by Andrea Speed
Diego shot glances at him as he tried to concentrate on the road at the same time, finding the latter to be even more difficult than usual.
He wasn’t sure what was more unbelievable: the thing Paris was asking, or the fact that he was asking him.
THE cats were resuming their positions on the barn’s packed dirt floor, not so much lying down as flopping down, eying him with some wariness but generally accepting him. Now that he concentrated on the smells, he could pick up more scents of decay and organ failure, as well as blood from the bleeding cougar. These were dying animals; it was astounding they had the strength to maul anyone. But why were they grouping together? It didn’t make sense, not across breeds. Sick animals were generally attacked by stronger animals too.
Was that a reason? Again, safety in numbers... but that was a human thought, evidence of reasoning. What the hell was going on here?
His ears pricked up at the same time as the rest of the cats, his nose catching the scent of gunpowder as he heard the grit of stones under boot soles. The muddy panther raised itself back to its feet, its sides heaving, but Roan made his way to the barn door first to see a couple of SWAT members slowly approaching, their bulky body armor adding about twenty pounds to their solid frames, assault rifles raised to fire. “Get the fuck away from here,” he spat at them, only aware in retrospect that he was growling while he spoke. “I have the situation under control. Stand down.”
The men paused, their rifles aimed at him, and finally one consulted someone on his radio. The order must have been given, because they started backing slowly away, back toward the fence, but their guns were still aimed at him. Why the fuck were they doing that?
Oh, yeah—he was still growling at them.
He turned back to the cats to find that the muddy panther was still sitting there, and none of the other cats had gotten up. He’d been accepted as the alpha, the protector of the group. “I’m sorry, but this has to end now,” he said in a slow, quiet voice. “I drug you, or they kill you. It’s the only choice on the table.” Moving slowly but deliberately, he pulled out the drug gun and shot the panther, then the battered leopard. The drugs worked fast if you got them in the right spot, and he did—he shot them both in the neck, and they barely had time to lie down before they fell over. The other cats weren’t alarmed in any way; their “friends” weren’t dead, and he was the leader now anyway. He put the third dart in the cat that looked the most disturbed by this turn of events and then returned to the open barn door, dropping the empty drug gun. “I need four more shots,” he shouted. The cops had retreated and seemed happy to let the SWAT team take over, although Gordo and Seb remained where they were at the split-rail fence. In fact, it was Gordo and Seb who tossed him the extra drug guns so he could finish the job.
As soon as all the cats were drugged, he left the barn and returned to them. As he stepped over the fence, a SWAT guy suddenly came stomping up to him. He was almost a full foot taller than Roan, with shoulders as broad as Par’s, but he was a Hispanic man with a round face, narrowed eyes, and a wispy hint of a moustache that looked somehow prepubescent pathetic. (Roan felt like bragging that, if he really wanted to, he could have a good start on a beard tonight, but it was childish to point out a man’s inability to grow facial hair, or only grow facial hair that looked pubic.) “You do not order my men, nor do you threaten them,” the SWAT captain said, a sneer in his voice. “You’re a civilian.”
He wondered how he had threatened them, then assumed he meant the growling. “I was a cop.”
“You’re a civilian now,” the man insisted, his eyes like glowing embers. He hated Roan way out of proportion, it seemed. Did he hate cats in general, or him in particular? “Stop forgetting that.” The man spun on his heels and stalked off, showing him his back. Did he know how inflammatory that was amongst cats?
“Don’t,” Gordo warned him softly. What the hell did he think Roan was going to do? Even Roan wasn’t sure. He was torn between the obscene gesture and winging him with a rock (a small one). Gordo then asked, in a normal tone of voice, “So what’s the deal with the cats?”
“They’re all sick and hurt, maybe dying. Call me when they’ve transformed, I need to talk to them as humans to determine what the hell is going on.”
“Sick?” Seb repeated, so confused he almost showed an emotion. “Why would that make them group together?”
He shrugged. “That’s why I need to talk to them when they’re human.” He had a hunch, but he wanted it confirmed before he started to wave it about. If he was wrong, he’d seem even more foolish than usual.
He left the cops to transfer the cats to the van that would take them to the kitty holding cells back at the precinct and walked back to his car, feeling surprisingly weary. Was everybody in the world dying? Sometimes it felt that way. Everybody but him.
He didn’t want to die, but he was slowly becoming aware that outliving everyone around you was its own special kind of pain. He felt like his own energy was being drained away just by psychic pressure, by the slowly dwindling life force of the people around him. He wished he could contribute his energy to the others, keep them going, but it didn’t work that way.
Paris had told him often enough, “You can’t save everyone.” And while he knew that logically, a part of him was just unwilling to accept it. There were some people he wanted to save no matter what, and Paris was on the top of the list. It might seem counterproductive, but he was willing to die if it would save Paris. If he could swap his life for Par’s, he would. He just didn’t know where to go to do that.
He was sitting in his car, resting his head on the steering wheel and willing himself not to cry or punch out the passenger window, when he felt his phone humming in his pocket again. He let it go for two rings, then figured it might be Paris or Diego, so he answered it. As it was, there was no phone number displayed—it was blocked.
“Leave town tonight or die,” a voice said, made slightly robotic by an electronic filter. “This is your only warning.”
Before he could even take a breath to say anything, they hung up. He tried to star-sixty-nine them, but it didn’t work.
Considering what he’d just been thinking, he wondered if this was irony or karma in action.
6
To the End
HALFWAY home, Roan’s cell phone went off again, and he rather hoped it was the person giving him death threats this week, as there was nothing more life-affirming than knowing a stranger hated your guts so much they wanted you to die. Okay, most people didn’t understand why he took that view of it, but when people had been threatening to kill you pretty much all your life, you could only take it as a bit of a joke. He wished he could get his haters to fill out a form as to why they wished him to die—there were so many reasons to hate him. He wanted to know which one was the leader.
But alas, it was just Murphy asking him about the witness he had to Thora’s being grabbed off the street. “The aunt confirmed the identity,” she told him, sounding slightly distracted. He heard noise in the background and figured a belligerent perp had just been dragged in. “So I’m thinking I should probably have a talk with this guy. He got a problem with cops?”
Roan considered that. He just didn’t know enough about Eric Chiang to say, but why hadn’t he gone to the cops in the first place? It was possible Matt had talked him out of it, but Chatty Cathy probably would’ve mentioned it if he had. “Possibly. He’s flaming.”
“That doesn’t mean he doesn’t like cops.”
That was true. The relationship between the gay community and the cops had improved; it was much better than when he and Murph were championed as “liaisons” between the communities. The relationship between cats and cops would never be good, though; that one was a lost cause. “He works at Panic as a bartender.”
There was a very long pause on her end of the line. “The gay disco?”
“Is there another Panic around these parts?”
She sighed heavily. “Holy shit. Tha
t’s going to be a tough one. Doesn’t that place have guys in cages and shit?”
“I wouldn’t know. I’ve never been.”
“Bullshit!”
“No, really. I hate house music. If real guitars and drums aren’t involved, I don’t want to hear it.”
She clicked her tongue in disapproval. “Are you seriously telling me that you’ve never once been to Panic? Even I’ve been to Lipstick, and I hate the scene!” Lipstick was a lesbian bar, essentially Panic’s gender opposite. He’d been there once as a cop to break up a bar fight. (Yes, it was a stereotype that lesbians were more aggressive than “regular” women, but there were some women out there—regardless of whom they chose to sleep with—who could brawl as eagerly and stupidly as a man. Especially if you got them liquored up, and they thought you were hitting on their girlfriend.) But otherwise Lipstick was classy and civilized and a hell of a lot quieter than Panic.
“I’ve been to Lipstick too. I liked it. You and Kim should go more often. Especially if it’s tequila shooters night.”
The length of the silence that ensued told him Murphy was glaring evilly at the phone and considering slamming the receiver on her desk just to hurt his ear. Ultimately, she decided not to. “You’re just a big old dyke in a man’s body, aren’t you?”
“Me and my dick resent that statement.”
“Leave it to a man to bring his dick into the conversation.”
He sighed, trying not to laugh. “Is there any way I can win this?”
“I’m a woman, so no.”
Well, that was fair enough, he supposed. He gave her Eric’s address but told her Eric was probably already at Panic, since he’d been getting ready for work while Roan and Paris were talking to him earlier. This got a groan of disgust out of her. “Do you know how hard it is to get the straight guys around here to go into a gay bar? They act like they’re going to get cooties if they step in the door.”
“A lot of those macho assholes are insecure about their own sexuality. Believe me, I know. Nobody wanted to ride in a patrol car with me, remember? Like I’d actually rape their flabby asses. They think highly of themselves, don’t they?”
“Well, you were a cat too.”
“Oh right—so maybe I’d give them fleas as well.”
She chuckled breathlessly. “Or turn into a lion and then teabag them.”
“A fate worse than death.” He’d turned down his road and saw the Blue Bug—his nickname for Diego’s Volkswagen Beetle—sitting in the driveway. Roan didn’t realize he’d linger after dropping Paris off, but he supposed he should have expected it. (What if he had medically bad news about Paris? Oh shit, he didn’t want to know.)
“Can you sweat this guy, see if you can bring him in to make a statement voluntarily?”
“This is just your way of making me go to Panic, isn’t it?”
“Hey, track him down wherever you want. But if you can get him to come in of his own accord, it’d be easier for all of us.”
“For all of us? I think not.”
“At least you don’t have all this paperwork to deal with.”
Which was true. The absolute worst part of the cop job—worse than the violently unstable crackheads or the heartbreaking murder scenes—was all the goddamn paperwork you had to sit down and fill out. It was what you really felt like doing after nearly getting killed. Going from sheer terror to sheer boredom in under sixty seconds could wear on a body pretty fast.
He parked the GTO parallel to the front yard so the driveway would be clear for Diego to get out and noticed how the winter had killed off most of the plants in the yard. The lawn looked pale with frost, and even the pine tree that towered over the house looked curled in on itself with cold. A season of death; a winter of discontent. God, he really needed a beer—he was getting maudlin. Or poetic, whichever one was worse. After a moment, he rubbed his eyes, and said, “Fine, I’ll talk to Eric again, see if I can get him to make an official statement. But I’m adding this to the ‘owe me’ column.”
“You can be such a whiny queen sometimes,” she teased.
“And that’s going to cost you too,” he warned, then hung up. He just sat there for a moment, listening to the engine tick softly, wondering if he was strong enough to go inside. Yes, of course he was—he wasn’t a weak person. If he had been, he’d never have survived this long. So why did he feel like he was growing weaker by the second?
He mentally cursed himself out for a few seconds, then climbed out of the car and headed toward the house, the frozen grass crunching under his feet. The door was unlocked, and he came in to find Diego waiting for him, sitting at the kitchen counter and having a Diet Pepsi. “Paris is upstairs taking a nap,” Dee told him. “He was pretty shagged out.”
He nodded, not surprised. “They’re not going to include him in the trials, are they?”
Dee shrugged, but he grimaced in sympathy. “I have no idea, but I think he may be too sick for them.”
“Yeah, I was afraid of that.” He went to the refrigerator to get himself something to drink; his throat was still rough from growling. But as soon as he opened the door he was shocked by how bare the shelves were. There were some cans of soda, a bottle of beer near the back, some take-out containers from the Chinese place, a carton of half and half, the chocolate syrup, and a bright yellow bottle of mustard, but that was it. He was so accustomed to Paris doing the shopping (not that Par had ever given him any choice; he’d just kind of barged in and taken it over, and Roan hadn’t minded ceding it all to him) that he’d inadvertently neglected it. He told himself to stop tonight and stock up, then grabbed the beer. It wasn’t his favorite, but it would do.
“You need to hire a personal assistant to do your shopping,” Dee said. He was being sarcastic but said it so weakly it had no bite at all. He looked too depressed to be his normal smart-assy self. God, how bad was Par?
He twisted the cap off the beer and took a gulp, aware that things had been so much easier when he was alone. It was true that when you had nothing, you had nothing to lose. “You upping for the job?”
“Oh you wish, girlfriend.” Diego held up an injector in a sterile plastic wrap and put it down on the kitchenette counter. “Vitamin B-12. Give it to Par when he gets up. It should give him a shot of energy for a little while. I’ll bring some more over tomorrow.”
“He’s that bad, huh?” Roan replied. Dee swore by B-12 shots to get him going on hard days, and Roan assumed that Dee pulled that from his own personal first aid kit that he kept under the front seat of his car. He had an odd first aid kit—along with the usual stuff, he also had the B-12 shot, caffeine tablets, Tylenol codeine, and a handful of condoms.
Dee stared at him, his hazel eyes both kind and harsh all at the same time. “You know he is, Ro. And you know what he’s worried about? You.”
He almost choked on his beer. “What do you mean?”
Dee scoffed, shaking his head. “He may be sick, but he’s still the same perceptive guy he’s always been. I don’t have any idea why, but you’re the one thing in this world he’s going to miss, and right now it’s killing him thinking he’s hurting you. I don’t care what you have to do, I don’t care how badly you have to lie, but as soon as he wakes up, you need to go upstairs and convince him he’s not. He deserves some peace of mind, if nothing else. It’s probably the only thing we can do for him at this point.”
“We?” He hated the way his voice thickened on that syllable. He hated Dee telling him this shit, but mostly he hated it because he knew Dee was right.
“Fine—you. But he’s afraid for you. He’s afraid you’re going to retreat into the cat, whatever the fuck that means.”
“He said that?”
Dee nodded, his lips thinning to a grim line. “And I think he’s right that you’re off your game. I don’t blame you at all—Paris is a better person than all of us, and you’ve been a better person since you’ve been with him. But I know this person, she’s a grief counselor, and I think you should pro
bably see her before... well, this has gone on long enough. I know you’d prefer to muddle through this by yourself, Mr. Macho, but I’m not sure I can, and I’m not even married to him.”
Roan shook his head, letting out a small, humorless laugh. “I don’t need to see a fucking grief counselor. I had my share of counselors and psychologists and social workers growing up. I don’t want anymore.”
Dee raised his eyebrows in the facial equivalent of a shrug and slid off the kitchen stool. “I’m sure you don’t want anymore, honey, but you need it. I’ll call her, see what her schedule is.”
“Not for me you won’t.”
Dee waved his hand in a dismissive manner as he grabbed his Pepsi and started toward the door. “Remember what I said. Lie to him and make it good.”
“You don’t think I can get through this.” The funny thing was, even as he said it, he knew what a silly thing it was to say. Roan knew he probably couldn’t, and that was what was scaring him. He could take beatings, shootings, stabbings, even being forced to eat at Tim Hortons but not losing Paris. This was a slow-motion nightmare.
Dee gave him a compassionate look that was almost pitying, so it was a good thing he was way out of punching range. “I’m not sure anyone could.” With a final sad, knowing glance, Dee left, and it suddenly seemed amazingly quiet and empty in the house. It occurred to him that he should get used to this, to this absence, and he grabbed the B-12 shot and went upstairs, leaving his beer behind.
Paris was asleep, and had apparently slept through their entire downstairs conversation, which was a good thing. Par had always been a fairly heavy sleeper, but nowadays it had become disturbingly closer to comatose. When Roan bothered to set the alarm, Paris almost never woke up.
Currently he had the suede comforter wrapped around him like a cocoon, the blanket partially covering his face, and almost out of habit Roan checked to make sure he was still breathing. He was, just not very loudly or forcefully.