by Andrea Speed
They went up the outer stairs to an inner corridor, redolent of French roast, where four doors led to four different apartments, all marked with brass numbers. The one they wanted was number three, which was at the end of the hall on the left side. Roan knocked, but he took a step back, so the first thing Eric saw would be Paris. That was an automatic reflex now—letting Paris take the lead was a guarantee you’d get in the door, whether it was a swanky party he’d never be invited to in a million years or a reluctant witness’s home. Paris was like a magic key, and they both knew it.
Eric opened the door a crack, but when he saw it was Paris on his doorstep, he threw the door wide open, gaping in shock. “Oh my God! You’re the hot—I mean that guy from the club! Sister, where the hell have you been?”
“Working on my tan,” Paris replied with a full-wattage smile. Paris was actually looking Gothically pale these days, but Eric’s eyes were so riveted to Paris’s face Roan bet the bartender didn’t even notice.
Roan stepped forward and introduced himself, handing him a business card, and while Eric nodded and took it all in, he almost never looked at Roan.
Eric’s place was small but neat, with only good Goodwill furniture and a tastefully stark futon, and a single framed photo of a well-built naked man’s torso. It was in arty black and white, cutting him off at the neck and at the waist, so all you could see was the rocky surface of a gym-blessed chest, which was, sadly, waxed. Roan was with it as a piece of art until that little detail; even that tiny line of hair that usually started just below the navel was completely missing. He wasn’t into bears, but come on—real men had hair. That picture was as erotic as a mannequin.
Eric himself was nice-looking in a somewhat fey way, with delicate features and attractive almond-shaped eyes in a slender face, his black hair short and spiky in a cut not unlike Matt’s. He was a wisp of a guy, maybe five-five and a hundred and twenty pounds, and he asked if they minded him getting ready for work while he talked. They didn’t, and they sat on his hard futon while he shouted at them from the tiny bedroom. He left the door open, and there was a full length mirror in his room that was turned just so, so that every now and then they caught a glimpse of skin. Was he putting on a show for Paris? Roan suspected he was, and found it hard not to smirk. Par grinned right back at him, trying not to laugh.
Eric told—shouted—them a slightly more elaborate version of the story Matt had told him. He was out in the back alley of Panic, sneaking a smoke, and while he was smoking he noticed a really thin girl being carried to a car on North Avenue. He figured she was a junkie of some type or maybe a “party girl” being taken away by her friends; she looked limp and unresponsive. He only noticed it because she looked so damn skinny, “like one of the Olsen twins.” He didn’t know cars at all, so all he could say was it was a silver car, “sedan-ish,” and he never noticed the plate, nor could he describe the men, except they were white and “kinda big.” As witnesses went, Eric kind of left you wanting. Even having Paris there didn’t bring any extra details to mind.
Eric came out wearing low-slung jeans, professionally worn in all the right places, and a leather vest without a shirt, showing a lean, hairless torso of his own. (This was another reason why Roan hated gay bars.) “It’s a little cold to be without a shirt, isn’t it?” He couldn’t help but ask. Paris elbowed him in the ribs for that.
“Not in the club, it ain’t,” Eric responded, talking to him but glancing at Paris. “You stopping by tonight?”
“I doubt it,” Paris told him. “I’m working.”
“So you’re a private detective, huh? I had no idea they made ’em as hot as you.”
Was he flirting? Yes, he was flirting with Paris right in front of Roan. Clearly Eric didn’t notice the matching rings, or the emphasis Roan put on “partner” when he had first introduced them. Or he did and he just didn’t care.
Paris smiled coyly and glanced down at the threadbare mustard-colored carpet, as if abashed by this attention. But Roan knew from the way he was biting the inside of his cheek that he was trying really hard not to laugh. “I’m really an associate. Roan’s the private dick around here.” And Par raised his eyebrows lasciviously when he said “dick,” forcing Roan to look away and then dry wash his own face. Bastard was trying to make him laugh too.
Eric didn’t look disappointed as much as confused, as if he wasn’t sure exactly what associate entailed. “Oh. So what’s with this chick anyway? I heard she was rich or something?”
“Or something,” Roan said, as soon as he was sure he wouldn’t laugh. He stood up from the futon, wondering if it had left indents in his butt. It felt like it. (How did anyone sleep on these things?) “If you see this car again, or remember any more details, please call me.”
Paris stood up with him, looking beatifically alluring, and Eric was just riveted. He should have had his tongue hanging out like a cartoon wolf—he couldn’t have wanted Paris more. And of course Par was doing this on purpose, perhaps to make him a friendlier witness, or perhaps just to prove that, sick or not, he could still turn the world on with his smile. “Yes, please. No detail is unimportant.”
Eric nodded like his neck was a spring, suddenly so eager to please Paris that Roan half expected him to make something up on the spot.
They left, and somehow made it to the outside stairs before they exploded into laughter, leaning into each other as they howled helplessly at Eric’s desperate little show and Paris’s shameless performance. They both laughed until they had tears running down their faces. It wasn’t quite that funny, but being forced to hold it in made it come out with that much more power.
When he could finally speak, Roan wiped the tears away with the back of his hand, and told Par, “That poor kid. Could you have been more of a slut?”
Paris looked at him with sparkling eyes, flushed with vitality. “Dare you ask that? Of course I could. I could have asked him if he wanted to give me an opinion on my new Speedo.”
There was no point in replying that he didn’t actually own a Speedo. “His balls would have exploded.”
“Oh, I know,” Par grinned, starting to laugh again.
Shameless. But that’s what Roan loved about him, right? He was fearless, and Par was shameless; together, they could mortify the world.
As they were leaving, Par pulled him into the bookshop to have a look-see, apparently deciding they were in no hurry to get back to the office. And they weren’t, were they? Talking to Eric had not really given them anything of note.
The shop was owned by a woman named Ally, a thirty-ish lesbian with nut-brown skin, well-toned arms, and many tattoos and piercings, her severely short hair a whitish blonde with pink streaks. She was friendly, though, and the shop cat—a ginger tabby that was apparently called Maya—hissed and ran away to hide in the stacks when they came in. Still, Roan soon found it following him, its pale green eyes bright and wide. It stayed out of pouncing range, but seemed almost perversely fascinated with him. “I don’t make much sense, do I?” he whispered to Maya, crouching down and holding out his hand. Eventually she crept over toward him, and after a wary sniff of his fingers let him pet her. Her fur was soft and glossy; she was a well-fed, well-cared-for cat. “I’m glad humans can’t smell how wrong I am.” She purred, a low rumble, and rolled over until she was exposing her stomach. He wasn’t sure if that was a sign of submission to the alpha cat or just an invitation to rub her stomach, so he scratched her belly and then went back to perusing the stacks of used books, which were crammed messily into plain wooden shelves. But he liked this setup better than the ones in the big bookshops; there was a controlled chaos that suggested people actually read these books, not just looked at them.
Maya continued to follow him around. As he returned to the front to buy some books and pay for the overpriced coffee Paris had gotten, Ally looked around to see Maya standing behind him. “Weird. You must be a cat person, huh?”
He couldn’t help but stiffen, even though he knew she meant a person
who likes cats. “Why do you say that?”
“She doesn’t like men,” she replied casually, pulling his change out of the till with a practiced ease. “I got her from the pound, and the woman there told me she was pathologically afraid of all males. She even cringed at their voices. I’ve been kind of hoping exposure to guys here would help her get over it, but… we don’t get a whole lot of guys in here.” It was a lesbian place? Oh, yeah, that might explain why everyone in the coffee shop appeared to be female.
Paris waved at Maya, and she arched her back and zoomed off toward the stacks like a bat out of hell. Par raised an eyebrow at him, quietly wondering if she was afraid because he was male or because he was a tiger. Roan could only shrug—could be a little of both.
Instead of returning to the office, they went home. Roan said it was due to his book purchases, but truth be told, he had all the business he cared to handle right now. He didn’t want to handle any, actually; only the threat of bills he couldn’t meet made him go in. He knew he should go talk to Hannah Noyes, but he didn’t want to; he didn’t want this fucking case at all. He wanted to just spend as much time with Par as he could before… no, he couldn’t even finish that thought. He wouldn’t finish that thought.
He made sure calls to the office would get forwarded here, and was almost glad when Paris said he was going to go take a bath to warm up. Even wearing layers hadn’t kept him warm enough.
He waited until he heard the water running upstairs before digging the Post-it note out of his pocket. He’d put this off as long as he could bear to, hadn’t he? He decided to call her on his cell phone, so in case Par came down, he could always duck into the garage.
He went into the kitchen to start heating up the milk for Paris’s hot chocolate, and only then did he call, trying to ignore the gnawing in his gut. Hot chocolate was great for both warming Paris up and getting lots of calories into him, which was especially true when he substituted half and half for milk, as he was doing now. Not that throwing calories at Paris ever seemed to help much—he probably needed some horrific Homer Simpson diet of nothing but fried foods and pureed doughnuts at every meal.
He set the half and half on low simmer, and called Petra Rosenberg, half expecting her machine, and was surprised when she answered. It took him a moment to figure out what he was going to say. “Um, yeah, hi, this is Roan McKichan. Apparently you called me earlier?”
“Yes, Roan, hello, how are you?” she said familiarly, sounding as friendly and sweet as a long-lost grandmother. The problem was, she wasn’t. (Was she?)
“Who the hell are you?”
She chuckled warmly. “I treated you as a child and young adult at the McAmmon Center. Once, I—”
“Yeah, I remember. I just don’t know why you’re calling me.” He pulled the dark chocolate syrup out of the fridge, let it clunk on the counter, let her hear it as he wedged the phone between his cheek and shoulder and pulled a microwavable mug out of the cupboard.
She cleared her throat nervously, not sure how to continue in the face of his aggressive disinterest, but she tried anyway. She sounded like she was maybe sixty, and a smoker at one point in her life. “I was sent a very interesting video the other day. It showed what appeared to be a man talking to a lion on a street I recognized downtown. The man appears to be communicating with the lion. It seems to understand what he’s saying.”
Roan suddenly knew where this was going, and his heart sunk to his stomach. Fuck those people and their camera phones. He poured the right amount of chocolate syrup into the mug, and put it in the microwave to nuke it for a couple seconds. It didn’t need to be hot, just warmer than it was. “People can do amazing things with computers these days.”
She wasn’t dissuaded. “It’s a very poor quality video, and the sound quality is laughable, but I was able to make out a name the man used: Roan. It made sense, certainly. There’s no forgetting your hair color, and the lion had unusual coloring in its mane.”
“And you just remembered me off the top of your head, is that it?” The microwave dinged, and he checked the saucepan on the front burner of the stove. The half and half was starting to roil ever so gently, a hint of steam coming off the smooth white surface of the liquid.
“I never forgot you,” she replied, and he could hear a smile in her voice. “You were so very unique.”
He snorted, turning off the burner and removing the pan from the heat. “Yeah, the freak boy. I never outgrew it.”
“I always thought you could, you know.”
That almost seemed like a non sequitur. “Could what?”
“Transform out of viral sequence,” she replied, as casually as if they were discussing the weather. “The way the virus incorporated itself into your cellular structure was just so unique. You, and a good percentage of virus children, seemed to have the potential to express traits of the virus, but most are unable to capitalize on it for obvious reasons. Yet you… you were always special. I assumed that you could learn to manipulate it to a certain degree, but it isn’t something you can really discuss with a child, even one as bright as you obviously were.”
Taking the mug out of the microwave, he carefully poured in the hot half and half and stirred it, watching the liquid turn a rich, deep brown. It smelled good too, but Roan hardly noticed it. His heart was thundering in his ears, and he had the urge to toss the phone in the microwave and nuke the fucker. This was not a conversation he wanted to have. “What is it you want from me?”
She sighed as if disappointed in him. “I’m not calling to… I have no desire to upset you or your life.”
“Then why call?”
She paused. He’d been trying to call up a mental image of the woman, but he continued to fail. It wasn’t going to happen. “I’m working on a research project here at the university now, and I was wondering… would you be at all interested in an experimental medication?”
He almost dropped the empty saucepan, but managed to get it on the counter. “What? A medication for what?”
“For the virus, although it’s not a cure or a preventative. What we’re hoping it can accomplish is a lengthening of the viral cycle, essentially delaying full expression. We’re hoping that this can lengthen the life span of—”
“I have a husband,” he blurted, suddenly feeling weak in the knees, feeling his pulse pound in his temples. Oh God, was this it? Was this an honest to fucking Buddha ray of hope in all this crushing darkness? “He’s infected. Can you take him instead? I mean now, today. Can you get him in?”
She was stunned into silence for a moment. “A husband? Is that legal yet?”
“Not really. Look, can you?”
“I take it he’s not a virus child?”
“No, he’s a standard infectee, tiger strain.”
That made her suck in a sharp breath, as if punched. “Good lord. I didn’t know we even had one in this state. How, uh, how old is he?”
“Twenty-seven.”
“How long has he been infected?”
“Seven years.”
“Really?” She sounded depressingly surprised. “That’s incredible. I’ve never heard of anyone with the tiger strain surviving that long.”
“He’s not a normal man,” he replied, and felt tears suddenly spring to his eyes. He had to close them and concentrate to make them disappear, to swallow down the lump inexplicably forming in his throat. No, Paris wasn’t a normal man; Paris was the only man he’d ever trusted this much or loved this much. He had a feeling that if Paris died, he would die—maybe not physically, but in all other respects he would die. “Please. If this medication doesn’t work on the deadliest strain, then what fucking good is it? You need a tiger strain in the trials.”
She was quiet so long he wondered if he’d scared her. Finally she cleared her throat again, and he could hear her typing on a keyboard in the background. “You have a good point. It would also be a good idea to have a virus child in the trials, just to see if it affects you in the same way as it does the infe
ctees.”
“Is that it? You want me? You have to take him too, or it’s not happening.”
“I’m not trying to blackmail you into this,” she assured him. “We’d be happy to have him in the trials as long as he volunteers for it.”
“He will.” He’d blackmail Paris into it if he absolutely had to, but Paris was going to volunteer, damn it. If there was any chance at all, they had to take it. “How fast can we do this thing?”
“Well, if you come down to the University Medical Center today, the Kesselman Wing, we can have you fill out the forms and take some medical details. The trials themselves won’t begin until next week—”
“Fine, whatever, we’ll be there.”
“There is no guarantee this will work,” she quickly exclaimed. She must have heard his note of desperation. “This is experimental.”
“I know, I heard. But some hope is better than none, right?”
She had no real answer to that. He hadn’t thought she would.
As soon as he composed himself—he was shaking, why the fuck was he shaking?—he grabbed the mug of cocoa and went upstairs, mentally preparing his script. He was hoping Paris wouldn’t fight him, but he really didn’t know; Paris could be so stubborn. And Roan was afraid that he’d already given up and become comfortable with the reality of dying.
Roan knocked on the bathroom door before going in, the heat and steam of the room clubbing him like a wet, velvet fist. Paris must have been using the hottest water he could stand, and Roan bet it would have been too uncomfortable for him. Par was slumped low in the big white porcelain bathtub, a behemoth that could easily hold two people and was probably almost as old as he was. Paris’s head was tilted back, resting on the edge of the tub, his chin dipped just below the surface of the water. His eyes were closed and he looked asleep, but he opened them tiredly as Roan approached the tub, and smiled weakly. “I don’t suppose you want to join me, huh?”
