Prey (3 page)

(cheating spouses/significant others/whatever the hell). Those Springer cases made you feel nice and sleazy, like you were a voyeur participating in the acts, but the worst thing as far as Roan was concerned was the reaction from some of those suspicious lovers/spouses when he told them their fuck buddy wasn’t cheating on them. Most were relieved, which was fine, but the ones he abhorred, the ones that really made him hate the human race, were those who insisted that they
were
cheating. Either he hadn’t looked hard enough or was working with the goddamn bitch/bastard. Rather than be glad, they were sure there was something wrong and that their partner couldn’t be trusted.

His advice—for them to break up with their significant other and move on, because clearly they were unhappy and trying to pin the blame on their partner—was generally met with rage, snits, and threats of physical violence. He kind of hoped they would try something with him, but so far no one had.

He wondered if they knew he was one of the viral children; certainly the cops had for the very brief time he was on the force. He was pretty sure two years was more than enough time to make him anonymous again, but you could never really be certain. It didn’t help that he had a freaky-ass name like Roan McKichan, an aggressively Scottish name that almost no one could pronounce properly. (For some reason, many people liked to pronounce Roan “Ro-Ann”—did he
look
like a woman?—and McKichan was usually pronounced “McKick-In” or “McKitchen.” They seemed absolutely baffled that the “I” was pronounced like an “E”, and it was McKee-Cann, which some people liked to tell him wasn’t at all the way it was spelled.) At least he had teamed up with a man with a name even worse than his: Paris Lehane. Yes, they could easily pronounce it, but he always faced the question: “Like Paris Hilton?”

Roan liked to say yes, yes, exactly like Paris Hilton. Only he wasn’t Infected: Prey

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a skanky blonde heiress with no discernible talent and a disturbing nose.

Paris was a man who looked like the athlete he had been before he was infected and went a bit nuts, and he had some discernible talent. Perhaps he had the bit nuts thing in common with Hilton—she was probably so heavily medicated, you couldn’t tell.

Finally Roan turned down the gravel drive leading to the house, yawning all the while, and parked behind the ’68 GTO Paris had been attempting to restore in his free time. The body needed a lot of work still—there was quite a bit of rear-end damage, rust spots marring the fender, and the left side was dotted and splashed with primer—but there was no fear of anyone stealing it, because Paris had pulled out the engine to rebuild it, and it was currently spread out on a tarp on the floor of the garage. If someone wanted to steal his GTO, they’d need a tow truck.

Roan dumped out the sewer mud jokingly called coffee on the side of the driveway, then tossed the cup in his car garbage can as he grabbed the bag containing his laptop and digital camera, which were also known as the backbone of his business, and headed for the house.

He shouldered the bag as he dug out his keys, and wondered if he should bother to be quiet. It was Paris’s time, more or less, right? They ran on different viral cycles, and sometimes when he got caught up in work, he’d forget. If it was his time, he’d be in the basement, so he didn’t have to worry about being quiet—not for now at least. Later on Paris might be pissed at him, but he’d deal with that later, once he was rested and fully caffeinated.

But as soon as he was in the door, he knew something was wrong.

It was several things all at once. When he closed the door, a puff of wind seemed to move through the house, bringing with it a taste of fresh outside air. There was also another scent wafting after it, one of pain and the musky smell of a cat mixed inextricably with that of a human.

Altogether it was like sour milk with a hint of flesh, iron, and fresh-cut grass. Not only weird, but immensely troubling. “Paris?” he asked, alarmed, putting his bag on the side table before venturing into the living room.

What awaited him there looked like the aftermath of an explosion.

Half of the sliding glass door leading to the backyard had been shattered, broken glass sparkling like fractured diamonds on the slate gray outer deck, and the curtains were partially torn down, the fabric billowing in the 6

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breeze like a collapsed sail. An armchair had been reduced to kindling with random clots of stuffing, and the coffee table was tipped over, its legs sticking up in the air like a dead insect. On the floor between the table and the couch, naked and curled up in fetal position, was Paris, semi-conscious and panting through the pain. He looked totally human, his skin slicked with sweat, but when his eyelids flickered open, Roan could see his eyes were still almost totally amber, the whites mere spots in the corner, his pupils still dark vertical slits. It was common that the eyes were the first to change and the last to go.

“I’m sorry,” Paris gasped. “I fell asleep upstairs, and when I woke up.… I tried to get downstairs, but.…”

“It’s okay,” he lied. Considering Paris’s strain, him getting out was never a good thing. Not only was he quite noticeable, but the amount of damage he could do was extraordinary; they were lucky to have just lost some furniture and a sliding glass door. He hoped that was the extent of it all, but Roan was not a natural optimist. That’s why they lived out here, in the middle of nowhere, far from other people: less chance of collateral damage if everything went wrong. When you were a werecat, you always had to think about these things.

They had an emergency first aid kit in the downstairs bathroom, so he retrieved it, sorting through the contents on his way back. Most first aid kits were full of gauze, BAND-AIDs, and Neosporin, but this one was custom-made for them. That meant it was full of disposable hypodermics and lots of painkillers. After his transition, he ached, but it wasn’t too bad.

Then again, he was a virus child, and they were different; the virus integrated into their DNA fully, rendering them slightly different than those who started out human and later became something else. He heard that, for them, the pain was excruciating, and often hastened their deaths.

Paris seemed to be living proof of that.

He loaded up a needle with the fentanyl analogue he’d picked up last time he was in Canada. Not only was it cheaper and easier to get there, but they didn’t ask so many questions if you identified yourself as an infected.

They just assumed you wouldn’t make such a thing up.

He knelt down beside Paris and stabbed the needle in his butt. He was in so much post-transition pain he didn’t even notice. He looked up at Roan, the amber receding but the pupils still slits, and said, “I’m so sorry.…”

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“Don’t worry about it,” he assured him. There was no point in worrying about it now; what’s done was done. He couldn’t turn back time and sling Paris in the cage in the basement.

Paris sighed and his whole body seemed to relax as the drug took effect. His muscles stopped spasming like they were trying to burst out of his skin like angry aliens, and he seemed to sag into the carpet bonelessly, not so much losing consciousness as slowly sliding out of it.

Roan grabbed the throw off the couch and spread it over him, deciding to get down on the floor and lie beside him, wrapping his arm around him for comfort. Paris leaned back into him, glad for the contact.

“You don’t think I hurt anyone, do you?” he muttered, his voice fading away.

“We live in the middle of nowhere. Who could you hurt?” But even as he said it, he knew if Paris had been closer to consciousness, he would have heard the hesitation in his voice. Yes, they lived in the middle of nowhere, but it wasn’t really that far from people, and a little less than a mile away was one of those suburban housing projects that seemed to spring up like toadstools. Paris easily could have covered the distance, eaten an entire family of four, and still have had most of the night to kill.

So to speak.

If only the strain reflected the character. Paris was the kind of man who wouldn’t hurt a soul, and yet he’d ended up with the fiercest strain of them all. Roan knew himself to be a darker, harder person, and yet Paris’s strain could kill his with little trouble.

Like he needed one more reminder life wasn’t fair.

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2

A Western Home in the Rubble

THE ringing phone woke him out of a dreamless sleep, and the first thing that occurred to his muzzy mind was the question, why did he ache so fucking much? His arm was asleep, so it was pure dead meat, and there was a dull ache in both his shoulder and hip. Opening his eyes, he saw Paris’s back, and remembered they were both on the floor of the living room. Oh, right. Had he meant to fall asleep?

The phone kept ringing, so he pushed himself up to his knees and used his one good arm to shove himself up to his feet as his asleep arm began to get that awful pins-and-needles sensation in it. He was just too old for shit like this.

Caller ID revealed the caller to be the last person he wanted to hear from right now, but the fact that he was calling was trouble itself. With a groan and a curse under his breath, he answered it. “What do you want, Sikorski?”

“Oh, and good morning to you to, Roan,” Detective Gordon “Gordo”

Sikorski replied with mock-cheerfulness. He was one of Roan’s few friends from the police department who still talked to him, and sadly considered him an “expert” on anything relating to what was referred to as

“kitty crimes.” Being an ex-cop apparently made him more legitimate than anyone else, or maybe it was the fact that he was a kitty too. Possibly both.

“Get up on the wrong side of the bed?”

“You could say that.” He glanced back at Paris, who continued sleeping peacefully, the drugs and the exhaustion of the change keeping him so far down in unconsciousness you probably could have put a bullet in the floor by his head and he’d never have moved. Roan belatedly wondered why he hadn’t given himself a shot too. “What do you want?”

He sighed. Sikorski liked to try and be friendly, liked to show how expansively liberal he was for a cop by being nice and interested in one of Infected: Prey

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Roan’s
kind, but Roan was too accustomed to scorn, suspicion, and outright hatred to ever trust anyone’s well intentioned kindness. Paris would tell him he was far too cynical for his own good, but Roan thought he had just enough cynicism for his own good.

“We have what looks like a homicide via cat here, but there’s some...

oddities. I thought we could benefit from your expert opinion.”

Roan closed his eyes and gently but firmly rapped his knuckles on his forehead. Yes, he was awake. “Isn’t this illegal or something?

Inadmissible?”

“You’ve been cleared by the courts. Remember, the Parvinder case?

Anyways, I’m not asking for a deposition, just a... look around.”

Sniff around is probably what he meant, but he wasn’t about to admit it. Most of the infected had no cat skills when they weren’t transformed; they were just people who had to deal with a really unfortunate problem five days a month. But as a virus child, Roan had some side effects that lingered no matter what his form, and as such he had a rather acute sense of smell and taste for a human—much too acute most of the time if you asked him, especially if he was near a men’s room. “I’ll contaminate your crime scene.”

“It’s already been locked down. And it’s not that far from you either, it’s on Pacific Court.”

Something in his gut turned to ice, leaking liquid nitrogen into his bloodstream. “What?”

“815 Pacific Court South. That’s only a couple miles down from you, right?”

He looked at Paris’s sleeping form, huddled underneath the green and red plaid acrylic throw. Close enough that he could have done it last night; someone he could have killed. Although it was a stupid question, he had to ask, “Are you sure they were killed by a cat?”

Sikorski snorted derisively. “Neck torn out, nearly decapitated, gut ripped open by claws? Yeah, I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say cat.

You comin’?”

Roan covered the receiver as he sighed. Throat ripped out? Holy shit yes, it could have been Paris; in fact, that had just moved the victim into the most likely category. “Yeah, I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

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“Twenty minutes? But you’re—”

“I need my coffee,” he said, and immediately hung up.

He looked at Paris’s huddled form, aware that he didn’t look small even when he was curled up in fetal position. It was almost impossible for a guy who was six four and broad across the shoulders to ever look small.

The courts sometimes made exceptions for crimes committed in cat form, simply because you were legally non compos mentis at the time, although lawmakers were always insisting that wasn’t true, and had passed a law adding legal culpability if you didn’t lock yourself up or voluntarily turn yourself over for detainment at your time of the month.

But when you became a cat, even if you were a virus child like Roan, you weren’t even remotely human anymore. The higher brain was gone—some said damaged, but he never felt brain-damaged in his human form—you couldn’t speak, couldn’t reason; you were simply instinct. And the problem was, those instincts were killer.

He knew he had to go to that crime scene now, if only to confirm or deny what Sikorski had said. If the man had been clawed in the gut first and then had his throat ripped out, he would know it wasn’t Paris who did it, and that knot in his gut could relax.

Because tigers always went for the throat first.

HE SHOWERED quickly, hardly able to stand the smell of himself, and opted for a bottle of cold Frappuccino rather than deal with the bother of brewing some. He actually hated the taste of these fucking coffee milkshakes, but the caffeine and sugar punch was powerful, and he was feeling far too wide awake and edgy by the time he drove to Morning Crest, the suburban housing enclave where Sikorski’s murder victim lived.