Rob Thurman - Basilisk

“Right, Arnold. I’m sure you will,” he drawled, sliding down in the seat as I slammed my door behind me. Inside the store, I went straight to the cash register, automatically reached for a Milky Way, and said, “I’m looking for Jacob and Johanna Cloud-horse.”

The girl there looked me over before flashing her teeth in a white, happy smile. “Which makes you a troublemaker. Deep shit and all that. I should call the law on you, but since Jacob is my baby’s daddy, I guess I won’t.” I had many names. Sebastian was the drug dealer one. Sebastian had money out the ass, a plane to go with it, and he was here to get it.

I hardened my face and tried for that killer twist of Stefan’s lips I’d seen a time or two, and by killer, I meant the authentic definition. “I know you won’t. Now get them over here. Tell them Sebastian’s here, and I don’t like waiting.”

She looked me up and down more thoroughly this time, her black ponytail swishing over her shoulder. Then with eyes turned to impenetrable onyx, she went for the phone, turning her back so I couldn’t hear her speak. “Look at you. You scared a teen mom, probably all of sixteen. Good for you. Are you proud, ‘Sebastian’?”

I snatched a quick glance over my shoulder to see Stefan standing behind me with arms folded and without any dark glasses because, face it, he didn’t need any. It was practice versus the real thing again. Stefan didn’t have to pretend or put on a mask to scare people—Stefan had to put one on not to scare people. That was what “Harry” had been all about. The real Stefan had only to show his true self, what he’d done, and what he’d still do if necessary; it was all in his face if he let it be. Reality was always more convincing than a mask.

I wasn’t the one who’d pushed the girl into making that call. It was one glimpse of what stood behind me. “You don’t want to be like me, Misha,” he whispered low enough that only I could hear. “I don’t want to be like me either, but that’s my bad luck there. If the means justify the end, let me be the means. It’s nothing new for me. You be yourself, got it?”

That the “myself” he was talking about was an assassin taught and trained was something he never remembered or never believed—the same as I tried not to believe. He moved up beside me and laid a casual arm over my shoulder, making sure his gun showed as his jacket gaped open. “Brother, cousin, or bodyguard?” he murmured.

Oh, damn, the story. What had I told the Cloud-horses . . . ? “Bodyguard,” I replied.

“We’ll go with cousin bodyguard. Gives me more reason to look out for your skinny ass.” I barely heard the words before he said aloud to the girl on the phone, “We don’t have all fucking day. Are they hauling their shit or not? We have a lot of money invested in their asses, and if they don’t give as they have received, like the Good Book says, we’ll take that money out of their asses and anyone else’s we can find, including you. Hell, conveniently located as you are, we’ll start with you, little bitch.”

He said bitch as lazily as if that were the only thing he ever called women. Stefan, who painted houses for free for needy landladies and undercharged Mrs. Sloot to paint her gingerbread; Stefan, who treated women with the utmost respect—he even hadn’t hurt the one who’d robbed us at gunpoint years ago at a time when we could least afford it. Yet if I hadn’t known him, I’d have believed every word, and I knew I couldn’t have carried that off. He was right. I should stick to being myself—the myself where my outside reflected what my inner biology wished it was.

But was it fair that Stefan had to be the mean one all the time, no matter his past?

No. No, it wasn’t, especially as much as he wanted to leave that part of him behind. Being a drug dealer was much easier online. The reality of being one or pretending to be one . . . I saw now why Stefan had been so upset earlier. Or pissed off—highly pissed off. Maybe there was a reason all Jericho’s children were like me . . . and looked somewhat younger and guiltless at first glance. We were trained to plan if we had to, trained every day of our lives, but we were made to not need to. Our faces were our alibis. Touch, kill, and who would ever suspect a nineteen-year-old who would probably look like a nineteen-year-old until he was thirty?

On the other hand, one look at Stefan and you’d know what he might do. One look at me and no one knew what I could do and that it was much worse than anything Stefan had in him. It was the perfect disguise. Nature would’ve applauded.

It only made me feel like a freak—as if it were only right I should be labeled “Caution,” “Dangerous,” “Biohazard.” That was as far as my thought process went before starting to spiral bleakly downward until Stefan pinched my shoulder hard—he knew; how did he always know?—and went straight for the Cloud-horse siblings the second they walked through the door.

They had rifles, attitude, and sneers, all of which went limp under Stefan flashing his Steyr in their faces before they had time to move. The muzzle set gently over the eye of one of them—that of Jacob, the brother. “Playtime is over, kiddies.” They were barely younger than he was, by two years at the most, but, in experience, I guess kids they were. If they’d used those rifles for anything but shooting rabbits, I’d be surprised. “This is why you look at porn on the Internet, not how to hook up with dealers, because you are not ready, assholes. You’re worlds away from swimming in this ocean but damn close to being six feet under that dirt outside. Now, take us to the plane. And if your girlfriend calls the cops, you’ll just be lying on top of that dirt in a pool of your own guts and blood.”

Stefan didn’t want me to be like him, but thanks to him, we had our stuff and were on the plane in fifteen minutes. The Cloud-horses had built a big barnlike building behind a line of pine trees to hide it. I didn’t know where they were hiding the drugs and Stefan didn’t mention it. The two Cloud-horses thought themselves pretty clever, I’m sure, in not bringing it up themselves. They weren’t. What kind of drug dealers show up and don’t want their drugs? But if they were smart, we wouldn’t be standing here in the first place. Smart people don’t grow marijuana and hide planes for strangers on the Internet, no matter how much they have been paid.

“Now.” Stefan stood in the large outbuilding concealing the plane and tapped one of them—Jacob—on top of the head with his gun. It was a friendly tap, if you didn’t count the pain that twisted the lean, brown face. “Which of you is going to take a ride with us? You or your sister?” His sister looked tougher by half, but she stood back with her hands up at shoulder level. When it came down to the bottom line, she came way before her brother apparently. Their rifles had been left outside at Stefan’s order.

Jason stumbled over his words. “What? What the fuck? We did what you said. What Sebastian said.” He pointed at me. I’d given up looking tough and just looked like what I was: bored. I was bored. Stupidity bored me and there was a massive amount of stupid here. Oddly, this expression seemed more intimidating than the one I’d tried at the store. I was being me now and that, despite Institute training, could be the most frightening thing of all in a person.

I remembered what Wendy at the Institute did when she was bored. It wasn’t a good time to be a rabbit or a guinea pig in the animal lab on those days.

“Be yourself,” Stefan had said.

Let that Frankenstein child you were shine through, I thought.

Shit.

I folded my arms, but didn’t look away from the brother and sister team. Stefan wouldn’t need back up with these two, but better safe than sorry. Now he was saying, “My cousin is learning the business. I want him to know drug dealers can’t be trusted. Too bad that’s a lesson you don’t already know, huh? But don’t worry. It won’t be a long ride and just until we get far enough off the ground to make sure you didn’t screw with the engine. Then we’ll boot you right back out. Fifteen, thirty feet. You’ll be fine . . . if we’re fine. You might break your legs or your spine, but I hear great things about wheelchairs these days.” Jacob moaned and his sister gave it up.