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ROAN was floating on a sea of blood. But it was warm and soothing, so he didn’t mind.
It was like he was hovering on a bed of warm, thick air, and it didn’t smell as much as you thought it would. It was very peaceful, and he almost didn’t notice how much pain he was in. But there was pain.
In fact, it was so great his mind seemed to have fuzzed out. Someone had overloaded the speaker, blasted it at a volume beyond eleven, and now nothing sounded right. Nothing felt quite right; it was lopsided somehow, off, and he wasn’t sure if he minded or not. Maybe when he was closer to consciousness.
That was a huge problem. When you were close enough to consciousness to ponder it, you were obviously coming back to it. It was totally unfair.
The floating sensation became a slow, sinking sensation, pain growing and dragging him back to Earth. The pain quickly went from excruciating to unbearable, and then moved into an area where vocabulary failed. It felt like he had been crushed, every single bone in his body had been pulverized one by one, his blood broken vessel by vessel, and he would have screamed if he had been capable of doing it without causing himself further pain (which was impossible, so he couldn’t).
He lay absolutely still, trying to will the pain to settle like warped boards in an abandoned house, but it never happened. So he had to lie there, aching, hoping he didn’t have to move, but just opening his eyes brought on a pulse of pain.
Where the hell was he? He was in a room with cheap white stucco paint slapped on flimsy walls, moldy green curtains pulled against what looked like radioactive sunlight, and a threadbare carpet some odd color between harvest gold and chewing tobacco. He smelled bland, horrible industrial laundry detergent coming from the flat pillow he was resting his head on, and figured he was in a very cheap motel, and if he was capable of feeling something beyond pain, he’d feel rough sheets. He groaned deep in his throat, incapable of actually articulating a syllable. He couldn’t move either. Breathing hurt.
Oh shit—he'd totally transformed, hadn't he? He must have. This was the kind of roaring, angry, malicious pain that only came with a full body warp. What was the last thing he remembered? With all this pain, his memory was even more fragmented, but... running into the house. He had a memory of that, of body tackling someone coming out the door. Then... shit, he didn’t know. Did he bite someone’s throat out? Did that actually happen? He had a sense memory of that, of flesh and muscle between his teeth, but nothing else. Could just be part of his nightmare. (Well, certainly that’s what he wanted to believe.)
From another room—but close—he heard running water and a slightly out-of-tune male voice singing. He heard a door open, smelled fragrant steam, and eventually the man crossed into his limited field of vision. Of course it was Holden, dripping wet and naked save for a thin white towel wrapped around his waist. “Hey, you’re conscious! Hold on a sec, I got something for you.” He disappeared to the other part of the room, and Roan heard a strange noise. Liquid being shaken in a plastic bottle? Yes, that was it. Finally Holden reappeared with a water bottle not quite half full of water. “Gonna need to drink this. It’s got enough ketamine in it to numb half of Panic, so I bet it’ll make you feel almost human for five seconds.” He frowned, then said, “Just prop your head up. I’ll dribble it in.”
He guessed he couldn’t move well? Good guess. He leaned his head back, a small movement painful enough to make him wince, and Holden delicately brought the bottle to his mouth and let water trickle down his throat. The water was lukewarm and had a slightly bitter, plastic taste, but Roan was dying of thirst, and the water kind of soothed his ravaged throat when he could force himself to swallow. The bottle was almost empty when he finally started feeling the effects of the ketamine, a gradual, warm numbness that started to wash over his agonized body like a healing tide. Once the bottle was drained, Holden walked off, still talking. “I know you can’t get heavier in your lion form, but I swear you were. Holy shit, did I have a hard time dragging you to the jeep.”
Roan turned over onto his back as the Vitamin K took over and he could breathe without feeling like someone was punching him in the chest. “It was a clusterfuck, huh?” His voice was a ghastly rasp. Apparently his throat hadn’t fully healed yet.
“Nope. I’d say it all went off according to plan. We make a hell of a team.” Holden crossed to the room’s lone chair and held up something flat and black. A hard drive. “You want evidence for the Feds? They can go to town on this.”
“Jordan?”
He shook his head. “We were too late. They killed him long before we got there.”
“Fuck.” He rubbed his eyes and was glad the drugs had kicked in. He did feel almost human, although his heart was pounding a bit fast now. “Where did you get the ketamine?”
“They had it. They had a lot of date-rape-style drugs. Maybe some of the people they killed weren’t getting paid for their time after all.” With no modesty at all, Holden pulled off his towel, showing Roan his bare ass as he pulled on his underwear. Well, no shock there. Holden seemed to think modesty was overrated.
“What the fuck happened?”
Holden told him that he lioned out (well, duh), and some guys fled while others attempted to bring him down, and they didn’t fare too well. Also, Holden figuratively lioned out and got a couple himself but didn’t specify what that meant (although Roan could guess). He then told him about finding Jordan’s body in a freezer in a shed behind the house, and how he'd decided he needed to get back to the main house, but couldn’t because Roan was out in his lion form. So he threw out the meat patties that he found in the freezer, hoping that would distract him. It did, apparently, but not enough that he felt safe to run back to the house. But he lucked out in that it was a hot day and he (the lion) was full and went to lie down in the shade and fell asleep. That’s when Holden decided to sneak out, and it was his intention to go back into the house, find some heavy drugs he could dose him with, and then get him out of there, but he didn’t need to. He told Roan he was already changing back, albeit slowly, when Holden ventured out of the shed. (He wanted to ask how so, what that exactly meant, but he was scared to know and didn’t ask.) So Holden just went back into the house, found some drugs he thought he might be able to use later, grabbed some cash, and then lit the place up.
Roan honestly thought it was the drugs at first, and the fact that he felt like he should have been dead, or that dying would have been more merciful at this point. “Lit the place up?” His voice still had yet to recover; he sounded like Harvey Fierstein’s distant cousin.
“Yeah,” Holden replied casually, pulling up his jeans. “Burn, baby, burn.”
“You burned the house down?”
“Of course I did. You probably left blood all over the place, and I’m sure I left fingerprints, and I’ve got a record, so I’m in the system. Better to hasten the ashes to ashes, dust to dust bit.”
Didn’t he know going in that working with Holden was opening a very dark door? These were “his people” these snuff guys were messing with, giving him an extra sense of mission. Roan knew he could only blame himself, as there was only one way this could go. “Aw fuck, Holden....”
“What? It hasn’t even been reported on the news yet. I’ve watched the morning and noon local broadcasts, and no mention of it. Either no one noticed it, or no one cared.”
“You know what the horrible thing is? You can do more time for arson than you can for some murders.”
“Probably. But we won’t get caught.”
“Oh really? You have a magic wand?”
“I knew this kid called Sparky for many years on the street. He was a pyro, total head case. Remember that rash of fires downtown about ten years ago? All him. He said watching stuff burn made him feel better.”
It was hard for him to think through the sludge of drugs and pain, but he finally got it. “Ten years ago? They never caught anyone for those.” The fires were mainly at abandoned and vacant buildings, and transients were initially blamed, but the cops were forced to revise their initial supposition when there was an explosion of similar fires that were too close in style to be called copycats. From what he understood, the method of ignition was similar in all cases as well. But the fires just stopped before a good suspect could be found, leading to speculation that he (and it was usually a he) was in prison for another crime.
“No, but Sparky was good. I just copied what he did. Who knows, maybe they’ll blame Sparky for this one too. I doubt he’d care.”
“What happened to him?”
“Sparks? Oh, he got bored of the scenery, hopped a bus to Miami. Have there been a string of fires down there? That’ll let us know he stayed.”
He almost asked Holden why he didn’t drop a hint to the cops, but why would he? He didn’t trust cops, and ratting a fellow street kid out was a no-no. At least the fires hadn’t killed anyone (that he knew of). He’d have been more indignant if someone had died. “How many people did I kill?”
Holden pulled on his T-shirt—a new one, or at least new to him; it advertised a Yakima titty bar called Sugar’s, which was funny on a couple of different levels if you knew Holden—and replied, “I don’t know. Maybe no one. I didn’t count.”
“You’re lying.”
“No, I deliberately didn’t count, didn’t check for life signs. You know why? Because I knew you would ask, and I wanted to give you a truthful answer. I do not know, I never knew. I don’t know how many ran away either. I don’t know if the second guy I shot died. I can live with the ambiguity.”
“And you think I can? Wait a minute—you shot two people?”
“One of them killed Coyote. The other pulled a rifle on me. I feel justified in both cases.”
He wanted to shake his head, but couldn’t because of the pain and because the drugs were really kicking in big time now, and that floating sensation was coming back. It was very nice. He could see how people got addicted to this stuff, but it was also very precarious. He had the sense that he was balanced on the edge of a razor blade and movement one way or another would slice him in half. “I didn’t want this to turn into a bloodbath.”
“I’m sure you didn’t. But how else was it gonna end?” Holden came over and sat on the edge of the bed. “I know you’re a good guy, Roan. It’s endearing, if slightly naïve. But I’m not, and you knew that. That’s why you brought me in. You want to heap guilt on someone, heap it on me. I can take it.” He then leaned over and kissed Roan gently on the forehead before giving him a bittersweet sort of smile. “No one’s better than whores for absolution.”
He glared up at him, trying to push his anger through the haze of pain and drugs. He had no idea if it got through. “That’s bullshit and you know it.”
“Do I?” he asked, with such false cheerfulness Roan knew he was being set up. “I’m not your assistant investigator because I’m eye candy, although I’m that, too, if I don’t say so myself, nor am I a great detective. I’m your assistant because I will always back your play, because you being in any form of lion will never shock me, and because I’m so motherfucking ruthless it kinda scares you at times. I get the job done, and we never discuss the cost.” He then broke into a grin that was somewhat gleeful and somewhat guileless, a hard combination that was all the more chilling for its improbability. “How awesome is it that I’m muscle? Rent-boy muscle. Wow, I think I just found a new line of work for when I get too old to sell my ass.” He stood up and made a dramatic gesture with his arms, like he was unveiling a magic trick. “What do you think—Fox the Gigolo Assassin? How awesome would those business cards be?”
Roan sighed and continued to glare, but now he realized Holden didn’t care. He could scorn him all day, and he would ignore it. “Do you want me to fire you?”
“You wouldn’t. I work for a kind word and a pat on the ass. You’ll never find anyone else that cheap.”
“Are you psychotic, and I just didn’t realize it until now?”
“Now don’t be insulting. You know I’m not a psycho. I’m just icily pragmatic. Fuck that whole hooker with a heart of gold stereotype. I’ve got a heart of stone. And you can’t say you didn’t know that.”
As he walked across the room, Roan knew he was right. Of course he was right. He had brought Holden into this because he didn’t have to worry about him if things went wrong (which they had), and it wasn’t just because he was a survivor. After all, why was he a survivor? It wasn’t because he was a born peacemaker. He’d said it himself: if it was us or them, they didn’t have a chance.
His head was pounding along with his heart, but it wasn’t painful per se, just weird. Ketamine was a powerful—and powerfully addictive—drug. He knew from having seen it used on Danny Nakamura that it could fucking kill you, but he wasn’t worried about it. Shouldn’t he have been? Then again, he’d survived an elephant tranquilizer overdose, so why would any drug worry him? What should worry him was the fact that a full transformation was still hard on him physically and getting harder all the time. Eventually, he’d transform and the change back would kill him. He might have been adapting to the virus, but the body still had limits, and he couldn’t count on it to bail him out forever. He had to stop the full transformations.
Now how the hell did he do that?
He was able to move his arm without screaming, so he rubbed his hideously dry eyes, and wondered if he could ignore the guilt. Would he fall in a K-hole and forget everything? That was a wonderfully tempting thought. Suddenly, he realized what Holden had said. “Noon news? What time is it?”
“Just going on one.”
“Shit.” He made to move quickly, and suddenly the one-two punch of pain and drugs knocked him flat to the mattress. Okay, he'd rushed it; he needed to take this in stages. So much for adaptation. “Oh fuck. Dylan.”
“Will probably chew you out a bit, but will be so grateful you’re alive it’ll be perfunctory. He’s crazy about you, old man, and I gave him a story he will be happy to buy. Just be glad I’m such a good liar.”
He stared at Holden. “You told him what?”
Holden sat down on the edge of the chair and cracked open a soda he probably got from a vending machine. “Actually I called Fiona and asked her to do it, ’cause Dylan would get suspicious if it came from me.”
“Why would he think it was suspicious if it came from you?”
He took a deep gulp of the soda, burped, and put it on the arm of the chair. “Hooker over here. You forget?”
“So? Dylan knows I’m not interested in you like that.”
Holden nodded, and nodded in a strange way, like he was humoring him. “He thinks I have a thing for you, though.”
“I never told him you said you’d fuck me for free.”
He grinned, but it had an edge to it, like it was sarcastic or he didn’t quite believe him. “Well then, he used his creepy boyfriend mojo and figured it out.”
“Creepy boyfriend mojo?”
“Some gay guys get it. They know an actual threat when they see one.”
“Threat? You’re not a threat.”
“Tell that to the guys I shot.”
That wasn’t the kind of threat he meant and he knew it, but Holden was content to dodge the comment, and Roan was too tired to pursue it. He’d put it on the “for later” shelf. “What did you tell Fiona to tell him?”
Apparently it was, like all good lies, wrapped around a kernel of truth. Supposedly Roan had trailed this cheating guy all the way up to Gig Harbor and got in a car accident up there. He was knocked unconscious—but no real damage done—and taken to a local hospital, but they found one of his false IDs in his wallet and just assumed that’s who he was. Roan woke up in the hospital and realized the mistake, but rather than correct it, he’d snuck out of the hospital and was now on his way home. He called Fi to tell Dylan because he was sure he’d get pissed at him. Although there was some plausibility stretching, it wasn’t totally out of line, and really, that was probably the best lie to cover both his absence and subsequent drugged-up pain when he got home. Holden really was the Hemingway of liars.
Carefully, with great concentration, Roan sat up and turned, so he was sitting on the edge of the bed. Putting his feet on the floor felt like a minor triumph. He was naked, which was a given (clothes didn’t usually survive the transition—how the Hulk kept his pants on he would never know), but there wasn’t any blood on him, which was highly unusual. “Did you clean me up?”
“Yeah. All that blood on motel sheets? It may be a dive that doesn’t ask questions, but a sheet like a bloody shroud? They might ask a question.”
Fair enough. In fact, good thinking. Sometimes he forgot how smart Holden was, and Holden was more than happy that people forgot, even Roan.
Roan really had to keep that in mind. As assistants went, he was the best. But as an enemy? Fuck no, he would never want to face that scenario.
Maybe it was ungrateful and bitchy, but at least Roan could take minor consolation in the fact that his rage got the better of him sometimes due to sharing space with the lion, a biological balancing act that got harder the angrier he got. But what was Holden’s excuse?
