THE DRIVE up to the passes was long, like Holden expected, and having so much time on their hands gave him and Chai a chance to talk. Chai insisted he hadn’t gotten laid last night, but he’d met a guy he really liked. He was a bit older than Chai usually went for, but he wasn’t white and viewed the scene with the same jaundiced eye Chai did, which were rare pluses. “His name’s Dee, and he’s a paramedic,” Chai said before taking a sip of his ludicrous coffee. It was s’more flavored or something; it had a solid half inch of whipped cream on the top. Holden was pretty sure it was a dessert with a hint of coffee flavor in it somewhere to give it a sense of legitimacy.
“You’re fucking with me now, right?”
“Huh?”
Holden glanced away from the road, long enough to confirm that Chai genuinely looked confused. He wasn’t making a joke. “Where did you meet this guy?”
“Panic.”
“Fuck me.” He liked to think the gay scene in Seattle wasn’t that small, until something like this happened and Holden could deny it no longer.
Chai still seemed confused, but he was putting it together. “You know him?”
“Yeah. He’s an ex of Roan’s. He doesn’t like me very much. Good thing you didn’t mention me.”
Chai raised an eyebrow at that, a corner of his mouth quirked up. “I did. I just didn’t mention you by name. Or mention the fact that we used to be sex workers. Think it’ll matter?”
“He knows I am. I don’t think he’ll care that you are.” Dee’s dislike of him didn’t stem from his previous sex work. Holden wasn’t a hundred percent sure why Dee disliked him, except he guessed Dee thought he was a bad influence on Roan or something similar. All of which discounted Roan’s own ability to lead himself into temptation. Not only was he a grown man capable of making his own choices, he was a fucking superhero who also happened to be one of the most stubborn people alive. Who the fuck forced him to do anything and didn’t pull back a bloody stump? Roan would be insulted if he knew.
But Holden imagined that logic only went so far in these matters. Even before they entered the supposed “postfactual” age, logic was of little use against pure emotion. And if people disliked him on a gut level, who was he to tell them they were wrong? Sometimes you never clicked with a person. Didn’t make them bad; it was simply what it was.
Chai shot him a couple of nervous glances before saying, “If it’s gonna be a thing, I don’t hafta see him again.”
“It’s not going to be a thing, or at least not on my part. If he makes you happy, man, go for it.”
“I don’t know that he does. We just had a good time last night.”
“Yeah, but that’s rare. So see where it goes.”
The drive reminded him that not all of Washington State was urban. Of course, Holden knew that, and yet he often forgot it. Never mind that he grew up in a suburb of well-tended lawns and controlled “wild” spaces, it sometimes slipped his mind that they were minutes from the Puget Sound and miles from the mountains. They drove over one of those old railroad bridges spanning a lazy gray river, and eventually the landscape was swallowed by trees, a flood of greenery that eventually blotted out the sun. It made Holden think of the time when he went up into the mountains with those cat cultists, aware they were going to watch transformed infected fight and kill each other, like that was a noble death somehow. In the back of that car, he suddenly realized why so many horror films took place in the woods. It was so empty, and if you needed help, you were shit out of luck. He knew Roan was following that night, that he was planning to break up this little death-match shindig, and yet Holden still felt a brief flutter of panic in his gut. If you wanted to kill a whole bunch of people and bury the evidence for good, you could hardly do better than far out in the woods.
“What about you?” Chai asked, startling him out of his morbid reverie.
“What about me what?”
“When’s the last time you’ve been on a date? I mean, it’s been a while since you and Scott broke up.”
Holden shrugged, not wanting to let on how much he disliked this conversational turn. He so didn’t want to talk about this. “Dating isn’t my scene. I’m good with one-nighters.”
“So how did you and Scott end up together?”
“It was an accident, trust me.”
Chai studied his face for a long, uncomfortable moment. “You miss him, don’t you?”
Holden pointed at him. “Shut your face. I’m not afraid to dump you on the side of the road and have you walk back, you know.”
Chai smirked. “Ooh, hit a nerve.”
“Think I’m joking? Change the subject or put your scarf on, ’cause it’s surprisingly chilly out there.”
“Fine, fine. I’m just worried about you.”
Holden side eyed him briefly, just to make sure he was serious. He was. “What? Why the hell would you worry about me?”
Chai scoffed. “Dude, you’ve been on edge for… well, since I moved out. Maybe before then.”
“You’re imagining things.”
“No, I’m not. Come on, man, you’re not indestructible. Give yourself a break sometimes.”
Holden thought of a couple of snarky remarks he could make, but before he could say anything, he caught a look at Chai’s face. He was serious, and sarcasm in the face of concern would be a real dick move. “I’m okay, man, really. I’m kind of valuing my alone time right now.”
Chai continued to side eye him. “That’s not code, is it?”
“What would it be code for?”
Chai thought about it for a few seconds. “What I used to do on a web cam?”
Holden rolled his eyes and snorted. “And waste a marketing opportunity? Never.”
Chai settled in his seat, staring out at the scenery as it passed, but just as soon as Holden thought it was safe, he said, “Just don’t do that thing you sometimes do.”
“Could you be more specific?”
“Throw yourself into something so you don’t have to think about whatever’s bothering you. I mean, I get it. I do it too. But you can go to extremes sometimes. Remember that time you stayed up all night, mainlining coffee like a proper junkie?”
“It’d prove your point if I said be more specific, wouldn’t I?”
“Very much so,” Chai agreed. After a few seconds, he threw Holden a bone. “It was the night that ended up in that guy’s apartment in Fremont. The one with the aquarium full of animal figurines?”
“Oh shit, the guy with the ball-torture kink! How’d I forget him?” Ball-torture kink was a thing, but pretty rare. He thought it was a made-up online porn thing until that guy. It was just a very specific, targeted form of S and M, and dangerous, as there was a superfine line between safe and permanent damage. Holden tried not to judge anyone’s kink, but it was beyond him that anyone could get any pleasure out of such a thing. “I think I did Adderall then, didn’t I?”
“We all did. I think I tried absinthe that night too, didn’t I?”
Holden tried to remember. It seemed like ages ago, but it was what? Six years? Wow. They were getting old. “Yeah, that was disappointing.”
“Was it? I was so freaked out, I don’t know if something actually happened, or if I imagined it.”
“Believe me, it’s all hype. I was waiting for some cool hallucinations. Hell, I drank extra to try and make it happen. But it never did. It’s just terrible-tasting liquor.”
“Think it was our fault it didn’t work? I mean, we were on Adderall.”
“Speed should’ve heightened it. So nah.” Thinking back on that night, he realized Apollo had been with them, not quite at the height of his muscle queen-ness, but getting there. It was weird to think he was dead, and he was only the second of the Elite stable to die. The first was Sparkles, who, despite his nickname, ended up killing himself after his boyfriend dumped him.
Shit. Holden suddenly realized he thought he’d be dead by now. He supposed he should be grateful, but he had this weird feeling that he would pay for it. It wasn’t that Holden believed in karmic balance or something—if he did he wouldn’t be a “fixer,” would he?—but there really was no step forward that didn’t come with two steps back. That just seemed to be the way of the universe.
After a couple of minutes of silence, Chai sighed. “We’re old, aren’t we?”
“We’re like a million in gay years,” Holden agreed, and then they both chuckled. It was funny because it was true. Of course, what did that make Roan? Poor bastard. At least he was married and didn’t have to worry about it.
Overview Hospital was a tiny place in a relatively small mountain town, and yet it appeared to be the most modern of buildings. If you could ignore the mirrored windows and lack of ornamentation, it could have been the world’s saddest castle.
But it wasn’t so small that it didn’t stick to the code of hospital parking—painful, endlessly painful—and once they got that nightmare dispensed with, they went inside.
It was indeed a hospital like any other hospital, smaller and favoring a pale blue so washed out it was more of a suggestion than a reality, and there was another thing it took Holden a moment to realize—the staff was shockingly white. Modern hospitals were diverse in a way that seemed modern, but this mountain town was showing off its general homogeny. Maybe that wouldn’t be true in another ten years or so, but right now they could have been in Sweden.
He and Chai went to the check-in desk, where a nice blonde nurse waited, and Chai explained they were here about the John Doe patient. When she asked why, Holden jumped in, explaining they thought it was his stepfather, whom he didn’t like for a long time, but developed a newfound respect for when he went off to college and understood how hard the real world was. He went on with this dizzying display of bullshit until she smiled politely and told them the room number and ward.
As soon as they were in the elevator and the doors closed, Chai started laughing. “Oh my fucking God, what the hell was that?”
Holden smiled brightly. “I’m a superhero, you silly man. My superpower is titanium-grade bullshit. You hit people with enough verbal diarrhea and they’ll generally fold.”
Chai shook his head, still smiling. “I don’t know how you do it. I really don’t. I’d start giggling.”
“I love these tales of pathetic people and their sad lives. They’re like darker timelines.”
“Oh, this is the best timeline for you?”
“As far as I’m concerned, yeah. I shudder to think what would have happened if I was never outed and continued the safe, towing-the-line life my parents wanted of me. I could have married a woman. Hell, maybe I would have become a preacher just like him.” Holden snickered. “God, what a nightmare.”
“Yeah, but with that gift for bullshit? You’d have made a hell of a preacher.”
“Don’t I know it.”
There was a different desk in this ward and a different blonde nurse, who looked so much like the first one Holden wondered if they were twins working at the same hospital. Or maybe this was some weirdass Twin Peaks hospital and one of the rooms had a dancing dwarf in it.
Chai told her that Holden was looking for his stepfather and thought it might be him, yadda, yadda, yadda. She remembered speaking to him on the phone and led the way to the room, warning them all the way that what they were about to see wasn’t pretty. Which was weird, considering they were paying a visit to a beating victim. They knew, and even if they didn’t know, they could probably guess. He wasn’t runway ready. Got it.
When they walked into his room, nothing was visible but a bed with too many covers, and several beeping machines surrounded it like acolytes. It wasn’t immediately clear there was someone in the bed, not until they got closer and noticed that the way the covers were hunched up didn’t make complete sense if there was nothing beneath them.
The man’s face was partly covered by tubes, and what wasn’t covered was swollen and discolored, a bruise on top of a bruise. Chai gasped as soon as he realized what he was looking at. He was so unidentifiable, even his race wasn’t instantly clear. He was a recumbent contusion and not conscious.
“Is it him?” Chai asked.
Holden shook his head. He had no idea. He scoured his mind for something else that might identify him as Alexei and recalled he had these two freckles on the inside of his left elbow. That wasn’t super common, was it?
Holden first had to find his arm, following tubes, and carefully lifted it, pushing back the covers to find his elbow. He had to shift more tubes, but indeed there were two freckles on the inside of his left elbow, like a tiny vampire bite. “It’s him,” Holden said, and felt both relieved and bad simultaneously. The general mystery was over; Alexei had been found. But he had been beaten half to death and was still in a near comatose state. He might eventually recover, but it would be a while.
“Any idea who did this?” Holden asked the nurse.
She shook her head. “The police are investigating, but that’s all I know. You may want to go to their office and talk to them.” She told them where it was, but Holden had tuned it out. He wasn’t visiting the cop shop—that was for Dahlia, a real family member, to do. He was just a onetime fuck buddy/acquaintance of the family, and that seemed to be stretching things. But the other part of him, the “fixer,” was dying to track down the sons of bitches who did this to Alexei and teach them the meaning of instant karma. But he’d already made a promise to Colton to try and find Kevin’s shooter. First things first.
Once they were back in the elevator, Chai gave him a worried glance. “You okay?”
Holden shrugged. “Angry. I want to hunt down the fuckers who did that to him.”
“I get that. But we shouldn’t, right?”
Holden glanced at him. “No, you shouldn’t.”
Chai clearly noticed he didn’t say “we” and was surely about to comment on it, but the elevator made a surprise stop, and an orderly got on—male, but also blond; this was the Twin Peaks hospital—and they didn’t say anything more until they were out in the parking lot. “How far does it go?” Chai asked.
Holden, leading the way back to the car, tossed him a look over his shoulder. “How far does what go?”
“You know.”
“Can’t say I do.”
“Don’t you dare—” Chai began, but stopped himself and pointed ahead of them. “In the car.”
Holden had known it was coming, but he hadn’t been looking forward to it. And having this talk here and now seemed ill timed and ill placed, but Chai had his frowny face on, and he knew he wasn’t going to let it go. So if their little detective operation ended, okay. Good a place as any.
As soon as they were both in the car, Chai turned to him and said, “Okay, cut the shit. You’re a vigilante, right? How far does it go?”
Holden knew Chai was a friend, and he should play it completely straight with him, no pun intended. But part of him couldn’t help being cagey. Something in him always wanted to play a game. “There’s a scale?”
Chai’s frowny face turned into a full glower, and Holden didn’t blame him in the least. “Yeah. From Daredevil punching baddies in the face, all the way to Death Wish level carnage. Where are you on that scale?”
Holden stared at Chai for a moment. With his handsome face and strong jaw, he should have been somewhere better, with someone better. But things randomly went to shit, and here he was, stuck with Holden in what had to be the absolute bottom of the barrel. At least it was familiar. “Do you remember that time Stormy got raped and robbed by that john?”
“Yeah.”
“Remember how the cops reacted?” To say the cops reacted poorly was an understatement. They basically said that’s what he was going to get if he worked as a hustler and threatened to throw him in jail instead. They had a good laugh about the beaten-up fag. That was probably the first time Holden connected with his own terrible urge for homicide.
Chai’s lips thinned. “I know where you’re going with this, but times have changed. Hell, you’re friends with a cop, right?”
“Roan’s an ex-cop, and he doesn’t count because he’s a professional weirdo no matter where he is. And if you mean Kevin, he’s made it clear we’re not friends. We know of each other. That’s pretty much where it ends.”
“Things have changed. Seattle is super fucking gay.”
“And yet, things are still bad. If you’re the wrong skin color, you’re gonna get shot. If you’re poor, you’re gonna get ignored. And if you’re homeless, you’re dead. There have been superficial changes, but things are still terrible, Chai. Someone has to fight for us.”
“This is insane. You can’t—” Whatever Chai was going to say, he stopped himself and tried again. “This isn’t the Wild West; this isn’t even Baltimore. This isn’t the way to fight for change. You could wind up locked up or dead. Or both.”
“And how is that different from the previous trajectory of my life?”
Chai’s eyes widened so dramatically Holden was afraid for a moment they might pop out of his skull. “What the fuck…? You can’t mean that, Holden. You were always the smartest of us. You could be amazing if you just put your energy in the right direction.”
Holden smirked. “I’m not amazing now?”
“You know what I fucking mean. You don’t have to do this. You can have a real life. You can be someone. You’re dooming yourself to a dead end you don’t need to embrace.”
Holden had to look out the window so Chai didn’t see him sneer. It wasn’t aimed at him. It was a reaction to his words. “And what led you to believe that was ever something I wanted? To be normal is to aim low. To me, it sounds like death.”
Chai scoffed, a sort of breathless noise that was halfway between a bleak laugh and a dry cough. “Fine, be the next John Waters, then. Don’t go out and hurt people.”
“I’ve never hurt anyone that didn’t deserve a thousand times worse than what I gave them.”
For a moment, Holden and Chai stared at each other, as if silently daring the other to break first. Holden knew Chai was disturbed by this, but he hadn’t lost him yet. Maybe he still trusted him.
It was Chai who broke first. He sighed and shook his head. “You can’t be sure of that.”
“Yes I can. I’m not Roan, but I can investigate people. In fact, reading people is kind of my specialty. Or did you forget?”
“No, of course not. But… I don’t feel good about this.”
“Why do you think I didn’t tell you?”
Chai frowned again, but Holden already understood that Chai wasn’t breaking up their partnership, or at least not yet. “I’m not sure you should keep doing this. Or at least not alone. Do you know what could happen if something goes wrong?”
“You mean like get a concussion, get stabbed, or get the shit beaten out of me by cops? Been there, done that, have the medical bills to prove it.”
Chai’s eyes widened again. “What? You were stabbed? Where? How? What happened?”
“Let’s just say that whoever doesn’t kill me soon regrets not having finished the job and leave it at that.” Of course, in the case of the cops and the asshole that stabbed him, Roan got there first, and even though he didn’t kill them, that was probably so much worse. They were nearly killed, and yet whenever they tried to explain what happened—most likely variations of “He started turning into a lion. I know infection doesn’t work like that! But he did!”—they were dismissed as crazy. Not only did they get the shit beaten out of them and looked into the animalistic eyes of death, not a single person believed their version of the story. It was glorious insult to ruinous injury.
Chai didn’t look impressed; he looked anxious. “Holden, you’re wrong. Okay? If you do something else, you’re not going to end up dead or in prison. You can’t give up on yourself like that.”
“I’m not giving up on myself. I’ve made my choice.” Holden started the car, giving him a legitimate excuse to avoid his eyes.
“How can a guy as confident as you have such low self-regard?” Chai asked.
Holden shook his head. “My self-regard is fine. I just know what I’m good at.”
“Why you? Why does it have to be you?”
Holden shrugged. “Because it does.” Did he have an answer for that? He wasn’t sure.
Holden idly wondered if he was lying to himself, then decided he’d rather not know. Sometimes ignorance was bliss. And maybe sometimes lying to yourself wasn’t so bad.