Prey (23 page)

Once inside, he went straight upstairs, and was relieved to find Roan still asleep and perfectly fine. He didn’t know why he was seized by the sudden fear that he’d find him hurt… or worse. It was stupid; he wasn’t a nervous Nelly, and Roan wasn’t helpless (although currently he was as close as he ever came). There was absolutely no reason for him to be worried about this.

Right?

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15

Bloodshift

CURIOUSLY, as bad as vomiting felt, he always seemed to feel better afterward.

Well, perhaps that was an overstatement. It was just that after the violent spasms of his stomach, the feeling of emptiness was a strange relief. Unless he got the dry heaves; then it was another form of misery.

Roan leaned over the toilet for a full minute after the last stomach spasm, watching a thin line of saliva dangle from his bottom lip to the very surface of the water, but his stomach finally seemed hollow and quiet, so he figured he was safe to move.

He flushed the last of his vomit away and stood up with the help of the sink, rinsing his mouth out with water and mouthwash to try and get the burning taste of bile out of the back of his throat. It kind of worked, but his head continued to pound as if his thoughts had rebelled and taken up violent revolution against the confines of his skull.

Paris knocked softly on the bathroom door before gently pushing it open. “Didn’t drown in the toilet, did you?”

“Only wish I had,” he admitted, looking at Paris in the bathroom mirror. He looked far too awake and happy, in khaki walking shorts and a maroon T-shirt with a drawing of a piñata on it, and the phrase “I’d Hit That” written beneath. (He recognized that as a gift from Randi, which Paris of course absolutely loved.) “I feel like a complete asshole.”

“Don’t. If you didn’t break down now and again, I’d worry about you.” He came in and put the bottle of ginger pills and a bottled water on the counter beside the sink, then put his arms around Roan and pressed up against his back. “Excedrin’s in the medicine cabinet.”

“So’s Vicodin. I think I’d rather have that.” He leaned back against Paris, who was warm and comforting, and made him feel a bit better (at 136

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least physically; he still felt bad in every other respect). “You’re being far too nice to me. I’m getting suspicious.”

“Why? If I was pissed off at you, I’d be a total hypocrite. You do know I probably had three sober days in college, and those three days were total flukes. The ’shrooms weren’t magic, and the pot was mostly stems.”

Roan grimaced, as he still hurt too much to smile. “Exaggerating much?”

Paris rested his chin on his shoulder, still looking at him in the bathroom mirror, his hair tickling the side of his neck. “Hardly. I can’t even remember what my bullshit major was supposed to be. Drama or film studies or some shit like that. Thanks to my athletic scholarship, I had access to the hot chicks, but I had to go into the arts to get the hot, sensitive guys confused about their sexuality and unable to hold their liquor.” He grinned at him and raised his eyebrows in a mock-suggestive manner.

It hurt to laugh, but Roan chuckled weakly anyway. “I can’t quite totally believe that, you know.”

“You really should. I was a pleasure-addicted man whore, a complete and utter slut. I was just there for the sex and drugs. Isn’t that what college is for?”

Roan smiled as he popped a couple of ginger pills and washed them down with the bottled water, which was clean and icy cold. Paris really was too nice to him sometimes.

(That made him wonder if he had been a total bastard to Con.)

“I’m sorry I missed out.” He opened the medicine cabinet and found the bottle of Excedrin, popping off the cap and pouring three bitter-tasting pills directly into his mouth. He had never gone to college. In fact, he’d dropped out of high school and got a GED instead, because it wasn’t like he could hack it at a normal high school anyway: he was a fucking lion five days out of every month. And if normal teens thought high school was hell, they should have tried it being both infected and gay. At least it taught him how to fight and how to take a beating, which was almost as important as the former.

Besides, he felt like he learned more on his own, spending so many long days and evenings reading (there often wasn’t much else to do in the Infected: Prey

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temporary group and state homes he was sent to), plowing through entire libraries until he could read so fast people began to think he was a speed-reader.

He closed the mirrored medicine cabinet to find Paris grinning at him in an openly lecherous way. “I’m still a man whore at heart, you know. I can help you make up for lost time.”

It hurt to smile, but he continued to do so anyway. Okay, maybe Paris was a man whore, but he was
his
man whore, damn it. “Maybe when I’m not hungover.”

“Excellent choice. It’s more fun when you’re not half-dead.” Paris’s smile faded slightly, although he continued to stare at him in the mirror.

“So, you gonna volunteer the info, or do I have to pull it out of you?”

Roan sighed, weighing his options. He didn’t have many that he could see, and Paris did deserve an answer. He glanced down at the sink, busying himself finding the shaving cream among all the bottles at the back of the countertop, and told him, not meeting his eyes in the mirror.

He only glanced at him when he was done, and Paris’s expression was unreadable, save for surprise in his eyes.

“Feeling you can bring it on and actually being able to bring it on are two different things,” he finally said.

“I know. But… there was a moment there when I was sure I could do it if I just let go.”

“No change happens that fast.”

“I know. But…” He closed his eyes and shook his head.

“Something’s happening to me, and I’m not sure I like it.”

“You shouldn’t worry. I know you, and I know you’ll always do the right thing. That’s the kind of guy you are. Unlike me, Slutty McWhore over here.” He kissed him on the cheek and added, “When you’re ready, I’ve got lunch and news for you downstairs.”

“I really don’t think I could eat right now.”

“Give it a minute.” He gave him a final squeeze before letting him go and leaving the bathroom.

Slutty McWhore? Oh, he was definitely writing him up a name tag with that on it. And knowing Paris, he’d wear it proudly.

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PARIS apparently did know what he was talking about when it came to hangovers, because as soon as the smell of eggs and sausage hit his nose, his empty stomach rumbled hungrily. Perverse little thing.

Paris had made what he called his “kitchen-sink omelets,” which was basically anything he found in the fridge or cupboards thrown into a bunch of eggs and cooked together in a pan. He sat down at the breakfast bar and Par slid a plate full of eggs in front of him, along with a vanilla Frappuccino (he told him he’d need the sugar and caffeine). As far as he could tell, the eggs were full of salsa, olives, vegetarian sausage, red peppers, and pepper jack cheese, and it was incredibly good; he had to close his eyes for a moment just to savor it. Why couldn’t he cook like this? Everything he tried to cook inevitably tasted like the processed food it started out as.

Paris sat on the opposite side of the breakfast bar from him, eating his own lunch, and filled him in on what he’d missed. He’d covered for him in meeting Susan Heffernan (he deserved some kind of boyfriend medal), and handed him the relevant paperwork, the meager fact sheet and the photo of Ryan and Cooper. Looking at the photo, he felt like he’d been smacked in the face. “Is Ryan the one in the blue T-shirt?”

“Yeah, that’s him. Why?”

“Just trying to keep it straight in my head,” he lied, turning the photo facedown and setting it aside. How did this happen to him? Was it because he hadn’t ever moved out of this state? Maybe he should have moved to San Francisco or New York City or something; maybe these things wouldn’t happen in such a big place.

The New Year’s Eve after Con had committed suicide—and before he met Paris—he had wandered the streets in the biting cold, trying not to feel depressed and failing miserably. He always hated the holidays, and didn’t celebrate Thanksgiving or Christmas; they seemed to be holidays invented for people with families and something to be happy about, neither of which applied to him. (Paris insisted on having a Christmas tree, though, and generally made pumpkin pie for Thanksgiving, and Roan didn’t stop him, mainly because he couldn’t.) He hated gay bars and nightclubs—they were just too damn annoying; geared toward femmes or butchies and little in between—but he didn’t feel like being alone, so he Infected: Prey

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ended up in a sports bar, trying new microbrews and munching on barely passable Buffalo wings. He started up a conversation with this guy who said his name was Jeff, and while he wasn’t hitting on him—who cruised a sports bar?—it became clear that Jeff was subtly but obviously hinting that he thought they should go someplace more private. Jeff wasn’t really his type; he wasn’t too bad-looking (or that attractive, actually), but it was New Year’s Eve, and he was tired of being so fucking depressed. It was just a one-nighter, no biggie… but Jeff was clearly Ryan, unless Ryan had a twin brother. He glanced at the fact sheet to see how long the Heffernans had been married, and saw that it had been eight and a half years. Holy shit, he was married then. He certainly hadn’t been wearing his wedding ring that night.

At least he’d already solved the case.

He quickly forgot all about his inadvertent fling with a married man when Paris gave him the envelope Randi had given him earlier. DeSilvo and Henstridge were on someone’s secret payroll? Oh, now that was interesting. Why? Whose? According to the dates, Metropol had started shifting little amounts into their bank accounts, a couple hundred here and there—as Randi had noted, dribs and drabs, just small enough not to raise any eyebrows—less than two weeks after the Tweaks arrest at Edgewood.

There was no way in hell Tweaks had that kind of money, no way he even knew how to set up a dummy corp in the Cayman Islands (even if it only existed in a post office box and on the Internet), and if he’d ever had that kind of money, it’d all go to Ecstasy and meth, not some patrol cops. The last payment to Henstridge alone was sizable, nearly thirteen thousand dollars, but it was like a money dump, somebody emptying the account so they could close it, and Tweaks was dead by then. Still, he called Randi and asked her to do a similar search for Anthony Westmore Andersen, and promised that Paris would make her dessert for that. As soon as he hung up, Paris asked, “I will, will I?”

“I’m hoping begging and pleading will work at this juncture.”

He smiled slyly, and Roan knew he’d just walked into something.

“How about a trade?”

Roan figured he knew exactly what he was alluding to. Man whore.

“We’ll haggle when I’m not hungover.”

“Oh joy, your excuse for the day,” Paris replied, but lightly, with a tolerant smile on his face.

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Actually, Roan was feeling a hell of a lot better; the combination of the pills, the food, the caffeine, and something else to think about were doing wonders for him. Paris probably knew that too. He always claimed not to be all that smart, but Paris, being an expert manipulator, always knew how to read people as easily as any decent criminal profiler. He followed people’s subtle emotional shifts, to the point that he could easily extrapolate what they wanted from him, what they expected, and he could tailor his response to get what he wanted from them. That was probably why they worked so well together; they had a whole left brain/right brain dichotomy going on.

Which was why the next thing Paris told him was a little troubling.

He recounted the incident with the man he didn’t trust in their driveway, although the description of the guy was just vague enough that he was almost familiar and yet obviously not at the same time. “Maybe you should have taken the check,” Roan suggested. “The name and address might have been something we could’ve traced.”

Paris frowned, making faint furrows appear on his smooth brow.

Paris was creeping toward thirty, creeping toward the age when tiger-strain victims began to die in large numbers. No tiger strain had ever been documented as living over the age of thirty-five. He felt a twinge in his chest just thinking that these might be Paris’s last years on Earth… and he’d obviously chosen to spend them with him. Just another reminder that there was no way in fucking hell he deserved this man, and yet he couldn’t possibly imagine life without him at this point. In fact, he wasn’t going to, because the mere thought of it would cripple him. He had to focus on the here and now, and let the future worry about itself.

“Oh fuck. I didn’t think of that.”

“Doesn’t matter. If this guy was as phony as you thought he was, that would have been a bogus check, borrowed or stolen. Wouldn’t have panned out.”

Paris sighed slightly, letting his shoulders sag. He seemed to be relieved at being let off the hook. “Good, I don’t feel like such an incompetent asshole now.”

“You’ve never been that, Par.”

“Oh come on! I can’t even tell you why I didn’t like this guy.”

“Except he had a cheap-shit David Beckham-ish haircut,” he replied, Infected: Prey

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parroting part of the description he’d given him earlier.

“And he was driving a fucking Subaru Outback.”

Paris had a pretty amusing and slightly baffling hatred for all SUVs, minivans, and any type of similar bulky, boxy vehicle, with Hummers especially singled out for his acidic scorn. As he liked to say, “If your penis is really that small, they have surgery for that now.” Roan couldn’t say he was a fan of any of them, but Paris’s extreme hatred of them always struck him as kind of funny.

Paris sighed, letting his fork drop to his mostly empty plate. “I’m just being stupid. If he was really some kind of bad guy, he’d have attacked me or something.”

Roan shook his head. “Not at all. If he was planning something, a second person could have screwed up his scenario. And you’re not exactly a limp-wristed pansy; you’re a big guy. Maybe he figured that, even with the element of surprise, he couldn’t take you.” Paris opened his mouth to speak, but he cut him off. “A man whore joke would be really inappropriate now.”