Infected: Shift (27 page)

The thing had fucking bit him. He should rip it in half.

He heard the noise of an engine and tires, and headlights blindsided his peripheral vision as it came up, slowly enough to let him know it would stop before it ran him over. He looked away, blinking afterimages from his eyes, and heard a car door open. It was funny, but from the scent of the exhaust he knew that it was a cop car. How weird was that? Exhaust really didn’t vary all that much.

“Roan, you got it under control?” a familiar voice asked. It was Seb, which was definitely a good thing for him.

Roan realized he was still growling deep in his throat, and he actually had to remember how to speak. He was sliding down. “Yeah.”

He heard the pneumatic hiss of a drug gun, and assumed the panther had been drugged. Would they shoot him next? he wondered.

“What the fuck’s this guy?” A male voice he didn’t recognize asked. It had the hard authority of a cop.

“Stand down. He works for the department,” Seb replied in an equally firm manner. So he had a replacement partner while Gordo was on leave. Guy sounded like a prick. “Roan, you okay?”

Seb had not gotten any closer, and his voice had a soothing quality, like he was trying to keep him from spooking, and he kept using his name, like the cop handbook said in dealing with volatile people. Use their name a lot, try and forge a connection, make them think they know you and can trust you. A brief surge of anger—he could rip Seb in half too, him and that dick partner of his, who was exuding testosterone like a cheap cologne—gave way to a sudden cascade of despair. Oh fuck, what was going on? Why had he even thought that?

“’m fine,” he grumbled, turning completely away, dry washing his face with his hands so no one could see any lingering signs of transformation. But he felt the blood on his chin, and his fingers ached as if they’d all been broken. His arms burned and so, inexplicably, did his back, his heart beating out a staccato rhythm in his chest that seemed to vibrate through his entire body. Only now did he realize he had come closer to a full change than he realized.

He heard a smash—something mostly plastic impacting the asphalt with force—followed closely by, “Hey man, what the fuck—”

“No pictures!” A voice exclaimed angrily, and it took him a second to realize the man who said that was Dylan.

Roan turned to look at the crowd, a hand on his face covering his mouth (and most of the blood, although he could feel a slick of it on his neck, growing cold in the chill night), and he caught Dylan’s eyes. He looked anguished, as if he had seen what Roan had only just realized, his chocolate-brown eyes shiny with unshed tears. Dylan turned away and quickly disappeared back inside Panic, followed by Rodrigo, who must have picked up on his despair, if not precisely the reason for it.

Roan wanted to call after him but didn’t. He didn’t feel he had the right to do so anymore.

It took
several minutes for Seb to question him about the incident, and someone found a bar towel for him, which he used to clean the blood off his face and then tie around the bite on his arm. Roan still hurt, still felt like he was full of broken glass, and he wanted desperately to get to his car and break into his Percocet stash. He also desperately wanted to go into Panic and find Dylan. He had no idea what he was going to say to him beyond “sorry,” but he felt it was paramount he find him as soon as possible.

It turned out there was a man hiding in the Dumpster, a homeless guy who had been scratched up pretty badly but would undoubtedly survive. He’d lost a lot of blood, but he was so drunk he didn’t seem to notice. That was probably for the best. But at one point, his glazed eyes settled on Roan, and he pointed at him and said to the EMTs, “He’s a werecat. Did’ja know that? Shouldn’t he be locked up or somethin’?” If they answered him, Roan didn’t hear it.

As soon as Seb wrapped the interview up, Roan stopped by his car, gulped the pills, and found himself confronted by staring men on his way back to Panic. “Wow,” one guy said. He had bleached-blond hair and smelled of that so-called “pheromone” cologne that Roan knew was complete bullshit. (He could smell pheromones, and while there were some in the mix, not enough to make any difference to anyone.) “That was… what did you do? Aren’t you hurt?”

Roan cut through the men without saying anything. Yes, he was hurt, but he didn’t care. And what had he done? He'd nearly turned into a lion, and he'd freaked Dylan out. Why had he freaked Dylan out? He’d seen him half transformed before… right? Oh fuck, he couldn’t even remember anymore. Maybe Dylan was just upset because he thought his head was going to explode from an aneurysm or something. Roan was growing convinced that the longer it didn’t happen, the less likely it was to happen. His body had probably adapted to the new reality, like it adapted to most things. Would Dylan buy that?

Once inside Panic, he found Rodrigo back behind the bar, trying to calm down customers who weren’t really freaked out, just vaguely excited that something violently odd had happened in their vicinity. But he couldn’t see Dylan. “Where is he?” he asked Rodrigo, aware that he would know the “he” he was referring to.

Rodrigo shot him a sympathetic look. “He headed home. Look, what you did out there—”

“Is what I do. There’s only room for one big cat around here.” He headed back out, and the crowd miraculously parted for him. Was this how Moses felt?

Dylan heading home without him—ahead of the end of his shift, in fact—was bad news. He drove home as fast as legally possible, an accident at another intersection holding him up for what seemed an unconscionable amount of time. It didn’t look too bad, it was mainly just broken glass and a ruined fender, so why the fucking holdup? Sometimes it seemed like the world conspired against you.

He arrived home, relieved to find Dylan’s car still in the driveway, but where did he think he would go? The pills were kicking in, and the edges of the pain had dissolved, melted like ice cream in the sun. It was really nice; he could move his fingers without feeling a lightning bolt of pain sizzle down each nerve. His head felt hollow, but the throbbing at the temples had ceased.

Once inside, he found that only the foyer light was on, and the rest of the house was dark save for a sliver of light in the upstairs hallway. “Dylan?” He charged upstairs and opened the door on the bedroom, the only lit room in the house. Dylan was standing at the end of the bed, zipping up a backpack. “Hon, what’re you—”

“I can’t do this anymore,” Dylan said, his voice sounding congested. He wiped his face with his hand before shouldering the bag, but his face was still wet with tears, his eyes red rimmed, beads of saline collecting in the stubble dusting his upper lip. “I can’t. I’m sorry. I’ll come back and get the rest of my stuff eventually, okay? I just can’t do this—”

“Do what?” he exclaimed, astonished. Dylan was walking out on him? “Live with a freak?”

“Fuck you!” Dylan snapped, with so much rage Roan reflexively took a step back. Dylan almost never got angry, so when he did, it was explosive and astonishing in its rawness. “You are not a freak to me, and you have never been a freak. Goddamn it, why don’t you treat yourself with more respect than that? Why do you hate yourself so much?”

“I’m not dumping me, so I don’t think my hate is an issue.”

“I am not—” Dylan paused and seemed to gather his thoughts. He was still crying; he had never actually stopped crying. “I love you, you stupid asshole, and I wish I didn’t. I can’t stand aside while you kill yourself a piece at a time. I can’t. I didn’t want to leave you because you could—I didn’t know what would happen, but I thought I could brazen it out, I thought you’d realize what you were doing or… God, I’m such a fucking idiot. I thought maybe you’d love me enough not to hurt me like this. But you don’t love me, and—”

“What? Of course I love you. What the hell kind of thing is that to say?”

“You like me, and maybe you’re used to me, but you don’t really love me. And please, no, don’t deny it, okay? I was good with that. I was willing to accept that ’cause that’s how much I loved you. You’re still in love with Paris, and I get that. I know you think the very idea is bullshit, but he was your soul mate, and I accepted that. I just can’t accept that you’d rather die than be with me.”

“This is bullshit!” Maybe it was the drugs—perhaps four Percocets was one too many—but he felt like half this argument was just rushing past him. “I had to stop the fucking panther, Dyl. What would you have me do? Let it maul someone to death, let the cops kill it? I thought—”

“It’s not about that! You’re giving it power—you want it to take over!”

“What?” Now he really was missing a piece of this argument. “What the fuck? You’re not making sense! When I’m around other cats, it—”

“It is you! You are the lion, Roan! It’s a part of you, and you wouldn’t have to fight it so hard if you didn’t unconsciously want it to take over.”

He was feeling a lot of things right now—comfortably numb, upset, sad—but now pissed off was letting its presence be known. “Don’t psychoanalyze me! You have no idea how hard it is to live with this!”

“No, I don’t, and that’s why I let the drugs go! I don’t know the kind of pain you live with, and if it takes it away, fine! Drown yourself in fucking pills, Ro! But I can’t watch you kill yourself anymore!”

“Fuck you! If I wanted to kill myself, I’d shoot myself in the head! Or slice my arms open like you did!” Even as he said it, he winced. Stupid, wrong, low, mean—why had he gone there?

Dylan’s jaw tightened, and there was genuine pain in his eyes. He’d hurt him with that. That was a confidence he'd shared with him, his suicide attempt after the death of Jason, and to use it as a weapon was beyond the pale.

“Jesus, fuck, Dyl, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”

“No, you did, and it’s okay. At least it’s out now.” He ran his hand beneath his nose and sniffed. “I have to go now before things get worse.”

“Please, no, Dylan, I—”

“Don’t, just don’t. If you care about me at all, let me go.”

“But—” But what? What was he going to say? He stood aside and let Dylan pass, feeling like utter shit. He was angry, both at himself and at Dylan, but the drugs made it seem oddly abstract. “I love you, goddamn it!” he roared. Not literally; he was too drugged and too tired to manage it. There was no response besides the opening and closing of the door downstairs. Damn it. “Would I put up with this shit if I didn’t?”

Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck. If he’d set out to deliberately destroy this relationship, he couldn’t have done a better job.

Angrily, he slammed the closet door shut, but that wasn’t satisfying. So he went downstairs and headed for his office, where he landed three or four punches on the heavy bag before snapping the chain and sending it thudding into the wall and collapsing onto the floor. Now he had something to fix. Great. That would keep him occupied for about ten or twenty minutes. “Fuck!” he shouted, feeling his heart beat in his ears. He was an idiot; he was a world-class moron.

Why did both Dylan and Murphy think he wanted to die? Why did they think he was suicidal? He wasn’t! His last overdose wasn’t his fault—some asshole had tried to kill him with animal tranquilizers. Didn’t they remember that? That wasn’t his fucking fault.

And that lion shit—Dylan had no fucking clue what he was talking about. The lion was… well, it wasn’t a thing, really, it was an impulse, an urge, an irresistible urge. He fought it, and it wasn’t as easy as he seemed to imply—he couldn’t make it roll over and play dead. How stupid was he? For a man who had taken years of college, he could seem totally clueless.