by Andrea Speed
Taylor went off for a bit on how he hated working for Cooper, Weiss, and Cooper, as he knew some of the clients were “shady” (only some?), and he was terrified the Feds were going to bust the office at any time. He wanted to get work at Dennis’s firm, but they had all the paralegals they needed, and it was a plum assignment anyways. Dennis had e-mailed him, though, asking him to hear Roan out, and he seemed to think that maybe helping him would give him an in with Dennis.
Roan told him he needed anything he could get on any legal or under-the-table transactions done by Kyle, John, or Joel Newberry in the past year (that was a guess). The name Newberry made Taylor sit ramrod straight in his plastic seat, as if he’d just received a cattle prod up the ass. Apparently everyone reacted that way when you brought the Newberrys into it. Roan watched sweat ooze out of Taylor’s pores, gathering on his forehead like the visible remnants of evil thoughts, and then Taylor put his cholesterol bomb down and excused himself from the table, ducking into the men’s room. Was that too much for him to attempt? Poor kid. He just wanted to get ahead, and some stranger was asking him to put his neck on the chopping block.
Someone at a nearby table had abandoned their newspaper, so Roan picked it up and glanced at it. He instantly wished he hadn’t.
A big cat had mauled someone in Bishop Park last night and killed another person, as well as a couple of pets (or at least it was blamed on the cat—investigation could render it an erroneous assumption). They’d already made connections between the Bowles killing and the German killing. He wondered briefly why Gordon hadn’t called him in on it, and then remembered he was in the hospital due to his heart attack. Son of a bitch, how had he forgotten that? What was fucking wrong with him lately?
He rubbed his eyes and realized they felt funny. Dry, and almost kind of hard, like they’d been replaced by stones, but when he pressed on them he could feel pressure, pain. It was hard to focus on the article, it was a little blurry (goddamn soy ink; sure, it was environmentally friendly, but it ran easily, and it smelled funny to his nose), but he could see at least one city councilman was calling on the chief of police to get the “goddamn cat menace” under control. As if that had never occurred to anyone; as if they were letting Grant run wild on purpose. (If it was Grant. It could have been another big cat. There were no details in the paper that actually swung it one way or another, and he knew the department wouldn’t release those kinds of details.)
Suddenly Taylor was back at the table, looking at him funny. “You okay, man?”
Roan wanted to ask him how he had managed to teleport from the bathroom to his chair, but then he realized the paper had fallen from his hands and was on the floor, and had probably fallen there a minute or so ago. For some reason, he only realized it in retrospect.
Those pills he’d taken were just Tylenol codeine he’d scored up in Canada, right? He thought they were. Maybe they were. Holy shit, what did he take? He could be such a fucking idiot sometimes.
He lied and said he was, and Taylor was too freaked by the idea of digging up dirt on the Newberrys to call him on it. He said he’d try, as long as Roan put in a good word for him to Dennis, and he agreed. The kid hinted around money, and Roan told him he’d be compensated, which was just the type of lawyer-speak he wanted to hear.
Roan had stuff to pursue, other leads. He needed to check in with Seb on both the Grant Kim case and Gordo, but suddenly right then he wanted to go home, so he went home. He blacked out for about half the drive, so how he got there in one piece he had no idea. At the last minute, he checked the bottle in the glove compartment: Tylenol codeine. Then what the fuck was going on?
Roan stumbled in the door, and had just collapsed on the couch when he heard Dylan coming down the stairs. “I didn’t expect you home so early,” he said. “But I’m glad you are, ’cause I was thinking I could make dinner tonight. But I have no idea what to—” He stopped suddenly and stared at him like he was a complete stranger. “Roan, what’s wrong?”
Roan looked up at him and didn’t know what to say. His head didn’t ache anymore, but it felt like it was filled with a heavy velvet fog. “I dunno. I had a headache, a migraine….” He forgot the word, so he just went on without it. “I took some Tylenol codeine for it. But there’s something wrong with it.” Was it his ears, or did his voice sound kind of thick? Slow. Wrong.
Dylan initially frowned—Roan had promised him he’d given up the pills, after all—but he quickly got past it. “What do you mean there’s something wrong? With the pills?”
“Yeah. They’re not what was supposed to be in the bottle. I think. I dunno. I don’t feel well.” He realized it was getting harder to breathe. There was a tightness in his chest, something he hadn’t felt since he was a kid and had walking pneumonia. His limbs felt heavy, and he wasn’t a hundred percent sure he could move them. If he could get mad, maybe he could bring the lion out, fight it back a bit, but he couldn’t imagine what would make him angry at this point. He was exhausted, and getting angry would require more energy than he had.
Dylan picked up the phone, and Roan heard him say, “Yes, I need an ambulance. I think my boyfriend’s been poisoned.”
Poisoned? That seemed overly dramatic. But Roan had to admit to himself that that might be the only word for it.
12
Can’t Exist
DYLAN wondered how often he had been in emergency rooms since he had been dating Roan. More than he had before he started seeing Roan? Yeah, he was pretty sure this pushed it over the amount he’d been in a hospital his entire life before Roan. Maybe this was the price you paid for hooking up with the hot, mysterious, dangerous guy. Was this agony worth it?
He answered questions for the cops while they worked on Roan somewhere behind the emergency room doors. Luckily the cops seemed to know Roan and didn’t consider Dylan a suspect (well, at least not yet). Before he passed out, Dylan got some information from Roan: he’d taken three pills (he held up three fingers), and the pill bottle was in the glove compartment (he nodded an affirmative to that). He then passed out while Dylan was on the phone with the 9-1-1 operator. He tried to wake Roan up—the only thing he was sure about was he had to keep him conscious—but save for getting his eyelids to briefly flicker, he couldn’t wake him up. His heart rate had dropped absurdly low by the time the paramedics showed up (he’d been hoping Dee would be one of the paramedics, but he wasn’t). The cops arrived to take the pill bottle into custody and check out the car, but the couple now questioning him—Walker, the somewhat good-looking, lanky black man, and Shale, the more compact, slightly masculine brunette woman—had given him a lift to the hospital. Dylan knew they at least knew of Roan, because as soon as Walker asked him if he knew of anyone who might want to hurt Roan, he rolled his eyes and admitted it might be easier to start listing the people who didn’t want to kill him. Shale snorted humorously at that. As far as Dylan could tell, it wasn’t meant in a mean way, just an ironic one.
He had no answers for them, but they didn’t seem to hold it against him. All he could say was what little Roan had told him when he got home. As far as he knew, no one had access to his car (although clearly someone did), and he was off on a case, so he had no idea where in town Roan might have been. He couldn’t even tell them about the case. He said Roan hadn’t told him, which was a lie. He knew he was working the Newberry case. But until that was relevant, he was going to play the dumb, clueless boyfriend. Being a bartender at Panic helped. As soon as he told them where he worked, they exchanged this look that Dylan recognized as “himbo.” They’d already written him off as a vacuous boy toy. Again, fine. He didn’t give a shit—they could think of him as Paris Hilton for all he fucking cared. He just wanted to know if Roan was going to pull through or not.
He thought he’d held himself together well. He’d wanted to cry, but he didn’t. He’d been swallowing back the tears since he saw Roan slumped on the couch, his eyes glassy and his lips perfectly bloodless. There was a time and a place for emotional displa
ys, and he preferred to lose his shit when no one was around to see it.
Dylan tried to empty his mind, use a Zen meditation technique to take himself out of himself and let the time go by faster, but that was hard to do when all you could think was your lover was dying in the next room.
Didn’t he know this could happen? The problem with Roan was he thought he was indestructible. He wasn’t, although he arguably had a decent case for it, what with being able to turn into a lion and all. But that wasn’t indestructibility; it just made him riskier to hurt. Roan didn’t seem to care about that difference at all. Incredible bravery or a suicidal tendency? It was a fine line, and kind of hard to say. Dylan didn’t know, and he was sure Roan didn’t either.
The suicidal aspect could just be his pill habit, but maybe not. Maybe that was just for the numbing effect. For all his tough-guy exterior, he knew Roan felt things a little too deeply for his own good. The pills were just backup for his armor, an inner framework that he leaned on more and more. Dylan wondered what it said about him that he’d decided to accept Roan as a drug addict, just like he’d accepted that he was always going to love Paris more. It was sad. He’d always had more self-esteem than that, and yet he had decided if he wanted to be in Roan’s life, he’d have to compromise. Sometimes loving someone just sucked.
Dylan sensed a person near him, and a vaguely familiar voice said, “I took a guess and figured you were a tea drinker.”
He looked up to see Fox, aka Holden Krause, Roan’s male-prostitute friend. Or acquaintance, Roan was never able to explain what he was, exactly. He’d actually seen him in Panic once or twice, back when he bleached his hair, but he hadn’t seen him lately. Tall, broad shouldered, he was more masculine than you would expect (save for his voice, which did give the game up a bit), and he wasn’t a pretty boy. He was one of those guys who, if they didn’t have a transcendent sort of charm, would be forgettable. Not ugly, not anonymous, just not special enough to warrant noticing. It also helped that a sort of furtive intelligence burned in his sea-blue eyes. It came and went, depending on how much of himself he decided to show to you, but it made Dylan distrust him the first time he saw him. If he wasn’t a hustler, he was a guy on the make, someone calculating and predatory, and the fact that he actually was a hustler made Dylan think of him in a tiny bit better light. He had a reason to be calculating then, a reason to be hunting.
Holden wasn’t in costume. He was wearing very ordinary jeans and a promotional T-shirt for 30 Days of Night that was a size too large for him, the fabric slouching on him like it was damp and fresh out of the washer. His brown hair was messy in a way that suggested he’d gotten dressed in a hurry and come right over. He was holding out a paper cup of steaming liquid—some awful tea or another—and Dylan remembered to take it with a small nod of thanks. How long had he been sitting here staring at the cup? “I am, yeah. Thanks.”
Holden sighed as he sat in the empty plastic chair beside him. “How is he doing?”
“I have no idea. They haven’t told me anything.”
“Is this a gay thing? You’re not family so you don’t count?”
“I think it’s more they’re trying to figure out what he took and how they can counteract it.”
“What was happening to him, if you don’t mind me asking?”
Odd question. He gave Holden a sidelong glance, but he sensed he was trying to figure something out; he had a strange focused look in his eyes. “He was slipping into a coma. His heartbeat and breathing were dropping lower and lower. I kept trying to wake him up, but nothing happened. He was slipping away from me and I got to see it—” Dylan had to stop, as his voice caught and he could feel those treacherous tears surging back. He closed his eyes and focused on stomping them down. He was not losing it, especially not in front of a man he didn’t fully trust. And he didn’t mean it in a sexual sense. There was nothing going on between Holden and Roan. It wasn’t even a question he had to ask. There was something so calculating about Holden he knew he’d never appeal to Roan. Ro had trust issues, and something about Holden made you wary about trusting him.
Dylan almost jumped when he felt Holden’s hand on his back, giving him a reassuring pat. “I’m so sorry, Dylan. Roan’s a tough motherfucker. The lion would never let him go without a fight.”
That was probably true, but for some reason he resented Holden for saying it. Dylan mentally wiped it away and opened his eyes, no longer afraid he’d start crying. “Why are you here?” He hoped that didn’t sound accusatory, but fuck it if it did. He didn’t feel like being polite right now.
“Dee called me,” he said, surprising him again. “He’s stuck at the scene of a huge pileup on I-5 near the Silverdale exit and couldn’t get here. He called me and asked me to come check on you and Roan for him.”
“Oh.” Diego called him? That meant Dee must have trusted him on some level. Dylan wasn’t sure if that was comforting or not. “I was wondering why he wasn’t here. The paramedic news network is formidable.”
“So I’m learning.”
Finally, a short Indian woman in a white doctor coat approached them. Dylan stood, and so did Holden. “How is he?”
“Alive,” she said. She had the brusque but not unkind manner of every hurried ER doctor everywhere. “As far as we can tell, he took an animal tranquilizer.”
“What?” Dylan replied. He wasn’t sure what he’d expected her to say, but it wasn’t that.
“Like ketamine?” Holden asked.
The doctor shook her head. “Heavier. This is stuff used to sedate elephants in a zoo. Two should have killed him, three pills should have been a nail banged into the coffin. But he’s not a normal human, by far. He has the constitution of an angry musk ox, and we got to him in time.” She sighed wearily and rubbed her forehead, as if she was even more tired than she looked and trying hard to keep focus. “He’s lucky he’s a hybrid, although I doubt anyone can convince him of that.”
“Hybrid?” Dylan asked. He’d heard Roan say something about that before, something about his rarity in catching colds.
She grimaced, as if she realized she’d said something wrong. “I simply meant his virus child status was a help in this case.”
“Can I see him?”
“Not now. He’s in the ICU on a respirator. Come back tomorrow at—”
“He’s on a respirator?” Dylan interrupted impatiently. She hadn’t mentioned that.
“It’s mostly a precaution. Respiratory depression is common in these kinds of things, and he may need some help breathing until it’s mostly out of his system. We don’t foresee any lasting problems. In fact, if you’d let me finish my sentence, I was going to say you should come by tomorrow, when we’ll probably be removing him from the respirator.” She patted him on the arm, a clumsy attempt at comfort. But Dylan vaguely recognized her, so she must have worked on Roan before. It certainly explained some of the implied familiarity. “He’ll be okay. It’s just the other guy I’m worried about.”
“What other guy?”
“Whoever slipped him the mickey,” she said, as her pager went off. She picked it up and glanced at it, frowning, as she turned away. “Roan isn’t a forgive-and-forget type.”
“No,” Dylan agreed, the syllable lost in a sigh. He dry-washed his face and wondered what he was supposed to do with himself tonight. Somebody had tried to kill Roan, and now a machine was doing his breathing for him. How did you sleep? How did you spend all those agonizing hours waiting for the sun to come up and a new day to start? He’d done such things in his life, but he never wanted to do them again.
“This is all my fault,” Holden said suddenly.
Dylan glanced at him, a little surprised by the certainty in his voice. “What do you mean? You didn’t give him the drugs, did you?”
Anger flashed through Holden’s eyes, and he scowled. “You think that little of me? No, I didn’t slip him the elephant tranqs. It’s just my fault it happened.”
“How?”
He hu
ffed a sigh through his nose and crossed his arms over his chest. “I hired him to look into Joel Newberry’s murder. Someone slipped him a lethal amount of potassium, and now they tried to get Roan with tranqs. This shitty bastard likes deaths that can be written off as accidents, no matter how weird they are.”
“But he just started the investigation. This person would have had to have known Roan was investigating this right from the start. That’s not possible, is it?”
Holden looked away as he considered it, muscles going taut in his jaw. “I don’t know. At this rate, we can’t discount anything.”
Great. He sounded like Roan there for a moment.
Dylan started walking away, wondering what he was going to do with himself, when Holden grabbed his arm and stopped him. “Look, stay with me tonight, or let me stay over.”
“What?”
“This guy, whoever he is, attacks with stealth. He doesn’t like confrontation, he doesn’t want a fight, and he won’t risk taking on two guys at once. There’s safety in numbers.”
Was this some bizarre come-on, or was he serious? Dylan’s head was still spinning from the fact that someone had tried to kill Roan. He didn’t have the mental capacity to deal with this right now. “You think he’s going to come after me?”
Holden shrugged. “It depends on how concerned he is about loose ends. But if anything happens to you, Roan will kill me. I’ve already seen what he does when someone hurts you. I don’t want to be on the other side of that.”
Dylan considered that but still felt as if he didn’t have a grip on things. “Are you making fun of him?”
“Absolutely not. He just loves you enough that he will kill for you. Literally—he will kill. He will let the lion out and rip people to pieces. I don’t want to end my life as a bit of food in his colon.” He paused a moment. “I bet there’s a dirty joke in that, but I’m too angry to make it right now.”