Prey (56 page)

She pulled her service revolver and aimed it, using a steady two-handed grip, and said to no one but herself, “I don’t want to do this. Don’t make me do this.” But it was a matter of public safety. Here was a lion, and here was a crowd full of people. She was not only within her rights to kill him, it was expected. Public safety trumped the transformed infected’s right of existence.

Could she wound him seriously enough to keep him down until the guys with the tranqs arrived? She knew she was a damn good shot, but there was a thin line between a paralyzing shot and a lethal shot, and she knew human anatomy a lot better than cat anatomy. A couple centimeters or minutes either way could make the difference between immobilization and death.

But the lion was just standing there, as if protecting the car, still growling, and she thought that maybe this stalemate, this inaction, would prevent her from having to shoot him. But then the lion’s large head turned back toward the injured woman in the driver’s seat, the black pad of its nose wrinkling as it smelled the blood. Oh shit.

She had braced herself to fire—she was going to have to give the paralyzing shot a try—when Paris said suddenly, “Roan.” His voice wasn’t questioning or angry; it had just the mildest tone of pleading in it, like insisting gently on his attention.

She spared a glance over her shoulder and saw him walking up beside her. “Get the fuck back!” she snapped. “He can’t hear you!”

But Paris barely glanced at her; his intensely blue eyes were fixed on the lion. “I’m not so sure about that.”

The lion was looking back at both of them now, and its growl was loud enough to make the crowd that was still here back up another two feet. She and Paris were now the only ones on the street with it. Him.

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Paris was talking low to the lion, his tone calm and measured, but there was a certain tension in his shoulders and across his back as he approached it slowly. To stop him she’d have to reach out, and such a sudden gesture could set the lion off.

“Roan, I know you’re in there. I know you can hear me somewhere in there. You’re stronger than it, I know you are, and you have to fight it.”

The lion continued its rumbling growl, but it was focused on Paris now. Paris had also now crossed into her line of fire, so she no longer had a clear shot. She just knew he’d done that on purpose. “Get out of my shot,” she snarled.

“If you shoot him, you might as well shoot me,” he replied quietly, sounding strangely resigned to it, as if he expected to die one way or another. But in a moment she got her shot back, as Paris sank to his knees on the asphalt.

“What the fuck are you doing?” she asked, fighting to keep her voice to a whisper so as not to startle the cat.

Paris didn’t answer her, so she wasn’t sure if he had heard her or not.

He kept his hands loose at his side, limp, and he was holding his head at an odd angle, his head tilted to the side and raised slightly up. It took her a moment to realize he was showing his throat to the lion, sending a clear signal of submission; nothing that showed its throat to you could be a threat. But it also meant that if the lion was going to lunge at Paris, it would have a damn easy kill. She probably wouldn’t get a shot off before it killed him, and he probably knew that. Bastard.

“You know me,” Paris insisted quietly to the cat. “You know my voice, you know my smell, you know who I am. And they’re gonna kill you if you don’t stop now. You have to take over, Roan; fight it back.”

A weird hush had fallen over the street, allowing her to hear the distant scream of sirens. What fucking idiot turned on sirens when there was a big cat loose? That could only make it panic. Her grip was so tight on her gun her palms were starting to sweat, and she felt slightly queasy at the possibility she was going to have to shoot a friend. He wasn’t even doing anything wrong—he’d just picked a really bad time to be a cat. But wasn’t Roan usually smarter than that? Didn’t he know when he was entering the high point of his viral cycle? It didn’t really make sense.

(Come to think of it… if he’d entered the car as a human, when the 352

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hell had he had the time to transform? That was too fast; no one transformed in minutes. It took about an hour or so. So what the hell had happened here?)

The lion was slowly approaching Paris, still growling, like he was prey. But Paris didn’t move, and his voice didn’t waver. If he was scared, it wasn’t obvious. “Roan, come back to us. I know you can hear me.

You’re running out of time.”

Everyone seemed to be holding their breath as the lion neared Paris, and there was a general unspoken consensus that they were all waiting for the lion to kill him. It seemed inevitable, like waiting for the mirror ball to drop in Times Square on New Year’s Eve, and Darinda felt oddly paralyzed. She knew she should do something, shoot Roan before he got any closer to Paris, but her mind kept stalling on “shoot Roan.” She really didn’t want to do that, but she knew she had to suck it up and do her job, even if it meant killing a friend.

The lion was within a paw’s swipe of Paris, and she knew she’d fucked this up. Oh, the Chief would let it slide because she’d understand the reluctance to shoot a former colleague, but she knew she’d fucked up.

She should have shot the lion as soon as she had an unobstructed view.

Time stretched out to impossible lengths as a few seconds seemed to take hours, and the lion seemed to move slowly toward Paris’s throat, and she tensed to fire, wondering if she really wanted to see the lion ripping his throat out. Paris, for his part, didn’t move at all—she didn’t know if he was absurdly calm or paralyzed with fear.

The lion went for Paris’s throat, but she wasn’t sure she was seeing things correctly, as the lion seemed to rest its head on Paris’s shoulder instead of biting deep into his neck. But then the lion seemed to collapse, one of its rear legs twitching like it was having a type of seizure, and Paris wrapped his arms around its throat, burying his face in its thick mane. He was saying quietly, “Thank you.”

Gasps started running through the crowd, which almost sounded disappointed that it had missed out on a good bit of violence, but there were also small comments like
“What the fuck...?”
On several levels, this didn’t make sense. Cats had no higher consciousness—they were just cats.

They couldn’t understand a person, they couldn’t respond to a loved one.

(Much like they couldn’t transform in under an hour.) She had no idea what the fuck had just happened here, except it felt impossibly wrong. It Infected: Prey

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was like the world as she knew it had suddenly shifted ever so slightly sideways.

It was coincidence or the cat was hurt or…
something
. But she couldn’t believe that Paris had actually managed to reach Roan, because that was impossible. A transformed human wasn’t a human at all, and everybody knew that.

So what if they were wrong?

The sirens were much louder now, the aid cars only a block or so away, and she reluctantly holstered her weapon, her mind snapping back into containment mode. “Paris, get him off the street. I have an unmarked sedan in the fondue lot, get him in there.” Of course she had no idea how he was supposed to do that, but she figured it was his problem. After all, the lion seemed to respond to him, so.…

Jesus Christ, how fucked up was this? She found herself trying to imagine what she’d put on her report about this incident, and realized she had no idea what she was going to say.

Then again, did it matter? No one would believe her anyway.

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17

Pigeon Camera

THERE was nothing more disconcerting than waking up with the certain feeling that something had gone horribly wrong.

Roan opened his eyes to complete darkness, and he would have started panicking, except this dark place was familiar. He also felt warmth, strong arms around his chest, a body conformed to his, breath against his neck. He was at home, in his bedroom, the clean smell of Paris’s skin confirming the identity of the man spooning him. But how the hell did he get here?

The last thing he remembered was… what? It took a moment for him to recall being in Mia DeSoto’s car. Okay, right, she crashed the car to try and kill him. And then… what? His memory felt scattered, fragmented; he only had a solid feeling of dread.

He moved to look at the digital clock on the nightstand—it couldn’t have been a dream, could it? No way. That thing with Mia was way too weird… and that’s when Paris stirred.

“Finally awake, sleepyhead?” he murmured, giving him a small kiss on the back of his neck. “I thought you were going to sleep until the weekend.”

Roan saw that it was just after midnight, but he couldn’t believe it.

Wasn’t it just sundown when he’d got in Mia’s car? “What happened?”

“You don’t remember?” He nuzzled his neck, an affectionate gesture that could become amorous with repetition. Roan was suddenly acutely aware he smelled like cat, and wondered what his pheromone level was.

“I remember Mia trying to kill me. I assume she didn’t succeed.”

“No, but not for lack of trying. She could have hurt you badly.”

“How much did I transform?”

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Paris hesitated, lightly stroking his abdomen with his fingertips. “All the way.”

“Oh shit.” That was the worst possible scenario: full transformation out of cycle. He was now officially the biggest freak possible. Just call him Roan, the Cat-Faced Boy. “Why am I here now? Did they tranq me?”

“No, I talked you down.”

“What?”

So Paris told him, and it sounded so surreal he would have thought that Paris was teasing him if his sense of humor was that cruel. There was no way in hell that could have worked, and also, it was fucking nuts.

“Why the fuck did you do that? I could have killed you!”

“No you wouldn’t.” He sounded so calm and so certain.

Roan rolled over to face him, wondering if Par had decided to start taking Prozac or some other kind of mood stabilizer. “How can you say that? In cat form, I’m a big dumb lion.”

“No you’re not. Do I really have to explain you to you?”

“Probably.”

His eyes had adjusted enough to the dark that he could see Par’s sly, bittersweet grin. “Infecteds like me get invaded by the cat and the virus alike. We go through life alone, and then suddenly we have another thing inside us, something that overwhelms us and takes us over. We have to learn to live with this… this other, no matter how much it hurts, but it occurred to me that you virus children have things much differently.

“From the beginning, the cat has to learn to live with you as much as you have to learn to live with it. You know how Michael Henstridge is more often a cat than a human, and no one can figure out why? What if that’s the way he wants it? He’s too brain damaged to say, but that doesn’t mean he can’t impose his will on the cat, and maybe he finds life easier and less painful as a cat than as a human. And if that’s true, if he can will the cat, why can’t other virus children? Okay, you can’t break the virus cycle, that’s a given, but what if the cat really isn’t that separate? What if it’s an integrated aspect of you? Most virus children are too ill or too damaged for this to be investigated in any meaningful way, but not you.”

He touched his face, and Paris had such big hands that his palm covered just about all of Roan’s cheek. “See, when you told me you could force a 356

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partial transformation, it got me thinking. Yes, it’s a purely physical process, and it has to be jump-started by pain or adrenaline, but you can switch it off. And that’s the key.”

“Umm… I was with you until now.”

“How do you shut it down? When you let it start, you stop it after a certain point. How?”

This was what Roan both loved and hated about Paris. He knew him better than he knew himself, and such a thing could range from touching to downright creepy. This seemed to fall in between those extremes. “I just… force it to stop before it goes too far.”

“Force. In other words, you will it to stop.”

Yes, exactly. This felt like a “D’oh!” moment. “You’re going to make me hit you, aren’t you?”

“Bring it on, pansy.” Paris lunged forward as if he was going to bite off his nose, but just kissed the tip of it instead. “Look, I’m not saying you can totally dominate the cat at all times; I’m just saying the cat has to make as many accommodations for you as you do for it. And I was counting on it when you were in your transformed state. Would it make you feel any better if I said I’d never try that if you were in the transformational stage of the virus?”

“A bit. But you risked your life on a supposition.”

“Not a supposition. I risked it on a belief that you were stronger than the cat. And I was right. So no more busting my balls about it, okay?”

Roan ran his hand through Paris’s hair and smiled, wondering what he’d ever done to deserve someone like him. And how he could understand something so naturally, something Roan should have got but somehow didn’t. Everything he said made a curious sense. Maybe Paris really had missed his calling as a detective. “You scare me sometimes.”

“You scare me too, so we’re even. And before I forget, Murphy wants you to know that you’re no longer on this case, and if you even try and resume investigating any of this, she’ll throw you in jail so fast your ass will get windburn.”

“Ah. I guess I should have expected that.” It wasn’t the worst thing that had happened; that had to be learning he could fully transform out of the viral cycle. But hadn’t he always suspected he could? If he could force Infected: Prey

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a partial change, there was nothing stopping him from a full change. It was just unforgivable that he’d had to learn it in front of Murphy and a crowd full of strangers. He was just lucky Paris had been there to get him under control and keep him safe, and lucky that Paris was a hell of a lot smarter than most people gave him credit for. Even him. “She’s going to want all our case notes, isn’t she?”