Authors: Andrea Speed
He was waved about as “See—we take on filthy degenerate lepers too; we’re progressive.” Henstridge, already a cop, would know what a laugh that was.
Although they listened patiently, Gordo was quick to point out he had no proof of anything, just supposition—although that whole money thing was damn suspicious. But all that aside, he told his friend on the other end of his cell phone to see if anyone knew where Henstridge was, because he needed to talk to him right away.
With the waiting game begun, he went back to his clients, the Nakamuras, and sat with them a while. Danny was still out cold, but his vitals were starting to look better, so the doctor figured he’d be conscious in another couple of hours. She didn’t think there’d be any permanent 162
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physical damage.
Gordo found him eventually, and told him no one had found Henstridge yet; no one seemed to know where he was. Gordo still wasn’t sure about his theory, but he told him—in a hushed voice, in case someone wandered by—that he’d make sure Henstridge would be brought in, and when he was, he’d make sure he was there. “We both know the reason I put up with you is because you do have the sharpest instincts of anyone I’ve ever met. So… if you say you think Henstridge is the guy… okay.
We’ll look at him hard.”
This was clearly a painful admission from Gordo, and he supposed he should have been touched, but Roan was too tired to muster it. “Are you hittin’ on me?”
Gordo scowled at him, shaking his head. “You just can’t keep from being a smart-ass, can you?”
“Snarky is my default setting.”
He sighed heavily, a fatally put-upon man. “So I’ve noticed.”
Although there were some questions about trespassing and excessive use of force, he was essentially let go. After all, as Seb so helpfully pointed out, according to the law, anything short of death was permissible in self-defense—and death was acceptable in some cases. Hatch was hardly dead, just hurting (although probably not nearly enough).
He’d left the Mustang on Hatch’s block, but Gordo and Seb offered him a lift home, and he figured he’d take it. He and Paris could head out tomorrow on the bike and pick up the Mustang—maybe they’d encounter a local “action news team,” and they could say something unconscionably filthy on the air. It was always fun to piss off someone with plastic hair and nothing better to do.
It was odd riding in the back of an unmarked police car, but at least Gordo gave him his gun back so he didn’t feel totally like he was being run in. He mostly nodded off in the back, vaguely listening to Seb and Gordo talk to Em at dispatch, and was looking forward to simply crawling into bed with Paris and sleeping for three days. Except Paris wouldn’t be there yet, would he? The sun was starting to come up, the sky’s fragile blue giving way to a pale blush dotted with thin, blue-gray clouds, and he figured Paris had just changed back or was soon going to. He’d be happy he’d solved his cases, although then that meant they had to start worrying Infected: Prey
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about the bills again.
His eyes were half-open as they turned the corner down his quiet, rural street, and he saw, parked on the soft shoulder of the road across from his house, a silver Subaru Outback. “What the fuck?” he exclaimed, sitting up, totally awake now.
Seb was driving, and while this exclamation did not make his driving suffer in any way, he glanced at him in the rearview mirror as he pulled the car smoothly into the driveway. “What’s wrong?” His voice almost had an inflection; that was near panic for Seb.
“That Outback,” he said, hastily getting out of the car. “It belonged to a suspicious guy that was here the other day,”
“Suspicious how?” Gordo asked. “Nutball?”
“I don’t—” The reply died in his throat as he took a step toward the house and caught the scent of blood. He had the instant mental image of Paris lying on the floor of the cage, his head punched in on one side, collapsed due to the force of a bullet pulverizing part of his skull, in a pool of blood like a collapsed shadow. His heart was trip-hammering, and he knew he should approach with caution… but it all disappeared in a sudden flush of rage, his vision tinting red as the muscles knotted inside his skin, and as he ran for the house he shouted, “Paris!” Only later, when his throat hurt, did he realize that the scream turned into a roar.
He didn’t open his door, even though he could have; he was too enraged to think clearly, the beast surging out on a wave of desperate emotion. He slammed a flattened palm against the deadbolt and it shot out through the door, cracking like spun glass, the metal bouncing across the floor as he kicked the door open, braced to pounce on the first thing that wasn’t Paris. He could almost feel the hot blood of the intruder in his mouth already.
He was smashed across the face with the rank, meaty smell of blood, and he saw that the basement door had been ripped off its hinges and was partially covering the body of a man sprawled out on the floor at the foot of the stairs. It wasn’t Paris; he knew that from the smell of his blood before he was even able to rein back the beast enough to focus on the body.
He was dead; he smelled like shit and decay already. His throat had been torn out, his skull punctured and face scarred by teeth marks. His 164
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right arm, extended away from his body, was held on only by the bone and a few straggly bits of sinew. There was a gun just beyond his curled fingers, and dark blood had pooled around him like a fallen shroud. He felt a dark sense of triumph that the stupid fucker had encountered the tiger and not Paris, the prey suddenly rendered predator in front of a man not prepared for it.
Anger mingling with relief and panic, Roan felt a bit more in control of himself, and looking around the room, spotted Paris curled up by the back door, blood so completely slicked down his naked back and torso that it looked like he was wearing a red shirt. He scrambled to him as Gordo and Seb came in the door, and one of them—he honestly didn’t know which, and didn’t care—exclaimed, “Jesus Christ!”
He grabbed Paris in his arms and curled himself around his upper body, fighting back tears as his nose confirmed that the blood wasn’t his; none of it belonged to Paris. His pulse, thready and rapid in the aftermath of the change, pounded away in a steady rhythm, and Roan felt almost dizzy with relief. For a second there he’d thought Paris was gone; he’d thought he was dead. He tried to swallow back the lump in his throat and realized he was trembling now, partially out of adrenaline overload and partially out of the fact that he’d just realized he had been more than ready, willing, and able to kill someone with his bare hands. It never even occurred to him to draw his weapon.
He was aware that someone was standing nearby, just far enough away to give them some semblance of privacy, and just by the scent of his cologne—it was faint and he didn’t recognize it at all; it smelled of wood smoke and pine, with a hint of cigar—he knew it was Seb.
“Is he all right?”
“He’s okay. He’s only out due to the change,” he replied, his eyes tightly shut, his voice gravelly. He stroked Paris’s sweat-soaked hair, and was glad he wasn’t conscious yet. How would he explain this? The last time Paris woke up in someone else’s blood, he’d had a nervous breakdown.
“Oh my God,” Gordo gasped. Roan heard the rustle of Seb turning toward his partner, and he risked opening his eyes to look. A couple errant tears spilled out, but they stopped. Gordo was crouched next to the body, just beyond the penumbra of blood, and he was holding two driver’s licenses that he must have pulled out of the coat of the victim. Gordo Infected: Prey
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looked up at them, blue eyes weary with the general horrors of humanity, and said, “It’s Mitchell Henstridge.”
Roan wiped the tears away with the back of his hand, and tried to figure out how he had become a loose end that needed tying up. Had Henstridge known he was investigating him? He must have. He must have worried he was getting close, and what the fuck were two more murders on top of the five he’d already committed? Once you killed at least two people, it was unofficially a “spree” anyway.
He laid Paris down carefully on the floor and grabbed the throw off the couch, covering him, as Seb called in for a meat wagon and the rest of the “cat” investigative unit. Roan had intended to go to the ground-floor bathroom and get Paris some fentanyl (he didn’t give a fuck that they were here; Paris was really going to need it), but he stopped as his nose got so accustomed to the smell of blood and death that he could now smell something else: a cat. A cat he’d never smelled before, one that didn’t belong. “Fucking hell, his son’s still here,” he snapped, heading for the stairs.
Gordo stood up, drawing his service weapon, and asked, “You can smell him?”
“Yeah, upstairs.”
As he started up the steps, Gordo moved to follow, but he looked back down at him and shook his head. “I can get this.”
“If he’s the cat that’s been killing people.…”
“Remember what happened at the station? If he’s a cat, I can handle him.”
Gordo frowned, but his eyes seemed to darken with newfound knowledge as he thought back to what had happened at the cat containment unit, and he understood now what Roan only was starting to understand: the cats were afraid of him. He smelled half-cat, half-human, and they just didn’t know what to make of him. He was the alpha male by default, because he was a strange mutation that couldn’t fit into their limited frame of reference. Gordo nodded reluctantly, but kept his weapon out, pointed at the ceiling. “You need help, shout.”
Roan nodded and went up the stairs quickly and quietly,
unconsciously shifting his weight to the balls of his feet. He closed his eyes, taking a deep breath, following the scent trail to the room beside the 166
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bedroom that they sarcastically referred to as “the library.” It was just a storage room for random crap that they hadn’t found a place for yet, but mainly it was full of Roan’s books; boxes and boxes of books. He knew of this great used-book shop on Pike Street that he could spend hours in, just perusing the stacks and finding hidden gems. He always went in there intending to buy only one or two books, and invariably left with a bag full of them. Paris used to joke that he should just open his own damn used-book shop in the house, if only to free up the room.
He slipped into the bedroom and then the connected bathroom, taking out a medical kit and loading up a hypodermic with painkillers, so practiced at it by now he could do it faster than Dee ever could. He hesitated, filled a second needle, and tucked them both in his pocket before returning to the library.
There was a window on the far wall, across from the door, and as he shoved the ajar door all the way open he was greeted by the smell of fresh air stirring around the scent of slowly moldering books. Mitchell’s son had jumped out, perhaps because it didn’t want to face a tiger. It had cut itself on the glass; he could smell a faint trace of blood, and that was enough for him to track it.
He went to the pane and looked out, but the backyard was clear.
Glass sparkled below like water, and before he realized what he was doing, he’d jumped out the window and landed easily on his feet in the grass. The boy’s scent was easy to pick up, and he followed the faint smell of blood toward the copse of trees at the back of the property.
Had he just jumped out the fucking window?!
When he’d found this place, the copse was the second reason he wanted to buy it. Being far from human neighbors was the main attraction, but this copse, full of towering pines and thick underbrush, huge ferns that were almost waist high and tangles of blackberry bushes as tall as a man, was an attractive cat hideaway. It was full of small animals that development had chased out of their old homes, and it could, in theory, provide enough distraction for any big cat that might have broken out of the house. It was small hope that they’d be distracted enough by a possum to forget about hunting human prey, but he had odd moments of living in hope.
He found Henstridge’s son, Michael, by the dried-up creek, laying underneath the hollow of a blackberry bush, his injured leg still sticking Infected: Prey
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out from under the shrub. He was still in cat form, and as Roan knelt down and pulled a hypo out of his pocket, he saw why no one had been able to identify his bite pattern.
Michael Henstridge was like no cat Roan had ever seen in his life.
His fur was short and camel-colored, but he had an awkward, lanky body, almost more like a cheetah’s than any anything else. But his head had the broader, flatter shape of a panther, and considering his age, he was a lot larger than he would have expected, almost the size of your average panther. But he wasn’t an average anything; he almost looked like some kind of cat hybrid. Although one of the most bizarre and troubling things was the black nylon collar around his neck—it looked like a shock collar, the kind you might use on an obsessively barking dog.
He stabbed the hypodermic in a vein in its leg, and Michael looked up at him, ears flattening, but Roan aborted his growl with one of his own.
“It’s over, boy,” he snarled. “Stay down.”
For a long moment he stared into uncomprehending yellow eyes, and then the cat laid back down, the drugs taking hold of its system as powerfully as for any human.
Or at least that’s what he told himself. He hated to think that, on some level, Michael understood him.
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MAYBE he had simply come to terms with his own impending death far too well, but the fact that he had killed Mitchell Henstridge bothered Paris less and less as time went on.
According to Dennis Caldera, a criminal lawyer that Roan worked cases for occasionally, Henstridge’s death wasn’t so much self-defense as it was a classic “asking for it” scenario: he broke into a house with a gun and a dangerous cat, clearly intending harm. The fact that he was partially eaten by the resident cat only meant the possibility that karma existed was better than ever. In fact, Henstridge’s death was basically classified as