by Andrea Speed
He knocked the lion out. It sagged heavily in his grip, and he was the only one holding it up. So he dropped it, and he knew it wasn’t dead. He just hoped he hadn’t done any serious damage. But part of him didn’t give a fuck.
He heard himself growling but couldn’t seem to stop. Needles of red-hot pain seemed to have settled in his eye sockets, and thin tendrils of it were worming their way through his jaw, down his throat, settling deep into his spine. He was aware that if he didn’t fight it, it might not hurt so much.
He didn’t trust himself to take the stairs, so he went to the elevator and then had to take a few seconds to remember how to work it, how to use his hands beyond hitting or grabbing. He wondered how many IQ points he dropped when the beast took over, or if he could even remember how to talk. He was trying hard to see if he could, but his output was currently limited to growls and snarls.
The elevator had mirrored surfaces in it, and he saw himself, but he didn’t quite believe what he saw. It was him, kind of, but his eyes were all wrong, the pupils bloated and more oval than round, and his mouth… well, no. He wasn’t seeing things clearly, and that must have been it, because his lower jaw looked like it belonged to another creature entirely, certainly not a Human. Blood caked his mouth, covered his chin, and hid some of his teeth, of which there were too many, and some were pointing at broken angles. He attempted to close his mouth and couldn’t, his teeth clicking awkwardly and his jaw feeling dislocated. He’d cut his tongue—on his teeth?—and it hurt. His vision was kind of blurry up close, so he was convinced he wasn’t seeing correctly—he just couldn’t be seeing correctly—but the shock of it felt like cold water thrown into his troubled mind. He didn’t know what he’d seen in the reflection of the elevator door, but it looked like a freak, some kind of lame rejected demon from Buffy The Vampire Slayer.
The glimpse of… well, whatever it was he thought he saw, threw him enough that he hadn’t expected the lift to stop and the doors to open, but as soon as he smelled blood and cat his mind snapped back into focus.
There were two cats on this floor, a cougar and a leopard, and he shouted a roar that tore up what was left of his throat. He heard an incongruous soft, pattering sound, and figured out it was his own blood dripping from his chin. The taste was so constant he’d stopped noticing it about two minutes ago.
There was a responding roar, and the leopard tore down the corridor to see what new cat was in its territory. Roan was happy to meet it halfway down the hall, where it stopped upon seeing him but still kept growling. They exchanged snarls until he heard the click of claws down a side hall, and Roan found that he was surrounded, with the leopard in front of him and the cougar behind him. He should have cared, but he still didn’t. He had opposable thumbs and they didn’t, which meant he’d always win, as long as he didn’t get stupid or change completely.
He stood with his back to the wall and crouched down, so he was closer to eye level with the cats, hoping he gave off the appropriately wounded air. He wanted them to close in, thinking he was wounded prey. He briefly wondered why they hadn’t attacked each other, but one was male and one was female. They were different species, sure, but the leopard female was bigger than the cougar male, giving the male more impetus not to get overly territorial. (Only tigers would attack their opposite gender members as a matter of course, but that was generally because tigers were the most territorial of all cats.)
The cats were falling for it, coming in warily, snarling and sniffing at him, when he heard an office door open.
Ah fuck. Why did people have to mess up perfectly good plans?
What the person intended he had no idea. Did they actually think Roan was in trouble? Did they think he was with SWAT? The leopard was closest and lunged for the person in the open door (all Roan saw was a dark suit—just the scent alone told him it was a man, but other than that he wouldn’t have known). Roan was forced to jump for it, screaming (roaring), “Shut the fucking door!” He didn’t know if what he intended to say even came out as words; he heard the roar, slightly modulated, but little else. He caught the leopard in midair, centimeters from the man, and the door slammed shut as he and the squirming leopard rolled down the hall, the leopard’s claws raking his chest and throat as he fought the urge to sink his teeth into its exposed neck and end it all now.
The cougar took this opportunity to lunge, but even though he was only peripherally aware of it coming in, a tawny blur, he somehow kicked it out of midair and sent it flying down the hall as he sunk his teeth into what was essentially the leopard’s cheek. Blood that wasn’t his for a change flooded his mouth, and the leopard squalled and squirmed away from him, gaining its feet but turning to face him as Roan got on all fours and spit out a mouthful of blood, growling at the leopard as it snarled at him, baring uneven teeth.
He’d hurt the cougar, so it came after him again like the stupid beast it was, and as it jumped he dropped and rolled over onto his back, so as the cougar came down on him he grabbed it and slammed it headfirst into the wall. It went limp almost instantaneously, and he tossed it aside before rolling back up to his feet.
The leopard was looking at him warily, growling low, but the fact that it hadn’t tried to attack him while he was dealing with the cougar told him she wasn’t as dumb as her male counterpart. “I don’t wanna kill you,” he snarled. “Stay down.”
The leopard was still growling at him, but it lay down on the floor, taking a submissive position. He pulled out the tranquilizer gun and shot it, although it took him a minute to remember how to use it.
He was stalking back to the elevator, aware he was bleeding more and still not caring, when Gordo’s voice came out of nowhere and startled him. “SWAT incoming.”
Okay, yes, SWAT were bad. He needed to get to the cats before them, or they’d simply kill them on sight. He had three of them, now he just needed to find the fourth.
In the elevator, he remembered how to talk and said, “Got it.”
“Whoa,” Gordo replied. “Was that you, McKichan, or did a demon just come on the radio? What’s up with your voice?”
He didn’t answer. He’d figure it out or he wouldn’t.
The next floor—The sixth or seventh? He couldn’t remember; his mind refused to work that way—was empty of cats (couldn’t smell any; his roar brought no response), so he simply went up to the next floor. There, as the elevator door opened, was a panther in the hall, sleek black but kind of stocky, sitting facing conference rooms with their doors wide open. No Humans were here, meaning people had been successfully able to evacuate or this floor just hadn’t been in use yet today, meaning whoever he was, this infected had picked the wrong floor to hide out in.
The cat looked at him with empty hazel eyes and a twitching tail, and Roan came out of the elevator, growling, “Some people have no luck at all.”
The cat snarled and got to its feet, looking ready to fight or run, but Roan had enough awareness to pull the tranquilizer gun and simply shoot it. Proving that this poor son of a bitch had no luck in any form, the dart hit it right on the bridge of his nose. He was aware enough to recoil and try and knock the dart out with a paw, shaking his head, but the dart was in deep, and the drugs finally kicked in and laid it out.
Roan crouched down and concentrated on his sense of humanity. What was his sense of humanity? He focused on the pain—or at least tried—but that didn’t seem to be it. What was his humanity? Did he actually have any?
His tongue still hurt. An odd detail, but one he focused on, trying to bring himself back. He wondered if he should bite it or if the resurgent pain would make his cat side worse. A bit of a song ran through his head, almost mocking his current predicament—“If I bite my cheeks long enough I figure I could chew right through the skin.” You know, he just might be able to. He always thought that maybe in midtransition he could rip the skin off his face and maybe find out if there was a lion under there.
Insanity. Insanity and These Arms Are Snakes lyrics. They went togethe
r so perfectly, no wonder he listened to them.
He was grasping at something—awareness, some sense of self, even if it was only a mocking sense—when he heard the elevator door open again. He could smell gun oil, body armor, hear the hiss and click of radios. He knew guns were aimed at his back, the clicks of firing positions being taken, as a super-macho male voice barked, “You McKichan?”
He raised a hand and nodded, not sure if he could speak yet, the pain finding laser focus in certain parts of his body: jaw, teeth, hands, chest, eyes. He heard a familiar voice snap, “Would you let me through? Can’t you see he’s bleeding?”
Dee? Of course. There’d be more than one ambulance needed, and he probably guessed he’d be needed, so he'd either nagged, coerced, or got the okay to come along with the SWAT team.
“There’s the cat,” a voice said, butch but surprisingly female.
The macho voice from before said into his radio, “Floor secured up to the eighth. Advance agent found.”
Advance agent? Oh, was that him? Must have been. Better than kitty fucker, he supposed.
Dee knelt beside him, thunking down his heavy EMT kit. “You get caught by a cat? You getting slow in your old age?”
Roan looked at him, still snarling, but even though he thought he saw the briefest reaction in Dee’s dark eyes, his face remained stony professional, all business. The good EMTs made natural poker players, as they learned to keep all emotion from their faces. “Don’t you snap at me, mister,” Dee replied, using an antiseptic cloth to wipe the blood off his face. He examined the scratches on his face, and said, “Not too bad. Those should heal up good.” Dee lifted up his chin with his fingertips and wiped his throat with the same cooling, stinging cloth. “Might need to get some surgical glue on a couple of these. Lucky it missed your windpipe.” He then frowned at him. “Why is your mouth bleeding?”
“Bit my tongue,” he grumbled, pretty sure he could talk now. He could, but it still sounded gravelly and inhuman.
“Let’s see.” Dee put a thumb on his lower lip, and Roan let him open his mouth. He got out his penlight and had a good look, squinting slightly. If his teeth still weren’t right, Dee gave no sign of it. “Goddamn, you took a real chunk out of it.” He rummaged in his kit and took out a small square of gauze, which he put over the cut in Roan’s tongue. “Nothing we can do about it. It’ll have to heal on its own. But knowing you, that’ll happen fast.”
The gauze tasted terrible, and he could feel it filling up with blood already, but conversely it made him feel a bit more sane, a bit more Human. Even having Dee here helped. Yeah, having your ex tend to you in a medical sense was off-putting, but at least there was little Roan could do (or become) that would shock him.
Dee lifted up his shirt and clicked his tongue at all the bloody scratches on his chest, but that was when Roan told him, “Don’t worry about it. I can heal.”
“Seriously? Your torso looks like ground chuck. I don’t—”
“I can, but not here,” he assured him, feeling more like Roan McKichan, Human being, instead of Roan McKichan, lion.
Dee finally met his eyes. He hadn’t before now, which Roan only realized in retrospect. His eyes must have been more Human now, or Dee was at least confident they were. “Are you sure? You don’t look so good.”
“I’m in so much pain, I don’t think I can move without screaming.”
Dee gave him a slightly dubious look. “You’re not just saying that for free drugs, are you?”
“I don’t need your drugs. I have better at home.”
That honesty got him a shot of something. He didn’t honestly know what, but after a couple of minutes he began to feel warmth in his hands and feet, and the edges of the pain smoothed, became smaller and more manageable.
Dee insisted on taping some big bandages to some of the worst scratches on his chest, so he let him as the pain continued to ebb, and finally he asked, “The guy in the stairwell, the one bleeding out. How is he?”
Dee shrugged. “He was stable when they loaded him. That’s all I know.”
Stable meant nothing; stable only meant he was still alive when they put him in the ambulance. But the way Dee said it seemed to imply “don’t get your hopes up”—stable was the best possible diagnosis for him. Asking for more was too much. You could only lose so much blood before you were honestly a lost cause. Roan knew that and didn’t know why he cared.
Dee helped him up and helped him down to the street, where things were noisier and more cops had showed, their flashing red and blue lights bouncing off mirrored buildings in such a way that all they needed was a DJ spinning to make this an official dance party. He was aware of TV news vans, but they had been pushed back to a distance that must have pissed off many a cameraman and segment producer. He heard some arguments, some cursing, but since he focused on none of it, it was kind of an angry white noise.
He balked when he realized Dee was taking him to his rig, but he told him, “I’m not letting you drive home on Demerol, and besides, there’s no better way to lose the press.”
Fair enough. He got into the back of the ambulance, where Shep was, and he exclaimed, “Fuck, man, what happened to your shirt?”
An excellent question. Roan had just noticed it was not much more than fabric tatters, held together by random threads and blood. As Dee closed the ambulance doors, he made a hand gesture of some sort to Shep, who nodded in understanding. Roan got that Dee had asked him to check his vitals without knowing how he knew that’s what he asked.
The Demerol—was that really what Dee gave him?—was kicking in big time, and it was very pleasant. So he lay back on the stretcher as Shep put a blood pressure cuff on his arm, and asked, “Saved the cats?”
“Saved ’em. Don’t know why, but I did.”
“Cats are people too,” Shep said with no irony. But it did sound kind of funny.
He heard Dee get in the front of the rig and felt them drive off as Shep looked at readouts and wrote some numbers in pen on his latex glove. Blood pressure numbers probably, possibly temperature, as he’d briefly put some machine on his forehead. “So am I dead?” Roan wondered.
“You still taking calcium channel blockers?”
Those were the meds he was given in an attempt to stave off another aneurysm. He had no idea if they were helping or not, but he took them. “Yeah.”
He nodded, still writing numbers on his hand. “You have an appointment with your doctor soon?”
He’d wanted to go see Doctor Rosenberg and ask her about that sudden change, the one he didn’t quite feel. Did that count? “Soon enough.”
“Good.” Laconic Shep was yet another good paramedic, one who didn’t give too much away, one who could beat you in a poker game with nothing but a pair of twos. “Rest and lots of fluids tonight, okay? No fighting, no serious narcotics. Understood?”
“Aye aye, captain.”
Shep raised a blond eyebrow at that. “Yeah, I guess you’re on the serious narcotics already.”
Oh, ha ha. The Nelson laugh seemed so appropriate right now, he wished he could do it.
He must have dozed off for a bit, because it seemed like a second later he was home, and there was a small argument over whether Dee should help him inside or not, but Roan insisted he was walking to his own front door, and finally Dee just let him. He watched him all the way, though, arms crossed over his chest, his face as sour as an upset schoolmarm. Once inside, he shut the door and locked it, in case Dee changed his mind and decided he needed to go to the hospital.
Dylan was home, but the reason he didn’t meet him was obvious, as Roan could hear the water running upstairs. Shower or bath? Bath most likely.
Roan sat at the bottom of the steps and tried to force enough of a change to heal some of the scratches. It was extra hard, probably due to the drugs, but he felt an itchy burning in his chest as he felt a new pain knife into his jaw and figured he’d pushed it as much as he could. Veins seemed to pulse in front of his eyes, little black capilla
ries that appeared and disappeared with every beat of his heart, and he knew he was done. Any further attempts, and he would pay for it dearly.
He still had bloody scratches on his chest and arms, and his hand still hurt (had he broken something?) but it was all something he could live with. He gave himself a few seconds of rest, then went upstairs.
In the bedroom, he tossed his coat in the closet and threw his shredded shirt in the garbage, grabbing a T-shirt out of the dresser and pulling it on. If Dylan noticed it was a different shirt, he’d just say he spilled something on the other.
He knocked on the bathroom door before walking in where Dylan was relaxing in the tub. The air was warm and smelled strongly of the peppermint and eucalyptus bath salts he usually used after yoga class. He said it was a muscle soother, and Roan had no information to the contrary, so he let it go.