Prey (21 page)

“You’re drunk.” Yes, it was an idiotic thing to say, but it was startling to see him this way; he couldn’t help but be stupid.

Roan shrugged in a strangely defeated way. “Con always liked it, so I thought now was as good a time as any to give it a serious shot.”

“Con?” he repeated, puzzled. Or had he said Vaughn? Either way, he had no idea who that was.

“I guess I get the appeal of drunkenness, but fentanyl’s easier.” He took a swig from the rum bottle, then grimaced as if it was the worst thing Infected: Prey

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he’d ever tasted. “God, this is horrible. It’s like drinking hair spray.”

“Then why drink it?”

“It’s the only hard liquor we have in the house.” He sighed heavily, and let the bottle thunk onto the carpet, where it still managed to remain upright. His voice was scratchy, hoarse, and Paris wondered if he was coming down with something. (Which would be about time, really. The whole time he’d known him, Roan had never gotten a single cold.) “I didn’t want to think anymore; I wanna stop thinking. I wanna shut off my head.” He dry-washed his face, and that’s when he saw that the knuckles on Roan’s right hand were red and slightly swollen, filaments of blood marking the back of his hand like a henna tattoo.

He reached out and grabbed his hand, examining the injury close up.

“Holy shit, Ro, did you get in a fight?”

Roan yanked his hand away violently before Paris could get a cursory glance. “Naw, I… I broke the bathroom mirror. Sorry. I’ll replace it.”

“How’d you break it? Are you all right?” But even as he asked that, he realized that the injuries on Roan’s hand could only have come if he’d punched the mirror, possibly more than once.

He shook his hand in the air as if it did actually ache, but then he let it fall casually to his lap. “I’m fine. I’m so fine I’m golden,” he replied, but with a derisive, sarcastic snicker, and he got a pained look in his eye.

“I’m the king of the fucking cats. I’m the alpha male.”

Paris sat on the couch beside him, and it was a fight to catch Roan’s eyes, as he seemed to be looking everywhere but at him. “Sweetheart, you’re not making sense.”

Roan’s eyes started to turn liquid as tears welled in them, and once again Paris was quietly amazed at how perfectly, richly green they were.

When he’d first met him, he thought he was wearing colored contact lens.

“They knew I could kill all of them. How’d they know that when I didn’t know that?”

Paris shook his head, trying hard to make sense of this. Well, drunken rambling wasn’t new, it was just new for Ro.

Roan sniffed and wiped the tears away with the back of his hand.

“There was this social worker once, her name was Allison. Rainbow 124

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reminds me of her in a way: very hippie-ish, kinda mousy. Allison was the only one who would touch me; she’d take my hand or give me awkward hugs. She would always tell me at the end of our sessions: ‘You are not your disease.’
She’d look me in the eye and say that, and I didn’t know why she was telling me that; it was other people who needed that info, not me. But I’m starting to think she was smarter than everyone else. I’m more my disease than I’ve ever wanted to admit.”

Paris reached out and touched his face, cupping his cheek and turning him toward him. “That’s nonsense—”

Roan pushed his hand away and shoved himself farther into the corner of the couch, like he was in one of his moods where he didn’t want to be touched. They were rare, but every now and then he’d get in these dark places inside his own head where he wanted no one near him, where a casual touch, no matter how gentle or affectionate, would make him nearly jump out of his skin. Roan never wanted to talk about it, and Paris respected him enough not to ask. He could imagine what it meant, though, and it made him a little sick to think about it.

“It’s not. I wish it was. I’ve known for some time that too much of the cat is bleeding into me, but I liked to pretend it didn’t mean anything.

But it does. What d’ya think’ll happen one day? Do you think I’ll change and never change back?”

What in the fucking hell was he talking about? Was he serious?

“That doesn’t happen. Infecteds don’t become cats and stay that way. You know that.”

“Infecteds like you. Functional virus children… the medical profession still doesn’t know what to make of us. We’re the freaks of freaks.” He continued wiping away snot and tears, , even with tears still streaming from his eyes as he stared resolutely down at the carpet. “And I’ve just gotten confirmation that I’m King Freak. I suppose I should be glad. If I gotta be a freak, at least I’m the biggest one.”

Paris wanted to tell him that was total bullshit, he was not a freak and he was not his disease—what kind of thing was that to say anyway?—

but Roan was not in a mood to listen right now. He reached out tentatively, letting Roan see his hand in the corner of his eye before gently touching his face, feeling if his forehead was hot. His skin did seem abnormally warm, but that could have just been the booze; he’d been to enough keggers to know that. “Come on, let’s get you upstairs. You need to get Infected: Prey

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some sleep.”

Paris stood and took his arm, and Roan reluctantly let him help him up to his feet, not so much stumbling as taking a moment to find his balance. He leaned against him, and buried his face in the side of his neck.

“You smell good,” he said, his breath hot against Paris’s neck.

Oh joy. You had to love these drunken mood swings. “No I don’t, I haven’t had a shower yet.”

“Doesn’t matter. Tigers smell good.” He scraped his teeth along his neck, not quite a love bite but very much in the same spirit.

“Are you serious? Have you ever been to the zoo?” He held Roan back by the shoulders, and said, “I’m on a supposedly lethal dose of illegal painkillers, and you’re falling-down drunk. Do you actually think we’re capable of doing anything at the moment?”

Roan stared back at him in glazed, bemused defiance. “Nobody likes a quitter.”

Paris frowned, trying not to laugh. At least Roan was still in there, beneath all the self-pity and alcohol, still being a smart-ass. “Come on, horndog, let’s go.”

“Shouldn’t that be horncat?” he suggested, but not very seriously.

Paris helped him up the stairs in an odd reversal of their usual roles, chewing over everything Roan had said. It didn’t make any more sense in retrospect, and he wondered what the hell had happened to drive him this far to the edge. Roan was one of the toughest guys he’d ever known, in just about every sense of the word; he had a contrarian’s soul, so the more you tried to push him down, the more he fought back. You could beat him black and blue and dump him by the side of the road, but he would just spit out teeth and go right back to where he had been (once quite literally).

It was either tenacity or insanity, depending on who you asked. It wasn’t that he wasn’t afraid, it was just that his fears had a tendency to be more esoteric and obscure. A gun in the face would just make him roll his eyes, but an EEG appointment would keep him up all night.

Obviously something was bothering him about himself, about his strain, but what? Yes, Roan had several aspects of the cat that never quite left him in his human form. The most obvious was his sense of smell, but his eyesight was equally acute, and he had a tendency to move with a feline grace that occasionally verged on eerie. People couldn’t actually 126

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move without making a noise, but Roan seemingly could; if he wanted to, he could be in a room with you and you’d never know it unless you somehow saw him out of the corner of your eye. He could stand in the shadows, move in them, and you’d never know it (that’s why he got so many great pictures of cheating spouses, and could tail people so successfully). He also had lightning-fast reflexes that allowed him to catch insects in midair and grab people’s fists even when they attempted an out-of-nowhere sucker punch; according to him, the police recruiters were especially impressed with his reflexes. (That
Matrix
shit, ducking bullets?

He bet Roan could do that in real life, although he hoped that never actually had to be proved.) But none of that seemed especially “inhuman,”

although he had to admit his “super-smelling” was a bit creepy at times.

Oh, and he did growl a bit. Usually when he was really angry—he always seemed to be startled to find himself doing it, like it was an unconscious reflex—but sometimes when he was aroused too, although that was a different kind of growl. It was much softer, lower in the throat, almost a kind of purr. Did he know he did that? It had never occurred to Paris to ask, but now it did, although there was no way in hell he was bringing it up while he was drunk. Paris always found it kind of flattering, that he could make someone want him enough to growl; a weird kind of ego boost.

His eyes were always the same. Did Roan know that? He never told him because he didn’t know how he’d process the news. But even when he was in his lion form, his preternaturally green eyes remained, almost like there was just a little bit of Roan still in there (the eyes changed shape, of course, it was just the irises didn’t change color). Did he find out and freak? No, Paris didn’t see how he could find out, and even if he did, that would hardly send him careening toward a self-pity drunk. He was having a hard time imagining any scenario that could shake Roan so badly.

Although he tried to help him down onto the bed gently, Roan just kind of collapsed on it, but didn’t seem to notice or mind. He took off Roan’s shoes and put them aside, pulling the blanket over him as Roan stared up at the ceiling, water still leaking from the corners of his eyes, tears like fragile diamonds getting suspended in the stubble staining his jaw. “I’m sorry.”

“For what?” Paris knelt down beside the bed so he could be more or less at eye level with him, and stroked the hair off his forehead. He did feel a little feverish; maybe he was simply sick and reacted weirdly to it.

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“For this, for everything. I’ve just wanted to believe I was more than a virus, but I don’t think I can deny it anymore. I am my disease; I’m not sure I’m all that human.”

“What bullshit is this?” He turned his face toward him, and this time he seemed too weary to resist it. “You aren’t your disease. You are Roan Christopher McKichan, and don’t even try and insult me by implying I love a walking virus. Got it?”

He smiled weakly, but it almost looked like a grimace. “Yes, dear.”

“Don’t you ‘yes dear’ me,” he said in mock-outrage, before giving him a kiss. He was right; the rum kind of did taste like hair spray.

Paris held him close, putting an arm around his chest and burying his face in his neck, and before he nodded off, Roan said the weirdest thing. “I wonder if I wanted you, or if it wanted the tiger.”

He was a little surprised to find out he was dozing off as well—

Roan’s voice made him start a little—but when he looked at him, his eyes were closed, and his breathing had the deep, slow rhythm of sleep. Had he dreamed Roan said that? He must have. What a weird thing to think you heard. What did that even mean? Oh well… dreams, right? They weren’t supposed to make sense.

He shoved himself up from where he’d been kneeling beside the bed, and he figured he’d be aching from being in such a strange position if it hadn’t been for the fact that he was so full of painkillers his insides felt like jelly, and his joints were so loose they could have been greased with WD-40.

Paris went and took a shower, and since the mirror in the bathroom was intact, he figured Roan must have broken the mirror in the downstairs bathroom. That reminded him of Roan’s hand, and as soon as he got out of the shower, he found the actual first aid kit—not one of their Courtney Love variations —and returned to work on his hand.

Roan slept through everything: the antiseptic spray, the wrapping of his hand in gauze, even the last-minute slapping on of the “cool patch,”

the ones they kept in the medicine cabinet for Roan’s migraines. Paris was hoping it would bring the swelling in his knuckles down. He couldn’t have punched the mirror hard enough to break them, could he? What would upset him that much?

He went downstairs and shut off the stereo before going into the 128

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bathroom to clean up the shards of bloody glass. Roan had done an excellent job of shattering it in its frame; in fact, there was a fist-shaped indent in the wall behind the mirror. He’d hit it incredibly hard, so hard he must have broken his hand. But you’d think, even as drunk as he was, he’d have felt a great deal of pain. You’d think he wouldn’t have been able to use it to hold a bottle of rum. Maybe that was another gift of the cat; maybe he could do things like this and not be hurt as much.

A bizarre thought, especially since Roan was hardly immune to injury, but since that was what Ro seemed so upset about, his cat aspects, he wondered if that was somewhere in the neighborhood of what was bothering him. God, he hoped he was willing to talk once he was sober.

Ro shut down so often, he kept things so bottled up, Paris felt privileged to pry little bits of information out of him. That thing he said about the social worker? Paris had no idea he even used to meet with a social worker, but if he was a kid in the state foster care system, that would make sense.

He thought about calling Sikorski just to see if he knew what the hell had happened to Ro last night, but Sikorski barely knew who the hell he was—he’d met him briefly at the funeral for that cop friend of Ro’s a couple months back—and Paris could still remember the look the old man gave him, like he was thinking “So you’re the guy Roan fucks,” a look both dismissive and disdainful yet tempered with an obvious splash of amusement. Paris loathed him on first sight, but played nice because it was a funeral, and because he was an acquaintance of Roan’s. But he also hated him because he so obviously used Roan; he used Roan’s compulsion to solve puzzles and his ability to look at a scene, at a pile of evidence, and see the tiny little flaw that would bring the whole thing crashing down.