Prey (20 page)

Andrea

Speed

parking lot, with bright white rocks that seemed to glow in low light. If your life was going well, you wouldn’t be here; a precinct house could never look friendly enough to overcome its basic function of locking people up.

Inside it was busy, with the usual assortment of perps in various stages of sobriety and belligerence, almost rivaling the assorted disbelief and belligerence of people here to bail someone out or accompanying the newly arrested. The assortment of smells was unpleasant and nearly overwhelming. But a couple of the cops looked up and scowled, recognizing him, and Gordo appeared in the doorway of the corridor leading to the “special” cells and waved him over. Roan cut through the crowd, only the people who recognized him bothering to hurry to get out of his way, and joined him there.

As soon as the door closed, sealing off a great deal of noise and smells, Gordo bitched, “I thought you’d be here five minutes ago.”

“Traffic is hell this time of night. So what type of cat is he?”

“Leopard… I think. He’s spotted.”

“That’s a leopard all right.” That was kind of a shame; he’d really been holding out hope that Eli would turn out to be a house cat or something; maybe a skunk.

He followed him down a cool corridor of easy-to-hose-down cement, although the air was redolent of that curious odor of industrial soap, vomit, body odor, and piss, with the lingering tang of cat; many different ones, all blending into a sharp, indefinable stink.

A metal door opened into what could best be called an antechamber, with a concrete floor and industrial white painted walls, and a guard’s observation post, where a pudgy, uniformed woman sat, observing the cell block on the monitors. Each cell was separated from others by soundproofed portable walls, but the cats could still smell each other and generally spent their nights (or days) pacing in agitation. A quick glance showed that six of the twenty available cells were occupied, five by cats in various states and one by a woman curled up in fetal position on the floor, one who had probably just metamorphosed out of her cat form. Also in the room was Sikorski’s usual partner, the almost abnormally calm and stoic Detective Sebastian “Seb” Estes (if he’d been white, he could very well have been Joe Friday), a guy from the tech branch he only knew as Allen, Officer Jeremy Brown, a cop he knew (and loathed), and the Chief herself, Infected: Prey

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Julia Matthews. Chief Matthews stepped forward and gave him a courteous if slightly strained smile. “Thank you for coming in, Roan.”

“Anything for you, Chief.” And she was yards better than McClarty, who’d retired ahead of a minor scandal involving all those “good” families whose rebellious offsprings’ names he kept off the books. The first female chief of this particular precinct, she ran a really tight ship, as if appearing as anything less than a ball-buster might open her up to charges that she was too “weak” to run the place. She was on the far side of forty, her almond-brown hair cut almost military short, her uniform seemingly so starched and tailored you could have cut yourself on its crisp edges. She was above average in height, almost six feet tall in flats, and fairly solidly built; she claimed that’s just “how Montana farm girls turned out,” but Roan knew that was just deflective self-deprecation. She was a good cop; he didn’t hold it against her that she asked for his badge after that whole Jenkins’ incident, and she always seemed shocked that he didn’t resent her for it. But how could he? She was simply doing her job, and he had already concluded that he couldn’t remain on the force. It seemed like a momentary lapse of reason that he ever even became a cop; he suspected he only had because people told him he couldn’t.

Little Allen—not an insult; at barely five-five he was the shortest person in the room—stepped forward with what looked like a thick, square dustpan on the end of a pole, the dustpan coated with a thick layer of a whitish-orange compound that smelled of antiseptic, filling amalgam, and plaster. “You know how to use one of these, I presume? You—”

“Yeah, I know the drill,” he said, taking it from Allen. The dustpan thing was the “bite plate”, the thing he had to make Eli the cat bite so they could get an accurate bite print. The stuff set pretty fast and tasted nasty, so after a cat bit it, it was more than likely to let go quickly, but there had been instances where the cat tore the whole thing to pieces. You had to be careful, which was also why it was on a long pole, so you didn’t have to get too close to the bars. “What cage is he in?”

“Three-B,” the female officer at the observation post reported, sounding so bored she could have been half asleep. The name patch on her uniform shirt said Stahl. “Go in, take a right; he’s the second one down.”

He nodded, and headed to the metal door plastered with all the warning signs in English and Spanish. “Got it.” Stahl hit a button that unlocked the inner door with a mechanical clank, and then he was within the small maze of cat cages, the tiny wing smelling like a disreputable zoo.

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The door clanked shut behind him and locked with an ominous thunk.

As he walked the aisle around the cages, he remembered bringing Paris here when he was homeless and living in his car, on the verge of a shift but having nowhere to go. Paris was just getting his sanity back, his self, and had told Roan he hated police stations and hospitals, he hated places where there were so many people he could hurt if things went wrong. Roan had to soothingly talk him in here, and promised him he would watch from the monitors and make sure he didn’t get out and hurt anyone; he promised he’d watch him all night. Roan had no intention of doing so, because even a tiger had no hope of getting out of here, and certainly not into the heart of the station. But as soon as his shift was over, he did come back, and the poor schlub on watch duty was more than happy to cede the chair to him. He told himself he just wanted to see what an actual tiger looked like, if they looked like the ones you saw in zoos, and yes, they did, or Paris did at any rate. He was the most magnificent cat he’d ever seen in his entire life, as well as one of the largest; no wonder he was worried about hurting someone.

He did end up watching him all night. He just hadn’t meant to.

As cats went, Eli wasn’t that big, just as he wasn’t in real life. He was a lean, almost scrawny leopard with wheat-colored fur, his spots mere suggestions on his thin coat, ghost echoes of circles like the rings of enlarged moles. His lean, almost vulpine-shaped head turned toward Roan, and he snarled, stopping his restless pacing to run, snarling, at the bars, reaching a paw through to try and swipe at him.

Roan was too far back for the cat to even get close to scratching him, but he swore he could almost see Eli’s arrogance in those yellowish eyes, something more Human than cat, and something in him bristled. “Back down, Eli,” he snapped. “Be a good loser for once.”

The cat looked up at him and snarled again, black lips pulling over ivory teeth, and Roan snarled back, the growl rising easily to his throat. He crouched down so he could be at eye level with him, and the cat’s ears went back flat against its head in what could very well have been confusion, if cats were even capable of that. Roan felt his snarl and growl become one, a thrumming like the engine of his bike, and the leopard charged forward again with a roar; Roan roared right back, stopping it in its tracks.

It was a roar, although it was also half-angry scream, and it scoured Infected: Prey

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his throat raw the moment it was pushed out. But the growl continued throughout it all, and Roan didn’t know how. He didn’t know a lot of things, actually. He was feeling oddly dizzy, almost detached from himself, and he felt his anger like a physical entity inside his own body, making his muscles bunch together beneath his skin, smooth fibers flowing into hard knots. He leaned forward on his hands, now on all fours, closer to the cage than he should have been, and somehow he roared once more, the force of the noise making blood well up in his throat, as he felt the muscles in his back tense, the hair on his neck bristle as his lips pulled back and revealed his teeth to the cat, growling as he moved forward slowly toward the bars of the cage.

The Eli leopard backed up, its posture one of submission, but that wasn’t enough for him. Roan’s blood pounded in his ears as his head seemed to swim in its own internal fog, and he could feel his muscles become liquid steel as the anger rose inside him, drowning his vision in red as he realized this cat had to die; he wanted to feel its warm blood gush in his mouth as he ripped open its throat, and—

What the fuck?

It was an effort of will to reassert himself over the beast in his system, the one rising up to take him over, and he nearly threw himself backward, shoving himself away from the cage as he panted for breath and finally stopped growling. What the fuck was that?
What the fuck was
that?!
His own blood was coppery in his mouth, his throat ached as if it had been rubbed with a steel scouring brush. His muscle shifted back into their usual places as—

His muscles shifted?

He looked at his hands, almost expecting to see fur and claws, but they were just hands; he could see the black curl of his Leo tattoo and his ghost scar, and he could see his hands were shaking. His whole body was quivering, again it was an effort of will to make it stop, and it was almost painful, since his muscles wanted to spasm. He felt like he was coming back to himself, but he had no idea where or when he had gone. He didn’t even remember dropping the bite plate.

His head spun, swam, and he felt almost unable to deal with his own thought processes. Was he going to become. ..? Was he going to change?

That was impossible; the change couldn’t be forced, it couldn’t be controlled or made to happen outside the viral cycle. It couldn’t happen; it 120

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had
never
happened.

He’d felt the muscles move. He didn’t roar; he couldn’t make that
noise. The second one wasn’t even remotely human. He had no idea where
all that rage had come from, or why he was so mad.

His first urge was to run, to get as far away from here and cats as he could, to barricade himself in his house and try to hold on to his humanity against an enemy that lived inside his own body, in his own head, but that was such a chickenshit reaction he was ashamed of it. He swallowed down his own blood, the very act of swallowing making him wince in pain, and he picked up the bite plate as he got to his knees and shoved the thing sideways through the bars, only turning it level once it was inside. “Come on and bite the thing, you stupid cat,” he grumbled, and his voice was gravelly hoarse, painful to listen to.

The leopard had lain down on the floor of its cage, its head down on its paws like a person in a guillotine waiting for the blade to come down.

He jabbed the plate at its face, annoying it, and finally it raised its head and bit the thing, but it was strangely perfunctory, with almost no aggression in it at all. After he pulled the plate out of the bars, it resumed its submissive posture, its tail twitching in mild irritation.

Roan used the wall to get back to his feet, and as he walked back to the exit, he saw something that horrified him to his very core: the other cats were all in submissive postures, too. The lion, the panther… he had a feeling if he walked the entire block, they would all be that way. They had somehow all heard him, or smelled him, or… no, no, he couldn’t deal with this. It suddenly felt as if the air was thickening, the walls closing in on him.

The door unlocked mechanically several seconds after he’d reached it, almost as if no one had wanted to let him in. As he stepped inside the antechamber, he saw a sea of faces all staring at him in abject horror, standing as far back from him inside the room as possible. Even Stahl was standing up from her station, although duty dictated she couldn’t move anywhere.

He shoved the bite plate into Allen’s hand—he nearly flinched away from Roan as he did so—and finally Gordo asked, the shock making his voice reedy, “Roan, what the fuck was that?”

Not sure he could keep his poker face intact, his vocal inflections flat, he still managed to spit out, “I had to establish dominance. I guess Infected: Prey

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I’m done here.” He quickly left the room and no one challenged him, no one made to follow, and he simply plunged through the crowd outside, elbowing people aside as he tried to leave the building as fast as he could without breaking into a run. His heart was pounding triple time, a beat that seemed to reverberate inside his head and his eyeballs, and he wondered if this was a heart attack. He wondered if he’d mind if it was.

He barely made it back to the Mustang before he doubled over and vomited on the asphalt.

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14

Watching the Detective

ONLY after the painkillers started to work did Paris realize the thudding he was feeling was actually coming from above.

As he climbed up the basement stairs, he realized it was music, a bass line and drums pulsing through the floor, and as he pushed open the basement door he recognized it as a song from Absurd Pop Song Romance, Roan’s favorite Pansy Division album. He’d heard it enough now that he could recognize it from a single guitar riff.

The sound washed over him as he stumbled blearily into the living room and found Roan sprawled on the sofa, swigging directly from a bottle of rum. That was shocking for several reasons. Roan didn’t like rum (the bottle was a Christmas gift from a totally clueless passing acquaintance); Roan drank very sparingly, and when he did, he had a preference for microbrews; and, perhaps most shocking of all, it was just after seven in the fucking morning! Since when did he drink in the morning?

“Ro?” he asked, padding around the sofa.

Roan looked up at him slowly, his bottle-green eyes glazed, red-rimmed, and strangely unfocused. “Oh, sorry, hon,” he slurred, his syllables an almost inaudible mush. “I didn’t think I’d wake ya.”