Bloodlines Page 23

  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 laid 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 the Beginning

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  About the Author

  ANDREA SPEED writes way too much. She is the Editor in Chief of CxPulp.com, where she reviews comics as well as movies and occasionally interviews comic creators. She also has a serial fiction blog where she writes even more, and she occasionally reviews books for Joe Bob Briggs’s site. She might be willing to review you, if you ask nicely enough, but really she should knock it off while she’s ahead.

  Visit her web site at http://www.andreaspeed.com and find her on Facebook. She tweets at http://twitter.com/aspeed.