Infected: Freefall (36 page)

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 huffed 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.”

This sort of went in one ear and out the other. Dylan couldn’t take much more tonight. He used to have a rather sedate life. Oh sure, he had his weird art friends and the interesting employees at the gay club, but he had a very normal routine: work, painting, watching TV, meditating. That was pretty much it. Pretty normal, much like everyone else’s with a couple of variations. But then he met an unusually attractive man named Paris, who was the only tiger-strain infected he had ever met, who seemed to talk all the time about his boyfriend, Roan. And somehow, his life took a weird sideways turn from then on. Suddenly his life was full of death, iron cages, books, guns, dominatrices, paramedics, and male prostitutes. While he was baffled much of the time, you’d think he’d been more miserable than he actually was. Oh sure, he was miserable right now, but for the most part he was perversely happy with Roan. In spite of the hard exterior, he was one of sweetest men he’d ever known. He seemed genuinely interested in helping people. Merging that with the man who could turn into a lion and eat people was a brain-twisting dichotomy.

“He… what? Are you saying you saw him do this?”

Holden got this look on his face that suggested he’d suddenly realized he had made a mistake. “And he didn’t tell you about it at all. Right. I should have guessed that really. Forget it. You know he has a temper. That’s all it is.”

“He tried to kill someone because of me?”

“No. If he wanted someone dead, they’d be dead. He just scared the living shit out of them.”

“But you said—”

“I’m full of shit, Dylan. Now, are we headed to your place or are you coming back to mine?”

How weird: he was lying and telling the truth at the same time. Dylan hadn’t known that was physically possible. But, again, he couldn’t deal with that now.

It was disappointing to think that maybe he wasn’t strong enough to be in Roan’s world, but he was starting to wonder.

H
OLDEN
knew he was many things, but a decent detective wasn’t one of them. Under normal circumstances. But circumstances were far from normal; circumstances were pretty well fucked.

It was bad enough the doctor had obviously lied to them: no one on a respirator was “okay.” That was like saying the guy on the iron lung only had a “mild cough.” But he figured Roan would recover eventually, because he generally did. He was a bad penny, and he kept turning up.

Poor Dylan. Not only did he look shell-shocked by all of this, but he asked him in the car, “You think Roan really loves me?” Oh, it was so weird. Holden told him that obviously he did, and obviously he didn’t admit it because the idea of it freaked him out. Lingering Paris guilt? Maybe. Holden really had no idea. The one time he’d thought he was in love, his heart had been so thoroughly crushed he was no longer sure he ever
was
in love. He thought love was a sham used to sell greeting cards and heterosexual conformity, even though he generally recognized the delusion when it popped up in others. Roan had it bad for Dylan, although he supposed he could understand. Dylan was a good-looking guy, but not vain, and he was as mellow as a heavily stoned person without being actually stoned or completely fucking stupid. He’d be an easy target for anybody who wanted to kill him.

Holden knew he wasn’t an easy target. He looked like he was, but he wasn’t. He’d learned long ago you did what you had to do to survive, and sometimes your survival meant hurting someone else. It happened. You just tried not to hurt anyone without necessity or good reason if you had any shred of a conscience. Holden had a shred, but only just. He figured it would serve him well.

Today, while “working” at John Newberry’s office, he had found a very queeny assistant to befriend. It wasn’t difficult. A bit of flirting, a bit of flattery, and this poor guy was following him around like a puppy. The scary thing? This guy couldn’t have been more than twenty-two, making Holden feel vaguely like a dirty old man. Okay, he was only thirty, but in hustler years that was ancient. The guy Callum—might have been shiny young, but he wasn’t very attractive and had a bit of a belly. Not much of one, but in the perfectionist world of the gay dating scene, that made him little more than a drunken desperation fuck at best. Attention from Holden meant a lot to him. He felt really bad for stringing him along.

He got access to some of John’s e-mails and line-item budget items for the past couple months. What he discovered was that, only yesterday, John had sent a rather large payment to a Duane Malloy. A bit of Googling and use of less widely known search engines turned up that he was a private investigator for a firm working out of Lakeview. John Newberry had hired a private investigator and just paid him off in a way that suggested their business was done. He wanted to ask Roan what that could possibly mean, if it was sinister as he felt it might have been, but Roan wasn’t conscious enough to ask.