Roan stormed out of Fiona’s place with a full head of steam (not just a cliché – it actually felt like it, like his head was a tea kettle, and steam was just going to erupt through his ears at any moment). He called Hatcher’s number and got his machine again, so he simply said, “Either get back to me immediately, or this is all over the web. Hope you’ve had a colonoscopy recently, ’cause the Feds will be crawling up your ass by the end of the day. Close your eyes and think of England, you sick fuck.” He felt like throwing the phone, but he would have broken it. He made himself remember that this was his cell and not Hatcher himself. He just had to wait, then he could pick up Hatcher and throw him, hopefully from a very tall building.

What if his own money grabbing exercise had killed his own son? Would that convince him that maybe, just maybe, this was all a big fucking mistake? Hard to say with raving capitalists sometimes.

He just got in the car when his phone went off, and checking he saw it was home calling. In a way, he hoped it was trouble, because then he could vent some steam on some assholes. “Yeah.”

“Honey,” Dylan said, in a quiet, lilting voice. “I don’t want to alarm you, but our home has been infested by hockey players.”

“Not the entire team, I hope.”

“No. Actually, Tank is a hell of a cook.”

That was a surprise. “Really?”

“Oh yeah! He made these buttery, cheesy omelets that were so good I swear, if he was gay, I’d have left you for him.”

“That’s it. Pack your shit and get out, you disloyal bastard.”

Dylan snickered. “He claims he can only cook breakfasts, though. Omelets, pancakes, crepes.”

“He makes crepes? Hot damn, I’ll leave you for him first.”

“I’ll try and save you some eggs, but hockey players eat like pigs. Scott already had to take off on an egg run.” He paused briefly. “Tank has an interesting story.”

“He’s been talking?”

“No, but he doesn’t have to. There’s a surprising amount of depth in his eyes; he always seems to be thinking. I bet he’s a hell of a lot smarter than he seems to be, probably – no offense to the rest of the Falcons – the smartest guy on the team. He’s also surprisingly good natured for a man I wouldn’t trust around a loaded firearm. Speaking of which, I called my therapist.”

Dylan used to see a therapist on a regular basis, but had quit about two years ago. Roan scoured his brain, trying to dig up the name. “Savage, right?”

“Yes, Doctor Savage. She has an opening on Thursday and can squeeze me in.”

“The problem is me, not you.”

“Bullshit. I learned how to manage my anger effectively, and I back slid. I don’t want to keep falling backwards.”

“Then you probably need to get away from me.”

“None of that. My wanting to protect you isn’t a failing on your part. It’s me needing to deal with my issues.”

“You know, it’s very sweet you want to protect me. Most people figure I’m on my own.” He leaned back in the driver’s seat and closed his eyes. For some reason, anger often exhausted him.

“Well, you are a super macho dude.”

“And inhuman. Don’t forget that.”

He sighed dramatically. “Don’t take this the wrong way, sweetie, but fuck you to hell.”

That made Roan chuckle. Really, he deserved no less. “You okay?”

“Yeah, just a little tired. I still can’t believe someone did that. Also, I can’t believe I’m entertaining a bunch of jocks from Canada.”

“Grey’s American.”

“Which explains so much about him. Of course he’s the team enforcer. Can we sue the Falcons for stereotyping?”

“You know, you’d think we should be able to. But it’s a fair cop, and society is to blame.” It was stuffy in the car, so he rolled down the window, and noted how much better he was feeling. When he first got in here, he was ready to kill someone (Hatcher). Talking to Dylan had pulled him back to sanity, which was probably the best thing for everyone involved.

“You can’t go to the Monty Python well forever.”

“You’ll pry Monty Python from my cold, dead hand.”

“Wow. There’s so many things wrong with that sentence.”

“Yes, well, there’s so many things wrong with me.”

“Knock off the self-pity shit. But does that explain why you sounded so pissed off when you answered the phone?”

“Yeah, I was expecting another call. In fact, I’d better get off. And you’d better buckle up, ’cause there might be a shitstorm after this.”

“Another?” He sounded genuinely exasperated. “I know money is tight, but can we go somewhere and get you away from all this trouble you seem to be causing? Drive to California or something? What about Canada? We can go back to Canada.”

There was almost a plea in Dylan’s voice that made Roan feel bad. He was putting him through the ringer, hurting the only person he really didn’t want to hurt. He had to make this right with him, but he didn’t know how, or even if he should. If Dylan was a friend, describing a relationship with someone else, he’d have advised him to pack up his shit and run, put as much distance between him and this drama magnet boyfriend as possible. It was what he should tell Dylan now, only he wasn’t that noble. “Once we get through this, we can go wherever you want. You pick the place.”

Dylan thought about it a moment. “Atlantis.”

He smiled weakly at his attempt at a joke. “The place has to actually exist.”

“Damn it. What is it with you and these picky loopholes?”

“I’m an asshole. Now I know it’s a pain in the ass, but stick with the rough boys ’til you hear from me again.” The rough boys were, of course, Grey, Tank, and Scott (and any secondary Falcons they may have roped into this baffling guard duty).

He sighed heavily and seriously. He probably hadn’t been thrilled to wake up and find everyone else but Roan in the living room. “And when will that be?”

“I don’t know, honey. Soon, I promise.” He paused, looking out the windshield, finally noticing it needed to be cleaned. If these Aryan fucks weren’t amateurs, he knew leaving Grey, Tank, and Scott to protect Dylan wouldn’t be enough, would just get them all killed, but they were amateurs, and Grey alone would be enough to take them out. But the others were just insurance, a guarantee that no matter what, Dylan would get through this okay. Physically okay, at any rate. “I love you.”

“You’d better,” he replied, in mock anger. “And remember, you’re not indestructible. Don’t do anything stupid.”

“You know damn well it’s too late for that.”

Roan waited for Hatcher to call him back, but he didn’t, and by the time he was driving along the lake, headed for his extravagantly expensive house, his anger had swelled to a nearly unmanageable size. He called Fiona to let her know he was going in, and if she hadn’t heard from him within in an hour, to go ahead and let it run. She was ready to post at some hardcore tech sites, giving them the breakdown of Hatcher’s connections to the website. Not only would it then spiral, as web gossip was wont to do, but she was convinced there’d be some quality Hatcher hating crackers (not hackers – that was apparently a gauche term) who’d infiltrate anything of Hatcher’s they could get their hands on. She was sure, illegal or not, they’d dig up even more dirt.

He drove up to the gate and gunned the engine. As soon as the speaker clicked on, he said, “Either let me in or I bring this gate down. There’s enough steel in this car to do it.” There was. Oh, how he loved Paris and his love of Road Warrior cars even more now. He could drive this puppy through the gate and straight into his living room, and with its huge windows, it wouldn’t even be remotely difficult. He could probably keep the GTO going until the kitchen before he met sufficient resistance.

He was starting to judge how far he’d have to back up before getting sufficient momentum (Paris also made sure the engine could go from zero to sixty in almost no time at all) when there was a buzz, and the gates started automatically opening. Believed him, did they? Good; they should, because he was more than ready to do it. Oh sure, Hatcher could sue him for property damage, but fuck it – he was too poor to ever be able to pay him a cent. He probably knew that.

He screamed up the drive, ignoring the pristine view of the water, and barely stopped before he collided with the ornamental fountain. He launched himself out of the GTO like a bullet, stomping up to the door and almost colliding with it before officious Andrew opened it and stationed his narrow, angular form in the entryway. “Mr. Hatcher does not -” he began, his voice cold and sharp.

Roan snarled. Not a Human approximation, but the real thing; he let enough of the lion out that it was happy to make itself known. Andrew jumped, and Roan continued growling while he forced himself to spit out words, which sounded like he was trying to talk through a mouthful of broken glass. “Get out of my way, or pay for it.”

Roan pushed through the doorway, and Andrew was backing up in horror, mouth opening and closing dumbly, a pale hand fluttering to the base of his throat. Had he started changing? Roan honestly didn’t know. He knew his jaw hurt, he knew his vision was a little blurry, but that often happened when he was this angry. It didn’t mean he’d changed; it just meant he was on the verge of losing his shit. But the way Andrew was acting, the way the fear reek came off of him like bad intentions, maybe there was some change occurring, something (even if it was only anger) was transforming his face.

They were in the sterile, expensively appointed front room before Roan was even aware of it, bathed in so much light it was like being in heaven’s waiting room. Hatcher appeared in the archway of his study, and said, “Would you stop terrorizing -” Hatcher’s sentence petered off as he stared at Roan, and his expression was a studious blank, a wonderful poker face that actually told him all he needed to know. Hatcher was scared too.

Roan walked around Andrew and headed straight for Hatcher. “You motherfucker …”

“I don’t know what you think you’ve found -”

“Fuck you!” Roan roared, a genuine roar, and he had no idea if the words were even recognizable to anyone else. He gave Hatcher a flat palmed shove in the chest, and he seemed to fly across the room, hitting the window wall hard enough to have all his breath knocked out of him. It was probably double paned or maybe bulletproof glass, otherwise Hatcher might have sailed right through it, although Roan thought he’d barely touched him. “Visionics Limited,” he rasped, trying to get his growling under control. “Tabu triple x. Your site, you own it.”

Now Hatcher looked baffled as he gasped in breaths like a newly surfaced drowning man. “What? What the hell is this, McKichan? Why -”

“People are dead because of you. They died because of you. You’ve probably killed your own son. You should join them.”

Something new and genuine blossomed on Hatcher’s face, and it was enough to make Roan pause. Confusion, fear, despair, all warring for supremacy. “What? What are you talking about? Where’s Jordan, what’s happened to him?”

Roan studied him carefully, head cocked to the side, looking for the tell, for the twitch that would let him know this was a bluff, Hatcher busting out his acting skills in an attempt to escape justice. But no, his sudden anxiety seemed genuine. Roan decided to interrogate him and make his next move accordingly. “Visionics Limited. You own it.”

“No!” He exclaimed it out of reflex, and he looked like a man who had suddenly lost his footing climbing a mountain. He scrambled for a new verbal foothold. “I – I own it with Conrad Maddux. Why?”

A new name. Not what he needed right now, as he always found it difficult to think like a Human when the lion was out. “Who’s he?”

“A business partner. He takes care of …” Hatcher paused, trailing off.

“He owns the porn sites,” Roan finished for him. “He takes care of that side of the business.”

He looked like he wanted to deny it, but Hatcher glanced at Roan’s face and looked away, down at the floor. It wasn’t a tell; he was too scared to look at him. Why he didn’t look at the flatscreen turned to some British financial news program he didn’t know, but Roan could see the stock readouts scrolling out of the corner of his eye, see the blandly handsome newsreader talking to a man who looked like an animate scarecrow. “Yeah.”

“The site is killing people.”

“No.” He began shaking his head. “It’s fake. It’s all fake. You couldn’t -”

“There’s bodies. It’s stopped being fake.”

Hatcher froze, his posture stiff, his hands clenching at his sides. “What? You can’t have … it’s not here …”

Wow. Maddux had fucked Hatcher; he’d changed the rules of the game and not even told him. “It is now. Where would it be?”

Hatcher was shaking his head again, and it seemed pathetic, like a child trying to refuse his punishment by rejecting reality. “He wouldn’t dare. You don’t shit where you eat. You don’t bring it into America …”

“He did. And Jordan’s there, Hatcher. Now tell me, where would he put it?”

“Jordan?” Now he looked at him, too shell shocked to be scared. “Why would he -”

“He found the site. You went over his computer, you must’ve seen it.”

“Yeah, but so? It’s a porn site! It doesn’t mean -”

A snarl of anger escaped him before Roan reined it in. “It’s not just a porn site. It’s fake death, it’s people fucking and killing each other; pretend or not it’s sick. I think he may have wanted to get into the business himself, but decided in the end to go hands on.”

Hatcher started shaking his head again, but his eyes had the sudden shine of sickening knowledge. “No. He wouldn’t be that stupid. He wouldn’t -”

“I saw him.” Roan remembered the screen cap Holden had sent him, and made his hands work, made them come out of fists and search his pockets for Dylan’s phone, which he still had. He found it, but he needed to focus to get back into Human mode, to use his fingers and read words. With it, his anger faded, but it didn’t disappear; it remained in the background, as loud as the BBC, brighter than the late afternoon sunlight. Roan found the photo still, and  tossed the phone at Hatcher. It bounced off his chest before he caught it in his hands clumsily, and when he looked at the phone’s screen, he didn’t seem to get what he was seeing. Finally, he said, “What -”

“Friend of mine started going through the film clips, looking for recognizable victims. Jordan was taking part in one of the movies.”

Hatcher didn’t react at first. Then his expression fell, and his hands started shaking. “No,” he said, his voice a stunned whisper.

“He was a fucker not a fuckee, if that makes it -”

“Noooooooo,” Hatcher said louder, drawing out the syllable to a near wail, tears welling in his eyes, his hands shaking so badly it looked like he was going to throw the phone himself. He sank down the window slowly, as if melting, finally sitting on the floor, back starting to curve like he was about to become an O. He was watching Hatcher break, and Roan wasn’t sure how he felt about that. It should have been triumphant, but it was just sad. He was the world’s biggest fuckhead and his son was clearly trying to follow in his footsteps, but they were still as depressingly human as all the rest of them.

He got a chokehold on the lion inside of him and pulled it back as he asked Hatcher, “Did you send someone after me? Skinheads?”

He was shaking his head vehemently, but he wasn’t sure if it was at the realization his son had joined the death circus or if it was aimed at his question. “No.”

Roan was a bit disappointed, mainly because he wasn’t lying. So if Hatcher hadn’t sent the white trash army after him, who did? Well, easy answer: Conrad Maddux, the silent partner. “Where do I find Maddux?”

Hatcher almost seemed to be in a trance of despair, but after several long seconds, he said, “Osaka.”

“Japan?” Okay, it wasn’t really a question – was there an Osaka, Texas? - he was just shocked. He expected Hatcher’s hands on guy to be within arm’s reach. He probably should have known better. Thanks to the internet, you didn’t need to be on the same continent as your immediate employees. “Does he have an employee, a manager doing his bidding? Who’s he? I need names.”

“I don’t know.”

“How can you not know? A man like you, a paranoid despot, you should know what your workers do in their free time -”

“I don’t know!” Hatcher shouted angrily, despair slamming against his resolve and coming out as fury. “We keep enough distance between us that he can’t be tied to me! I don’t fucking know who works for him!”

And that made sense. He was a “silent partner” after all. If he got caught up legally, he couldn’t be officially tied to Hatcher; Maddux would go down alone, and keep his mouth shut if he knew what was good for him. How much money did you have to spend to get that kind of loyalty? How much of your soul did you have to sell to make money off what was essentially necrophilia porn? There was so much here he didn’t and couldn’t understand. He needed to find Dennis Cooper some day and ask him if he could explain any of this stuff to him.

Hatcher bolted up to his feet and lunged for his desk, anger making him move faster than he probably had in years. He clipped a Bluetooth onto his ear and called Conrad, but did he talk? No, he was leaning on the desk like it was the only thing keeping him on his feet, and he began screaming, “You fucking bastard, give me back my son! If you’ve hurt him I swear to god I will have you killed! Do you hear -”

Roan ripped the Bluetooth off his ear, and exclaimed, “Idiot! You’ve just given him fair warning to pack his shit and run.” Roan held the device up to his ear, to see what Maddux had to say to his angry boss, but there was just a mechanical voice asking if he was satisfied with his message. Hatcher had gotten the man’s machine.

Hatcher glared at him, the look in his eyes wild and mad. Insane mad and angry mad; he was covering the spread. “He can’t run from me.”

Hatcher certainly believed that. Roan wasn’t sure he did.

Roan tossed his Bluetooth on the desk, having no further use for it, but Hatcher didn’t seem to notice. He was in some ugly place inside his own head, only marginally aware of the outer world. “Find him,” he said, his a low croak. “Find Jordan. And burn that fucking place to the ground.”

Hadn’t Hatcher noticed that was exactly what he was trying to do?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I got sobbed on.”

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

He didn’t dare ask what that was.

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

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

“Mandy’s your cat?”

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

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

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

“I’m okay. Thanks, though.”

“What about another shirt?”

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

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

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

“He tried to burn down your house.”

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

“How’s Dylan?”

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

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

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

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

“Who the hell’s Dermot Cook?”

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

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

“No, he’s dead.”

“What?”

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

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

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

“For the snuff site? Six months ago.”

“From before he died?”

“No, hon, six months ago.”

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

“No one. It’s a dummy corporation.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thompson snorted. “Nazis? Yeah.”

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

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

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

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

“Mixed.”

“Could they be after him?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Need a favor.”

“More tough guy work?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Profoundly full of shit?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Sadly.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“N-no-”

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

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

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

“No.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What did you do with a dichotomy like that?

Roan pulled out his IV and then excused himself to sneak into the bathroom, mainly because he had to take a piss, but he also wanted to have a look at himself in the mirror. He held a wad of toilet paper to the IV exit wound until he forced a minor change, and got the skin to heal up enough that he didn’t have to worry about it.

Yeah, his beard was way too thick, and frankly it made him look a bit crazier than usual. But the worst part was his eyes. His blood vessels had healed, so his eyes were normal white, shot through with a couple of typical red capillaries. They looked fine, normal, except he knew they weren’t. His eyes were a lie, hiding a nature that was inhuman and inconstant. “Stop being such a freak, freak,” he muttered to himself, quietly, so no one else heard and had him committed.

When he stepped out, Doctor Rosenberg had gone, and Dylan and Tank were back. It was like an odd version of visitor musical chairs, except no one was sitting. Dylan did have the now empty tote bag slung over his shoulder, though, and Tank was holding the flowers. “Ready to go?” Dylan asked, trying to be chipper.

He nodded. “I’m starving. Can we stop somewhere on the way home?”

“Of course. What do you feel like?”

“Good question.” Roan held out his hand towards Tank, and he handed him the bouquet. Roan took the beer out, and handed it to Tank. “Hold on to that for me ’til we’re out of the hospital, okay?”

“Sure.”

Dylan eyed it in shock. “You brought him a beer?”

“He likes beer.”

“I like beer,” Roan echoed with a nod.

Dylan rolled his eyes and shook his head, and as they headed out into the hall, he asked Tank, “Is he a member of the team now? Did I miss a press conference?”

“He’s an honorary member,” Tank told him, struggling with the pronunciation of “honorary” for a moment. That was a hard word for those with pronounced French accents. “We expect him to jump on the ice and participate if there’s ever a bench clearing brawl.”

They were walking down the hall, more or less shoulder to shoulder, but Roan could tell Dylan wasn’t overly pleased with this. “Do you expect any?”

“No, but it is hockey, so it could happen. And I hope it happens when we’re playing the Wheat Kings. I’d love to unleash Roan on this center, Constantin Bourdin. He thinks he’s Sidney Crosby, but the only thing he has in common with him is whining like a little puss. He needs to be beaten like a pinata full of Krugerrands.”

That made Roan stop to laugh, as it was one of those overwhelming, hard laughs that almost paralyzes you. It took him a moment to get himself under control, to find Dylan and Tank waiting for him, Dylan looking mildly concerned, and Tank faintly, absently smiling. “That is the best metaphor I have ever heard. Can I use that?”

“Knock yourself out.”

“Awesome.” He wiped the tears from his eyes with the back of his hand, and as they started down the hall again, he held out the flowers towards a passing nurse. “Can you give these to someone who needs them?”

The nurse started at them and then him, but after a moment seemed to recognize him. “Oh, Roan, sure.” She took the flowers and moved on down the hall.

“Who was that?” Dylan wondered.

Roan shrugged. “No idea.” Dee seemed to know so many nurses and paramedics, Roan just assumed they knew him until it was obvious they didn’t.

They said goodbye to Tank in the parking lot, where he gave him the beer, and, much to his shock, a slightly clumsy hug. Roan patted him on the back and thanked him, letting him know he could visit him and bring him beer any time.

As soon as he and Dylan were in the car, he opened the beer and took a swig, and told Dylan, “I’m not going to drop dead any second, so you don’t have to worry about that. I’ve adapted.”

Dylan gave him a steady gaze that Roan had learned to interpret as ‘What the fuck are you on about?’ It was close enough. “What does that mean?”

“Fuck if I know. Rosenberg told me I most likely had an aneurysm, but it stopped, because I continue to adapt.” His mysterious anger returned, and he started to rant like a crazy person on  a bus. Tears blurred his vision, but he wasn’t sure if they were sad or angry; probably both. “I’m gonna be the longest living infected ever. I’m gonna outlive them all, maybe as a human, maybe as a cat, maybe as a huge fucking bipedal virus -”

Dylan cupped his cheek with his hand, and that’s all he did, but it startled him into silence. He then leaned over and kissed him softly on the forehead. “I love you, no matter what. You know that.”

Roan rested his forehead against his and put a hand on his chest. Sweet man, one he didn’t deserve. “I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

“The insanity that is my life. Me.”

“Hey, I signed up for this ride. I knew from past experience that sexy men were always trouble, and it wasn’t like your reputation didn’t precede you. I have no one to blame but myself.”

“You think I’m sexy?”

“Don’t fish for compliments.” He gave him another kiss, then sat back in the driver’s seat. As he put the keys in the ignition, he asked, “You’re one hundred percent certain that Tank is straight?”

“What are you implying?” He took another swig of the beer. If it was this good warm, it must have been a thousand times better cold. He looked at the label, but alas, it was in French. It had a picture of a sword and shield on it, though. What the hell was it, Gladiator Beer? (Motto: For Those About To Die, We Beer You.)

He shrugged a single shoulder and shook his head, but as he started his car he just sat and stared at the windshield for a moment. “He’s fascinated by you. It’s definitely a man crush in one sense or another.”

“At least it’s mutual.” Dylan raised an eyebrow at that. “C’mon, he’s fucking cool. Anyone who can catch a thrown bottle before it smashes me in the face and stop a fight simply by scaring the shit out of the opponents is in my good books.”

The surprised look turned alarmed. “He did what now?”

He patted Dylan on the shoulder. “You should be glad he was there. When he does his intense crazy man act, no one wants to fight. They just want to run away and hide.”

“The fact that he has an intense crazy man act is alarming.”

“He’s a goalie. He’s gotta do something to defend himself.”

“They have big sticks.”

“If they hit someone with it, they’re penalized.”

“Oh. Is it because they could decapitate someone?”

Roan shrugged. “No idea. But you’d think.”

Once they were on the road, Roan turned on the radio, which was on one of the alternative stations (ah, Western Washington – there were a couple of “alternative” stations, but what it was the alternative to he had no idea), and they were playing Modest Mouse. When he heard the line “It coulda been, shoulda been worse than you will ever know -” he almost laughed. That was his medical diagnosis for the day.

They discussed where they’d stop for a bite to eat, and they decided on a nearby bakery, as Roan felt like sugar. He also asked Dylan if he’d found out about all that domestic partnership registry bullshit, and he said he had, which was good, as Roan figured they’d need to get that done before he disappeared into Willow Creek to be scanned within an inch of his life, in case something went wrong or the CDC decided to lock him up as a public menace.

Dylan hadn’t brought his cell phone, but he’d brought his own, so he borrowed it to call Holden. Dylan was off at the glass topped counter, ordering pastries and a green tea, while Roan sat at one of the tiny corner tables, feeling as gay as he had ever felt. Even when he married Paris he didn’t feel this gay. It was probably all the lace tablecloths and the ceramic teapots with Delft flowers on them. He suddenly wanted to camp it up like Pat Robertson was in the room.

He fought back the urge and called Holden (the gay hustler – well, this was a pretty fucking gay thing to do). The phone rang four times and he thought he was going to get shunted to his call messaging when he finally picked up. “Hey, Roan, I was gonna visit you later,” he said, sounding slightly breathless.

“Did I interrupt something?” He felt intensely weird calling during one of Holden’s “dates”. It seemed like a grotesque invasion of privacy that he wanted no part of, even from a distance.

“No, I was just doing my crunches,” he said, audibly taking a drink. “Hundred a day. Can’t get six pack abs, but I still have to work to keep the flab away. It’s fucking unfair.”

Roan grunted an affirmative. As much as he found flat stomachs sexy, he actually felt working towards them was too much bother and not worth it. Which was why he’d probably lucked out in having his wonky metabolism, which sometimes made it difficult to keep weight on (especially when he transformed all the time). But wasn’t he just partially hospitalized for undernourishment, even though he ate a whole pizza? It was a fucked up world, and he couldn’t see eating like Mr. Creosote just to keep the pounds on. Life was too short (more in some cases than others), and frankly, he probably didn’t have the budget for it. If only being a superhero paid. “I was afraid you’d gone to meet snuff guy without me.”

“Oh hell no. I’m just bait, the sidekick who gets kidnapped and has to be rescued. You’re the macho hero who rides in and kicks ass.”

“Says the guy who stabbed the two asshats that assaulted him.”

“I never said I was completely helpless. I’m just not the demolition man that you are.”

“Ha.”

“So you out?” He could only mean out of the hospital, as he’d been out forever.

“Yeah. It wasn’t bad as it could have been, I just pushed myself too hard.”

“Wow, that’s new,” he replied sarcastically.

“Don’t you start.” Dylan came to the table, bearing a tray of pastries and a cup of mango scented green tea. Roan gave him a nod of thanks and reached for the gooiest pastry, the one coated in what looked like chocolate icing with almost tar like consistency. Of course nothing here was a doughnut, everything had a French or Italian name, but damn it, it was a doughnut under an assumed name. He took a bite and enjoyed a minute of sugar coated bliss. Here was those ten thousand calories that Rosenberg wanted him to eat in a single pastry.

“Snuff guy hasn’t gotten back to me yet,” Holden admitted, with a disappointed sigh. “I don’t know if I’m not the type he was looking for, too professional, or too old.”

“Old? Come on, you’re not old.”

“Yeah I am. In hooker years, I’m like eighty. So I’m trying to get someone else in on this. I’m thinking Phoenix will be up for it. He’s a tough kid, he did a gig or two with Coyote so he’s good for the revenge angle, and he’s twenty three but looks seventeen, so I can’t see them ignoring this bait.”

He scowled down at the neat lace tablecloth. He didn’t like exposing someone he didn’t know to a bunch of murderous assholes. He didn’t feel good exposing Holden to them either, but at least he took some consolation in the fact that Holden was a much harder target than he looked. He could play up his lisp and seem super harmless, but people really had to not be paying attention to the look in his eyes, which was hooker hard and merciless. Everything had a price. “We don’t even have a workable plan. How can you bring someone else into this?” He was careful not to look at Dylan, as he knew the look Dylan would be giving him.

“I don’t like it either, but letting them get away is not an option.”

Well, he had to give him that. They’d killed three people that they knew about – who knew how many more that hadn’t been found? If they’d found one body for every two killed (a low estimate), that still put the body count at six.

“Oh, there was something I wanted to show you. You on your phone?”

“I’m on Dylan’s phone.”

“Web enabled?”

He checked. “Looks like it. Why?”

“I’m gonna send you a screen capture. I’ve been trying to comb through the films, trying to spot any recognizable faces. I’ve heard from a couple of girls working the street that Ebony has just dropped off the map, so I’ve been looking for her, and I noticed this kid and he looked familiar, but I couldn’t place him. I thought you might know him.”

“Send it on.”

He did, although it took a minute, and the screen cap wasn’t the greatest. (Although he didn’t blame Holden for that; the snuff filmmakers were clearly using bargain basement cameras, and often lit things so the faces of the participants weren’t visible.) But he could make out what was essentially a profile shot of a kid – teenager, or someone in their early twenties – with close cropped black hair and a pointy sweep of bangs that almost made him look like an anime character. But what gave him away was his strong chin, not square but heavy, strangely rugged on such a young man. Roan felt a shock down to his toes, and the pastry turned to cement in his gut. Why did things always get worse? Was he cursed? That was it, wasn’t it? Some angry anti-cat hetero cursed him to have a life full of drama. If he believed in any sort of god, he’d have happily blamed it.  “Was he a participant or a victim?” he finally asked Holden.

“Participant, at least in the film I caught him in. Why? Who is he?”

He rubbed his eyes, wondering what he was going to do with this information. It was probably too late to save him. “It’s Jordan Hatcher, the boy I was hired to find.”

The question was, how did he get mixed up in this? And how much did his father know?

Roan woke up in bed, and was so warm and cozy he decided he wasn’t getting up. Except things started nagging at him, little things he couldn’t quite dismiss as easily as he wanted to. Like the fact that the body cuddling him was a bit too large to be Dylan, and also, smelled ever so faintly of tiger.

Paris would do this a lot, not so much snuggle against him as cover him like a blanket. He rather liked it actually, he loved the smell of him and the feeling of his weight, the way his warm skin felt against his. It felt like Paris was trying to protect him even in their sleep, and while he would normally balk at the idea of anyone protecting him, he still liked the comfort of it.

He was aware this was all wrong, yet at the same time he actually didn’t give a shit. “Am I supposed to think I’m dead or something? ‘Cause you know, even if I believed in an afterlife, I know this wouldn’t be it.”

“Why?” Paris asked, in his teasing voice. “Am I not divine?”

He sighed heavily, although he felt a twinge in his chest. That was exactly the kind of cheesy joke Paris would make. “I’m brain damaged, is that it? I had an aneurysm, and a section of my brain has died. Now I think you’re here, or I’m imagining it as a comforting fantasy.”

Paris stroked his hair and nuzzled his neck, which was familiar and nice. “You have to be cynical about everything, don’t you?”

“I know this is my subconscious or unconscious, or a hallucination. I’m just wondering how bad it is.”

“How would I know? I’m you.”

“Good point.” Paris’s hand was on his stomach, so he picked it up and kissed his palm before letting it fall back on his chest. “I miss you.”

“I know sweetheart,” Paris replied sympathetically. “But you have Dylan now. You love him, don’t you?”

“Of course I do.” It was funny, but while he could easily lie to himself, he couldn’t while he thought he was talking to Paris. “But not like you. It’s different.”

“It would be. But you be good to him. Hear me?”

“I hear you. But if I’m a drooling vegetable, there’s no way I can be.”

“Like that would ever happen to you,” he said, giving him a quick kiss on the nape of his neck. “You’re a superhero, remember? You can only die on television.”

Roan was puzzling over that cryptic comment when he woke up, not overly surprised to be in an uncomfortable bed, surrounded by the horrible smells of a hospital.

But having Tank in his room? Yeah, that was a surprise.

For a moment, he thought he was still dreaming, but then Tank noticed he was awake, and said, “Bon jour, Roan. How you feeling, ‘ey?” Tank had started growing facial hair that looked like a combination between a soul patch and a goatee; it was hard to say if it was intentional or accidental. It was also, oddly enough, a reddish gold, whereas the unruly mop of hair on his head was a sort of a polished cedar color. He was standing up near the back corner of the room, and it looked like he’d been checking a text message on his phone. Only now, with this new weird facial hair, did Roan see an oh so slight resemblance to late Alice In Chains singer Lane Staley, although Tank was shorter, more muscular, and undoubtedly much more Quebecois (and less heroin addicted).

Roan stared at him a moment. “What are you doing here?”

He didn’t seem at all offended by the slightly confrontational nature of the question. “I heard you were in the hospital, yeah? So I thought I’d drop by, see how you were doing.” He picked up a big bouquet of flowers wrapped in blue paper off the room’s lone chair. “I brought you these.”

Again, this remained so weird he wasn’t sure he was awake. But why would he dream that facial hair? “I’m not really a flower kind of gay.”

“There’s a beer in it.” He reached into the bouquet, and slid out the top of a beer bottle, which seemed hidden by a large yellow spider mum.

“I love you.”

“I’ve visited lots of people in hospitals,” he said, putting a strange emphasis on the final syllable. “I know ways around things.” He put the bouquet down on the chair again, carefully, as if he was afraid the beer might roll out.

“Microbrew?”

He nodded. “Canadian, not that watery American piss.”

“Will you marry me?”

That made Tank grin at him, and it was oddly childlike. And unlike many hockey players, he appeared to have all his teeth. “If I was gay, I’d be all over you. I gotta thing for redheads.”

What on Earth did you say to that? He didn’t know, so he switched topics. “Where’s Dylan?” He was here, wasn’t he? What if he wasn’t here? He’d taken it for granted that Dylan would be here, but that wasn’t right, was it? Maybe this was what Paris – his subconscious – was trying to warn him about. What was in all this worry and stress for Dylan? He might come to his senses and decide that he simply wasn’t worth all this pain.

“He went to talk to a doctor I think. He wanted to -” he paused, and his face screwed up briefly, like he didn’t like the taste of the word. “- damn. If he mentioned it, I forgot. Sorry. If I’m not in game mode my attention wanders sometimes.”

“You don’t have ADD, do you?” This was a joke.

Tank shrugged, as if the question was serious. “I exhaust my concentration. Sounds funny, doesn’t it? But I focus so tightly during games it’s like I don’t wanna do it if I really don’t hafta.”

“I believe it. You have sniper like concentration.”

“Hardest part of being a goalie. It’s not guys lobbing shit at you or gettin’ in your face, it’s concentrating on a tiny, fast moving piece of rubber while noise and people and lights are all around you, and just knowing without looking too hard who your guys are and who aren’t. I’d rather catch hundred mile an hour slapshots than have to deal with a three on five with really hungry players and an angry, noisy crowd.”

This was all very interesting, mainly because Roan only knew that goalies were generally considered to be nuts; he had no idea of their perspective on things. As he sat up, he said, “Your reflexes are great, you know. I think they’re equal to mine.”

Again, that unselfconscious grin. Roan couldn’t help but think of most jocks as total assholes, but there was something very likable about Tank. There was something very off-putting too, but once you got to know him it seemed like less of a worry. He was just an odd man, not scary odd (not constantly), just weird. “I’d hope they’d be better. You know how hard I’ve trained?”

Roan was going to point out he was superhuman, therefore Tank shouldn’t feel bad about a draw, but that seemed both arrogant and presumptuous, so he didn’t say anything. He simply sat up and looked at the IV drip in his arm, trying to determine if it was just saline or something more, when Roan decided to ask, “Why have you visited lots of people in hospitals? Is it sports related?”

He shook his head and scratched his arm. He was wearing jeans and a powder blue t-shirt that seemed to be advertising a seafood place in a city called Trois-Rivieres (he was guessing, because the words on the shirt were all in French), and where he scratched Roan could see both an old inoculation scar (?) and a tiny tattoo of a blue sun, with rays like starfish arms. “Sometimes. But mainly it was ’cause of my grandpa and my mom. My grandpa had emphysema that eventually killed him, and my mom got pancreatic cancer when I was a teenager, and she spent the last two months of her life in a hospital.” He shrugged again, but there was a little moment of pain in his eyes, hidden in a frown.

“I’m sorry.” Pancreatic cancer was a real bitch too. All cancers were bad by definition, but some were worse than others.

He shook his head, and the darkness that had briefly clouded his vision disappeared with the return of a friendly smile. “Nah, it’s okay. I learn things. Like how to steal meds from the supply closet. Wow, did me and my friends get high on the hospital’s dime.”

“You still do that?”

He shook his head. “Don’t know American hospitals so well.”

“Too bad. I was gonna have you go get me some Demerol.”

He tossed him a wink. “I’ll see what I can do.” He meant it too. Now that was a friend. Why he’d been adopted by a possibly crazy goalie he had no idea, but at least he was a cool guy.

The door to the room opened, and Dylan came in, looking to Tank before he noticed that he was awake and sitting up. “Roan!” he exclaimed, immediately coming to his side an embracing him in a powerful hug. He almost got tangled in his IV line.

He hugged him back, and realized that that two day’s growth of beard he had after the transformation seemed thicker. Not only that, but Dylan had a dark fuzz of stubble on his cheeks as well, which he hadn’t had earlier. When Dylan pulled back, tears glimmered in dark chocolate eyes. “How are you feeling?”

“A little drugged, but okay. How long have I been here?”

“Only since yesterday.”

“Yesterday?” He’d been out for what, twelve hours? Could he blame the drugs they gave him or not?

Before he could ask, a familiar voice said, “It should have been a lot worse.” Doctor Rosenberg came in, looking at his chart and shaking her head. “God, your luck. I’d play the lottery if I was you.” She looked up, noticing Tank. “You’re a new one.”

He must have guessed that was an invitation to introduction. “Tank Beauvais.”

“Your name is not Tank.”

“My real name is Theobald.”

She studied him for a moment. “Tank it is.” She pushed her tortoise shell glasses up to the bridge of her nose, and said, “I need to be alone with Roan for a few minutes.”

Dylan gave him a quick kiss on the cheek, and told him, “I’ll be right outside.”

Roan nodded at him as he gave him a small smile and a comforting squeeze on the arms before leaving the room, Tank falling in behind him without comment. The way Dylan acted, he couldn’t help but think Rosenberg was here to give him bad news.

“What’s with the Frenchman?” Rosenberg wondered.

“He’s a goalie. I’ve been adopted by a hockey team.”

“The Falcons?”

“You know of them?”

“I’ve seen the logos. I’m not locked up in my office all the time.”

There was no help for it – he had to just come out and ask. “I had another aneurysm, didn’t I?”

She gazed at him steadily, her hazel eyes giving him nothing. “Yes and no.”

Of all possible answers, this one was the most unexpected. “Well, that’s definitive.”

She rolled her eyes and tapped the clipboard holding his chart like somehow the answers on it were his fault. “The long and the short of it is you probably did have an aneurysm, but beyond the burst blood vessels in your eyes, your blood pressure upon arrival, and initial head CT readings, we can no longer prove it.”

He mulled over everything she said carefully before answering. “Huh?”

“You’ve totally recovered.”

He considered this again. Yes, he was drugged. “Umm … didn’t I fully recover last time?”

“You weren’t brain damaged, but you did suffer some after-effects. Now -” she shrugged with her hands, almost flinging the clipboard by accident. “Well, fuck me sideways. I don’t get these readings at all.”

It was always a little shocking when your small, grandmotherly doctor said “Fuck me sideways”. He rubbed his head, wondering if he was still dreaming. If he slapped himself, would she have him committed? “So … why I am here? I mean, if I’m all right …”

“We had to determine that. You did pass out. Besides, I wanna figure this out.” She lifted a page on the clipboard, scanned it, and then shrugged again. “I’m gonna give up, though. Life’s too short. Besides, I know you’ll wanna get out of here as soon as possible. So what I want you to do is give me the weekend.”

Lost. He felt totally lost and at sea and drugged without actually being drugged. What was going on here? “Are you speaking in riddles, or am I actually brain damaged?”

“I want to check you into Willow Creek this weekend,” she continued, as if he hadn’t actually said anything at all. Willow Creek was an infecteds only hospital, the one where Paris spent a week recovering after he first met him. “I want to run a full battery of tests: PET scan, MRI, EEG, all the acronyms. It’ll just be me and a couple of trusted assistants. Scientific American won’t get their greedy little hands on you.”

“I’m on a case, I can’t do this weekend. Why the hell do you want to poke and prod me some more? Didn’t you do that enough when I was a kid?”

“Sorry, but you’ve grown up and adapted far beyond my comprehension. I can’t wrap my head around it. I feel like a moron, quite frankly.”

He grabbed onto the only word that really alarmed him. “Adapted? Meaning what exactly?”

She shrugged with her hands again, less violently this time. “Haven’t you noticed? Evolution takes thousands of years, maybe millions, but you’re making it look like a lazy idiot. You’re adapting to your new situation, Roan, just like you adapted out of having a viral cycle.”

“That isn’t possible.” Was that why he started changing without realizing it the other night? Was he starting to adapt? That was insane. Bodies didn’t work like that – the virus didn’t work like that.

“Isn’t it? You’re the impossible man. The virus shouldn’t have incorporated into your DNA the way it did, and from there it’s just been an avalanche of impossibilities with you. Do I really need to point out that most virus children are ten years dead at your age? Or that all infected have viral cycles, except you? Come on. I think we’re both too old to dick around. You are a …” she didn’t have the word.

“Freak?” he suggested.

“Hybrid,” she replied, with an evil scowl. “If you were at all an optimist, we could say you were the best of both worlds.”

“My mother was a human and my father was a virus,” he replied sarcastically. Before she could tell him to knock it off, he held up the IV line. “So what’s this then if I’m fine?”

“Fluids. You were dehydrated and believe it or not, mildly malnourished, and probably exhausted considering the way you slept. You’ve got to remember the way your metabolism changes even during partial shifts; it’s playing holy hell with every system in your body. You probably need ten hours sleep on days of change, and fuck knows how many calories, maybe ten thousand or so. You can’t act like it’s just a normal day, because it’s not.”

“Could it have been a migraine?”

She shook her head, but then shrugged. “Can’t actually rule that out. We don’t know for sure how the change effects your migraines, so it’s possible there could be a trigger mechanism. But dehydration is definitely a trigger, so keep your fluids up, damn you.”

He dry washed his face, trying not to notice how hot and itchy his beard was, and wondered why he was so mad. What was he mad at? Her? Himself? His virus? “Am I in danger from aneurysms anymore?”

“Honestly, I don’t know. I think you started having one, and it stopped.”

“Stopped?”

She nodded. “Makes no fucking sense to me either. Maybe it was just some weird kind of seizure, I can’t rule that out either.”

“It hurt like fuck.”

“No reason a seizure couldn’t.”

That was a fair point. “But you don’t think it was.”

“No. I think you almost had an aneurysm, and your body fought back. But since that’s illogical and can’t be proven, that’s pure speculation on my part.”

This was frustrating, and threatened to make his head start hurting all over again. He noticed that there was one of those reusable shopping totes sitting on the floor beside the chair – Tank had accidentally been blocking his view of it. (Goalies made better doors than windows, even off the ice.) Were there clothes in it? He was pretty sure there was, as he thought he recognized the color of his zombie t-shirt (burnt orange). Dylan brought clothes, and Tank brought beer. He knew some great guys. If Dylan also included his cell phone (he seriously needed to call Holden if he’d lost a day), he’d have to marry him later today.

“You’ve already tuned me out, haven’t you?” Rosenberg asked. It wasn’t accusatory, just weary.

“Am I going to drop dead of an aneurysm or not?”

“I don’t know. You could live until one hundred or die in sixty seconds; there are limits to adaptation. That’s why I want to get you into Willow Creek and scan the shit out of you.”

He got out of bed, taking a moment to steady himself, and then hauled the IV stand across the room with him as he walked to the bag of clothes. Yeah, he was wearing a stupid paper gown and his ass was hanging out, but Rosenberg had pretty much seen every inch of him so it didn’t matter. As he stepped into his jeans, he told her, “I have a case to finish. Once I’m done … fine, Willow Creek. But only to find out how much of me is still Human.”

“Don’t be an asshole. You’re Human.”

“Yeah, a Human who can change into a lion and stop his own aneurysms.”

“Speculation on my part,” she replied archly. “Don’t go on a self-pity trip.” He ripped off  the paper gown and tossed it aside before pulling on his shirt. “Holy hell, when did you get so many tattoos?”

“A weird side effect of my self-pity trips. What did you say to Dylan? He looked upset.”

Here she paused, long enough to feel a warning spasm in his gut. What had she said? “I might have mentioned the thing about not knowing if you were all right or on the precipice.”

“So he thinks I could drop dead any minute. Terrific. Did you have to scare my boyfriend? Was it emotional blackmail to get me into Willow Creek?”

He got the evil scowl again, but probably for a good reason. Doctor Rosenberg could be a huge pain in his ass, but she usually wasn’t that manipulative. “I was thinking aloud. I’m worried about you, you stupid prick. And I’m not alone.”

He had to give her that. He was kind of worried too. In theory, this should have been good news. Maybe he wasn’t about to drop dead, maybe his head wasn’t going to implode.

So why didn’t it feel like good news?

Roan felt like a moron, and wondered if Dee had lied about giving him Demerol and gave him something else, something that made him as maudlin as a drunk. Dylan remained as sweet as he always was, comforting him and soothing him. When Roan admitted that he felt like he should be doing more for his people, Dylan rightly asked, “Which ones?”

A good point. He was always in the middle of a reverse tug of war, with the gays saying, “You have him,” and the infecteds replying, “No, you have him.” But he always said he didn’t want to be a member of any group that would want him, so at least he could belong to either with a clear conscience: neither wanted him.

He meant infecteds, but sure, gays too. He did nothing for anyone. Dylan pointed out that wasn’t true, that just by being the first infected to join the police force he’d been a trailblazer and broken down a lot of doors, but how much good had it done? There weren’t any other infected cops that he knew of on the force right now. And openly gay? Well, he knew of one downtown, not counting Dropkick, but he knew many more were still in the closet. It was a Pyrrhic victory at best.

A combination of drugs and post transformation crash made him tired, but his hunger (also a post transformation symptom) let him know he was going to be up for a while. So he called for a pizza and noticed he had a couple of messages on the machine already. In fact, if he hadn’t turned the ringer off for the phone, he might have noticed it going off almost nonstop. (He discovered this when he turned the ringer back on. Dylan answered the phone a couple of times, and after reporting he had no comment and didn’t wish to speak to the press, they just turned the ringer off again.) He kept smelling blood and thought it might be psychosomatic, but then he realized his pants were soaked with it. He stripped them off, a bit relieved to see the blood hadn’t soaked through to his skin. Rather than put on pants, he figured fuck it, that being down to his boxers was good enough. Dylan didn’t care; he’d seen so much worse.

Dylan decided to go downstairs and check on what was happening on the news, and Roan decided to stay upstairs and try and get some work done. A joke, since he was still incredibly stoned and not really in a good head space for it, but he was convinced he could try and force himself to go there. He blasted Pansy Division, mainly because it sometimes helped.

He assembled everything he had about Jordan on a computer file. It basically boiled down to ’spoiled brat’. In that case, he probably would have run off to Tijuana or something, was having the time life of his callow life with cheap hookers and tequila. Could he convince Hatcher he needed to take an all expenses paid vacation down there to find him?

The pizza guy came, but Roan hadn’t heard him, so Dylan, dressed only in a green tank top and matching yoga pants, brought him his large pepperoni pizza (he was going to eat all of it and Dylan didn’t feel like pizza, so he didn’t feel bad about it). “You know, there’s this guy on the news saying you’re a hero.”

“What kind of attention whore is he?”

“He said a cat tried to attack him and you caught it. He said you were fighting two cats at once.”

He paused to consider that as he opened the pizza box, and the smell of grease, tomato sauce, cheese, and processed meat hit him face first and nearly made his stomach turn inside out with need. “Oh, he must have been the fuckhead that opened the door. He wasn’t in any danger he didn’t put himself in with his sheer idiocy.”

“Is that how you got so scratched up?”

He shrugged, but he had the excuse of having about half a slice of pizza in his mouth. (He was so hungry, he wanted to shove a whole piece in.) Once he’d finished chewing, he said, “It was a combination of things. Mainly I got angry and lost control. I had to constantly fight myself to stay focused.”

Dylan had brought him a can of root beer, which he took with a grateful nod. Yes, root beer was disgusting and sickly sweet, and yet he really liked it. Dylan sometimes looked at him like he was crazy, but he humored him, just like he humored his carnivorous ways. “How much did you change?”

Oh shit. Talk about a question he didn’t want to answer. Luckily, he could give him an honest answer. “I dunno. Too much.”

Dylan nodded, and looked distracted enough that Roan asked between mouthfuls of pizza, “What’s wrong?”

He sighed heavily and sat on the end of the bed. “They said there was a near riot by the Arcadia building. Twenty five people were arrested.”

“That’s not what’s bugging you. Well, not everything.”

“I gave my notice at Panic today. I’m not going back.”

“Not because of me, I hope.”

“No. I’m not sure it’s safe there anymore. Best to pack it up and try somewhere new.”

“Your fan club’s gonna miss you.”

This made him smile faintly, staring down at the carpet. “My fan club is horny drunk men. They’ll miss me for approximately ten seconds, until the new guy with the pecs passes through their field of vision. Then they won’t be able to pick me out of a line up.”

“I’ll still be your number one fan.”

He looked up at him, giving him a genuinely amused and adorable smile. “You’d better be.” He paused briefly, then added, “Should we check the dressings under your shirt, Rambo?”

Roan looked down, and he could kind of seem the irregular lumps of bandages, but not well. “Ah. I bet I can’t blame an ill fitting bra, can I?”

“You can, but I know damn well you’re not a cross dresser.”

Roan took off his shirt, and Dylan got up and went to the bathroom, emerging from it with gauze and medical tape. Dylan did his best to take the bandages off carefully, but Roan had a reasonably hairy chest, so there was just no way to do this painlessly. At least the Demerol (or whatever) was still working.

He’d done a decent job using the partial change to heal himself, as his chest didn’t look like ground chuck anymore. It was still bad enough to make Dylan grimace, though, and two of the gauze pads Dee had slapped onto him were saturated with blood and needed replacing. “Maybe I should do it,” Roan told him. “Infected blood and all.”

“I don’t have any cuts on my hands,” Dylan replied, with a brief but fussy frown.

“Still -”

“I’ll be careful,” he snapped. And to give him credit, he was. Dylan was always careful and always gentle, and let out an empathetic hiss of pain when he had to pull the tape off his chest hair. (With the hair, of course. At least growing hair had never been a problem for him, especially when a transformation was involved. As proof, even though he shaved this morning, he now had about a two day’s growth of beard on his face thanks to his partial transformation.) Dylan cut the gauze and the medical tape very carefully, and said, more to himself than anything, “I guess I’d better get used to this. These are the kinds of skills you need when your boyfriend’s a superhero.”

“Don’t you start that shit.”

“Oh stop kidding yourself, hon. You’re the closest thing to a superhero in this world and you know it. See, a real superhero wouldn’t be lauded and loved; a real superhero would be seen as a freak and threatened with lawsuits at every turn.”

“Shit. Put it that way, and you have a point.”

“Of course I have a point. I have a BA and an unemployment check. I know everything.” He then flashed him a brilliant smile, and Roan couldn’t help but grin back.

“Can I call you my boy wonder?” Roan teased.

“Only if you like sleeping on the lawn.”

“Ah. And it’s too soon for you to have an unemployment check, you’ve just left.”

He gave him a self-deprecating kind of smirk. (It was possible. Roan had seen it several times.) “A boy not so wonder can dream.”

If he was a superhero, he was a super lame one. But hey, someone had to be Aquaman. And who would want to be Superman anyways? Red underpants over blue tights? No one was that gay, not even Paul Lynde.

He finished his pizza sitting in front of his computer, wearing boxer shorts and bandages, wondering if all superheroes ended up like this, when he decided to check on his many phone messages before the damn thing filled up. Anyone who identified themselves as a reporter got their message instantly erased. He had nothing against the press, he just had nothing to say about the incident today or in general. Except Arcadia sucked, but odds were they wouldn’t print or show that.

Dee had left him a very simple message. “See Doctor Rosenberg soon, or I’m going to talk to her myself.” And that was it; he hung up. Did that mean he’d seen the numbers Shep had written on his glove and didn’t like them?

The call from Dropkick was slightly more interesting. “If you’re finished being a cat wrangler, call me back. I’m think our hooker killer is a serial.” And then she just hung up.

Well, he had to return that call. He did, and luckily he caught her at her desk. “Has another body turned up?” he asked. It’s the only reason why she’d jump to the conclusion that the killer was a serial.

“Yeah,” she sighed wearily. She sounded tired. “I started searching for fairly recent murders that shared many of the same characteristics as the previous one, and I found a really sad one. Seventeen year old girl, possibly raped, strangled and found in a drainage ditch off some abandoned government land outside of Spokane two months ago. Probably an illegal, as she was never identified by anyone, and they weren’t able to find anyone in the databases matching her fingerprints or description.”

Roan closed his eyes and laid on the bed, rubbing his forehead. The Demerol was finally wearing off, as he felt a dull ache deep in his head. “Not a hooker.”

“Not to anyone’s knowledge, but in the same general category of disposable people. A person no one would miss or look too hard for. Fits the general profile of such a bottom feeder killer.”

“Yeah, it does.”

She scoffed, and he heard a soft, dull noise in the background. Did she throw some paperwork on her desk? “They pawned the case off on some overloaded detective who did all he was supposed to do, and absolutely not one thing more.”

“So it’s a cold case.”

“If she was a seventeen year old white girl, maybe someone would have given a fuck.”

“Now now, we’re not supposed to play the race card. Or the sexuality card. Or the gender card. What cards can we play?”

“Do not pass go.”

“That’s it? I was hoping for Community Chest at least.”

She sighed again, long and low, but afterwards, she said, “I wish you were back on the force, Angus. For a crazy asshole, I think you were the sanest one here.”

“Holy shit, are things that bad?”

“It seems like it sometimes. Ignore me, it’s been a shitty day.”

“Tell me about it.” The pain in his head was getting worse. It felt like the slow motion explosion of a migraine. The problem with that was migraines usually gave more warning. Still, his partial transformation could have fucked up the schedule.

“Yeah, how was that cat thing? I heard you got scratched up pretty bad.”

“I’m fine.” He really didn’t want to talk about it anymore.

“Yeah, macho man, you always say that.”

“Like you don’t.”

“Yeah, well, I’m a woman. We always handle these kinds of things better than you wimpy men.”

“Sexism! I could have your badge.”

“You can have it.” After another frustrated sigh, she said, “It’s been a day for crazies. I got called out to a scene first thing this morning – it’s probably on the news, if you bother to watch it – where a guy took a shotgun to his family in a mobile home.”

“No.” More of sympathy than disbelief. He had little trouble believing it occurred. “Bad scene?”

“Four kids under thirteen, his wife, and then himself. It looks like the ten year old tried to fight back and escape through the bathroom window, but she never had a chance.”

“Jesus.” He rubbed his eyes, which now had the dull, hollow hurt of a migraine. This fucker was coming on fast, like it was just waiting for the drugs to wear off so it could jump into the fray. “So what excuse did this dirtbag fuckjob leave behind?”

“Well, from what I can tell, he thought his wife was cheating on him. Did I mention he married her when she was fifteen and pregnant? He was twenty two at the time.”

“I’m gonna go out on a limb here and guess controlling, abusive, immature bastard.”

“Also guess unemployed and eighty pounds overweight and yeah, you’ve got a good picture of him. Fuck, I hate this job sometimes, you know? It’s not about catching the bad guy, it’s about picking up the pieces and throwing them away. The worst part was the false hope we could pillory this guy, you know? A neighbor called it in, ’cause they thought they saw a body through the window – nobody heard the gunshots; a shotgun in a fucking mobile home park and yet no one fucking heard the thing – but the guy was gone, and I thought maybe I’d get to string the bastard up by his balls, show pictures of his ten year old’s head splattered across a shower curtain until every juror wanted to beat him to death with the gavel … but then the fucker’s car gets spotted by the highway patrol in a lot behind a bar. He killed himself there, god knows why. And now I have all this disgust and I have no one to vent it on, I just have pictures of entrance wounds and exit wounds, when there was enough of a body left to call it an exit wound, and I have these emails and phone messages left by the killer that show me what a selfish, immature, hideous prick of a man he was. Fuck.”

“Know what helps? Working the heavy bag. Or any punching bag really. Go now, hit the gym, beat the shit out of an inanimate object until you’re ready to drop.”

“Like I don’t fucking know that?” She made a noise of frustration, one he was very familiar with, and he let her have a few seconds. Finally, she said, “Sorry, yeah, I probably oughta.  My victories feel smaller and smaller.”

“I know the feeling. It happens to us ex-cops too, if it’s any consolation.”

“It’s not, but thanks.”

There was a long silence, but it wasn’t awkward. It was the silence of two people who really wanted to help people, and often found themselves wondering why. Why would anyone want to help people when they were so fucking awful? You had to ask yourself that question a hundred times, and maybe Dropkick sometimes came up with an answer. Roan knew he almost never did.

Dropkick broke the silence once more, clearly trying to get her mind off the wholesale family slaughter she had to sort out this morning. “Can you ask Holden and his hooker pals about any customers they have in the military, or maybe amongst truckers? I’m thinking our serial will be amongst them, since if I’m right about Jane Doe, this guy travels.”

“Yeah, I was wondering about that.” Spokane was in Eastern Washington, and Coyote and Karen worked here, on the Western side. But there was that serial killer in the military – was he Air Force? Roan couldn’t remember – who killed mainly in Eastern Washington, but had a couple of known victims in Western Washington when he was stationed here. There was also a trucker serial killer, although he spread his handiwork along the I-5 corridor from California, through Oregon, and to here, pretty much leaving investigators an obvious clue to his profession. “I know Holden’s had a military client or two, one gave him his dog tags. I’ll see what he can find out.” He didn’t tell her it seemed to be a porn site that was doing genuine snuff films, mainly because it sounded like something out of a Dennis Cooper novel. Also, because the Feds would have to be brought in, and they might escape. Well, no, they’d probably get caught. But Roan didn’t want them caught. Did he want to kill them? He didn’t know. His impulse was to hurt these fuckers, hurt them for seeking out and killing some of the most vulnerable adults (near adults, if Jane Doe was indeed a victim) and filming it for the sexual gratification of equally sick motherfuckers.

But if Jane Doe was one, how did that work? A snuff film site didn’t travel, didn’t change locations …

… or did it? Why was he assuming they were doing this only at one place? Why did he assume anything when he had so little to go on?

“You’re not gonna do your usual thing, are you?”

“What’s my usual thing?”

“Getting your own brand of revenge instead of turning him over to the correct authorities. That ring a bell at all, Roan?”

“I deny that. Since when have I ever gotten revenge on anyone?”

She snorted derisively. “You can play the game, you know how to rig the system. You may not do anything actionable, but come on. How weird is it that all the guilty parties you finger end up … punished?”

“I’m the Punisher now?” Wow, his head was really bad right now. He was trying to keep things light, but the pain was really throbbing, becoming nuclear, sending hot filaments through his grey matter. Jesus, he could have used Dee and his Demerol right now.

“I hope not. What a shitty film.” After a brief pause, she asked, “Are you okay? You sound funny.”

“Bit of a headache,” he admitted. “Probably oughta go now.”

“Yeah, okay. But Roan, about the usual thing … maybe it wouldn’t be so bad this time around. Take care of yourself.” And before he could say a word, she hung up. Wow, she must have had a bad day if she was giving him license to kill the bastards. She didn’t even know about the snuff film angle of all of this.

He needed painkillers, and he needed them now. He attempted to sit up, but the pain was so bad his head felt like it was filled with molten lava, and sitting up seemed like a pipe dream, something bizarrely out of reach. Oh no – something was wrong.

He rolled over on his side and gritted his teeth against the pain just as Dylan came in. “I was gonna run to the store, we’re out – holy shit, Ro? Hon, what’s wrong?”

“Oh fuck, Dyl, my head hurts so much,” he said, feeling like he was going to have to hold his skull together with his hands to keep it from bursting apart. “Can you get the Percocet? I’ll be fine if I have a couple of those.”

Dylan looked down into his face, and Roan could see the horror in his eyes. “You’re flushed, your eyes -” He didn’t finish the sentence, he simply reached for the phone and snagged the handset. He punched in a couple of numbers, so few that Roan knew he could only be calling 9-1-1. “I need an ambulance,” he said, keeping his voice as emotionless as possible.

“What’s wrong with my eyes?” Roan asked through gritted teeth. But in immediate retrospect, he realized he didn’t want to know.

He thought he’d been flirting with an aneurysm. But you know, he thought the danger was over. So much for wishful thinking.

Roan entered the fifth floor angry, and he wasn’t completely sure why. Well, maybe the helpless feeling of someone bleeding to death, of someone dying pointlessly for an honestly stupid cause. Insurance companies were bastards, they could only profit if people died, and people hated infecteds, so why would anyone else care if infecteds died? They wouldn’t. People hated insurance companies too, but the treatment of infecteds wouldn’t sway them one way or another. He wished it would.

On the floor he could smell panic, fear, blood, and cat, tainting the otherwise cold and business bland hallway, that still had faint traces of coffee, toner, and ozone. He let out a challenging roar, channeling his anger into the scream, but it didn’t work – it made him angrier.

There was a responding roar down the hall, and he heard claws clicking on the floor, running for him. He ran for it, wondering if this was Brandon, if this was the cat that had accidentally killed his own friend. He couldn’t hate it if it was, it wasn’t his fault, but that was logic and he was too angry to be logical. He ran towards the noise, still roaring, feeling the pain in his jaws, in his gums, tasting blood in his mouth and hearing bones crack in his cheeks. He thought briefly of dropping to all fours, of trying to summon the change so he could sink his teeth into its fur and rip the flesh off its bones, but he somehow managed to hold that back.

It was a lion charging down the hall towards him, and he roared another challenge at it, continuing to run towards it. Something made the animal hesitate, stop so suddenly its claws skidded on the shiny slick floor, and Roan almost didn’t stop, but then he was dimly aware that if he didn’t, the lion would run and he’d have to chase the damn thing.

They exchanged growls and snarls, the lion a squat one with streaks of mud brown through its ruffled mane. Roan felt the muscles boiling in his arms, the tendons stretching, the bones dislocating and cracking in his hands and feet. One side of the hall had offices and conference rooms with opaque glass inserts in them, and he was aware of Human sized shadows in his peripheral vision, people quarantined in their offices trying to see what was happening. If he saw nothing but shapes through the glass, that’s all they saw too.

The lion was confused, probably because he smelled like different kinds of blood, and Roan found himself distracted by his own internal fight. The last time he partially changed it hadn’t hurt at all, but he hadn’t been fighting it then. (He hadn’t realized it’d been happening, but that was beside the point.) Fighting it was nearly as painful as simply transforming.

The lion sensed the hesitation in him and lunged, which was fine with him. He caught its muzzle in one hand, forcibly shutting its jaws, and while its claws tore into his arms and chest, he punched it straight between the eyes, hard enough that he heard something crack in his hand. Or maybe its head – maybe both. But he was in too much pain to feel anymore pain; the circuits were overloaded and couldn’t accept any more signals.

He knocked the lion out. It sagged heavily in his grip, and he was the only one holding it up. So he dropped it, and he knew it wasn’t dead, he just hoped he hadn’t done any serious damage. But part of him didn’t give a fuck.

He heard himself growling but couldn’t seem to stop. Needles of red hot pain seemed to have settled in his eye sockets, and thin tendrils of it were worming their way through his jaw, down his throat, settling deep into his spine. He was aware that if he didn’t fight it, it might not hurt so much.

He didn’t trust himself to take the stairs, so he went to the elevator, and then had to take a few seconds to remember how to work it, how to use his hands beyond hitting or grabbing. He wondered how many IQ points he dropped when the beast took over, or if he could even remember how to talk. He was trying hard to see if he could, but his output was currently limited to growls and snarls.

The elevator had mirrored surfaces in it, and he saw himself, but he didn’t quite believe what he saw. It was him, kind of, but his eyes were all wrong, the pupils bloated and more oval than round, and his mouth … well, no. He wasn’t seeing things clearly, and that must have been it, because his lower jaw looked like it belonged to another creature entirely, certainly not a Human. Blood caked his mouth, covered his chin, and hid some of his teeth, of which there were too many, and some were pointing at broken angles. He attempted to close his mouth and couldn’t, his teeth clicking awkwardly and his jaw feeling dislocated. He’d cut his tongue – on his teeth? - and it hurt. His vision was kind of blurry up close, so he was convinced he wasn’t seeing correctly, he just couldn’t be seeing correctly, but the shock of it felt like cold water thrown into his troubled mind. He didn’t know what he’d seen in the reflection of the elevator door, but it looked like a freak, some kind of lame rejected demon from Buffy The Vampire Slayer.

The glimpse of … well, whatever it was he thought he saw threw him, enough that he hadn’t expected the lift to stop and the doors to open, but as soon as he smelled blood and cat his mind snapped back into focus.

There were two cats on this floor, a cougar and a leopard, and he shouted a roar that tore up what was left of his throat. He heard an incongruous soft pattering sound, and figured out it was his own blood dripping from his chin. The taste was so constant he stopped noticing it about two minutes ago.

There was a responding roar, and the leopard tore down the corridor to see what new cat was on its territory. Roan was happy to meet it half way down the hall, where it stopped upon seeing him, but still kept growling. They exchanged snarls until he heard the click of claws down a side hall, and Roan found that he was surrounded, with the leopard in front of him and the cougar behind him. He should have cared, but he still didn’t. He had opposable thumbs and they didn’t, which meant he’d always win, as long as he didn’t get stupid or change completely.

He stood with his back to the wall and crouched down, so he was closer to eye level with the cats, hoping he gave off the appropriately wounded air. He wanted them to close in, thinking he was wounded prey. He briefly wondered why they hadn’t attacked each other, but one was male and one was female. They were different species, sure, but the leopard female was bigger than the cougar male, giving the male more impetus not to get overly territorial. (Only tigers would attack their opposite gender members as a matter of course, but that was generally because tigers were the most territorial of all cats.)

The cats were falling for it, coming in warily, snarling and sniffing at him, when he heard an office door open.

Ah fuck. Why did people have to mess up perfectly good plans?

What the person intended he had no idea. Did they actually think he was in trouble? Did they think he was with SWAT? The leopard was closest and lunged for the person in the open door (all Roan saw was a dark suit – just the scent alone told him it was a man, but other than that he wouldn’t have known). Roan was forced to jump for it, screaming (roaring), “Shut the fucking door!” He didn’t know if what he intended to say even came out as words; he heard the roar, slightly modulated, but little else. He caught the leopard in mid-air, centimeters from the man, and the door slammed shut as he and the squirming leopard rolled down the hall, the leopard’s claws raking his chest and throat as he fought the urge to sink his teeth into its exposed neck and end it all now.

The cougar took this opportunity to lunge, but even though he was only peripherally aware of it coming in, a tawny blur, he somehow kicked it out of mid air and sent it flying down the hall as he sunk his teeth into what was essentially the leopard’s cheek.  Blood that wasn’t his for a change flooded his mouth, and the leopard squalled and squirmed away from him, gaining its feet but turning to face him as Roan got on all fours and spit out a mouthful of blood, growling at the leopard as it snarled at him, baring uneven teeth.

He’d hurt the cougar, so it came after him again like the stupid beast it was, and as it jumped he dropped and rolled over onto his back, so as the cougar came down on him he grabbed it and slammed it head first into the wall. It went limp almost instantaneously, and he tossed it aside before rolling back up to his feet.

The leopard was looking at him warily, growling low, but the fact that it hadn’t tried to attack him while he was dealing with the cougar told him she wasn’t as dumb as her male counterpart. “I don’t wanna kill you,” he snarled. “Stay down.”

The leopard was still growling at him, but it laid down on the floor, taking a submissive position. He pulled out the tranquilizer gun and shot it, although it took him a minute to remember how to use it.

He was stalking back to the elevator, aware he was bleeding more and still not caring, when Gordo’s voice came out of nowhere and startled him. “SWAT incoming.”

Okay, yes, SWAT were bad. He needed to get to the cats before them, or they’d simply kill them on sight. He had three of them, now he just needed to find the fourth.

In the elevator, he remembered how to talk, and said, “Got it.”

“Whoa,” Gordo replied. “Was that you, McKichan, or did a demon just come on the radio? What’s up with your voice?”

He didn’t answer. He’d figure it out or he wouldn’t.

The next floor – the sixth or seventh? He couldn’t remember, his mind refused to work that way – was empty of cats (couldn’t smell any, his roar brought no response), so he simply went up to the next floor. There, as the elevator door opened, was a panther in the hall, sleek black but kind of stocky, sitting facing conference rooms with their doors wide open. No Humans were here, meaning people were successfully able to evacuate or this floor just hadn’t been in use yet today, meaning whoever he was, this infected picked the wrong floor to hide out in.

The cat looked at him with empty hazel eyes and a twitching tail, and Roan came out of the elevator, growling, “Some people have no luck at all.”

The cat snarled and got to its feet, looking ready to fight or run, but Roan had enough awareness to pull the tranquilizer gun and simply shoot it. Proving that this poor son of a bitch had no luck in any form, the dart hit it right on the bridge of his nose. He was aware enough to recoil and try and knock the dart out with a paw, shaking his head, but the dart was in deep, and the drugs finally kicked in and laid it out.

Roan crouched down and concentrated on his sense of humanity. What was his sense of humanity? He focused on the pain – or at least tried – but that didn’t seem to be it. What was his humanity? Did he actually have any?

His tongue still hurt. An odd detail, but one he focused on, trying to bring himself back. He wondered if he should bite it or if the resurgent pain would make his cat side worse. A bit of a song ran through his head, almost mocking his current predicament – If I bite my cheeks long enough I figure I could chew right through the skin. You know, he just might be able to. He always thought that maybe in mid-transition he could rip the skin off his face and maybe find out if there was a lion under there.

Insanity. Insanity and These Arms Are Snakes lyrics. They went together so perfectly, no wonder he listened to them.

He was grasping at something – awareness, some sense of self, even if it was only a mocking sense – when he heard the elevator door open again. He could smell gun oil, body armor, hear the hiss and click of radios. He knew guns were aimed at his back, the clicks of firing positions being taken, as a super macho male voice barked, “You McKichan?”

He raised a hand and nodded, not sure if he could speak yet, the pain finding laser focus in certain parts of his body: jaw, teeth, hands, chest, eyes. He heard a familiar voice snap, “Would you let me through? Can’t you see he’s bleeding?”

Dee? Of course. There’s be more than one ambulance needed, and he probably guessed he’d be needed, so he either nagged, coerced, or got the okay to come along with the SWAT team.

“There’s the cat,” a voice said, butch but surprisingly female.

The macho voice from before said into his radio, “Floor secured up to the eighth. Advance agent found.”

Advance agent? Oh, was that him? Must have been. Better than kitty fucker, he supposed.

Dee knelt beside him, thunking down his heavy EMT kit. “You get caught by a cat? You getting slow in your old age?”

Roan looked at him, still snarling, but even though he thought he saw the briefest reaction in his dark eyes, his face remained stony professional, all business. The good EMTs made natural poker players, as they learned to keep all emotion from their faces. “Don’t you snap at me, mister,” Dee replied, using an antiseptic cloth to wipe the blood off his face. He examined the scratches on his face, and said, “Not too bad. Those should heal up good.” Dee lifted up his chin with his fingertips, and wiped his throat with the same cooling, stinging cloth. “Might need to get some surgical glue on a couple of these. Lucky it missed your windpipe.” He then frowned at him. “Why is your mouth bleeding?”

“Bit my tongue,” he grumbled, pretty sure he could talk now. He could, but it still sounded gravelly and inhuman.

“Let’s see.” Dee put a thumb on his lower lip, and he let him open his mouth. He got out his penlight and had a good look, squinting slightly. If his teeth still weren’t right, Dee gave no sign of it. “Goddamn, you took a real chunk out of it.” He rummaged in his kit and took out a small square of gauze, which he put over the cut in his tongue. “Nothing we can do about it, it’ll have to heal on its own. But knowing you, that’ll happen fast.”

The gauze tasted terrible, and he could feel it filling up with blood already, but conversely it made him feel a bit more sane, a bit more Human. Even having Dee here helped. Yeah, having your ex tend to you in a medical sense was off putting, but at least there was little he could do (or become) that would shock him.

Dee lifted up his shirt and clicked his tongue at all the bloody scratches on his chest, but that’s when Roan told him, “Don’t worry about it. I can heal.”

“Seriously? Your torso looks like ground chuck. I don’t -”

“I can, but not here,” he assured him, feeling more like Roan McKichan, human being, instead of Roan McKichan, lion.

Dee finally met his eyes. He hadn’t before now, which Roan only realized in retrospect. His eyes must have been more Human now, or Dee was at least confident they were. “Are you sure? You don’t look so good.”

“I’m in so much pain I don’t think I can move without screaming.”

Dee gave him a slightly dubious look. “You’re not just saying that for free drugs, are you?”

“I don’t need your drugs. I have better at home.”

That honesty got him a shot of something. He didn’t honestly know what, but after a couple of minutes he began to feel warmth in his hands and feet, and the edges of the pain smoothed, became smaller and more manageable.

Dee insisted on taping some big bandages to some of the worst scratches on his chest, so he let him as the pain continued to ebb, and finally he asked, “The guy in the stairwell, the one bleeding out. How is he?”

Dee shrugged. “He was stable when they loaded him. That’s all I know.”

Stable meant nothing; stable only meant he was still alive when they put him in the ambulance. But the way Dee said it seemed to imply “don’t get your hopes up” - stable was the best possible diagnosis for him. Asking for more was too much. You could only lose so much blood before you were honestly a lost cause. Roan knew that, and didn’t know why he cared.

Dee helped him up and helped him down to the street, where things were noisier and more cops had showed, their flashing red and blue lights bouncing off mirrored buildings in such a way that all they needed was a DJ spinning to make this an official dance party. He was aware of TV news vans, but they had been pushed back to a distance that must have pissed off many a cameraman and segment producer. He heard some arguments, some cursing, but since he focused on none of it it was kind of an angry white noise.

He balked when he realized Dee was taking him to his rig, but he told him, “I’m not letting you drive home on Demerol, and besides, there’s no better way to lose the press.”

Fair enough. He got into the back of the ambulance, where Shep was, and he exclaimed, “Fuck man, what happened to your shirt?”

An excellent question. Roan had just noticed it was pretty much just fabric tatters, held together by random threads and blood. As Dee closed the ambulance doors, he made a hand gesture of some sort to Shep, who nodded in understanding. Roan got that Dee had asked him to check his vitals without knowing how he knew that’s what he asked.

The Demerol – was that really what he gave him? - was kicking in big time, and it was very pleasant. So he laid back on the stretcher as Shep put a blood pressure cuff on his arm, and asked, “Saved the cats?”

“Saved ‘em. Don’t know why, but I did.”

“Cats are people too,” Shep said, with no irony. But it did sound kind of funny.

He heard Dee get in the front of the rig and felt them drive off as Shep looked at readouts and wrote some numbers in pen on his latex glove. Blood pressure numbers probably, possibly temperature, as he’d briefly put some machine on his forehead. “So am I dead?” Roan wondered.

“You still taking calcium channel blockers?”

Those were the meds he was given in an attempt to stave off another aneurysm. He had no idea if they were helping or not, but he took them. “Yeah.”

He nodded, still writing numbers on his hand. “You have an appointment with your doctor soon?”

He’d wanted to go see Doctor Rosenberg and ask her about that sudden change, the one he didn’t quite feel. Did that count? “Soon enough.”

“Good.” Laconic Shep was yet another good paramedic, one who didn’t give too much away, one who could beat you in a poker game with nothing but a pair of twos. “Rest and lots of fluids tonight, okay? No fighting, no serious narcotics. Understood?”

“Aye aye, captain.”

Shep raised a blond eyebrow at that. “Yeah, I guess you’re on the serious narcotics already.”

Oh, ha ha. The Nelson laugh seemed so appropriate right now, he wished he could do it.

He must have dozed off for a bit, because it seemed like a second later he was home, and there was a small argument over whether Dee should help him inside or not, but Roan insisted he was walking to his own front door, and finally Dee just let him. He watched him all the way though, arms crossed over his chest, his face as sour as an upset schoolmarm. Once inside, he shut the door and locked it, in case Dee changed his mind and decided he needed to go to the hospital.

Dylan was home, but the reason he didn’t meet him was obvious, as he could hear the water running upstairs. Shower or bath? Bath most likely.

Roan sat at the bottom of the steps and tried to force enough of a change to heal some of the scratches. It was extra hard, probably due to the drugs, but he felt an itchy burning in his chest as he felt a new pain knife into his jaw, and figured he’d pushed it as much as he could. Veins seemed to pulse in front of his eyes, little black capillaries that appeared and disappeared with every beat of his heart, and he knew he was done. Any further attempts, and he would pay for it dearly.

He still had bloody scratches on his chest and arms, and his hand still hurt (had he broken something?) but it was all something he could live with. He gave himself a few seconds of rest, then went upstairs.

In the bedroom, he tossed his coat in the closet and threw his shredded shirt in the garbage, grabbing a t-shirt out of the dresser and pulling it on. If Dylan noticed it was a different shirt, he’d just say he spilled something on the other.

He knocked on the bathroom door before walking in, where Dylan was relaxing in the tub. The air was warm and smelled strongly of the peppermint and eucalyptus bath salts he usually used after yoga class. He said it was a muscle soother, and Roan had no information to the contrary, so he let it go.

Dylan opened his eyes, and said, “Hey, I didn’t – holy shit, what happened to you?”

Roan caught a glimpse of himself in the medicine cabinet mirror, and while he was almost afraid to look, he still managed. He looked human, himself, with light, long scratches across his cheek and just beneath his eyes, one almost bisecting his lip where an older scar was. Dee had cleaned him up nice, and his partial change had closed some of the scratches up. But he was very lucky he didn’t lose an eye.

“Cat incident downtown,” he told him, and he was so tired, his legs so rubbery, he sat on the floor beside the bathtub. “Some protest gone horribly wrong. Had to get four cats out of a building.”

Dylan had sat up, and was now looking at him over the lip of the tub. “Are you okay?”

Stupid question. Of course he was okay, he was always okay. People died around him, other infecteds died, but he just wouldn’t go down. But who was it that was hanging on so hard – the human or the cat? Maybe neither; maybe it was just the virus. “No,” he admitted, and for whatever reason, he started crying. Why the fuck was he crying?!

He wanted to stop it, but the drugs had sapped him of all his will, and as Dylan reached out and brought him into a clumsy embrace, he was too stoned to fight it. He sagged into him, into his warm, wet skin, and wished he could be a normal human being.

Technology was putting private detectives out of business. But at the same time, it was making their lives significantly easier. Case in point: the consequence of sharing too much information online.

Brittney did have a Twitter page, and she filled it with the most mundane things imaginable, often misspelled. But that allowed him to figure out where she was whenever she posted. (He refused, on principal, to call it “tweeting”.) A quick read revealed her to be at the mall, complaining about fashion (he thought – he honestly wasn’t sure; she was complaining about something), and a past read of her Facebook and Twitter page had revealed she favored the Bellevue Mall. So as soon as he read she was bitching about it, Roan rushed there, and hoped he could find her. Sure, he knew what she looked like, but it was a big mall, and she didn’t exactly say what shops she was in.

He got lucky and found her in the food court, texting as she drank a diet soda out of a cup nearly as big as her head. She looked like she weighed all of ninety eight pounds, lost in a thin turquoise dress that could have doubled as lingerie, and a pink leather jacket that barely reached her waist. Her hair was long and dyed to golden blonde, a pair of large black sunglasses perched on her head like an oversized barrette. She wore way too much make up, and seemed to be trying to look thirty, which perplexed him. Didn’t most straight men go for jailbait? So why try and look older, unless you were trying to get into a club?

He sat at her table without asking, and identified himself as she looked at him with an expression that was equal parts bored, sullen, and utterly blank. She interrupted him to say, sounding about two minutes away from a deep sleep, “You’re the guy Jordan’s dad hired, right?”

“That would be me.” He had to wrinkle his nose and hold back a sneeze, as her perfume threatened to both send him into a sneezing fit and trigger a migraine. He couldn’t identify it by scent, but oddly enough, he could smell the trace of chemicals in her bloodstream coming through her pores, in spite of all the warring food smells drifting over the food court. Prozac? An anti-depressant of some kind. Perhaps that explained her air of drugged ennui.

She blinked at him, eyelids smeared with faintly glittery purple eyeshadow like a metallic bruise. “You come with your goons? Darren said you had goons that attacked him.”

“They weren’t goons, they were hockey players.”

“What’s the diff?”

Ouch. “Hey. I’ll have you know Tank Beauvais is perhaps the coolest straight man I have ever known.”

That almost surprised a genuine reaction from her. “You’re gay? You beat up my boyfriend and you’re gay?”

There was a slight sneer to her voice that annoyed him. It seemed to suggest that all gay men were limp wristed hairdressers who would scream and faint if they saw a spider in the bathtub. That irritated him enough to reply, “I didn’t touch him. I didn’t need to, ’cause he collapsed like a Wal-Mart end table. I’m just trying to find out where Jordan ran off to.”

“I don’t know and I don’t care. Now leave me alone.”  She looked back down at her Blackberry and kept texting.

All the competing smells were annoying him more than she was. His sense of smell often fluctuated, usually due to if it was his “time of the month” or not, but since he no longer had a normal viral cycle, he had no idea why his sense of smell was stronger on some days than others. Probably still a viral load variance, but now inherently unpredictable since he could instigate a change at any time. Sharp odors - perfume, teriyaki, beef tallow, French fries, pepperoni, pho, cinnamon rolls, pretzels, overcooked chicken, icing, coffee, yeast, oatmeal raisin cookies, corn syrup, sered animal fat, garlic, a dozen different perfumes, colognes, hair sprays, gels, conditioners, deodorant, acne cream – all combined to make him alternately hungry and nauseous, with some scents traveling straight up his sinus passages and lodging in his brain like a bullet. He hadn’t taken enough painkillers before he came here, and he desperately wanted to swallow a couple more Vicodin, but not in front of this girl. “What I don’t get is why you’d fuck around on your boyfriend and take pictures of it with your cell.”

Now she looked annoyed. “I haven’t fucked around on Darren.” She considered a moment, frowning, and then said, “Oh, you mean Jordan. I didn’t take those photos, Darren did.”

“With your phone?”

She shrugged. “His battery was dead.”

Oh sure, that made a ton of sense. He rubbed his eyes, trying to will away the nausea. Did he have some Promethazine with him? He was pretty sure he did.

Brittney noticed his struggle, and must have thought it had something to do with her, because she said suddenly and defensively, “Jordan was a creep, you know. I had to change my email several times ’cause he kept hacking into them and reading my emails.”

That made him raise an eyebrow. In spite of the fact that he was being overwhelmed by smells, he knew she wasn’t lying. He hadn’t heard about this side of Jordan before. “He was controlling?”

She gave him a dead eyed stare that was both challenging and disinterested, a sort of bipolar look that only teens and true psychopaths could pull off. “He was a creep. And if he hadn’t run off I’d have dumped his ass. It was sorta flattering at first, but it got old.”

How could abusive behavior be considered flattering? At least he took after dear old dad. “He was good with computers then?”

Again that shrug, that look of bored disaffection. “Guess so. He talked about ‘em a lot, talked about setting up an internet business.”

“What kind of business?”

Another shrug. God, he wanted to throw her diet soda on her just to see if he could startle something genuine out of her. “How the fuck do I know? I didn’t care. Are we done? I have to meet Heaven at Hot Topic in a few minutes.”

“You have no idea where he could have gone?”

Again that starkly bored bipolar look. “No. Are we done?”

He sighed and slumped back in the hard plastic chair, aware that she had given him little worth the trouble of following her Twitter page and running down here. “Yeah, fine.”

She got up and left, not saying anything or giving him a backwards glance. He figured as much. How could she be so jaded so young? He tried to remember if he was. Maybe, or at least he was heading that way.

He decided to buy something to drink so he could have some pills, but while he was waiting in line, his cell vibrated in his coat pocket. A glance at the read out showed it was Gordo calling him, so he decided to go ahead and answer it. Maybe they knew who had tried to frame the cats for the murder. “Yeah?”

“How close are you to downtown?”

Roan was pretty sure he heard sirens in the background. Oh, this wasn’t good. “North or South?”

“North.”

“Pretty damn close.”

“Get to Stewart and 19th ASAP, and maybe you can beat the SWATs. We have a multiple cat incident inside the Arcadia insurance building, with several wounded, deaths unconfirmed, and a number of cats anywhere between three or a dozen – no one inside the building can decide on a number.”

“Oh fuck.” Arcadia. They’d been in the news lately for their underhanded manner in kicking all infecteds off their policies. They couldn’t technically discriminate, so they’d fine little niggling things to get people off their rolls and never pay for anything. They weren’t the only insurance company doing this – in fact, they were all doing it - they were just the most egregious. “How’d they get so many cats in a building?”

“How the fuck do I know, Roan?” Gordo snapped, sounding really pissed off. Not at him, not really, just pissed off at the situation. “Get here if you still have the power to control cats.” Gordo hung up abruptly.

He didn’t have “power” over cats, they were simply afraid of him. But maybe that was considered much the same thing.

Roan got out of line and ran for the exit as soon as he was clear of the crowds. The only way there could be a multiple cat incident in a place like an office building was if it was planned in advance. So basically this was a rampage, but done in animal form. Shit. Why did they have to do this now? People who didn’t already loathe them – a small number – would now.

He avoided as much of the bridge traffic as he could, and managed to reach the Arcadia Building within eight minutes. They had cordoned Stewart and 19th off to incoming traffic, so he parked over on Madison and ran around the corner. The cops had parked their cars on the sidewalk to make a cordon holding pedestrians back, but they also needed to access the scene and let the paramedics through, so there were spaces to let them through, and uniform cops on crowd duty, standing there to keep any unauthorized people from getting through. He didn’t recognize either cop he saw as he shoved through the crowd, but they must have recognized him, as they stood aside and impatiently waved him through, briefly splitting so he could squeeze past them. They weren’t the only ones who recognized him, as some man shouted, “Infecteds suck!” Roan didn’t glance back, he simply held up his middle finger, which earned some ill tempered grumbling and cursing from the crowd. One man had the decency to laugh.

Gordo and Seb were loitering in the shade of an ambulance. “Still making friends and influencing people?” Gordo asked sarcastically.

“People love me. Now what’s the situation?”

“Same as before. Cats loose in the building, an unknown number, but people have separately identified a cougar and a lion. Someone’s suggested an entire pride, but I’m not sure it works like that. Anyways, the lowest reported floor they’ve supposedly been seen on is the fifth, and all floors below have been evacuated. We believe some people maybe have been injured attempting to corral the cats.”

“Morons.”

“SWAT team ETA is seven minutes, so if you wanna try and save any, get to it.” While Gordo was talking, Seb handed Roan a tranquilizer gun, which he took if only to convince the SWAT guys that the cats were no longer a threat. He tucked it into the waistband of his pants as Gordo also handed him a radio. “Stay in touch. We’ll give you a heads up when they ingress.”

Roan nodded, and spun around, tensed, as something impacted the sidewalk behind him. It was a half empty Starbucks cup that spewed cold coffee all over the mica flecked sidewalk in front of the Arcadia Building. Gordo pointed into the crowd, and barked, “Arrest that asshole.”

One of the boys in blue plunged into the crowd, which parted uneasily, as the man who threw it yelled, “You fuckin’ cats are murderers! You should all be drowned!”

“Shut the fuck up!” Gordo snapped. Roan ignored it and headed into the glass fronted tower of Arcadia. Deciding he and Paris weren’t so bad had done wonders for Gordo’s sympathy towards infecteds.

Roan found himself in an eerily empty lobby, where signs of how much fucking money these people made were everywhere, from the marble floor to the mahogany reception desk and the super quiet air conditioning system that always kept the lobby just a couple of degrees above arctic chill. He could smell fear and panic, but it was quickly dissipating in the chilled air, and it was all Human. He smelled that no cats had been in the lobby.

How had they gotten in and where had they hidden? Someone used to be an employee here, or a customer who had been in the building enough to get a solid idea of its layout (perhaps on purpose). They knew where they could go and hide out until the change. And the change took about an hour, give or take a few minutes (not for him, but for everyone else), so they had to be places where no one would go during their change. This was a plan with a lot of “ifs” that shouldn’t have worked with so many cats, and yet it seemed to have worked. Was it an inside job? Did they have a current employee (infected or not) helping them? You’d think they’d have to.

Roan ignored the elevators and found the door to the fire stairs, which was hidden absurdly well. He felt like running, and that’s exactly what he did, pelting up the stairs like he was running a marathon. He barely felt any of the exertion, but when he reached the second floor and started up the third, a bit of a Clash song just floated through his head for no reason at all: “London calling to the imitation zone, forget it brothers, you can go it alone!” Now why had that occurred to him? It was either his subconscious attempting to be funny (or just entertaining), or a precursor to another aneurysm. (The last thing he genuinely remembered before feeling that deep, stabbing pain in his head was a These Arms Are Snakes lyric that just floated into his head for no reason. Either this was his brain’s fucked up way of trying to warn him bad things were a-brewin’ in his blood vessels, or just some random thing, a coincidence. At least it had good musical taste.)

He stopped dead as he smelled blood.

Now that he had stopped he could hear harsh breathing too, echoing in the narrow metal stairwell. It was above him, but not far. “I’m on my way,” he announced. “Can you hear me?”

At first he was sure the guy (it was a guy; you could tell from the blood) was unconscious, but when he was within view of the fourth floor landing, the guy said, gasping and weak, “You shouldn’t go up. I don’t know where they are.”

The man was infected, Roan knew that from the blood too. Panther strain. He was in human form though, splayed on the fourth floor landing, partially slumped against an exit door, bloody scratch marks on his face, arms, and torso, but most of the blood was coming from a neck wound that, while not spurting, was losing blood in copious amounts that couldn’t be healthy for anyone. A puddle had already formed around him, dying his jeans black. His t-shirt was previously black, but it gleamed wetly and clung to his torso like he was a model, except models usually weren’t drenched in blood.

He was an average looking guy in his early twenties, with the only odd thing about him being his strawberry blond hair and hazel eyes, as red hair and hazel eyes was an unusual combination. When his eyes locked on his, Roan thought he saw recognition in them, which was confirmed when he said, “Oh, you’re him.”

Before asking what that was supposed to mean – and his inflectionless, tired voice gave no tells – Roan pulled out his radio, and said, “Got a guy bleeding out on the fourth floor landing of the emergency stairwell. The area’s clear to this point, send in the paramedics.”

“Roger,” Gordo replied.

Roan tucked the radio into his waistband (which was getting crowded at this point, but fuck it), and then covered the throat wound with his hand, putting as much pressure on it as he dared. He should reach into his neck and pinch off whatever vein was leaking out so much blood, but he wasn’t a medical professional and there was a good chance he’d pinch off the wrong damn thing. Also, he would probably cause this guy pain, and he’d undoubtedly been in enough pain. There was blood on the stairs from the fifth floor, suggesting he’d dragged himself to this point or fallen. “Do we know each other?” Roan asked, sure they didn’t.

“No,” the guy confirmed. “But I know you. You’re Roan McKichan.”

He mispronounced his last name, but since he was dying, he let it go. “It’s my day for being recognized. What’s your name?”

“Ben. Ben Sawyer.”

“Well Ben, what happened? How are you the only members of the cat hit squad who didn’t change?”

All he had was his eyes now. His posture was limp, there seemed to be no strength in his body, and most of his face was obscured by blood. But his eyes, as tired as they were, still told him all he needed to know. He saw the denial, but then he saw the surrender, the decision to just tell him the truth. “We weren’t a hit squad.”

“So what were you? You had to know people might die.”

“Not if they weren’t idiots. We had nothing to lose, we’re all as good as dead anyways, and we figured it was time someone noticed what these greedy bastards were doing, letting our people die -”

“By killing some of them? Not smart.”

“No, we just wanted to bring attention to them.” He paused briefly. “You could.”

He ignored that. “What happened to you?”

“I dunno. I was supposed to change like everyone else, but somehow I didn’t. I mean, fuck, I’ve never had a cycle be so short. Why didn’t I change?”

“How long was it?”

“Three days,” he scoffed. “Three fucking days.”

That was the absolute least of a cycle. It didn’t happen a lot, it was rare, but it did occasionally occur. Obviously it did to this poor bastard. “One of your friends attacked you?”

“I thought I could leave without getting noticed, but I shoulda stayed put. It was Brandon, I think, but I don’t blame him for what happened. Shit happens.”

Roan wondered where the EMTs were, but thought he heard noises below them. They probably had trouble finding the door. Roan was kneeling beside him, and felt blood soaking into the knees of his pants even as it ran down his hand. The funny thing was there was so much blood in a person; you really had no idea how much until you had one bleeding to death right in front of you.

Ben stared at him, and Roan could almost see him falling somewhere deep inside his eyes. He wanted to sleep, and Roan knew he couldn’t let him, he had to keep him conscious. He could hear the EMTs pounding up the stairs, but they were taking much longer than Roan had. But to be fair, he wasn’t lugging equipment, and also he wasn’t quite Human. “You should be our leader,” Ben said.

Roan gave him a quizzical look. “Excuse me?”

“We need a leader. Most groups have them, but we don’t. And you’d be perfect.”

“I doubt it.”

“You would. Most normals are afraid of us because of what we could give ‘em. They’re afraid of you ’cause of what you can do to them.” His gaze was steady and strong – he honestly believed what he was saying. But that could have been the blood loss.”You’re dangerous because you remind them they’re just prey.”

Finally the EMTs reached the landing, huffing slightly. “He’s infected,” Roan told them. Both of them, a far too handsome man and a woman built like a fireplug, nodded as they put their kits down. Roan waited until EMT Handsome was ready, and then quickly removed his hand from Ben’s neck wound, where just a bit more blood spilled out before Gorgeous George put his gloved paramedic hand over it. He had a thick gauze pad too, but it would probably last only a few seconds before it was soaked with blood and utterly useless.

Roan stood up, and Ben’s hazel eyes followed him, even as the female paramedic shined a penlight into his eyes and asked him basic response questions. Roan felt bad for the kid, but there was nothing he could do for him now, and he still had friends upstairs. Which reminded him to ask, “How many?”

“Four,” Ben replied, still ignoring the EMTs.

Roan nodded and skirted them, heading for the fifth floor. “You’ve got blood on you,” Paramedic Sexy said. Bizarrely, he had a British accent, which he didn’t expect. But why not? Paramedics could be British. “It’ll draw the cats right to you.”

“Good.” He wanted them to come to him, to leave the Humans alone and respond to their alpha. It might be the only way to save them before the normals killed them all.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Is anyone going to tell me what happened?”

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I know. But still … disappointing.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What do you mean?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Everybody slips. No one’s perfect.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“So what’s going on?”

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

“No. Now it’s your turn.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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