn’t do that! I’m not a fag! He – he threatened me! He’s not even French! He’s making this up!”

“Tell Robin he’s barred,” Dylan said to Julio. “And if he comes back, call the police.”

Julio nodded and started muscling the man towards the door, the few restaurant patrons around staring after him as he continued fruitlessly protesting. Julio’s English was kind of limited, so it was almost all wasted on him anyways.

Tank grinned at him, looking like a goofy but attractive busker, with shaggy hair and a t-shirt that Dylan now realized read “Supervillain Intramural” (another t-shirt his teammates probably bought him, no doubt). “Amazing what you think is a knife if someone implies it is,” he said, his voice back to its lightly accented state. He fiddled with a ring on his right hand, and Dylan realized that’s what he had pressed up against his neck.

He shook his head wonderingly. “You’re just evil. I see why Roan likes you.”

This made him grin wider, even more endearing than before. Still, he had an almost unnerving intensity in his eyes that never quite left, and combined with his neatly trimmed pale brown goatee, it made him look slightly devilish. Who had Roan said he kind of looked like? Oh yeah, that guy who used to sing for Alice In Chains. Dylan was taking his word for it, because he kind of missed the whole grunge thing, even though he was a Seattle boy. It’s just while he was in college, the singer-songwriter stuff was more popular. (He could totally see Roan’s point about that form of music being “bloodless”, but he couldn’t see embracing some of that honestly noisy stuff that Ro seemed to love.) “Hey, he clearly wanted to start some shit. Is it my fault he wasn’t all that serious? I mean, what’s the sports cliché, go hard or go home? If he went hard, maybe he wouldn’t be going home.” He paused briefly. “Who am I kidding? Of course he’d be going home. I wasn’t gonna let some bigoted fat piece of shit get over on me. If he started gettin’ stroppy, I’d have rabbit punched him in the kidneys, thrown him down on the floor, and kicked in his solar plexuses. Hard to make charges when you can’t breathe or stand.”

Dylan continued to shake his head, mainly because he didn’t know of a more appropriate response. Violence was base and wrong. And yet there were some nice unexpected benefits to having your husband be friends with a hockey team. “Well, thank you for the help.”

“What was up that guy’s ass?”

He shrugged. “Just a hater. Saw me with Roan, figured I was an agent for infecteds, out to infect all the fat white rich people in here.”

“Horrors,” Tank said, still grinning, his eyes glittering like diamonds. He lowered his voice to a ghost of a whisper, leaning over the bar conspiratorially. “It’d serve the bourgeoisie bastards right.”

Dylan couldn’t help but smile and chuckle faintly. It was obvious why he and Roan liked each other. Yes, there was a little man crush there, but Roan and Tank seemed to have a certain attitude in common. They were also both a bit smarter than you’d probably give them credit for, and too unpredictable for safety. “What can I get you Tank?”

“Oh, I’m not here to drink. I knew you worked here now ‘cause Fi told me, and since I can’t get a hold of Roan, I thought I’d let you know that you and Roan are working personal security for me tomorrow.”

“Pardon?”

He leaned his elbows on the bar, slumping down and looking comfortable. “It’s my last game with the Falcons; I’m signing an insane contract with the Bruins the day after tomorrow. I convinced the arena staff I needed extra security and were bringing in my own people. That’s you and Roan.”

He stared at him in open disbelief. “You convinced someone you need a bodyguard?”

He continued grinning at him in a way that was equally charming and chilling. “I’m a goalie. We don’t fight.”

“Really?” Dylan busied himself pouring Tank a glass of ice water. He needed to look like a customer, or he might get shit about it. “It’s funny, but the last time we were at a Falcons game, I could have sworn the opening video bit they played of the team included you punching a guy so hard his helmet flew off. Or was that another goalie with your number?”

He chuckled with genuine amusement. “That was justified. Fucking asshead pushed Zack into the boards, and if he hadn’t gotten his shoulder up he’d have gone in head first. That’s fucking dangerous, he coulda hurt him bad, and on top of that, Zack’s small. I mean, he weighs what, as much as Grey’s leg? And this fucker, Perry, he was almost Grey sized. And it wasn’t the first asshat thing he’d done that night either. So I just snapped, called him a motherfucker, and when he turned to give me shit back, I’d already shucked off my catching glove and took him down with a right. “ His grin ramped up a notch. “That got on ESPN. So did my subsequent decking of their second enforcer with my blocker, but by then Scott had grabbed me and pulled me away from the dog pile, and Grey and Richie put themselves in front of me to fend off the angry Tigers. “

Dylan almost asked, but then figured Tigers was the team name. “Roan needs a bodyguard as much as you do.”

“I know. But since it’s my last game with the team – well, if I don’t get busted back to the minors at some point – I thought it might be fun to have you guys right there, behind the bench. Ethan’s all for it, he can’t wait to have Roan nearby, he thinks his good luck will rub off on him.”

“Ethan?”

“Back up goalie, now becoming primary goalie. I told him Roan’s been my good luck charm.”

Dylan almost laughed. He’d been wondering if Roan was a bad luck charm, and here came an alternate view. “Why?”

Tank looked at him as if he couldn’t believe he’d have to ask. “My career’s taken off since I met him. I mean, I’m playing the best I’ve ever played, and now I’m off to the NHL. How is he not a good luck charm?”

“But that was a coincidence. You’re playing so well because you train like bastard, and you’ve been working for this most of your life. Roan was happenstance, coincidental at best.”

He nodded. “Doesn’t change anything. He’s been good luck for me.” He gulped down his ice water, and when he put it down, he asked, “Do you have a specialty?”

It caught him off guard, mainly because he was still pondering Tank’s superstitious but weirdly sweet belief that Roan was a good omen. Wasn‘t he, in an odd way? Yes, things had been kind of rough, but there were undeniable good times. And Roan, as much as he frustrated him, could make him happy in a way that no man had since Jason. Maybe even more than Jason ever had. “Huh?”

“Specialty drink, something you like to make.”

Wow, he hadn’t been asked that since … had he ever been asked? He wasn’t sure, but he said the first thing that popped into his head. “I dunno, a Surf Sider?”

“What’s that?”

“Blue Curacao, Southern Comfort, pineapple juice, lime.”

“Ah. Sounds like a fruity drink that’ll knock you on your ass.”

“That’s exactly what it is.”

“Set me up. Oh, what time do you get off work?”

“Tonight? Midnight. Why?”

“Insurance,” he said cryptically, pulling out his cell.

There was another customer, so Dylan had to get him his glass of wine before he made the Surf Sider and brought it back to Tank, who was now folding his phone and shoving it in his pocket. “So who’s the insurance?” he wondered, putting the blue drink in front of him.

“Grey. I’m worried fat ass is gonna hang around and try for ya after work. So if he does, instead of meeting me, he’s gonna meet Grey.” He picked up his drink with a smile. “If he thought I was bad, he hasn’t met him.”

“Ah yes, the guy who threw the punch heard ‘round the hospital.”

“I’m sorry I missed that. Usually you start a riot with a punch, not stop one by throwing a hit.”

“Well, this one was pretty stunning. I don’t think anyone knew you could actually rearrange someone’s face with one punch. You just assumed it was a figure of speech.”

“Grey’s got fists the size of ham hocks and punches like a jackhammer. He can rearrange, renovate, dislodge, puree, pulp, and blend. That’s why he’s an enforcer. To make sure guys who go after little guys or me don’t do it twice. So I doubt Mr. Fat Ass is gonna bug you twice.” He sipped the blue drink, raised his eyebrows, and then gulped it, putting down the now empty tulip glass with gusto. “Wow, that tastes good enough to get shitfaced on. Can I have another?”

“Don’t you have a game tomorrow?”

“Yep, but I’ll stop at two, or you can call me a cheese eating surrender monkey.”

Dylan grinned, unable to help himself. “You know, I’m going to miss you.”

“I ain’t going anywhere. I mean, sure, I’ll have to relocate to Boston, but I’ll be emailing, phoning, and when it’s the off season, I’ll be back. I love Seattle. It’s like Vancouver, but American.” He then gave him a cheesy but genuine grin, showing that, in spite of stereotypes, he had a full set of teeth.

Yes, there were some odd positive notes to being friends with crazy hockey players. But the thing he really never expected was one of them cheering him up when he was feeling down. Maybe he should encourage Roan to hang around with them more often.

****

Roan was initially disoriented when he woke up on Holden’s couch, although the smell of the place was familiar enough that awareness clicked into place, and helped his memory kick in.

The apartment was low lit, though, and he had no sense anyone was around. He found Holden had left a Post-It note on the bathroom mirror. It read: ‘Gone to store. Keys on counter. Don’t kill yourself.’ It was almost a poem, and if they could work around the syllables, it was a haiku waiting to happen.

He felt infinitely better, mainly because his head didn’t feel like it was splitting open anymore. It was always humbling to be taken down so easily by a migraine, but that opened up a new possibility, now considered – it wasn’t just a migraine. Maybe he had a time bomb in his head, not an aneurysm this time, but a tumor.

He stared at himself in the bathroom mirror, wondering if he could see it on his face, death written in the fine lines of his eyes, in the tense set of his jaw. But no, he looked no different than before, except he had two days’ growth of stubble from his partial change earlier in the evening.

Evening. Holy shit, how late was it? He checked his watch, and realized if he floored it, he just might beat Dylan home. He’d already decided he couldn’t keep this from him any longer, and since there was no good time to tell him, he was just going to have to come out with it. Besides, he’d already told Holden, and that wasn’t fair.

As it turned out, he didn’t beat Dylan home, but arrived soon after he had. He was still making himself tea, his post-work de-stressing ritual, and full of messages for him. Seb called to let him know Matthews wanted to see him ASAP (what a shock); Doctor Rosenberg wanted to see him, but wouldn’t leave a message. That concerned him a lot, and he asked if something was wrong. He couldn’t say there wasn’t a good reason to tell the truth.

So he did. He told him about the tumors, about how most were small and of no consequence, but Rosenberg still wanted a biopsy, and wanted to get a couple removed from him. Also, he’d had a brain scan, and she thought maybe his uncontrollable shifts could be blamed on a tumor. Then Roan admitted something he hadn’t said to Holden: the idea of this scared him shitless. He didn’t want to die like this.

Dylan held him and reassured him he wouldn’t, told him everything would be okay, even though Roan knew he didn’t quite believe that himself. He was hoping, he was trying to will it to be true, and Roan actually found some reassurance in that. Dylan said all the right things, and eventually they started kissing desperately, both realizing they wanted the comfort of each other at the same time. Sex made you feel alive, it made you feel like you weren’t going to die, even though it was inevitable. It was a little death that made you feel, if only for a moment, that you could subvert the big one.

Afterwards, Dylan slept while Roan found himself staring out the window at the unfamiliar landscape of a stranger’s backyard, wishing he was home. But he could still smell Dylan on him, and knew exactly why he wasn’t home. Not everybody wanted to fight him; most wanted easier targets. He couldn’t let that happen.

He was planning out his day tomorrow, where he was going to start his search, when the phone rang. He almost didn’t answer it – at nearly three in the morning, there was no way it could be good news – but that’s precisely why he answered it. Might as well man up, face it head on.

He really hadn’t expected anything, but still the fact that it was Luke on the phone – Dee’s nurse boyfriend (or ex-boyfriend? He wasn’t clear on their relationship status) – was still a surprise. “Hey Roan, didn’t wake you up, did I?”

“No, you got lucky. What can I do for you?”

“You know a guy named Oliver Jephson?”

“Yes, he’s a client. Why?”

“He’s in the ER, someone beat the ever living shit outta him. We found your card in his possession, and it was the closest thing to a next of kin we found. Got some contact info for him?”

“Nothing in state,” he admitted, trying to remember. “How is he?”

“He’ll live, assuming there’s no complications. He’s unconscious, though, and he’s at least got a concussion.”

“Do you know what happened?”

“No, no idea. It looks like someone wanted to make it look like a mugging, and maybe it was, but … it’s too vicious. Either he encountered a psycho mugger, or this was personal.”

Yes, that was what he was afraid of. Nothing was ever as it seemed, and why should he expect anything different from this? Even a sad sack kid who seemed perfectly harmless.

But what if he wasn’t?

Roan knew that the cops would do this differently for murdered cats than murdered people, he knew it.

But he had really underestimated both the bullshit and the contempt.

It started with sniggering references to a cat house, and how many ways you can skin a dead cat, and while Seb didn’t take part and tried to shut everyone up, most ignored him. Roan knew it was macho cop shit as well as graveyard humor, the kind that eased the horror of ugly situations, but it was just too gleeful. He snapped when one obnoxious little rookie shit made a comment about what cat tasted like, and maybe the Greek restaurant down the street was responsible. People had said worse things, but he had had enough.

He grabbed the rookie by the throat and slammed him up against the nearest wall. He held him with one hand, felt his pulse beating in his neck, and knew with a single squeeze he could crush every single fine bone in his neck to powder. It wouldn’t even take much, just a millimeter more pressure; his arm was actually shaking from the restraint that he was using to hold back all the strength that wanted to pour into his hand. “These are people,” Roan growled. And it was a growl; there were actual words in there, but they surfaced and sank like a drowning person. “You fucking sadistic moron, these are Humans beings. Are you that much of a cannibal? You Hannibal Lecter’s boy, huh?”

Seb was right there, and looked like he was about to touch him, maybe grab his arm, but instantly thought better of it. Instead, he said, firmly but not angrily, “Roan, let him go. He’s mine to deal with.”

The rookie had almost reflexively put an arm on Roan’s shoulder, as if to push him away, but just as his confusion turned to rage, his hand slipped away as his rage turned to fear. Roan had no idea what the brush cut little boy saw in his face, but it scared the shit out of him. Almost literally. The growling probably wasn’t helping. While the fear was intoxicating, he knew it was time to step back.

With almost painful reluctance, he let go of the rookie, who sank down to the floor. Only then did he realize he had lifted him up off the floor. Once again, he was surprised at his own strength, and remembered Rosenberg told him that maybe it wasn’t his fault. He certainly hoped it wasn’t.

“Let’s take a walk,” Seb said. It wasn’t a suggestion and they both knew it.

As they both left the noisome hallway of the tenement, he noticed the cops were now shooting him looks of wariness, or looks that could have qualified as first degree felonies. But at least they’d all shut their ugly fucking mouths.

They had to make their way carefully down the broken staircase, but didn’t talk until they were outside. Seb turned on him, and exclaimed, “What the hell, dude? I know they were being assholes, but that doesn’t give you the right to Hulk out.”

“If I Hulked out, they’d be dead,” he snapped. “And they weren’t being assholes; they were a hell of a lot worse than that. Those were bodies in there, and they were making fun of the whole situation, like this was a fucking disturbance at a strip joint.”

Seb gave him his firm but otherwise emotion free Spock look. “Could you please stop growling? It’s distracting.”

He hadn’t realized he was growling – yes, again – and it was a true effort to stop. “They’re treating them like a joke, Seb, like they aren’t people at all.”

“I know, and I’m reporting each one who made a crack. This is not your fight, Roan.”

“Isn’t it? They’re my people.”

That made him raise an eyebrow at him. “You’ve adopted them all? I thought you weren’t -”

“This isn’t the place for semantics. You better go back inside and make sure those fuckholes aren’t wearing the victims as hats.” He then turned and stalked away, before he could take out his rage on Seb, who was possibly the only non-asshole at the scene.

At least the cougar was okay. He drugged her before forensics was able to pick its way up the staircase, and the cat squad took her away, complaining that they never saw any action anymore. Roan wished he could say the same thing.

Once he was back in his car, he felt like punching something, but the last time he did he almost broke his steering wheel, and he couldn’t imagine how much that would cost to replace.

The cops weren’t going to treat this like a murder case, he knew it. It was legal to kill loose cats, wasn’t it? They weren’t going to try very hard to find the killer, or even find out who the victims were. Yes, Seb was a good guy, and Chief Matthews seemed to want his services as the resident cat expert, but he was losing what little faith he had left in humanity.

That actually gave him an idea. He needed the help of another person who had zero faith in humanity.

Holden answered on the second ring. “Well, aren’t I mister popularity today? And what can I do for you, Roan?”

Did he even want to know what that popularity crack meant? “You home? I need to talk to you.”

“Great, yeah, come over, I’ll make you a sandwich.”

Was that sarcasm? Somehow he didn’t think so. “Make me a sandwich?”

“You just changed, didn’t you?”

He wasn’t still growling, was he? If he wasn’t, he could neither hear it or feel it. “How do you know?”

“Your voice. Sounds like you’ve been scraping your throat with a metal rasp.”

“That’s a very specific descriptive.”

“I know. I save this shit for you. I know you’re the only one who’d appreciate it. Chicken or tuna?”

He checked over his shoulder to see if he could tell where the conversational shift went. “Huh?”

“Your sandwich. Which would you prefer?”

“You’re serious about that?” Truth be told, he was hungry, but he usually was after a shift. “Tuna, I guess.”

“Good choice. The chicken’s kinda iffy. And don’t hit the pills, I got something for that too. See you in a few.” With that, Holden hung up.

Roan looked at the cell for a moment, his anger draining away to simple confusion. What the hell was all that about? Then again, it was Holden – he would never understand the man, nor was he going to waste his time trying. He just lived to confound, vex, and thwart, all words he probably would have liked. And that was precisely the reason he called him.

His head started throbbing on the drive over, a seeming after-effect of the sharp pains pulsing in his jaw, bad enough that he wanted to reach up and rip off his lower jaw. (Could he? He had a feeling he could if he really wanted to, so he wasn’t going to push it.) The sun coming out didn’t help, as the light stabbed into his eyes like glass shards. Was he getting a migraine? His reaction to light seemed to indicate that.

By the time he reached Holden’s apartment, he ignored what he’d told him on the phone and went ahead and gulped a Percocet before getting out of the car. He was going to need it.

He was about to knock when the door opened, and Holden said, “Wow, you look like shit. Maybe you should take some pills.”

“Say it louder, I’m pretty sure your upstairs neighbor didn’t hear you,” he replied sourly.

Once they were inside, and Holden had shut the door behind them, he said, “Please, he’s a drug dealer. All he’ll wanna do is sell you some E.” Holden was shirtless, wearing nothing but sweatpants and the dog tags he got from that soldier client, now long dead. His apartment smelled like popcorn and tuna, and the scent of food made his stomach roil. It must have showed on his face, because Holden looked alarmed. “Fuck, you gonna hurl?”

He wasn’t sure, and he took a moment to just stand still and concentrate on swallowing down his gorge. “I dunno. I think I’m having a migraine attack.”

“Fuck. Okay, c’mon, let’s get you settled, I have an ice pack.” Holden helped him needlessly to the sofa, and then picked up a saucer and put it on Roan’s leg. “Have that, it should make you feel better in a few minutes.”

It was a brown lump, which would have been really unappealing, except it smelled like chocolate. A brownie chunk, only … there was something else there too, too strong to ignore. “Are you seriously feeding me a pot brownie?”

“These are better than your average po-bo,” he claimed, retrieving an ice pack from his fridge. “I know Mavis, this charming British lady who works for the Angel Project, you know, that charity that delivers food to seriously ill people? Real sweetie; wish she was my grandmother. Anyways, she makes these special painkiller brownies for some of her people, and by making a generous donation I got some. I keep it on hand for really bad days.”

“Pot brownies are horrible.” He’d had a bite of one once, and almost immediately spit it out. It was dry, with an almost straw like texture, and tasted like chocolate laced shit. He had no idea how anyone ever ate them.

“These are different. Mavis has a way with Hershey’s syrup. Try it, you’ll see.”

He sniffed it warily. “You turnin’ into a pothead on me?”

This made Holden snort derisively. “I oughta. I just have painkillers around in case I ever need ‘em. A lingering remnant of my street corner days, I suppose. You always had to be ready for somebody to try and beat the shit out of you. And trust me, those brownies are a great pain killer.”

Well, he was feeling like shit, so he went ahead and took a nibble. He was right – it really wasn’t bad. It tasted like an actual brownie, just with a thicker texture and a slight aftertaste. It didn’t make him feel like vomiting, which was a minor triumph. “Hmm.”

“See, what did I tell you?” He came back from the kitchen, with a plate containing a sandwich, a blue ice pack, and a bottle of peppermint honey green tea clamped firmly under his arm. As Roan continued to eat the brownie, Holden put the plate, tea, and ice bag on the coffee table in front of him. “Mint’s good for your stomach, so drink up.”

He eyed him warily. “You have mother hen aspects about you, you know.”

“Father hen,” he corrected, flinging himself down on the other end of the couch, and picking up his half empty bag of microwave popcorn. His television was on, the sound down to levels that Roan could hear, but he was pretty sure Holden couldn’t. “It’s a hard habit to break.”

That was what Holden meant when he referred to “his boys” – when he was just your average street whore, he still looked after a bunch of younger, smaller, or greener street kids (they weren’t all hookers, but most). Street kids often glommed together simply due to safety in numbers, but there was always a leader, someone who looked after the others, be they tougher, smarter, or more experienced than the rest. Holden fit all aspects of the bill, and seemed to have taken his job quite seriously. Even now, he was trying to protect kids he didn’t even know.

“You watch The Soup?”

Holden glanced at the set, as if double checking, as he grabbed his remote and hit the pause button. The fucker had a DVR. “Yep. It’s funny, and allows me to keep vaguely up to date on reality shows that some of my clients seem to love, don’t ask me why. But I must admit some do have a horrific train wreck quality about them.”

“I don’t know about other people, but I have enough horrific train wrecks in my life.” He popped the rest of the brownie segment in his mouth before reaching for the ice pack and holding it to his head.

“Oh hon, I know. I’m a spectator. Which leads me to think we have another train wreck to discuss.”

He couldn’t deny that. He explained what he’d discovered in Jefferson Heights, and how he was afraid the cops wouldn’t treat it as much of anything. “Do you have any contacts in that part of the city?”

Holden considered that with the barest hint of a smile on his face. “I have friends all over, especially in low places. What do you want?”

“I want to know who might be bragging about cat killing. He was using an abandoned building as a tannery, which tells me he can’t do it where he lives for some reason.”

“Or he knows better than to shit where he eats.”

“Yeah, could be. But I find it hard to believe a man who appeared to be making them into skins would keep quiet about his hobby.”

“Isn’t that rule number one for a serial killer?”

“Typically. But since he’s not, in his mind or the mind of the legal system, killing people, he may not think of himself in that way. Hell, he may think he’s doing the community a service.”

“Well, according to Pat Robertson, infecteds are destroying America.” He paused briefly. “Or was it gays? Foreigners? Women? Hell if I can remember. What month is it?”

“Let’s just say all of the above and move on. Do you think you can help me?”

He nodded, now all business. “No problem. I’ll get the word out I’m looking for a cat killer, someone good at his job. I assume you want him alive?”

He wasn’t kidding. That was one of the most disturbing things about Holden. No, he didn’t judge, and that was refreshing, but he didn’t judge, and that could also at times be very unsettling. Not that he didn’t have a code, but it was a very limited one: no kids, no innocents, no one who wasn‘t there by choice. Everyone else was fair game. Although, to be honest, that was a pretty good code, especially if you believed in karma. “Yes.” He wanted to make sure they had the right guy, and Roan knew he would know the man if he met him. He would smell him, smell the trace of a scent he left at the murder scene, smell a scent of death on him that no amount of soap or time could wash away. Predators knew other predators.

Holden simply nodded again, looking in his microwave popcorn bag, probably for some remaining popped kernels. “You know, I took today off as a mental health day. I figured I’d just watch TV all day and maybe sleep for twelve hours. Best laid plans, huh?”

“I thought I’d be trolling Capitol Hill, looking for a missing man.” His stomach had settled, the pain in his head fading to a dull roar, so he reached for the sandwich.

“Oh, a case? Can I help?”

“Only if you want to pass a photo around, ask if anyone’s seen him.”

“Goddamn, I hardly have to get off my ass for that. Can do.”

Roan took a bite of the sandwich, and marveled. He was expecting a simple tuna on wheat, even though his nose told him to expect a sharp tang of vinegar, but what Holden had made him was a tuna sandwich with fresh vinaigrette, pickles, lettuce, and pepperoncinis for crunch and zest. “Holy shit,” he said impolitely, through a mouthful of food. “This is the best tuna sandwich I’ve ever had.”

“I don’t do normal,” Holden said, reaching for his can of Coke Zero. “Either I’m spectacular or I’m horrendous, but I never settle for the middle. Anyone can be average.” He said it with a little irony, but very little. And having seen him in action, it was easy to believe.

Since Roan was busy eating, Holden turned The Soup back on, and they both ended up watching it as Roan realized how surreal things had become, and the pot was kicking in, big time.

The funny thing about massive pain was the sudden absence of pain was almost orgasmic. Both the Perocets and the pot finally got together for a conference, and decided to make the hurt go away. Relief prickled along his scalp, giving him goosebumps as the ice pack made him shiver, and he still felt a calming warmth in his arms, hands, and legs. Suddenly Holden’s couch seemed like the most comfortable thing in the world.

Holden caught the shiver, and asked, “You okay?”

“I’m fucking brilliant. How strong was that pot?”

“Mavis only uses the best ingredients. She says that’s the key to a great dish; great ingredients trumps a sloppy execution.” He balled up the empty popcorn bag and tossed it towards his kitchenette. It bounced off the countertop and hit the floor. He shrugged at his failure, although it wasn’t clear where he was aiming.

“You know, I never ask how you are,” Roan said. It finally occurred to him, possibly because a secession of pain always made him chatty. He wasn’t sure why, but he was pretty sure this was how Dylan knew when he’d been hitting the pills.

He looked at him with genuine surprise. It was so rare to see a genuine emotion on Holden’s face he hardly knew how to react to it. “Why would you? If it was worth mentioning, I’d say something.”

“Would you?”

“If it was important.”

He frowned at him. “You’re lying. You don’t give any of yourself away.”

Holden looked at him with what may have been a genuine small smile. “There’s nothing to give away. I get so exhausted being what people want me to be that when I’m on my own, I enjoy being nothing to no one. You have no idea how tiring it is always being someone else.”

“I think I might,” he said. He was thinking mainly of how hard it was to walk the line sometimes, between being a Human and being the expression of a virus that ruled his life. The cop and the lawbreaker, the Human and the animal, the outsider and the … pariah. Okay, no, that last one didn’t work. At least he knew what he meant.

“Yeah, maybe,” he reached over and grabbed the ice pack, leaning in enough that Roan thought he might try and kiss him. But he behaved himself, and didn’t. “You went ahead and took some pills, didn’t you?”

“My skull felt like it was going to split open from the pressure.”

He grimaced as he stood, returning to the kitchen with the ice pack. “Go ahead and stretch out, sleep it off, I’ll call Dylan and let him know you’re here.”

Roan laughed. “Like hell. I feel great now.”

“You’re way too fucked up to drive.”

“No I’m not.”

“This isn’t an argument,” Holden said, and held up some keys. It took him a moment to realize they were his keys.

Roan instantly reached into his coat pockets, only to find that yes, his eyes weren’t playing tricks on him – his keys were gone. And he never felt them being lifted. Hell, when did Holden even have the chance to do that? “Motherfucker! How’d you get my keys?”

“Oh please, hon, I’m a professional hooker. I could take your wallet, fill it full of junk mail, and replace it without you being any wiser.” He palmed the keys and dropped them in the pocket of his sweatpants. “You sleep this off. I don’t know if it was the crime scene or what, but you look like motherfucking hell. Take five before you drop.”

It was the drugs, they made him feel good, and it seemed to switch off his internal filter, because he blurted, “I might have a brain tumor.” He didn’t mean to say it, it just came out.

Holden had been coming back into the living room, but he froze where he was, and the look on his face was once again genuine, one of naked surprise that made him look oddly Human. Not that he wasn’t or never did, but Holden had such a slick awareness that he always seemed better than Human. Now he was just a man, and a startled one at that. Maybe if he wasn’t so wasted, he could appreciate that he was getting a rare glimpse of the real Holden, a person almost no one ever saw. “Are you serious?”

“I hafta tell Dylan, but I don’t know how. All I do is disappoint or scare him, and here I am, doing it again. Why doesn’t he leave me? I’m only gonna kill him, one way or another, and I don’t want to hurt him anymore.”

Holden looked genuinely stunned, and Roan suddenly wished he had a camera. Holden then dry washed his face, giving himself a moment to process what was said and get over his shock, and came at it again. “Okay, first of all, he loves you, and I suspect he’s kind of a low level masochist, ‘cause he hasn’t walked away from your drama. Second, hurt him? Who has the fucking brain tumor? It ain’t him. So stop being a macho asshole and just tell him.”

“Like it’s that easy.”

“Fine. Get wasted and tell him. Everything’s easier when your wasted.”

“Apparently.”

After another moment, where Holden briefly paced in a circle, he said, “Try Valium. I’ve noticed Valium has a tendency to make people say things they normally wouldn’t say.”

Roan was going to ask him how he knew this, but decided not to. Also, was Holden genuinely rattled? He seemed to be, kind of, as much as Holden could get rattled. Had he upset him? Why was he upset? Well, maybe it was kind of a big deal, announcing you might have a brain tumor. To him, it was just one more damned thing in a life full of damned things. “I might not have one,” he offered, aware that seemed like too little too late now.

He gave him a hollow eyed look, like he was staring at Roan from the bottom of a well. Or maybe that was just the drugs kicking in big time. “Maybe, but you know it would explain a lot.”

Roan shrugged, as he could only shrug for the moment. He was so tired. Oh, he felt better than he had in ages, but he was still ludicrously weary, and his arms and legs felt like they’d been replaced with lead replicas. Maybe Holden was right about him needing to sleep this off.

Maybe he could sleep it all off, the day, the week, the year. Rip Van Winkle probably had the right idea.

Considering the time of day, Roan wasn’t surprised to find that The Eagle wasn’t very crowded, with only a few men who’d come in on their lunch break and lingered still hanging around. The bartender was a reasonably good looking bear in a maroon t-shirt, with a tattoo of barbed wire encircling his left wrist. He showed him the picture of the supposed Adam Jephson, and fed him the story about him coming into an inheritance despite having been estranged from his family. (Because it was a gay bar, and Adam was trusted to be gay, the bartender just assumed he was estranged from the family due to his gayness. Roan didn’t discourage this belief.)

The bartender, whose name was Tanner, admitted that he wasn’t sure if he’d seen him or not; the picture was a profile, and after all, he kind of looked like a lot of people. (He couldn’t argue with any of this.) Tanner also flirted with him a little, offered him a drink on the house, and Roan found his kindness so alluring he agreed, but only to a virgin margarita (well, it was the afternoon, and he was on several Percocets). After he made him his drink, he admitted he recognized him as “that cat guy” (oy vey), but added he thought he was pretty cool. He also told him not to worry, that he knew he was “Toby’s guy” (Dylan’s old bar nickname), and he wasn’t seriously flirting with him, although the margarita was on the house. Roan suspected a bit of duplicity here, either that or he was hoping they were an open couple looking for a third. But after a little bit more conversation, he realized Tanner was honestly interested in Dylan, not him, he was simply flirting with him because he was here. Which was fair enough, because Dylan was one hot dude, a lot hotter than him. If guys liked him, Roan chalked it up to his out of control pheromones, one of his dubious viral “gifts”.

Tanner agreed to keep an eye out and spread the word, see if anyone knew of the guy, and Roan thanked him before leaving the bar and cutting his way towards the back bathrooms, which were coincidentally far too cramped and uncomfortable to ever have sex in. (Coincidence? Doubtful.) It was in the claustrophobic corridor, paneled in dark wood and safe sex posters featuring attractive naked men from the neck down, that a sudden cramp of cold seemed to seize his guts, making him stop in his tracks as the hairs on the back of his neck stood on end and he had an almost undeniable urge to run, to leave the place through the walls if need be, just get the fuck out of there now.

It took him a moment to pinpoint the problem: the music. The bar’s sound system was playing M83, a song from the CD “Before The Dawn Heals Us” – the CD Paris was playing when he killed himself. It was … logically, it was stupid and pointless, but he ran out of the bar like it was on fire.

He stopped and leaned against the brick wall outside the tapas restaurant, doubled over in pain and trying to catch his breath. The pain had made his solar plexus a fist, it was radiating pain outward into his torso and away, like he was a vessel that existed simply for this agony. There were tears in his eyes, but he wasn’t sure if they were from physical pain or some other kind of pain. So much for Percocets, huh? Couldn’t fight this.

The worst thing about grief was it laid little booby traps for you. Oh sure, you moved on with your life, you could fool yourself you were past it, and then the trap would spring and those metal teeth of sorrow would crush you, puncture your lungs and tear your heart and split your brain down the center like your skull was made of silk.

He was gulping air and trying to get a grip, trying to fight back pain, as he felt his jaw ache with the force with which he was clenching his teeth, and belatedly he realized he was growling, a sort of sad, muted sound born purely of pain.

He was shaking and trying to keep from whimpering when he realized not all the shaking was coming from his body – his phone was vibrating. He didn’t want to answer it, but fuck, he probably needed the distraction. He sank down to the cold asphalt as he answered, seeing Seb’s number on the display. “What?” he grumbled, hoping Seb couldn’t hear anything in his voice he shouldn’t.

“Woah, ain’t you in a bad mood?” he replied. “Well, it’s gonna get worse. You know Jefferson Heights?” Rather than talk, Roan simply grunted an affirmative as he wiped his nose on the back of his hand. “We got a cat loose, and it may have taken refuge in one of these squatter’s shacks. We’ve been ordered not to make a move, to leave it to the cat squad, but I figured you might wanna crack at it first.”

Jefferson Heights was actually an unofficial name, given to one of the poorer parts of the city. It was filled with slums always being condemned or burned down, and as a result, there might be twelve apartment buildings on one block and half would be officially empty (unofficially was a different story) at any one time. It was a minor maze, and most cops didn’t go in there without serious back up first, mainly because you never knew what you’d find. Crack den, shooting gallery, homeless encampment, Neo-Nazi squatters (this was true; he was on the force when that particular incident happened), dog fighting ring, maybe even, if you were lucky, an unlicensed take out joint. If you didn’t absolutely have to be there, most people avoided it.

And as coincidence would have it, it wasn’t far from where he was right now. Maybe eight miles, tops. He cleared his throat and finally said, “I’ll be right there.”

“Fine, Catmandu, but are you sure you’re all right? You sound weird.”

“Catmandu?”

“You’re a superhero, you need a superhero name.”

“Are you fucking serious? That’s horrible.”

“What? I know it’s cheesy, but most superhero names are kinda cheesy.”

“If you ever call me that again, I’ll break your fucking nose,” he snapped, and hung up the phone. “Catmandu. How fucking gay does he think I am?” Well, at least that distracted him from the pain.

In the car on the way to the Heights, he listened to Mr. Bungle on his iPod and shouted along with the lyrics he could make out or knew. It made him laugh and cry a bit at the same time. Mr. Bungle was the perfect soundtrack to a psychotic break, so much so that he felt that they were almost a community service. If you were crazy or going crazy, you could listen to them and not feel so alone. ‘Your lips say one thing but the drugs say another’ was perhaps the most insightful lyric about his life since ‘And if I bite my cheeks long enough I figure I could chew right through the skin’. Considering it, that was pretty fucking sad.

Before getting out of the car he checked in the rearview to make sure he wasn’t crying still. He looked a bit like he had been crying, but he tried to force a partial change, enough to flush his skin and just make him look fucked up, not like he had been crying. He could settle for that.

He didn’t feel terribly strong, pain echoed through him like ripples on the surface of a disturbed pond, but he knew enough not to show weakness. Cop cars stacked the sides of the street, making a half assed cordon, and the amount of blue on the street seemed excessive, several of them openly wearing bulletproof vests on the outside of their uniforms. They were more afraid of the Humans around here than the loose cat, a message they were sending loud and clear.

Obviously most of the guys recognized him, and more than a few sneered or turned their backs on him. Boy, he wasn’t going to win any popularity contests, was he? Someone at the head of the street whispered, “Fuckin’ kitty fag,” to his buddy, letting Roan know they forgot about his sense of hearing. Right now he didn’t care much, he was too weary to give a shit about their insults.

He cut through the cops easily, they parted like he was toxic, until he reached Seb, who regarded him with the same equanimity that he always did. “Wow, Roan, you look like shit.”

“Bad day. Any word on the cat squad?”

“ETA seven minutes out. Better get movin’.”

This was a bad area to have a superior sense of smell, but then again, most places were. Still, he crouched down, as being closer to the ground would help him filter out so many of the Human smells, the garbage smells. He smelled blood, tainted quite heavily with alcohol, and asked, “Who was hurt?”

“Transient. He was able to stop the attack by shoving a lighter in its face. He’ll probably survive. Said it was a cougar.”

“Amazing he had the presence of mind. He was super fucking drunk.”

Seb chuckled. “Yeah, noticed that. Guy smelled like a sour mash explosion.”

The lighter explained the noxious scent of burned hair, but there was something else, something … off. “Cat’s sick,” he said.

“Might explain the attack.”

“Probably.” Was he convinced? Oh, he didn’t know – it seemed to vary from one cat to another. But he didn’t like the smell.

He stood, took the drug gun and radio Seb offered him, and followed the trace scents, just barely there beneath the odious, garbagy Human scents. He followed it into the alley, which was strewn with even fresher garbage, enough to make him almost gag.

He pressed on, past old blood, gang graffiti, and a trash can overflowing with garbage so old it was sweet with rot. The buzz and click of insects was a constant background noise.

His phone went off, still on vibrate, but in this state it was as loud as a bang, so he reached in his pocket and shut it off without looking at it. When he concentrated, when he let the cat inch forward, his senses exploded, and he had almost a kind of synethesia. Sounds were almost feelings; smells were colors, layers in the air. The Human and trash smells made the air look polluted, a sort of murky, washed out brown, nearly the color of landfill mud, but the sick cat was a tiny red thread beneath it all he could follow, the world’s dimmest beacon.

He entered one of the empty buildings, whose door had been smashed in by police battering rams a long time ago and never replaced. The smell of Human shit and piss was overpowering, a noxious dirty yellow funk, that suggested that junkies and homeless people were using it as a toilet.

There was no light, the former windows (they hadn’t seen glass for decades) were boarded up, but he could see well enough to know he didn’t want to pull out his flashlight. There were gang tags, curses, and feces smeared on the wall, and a staircase that was definitely unsafe, with a missing chunk of railing and a broken step gaping like missing teeth in a crooked mouth. But the cat’s scent line went that way, so he had no choice.

Careful to avoid any particularly disgusting piles, he made his way to the steps and carefully went up them, avoiding empty spots and steps soft with rot and damage. The ceiling was hanging down in chunks on the second level, so he couldn’t imagine the upper floors were very stable if at all passable.

There were no rats, which told him the cat was here in case nothing else did. The rats around here had no fear of house cats or even Humans – why should they be afraid? They outnumbered them all – but a cougar was a different story. Rats were smart enough to know you don’t fuck with that shit.

So he wasn’t surprised to see the muddy hued cougar waiting for him in the middle of the corridor, growling low in its throat. It was small, female, and attempted to roar. Cougars, whether the born or infected variety, couldn’t actually roar; they could squawl, make an almost equivalent noise, but a roar it wasn’t. He reflexively showed it what a roar actually was, tearing up his throat and hurting his own ears in the process.

The cougar seemed to accept it well. Her ears went back, but she crouched slightly, not as if ready to pounce but in submission. She wasn’t going to fight him, she knew she would lose, and this again brought home his general, unspoken thought that the female cats were generally smarter than the male ones. Of course, to be fair, it varied from cat to cat – he’d met some remarkably dumb females, and some males who seemed to have some sense – but in general he liked facing females more than males. There was usually less bloodshed.

But the cougar did something odd. It turned and walked down the hall, not running, not trying to hide, and he followed in curiosity.

The stench hit him about three feet later.

Dark tendrils of the sickly sweet rot of death, the metallic meat smell of blood, and it was so overwhelming that he had to pause for a moment to regain his bearings. He’d have instantly blamed the cougar, but the smell of blood had the sort of rusty tang of old blood; it wasn’t fresh.

The cougar was at the fifth door on the left, scratching at a closed apartment door like a housecat who desperately wanted back inside. It was such odd behavior that he wondered for a moment if this was a prank being played on him by the cat squad. Except they couldn’t rig something like this, and they weren’t really bright enough to think of something this creative either.

The cougar was trying to tell him something, and he knew exactly what: the death, the blood, the meat smell was behind that door, and the cougar didn’t like it any more than he did.

As he approached, the cougar backed off and crouched down low, submitting to him. He let his Human side come forward more, as the cougar was no threat, at least not to him. He wondered if he had his gun with him, because honestly he’d forgotten. The threat was behind the door, and even the cougar was happy to leave it to him.

Fuck it, he wasn’t Human – no matter what the threat, he didn’t need a gun. Like Seb said, he was a superhero, right? He was the weapon. Guns were extraneous.

He kicked open the door, as surprise wasn’t much of an option with a cougar scratching to be let in. He didn’t think there was anything living on the other side, though, he smelled nothing alive amongst the dead.

Still, what he saw surprised him. It was a tiny apartment, more or less intact, and there were pelts hanging like the shadow of death from the low ceiling in just about every available area, the layers of newspaper on the floor stained brown with blood. Roan counted over a dozen cat skins, of all the species – lion, panther, cougar, leopard. (Okay, no tiger, but good fucking luck getting one of those.) They were almost all headless pelts, but otherwise full skins, cleaned and dressed like a professional tanner had been working on them.

On a rickety card table in the center of the room were a couple of severed paws, with what looked like metal fittings on the end. Was someone turning them into jewelry? Maybe some kind of trophy pendant. There was a single severed head on the table too, a panther, the top of the skull and brain removed – someone had been using it as an ashtray. Somehow he recognized Marlboro butts, a weird little detail that shouldn’t have stuck out but somehow did.

The cougar made a strange noise behind him, a sort of a combination growl and whimper, and Roan found himself echoing it before catching himself. The horror of the scene sank like a stone in his body, leaving him feeling cold. Then the rage came, a wave that warmed him as a growl boiled in his throat, and he had to swallow it all back before it overwhelmed his rational mind. Well, whatever he had left that passed for a rational mind.

He remembered his radio, and pulled it out from where he’d stashed it in his coat pocket. “I need a forensics team in here.”

“What’cha got?” Seb replied.

“A slaughter.”

“Cat under control?”

“The cat didn’t do it. A Human did this.”

“What?”

“It’s an abattoir in here, Seb. Some motherfucking bastard has killed a bunch of cats, skinned them alive.”

These weren’t just cat pelts, of course; these were Human skins. Someone had  killed infecteds in their cat form and peeled the fur from their bones, kept their transformed skin as a hunting trophy.

Not just a murderer. A sadist, a fiend, the sickest bastard to walk the city.

And he was loose. Where was the freak squad for him?

Rosenberg objected to the idea of an outpatient biopsy, although didn’t HMO’s do shit like that all the time? Besides, Roan being who he was, being opened up wouldn’t hurt him; he’d heal faster than a normal, get on with his life. But she still objected.

So they set aside the biopsy for another day. He did agree to get the brain scan though, if only to appease her, and he hoped she knew what a sacrifice that was.

There was something awful about being squashed in a narrow metal tube, which echoed with strange noises (clanks, hums, sinister science fiction type sounds), and made you feel like you had been shoved into a torpedo and were about to be fired at an enemy vessel. That wouldn’t have been a bad way to die, come to think of it – flung at the enemy like a biological weapon, which was in essence what he was. Rosenberg sometimes talked to him, and since he was a captive audience inside the big scanning machine, she told him about all the assholes out there (fellow virologists) who make various claims about the virus and infecteds, while she was sitting on him (in a figurative sense, of course), and could blow all those putzes away. Did she want him to give consent to release information on him? Too bad, she wasn’t going to get it.

He wondered if he was going stir crazy in the tube. He felt like he’d been in the scanner for most of the day, but it was about an hour. Even though he’d done nothing but remain motionless in the damn tube, he felt both jittery and exhausted. She wanted to talk some more, schedule him for a biopsy, but he was in no mood for a talk and told her he’d schedule them later on his way out the door. He believed she called him a very nasty name, but maybe she was talking to someone else.

He sat in the car, wondering what he was going to do. His head hurt from the noises and the lights in the scanner – was she trying to trigger a migraine? He could believe it – and struggled to open a bottle of Percocet. His hands were shaking, and he wasn’t sure why. There were so many reasons for him to fall to pieces right now. Not that he was planning to, but it was nice to know he had a pass if he couldn’t hold his shit together.

He swallowed a couple of pills with lukewarm bottled water that tasted more like plastic than anything else, and pondered his next move. He should tell Dylan; it was only fair that he knew his freak husband had a freak problem. He couldn’t show up at work and tell him, that was cruel, but right now he was doing his usual weekly work for the temple, and there was no way in hell he was going to track him down and tell him now. He could make dinner tonight, break it to him then … except no, that seemed awful too. He was going to have to think of a better way to break it to him.

“So what now, genius?” he asked himself. He wished he knew.

Did the thought he might die actually bother him? Or was it the method? He wouldn’t mind death if it was fast; the thought of a slow death made the hairs stand up on the back of his neck. Not like that; any way but that.

The best thing for it was distraction. And who better to pursue a hopeless case than a man who was a hopeless case himself? He started the car and headed out towards the Eagle, hoping the rest of the day was better from here on out.

It could be worse, but he was seriously hoping the universe was done fucking him for now.

****

Holden was just trying to decide if he wanted to throw frozen blueberries into his smoothie when there was a knock at his door.

That was weird, mainly because he rarely if ever had unannounced visitors. Oh, sometimes Roan came over with little warning, usually when there was a situation, but it didn’t sound like Roan. When he knocked, he usually shook the door in its frame. His little segues into Hulk-dom sometimes made itself known in the oddest places.

Curious, he approached, wondering if he should grab his gun first. Oh sure, he wasn’t an infected, and he wasn’t sure any of these fundie haters even knew who he was (he made damn sure he was a difficult man to know and find – he even paid his rent under a fake identity), but these days you couldn’t be too sure. He knew the “kill the cats” bastards were just trying to scare people into submission, but they were just making him angrier by the second. Maybe it was being a preacher’s son and knowing exactly what kind of hypocritical, nasty bastards they actually were, and how little they genuinely thought of their loyal followers, but perhaps he was just projecting. He supposed there were some good God boys out there, but any that preached hate and homicide were instantly ruled out.

He glanced out his peep hole, approaching it from the side so anyone waiting for a light shift would just be shooting through the door, but he was surprised by who he saw. If this was an FCC member, he’d undergone a serious brainwashing.

Holden unlocked the door and opened it wide enough to lean against the door frame. “Hey little boy, you lost?”

Scott Murray, the way too cute hockey player, seemed a little thrown off by the statement. Good Canadian boy, was he? He’d witnessed hockey fights and heard a couple of things to the contrary. He chuckled nervously and scratched his forehead before saying, “Sorry to just drop by like this, I was hoping to talk to you. Is this a bad time?”

“No, I guess not. Come into my parlor, said the spider to the fly.”

He stopped staring at his chest – until he opened the door and felt the cool air, Holden forgot he was wearing nothing but the sweatpants he stepped into after his shower (well, it wasn’t like nudity was uncommon for him …) – and gave him a curious, almost wary look. “Huh?”

Holden opened the door wide and made a sweeping arm gesture towards the interior of his apartment. “My casa is your casa.”

For a moment he looked like he might turn and run away. But he gathered his courage like a good little macho man and came in. Holden had to swallow a laugh. Oh, it was too easy playing with the nervous and shy, and too damn fun too. As soon as he shut the door, he asked, “Who told you where I lived?” He tried not to sound hostile, but he was curious.

“Oh, um, Diego, that paramedic? I kinda lied to him, I said Roan wanted us to work on something together, but I didn’t know where you were, and Roan wasn’t answering his phone.”

“I’ll give you credit for plausibility. That sounds like Roan.”

“I thought so.”

He walked back to the kitchenette, wondering if Scott was watching his ass. Well, did they look any good in these sweatpants? He couldn’t remember. “Can I offer you a drink? I’m making a smoothie, I’m sure there’ll be extra.”

“Um, no thanks. Can I, uh, sit down?”

“What, you don’t sit in your own home? Of course you can sit down. Just don’t put your feet up on my couch or I’ll cut you.”

Scott laughed nervously, and whatever he said after that was lost in the whir of the blender. When it stopped, and he was pouring the smoothie into a glass, Scott tried again. “So, um, I was wondering … um …”

“If I’m a prostitute? Yes. What else can I help you with?” He turned around to see Scott just staring at him from his couch with a look somewhere between surprise and disbelief. He sipped from his smoothie to keep from laughing.

Scott actually looked small in his civilian clothes, a pair of loose jeans, a t-shirt advertising some skate shop he’d never heard of (had he heard of any skate shops?) and a black leather jacket, and the innocent look on his face made him look barely old enough to shave. Of course he really wasn’t that old, was he? It was easy to forget, just like it was easy to forget how much of his hockey gear wasn’t actually him. That stuff added about fifteen pounds to a guy. Still, what he did have of body mass was mostly solid muscle; if he had a single ounce of fat, it wasn’t visible. “Um, wow,” he finally said, running a hand nervously through his shaggy black hair. “I guess Diego was right about you.”

“Oh? What did he say?”

“He said you had no shame.”

“Shame is for the weak. Do I look weak to you?”

It took a moment for Scott to look at him, but his eyes were furtive and skittish. Poor boy. Holden wasn’t sure if he should comfort him or torment him. “No.”

“There you go.” He leaned on the counter of the kitchenette, looking out into the living room, so there was a physical barrier to mimic the psychological and emotional one between them. He couldn’t help but wonder where this conversation was going to go, and yet he was curious to play out the line for a bit.

“I thought you were Roan’s assistant.”

“I am. But that’s a part time thing at best. And I’m not just any old hooker, but one of those high class prostitutes that you hear about in various political scandals. I have a page on the agency’s web site and everything. Awesome picture of me, if I don’t say so myself.”

His look was dubious, like he thought he was kidding. “I thought those were only female.”

“Generally. But not in big cities with sizable gay populations. I mean, there are high class male hookers in Los Angeles, New York, Atlanta, Boston, New Orleans … and don’t even ask about San Francisco. But you probably guessed that.”

“I guessed nothing. I’m surprised by this.”

“Why?”

“You just … I guess I imagine male hookers as …”

“Twinks? Transvestites? Scrawny little HIV victims? Strung out junkies? Sexually abused train wrecks? Give me the high sign when I get close.”

He shook his head. “I wasn’t trying to offend you -”

“You think this is offended? Sweetheart, when I’m offended, you will know. The taste of blood will be a major giveaway.”

That made Scott smile, like he thought it would. Macho men generally responded to macho, good or bad. “See, that’s why I’m having a hard time with this.”

“What, ’cause I’m not a victim type?”

“I guess. I’m not sure that’s what I was going for …”

“Look, I sell myself, sure, but I’m not a doormat. I didn’t start out as some club kid pimped out by his sugar daddy. I knew what I was getting into when I got into it, and I did my time on the street. You survive there by either adopting the colors of a predator, or attaching yourself remora like to a much bigger fish than you.”

He weighed this carefully, with the slightest twitch of his eyebrow. Scott did have those great, eerily clear blue eyes, the kind that always reminded Holden of Husky dogs. It made him seem more innocent than he probably was. “You gonna make me guess what you did?”

“My street name is Fox. Does that help at all?”

He considered that a moment, and finally remembered that a fox was indeed a predator. They were small and considered cute by some, which was probably why people forgot what they actually were. Did that explain why some people forgot what he was too? Well, no; he wasn’t small, and no one had ever called him cute. “I guess it does,” Scott finally admitted, and looked at him with more obviously critical eyes. There was no intent to offend, though; he was simply scrutinizing him, looking for some crack in his armor that would explain him. He wished Captain Canada good luck, ’cause he was going to need it. “I still don’t understand why you sell yourself. You seem smart, you seem tough. So … why?”

He shrugged. “Why not? It’s good money.”

“You can’t do something else for money?”

“Who said it was all about money?”

Scott stared at him in bewilderment. “Didn’t you?”

“No. I gave you one reason out of many. Gotta look out for those little details, they tell you more about a person than you might realize.”

He shook his head and stood up, flinging his hands up as if lobbing a heavy gun overboard. “This is a mind fuck. You’re mind fucking me.”

“I mind fuck everyone. It’s a little freebie.”

Those crystal clear eyes locked onto his again, and Holden watched a current of anger sizzle and fly by. Maybe he wasn’t on ‘roids – he was too scrawny, his skin too clear, his muscles too realistic for it – but something kept his temper close to the surface. Could have just been years of playing hockey; Scott wasn’t one to fight a lot, but he did fight, and he grew up in an atmosphere that didn’t frown on it. Fighting was to hockey as homoerotic ass grabbing was to football – something done without a lot of thought. “Is that why you’re Roan’s assistant? To irritate people until they talk?”

“No, that’s just a lovely little side benefit.”

He gave him a stony look, his eyes like agates. “You enjoy this, don’t you?”

“Fucking with people? Sure. Who doesn’t?”

Ooh, he didn’t like that. His mouth twisted in irritation as he turned towards the door. “I give up. Why did I even come here?”

“’Cause you wondered how much I charged.”

That made him stop dead, his back stiffening like someone just put ice down his shirt. “What?”

“Oh, come on. We’re both adults here, and I’m not gonna rat you out to your team. That’s part of what you pay me for when you hire me: privacy and silence. There are cheaper hustlers, but with me you get a guarantee of no diseases, and discretion. I’m not going to tell on you to your wife, girlfriend, or co-workers, and if you become big and famous someday, I’m not going to out you on Oprah and write a tell all memoir about how you liked me to fuck you in a clown mask. I may be a whore, but I’m not that kind of whore. I do have standards. Play fair with me, and I play fair with you. No games, no bullshit.”

His expression was studiously blank, as if he was trying to give nothing away. He was trying, but failing. “Clown mask?”

“People have weird kinks; I don’t judge. Although clowns are freaky.”

“You know I don’t hafta pay for sex, right?”

“Oh yeah. You’re gorgeous and an athlete, two bonuses in the getting laid sweepstakes. But I also know you’re locally fairly well known, and meeting guys has an extra layer of peril.”

He scoffed, and his half smile was attractive and somewhat convincing. “I have a girlfriend.”

“Many of my clients do; that’s so not the point. You’re bi, we both know it, so what’s with the pose? Drop it, hon, we’re all friends here.”

He raised an eyebrow at that. “Are we?”

Holden flashed him one of his more seductive smiles. “I’d like to think so. When’s the last time you were with a man? In a Biblical sense.”

“I thought the Bible frowned on that.”

That made him chuckle. “You’re talking to a preacher’s son here. The Bible frowns on many things, and yet seems good on slavery and selling your daughters, so I’m thinking it’s schizophrenic at best.”

“You’re a preacher’s son? Wow. How come almost every gay guy I meet comes from an ultra religious home?”

“You’ve noticed too, huh?”

“Yeah. My first boyfriend was a Mormon.”

“You have Mormons in Canada?”

“I know, right? But he was cute. Couldn’t shoot for shit, though.”

“He was a hockey player too?”

“No, lacrosse. He initially wanted me to teach him how to play, but I saw through that pretty quickly.”

Perhaps this was why he sort of liked him, beyond him being pretty damn hot – they had a lot in common. “I used to be a jock, you know. I was the star baseball pitcher at my tony private Christian school. My first boyfriend was the captain of the swim team.”

Scott chuckled. “It’s always the swim team.”

“Hey, it allows the fussy gay boy to wax his body hair and have a legitimate reason for it.”

“I suppose.”

“So how long has it been?” He knew he was pushing it. He had no idea how comfortable Scott was with his sexuality, although the fact that he was still in the closet suggested some discomfort. Was it all career related? He guessed not. Scott struck him as surprisingly reasonable for a semi-pro athlete, enough that Holden wondered why he would put off by his own sexuality, and why he went the jock route. Then again, some people wondered the same thing about him being a prostitute, so it all evened out.

He seemed torn between staying and leaving, but Scott seemed to come to some internal decision and stood his ground. “Six months.”

He let out a low whistle, shaking his head while giving him one of his sliest smiles. “Nasty. I don’t know if I could go that long without sex.”

“I’ve had sex. I got a girlfriend, remember? It’s just …” he shifted his weight from foot to foot as he ran a hand through his hair, ruffling it adorably. “It’s different with a man, y’know? I mean, I’m fine with women most of the time, but every now and then …”

“You want raw, animalistic, no strings attached sex? Hell, that’s the only kind I like.”

They held each other’s gaze for a very long time, a silent battle of potentialities, desire, and awkwardness. Would it be awkward if he took Scott on as a client, since he was part of Roan’s inner circle of super freaks? Maybe for Scott, but it wouldn’t be for him; he had no problems separating his work from the rest of his life. There was Fox and there was Holden, and while they were closely related, they were still very different.

Scott lied to most of his teammates (surely the unfathomable Grey and terminally weird Tank knew, and obviously didn’t care), so why couldn’t he lie to Roan? The only problem was Scott seemed to idolize Roan. He could feel weird around him. Oh, so fucking what? That was his hang up.

Scott finally admitted, “I don’t know if I could do that.”

“You’d be surprised what you’re capable of.” He opened a drawer by the sink, and after rummaging around, found one of his business cards. All it had on it was the web address of his escort agency page and one of his private cell numbers (no name, nothing else – if you got the card, you knew what it was and why), so if anyone found it, they’d have no idea what it was. Unless they looked up the web address, then he was screwed.

Holden held out the card to him. “Change your mind, give me a call.”

Scott studied the plain card, looking at the few things on the front and flipping it over to see if there was anything on the back, before meeting his eyes again. “I couldn’t just ask you out for a beer?”

He almost laughed, but he seemed half serious. “I don’t know. You could try.”

“I could, I guess,” he said, but only shot him a small, somewhat embarrassed smile before leaving his apartment.

Funny. He could totally see why Roan liked him.

“Do you have any idea what it was like?” Oliver continued, tears welling in his eyes. “We thought he was murdered, and we’d never know how he died or who killed him. They’d get away scot free, and we’d never know what happened to our dad or why. And now, after all that agony, this. That fucker is still alive? So he just walked away, is that it? Can people do that?”

“People do it all the time; men more than women, but they do it too.” He got out the box of tissue he kept on hand for crying clients – he had a lot of clients who cried, which made sense, as he was usually the last resort for these people – and put it on the edge of his desk, close to him. “Do you have a photo of your father from before?”

He took a tissue, wiped his eyes and nose, and nodded convulsively. “Yeah, yeah I do.” He balled up the tissue and sniffed as he dug in his man purse once  more. He put the print on his desk, and followed it with a yellowed Polaroid, of a rather average looking man in his early thirties, with brown hair thinning at the temples, soft, pale eyes nearly lost in his doughy round face, his nose a sharp blade that dominated his otherwise unremarkable visage. He looked tired, and seemed to be sitting at a kitchen table, with a red and white gingham checked cloth beneath his blue coffee mug, dishes in a rack visible over his left shoulder.

The print picture was in profile, while the Polaroid shot was head on, making this a bit more dicey. Still, there were some obvious similarities – the nose appeared exactly the same, as did the shape of the chin. The face was thinner, but in an expected way, one you might expect from someone who had aged over several years. “How old is this photo?” he asked, holding up the Polaroid.

He was dabbing his face with the tissue again. “Fourteen years old.”

He quickly did the math in his head. “The year he disappeared.”

Oliver nodded again. “It was taken on his birthday, in May.”

Roan studied the photos carefully, one right against the other. Neither picture was especially sharp, but they weren’t bad either. There was a nagging similarity between the photos, and there was no way he could deny it. “They are the same, aren’t they?”

Would he be getting his hopes up if responded in the affirmative? “There is an uncanny resemblance. But you are aware that occasionally someone can look almost exactly like someone else but not be them.”

“Yeah, I know. But it’s him, I know it’s him. And I don’t know what I’m supposed to feel about that.”

A fair point. “You need to understand something before you hire me: I may not be able to find him. Even if he is your dad, he may have moved on or just been passing through Seattle. I have no name, no location, no nothing. In essence, I am looking for a ghost, and it may ultimately be pointless, a waste of your money and my time. So do you still want to do this?”

He nodded, his expression oddly chastened. “Yes. I hafta know.”

“Can you even afford me? I don’t know if I can fit in a college student’s budget.”

“It’s not me paying, it’s my Aunt Abby, my dad’s sister. I emailed her as soon as I realized what was bugging me about the pic, just to make sure I wasn’t insane. She thought it was him too, and she wants to know what the fuck he’s been up to. We decided not to tell the rest of the family until we’re sure it’s actually him.”

“Good choice.” Best that two people were disillusioned rather than everyone all at once.

They discussed payment and everything he was going to need from him about his dad, who was named Adam Jephson. Oliver seemed surprised he wanted to know everything there was about Adam, but it was the only thing that might help him figure out how a guy like this would have thought, and where he may have gone.

He had the basics: Born Adam Frederick Jephson in Fort Lauderdale, Florida on May 29th, 1963, he was the only son of Fred and Susan Jephson (he had one sister, Abigail, two years younger), he went to college at the University of Delaware and he married one Annette Eberle in Dover, Delaware on June 16th, 1985 (coincidentally – or perhaps not – Oliver’s older sister, Caroline, was born in November of that same year). Adam went on to work at an insurance company, the same one his father worked for, which was simply not a coincidence. They had two other children in quick succession – Oliver was born in 1988, followed by another sister, Melanie, in 1990 – and an otherwise unremarkable life. Anette eventually started working for a florist, and they were your perfectly average white nuclear family.

Until Adam disappeared.

According to newspaper articles he found thanks to Lexis Nexis and Google searches, it barely warranted an inch high notice in the paper when it was first reported, on September 3rd of 1996. But as the days wore on, it got more notice, and the discovery of the car kicked things into overdrive. The newspapers were breathless in their speculation that something horrible had happened to him, that the car was proof of foul play (even though the cops said there was “no sign of foul play” – meaning, in police speak, they found no blood or bullet holes in the car).

Roan knew there were a couple of possibilities here. He walked – he wouldn’t be the first man, overwhelmed by family life, a boring job, and a rough (?) marriage to just walk away. Second possibility: His car broke down, and he got help from the wrong guy – since serial killers of straight white men was a statistical non-starter, the most likely violence scenario was a robbery gone wrong. And because the would be robber was something of a pro, he knew not to use the guys’ cards, just dump them and take the cash. (He went missing with a bank card and two credit cards, none of which were ever used again.) Third scenario – he committed suicide. Adam abandoned his car and walked into a river, filling his pockets with rocks before going for a midnight swim. It was possible that his body would never turn up if there was enough of a current.

But right now, he had to work from the possibility that Adam walked, and a photographer caught him in the background of a shot taken at the Seattle pride parade last year. Could Adam be gay? Just because he was in the background of the shot didn’t mean he was gay, he could have been crossing the street or living on the block. But if he was gay, it gave a good reason for him abandoning everything and starting over. He could have been living a double life, with a wife and family and a male lover on the side (or just a series of anonymous sexual encounters, or both), and finally got sick of having to juggle them. He decided to pick one, but to save his family from “shame”, or him from guilt and a protracted legal battle, he walked away, and allowed them to think he was dead.

He had one place to start his search: that neighborhood, and the local gay bars. He’d have to work on the assumption he was gay and local, because he had nothing else to work with. The Eagle was close, wasn’t it? He liked the Eagle; it was his kind of gay bar. Hard to find, small and unpretentious, you pretty much went there just to have a drink. Oh, and maybe pick someone up, but there was no deafening dance music, no place to dance actually (unless you went upstairs, but even then the tables and the pool table took up most of the space). He never actually hooked up with anyone there, but he made friends, and that was probably better.

Roan found himself getting slightly nostalgic at the thought of going back to the Eagle, and got up to go, shrugging on his coat and making sure he had the photo taken of the Adam wannabe at the pride parade. Even at the Eagle, saying his kid was looking for him might bring out protective shields, but saying he was hired by a lawyer to find him because he inherited some estate? Again, people were more than happy to get involved when there was money on the line.

As he came out, Fiona was just getting up. “Hey, I was gonna ask what you wanted for lunch.”

He shook his head. “Take the rest of the day off. I’m going out to start banging on garbage cans.”

“Whatcha looking for?”

“A guy who may or may not be a guy who supposedly died in Delaware fourteen years ago.”

“Wow. Emo boy brought that one in?”

“Yep. It gets even more emo – it’s his dad.”

She let out a low whistle. “That’s gotta be worth an Oprah episode or two.”

“If it is his dad. Right now, it could be a guy who just looks like him. That’s my impossible job.”

“Awesome,” she replied, with a tinge of sarcasm. With her eyes alone, she seemed to be asking why he would take such a hopeless case, but he only shrugged. Why not seemed to be the only appropriate answer.

The door opened, and while Roan took in the physical features of the tall, skinny guy in the tattered overcoat, his cat senses had kicked into overdrive. He was already moving when he pinpointed the thing that set it all off: gun oil. The kid smelled like gun oil, gunpowder, and hate.

Roan’s intention was to land a kick in his solar plexus, sending him flying out into the parking lot, but that’s not what happened. The gunman had withdrawn the gun just in time for Roan’s feet to impact his chest, like he was jumping off of it, and in fact he was. He managed to wrench the gun from his hand and pushed off with his feet as the guy was already falling backwards, doubling his speed as gravity pulled him down. The gunman hit the outside asphalt with bone crunching force, his head bouncing off the pavement like a basketball, as Roan managed to turn in midair, feet scraping the ceiling, as he landed in a crouch inside his own waiting room,the gun clutched to his chest. “Holy fuck!” Fi exclaimed, more surprised than anything else. “How the fuck did you do that?”

He wasn’t sure what she meant, just like he wasn’t completely sure what he’d done. It was all instinct, the cat just under the surface and taking over with the sudden adrenaline rush. It didn’t know what was impossible, not for him, and didn’t obey too many rules in any case.

He gulped air and ran out into the parking lot. The guy was laying flat out, wheezing like he was drowning on dry land, and yet he was still trying to pull himself across the lot, trying to move. Roan heard the screech of tires as a car, some ugly ass Toyota in a shade of primer gray, sped out of the edge of the lot like its ass was on fire. The guy’s compatriots, abandoning him as soon as it was a dead cert that he had lost. Roan walked over to the kid, and just listening to his labored breathing and the lumpy look of his chest, he figured he had busted his ribs, perhaps collapsed his entire fucking torso. He hit him like a Human missile, and there was no counter for that.

A fear stench was coming off him in waves, and he wasn’t sure why until he realized he was growling, and Roan forced himself to stop. The guy was trying to say something, but he couldn’t get enough air to do it. A quick glance confirmed a spider web tattoo on the back of his hand, the kind with the hidden SS symbol in it, a prison special. “FCC?” he asked, but it wasn’t really a question. He already knew.

He heard police sirens, loud but fading, and figured cops had already picked up the speeding Toyota. Another prowler turned into the lot, briefly blaring its siren before the black and white pulled parallel to them. He didn’t recognize the cops that got out, a stocky Hispanic guy built like a fireplug and a doughier, taller white guy, but apparently they knew him. “What happened here?” the stocky guy, named Morales, asked.

“This idiot pulled a gun on me.”

The white officer, named Fisher, snorted derisively. “Oh my god, you attacked Batman? Jesus Christ, you gotta death wish or somethin’?”

“He needs an ambulance.”

“He’s gonna need a fuckin’ mortuary once I’m through with him,” Fiona exclaimed, stomping out into the parking lot. It looked like she was going to kick him, but his obvious physical distress and the cops made her pause. “What was this fucking fuckface asshole thinking?!”

While Fisher radioed in for an ambulance, Morales told her, “I’m assuming he was gonna shoot your boss.” He patted down the legs and chest of the guy on the ground, searching for hidden weapons. He found a wicked looking hunting knife with a serrated blade that would actually be very clumsy to use in a fight. Morales must have known that, because as he pulled it out of the sheath on the man’s leg, he held it up and asked, “Really?”

The gunman’s eyes were glass bright and shiny with panic. He couldn’t breathe, or at least he was having such a hard time breathing his brain was kicking into full on animal mode, where nothing mattered but the pure basics of existing.

He handed Morales the guys’ gun butt first, and said, “He was gonna assassinate me with this.”

He looked at it dubiously. He was wearing latex gloves, so he wasn’t going to worry about contaminating the evidence. “A .45?”

“I know. If I didn’t collapse his entire chest, I’d feel insulted.”

“How did that happen, by the way?”

“I drop kicked him.” Well, that was essentially what he did. It was a bit fancier than that. Morales just stared at him like he didn’t quite believe him.

“With what, a battering ram?”

Roan figured, with his luck, the ambulance would be Dee’s, but no, it was a crew he’d never met before (and he was kind of relieved). As they were loading the guy onto the stretcher and shooting him slightly dirty looks (he didn’t mean to crush his chest – he didn’t know he could kick someone that hard) when his phone started vibrating in his pocket. He checked the read out, saw it was Doctor Rosenberg, and decided to answer. She’d done a scan of his chest the other day, just to see if the phantom muscle that blocked the bullet was still there or not. She must have had an answer by now. “Hey there Doctor Nick,” he said, figuring she’d get the reference.

“Drop whatever you’re doing and get to my office now,” she said, her voice all steel. “I mean it, none of your bullshit, just do it.”

“Why -”

“Do it, or I’ll send one of my interns to come get you. Do you understand me?”

He was completely baffled by her hostility. “What -”

“Now. When I call back, you better be on the road.” And with that, she hung up. He stared at the  cell for a moment, wondering what he had done to piss her off. Well, there were so many possibilities to choose from, he didn’t know which to select.

He’d already given his statement to Fisher, so he was okay to leave the scene, and since Fi was fine and knew they were done for the day (certainly now, if not before) he went ahead and took off. He wanted to go to the Eagle, but later – he knew Rosenberg well enough to know she actually would send an intern after him if he didn’t do what she said.

It wasn’t a long drive to the university, although when she called back he was stuck in traffic. She barely believed that.

She all but shoved him into her office, and as soon as she walked to her desk, she started her spiel. “Couldn’t find the muscle on the scan, but I know it’s there. What I did find … shit, kid, I don’t know how to tell you this.”

“Kid?” he chuckled, taking the chair in front of her desk. “You know I’m pushing forty.”

“Young compared to me. But so is Methuselah, so don’t be too flattered.” She sat behind her desk with a sigh, and brought out a color scan of a torso, presumably his. “I want to check into the university hospital, right now. Have you been having visual auras lately, migraines, random head pains, loss of consciousness? And please, be honest here.”

“What? What the hell is this about?”

She handed him the scan. He looked at it, seeing the outline of a chest and arms in bluish light, with organs highlighted by various colors, and muscles like traces holding the sketch together. There were also some odd, tiny dark spots scattered around, like a handful of pepper spilled on the image. “What the hell are these specks?”

“They’re not specks; they’re about the size of a pea.”

“Okay, what are the peas?”

She scowled, emphasizing the thin lines gathered around her mouth. He suddenly realized she wasn’t angry, just upset. “They’re tumors. We went through all the digital views of the scans available in the database, and we’ve counted fourteen. There appears to be one in your stomach too, which I really don’t like. I want to check you in right away and get a biopsy of some of these. My hope is this is just a form of hyperplasia and nothing to worry about,  but it’s best we make sure, especially considering how fast it’s come on, and I want to do a brain scan right away to make sure that area’s clean.”

Maybe it was the fact that he crushed a man’s chest less than hour earlier, or all the pain pills, but this seemed unreal somehow. “I thought tumors didn’t spread.”

“They don’t.”

“But I have more than a baker’s dozen of them? How?”

“What do you think I’ve been asking myself?” She sighed and rubbed her eyes, temporarily moving her glasses up to her forehead. “Look, you are a hybrid organism, and your physical adaptation to your unique condition has been miraculous. But there are problems that come with being a hybrid organism, and this is terra incognita. We don’t know what could plague you, we don’t know the full life cycle of the virus, we can only take educated guesses at certain weaknesses. This surprises me as much as you. But we need to work fast to make sure this is contained, that this is not as bad as it looks. Please work with me here, Roan.”

Suddenly things started falling into place, in a very weird way. He wasn’t surprised by any of this, nor was he at all afraid. He knew he should have been, but again, it was all from a remove, from a distance, as if this was happening to someone else. “Brain scan. You think I have a brain tumor.”

Not a question, but she took it as such. “You have a history of migraines and aneurysms, and it’s better safe than sorry. If these tumors have spread everywhere, it’s best to cover all the bases. None of these tumors are especially serious, although we do have to remove the one on your stomach wall and one on your left kidney. But if you have one in your brain, you know how damn serious that is.”

That was the diplomatic answer. He chuckled, suddenly finding this all very funny. “This ain’t gonna kill me. This isn’t how I go down.”

Her glasses settled on the end of her nose, and she stared at him again. “You know this for a fact? You know how you die?”

“For a certain fact? No. But violently seems to be the obvious conclusion. Somebody tried to kill me before I got here.”

“And what happened to them?”

“Crushed sternum, punctured lung.”

She looked alarmed. “Seriously? You fucked them up that much?”

“I didn’t mean to. It got a little out of control on me.”

“Oh, yeah, that’s the other thing. It could explain it.”

“Explain what?”

“A tumor. A small one, in a very specific area of your brain, could be part of the reason you’ve been losing control of your shifts.”

It was turn to stare at her for a very long moment. “Are you serious?”

“Absolutely. It’s only started happening recently, yeah?”

He had to consider that, and even then, he wasn’t sure. “I guess. But …” He didn’t know what he was going to say.

A wave of relief washed over him, so intense it almost brought him to tears. Maybe it wasn’t all his fault; maybe he wasn’t completely insane. Maybe all wasn’t lost.

Maybe he wasn’t lost.

Holden was correct about him knowing Jessie, only when he knew Jessie, Jessie was still on the street – and still a man.

Now Jessie was a social worker of some kind, and a very hippie-ish woman who favored granny glasses, long skirts, and peasant blouses, very much someone he’d describe as a crunchy granola type. Her transition was an impressive one; you barely noticed her Adam’s apple.

He pulled her aside and told her he was worried about the girl because she was so quiet, acquiescent, and never scared. Some people took silence or meekness for fear, but he could smell the difference. As he told Jessie this, she canted her head like a parakeet, looking at him curiously, and when he was done, she said simply, “You were abused, weren’t you?”

He just shrugged. “Who wasn’t?” Now, if she’d ever asked if he’d ever been hit with a crosscut saw, he might have had an emotional moment, but now he no longer cared. Nearly everyone had a “smacked around as a kid” story, and he wasn’t as bad off as Katie. He got scared, he got hurt and scarred, but he never got broken. That had to wait until Paris died.

At least Katie was in good hands now. Even though Holden gave him a funny look, he agreed to take him home, and when they were in the car, he said, “You realize you’re stone cold sober now.”

“Uh huh. I hurt like fuck.” It was a shame to be back to normal, but the partial change had caused him to fully metabolize the pills and the booze. But at least he’d been fucked up enough to keep a handle on the beast for the whole time (more or less). Maybe that was the way forward from now on – get super fucked up and keep in control during the change.

“And yet you’re so cavalier about the violence.”

“Child rapers are the lowest of the low. As far as I’m concerned, whatever they get, it’s not as bad as they deserve.”

Holden stared at him for a moment, before putting the keys in the ignition. “At least we’re on the same page there. Which kinda bothers me.”

What was there to say to that? So he said nothing, and searched his pockets for any pills. He found a couple, and when he was sure Holden wasn’t looking, he dry swallowed them.

By the time Holden dropped him off at the Magnolia place they currently called home, the pain had ebbed to a dull roar. The house was dark and he knew Dylan was upstairs asleep, because he caught his scent still in the air. He must have come home within the hour.

Roan glanced at the only clock in the house with a readable time on it, and wondered how it got so late. It hadn’t taken that long to beat those guys up and get Katie out of there. Maybe it was the drive.

As for the clock, it was designed as a fishbowl, and the minute hand was a goldfish that made the slowest rotation in history, with the hour hand the type of underwater castle you see in a goldfish bowl.  There were no numbers, merely lines, but he could still figure out what time it was. In the living room was a huge clock the size of a hubcap, shaped like a starburst. Did it have any hour markings of any kind? No. It had hour and minute hands that pointed at nothing; you were supposed to guess the time by position. He wasn’t an idiot – he didn’t like to think of himself as an idiot, at any rate – but he found it impossible to read that fucking clock. What was the point of it? It didn’t even look that good as an object d’art.

Staying in this expensive, archly decorated house, it seemed to emphasize the differences between him and Dylan. Roan knew his lower middle class roots were showing in the fact that he found this house almost appalling on several different levels, while Dylan just shrugged and chalked it up to different tastes. But as different as he and Dyl were, he thought this was a good thing. They had separate lives, they weren’t in each other’s business all the time, they had different interests and time apart, all of which was good. He didn’t know how couples who were  together all the time ever made it. You needed your own space. Just because you were married (or civil partnered, or whatever the fuck you wanted to call it) didn’t instantly turn you into conjoined twins.

He took a shower in the absurd downstairs bathroom (this house had three, all absurdly decorated, and large enough to be spacious living rooms) washing away any lingering traces of blood (okay, only he could smell them and barely, but why take the chance), wondering what was so wrong with him that he wanted to take a sledgehammer to this place – because he was sure you could feed all the homeless of Seattle for a year if you sold the furniture? Actually, you could probably feed Tacoma’s homeless as well. And why even have them? The couches were ugly! And uncomfortable. The ninety dollar one he picked up at a thrift shop was comfortable enough to sleep on, and didn’t look like a drunken leprechaun had thrown up psychedelic mushrooms on it.

Oh shit, was he turning into some bitter old queen? (In his mind, he could hear Dee snort and say, “Turning? Try have been and get back to me.”) Bitter, cynical … vicious. That trafficker who took a shot at Holden was dead. Maybe not this second, but he would be. There was no way you could use a man’s skull to shatter a sink and not kill him. He didn’t feel bad about it – he was selling the girl; she had simply been one in a series – but he thought he should. He was hardening, becoming more of a predator by the day. Or was that a convenient excuse?

He went upstairs, to the insanely large master bedroom with its round bed (ludicrous – who had a round mattress, and most importantly, why? Even Dylan admitted he had no idea how they ever bought the sheets for the thing), where Dylan was curled up on one side of the spacious bed. He remembered how the bed was all white when they first moved in – white sheets, white blankets, white shams, whatever those were. (Both he and Dylan found that weird. “We’re just not all white people,” Dylan had said, and Roan ran a hand through his red hair and replied, “Speak for yourself. If I was any whiter, I’d be translucent.”) In a spare bedroom closet, Dylan found a comforter that was a very gay shade of lilac, but at least it was a color, so he moved it to this bedroom and was currently huddled beneath it. Roan crawled into bed carefully, so as not to wake him up.

His eyes were adjusted to the dark, so he could see Dylan’s shoulder, the delicate latticework of bones beneath taut olive skin, and he carefully traced the scapula with his fingertip.

They were a relationship of two different worlds. But it wasn’t the divide people expected. It wasn’t that Dyl was an artist and he wasn’t, or that Dylan was younger than him, or that he was Hispanic and Roan was clearly a whiter shade of pale, or even that Roan was infected and he wasn’t.

It was that Dylan was totally Human, and he wasn’t. He wondered if that would ultimately tear them apart.

****

When his bladder finally forced him awake, Roan found himself confronted with the punishing bright accusation of the sun, streaming through the gauzy white curtains like a stream of curses. He squinted and grumbled as he made his way to the bathroom, which was all white marble and gold colored fixtures, and it took Roan a moment to realize what was wrong: the birds. At home, he could hear the birds chirping sometimes very loudly, as if they were right above his head. Here, the landscaping kept them in the ornamental trees some distance from the house, and perhaps the building materials also kept the outside sounds muted. It was a shame, as he actually had gotten used to the noise, of birds and wind and branches scraping and slapping against the side of the house. He was a city boy and he knew it, so he had no idea why those sounds made him feel better.

Since it was such a sunny, pretty day, he decided to just go ahead and stay in bed with the covers pulled up. He seemed more accustomed to rain, fog, and gloom. Still, he smelled toast, and wasn’t surprised when the door opened and Dylan came in, eating toast and carrying a mug of tea. “So, when were you gonna tell me about the video?”

Roan sighed as he pulled the sheet off his face. “When I found the right moment. I never did.”

Ultimately he compromised with Bolt, and while it didn’t involve him compromising on personal principals, he still felt dirty. He shot a quick video that would be on Divine Transformation’s page and in general on YouTube. It wasn’t much really, just a statement of intent: he would resist any registry, and encouraged any and all infected to do the same. He doubted they’d arrest them all, but he kind of hope they tried, because then the registry would be revealed for what it was. He encouraged them to all stand together, and promised them, the infected viewing audience, that he would fight this as long as he could. There was nothing radical on it, nothing saying he loved the church or even liked them, it was simply a statement of fact. One that might get him investigated by the FBI, but fuck it. Playing it safe didn’t appeal to him.

He sat up as Dylan sat on the edge of the bed, and offered his tea and toast to him, possibly because he thought he might have a hangover. He didn’t, but he was starving, so he accepted them with a nod and helped himself to a bite and a gulp. The toast was at least sourdough, and the tea some weird green tea berry combination that was actually pleasant. “So are you leaving me?” he asked between bites of toast, mostly just curious.

“No. I must say you sounded very reasonable. I have no idea why some people are losing their shit over it.”

“Because I am encouraging the armed rebellion of infecteds against the normals. It’s the apocalypse, and I’m God or Satan, depending on who you ask.”

“I missed the armed part.”

“I think it’s implied, me being me and all.”

“I see.”

He set the tea down on the end table, and put a hand on Dylan’s naked back. He was wearing nothing but pajama bottoms, pale blue with white and red snowflakes on it, and Roan found himself once again entranced by the long lean line of his spine. “I’m just gonna apologize now for all the shit that’s gonna come ’cause of this, okay?”

It was Dylan’s turn to sigh. “You do realize if you start doing that, you’ll have to keep doin’ it forever.”

“Oh, I know. Thanks for not killing me before now.”

He glanced at him over his shoulder, eyebrow raised. “I married the gay Die Hard. What did I expect? I have no one to blame but myself.”

“Did you just compare me to Bruce Willis? I’m insulted.”

He patted his thigh comfortingly. “I meant the character, not the actor. We all know you’re better looking. Even with all the ink.”

“Hey, some of this is yours.”

“The best, yes.”

“That’s right, hon, embrace humility. Speaking of which, how’d the show go last night?”

He seemed to perk up at the very mention. “Pretty well. I sold a few paintings, and someone wants me to do something on commission. Normally I don’t do that kind of thing, but I was intrigued, so I took his number. I figure if I don’t like the idea, I can just back out.”

“His number? Are you sure someone wasn’t just trying to pick you up?”

Dylan smirked at him. He liked it when he showed a little jealousy. “He wasn’t my type. Oh, and a couple of people wanted to buy the photo montage of you. I turned them down, because how could I part with that? It’ll be nice to have a reminder of when you had a rockin’ bod after you get all old and saggy.” He was now grinning like a smart ass at him.

“Old and saggy? You bastard,” he said, and pounced on him, pinning him down to the bed as Dyl laughed. There was something curious about that joke, though – old and saggy. Infecteds didn’t live long enough to get old and saggy, unless they were infected at an advanced age. But since his infection was weird and his body seemed to be adapting to things he never should have been able to adapt to, maybe he did have a shot at becoming old. What would that be like?

It suddenly occurred to him that he never really contemplated the future. He simply lived for the now, because he assumed that was all he had left. Maybe that wasn’t true anymore. How weird would that be? Should it cause him to feel a brief spasm of pure dread? “I will never be old and saggy,” Roan proclaimed, with sarcastic vanity. “I will be beautiful forever.”

“Wouldn’t that require you being beautiful now?” Dylan retorted, smiling.

“Asshole.” He then tickled his ribs, knowing he was ticklish and hated that. He bucked under him, laughing even as he grabbed his wrists and rolled over, pinning Roan beneath his body.

He liked the weight of him, the feeling of his skin against his skin, and Dylan seemed to be aware of that. His smile became playful and sensuous, and Roan returned it to him before they kissed, with the odd sensation of stubble scraping against stubble (neither of them had shaved yet, apparently). Roan’s cell phone, still tucked in the pocket of his jacket on a chair across the room, started to buzz, and since it was right up against the chair’s metal frame, it was hard not to notice. “Ignore it,” Roan said between kisses, wrapping a leg around Dylan’s leg to hold him down. That made him laugh, suggesting he was never even tempted to answer it.

Well, why would he? They had something better to do.

****

Dylan eventually reminded him he said he’d be into work today, and that Fiona would be waiting, so after a quick shower (he didn’t bother shaving) he headed out.

He arrived at the office ten minutes later than usual, but he had a good excuse for being late, although he didn’t need it. After all, he was the boss – who did he answer to?

Fiona was there when he arrived, but so was a stranger. As he came in, she stood up, but so did the stranger. “There you are,” she said, giving him a look suggesting she didn’t find his lateness amusing.

“Sorry. Traffic.” He could have told her he was having sex with his husband, but that was too much information. Besides, he knew that when she watched porn – rarely – she preferred gay porn for some reason, and he didn’t want to give her any kind of mind fuel.

She gestured to the stranger, and said, “We had a walk in.”

“I see.” The walk in was a boy who looked barely old enough to shave. He was a boy of average height and average weight, although tending towards a bit pudgy, a situation not helped by the fact he was wearing two shirts (a long sleeved black shirt beneath a sleeveless white one) and a coat on top of all of that, one of those Army surplus coats in olive drab. He had a floppy haircut, one where his heavy bangs threatened to obscure his eyes, dyed a bottle blond and highlighted with blue and purple streaks. A buckshot of acne highlighted his weak chin, but his pale blue eyes were open and friendly. It looked like he was trying to grow out some stubble, but could only manage a few wispy hairs that were hard to see until you were up close. His mouth was thin and uncertain, like an anxious cartoon character, and as Roan extended a hand towards him, his lips seem to recede further into his face. He looked about fifteen, but the smell of a cologne that wasn’t Axe body spray made him push his age up further. “Hello, I’m Roan McKichan.”

He shook his hand limply; his grip was almost nonexistent, and his hand was cold. “I know, I recognize you from your picture. I’m, um, Oliver Jephson.”

“Nice to meet you. Shall we go into my office?” He didn’t ask where he recognized him from, mainly because he was afraid of the answer.

Not waiting for the kid’s response, he headed into his office, aware of his phone continuing to hum in his pocket. He checked his phone after he got dressed, and discovered it was Seb asking him if he just wanted to make his life harder and cursing him out, showing an uncharacteristic burst of emotion. Maybe because if the registry did become law, it would be Seb that would have to arrest him. He was expecting to get a similar, if more profane, call from Dropkick. It was probably her, so he didn’t answer.

Only when he came in and shut the door did Roan see Oliver was carrying a man purse beneath his coat, adding to his bulky appearance. Since he didn’t smell gun oil on him – just cologne, acne cream, detergent, deodorant, and a smidge of body odor – he wasn’t concerned about its contents. “Can I ask how old you are?” Roan asked, taking a seat behind his desk.

“Um, yeah, I’m twenty two,” he said, taking the seat in front of his desk. He didn’t smell a lie, although the kid was clearly nervous. Was it about this whole scenario, or being alone in a room with him? “I know I look younger, though. I can show you my ID if you want.”

“I’m not selling you booze, kid, don’t worry about it. So what can I do for you?”

The kid settled in his seat uncomfortably, and for a moment didn’t seem to know what to do with his hands. Once he stopped fidgeting, he said, “This is kind of, um, weird. I’m not sure where to start.”

“The beginning’s always good.”

He nodded convulsively. “Yeah.” He scratched his face, clearly considering his options, and just dived in. “So I’m from Milford, Delaware. When I was eight, my dad went missing. He went to work, and he was supposed to come home, but he never did. I remember it was fall, ’cause, like, I was worried about going back to school and junk, you know? I did okay in school, I was just picked on a lot. I was small for my age.”

Was that all? Roan was getting a gay vibe from him, and it had nothing to do with his black painted thumbnail or somewhat high pitched voice, although those helped. There was an undefinable something that just set off his gaydar.

“So anyways, it was really hard. It was big news for a while, and when his car was eventually found in Wilmington, in a vacant lot with its door open and the battery dead, everybody feared the worst. The police never found much, though, and I think by Christmas of that year we figured he was probably dead. Mom didn’t make it official until the summer I turned fourteen though, she had him declared legally dead, then married my step-father Ken.” He rolled his eyes, easily implying that they didn’t get along. “He’s a nice enough guy, I guess, but he and I just couldn’t stand each other, and when I graduated high school, I applied to every college I could think of on the West Coast, to get as far away from him as possible, and I got accepted to the you-dub first.” U-W, otherwise known as the University of Washington. Roan wondered when he was going to get to the point of his visit. “Anyways, just a couple of weeks ago, I was getting photos for a photo essay, and I was on Flickr. You know what Flickr is?”

Was that a veiled old crack? “Photo sharing software and site.”

“Yeah, right. Anyways, there’s this one guy, Rearadmrl42, who takes great photos, and I was looking through some of his shots, and one caught my eye and I wasn’t sure why.” He moved his man purse to his lap and started scrabbling through it, finally pulling out a photo print. Although the photo had a nice composition, it seemed like an otherwise unremarkable street scene, of three men standing and smiling. Two had their shirts off and a third was wearing a too tight tank top in an oddly pastel orange color; all three men had their arms around each other’s shoulder. Roan recognized the building in the background, knew it was taken in Seattle, and the rainbow bedecked float slightly out of focus off to one side indicated it was taken at the pride parade.

Oliver put his finger on the very edge of the left side of the photo and tapped it. “See him?” He was indicating a man in the near background, almost completely out of the shot, but he was in focus, and his profile was visible as he was on his way out of frame. Roan nodded once, just to let him know he had. “This is my dad.”

Oh, okay. Now he knew why he was here.

****

1 – Trix

Roan wondered if there was any way not to feel like a total dick in this situation.

Since he had nothing but time to think, he contemplated this for a while, and he had finally decided no, there was no way not to feel like a dick. The fruity drinks probably helped.

He didn’t like fruity drinks as a rule, but the art gallery’s bar only served drinks in primary colors, with shaved ice in them. Whatever it was he was currently sipping, it tasted of alcohol and a berry juice that might as well have been cough syrup the unnatural color of Windex, and was probably something he shouldn’t have been mixing with Percocets. But did he care? No. He was out of his environment, and felt every centimeter of that pressure.

But he had to be here. This was Dylan’s show, and while Roan had found a nice bench made of clear acrylic and resembled a block of ice, it was tucked in the far corner of one of the back rooms, but he could look down the wide hallway from where he was and see Dylan at the center of a circle of hipsters, entertaining them with stories of artistic folly. Some of those laughs sounded genuine.

Dylan had said he wanted to “show him off”, but considering everything going on, he thought it was best he escape and let Dylan have the spotlight. It was his night, and he should enjoy it.

Exactly what he didn’t want to happen did: someone sat on the bench next to him, a slip of a woman in a spangly silver skirt and semi-sheer black blouse that almost matched her smoky eye makeup and casually upswept raven hair. She looked about twenty, but he judged her to be twenty five or so. “That’s you in the picture down there, isn’t it?” She nodded her head down the hall, where the edge of the picture was just visible.

It was the photo collage of Roan’s painted body, although Dylan was kind enough to crop out his face or any truly distinguishing feature (although if you knew his tattoos, you’d see them in the photos). Dylan had decided to go with a cat theme on him, painting big cats, tiger stripes, spots, paw prints, bloody scratches, all sorts of odd cat related things, in some strange bid for cats’ rights. “My shapely calves give me away?” he wondered. Since he was wearing baggy jeans, a loose t-shirt, and a loose leather jacket (he was loose tonight, inside and out), this was an obvious joke.

She laughed, and it didn’t sound forced. Roan noticed she had stick thin legs, mottled beneath pearl hued hose, ending in heels that looked like some kind of torture device. The fruity drink she had was Kool-Aid cherry red, and smelled like Hawaiian punch spiked with turpentine. “You a professional model?”

That made him snicker. Why the fuck was she flirting with him? Even if he was straight, she could do so much better. “Yeah, right. These scars are painted on. I’m his husband.” He didn’t like saying partner, because it sounded like they belonged to the same law firm.

“Oh!” She said it in a way that suggested she was surprised, but trying not to be. “I knew he was gay, but you didn’t – I mean -”

“I don’t look gay?” He guessed. Well, no, not in this crowd. Even the straight boys were all emo; the gallery stunk of guyliner, high end cologne, and mousse. There were probably more scarves on display here than in Elton John’s closet. While he wasn’t the only one wearing jeans, he was the only one not wearing designer jeans, just pants he bought at Target a couple of years ago on sale (that managed not to get ruined by bloodstains). He suddenly noticed he was wearing his steel toed boots, and those were so scuffed you expected there to be holes in the soles (there weren’t, but you couldn’t be blamed for thinking it).

“No offense. I mean – you just … um …”

“I look like part of the after hours janitorial staff.”

She smiled faintly, not agreeing, but it was implicit. Her lipstick was almost the color of  her drink, making them flush and shiny. “Aren’t you supposed to have fashion sense?”

“So the stereotype goes.”

She studied the side of his face, while he resolutely stared down at the floor. The floor was some kind of contrasting marble – white and black, with veins of gold – and the more he stared, the more it looked like the veins were throbbing. Wow, how fucked up was he? “You look familiar,” she finally said. “I’ve seen you somewhere before.”

“Doubt it. I don’t get out of the crawlspace much.”

She laughed, but it was a forced, breathless kind of chuckle. “Oh! I know where I’ve seen you. I’ve seen you beating up people on TV.”

“That’s what I do. I beat up people on TV.”

She attempted to smile. He supposed he should give her credit for that, but he couldn’t, because she was starting to smell nervous. “You’re that infected cop, right?”

“Not really a cop anymore. More of an independent contractor.”

She didn’t seem mollified or interested. “Does that mean that he – erm, Dylan, is, um -”

“Infected? No. Condoms save lives, honey, use them.” Why had he said that? The problem with being totally wasted sometimes was things just fell out of your mouth and you didn’t even know they were coming.

She seemed uncomfortable, like she wanted to move away but didn’t know how to do it without being obvious about it. Was he interesting until she realized he was infected, or was he a fun gay guy until he reminded her he was a sexual being? Maybe a little bit of both. “Well, umm, that’s good.”

“You an artist?” he asked, if just to cut the tension. He couldn’t actually give a shit, which probably showed in his voice.

“Well, kinda, but I’m really just here to look, you know? He’s a great artist.”

“He is.” The paintings showed off all sorts of styles, from realistic to abstract, and he had a real eye for color. Not that he knew what any of it meant; he just knew Dylan’s art didn’t bring on an urge to smash it, nor did it look like something you might find hanging next to the ice machine in a chain hotel. So that meant it must be even better than he thought it was.

There was a buzz in his coat pocket, his phone vibrating, and he pulled it out to check who it was. Holden. Weird. “Well, this was fun, but duty calls. Enjoy yourself, and don’t worry, you can’t get cooties from me. Fleas maybe, but I wore my collar tonight.” He got up before she could respond, and walked off to a quieter corner, beside one of Dylan’s abstract paintings, splashes of bright, high intensity colors on a black background. Although there was no title given, Roan knew Dylan called it “Eat This, Mark Rothko.”

“Yeah, Holden, what’s up?”

“I’m calling in a favor,” he said, with no preamble. Hookers just weren’t big on the foreplay. “I need back up.”

“I’m not doing a three way.”

“Ha, very funny. No, I may need someone to quickly and quietly knock out a couple of thugs. If you’re not interested, you got Grey’s number?”

He looked around, to make sure no one who cared was listening. “Who are we talking about?”

“Traffickers.”

“What kind?”

“Kids.”

“What?”

“No phone discussion. You in or out?”

Human traffickers meant either some kind of indentured servitude or sex trafficking (although both could apply at the same time), neither good. And somehow, considering it was Holden, he assumed sex trafficking. “In. Where?”

“Come by my place, but make it fast.”

“Yeah, I’m downtown. Should be there in a few minutes.” Holden hung up shortly after the final syllable. What had Holden gotten himself into? He wasn’t sure he wanted to know, but if he needed help, he wasn’t going to turn him down, especially with full caliber scumbags like that.

He slid his way into the group that had metastasized around Dylan, and asked, “Can I talk to you alone for a moment?”

He gave him a sweet smile. “Sure.” To the group, he said, “I’ll be right back.”

As they retreated to a distant corner, Dylan said, in a low voice, “You look fucking miserable.”

“I’m not, sweetie, I’m just trying to stay out of your way. Speaking of which, Holden’s called and asked me for help. Would you kill me if I left?”

“No, not at all. But I will kill you if you get shot.”

“I will not get shot. Cross my heart, and hope to get shot.”

He shook his head and gave him a pained smile, just south of a smirk. “It’s a good thing you’re good in bed, or you’d be so out on your ass.” He kissed him on the corner of the mouth, and gave him a brief, firm squeeze. “Don’t be late.”

“I’ll try not to be. See you at home.”

Dylan had embraced the Zen of living with him. Mainly, he didn’t ask what trouble he was getting into if he absolutely didn’t want to know. This worked just fine for him, as it cut down the number of lies he had to tell in a day.

He had to tell him about the YouTube video he made, as it would be released tonight, starting at midnight. He probably wouldn’t like the tie in with Bolt, but he already told Dylan about his plan to just get arrested if the registry was passed. Dylan didn’t like the idea of him going to prison, but said, “If you feel it’s unjust, you do what you need to do.” How awesome was it to have a Buddhist boyfriend? He was never going to kneecap you on principal; if you had a righteous cause, he would support you, even if he thought you were being a bonehead.

There were cabs hovering around, so he wasn’t worried about finding one. As he exited the gallery, he nodded at a shadowy black man pretending to have a smoke under the eaves of the building, and he gave him the slightest nod back. He was a “floater”, one of the guys who worked with his friend Phil’s security and detective agency. He asked him if he could send a guy or two to the gallery, to keep an eye on things, specifically Dylan. He wasn’t worried about himself, but he didn’t want those FCC dickholes finding out about Dylan just in time to hurt him.

He hadn’t told Dylan about the floaters. There was no point; they were invisible unless trouble happened.

The taxi drive to Holden’s was pretty quiet, possibly because the driver’s English wasn’t so good, but that was fine with him. He only realized how wasted he was as he sat there, feeling like he was floating inside his own head. Whatever was in that Windex drink had more of a kick than he thought. Would he be able to do the muscle thing? Well, if he absolutely had to transform, he supposed he could.

He arrived at Holden’s to find him dressed as anonymously as possible: loose khakis, off brand sneakers, Seahawks t-shirt he picked up in a thrift store, brown canvas jacket a size too big for him (good for concealing weapons). Holden looked at him, and asked, “How many pills have you taken? You look fucked.”

“I was at Dylan’s gallery show.” An answer that was no answer at all.

“Holy shit, was that tonight? God man, I’m sorry. I didn’t put you in the doghouse, did I?”

“No. He knows that’s not my scene, I was just there for moral support. I gave as much as I could, but you know I don’t have a lot of morality to go around.”

“I hear ya, brother.” Holden went to his kitchen counter, and tossed him something from there. When Roan caught it, he saw it was a black watch cap and black faux leather gloves. “Had spares, figure you might want them.” He started putting on his own gloves.

“What’s going on here?” He sat on the arm of his sofa, mainly because he felt a little woozy.

“I have a friend, Jessie, you may know her. She used to work the street, she got out, and now she devotes her time to trying to rescue kids from there. But it’s paperwork and bureaucracy and budget cuts, and she often can’t help as many as she wants. Especially in a case like this. She got word a major trafficker is meeting a guy at a rest stop to sell him a thirteen year old girl. He’s actually going to meet me and we’re gonna get the girl, but he ain’t gonna be paid.”

Roan was sort of glad he was completely shitfaced, because having a sense of unreality attached to it kept him from getting furious. “Is this a hit?”

“No. Jessie wouldn’t get involved in such a thing. I’m just gonna make sure he gets arrested.” He paused briefly. “And maybe make him hurt a bit.”

“That’s what I thought.” He scratched his head, trying to see all the angles of this story with a fogged, addled brain. “If this guy is big time -”

“I know,” he interrupted. “But this looks like a pretty simple set up. These guys don’t travel in an RV full of sex slaves from the Ukraine. It looks like the guy is gonna show up with the girl, and with a couple of foot soldiers, but no more than a car’s worth. They keep this casual, under the radar, so no one ever notices the suburban perv buying himself a little girl at a rest stop at one in the morning. They traffic on a larger scale, but sell smaller.” Holden slipped something in his jacket and then zipped it up. “It sounds simple, but it probably isn’t. Do you think you could take out the guys outside before they can alert the guys inside?”

“Yes.” Maybe he shouldn’t be so confident, especially wasted, but he wasn’t Human. Humans could outnumber him, but they could never stop being Human.

“It would be silly of me to ask if you need a weapon, huh?”

“Yeah.”

He held out his arms as he came out of the kitchen. “Do I look like a perv?”

Roan studied him, actually taking time to consider this. This was a pure vigilante hit, no pretense of detective or cop work, but he was surprisingly okay with that. “Passably. You need an “Official Pussy Inspector” t-shirt.”

“I know. I couldn’t find one on short notice.”

Roan pulled the watch cap on, shoving his hair beneath the hat, so one of his most distinguishing features – his dried blood reddish-brown hair, the only warning ever given to people that they really should avoid him unless they liked pain – was gone. He still had his facial scars and unreal green eyes, but most people thought the eye color was contact lenses, and he didn’t expect the men to stay conscious long enough to notice the scars.

And besides – when did these guys ever go to the cops?

They didn’t go to Holden’s car, but a junky Plymouth he’d never seen before. But that made sense, as this was a junk special, the kind you dumped after it’d been used. It would probably be parted out by sunrise. Roan sat in the passenger seat and let the rumble of the engine lull him for a while. They drove in silence, save for the radio. Holden turned it alternately between KEXP and a fainter, smaller wave station that played nothing but dance music, mainly house and trance, but some harder stuff as well. Holden had to know that kind of music drove him nuts, but then again, KEXP seemed to be playing lots of sensitive singer-songwriter, low fi stuff that, while nice and pleasant, made his balls shrink. He actually preferred the dance music to some of it; at least some of it sounded like it had muscle, like everyone involved wasn’t one chord away from falling asleep. Maybe it was his punk sensibilities rearing their ancient head, but he felt there was something inherently wrong with innocuous music. If you could take it or leave it, where was the passion? He wanted music you could fuck or fight to, and while he did like some of their songs, Fleet Foxes just didn’t fit that bill.

They were closing in on the rest stop when he asked Holden, “So how long have you been doing this avenging angel thing?”

“I don’t really. I just help Jessie out from time to time.”

“So you haven’t been vigilante-ing without me?”

“Is that a word?”

“No. But don’t avoid the question.”

He sighed like Roan was the most wearying travel companion ever. “I’ve never been a shrinking violet. You know that.”

“It’s dangerous, especially without back up.”

“Not necessarily. No one ever expects anything from me. I’m just a whore.”

“That only works once.”

“I know. But that’s usually enough.”

Holden pulled off to the soft shoulder the equivalent of a block away from the rest stop, and Roan walked towards the building, sticking to the darkness. It wasn’t too busy on the highway right now, the few cars out at the moment were a pleasant background hum. Everything in him was telling him this was stupid and would probably end in a bloodbath, and yet he didn’t care. Maybe it was the fact he was wasted, maybe it was just because he really didn’t give a shit, as long as he could beat the holy fuck out of some traffickers.

He smelled cigarette smoke long before he came up on the lighted oasis of the building, a squat, boxy affair that looked as appealing as a shoebox outhouse. (Wow, he was really fucked up.) He heard two male voices too, talking about some incident involving someone else’s girlfriend, a waterbed, and the untimely return of an ex. He didn’t pay attention to what they were actually saying, but he picked up a few things: they were American, and they obviously expected no trouble whatsoever. He smelled gun oil somewhere beneath the tobacco and testosterone, but that wasn’t a surprise.

He was quiet, and stuck to the shadows as long as possible. They never heard him, never broke their conversational stride. As soon as he ran out of shadows and buildings to hide behind, he moved to the few cars in the lot (which was precisely theirs, the one they were standing beside, and the junker Holden drove in, and one that had a missing tire and had probably been here for some time).

He listened for a minute, orienting them in space by the sound and direction of their voices. He used the mirrors and reflective surfaces of metal to visually locate them. They weren’t anything special to look at, two guys around six feet tall (give or take some loose change), with broad shoulders and some pretty good muscles, although that wouldn’t help them. Judging from the bulges, one had a gun in a shoulder holster, and the other had his gun in his belt, near his right hip.  He wondered if either would have time to pull them – he’d do his best not to be that slow. They were both unremarkable men, save for the fact that one had sideburns ending in sharp points, while the other was given a greasy complexion by the sodium lights. He looked like he was melting.

He concentrated, thinking about these men selling kids, women, beating them, murdering them, tapping into the rich vein of rage hidden beneath the numbing calm of the drugs. It was hard to find, but he finally felt the toxic heat of it, let the blackness bubble up from beneath the narcotics, fill his veins like sour adrenaline. He heard the gentle fireplace crackle of bones in his jaw snapping, tasted blood, felt his skin go taut as if trying to peel itself away from his body, and his vision switched from myopia to hyperopia as the change worked on his eyes. They were still Human, but he was becoming something else.

The drugs not only kept most of the pain out of the partial change, but it allowed him to keep more of himself from getting overwhelmed by the cat. He told it quick and quiet, nothing showy, nothing brutal; no playing with prey tonight. Take out the sentries before they could sound the alarm.

He scuttled along the ground, almost on all fours, using the cars and shadow as cover until it became impossible, and then just went simply for surprise, bounding over the back of the men’s car and throwing himself at the men. One of them made a noise of surprise as his tackle brought them both to the ground, and with one hand he rammed sideburns’ head into the asphalt, silencing him, while greasy attempted to squirm away and reach for his gun at the same time. Roan was on him first, throwing a punch that hit him square on the side of the head and knocked him out almost simultaneously. Was he dead? No, he didn’t smell death. But he wasn’t well; neither of them were well. They might regain consciousness by sun up, but he wouldn’t bet on it.

He thought about taking their guns, but no point. They wouldn’t be getting up to use them any time soon. He’d have felt sorry for them, but they deserved worse. He should let the lion bite deep into their throats, tear them out, leave them to bleed.

He let the Human reassert itself, got up to his feet, moved towards the men’s room door of the rest stop. With his hearing as changed as his eyesight, the buzz of the sodium lights was irritating, almost like an endless drone of guitar feedback, but still he could hear voices inside, all male, Holden’s and two others. One of the men had an unidentifiable accent, but the other sounded Midwestern.

All he heard was voices, not words, but from Holden’s low, almost dead tone, he was playing scumbag to the hilt, a man who saw others as pieces of meat. He could probably mimic them perfectly because he’d been bought by them before.

It happened fast, with no vocal inflection change at all. Holden was talking to them, and suddenly there was a shift, a dull thud of violence, a shift in smell and the other male voice, the Midwesterner, now angry. There was a gunshot, the sharp tang of cordite, but Roan had already burst through the door and was on the man before he realized there was someone else in the bathroom.

It was a blur, the drugs no longer participating. As the man swung the gun around towards him, Roan already had his arm, snapped it like balsa wood, jagged ends of bone bursting out of his skin and spilling his blood. The man started to scream, but Roan grabbed him by the face and slammed him down into the sink, with enough force to break it, porcelain chunks breaking like ice and sliding across the tiled floor as the man collapsed bonelessly to meet it, blood splashed over the broken remains of the basin and pipes breaking through the wall, creaking in complaint.

He stood there panting for a second, trying to breathe through his mouth so he didn’t have to smell their surroundings. Blood covered a lot, the man’s blood and the blood of his companion, whom Holden seemed to have knocked out with an object. Beneath it, though, there was a stink of a bleach based industrial cleanser, pine scented urinal cakes, and a piss and shit smell that could never be completely scrubbed away for his kind.

Holden came out from behind the safety of a stall, and only then did Roan noticed the small bullet hole in the far wall, close to him. He looked down at the gunman, at the destroyed sink, at the man’s blood snaking its way towards the drain in the center of the room, and said, “Who needs hockey players when they got you, huh?”

Roan just stared at him, eyes blurring, refocusing, locking on. He wiped the blood from his mouth, and asked, “What went wrong?”

“Timing. I thought I could get them in succession, but that prick moved away at the last second. How were the guys out front?”

“Pathetic.” He knew there was another person here, he could smell them, and he found them crouched down and wedged between a urinal and a sink pedestal. It was a little girl, scrawny for her age – she looked pre-pubescent – in a dress that seemed a little too small for her. Her legs were scabbed and her eyes were hooded bruises in a studiously blank face framed by lank brown hair, and Roan felt something knot in his chest as he realized she was too broken down to even be scared of this situation. Seeking cover was reflex, little more.

He glanced in one of the mirrors to make sure he looked Human, to make sure all the blood was off his face, and then crouched down to be close to her eye level. “What’s your name? I’m Chris.” Yes, he was lying to her, but if he told her his real name and she repeated it to a police officer someday, he was in deep shit. At least Christopher was his middle name.

After a long moment, she said, “Lolita.”

“Your real name.”

She paused again, almost as if she thought this was a trick. Finally, she said, “Katie.”

“Okay Katie. We’re not bad guys, we’re here to rescue you. We’re gonna take you to a safe house, okay? I promise we won’t hurt you.” She didn’t seem convinced, and he couldn’t blame her. She probably heard that a lot. “If it means anything at all to you, my friend and I are as queer as three dollar bills. We’re not gonna hurt you.”

“Hey, I’m a three dollar and fifty cent bill, thank you very much,” Holden said. He was going through the pockets of the unconscious men, but he wasn’t taking their guns. He took some money, and he seemed to leave something in their pockets. What?

He almost held out his hand, and did, but only as a gesture. He kept it out of her reach for the simple reason that he wasn’t going to make a sexual abuse victim touch him, even if it was just to innocuously take his hand. She needed to have some bodily autonomy, and it might as well start here. He nodded and stood, hoping she would follow, and reluctantly, she did.

Holden was done, so he headed out, and Roan waited by the men’s room door, holding it open, waiting for Katie. There was a molten pain radiating from his jaw like something nuclear, the drugs no longer able to fight it.

She glanced at the men on the floor, and he noticed she had the gangly limbs of a teenager, pushing his age estimate up by a year. Finally, she asked, “Are they dead?”

“No.”

She said nothing, but he got the sense she was disappointed. Her refusal to say anything indicated to him she didn’t trust them. He didn’t blame her.

When they got outside, Holden was finished planting things in the unconscious men’s jackets. He promised to get them arrested, and Roan had to assume this was part of it.

The girl got in the back seat of the Plymouth, still quiet and beaten down, enough to make him feel mildly nauseated. People were such shit – wasn’t he glad that he wasn’t completely one of them?

Holden found a cell phone in one of the goons’ coat pockets, and called 9-1-1, lowering his voice and using a passable Spanish accent. As soon as he gave the information required, he snapped the phone in half and tossed the bits into the parking lot.

Holden opened the trunk of the car and pulled out a large envelope, which he put in the backseat of the traffickers’ car, then came around and got in the driver’s side of the Plymouth. As soon as he started the car, Roan asked him, “What was all of that?”

He gave him a sly grin, and said, “Enough rock for a thirty year ride, minimum.”

Roan shook his head, although he didn’t disapprove. It would render this a scene of “drug violence”, and no matter how the men protested it wasn’t and that the drugs weren’t theirs, they wouldn’t dare tell them the truth, so nothing they came up with would make any sense. The cops would never believe the drugs weren’t theirs.

“We’re taking you to a friend of mine,” Holden told Katie, looking at her in the rear view mirror. She didn’t look back or look up. “Jessie will take good care of you, and she’ll help you go home if you want.”

“I don’t wanna go home,” she replied, almost a grumble. Did her parents sell her in the first place? It was possible. People, as he had previously mentioned, were shits.

“I hear ya, sister,” Holden replied. “I wouldn’t go home either.”

There were several miles under their wheels before she spoke again. “They’ll be coming for you,” she said, her voice a dull monotone. Again, she was broken, a shell of who she was. Hopefully she’d recover after she wasn’t abused for a while. “They’ve done it before.”

Holden shook his head. “Not this time. They can’t trace us, can’t find us. You’re as safe as houses.”

She made a negative noise, like she didn’t believe him, and again, he couldn’t blame her.

Holden didn’t either. He pointed at Roan, and said, “He’s standing between your guys and you. Do you think they have a chance?”

She looked at him with her sullen, wounded eyes, and said, “No. He isn’t Human.” So she did see him in his partially transformed state. There was a long pause before she added, “Good.”

That about summed up his feelings right now as well.