Rob Thurman - Basilisk

What he’d done in that second was only a fraction of what he could do. But then he remembered he wasn’t Stefan here. He blinked, and the bared teeth and wolf eyes were gone and he was Happy Harry again—the gingerbread man. “My old man was in the marines.” He gave a sheepish shrug but didn’t back down. “He taught me a thing or two. He also taught me you don’t pick on kids or family. This guy did both.”

“And I think he’ll regret that—once he stops puking.” The sheriff pushed up his sunglasses and let it go—what he’d seen and what he had to suspect, because it had turned out a few weeks ago that Stefan was right.

In Cascade Falls you could get bail for anything.

Two weeks ago, Stefan had gotten in a bar fight on his usual have-to-be-ordinary-to-fit-in-Friday routine. I’d told him that wasn’t the way to avoid notice, the same thing he was always telling me to do. But he’d shrugged and said, “It was the whole damn bar going at it. If I hadn’t swung back when that guy punched me, I would’ve stood out. Exception that proves the rule.” The bail had been only five hundred dollars. When I’d paid it and picked him up, he’d shrugged, wadded up the receipt, and tossed it in the backseat. “ ‘Harry Alonzo’ now has a record. Actually, that’s my first time behind bars, believe it or not, which means no worry about comparing fingerprints,” he’d said.

This time there was no bail. The folks of Cascade Falls liked their tourists for the most part. But they didn’t like ones that messed with their citizens. The sheriff waited until the one on the ground stopped puking, handcuffed him, and shoved him into the back of the car. “Assaulting a minor is no way to spend your vacation, son.” Before he pushed his sunglasses back up, he winked at me to let me know it was a good time to pretend to be as young as I looked—seventeen instead of the twenty I almost was. “You call us next time you have some out-of-towner giving you trouble, Parker. Harry,” he said, tipping his hat, “nice moves. You done your daddy proud.” Then he was in the car and gone.

Maybe he’d recognized one of his own—a soldier of sorts. Although, from the premature beer belly on Sheriff Simmons, it’d been a long time since he’d kicked anyone in the ribs, which was, if you thought about it, great cardiovascular exercise. I’d have to look into the sheriff again. I’d underestimated him and his skills, former or not. I was really beginning to lose faith in my background checks.

Stefan folded his arms. “If I had a woodshed you hadn’t blown up, I’d take you behind it and beat some sense into you.”

I didn’t bother to roll my eyes, the threat not worthy of a response.

“Seriously, what did I tell you, Misha? Don’t let anyone see what you can do. Although making that fat bastard puke his guts up in the street. . . .” He swallowed the grin that surfaced and went for a more somber tone. “If it’s to save your life, do what you have to do. Absolutely anything you have to do. If it’s just a jackass messing with you, come get me and I’ll make him sorry his father bought that on-sale cheap-ass expired condom. But if it’s not life or death, keep what you can do secret, okay? Or we’ll have more than the Mafiya and that hellish place that took you after us.”

I said pointedly, “Because pounding him to a pulp was much more subtle.”

“No, but it’s not science fiction, so do what I tell you, all right? Now, are you done testing those teenage boundaries? The ones you missed while you were under that bastard who took you? Get it all out of your system, defying the big brother?”

Yeah, my brother was smarter than I have given him credit for sometimes. In matters of emotion, he was five Mensa levels smarter than I was. “He was a dick,” I said stubbornly.

“Michael, in life you’ll discover there are a million times more dicks in the world than there are shitheads to fucking hang them on,” he snorted. “It’s not right. It’s not fair, but we have to work around it. You keep your Superman powers out of sight and I’ll beat the crap out of anyone who messes with my family. Illegal, sure, but not science fiction.”

Superman . . . that was so far off base, I didn’t bother to go there. Like any other nineteen-year-old, I wanted to take care of myself. But unlike any other nineteen-year-old, I could take care of myself. I could take care of myself in a way that could leave the streets littered with bodies. My brother was right. He usually was. And like any other nineteen-year-old, that made me sulk for a while.

But, hey, the word “dick” had come to me naturally. That was something.

“ You be kind to Stefan. He deserves that.”

“Kind” was an odd word to come from a man who may have killed as many as the man who’d kidnapped his son, but he’d meant it. It was the only thing he’d meant as he’d talked to me the time when both Stefan and I had been shot by Jericho and his men. I was different then . . . and now. . . . I’d healed much faster than Stefan, although I’d been shot in the chest and he’d been shot in the leg. The bullet had broken his thighbone, which caused him to limp in cold weather. Me? Who they’d thought would die long before the AMA-booted doctor would show up? I barely had a scar.

It had been when I’d been closer to healthy and whole and Stefan knocked out on pain meds in that South Carolina safe house that Anatoly had said that to me.

“Be kind to Stefan. He deserves that.”

He’d been right and I hadn’t had to hear it from him. Stefan did deserve it. Stefan hadn’t given up on his brother—he had saved me, and he didn’t lie to me. Anatoly had done none of those things. He never even said my name, either of them, not Lukas or the “Michael” the Institute had given me. He’d been polite, for a killer, but weren’t we all killers in that beach house/ makeshift hospital? Stefan had said that Anatoly was my father, but I hadn’t trusted the older man for a second.

Now, though, looking at what was left of him on my computer screen, I wished I’d tried to find out more of who’d been behind the killer. Was there more to him? I’d had the skills at reading people, same as now, but I hadn’t used them. Everything, the entire world, was so damn new then that Stefan was all I needed and all I could handle. I didn’t want or need a father, I’d thought at the time, especially one who’d given up on me.

“Be kind to Stefan.” I remembered those words.

I looked at the bones and chunks of decomposed flesh on the screen. He’d been in a lake. Lake Michigan. Floaters aren’t pretty and I honestly couldn’t remember if I’d learned that at the Institute or on one of the thousand TV cop shows since. Wherever I’d heard it, it was right. He was roadkill marinated in a swampy Everglades ditch. He was in pieces and the pieces didn’t fit together to make anything that looked human. They’d identified him by dental records. I clicked on the next picture. These weren’t the kind available to your average Internet surfer, but I wasn’t your average anything. If there was a place that cybertendrils didn’t extend into, I hadn’t found it yet. Chimeras were trained to fool people. I’d found that fooling machines was far easier. If there was a data stream, I rode it; a path of pixels, I walked it. I saw it all, saw through everything as if it were made of glass.

Not like Anatoly.

“Be kind to Stefan,” he had said. He hadn’t been much of a human before or after he died, I’d thought, but he’d loved his son. He hadn’t loved me; I could tell. I didn’t read him, but I didn’t have to search his face or catalog his movements and words to know that. Love is easy to see; no effort required. Other emotions took effort, but love was simple. I didn’t know why he hadn’t accepted me like Stefan had. Maybe I’d been gone too long. Maybe he’d wiped me out of his heart and mind. The reason didn’t matter.