Rob Thurman - Basilisk

All of Jericho’s children could see, because we’d all been trained to look. I’d seen every one of Stefan’s weaknesses and vulnerabilities—I’d seen him as a target long before I’d seen him as a person.

But the past years had taken his hand and pulled him up, pulled him out. He hadn’t been on the shore, but he’d been in the breakers, close to being free. If he laughed, he meant it. If he was happy or at least content, he didn’t have to fake it. Now he had to step farther back into the water, if only for the violence. I watched the smoke disappear behind us, because I didn’t want to watch Stefan. He was a good man and when good men have to do bad things, that ocean will never let them go.

Be kind to Stefan, Anatoly whispered . . . because life hadn’t been.

“Where’s Raynor now?”

I didn’t turn, the road unspooling behind—the same road to nowhere as Stefan’s scar. “Gone. He lives in Washington, D.C., a house, so I was able to get into the utility companies there and take a look. His electricity and water use has been pretty much nil for the past two weeks, which means he left one light on and has a dripping faucet. I used Google Earth and his car is parked in the driveway, no airline has his name for that time, so either he had a nasty bathroom accident, statistics rank those very high on the scale, or he bought another car—a used one, with cash, because it hasn’t been registered yet.”

“He’s smart. Fuck.”

“I know. I think he might be as smart as me.” I did turn this time, offended as they came at the notion. No, offended as . . . hell. Right. Offended as hell . “Do you think that’s actually possible?”

“That he might know you’re keeping an eye on your back trail to see if he might come following? Yeah, I think he’s that smart. But as smart as you? Come on. Where’s that ego I know and put up with?” He shoved my shoulder with one hand. “Although the earplugs really help with that last part.”

We’d passed through town—there wasn’t much to pass through; blink and it was gone—and we were headed for the Bridge of the Heavens. Kicked out of Paradise and I didn’t even like apples that much.

Didn’t that suck?

The plan called for driving through Washington, crossing the border into Canada and then we would keep going until we were lost in Banff National Park. Our fake IDs would pass border patrol; I knew that. I’d made them, but camping in the wilds of Canada wasn’t going to help me continue my research to help save the rest of Jericho’s children, all of them—to take away their power to kill. Saul had found their location two years ago and I’d been working on a way to fix them since then. I hadn’t needed to be fixed. I didn’t like to kill, but I knew the same wasn’t true of all the rest. Some might be like me—it was a possibility—but some loved to kill. Where we were going there wasn’t even the most hideous of creations—dial-up—much less WiFi. I’d never be able to continue talking with Ariel about my fake “paper,” about the cure. And I needed to keep in contact with her—even if that was my business and no one else’s at the moment. Maybe “suck” wasn’t a strong enough word for this. “Bites”? “Blows”? “Sucks balls”?

I had to get a dictionary for these sorts of situations.

“Holy shit!” Stefan spat, and slammed on the brakes.

I automatically braced myself with one hand on the dashboard and with the other tossed Godzilla into the backseat. He hissed and I felt him crawl under my seat. He’d been through this type of thing before. He had his own drill plan.

As we three-sixtied off the road onto the grass and dirt side, I saw an unfamiliar car and an annoyingly familiar face through our windshield. The tourist—Mitchell, the sheriff had called him—was sitting on the hood of a car, gape-mouthed with a half-eaten sand-wich dropping from his hand.

There is no such thing as coincidence in the known universe. This blobby ass didn’t come close to the failing end of that grading curve. If nothing else, it was nice to know that stress improved my cursing abilities.

Stefan was out of the car with a fistful of the guy’s shirt and slamming him repeatedly into the windshield of the man’s car before I managed to get my seat belt unbuckled and get out myself. I was quicker, stronger, had trained for this for all of my life that I could remember, but Stefan hadn’t only been trained. He’d lived it in the Mafiya every day, and that made him better than me. I wasn’t envious of his skills. I was only sorry it had turned out that way.

“What are you doing here, asshole?” Stefan snarled, and banged him against the glass again, this time cracking it. It formed a spiderweb pattern around Mitchell. He was a tourist—a fake tourist—caught in a web of violence and rage that I didn’t think he’d escape. “When I give people the kind of beating I gave you, they don’t tend to stick around. They damn sure don’t park by one of the two ways out of town and eat goddamn sandwiches. Who are you?”

Suddenly, the hand that had held the sandwich now held a gun, the dazed and stupid eyes sharpened, and what had seemed like fat now looked like something much more solid. The muzzle of the gun didn’t have far to go to end up jammed under Stefan’s chin to blow a hole through it, his brain, and out the top of his skull. Stefan stiffened before falling on the grass and road, a spray of blood and brain matter fanning the pale worn asphalt widely behind him. Eyes, neither brother brown nor aggressive amber, instead mirrored the gray of the sky.

Life changes just that fast.

People . . . they die faster.

And your desire to live can change from fierce to absent in that instant.

But that wasn’t what happened.

It was what I saw in a split second of dark imagination, a calculation of the odds, the preparation for every possible outcome, and the Institute-honed, razor-sharp logic of predator prediction. We all had it, inherent, and were trained to see the deadliest of potentials on top of that, but Stefan proved it wrong. The man’s gun was not far, but not far was too far. Harry used a paintbrush—his alter ego, Stefan, used a Steyr 9mm. A bullet from that could destroy a man’s heart as easily as I could. And it did.

“Shit.” Stefan stepped back from the body that sprawled on the hood of the car. He had blood on his shirt from the blowback of being so close when he’d pulled the trigger. “Shitshitshitshit.”

I echoed the sentiment mentally, because right then I was as verbal as a goddamn rock.

Hey, more cursing. Look at me.

I dropped onto the hood of our own car, which was slick—Stefan waxed it as if practicing to represent his country in waterproofing in the Olympics. It was slick enough that I slid and went down over the bumper without feeling it—wax, wax, wax—and hit the ground, which was considerate enough to be gritty and solid. No car fanatics had gotten it yet, and there I sat. I would’ve thought my mouth was hanging open like the dead guy’s, gaping in eternal surprise, but I tasted blood, so it was more likely that my teeth were buried in my lower lip.

It was the Institute all over again. The escape. The blood.

Once you thought you were out, they pulled you back in. Stefan should be saying that, though—it was from a mob movie.

Funny. Wasn’t I funny?

But this wasn’t the Institute repeated. This was almost three years later. And I wasn’t obedient Michael trained thoroughly enough to sit on his single bed smelling of industrial bleach, unmotivated to move until they came to take me for graduation or downstairs where they took the failures and dissected them to see where they’d gone wrong. I wasn’t that Michael anymore. I was Misha, claimed son of a dead Russian mobster and brother of a live one, and Misha wasn’t going back to Jericho-land fucking ever. Stefan had encouraged me to live the life of a teenager, a kid, to catch up on all I’d missed out on. But that time was over. Just as that logic-defying, contradictory book said: It was time to leave childish things behind. I was not a victim any longer. I was a man. I’d been saying it for a while now, and it was time to start acting like it.