Authors: Andrea Speed
Paris’s eyes snapped back to his instantly. “What? No. I love you and I’m not ashamed of that. Besides, my family is a bunch of intellectual lefties; we had a cat named Che Guevara when I was a kid. I’m also pretty sure my Uncle Ben was gay, and no one cared.”
“You haven’t mentioned him.”
“Oh, he was a painter. He used to come to holiday gatherings with his “friend” Travis, who was a literary agent with a great love for Brooks Brothers suits and Berlioz. They seemed like an odd pair since Ben was so freewheeling and Travis seemed so mainstream, and I couldn’t quite guess how they’d come to be such good friends or why. But in retrospect I can see it was just a case of opposites attracting.”
“Like us?”
Paris smiled at him. “Are we that opposite? I kinda think we’re a good fit.”
“And neither of us owns a Brooks Brothers suit.”
“A point in our favor.”
They were starting to digress from the point, though, and he could feel the low hum of attraction between them as Paris placed a hand flat against his chest. If they didn’t watch it, they’d be tearing each other’s clothes off within ten minutes, and while that was always a great deal of fun, he had to go meet Matt at Café D’Ante soon. And besides, he wanted to go out and see if he could go by Patrick Farley’s place beforehand, maybe run by Christa Hernandez’s place and see if he could talk to her Infected: Prey
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great-aunt. Maybe last night they had been able to call an early end to the work shift, but there was no way he could justify it to himself two days in a row. Although part of him loved the idea of itemizing a bill for Eli and including notations for
Fucking.
“What are you afraid of?” he asked Paris, aware that this would probably short-circuit this slow-building, comfortable lust between them.
It did, quite rapidly. Paris let his hand drop away from his chest and broke eye contact, glancing at the stereo as if appealing to it for help. “You know what I’m afraid of, Ro.”
“Telling them you’re infected.” Par sighed heavily, which was an answer. “If they’re a bunch of intellectual lefties as you say they are, they’re not going to care.”
“I’ve disappointed them enough. I don’t want to disappoint them further. I mean, I know they’ll act cool about it, they’ll say they’ll support me, but I know it’ll break their hearts.” He grimaced and rubbed his face, and Roan suspected he was trying to hide the tears building up in his eyes.
“I’ve done that enough. I’d rather just die suddenly and have them find out once I’m gone that I was infected. That way I wouldn’t have to pretend I didn’t notice how horrible I made them feel. That’s cowardly of me, isn’t it?”
“A bit.”
That made Paris look at him in surprise. Maybe he wasn’t expecting honesty. “Would fudging the truth have really killed you?”
“I have a reputation to uphold.”
Paris shook his head and rolled his eyes, crossing his arms over his chest. “I’d be really pissed at you if I didn’t know you were right. No, wait, I’m pissed at you anyway.”
“I think I’ll take that as my cue to leave.” He slowly unfolded himself from the couch and stretched, some exhaustion from so much broken sleep making itself known in his tired limbs. If those forays late at night had proven anything to him, it was that he could make that disappear as soon as he started moving around. He gave Paris a gentle kiss on the forehead before walking away.
Paris watched him with narrowed eyes, but if he had been really angry at him, that vein on his neck would have stood out. He was more annoyed with him, which was bad enough. “Anything I can help with, or 230
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am I supposed to do some light filing and just sit here and look pretty?”
“I’d hope you’d call your sister. Really, I’m not doing anything thrilling, just seeing if people are home and willing to talk to me. I still have to make the connection between Eli and Cryer and Hernandez, which may be impossible.”
Paris’s brow furrowed in confusion. “Huh? I thought you said the church wasn’t the connection between the four victims.”
“Right, the church isn’t. But I have this feeling Eli is. He may be the cult leader, but he is separate from the church. I bet the police didn’t even bother to break them apart.”
“Is this a gut feeling?”
“Kind of. But Eli goes out and has coffee; he goes out and eats.”
Ashley worked at a Starbucks, and Christa worked as a waitress at a trendy sushi restaurant called Kaisou, all within three miles of each other, and all within five miles of the church. “They were his type, and I know for a fact that he’s been to Kaisou. He was fucking Melissa, and Patrick was a church attender; if I can tie Eli at any point to Ashley and Christa—”
“You have the link between the victims,” Paris concluded, nodding at the logic of it all. “But, wait, doesn’t that make Eli a suspect again?”
“It could. Or it really could mean he is the next victim. Someone’s obliquely working their way down.”
“Oh shit. No wonder he was freaked out enough to hire you.”
“And yet he’s not freaked out enough to tell me the whole truth.
Funny how that works.”
Paris suddenly smiled slyly, as if he’d just had a funny thought, and of course he felt compelled to share it. “A leopard doesn’t change his spots, Roan.”
“Oh God, that’s horrible. I’m calling the pun police on you.”
He raised his eyebrows suggestively, and lowered his voice to a seductive tone as he purred, “Shall I assume the position, Officer?”
Roan shook his head and snickered, waving to him as he walked to the foyer and grabbed his coat and hat off the hooks by the door. “Call your sister, man whore. I’d love to meet her sometime. I bet she has a ton of embarrassing stories about you as a kid.”
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“Thank you for giving me another reason not to do it,” he replied cheerfully.
Roan actually hoped he did call, and he thought that, fears and sarcasm aside, Paris would eventually. If he cared for his family as much as he seemed to, he’d reach out to them, even if he did omit certain facts about his existence.
After all, life was short—and for some people, much shorter than seemed fair.
CHRISTA’S great-aunt lived in a quaint little clapboard house that could have been made of gingerbread and iced with lemon frosting, but no one was home save for one of those little yippie dogs that could only shake and pee, so after scaring it off to the other end of the house by growling at it through the door, he wrote a note asking her to please call him and arrange a good time for them to meet, as he wanted to talk to her about Christa. He left one of his business cards folded inside the note, and slipped it through the mail slot in the door.
He had a bit more luck at Patrick Farley’s apartment, as he encountered a neighbor who was willing to talk to him. His name was Juan, a young Hispanic man with long, shaggy black hair who smelled of cheap aftershave and cigarette smoke, and who had Korn blasting on the stereo the whole time he was talking to him. He was the neighbor across from Patrick, and had talked with him several times, including lending him some quarters for the laundry room. He knew that Patrick went to the church, but he didn’t know he was actually infected; he assumed he was a
“wannabe,” although he didn’t look like one of those “Anne Rice-lovin’
motherfuckers.” (Roan loved that description; he was going to have to use that sometime.) He was at work at the time of the shooting—Juan worked for a pest extermination service (which explained the aftershave; it wasn’t bad cologne but lingering traces of insecticide)—but he came home and found his body. He was digging out his apartment keys when he’d noticed Patrick’s door was slightly open, and he knew that wasn’t right, especially in a place like this. He knocked on the door and attempted to open it all the way, but something was blocking the door, and then he smelled “it”—
presumably blood and shit, the pungent, awful smell of death. He saw blood on the floor and an outstretched hand, as well as a big mess that 232
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looked like “spilled lasagna” (presumably the remains of Patrick’s head).
He called 911 and was careful not to touch anything else, because he figured a non-white guy finding a dead white guy might give the cops
“ideas.”
He’d only known Patrick in a casual sense, but he didn’t think he was a bad guy, and he hoped the cops found the
pendejo
who did this. He was actually shocked the cops hadn’t arrested anyone yet, as he figured they were extra speedy when the murder victim was an “all-American white guy,” but maybe the fact that he was “one of them” (infected) made them drag their feet. Juan also said, as far as he knew, no one disliked Patrick, he was pretty friendly and pretty quiet, and he couldn’t think of anything especially suspicious around here in the days leading up to the shooting. Roan left him his card on the off chance he remembered something else, and he said he’d call if anything occurred to him. Roan actually believed him.
The sad thing? Patrick had been dead forty minutes by the time Juan found him—meaning that if anyone else had seen the open door, they hadn’t checked; or if they had, they hadn’t called it in because they hadn’t wanted to get involved. Roan knew he was overly cynical at times, but the world seemed extra callous nowadays, with people too concerned about their own asses to risk involvement in anything that might get them in trouble. Juan was actually one of the good guys, but he probably didn’t know that.
The rain had let up to a dismal drizzle, although the sky was so dark it seemed like dusk when that was actually hours away. He found one of the last parking spots in the sprawling lot beside the Café D’Ante and went in, bracing himself.
The Café D’Ante was one of those places that tried so hard not to be pretentious they were actually pretentious, a casual but trendy place that just tried too damn hard to be something it both was and wasn’t at the same time that it was irritating. It had lots of windows to let in light (on any other day but today), potted plants to give the place an air of life, and lots of little round tables covered with tablecloths as white as snowdrifts.
The hostess who greeted him far too eagerly was a perky young brunette who was probably a former cheerleader, and wore a black satin vest, which all the servers had on as their “casual” uniform. He told her he was meeting someone, and when he started to describe him, she said, “Oh, Matt.” So that’s why he picked this place—he was known.
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She led him to a window table at the back, where Matt waited, looking frighteningly eager. He’d changed from his yellow T-shirt and walking shorts to designer black jeans and a pale blue muscle shirt that wasn’t quite as tight and showed off the other tattoos on his arms: he had a
“bracelet” of black tribal marks encircling his right upper arm, and a dark red kanji on his left shoulder. It looked like there was a small red and blue mark peeking beneath the neck of his shirt, but he had no idea what that tattoo could have been.
Roan had never really liked blonds, his tastes had always run toward darker men (his last three boyfriends—Connor, Diego, and Paris—all had black hair, their one common denominator); but there was something appealingly open and attractive about Matt’s face, well-scrubbed with solid bone structure, a firm jaw and sharp cheekbones, his eyes large and golden hazel. In about ten years he’d probably be really handsome. He wore a cologne Roan didn’t recognize, something woodsy and smoky, and beneath that was the scent of soap and shampoo. Had he gotten cleaned up extra-nice for him? Oh no.
Matt’s face lit up in a bright smile. “I brought the key.”
“Great, thanks.” The waitress hovered nearby, and he just ordered coffee. He was hungry, but he wasn’t eager to face pumpkin ravioli with vodka aioli, or whatever pretentious “fusion” food they served here.
Matt was Matt Skouris, a nineteen-year-old city native who grew up in the fairly tony suburb of Harmon Hills. He admitted sheepishly that he was a high school dropout who had only recently got his life back on track, which made Roan guess he had a drug problem. Matt won some points for admitting that as well, saying he’d been dropping Ecstasy and hitting the amphetamines (speed and coke) pretty hard since he was fifteen and discovered the party circuit. He was eventually forced into rehab by his parents and had been totally clean for eight months, but it wasn’t always easy.
Matt had ordered an appetizer, some kind of bruschetta thing (small pieces of toasted bread with some tomato mixture on it) and it smelled good enough that his stomach rumbled nosily. Matt clearly heard it and offered him some, and he didn’t refuse. It was pretty good.
Matt also told him he wasn’t actually Ash’s best friend, and that she had probably barely considered him a friend at all. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to be, but Ash had been very aloof and nervous, he supposed because of the way people treated her when they discovered she was infected.
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She’d given him a copy of her apartment key after an incident in her building involving an “invasion” that left three people tied up in their apartment for a whole day. It was a drug-related crime (of course; it was the Wildwood) but since she lived alone and far from her family, she had liked the idea of having someone around who would be willing to check up on her if she suddenly didn’t show up one day. He felt a drive to be nice to her because she was infected, and he knew what it was like to be singled out and treated badly because you were different.
Matt was very animated. He used his hands when he talked, and talked almost a mile a minute, but that might have been due to his complementary lattes from work. He had clearly traded amphetamines for caffeine, and while surely his blood pressure was better for it, he still got a nice buzz.
While Roan was chewing on a bruschetta piece, Matt leaned over the table and seemed to study him intently. “Too bad you aren’t gay,” he said.
Roan almost choked on a tomato chunk. “Excuse me?”
Matt rested his elbows on the table and put his chin in his hands, just staring at him like he was the best-looking dessert behind the glass counter. “You’re the most gorgeous guy I’ve ever seen in person.”