Authors: Andrea Speed
If it wasn’t a hospital, that probably would have earned him a much stranger look than he actually got.
Whenever he went out on a surveillance detail, even when it was unlikely anyone would spot him, he carried a duffel with him that he called his “recon kit.” It was full of plain T-shirts in various colors, windbreakers and light linen jackets, gimme caps, and cheap sunglasses.
Cheap disguise techniques, yes, but usually surprisingly effective. Unless there was something really striking about you, people just went on bare surface appearance, and as long as he covered most of his hair 300
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(occasionally someone commented on his hair color) and hid his eyes (he knew that green wasn’t exactly common), he was just an average joe, a nobody, someone you passed a million times a day without a second glance. Looking ordinary was a boon to a detective.
It was also a boon to a man who often got other people’s blood on him. He could dump the jacket and the shirt, exchange them for something in the kit, and he just had to hope he had no blood on his pants. And if he did, that he was able to get out of them before Paris noticed. He wasn’t going to tell him about this if he could at all avoid it.
Of course he had to answer a few questions, but Matt’s story that Sam—apparently Sam Merton, and Roan was relatively certain he had heard of a cop named Merton—was trying to kill him before Roan showed up was backed up by Sam’s full scale freak-out in the ER. They had to give him a tracheotomy so he could breathe (okay, maybe Roan had punched him a bit too hard), and as soon as he could breathe, he got violent with a nurse and actually tried to storm off, picking up a scalpel and trying to stab someone with it. He was doped to the heavens and his arms and legs restrained so they could finish working on him—he did have a bullet wound, after all.
Leonard was such a wreck he admitted everything—including catching the cat that was nailed to Matt’s door—as long as the cops promised to keep “the freak” away from him. “What the fuck is he?” Roan could hear him screeching from the room down the hall. “He ain’t human!” He didn’t know what answers the cops gave him, if any.
Seb had recovered his SIG Sauer, and since it hadn’t been fired, he gave it back to him. Before he could leave, Gordo pulled him aside, into a quiet part of the lobby between the vending machines and a more private waiting room. Gordo looked uncomfortable for a long moment, as if he wasn’t sure how to say what he wanted to say, but Roan just let him squirm. He wasn’t going to help him; he honestly didn’t want to know what he was going to tell him. Finally, Gordo spit it out. “Are you… all right?”
He shrugged. “Coupla bruises. I’ve had worse.”
“No, I didn’t mean that. I mean…you’re in control, right? This isn’t your… it’s not that point of the viral cycle, is it?”
He didn’t want to say “that time of the month,” did he? Not to a man, at any rate. “No. Why? What did you see?”
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Gordo glanced away nervously, rubbed his mouth as if he suddenly needed a smoke or a drink. When he looked back at Roan, it was with great trepidation. “You really have no idea what happened to you?”
“I felt it—I couldn’t see it.”
Sikorski sighed heavily, his breath reeking of coffee. “Well, your eyes, they were… something happened to the pupils. They were barely there and they weren’t exactly round. And your face was… the veins were standing out on your neck and cheeks, and it looked like your jaw was… it didn’t look right. Your teeth looked… bigger. It’s hard to explain. It wasn’t too dramatically different, it was just… bizarre. I mean, you didn’t look like a wolf man or something, it was just… incorrect. If you get what I mean.”
He remembered feeling the muscles in his face twitch, but he didn’t remember feeling the teeth change, or his jaw. But as long as his jaw didn’t break or dislocate, he probably wouldn’t have known if it had changed. If the lion’s teeth started to come out, he’d have felt the pain, tasted the blood… but he was gone on adrenaline, and he did taste blood, didn’t he? But he chalked that up to the choking. Had his jaw actually shifted? Had the teeth started to come out? The thought panicked Roan, mainly because he really hadn’t felt it. He had the urge to touch his jaw, but he fought it down. He had seen it in the mirror—it looked normal, except suddenly he had some stubble coming back. Maybe the hair growth came with the partial change.
Roan still didn’t escape clean. He was almost out the doors when Matt shouted his name. He turned with great reluctance, not sure what he was going to say, not sure he wanted to hear it anyway. Matt had fresh stitches in his cheek, but very slender bandages patched up the cut on his throat. His eye was now a deep purplish-black, swollen until it was half shut, but his fully open eye had the light glaze of good painkillers. Matt didn’t say anything as he approached; he just suddenly hugged Roan, nearly collapsing in his arms. “Thank you,” he said quietly. He was afraid he was going to start to cry, but Matt managed to keep it down to a couple of sniffles, the drugs keeping him on an even keel. When Matt let him go, he attempted to smile, but failed. Admiration shone in Matt’s eyes, and it made Roan’s skin want to crawl off and find a nice, quiet hiding place.
“I owe you my life.”
“No, you don’t,” Roan countered, not unkindly. “Just do me a favor, and stay away from the crackheads.”
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He nodded, wiping errant tears away with the back of his hand. Matt looked at him with something akin to wonder; he was no longer freaked-out by what he’d seen. Roan wondered if it was the drugs, the puppy crush, or a combination of the two. “I got that lesson, believe me. Look, if I can ever do something for you—”
“You’ll be the first to know,” he replied, quickly turning and heading for the door. He really didn’t want to face either gratitude or a come-on at this point. “I know where you work.”
Matt waved at him as he went, and he felt somewhat bad for him. He bet Matt was just the type of guy who habitually dated fucked-up men; he probably tried to “save” them, and then wondered why it never worked. If he thought he’d actually listen, Roan would have told him that you were lucky to save yourself in this life, but he didn’t think he would. The codependent never did.
On the drive home he let PJ Harvey rage for him and The Dead Milkmen be snarky for him as he tried to clear his head and think of nothing, just let the music fill it. He dumped his bloody shirt and jacket in the first Dumpster he saw, trading them for a clean green T-shirt and a dark windbreaker from the kit. Would Paris notice? It was possible, as he was the more fashion-sensible between them, but he was hoping he could get away with it.
As it was, he caught a break. He got home to find Paris had fallen asleep on the couch watching television. As he came in, Par was sprawled loosely on the sofa, one arm draped over the side and touching the carpet, a rerun of
South Park
playing on the screen. That just reminded him that some of the cops—supposedly behind his back, but still rather obviously—used to refer to him bitchily as “Big Gay Roan.” That pissed him off so much that one day he just wanted to show up wearing nothing but pink satin hot pants and a T-shirt reading “Ass Bandit.” Of course he didn’t—(Like he’d ever wear satin hot pants! He just didn’t have the legs for them.)—but the “stairs” incident had happened only a month later, so he never really got a chance to refine his plan.
He got out of his jeans and tossed them in the washer, glad Paris would never get a chance to discover the bloodstains, and went upstairs to shower and shave off the new stubble, as well as trim off about two inches of his hair, which also looked a bit longer and bushier than before (it could have been his imagination, but he just wasn’t sure).
He was okay—he was human. And it was a very poorly lit area of Infected: Prey
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the parking lot; maybe what Gordo, Seb, and Leonard thought they saw they didn’t really see. His pupils had probably contracted drastically due to the sudden brightness of the flashlights, and as for the veins standing out… sure, that probably happened when his muscles changed. It was easy to explain, and that thing with his teeth… no, damn it, he would have felt that, and there would have been more blood in his mouth. It wasn’t that the teeth changed when you transformed more than an entire new set grew in over the old—you essentially had two rows of teeth, more like sharks than cats. And it fucking hurt, and since it cut your gums to shit, it always bled a lot. That’s why you always woke up after a transformation tasting blood, your gums as sore as if a dental hygienist with a pick and a grudge had just gotten through with you. Maybe his jaw had distended slightly, which might look pretty weird, but there was no way that his teeth had started to come in.
Although it was odd to wake someone up to get them to bed, he did just that. Paris asked him how it went, and he told him an acceptable bullshit story about a sloppy crime scene but a relatively quick arrest. He also told him that the cops had discovered Matt had a stalker and that he and his friend had shot him out of jealousy or because he’d shoved Matt out of the way of the bullet. Either way, they were both in custody, and Par seemed so relieved by it that he felt guilty for leaving so much out.
But obviously not that guilty, as he fell asleep while Par was brushing his teeth. Adrenaline crash could be a dramatic thing.
He dreamed he was running, the street disappearing beneath his feet as if it ceased to exist the moment he was done with it, the view changing unpredictably from low to the ground to higher above, but his speed and his gait never changed. He loped past apartment buildings so tall they seemed to be propping up the canopy of the sky, which had the odd, washed-out, blue half-light of a false dawn. The buildings soon gave way to open fields, although the stinging scent of wet asphalt, exhaust, and too many humans bedeviled him, haunted him like a bad memory, following him into the tall grass where their smell should have brushed away. His muscles stretched and his lungs pulled in air like bellows, but there was no tiring, no pain of exertion; only exhilaration, as if he was free from his cage at last. Finally there was the scent of water and earth, of compost and chlorophyll, but the smell of the human lingered. It was rank and fetid, sweat and blood and fear and sex and rage, and he realized dimly that the scent was clinging to him. He was the scent, and it disgusted him.
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With no transition at all, he’d gone from the razor-blade grass to a home, a staircase he climbed with the softest steps, and he realized that a new scent was pulling him, something familiar and welcome, something that made his stomach feel like it was full of fluttering birds. Once again he was simply there, standing over Paris, asleep on the bed, the sheets and blanket tangled around his waist and legs like a partially constructed cocoon. His flesh was warm, the blood beneath a slow but steady roar, and he put his head on his chest and listened to that heart thumping away inside its rib cage, something in its rhythm suggesting a desire to get out and run. Paris touched his face, ran his hand through his hair and held on, while lifting his own head and baring his throat to him. Roan kissed the skin, tasting the salt of it, feeling the pulse of a vein beneath his lips, and then bit deep, his fangs sinking into Paris’s neck and the blood roaring from Paris into his mouth, slaking the thirst that had turned his own throat into sandpaper.
Roan instantly woke up, his own subconscious emergency eject system kicking in—he’d had enough nightmares in his life that he’d taught himself to wake up once his dreams turned terrible, although it didn’t always work as quick as he hoped—and he had to check that Par was alive and breathing and had an intact throat. Paris’s back was to him, curled up in a semi-fetal position, hogging almost all the covers (as usual), his breathing deep and regular.
He stumbled off to the bathroom, and stared at himself in the mirror over the sink, trying to will the animal inside him to make an appearance.
It didn’t, but he knew that it was in there somewhere, a shadow behind his eyes. “If you touch Paris, if you hurt him, this is over,” he snarled to his own reflection. He made a gun of his thumb and forefinger and shoved them beneath his chin at just the right angle, so that if it were a real gun, pulling the trigger would have blasted off the top of his skull. “Bang—our brains all over the ceiling. Heal that, asshole.”
If he was wrong, if there was no actual beast, then he was simply talking to himself. But that was okay, as his other self clearly needed the message anyway.
Was he a lion who dreamed he was a man or man who dreamed he was a lion?
Oh fuck it. He hated bullshit questions like that anyway.
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WHEN he woke up, the sunlight streaming in through the window and the birds singing so noisily outside he felt like roaring out the window to make them shut up, he had a single moment of panic, since he was alone.
But the smells of coffee and toast were wafting up from downstairs, and any momentary fear that the beast was as naturally contrarian as he was faded away.
Roan wandered downstairs in only his sweatpants, deciding he’d rather see that Paris was genuinely okay and didn’t think anything was strange about him before bothering to get dressed for the day. What the hell was he doing today anyway? He could do some more checking on Barlow, maybe run that skip trace, but he had hit a dead end on leads as far as the killer went. Since all of this could be done on computer he didn’t need to show up at the office; he could just stay home in his sweatpants.
He had to admit it—sometimes this job was pretty damn good.
One of the most annoying things about Paris was that he was often a
“morning person,” one of those people who were inexplicably awake and happy to be so, full of energy and pep even without an intravenous caffeine drip. Roan personally wanted to beat all those freaky people with a sock full of wood screws, so of course his boyfriend would turn out to be one of them—that was just how the world worked. Paris was as happy and chirpy as the birds outside, and had decided to make French toast for breakfast. He made gourmet-style French toast too, perhaps reflective of his better-than-middle-class background; no thin slices of regular white bread for him. He got actual baguettes and sliced them thick, so a single piece of his French toast was about the size of a pancake stack at an IHOP, and on top of that he dusted them with a cinnamon/nutmeg/powdered sugar mixture, and brought out the “real” maple syrup, which he always bought in Canada, because he said the American stuff was shit (“
Vermont
can kiss my ass.
”)
It was another thing Paris was inexplicably passionate about, but who really cared since his French toast rocked?