by Andrea Speed
Paris commented on Gavin’s bad karma, and Roan agreed. He didn’t know if Paris suspected the truth, because neither of them pursued it.
Back home, Paris wanted to do something they hadn’t done since Paris had moved in to Roan’s house: go up on the roof and look at the stars. It wasn’t difficult; thanks to an architectural quirk, there was a pointless, narrow ledge outside the main bedroom window, and from there it was easy to lever yourself up onto the roof, which was sloped gently enough that you could lie back and just enjoy the overhead view without worrying about falling off. It was freezing up there, but the night was still, there was almost no wind, and the sky was magnificent. Inky black, but out here, far from the light pollution of the city, the stars were bright pinpricks of white light, and there was a crescent moon that seemed almost as bright as a spotlight, gauzy clouds occasionally scudding over it, looking like wisps of velvet. It was beautiful, but Roan mainly watched Paris watching the sky, his breath visible in ephemeral white clouds. Roan wished he could freeze this moment, stop time completely.
Paris eventually got too cold, so they had to climb back inside. To warm up, they crawled into bed and made love once more, Roan trying very hard not to think that this was the last time they ever would. Then they slept for a while, holding each other tightly in spite of the general discomfort of doing such a thing. Roan needed to know Par was still here.
He woke up when Paris got up in the early morning, and Paris kissed his forehead and told him he’d be right back. Roan actually dozed off for a bit before faint music coming from downstairs roused him. It sounded like mellow electronic music, and he eventually placed it as M83’s “Before The Dawn Heals Us.” Paris had said that seemed like an appropriate final soundtrack. Paris finally came back, smiling, and carrying a hypodermic needle. “There’s a dusting of snow out there,” he reported happily, crawling back beneath the covers. “It’ll probably be gone in a couple of hours, so if you want to build a really tiny snowman, you’d better get out there soon.”
Paris was hiding the needle, but he knew what it was, what it contained. A fatal overdose. Roan couldn’t keep from crying as he admitted, “I don’t want you to go.”
Paris took his face in his hands and kissed him, but when he pulled back, Roan could see tears in his eyes as well. “I don’t want to go either, but I have to. I can feel it, you know? The sicker I get, the more I can feel the tiger waiting. I think it wants to get out before it dies too. That’s not going to happen.” Roan buried his face in the side of Paris’s neck, trying to make himself stop crying, and Paris held him tight, stroking his hair. “Sweetheart, I need you to promise me something: live for me. I can’t do it, so you’re going to have to do it for me.” Paris pulled him back, making him look him in the eye. He knew Roan couldn’t lie to him when he was looking Roan in the eye. “Roan, promise me.”
He didn’t want to, but he couldn’t start denying Paris anything now. “I promise,” he said breathlessly, in complete defeat. If Paris was dead, did any promise he made to him matter? He honestly didn’t know.
Paris kissed him, hard and deep, and Roan knew this was it. He wanted to stop him, to break that fucking hypodermic, overpower him to stop him from doing it... but he was going to die. He had to respect that Paris wanted to do it this way, not wait for his final, fatal transformation to a tiger.
Roan was shaking as Paris finally showed the needle, and he realized that Paris was shaking too. “I love you,” Roan told him, and it was almost a plea.
Paris touched his face, stroked his cheek. “Oh, sweetheart, I know. And you’re the only person I’ve ever loved. Remember that.” He then looked at his left arm, bared over the cover, and made a fist tight enough that a vein stood out in stark relief. With a hand now steady, he plunged the needle into the vein with the slightest hiss of pain, and injected the toxic drug into his bloodstream.
Roan grabbed his face and kissed him softly, trying not to cry and perfectly unable to stop. Paris let the empty needle drop on the carpet and kissed him back, looking at him with sleepy eyes. “If there’s an afterlife after all, I’ll see you there. I’ll save you a good seat.” He lay back and closed his eyes, and Roan held him, unable to keep the tears from flooding out his eyes.
It should have been world-shattering, something that came slamming down like a heavy mausoleum door, but that wasn’t how it happened. Roan lay there listening to Paris breathe, his breaths becoming shallower, his heart rate becoming slower. There was a muscle spasm, much like the kind you sometimes got inexplicably when falling asleep, and his breathing continued, but with more space between inhales and exhales.
And then, he simply stopped. He exhaled, and he just never inhaled again. Roan kept waiting for it, waiting for the thud of his heartbeat, but when he caught the faint but unmistakable scent of death from his skin, he knew it was never going to happen. Paris was gone.
He sat up, looking down at him. Paris’s face was slack, peaceful, like he was sleeping... but Roan’s nose was telling him what his eyes refused to see. He couldn’t deny it. He threw back his head and screamed, a sound from the pit of his soul that quickly became a roar so savage and forceful that it didn’t just scour his throat but tore it up from the inside out. As the lack of oxygen finally made him stop, he could taste blood in the back of his throat.
He reached for the phone, feeling dizzy and disconnected, the tears finally drying as he called 911 and reported that his husband was dead. The operator tried to get specifics, but after giving his name and address, he hung up. He pulled on his boxers and stumbled downstairs, hearing the phone ring as the operator called him back. He didn’t answer it. He just turned off the stereo—that was unexplainable to the cops—and collapsed on the sofa, feeling like an empty husk of a human being. He bet he was hollow now; he bet if you pushed on his chest, his ribcage would collapse.
He had no idea how long it was between the phone call and the siren-screaming arrival of the ambulance; time had lost all meaning at this point. Nothing seemed real. Was he still sleeping? Maybe he was. He liked to believe he was.
A male and female duo of EMTs arrived, ones he vaguely recognized but couldn’t place, and then Dee in civilian clothes showed up and took over, telling them where to find the bedroom upstairs before gathering him in a solid embrace. “I’m sorry, Ro,” he whispered, squeezing him tight. “I’m so sorry.”
How had Dee showed up so fast? He probably had alerted people to tell him if a call ever came in from this address; Dee had lots of friends. Had he gotten Paris his lethal injection? It probably didn’t matter; Paris could have gotten it anywhere. He had had lots of friends too.
Dee wasn’t the only one who had tagged his name and address, though. Gordo and Seb, their morning coffees still in their hands, showed up to take the standard report. This wasn’t a cat crime, this was the usual routine stuff done by beat cops, but he imagined that Gordo was trying to be kind to him. A further apology for how he sometimes used to treat him and Paris.
The official story was easy to report, and no one questioned it. Roan was vaguely aware that Paris, who had been sick and in a lot of pain lately, had gotten up this morning and retrieved a painkiller to help him sleep. Roan wasn’t sure what, as he was pretty much asleep, but he woke up a short time later, smelling death and finding Paris dead. It would have been a bizarre story for someone who didn’t know what being infected was like and who didn’t know about his sensitive nose, but Gordo and Seb knew, and they didn’t ask any further questions. If he’d known they were coming, there’d have been no need for him to remove all the other drugs from the house and hide them—they weren’t even going to attempt to search the place.
He was right. Both Gordo and Seb extended what seemed to be genuine sympathy as they closed their notebooks, and while Seb went to talk with the EMTs bringing Paris down the stairs, zipped inside a body bag atop a stretcher, Gordo asked Dee—who’d been sitting beside Roan the whole time he gave his bullshit account of how Paris had accidentally over
dosed—if he was going to stay with him (like Roan wasn’t in the fucking room). Dee nodded and said he was, and Gordo nodded back before telling Roan to call if he needed anything. Gordo’s eyes could barely settle on his face before he quickly looked down at the carpet. Looking someone else’s grief in the face was one of the hardest parts of the job.
They all left, save for Dee, whom he heard making a cell phone call, telling someone on the other end of the line that he was taking the day off and wouldn’t be in today. But Roan wasn’t really listening as he let himself fall over on the couch, boneless as a doll, waiting for his body to die off as surely as his heart had. He wished he believed in an afterlife; he wished Paris really had too.
T.S. Eliot was right after all, and it wasn’t surprising, just disappointing. If he could have felt anything at all it might have made him sadder, but he felt nothing but empty and cold. A wasteland in humanoid form.
This was how the world ended. Not with a bang, but with a whimper.
Don’t miss Book Three, Infected: Life After Death
In a world where a werecat virus has changed society, Roan McKichan, a born infected and ex-cop, works as a private detective trying to solve crimes involving other infecteds.
But when your heart is gone, it’s easy to fall into a black hole and never crawl out. Roan has been lost and alone for more than a year, and his best friends think a new case might be just the motivation he needs. Roan forces himself back into the game and discovers a dead man who might not be all that dead, a street hustler that wants to hustle him, and a dominatrix who is well prepared to take Roan’s orders. As Roan claws his way out of the darkness by diving back into his work, he finds himself in a race against time in the adrenaline-pumping realization that nothing helps a person want to live like helping someone else survive.
1
The Ghost of You
PARIS threw open the bedroom curtains, letting in the unforgiving morning light. “You’re going to do it again, aren’t you?” he accused with weary affection.
Roan pulled the pillow over his face and burrowed deeper into the blankets. “What?” he murmured, barely articulating the thought.
“Stay in bed all day, stay here dreaming. Or hallucinating. Is it hallucinating? What’s the difference?”
“You’re asleep for dreaming.”
“Yeah, hon, but you never get up anymore, so how do you know when you’re awake or asleep?”
Roan felt the mattress shift as Paris sat on the side of the bed, reaching down to touch his arm. For some reason, his hand was cold. In these... dreams, hallucinations, whatever, Paris’s hands were usually cold. He had no idea why.
“You need to stop this.”
“I can’t believe I’m being lectured by a dead man,” Roan muttered, feeling the same old catch in his chest he always did when he realized Paris was gone.
“Well, someone has to do it,” Paris replied, exasperated. “And you have a tendency to scare everyone else off.”
“Not fast enough.”
“You know this has nothing to do with me,” Paris said quietly, his voice dropping to a deeper, more disappointed register. “This is self-pity.”
Roan pulled the pillow off his head and looked up at Paris, then immediately wished he hadn’t. Paris was looking down at him with so much pity and sorrow that Roan could hardly stand to look at him. “How can you say that? You were—”
“If you ever really loved me at all, you’d stop killing yourself,” Paris interrupted impatiently, looking away.
Roan woke up to a nascent headache somewhere deep behind his eyes and the smell of cooking coming from downstairs. His stomach rumbled noisily, and he wondered when he had last eaten something. He had no idea; time had become irrelevant after Paris died, and days, weeks, and months blurred into the same empty, wan thing. The curtains were closed, but some fringes of light bled around the edges, letting him know it was daytime.
He rolled out of bed and stumbled to the bathroom—see, he did get out of bed occasionally—and after having a long-needed piss, he caught a glimpse of himself in the bathroom mirror. Holy hell, he looked like shit. He’d lost a lot of weight, mainly in muscle, as he was no longer testing the bounds of his ability to partially transform. In fact, he looked almost as skinny as Par had at the end; he could see his own ribcage, and the bony knobs of his hipbones stuck out just above the waistband of his boxers. Even though he’d shaved off his beard—a couple months ago, was it?—it was back again, a reddish-golden color lighter than the odd shade of his hair, spreading up the side of his face and down his neck like a fungal disease. It itched in much the same manner, although he thought he’d earned the discomfort. His hair came down to his shoulders and was so shaggy and thick it looked distressingly like a lion’s mane. When was the last time he’d transformed? He could no longer remember his own viral cycle.
His eyes looked out from beneath a thick fringe of bangs, hot and glaring; they were the eyes of a madman, staring out from behind his own wall of hurt. That made sense. Did you know when you were going insane, or did you just wake up one day and suddenly realize that your sanity had packed up and moved away? That was his experience. He didn’t mind either—sanity was overrated.
He smelled bad. When was the last time he had taken a shower? He couldn’t remember. Probably the day of Paris’s wake, which was just a colorful blur. He’d been hopped up on a lot of pills and a couple of beers just to get through the whole thing, and as a result he had few memories of it. He did remember feeling like he was hyperventilating when the DJ started to read a message Paris had written for him. The DJ had burned a CD of Paris’s playlist for him, but he had no idea why. If he remembered correctly, he had thrown it on the coffee table when he got home, and it had been there ever since.
Roan wondered if he should go downstairs and figured he should. Dee had threatened to put him on an IV drip if he didn’t eat occasionally, and once he had woken up feeling strangely groggy and found a strange bandage on his arm, over a vein. Had Dee actually drugged him and hooked him up to a drip? He honestly wouldn’t have put it past him. Why couldn’t Dee be like every other ex-boyfriend in the world and want nothing to do with him? And why oh why did he have to be a fucking EMT?
Roan’s stomach was pretty insistent on eating, though; it growled rather relentlessly, and he wondered if it was responsible for his headache. Lack of food, just like lack of sleep, could be a trigger, and he knew lack of sleep wasn’t responsible this time.
He went downstairs, wondering which of the revolving door of busybodies he’d face, and what month this was, and he still felt not only light as a feather but as hollow as a chocolate Easter bunny. If he could somehow untether his head from his neck, it would float away, and he would happily let it.
“Oh, hey there,” Matt said brightly, moving about Roan’s kitchen. He’d turned the radio on, but at such a low volume he could barely hear it. Matt’s hair was longer and shaggier than it had been last time Roan had seen him, a calculated bedhead look that indicated a needlessly expensive haircut. He was clean-shaven now too, although he kept his beefier physique up so he didn’t look so much like a twink. He was wearing a burgundy T-shirt advertising Dick’s Drive-In and dark sweatpants, as if he’d come here on his way to or from the gym. “Hope you’re hungry. I saw this recipe on the Food Network and decided to try it out.”
“How the fuck did you get in my house?”
Matt looked at him with grave disappointment and let out a small sigh as he picked up the hot pads and turned toward the oven. “You asked me that last time, remember? Diego gave me a house key.”
“Did he give everyone a house key?”
Matt pulled a pan out of the stove, and Roan couldn’t tell what it was he had. “Me and Randi. That’s it, as far as I know.”
“Seems like too damn many.” He walked over to the couch and collapsed on it, staring at the blank television screen and inactive stereo system. (Matt had brought his own portable radio, at least not feeling c
omfortable enough here to use his stereo.) “You ever have an ex-boyfriend this fucking annoying?”
He heard Matt put the pan down on top of the stove and then heard him shuffle with some plates and cutlery. Had making him suddenly the subject of the conversation made Matt nervous? Good. “Umm... well, I’ve had annoying boyfriends, yeah, but Diego’s just concerned about you, Roan. We all are.”
“Don’t be. I’m a grown man—I can take care of myself.”
“Really? Is that why you haven’t left your house in almost a year?”
He glared at him. “That’s my business, not yours.” Had it really almost been a year? Wow. Time went by quickly... when you spent most of your time drunk or hallucinating. On some level, he was aware this was madness, that Paris would so kick his ass over this if he were here, but that was the point, wasn’t it? Paris wasn’t here. And it wasn’t just that he loved him, although he did. The point was he had needed Paris. He sort of knew that before Paris had died, but he hadn’t realized how much until he was gone. Paris was like the sun, and now that he was gone, Roan could no longer see anything; he was stuck in a world of eternal night. He hated being that way, he hated having been so emotionally dependent on anyone... but there was nothing for it now. Somehow he had survived before Paris, but he couldn’t remember how to do so now. It was like he’d lost some vital part of his body, and now he had to learn how to walk again, but he didn’t know how, and besides, he almost didn’t want to. What was the point?
