by Andrea Speed
18—Governed by Contagions
ROAN NEVER thought it would be weird being back in Seattle, but it was. It only brought his changes to the surface.
It came out in the hospital, of course. How could it not? The pain in his head wouldn’t stop, and the drugs weren’t working. Doctor Rosenberg was finally there to try to help, although Roan was delirious and rambling with pain. He knew he was saying too much as he said it, but he couldn’t stop. Constant pain did funny things to a person, and when it was a constant drilling pain along with a lack of sleep, things got downright ridiculous.
It had started probably before he moved to Canada, although it was one of those things that he only realized in retrospect. Of course Roan was already known for his spectacular sense of smell—he was the world’s only legally recognized human bloodhound. And while heightened smell was usually attributed to dogs and canines, felines had it too. They just weren’t inclined to help humans with it.
Since he had brain scans of all kinds from youth onward, Roan knew his brain was the same as any other human’s, with some minor variations. For example, the parts of the brain that processed olfactory information were more robust than your average human’s, which was a given. The thing was, olfactory wasn’t processed in one part of the brain. It was spread around and had effects in many different areas—the orbitofrontal, the insula, and the piriform cortex areas were the most important, with the amygdala, the olfactory anterior nucleus and tubercles, and entorhinal cortex all pulling some weight. Of course he knew this because Roan had nothing but time to learn how far the depth of his freakery went. Smell was more complex than most people realized, and humans were punching from the lower end of that scale.
Roan hadn’t really realized it, but his sense of smell was getting better. When people aged, naturally their senses all began to taper off a little bit. Although, as Rosenberg pointed out, a wildly diminished or sudden lack of ability to smell was always a warning sign of something terrible. Humans might have been weak in that department, but it was still vitally important. The fact that he was able to smell things better than ever was puzzling, but Rosenberg thought it could be troubling as well.
Roan could get locked in an olfactory spiral easier now, following those tangled skeins of smell down and down into minutia, until he completely lost the plot and became almost functionally blind in every other sense. He always carried strong mints just for the purpose of knocking himself out of these spirals. Mints were natural scent overloaders that could painfully punch an olfactory reset. But there was no getting around the fact that he now had synesthesia.
Synesthesia was a neurological condition where stimuli got crossed in the brain. For instance, all scents he picked up had colors, and sometimes sounds. Pain sometimes had a sound. Sometimes tastes had a color too. Rosenberg had never heard of a case of “spontaneous” development, but hell, why not? Also, he was showing signs of having a super-rare form of synesthesia called mirror-touch, where he could feel the same tactile response someone else felt. It had only happened a few times, but it was as freaky as hell. Totally unrelated to anything else—as far as they knew—he had also developed exploding head syndrome, which—in spite of its dramatic name—was simply a sleep disorder where you dreamed of loud sounds that woke you up. But why not? He could taste and occasionally smell in dreams too, stuff he was pretty sure wasn’t supposed to happen, at least not regularly. His senses were going haywire.
But that wasn’t the end of the issues—it was the beginning. Because, as Rosenberg had discovered during his time in the hospital with the headache that wouldn’t stop, his brain was starting to swell. Maybe. Or it was just bigger. It didn’t appear to be a brain tumor, although it was possible it was hidden from the readouts. Roan knew he didn’t have cancer—he could have smelled it on himself if he had. (Irony!) Rosenberg speculated he was actually increasing his brain mass as a result of all this sensory “growth” but admitted that was probably closer to science fiction than anything she could prove. But if his brain kept growing/swelling, it would kill him. This was obvious and hardly needed stating. Roan asked Rosenberg not to say anything to Dylan, as he wanted to tell him, and she agreed, but Roan hadn’t told him yet. How could he? Of course, he could tell himself that the call from Chai had come in and he just had no time to say anything, but it had the luxury of being true and also a total excuse.
Dylan deserved all the medals for staying with him. The elephant in the room of their lives was that Roan was going to die, sooner rather than later, and Dylan would be left behind. What kind of burden would that be? He didn’t deserve it. He deserved none of this. He was going to get it anyway.
Roan found himself thinking about the Murder City Devils’ song “Bride of the Elephant Man.” Dyl was no bride, but it was still an apt thing regardless. The freak’s husband.
Roan dug out the small plastic baggie in his pocket and took a bite-sized morsel of cookie and chewed it. It was actually a pot cookie, but he had a medical prescription for them now. All the doctors in Vancouver were happy to throw the strongest painkillers they had at him once they saw all the tests he’d been through. A doctor said he probably had a “permanent pain condition,” which was funny and also sad. Some days he noticed it more than others. But that wasn’t really why he took pills most of the time. Pills kept the lion quiet. He was tranquilizing himself. Rosenberg and Dyl knew that, but he wasn’t sure anyone else did. It probably didn’t matter.
As soon as he started feeling warmth in his hands, he went into the cop shop and started making more inquiries. He had to drug up before coming in here, not just due to synesthesia. He was very angry at police in general right now. When he was trained, he was taught using your weapon was a method of last resort. Nowadays, it seemed to be the first move, especially if the perp’s skin was brown or darker. It was fucking ridiculous.
Roan was allowed to look at Burn’s file because it seemed they were ready to call it a day on his case. And why not? He was a known street person on the fringes of the drug trade. No one had even claimed his body. He would be buried in a potter’s field, and no one would remember his murder in three days time. Hell, people had probably already forgotten. He was no one, nothing, and wouldn’t be missed.
Roan didn’t like Holden’s vigilantism, but it was times like these that he understood it. Homeless people were still people. Lack of housing didn’t mean they forfeited the rights of humanity. Admittedly, Roan wasn’t Burn’s biggest fan, but he still deserved justice. He was angry on his behalf, although the pot kept it from becoming a physical reality in the precinct house. His head was throbbing with swallowed rage by the time he left.
Out in his—well, Chai’s—car, after he chewed up a handful of mints, he called Chai to check in with him. It went straight to voicemail. Chai had promised he’d pick up if Roan called. Roan left a curt voicemail, telling him to call him back instantly. He sat sweating in the car for a couple of minutes, letting music from his phone fill in the quiet and to try to dampen his other senses. It didn’t quite work. He could almost see the music curling in the air around him, ribbons of red, blue, green, and orange. It was pretty, if a little too much like he was constantly on acid.
Roan had a bad feeling in his gut that he couldn’t dismiss. Something was wrong with Chai. He didn’t question the feeling. He went with it and drove back to E’s apartment building.
Roan only knew that E was a former escort who Holden and Chai had worked with, but he didn’t know who he was by sight or anything else. Presumably he had a real name, but Roan was fucked if he knew what it was. Roan chomped on a handful of mints before getting out of the car and being assaulted by city smells. But the thing was, in front of the building, he was sure he could smell Chai’s scent.
It was dim and fading fast, getting pulled into and submerged beneath waves of other people, but it was there in all its orangish-brown glory. (Yes, okay, people generally got assigned colors with their scent. Dylan was sky blue, Rosenberg a sturdy, utilitaria
n olive green. Holden was a deep contusion purple, and Chai a sort of burnt orange, but far more attractive than the ugly ’70s appliance color.) Roan could see the scent trail fading and being torn apart by currents of other scents, but it was strongest at the opposite corner. As he crossed the street and neared that point, he realized the orange started shading neon with the scent of fear. He also saw Chai’s cane, kicked into the gutter.
Shit.
After grabbing the cane, Roan ran back to the car, pulled his phone out, and checked it. As a precaution, Roan had set up a GPS tracing thing on Chai’s phone, on the off chance he was grabbed. It struck Chai as a little paranoid, but Roan hated being proven right. Now he hoped these assholes hadn’t thought to dump his phone. It took a few very long seconds to load, but either they hadn’t, or they’d thrown it in a car that was currently heading toward Beacon Hill. Roan would find out soon enough.
In spite of the drugs, adrenaline was thudding through his veins, and a small pounding started behind his eyes. It wasn’t exactly a headache; it was the lion uncoiling in his head, seeing an opportunity to come out after such a long dormancy.
Roan knew from looking in the mirror that he and the lion shared a color. It was a vampirish crimson red, as fresh and gory as raw meat. As much as Roan really wanted to deny it, he couldn’t. It was very apt.
And he had a feeling some other people were about to find that out.
CHAI WAS sure people were only tied to chairs in movies and TV shows, and that was never actually done in real life. But he woke up with a throbbing head and a bloody nose, tied to a wooden kitchen chair. Well, duct taped to it, but same difference. His hands were behind his back, and his ankles were taped together like one of his legs wasn’t artificial. Did they not notice or not care? Hard to say, since none of them were in the room with him.
Room was probably generous. His best guess was he was in a large closet. It was dark and cold, but light was bleeding in through the crack beneath and beside the door. In a farther room—not the one outside the closet, but an adjacent one—he heard men arguing.
“Stupid! This is fucking stupid,” Asshole Number One said.
“No it isn’t,” Asshole Number Two said. His voice was slightly reedier, and Chai was fairly certain he was the guy who’d threatened to kill him on the street corner. “A hostage trade will keep him busy and buy us time.”
“He can’t find us,” Asshole Number Three said. “The kitty fag’s a real freak, but there’s no fucking way he can find us. Don’t believe half the shit about him.”
Kitty fag? Holy shit, people actually called Roan that! Chai really thought it was a joke. He shifted in the chair, feeling and hearing it creak. It was wooden and probably old, not one of the good chairs. If he could topple it over, maybe he could break it, and the duct tape would no longer hold him to it. But what then? And did he really think he could break the chair? Even when he did porn, he was never the action hero, and those were parodies.
“He’s not human,” Asshole Number One said. “He’s a monster. The SPD’s been protecting him for years. If news about what he really was got out, people would freak the fuck out.”
“If he’s such a fucking monster, why didn’t we just leave?” Asshole Number Thee said.
“I told you. I can’t just pick up and run like that,” Asshole Number Two said. “There’s Sylvia and the kids, and it’d make us look as guilty as fuck.”
“We are guilty as fuck,” Asshole Number One said. Point to him.
“I say we kill him now and get the fuck out,” Asshole Number One said. Chai’s stomach quickly tied itself into a brutal knot. “He’ll have to report the body, and that buys us more time.”
“If we do the exchange in the right place, it buys us even more time,” Asshole Number Two said.
One of them scoffed, but Chai couldn’t say who. “You’re complicating things,” Asshole Number Three said. “We should just ice the camel jockey and leave.”
Chai was furious, but he wasn’t sure if he was angrier at the racial slur, or the fact that the ignorant dildo was using the wrong racial slur. Were his skin tone and facial features really that confusing? He didn’t think so. Stupid redneck crackers.
“Why are we rushing this?” Asshole Number Two said. “We have time. He has no idea who we are.”
When the lights died, Chai thought maybe one of them had come into the room to kill him and switched off the room light so he wouldn’t see who was doing it. But he heard Asshole Number One say, “What the hell…?”
“Did you blow a fuse, or is it a fucking brownout?” Asshole Number Three said.
“Guys,” Asshole Number Two said. “I think—”
Whatever he thought was interrupted by a loud crack and thud, a noise Chai eventually interpreted as a door being knocked down. Then a man started screaming, but it quickly turned into something else. It was weird, and Chai kind of held this all at a remove, which he assumed was shock or a possible concussion. For maybe half a second, it was a human noise, and then it very much wasn’t. It morphed and filled out into an incredible, inhuman roar loud enough to shake the walls and make Chai’s blood turn instantly cold.
Was that what a real lion’s roar sounded like? It was louder than he expected. Also, it made something in his lizard brain panic and start climbing the walls. Despite the chill and emotional numbness, his body flooded with fight or flight adrenaline, although fight wasn’t on the table. His mind was only capable of one thought, and that was run. Impossible to do when duct taped to a chair.
There was gunfire, but it was brief, and the shots seemed dwarfed by the roar. The roar was all; it was alpha and omega, the Big Bang, the beginning of everything and the end of everything. There was another noise, a wall-shaking thud, combined with a kind of wet noise that Chai couldn’t interpret at all. Was that blood? All Chai knew was it was down to one person shooting, and within seconds he was screaming.
There was a closer, quieter noise, and suddenly the closet door opened. The lights were out, but the man had a flashlight. “Can you stop him?” the man asked. Asshole Number Two.
What had Chai expected? How had he thought he’d look? He hadn’t formed any images in his mind about what all the cops looked like, but he was still disappointed. He was resolutely average, maybe five nine if you were generous, with some pudge softening all his edges and pushing him toward two hundred pounds. He had a close-cropped brown beard, probably hiding the fact that his very round face had no chin to speak of. He was pale and soft, like the Pillsbury Doughboy, only not quite as friendly looking. There was something hard and merciless in his hazel eyes, but he was the only one who hadn’t voted to kill him.
Chai’s head still throbbed, and looking anywhere close to the light made the pain worse. “I don’t know him. He’s a friend of a friend.”
There was another thud hard enough to shake the walls, and silence rushed in. No more shooting, no more screaming, and Chai sensed his own terror mirrored in the cop in front of him. It was over. Whatever puny resistance there had been, it was done now. It’d lasted less than a minute, maybe even less than thirty seconds. They had guns and training and experience in murder, and it didn’t matter. It wasn’t enough. It was never enough. The lion picked them off like so many rabbits in a warren.
Roan was right—he was a lot more than just a lion guy. He was a perfect balance of human and predator, and that’s the thing that most people didn’t get. Both could hurt you. Ignoring one in favor of the other would never end well.
The silence was unbearable. Even so, Asshole Number Two lowered his voice to a whisper. “He’s still human, right? He’s gotta respond to something.” The cop kneeled down and pulled out a knife. Before Chai really understood that, he was sawing through the tape on his ankles.
Chai almost said he wasn’t sure how human Roan was right now but kept it to himself. If these assholes hadn’t grabbed him, they wouldn’t be in this mess.
For some reason, the silence was the worst. Did that last
asshole actually shoot and kill Roan? Why was it so quiet otherwise? Holden was going to kill him if he got Roan killed.
Chai had just risen to his feet, his head still throbbing and pins and needles in his leg, when the room’s door came down with a dull, hard thud, slamming down like the gate to a drawbridge. Roan was in the doorway, shoulders rounded and head down, and there was this noise it took Chai a moment to recognize as a growl. It was constant, like a running engine, and sounded like a dog growl, but somehow a thousand times worse. It sounded like it belonged to a demon.
The cop grabbed Chai and ducked behind him, holding the knife at his throat. “C’mon, McKichan, you don’t want me to kill him, do ya?”
The only light in the room was bleeding in from between the curtains, but it was pale slivers of moonlight, and Chai couldn’t make out much. But he could see Roan’s face in a blade of light, and it sent a shiver of fear down his spine. His pupils were blown again, rendering his irises nothing more than a thin ring of emerald, but they were also weirdly empty, full of nothing but amorphous rage. His jaw was distended, teeth bared and covered in blood. His chin was all bloody as well, and it was impossible to tell if it was his blood, someone else’s, or a mix. He looked mainly human, but Chai got it now. He wasn’t. This was what Holden meant by saying “you’d know” when the lion was occupying Roan’s body. Yes, somehow you did. He was a meat puppet, being controlled by something else.
“That’s not Roan,” Chai said as the lion just stood there, continuing to growl and show bloody teeth. At least its empty eyes weren’t looking at him but at the cop over his shoulder. It knew the enemy, for the moment. Chai also realized, with the wonderful distance of shock, that Roan had killed the lights for the advantage. The men couldn’t see in this low level of illumination, but the lion could, with ease. He’d tilted the battlefield before the fight even started. They’d lost it before it began.
“What?” Asshole Number Two said. He sounded annoyed. “What the fuck do you mean that’s not—”