Rob Thurman - Basilisk

Too late, I turned. Stefan had turned too. It was only a tranq gun, and the boy was nine at best. He could’ve walked right out of The Brady Bunch , one of those old TV shows that had been on cheap hotel TVs as early-morning reruns when we’d been trying to escape the Institute the first time. The same curls, freckles, happy smile, but with a hand that struck faster than a cobra. It hit in the center of Stefan’s chest and I felt it. I felt Stefan’s heart stutter, I felt it stop, and then I felt it tear in half. I felt him die. I’d worked so hard on blocking Wendy’s type of deadly ability, I hadn’t had the resources to block the usual chimera kind as well.

Saul shot the boy in the back and he probably shot more. I didn’t notice and I didn’t care. I ran, dropping my gun and falling on my knees by Stefan’s side. When this had all begun days ago, I’d imagined Raynor’s fake tourist shooting Stefan, I’d seen the image of his eyes, turning from the brown I knew to the gray of the clouded sky. I’d imagined wrong. They stayed brown, the brown I saw over a breakfast table, that laughed when I did something idiotic or clever or pretty much anything at all, the brown of a brother who hadn’t taken one day of our years together for granted. It was the brown of a brother who wasn’t going to leave me, no matter what he or God or reality thought.

I wasn’t going to let that happen.

I put my hand over his chest in the same spot the other chimera had snatched his life away and closed my eyes. If he’d just stopped Stefan’s heart, it would’ve been simple. But he’d torn it apart and that wasn’t simple at all. Ragged edges—I couldn’t see, but I could feel. They had been viciously torn. How could I join those back together again? God, how?

No. No . I had to remember what I’d learned.

It was flesh, not bone. Bone was difficult; flesh was easy. Wasn’t it? Hadn’t I said so? Hadn’t I proved so? And a heart, that was merely—shit, Stoipah, don’t—that was only the engine that kept the entire body running. You could do without one of those for a good four or five minutes without brain damage; if the body was cold, hypothermic, then longer. I dropped his body temperature like a rock as I carefully put his heart back together, bit by bit. It had to be right, had to be perfect or it wouldn’t work. It wouldn’t. . . .

I stopped thinking and healed—that and nothing more. I poured every ounce of my ability from me into him. I did the impossible. I made his heart whole again but it didn’t beat.

I raised his temperature back to normal but it didn’t beat.

I was terrified, desperate, desolate, and fucking pissed off, and I gave it the biggest bio-electrical jolt I could manage. I gave him everything I had and felt the blackness creeping around the edges of my vision as I slumped across his unmoving chest.

You never let your brother down. You never let your brother down. You never let your brother down.

Until you do.

The darkness was complete. I didn’t know for how long, but when I opened my eyes, I felt a hand patting my back and saw breakfast brown eyes smiling at me. “You’re a miracle, kid. Did I ever tell you that?”

“Don’t call me kid.” I swiped at my eyes, which weren’t wet; I didn’t care what anyone said. “Ah, Jesus. Call me kid whenever the fuck you want.”

If I let my big brother hug me, I wasn’t going to admit to that either.

Theoretically.

Saul helped us both up. Stefan was steadier than I was, but that was from all the energy I’d expended. Big boys don’t cry and all that manly crap. Around us all the chimeras save one were down and unconscious. Saul shrugged. “She didn’t try to attack us. She didn’t do anything at all. I thought you might want to talk to her before whacking her with the cure.” Both he and Stefan stepped back, not too far, but enough to give us the illusion of privacy.

“You really weren’t surprised?” Ariel tilted her pink head, curious. “You knew?” Her gaze, the lifelong familiarity of blue and green—there was a brilliant, almost explosive shine of life behind those eyes. She had a love of life—her own. It was too bad there was no love for humanity.

“I gave you a clue, you know.” I gave a rueful smile. “My fake name. Bernie. Short for Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli.” I wouldn’t admit to myself I’d hoped she would pick up on that and leave this all alone, disappear, and save herself. Stefan wondered when his father died if someone could love a cold-blooded killer.

Now I knew.

“Oh, that was clever. Clever, rotten, and sneaky. I love it.” She gave me an admiring salute with three fingers, all bearing brightly colored rhinestone rings. “But tell me, Misha, what did I do? How’s a girl going to learn if she doesn’t know where she went wrong? What made you suspicious?” Beneath us, the river roared as it hurtled over the dam, a monster of nature ready to gobble whatever fell into its maw as it had gobbled up Wendy. With so many monsters gathered in one spot, the natural and the unnatural, it was enough to make a skeptic like me believe in fate.

“Nearly everything. You were too good, Ariel. You’re smart, far too smart. You would’ve come to the same conclusion that I did with the information I gave you and the genetic samples themselves. There’s no way to synthesize a drug to cure a chimera, but you lied. You agreed with me, questioning a few things once or twice to make it more believable, but then you ‘helped’ me find the nonexistent solution.” This was how Wendy had found out I’d tried to make a cure and why she was so intent on punishing me. Ariel had told her.

“Anyone as intelligent as you would’ve known there wasn’t one. You’re also too psychologically adept,” I said. She preened as if it were a compliment. Hell, it was. “You asked questions that seemed innocent on the surface but actually tunneled deep beneath it.” She did it better than I could and I’d been a star pupil in the Institute’s psychological interrogation class.

“You used verbal and physical cues to make me automatically trust you. . . . That was why you were so insistent on the video feed. When I talked, you looked at me as if I were the only other person in the world and as if every word I said were the most fascinating thing you’d heard or would hear.” All the best con men could do that, and con men were nothing compared to a chimera. “You dilated your pupils to indicate arousal.” We hadn’t been taught to follow through with seduction; we weren’t taught why seduction was seduction; we were only taught it was bait and a way to get a wary target close enough to touch and kill. That was all the Institute needed us to know—enough for that one touch. More than that was a waste of time and profit. “You did lead into it a little early, though.”

“It couldn’t have been real? Dr. Theoretical, I think you underestimate me.” Her pale pink lips curved playfully.

“It could’ve been.” On my part I knew. On hers I could only guess. “But you were too good at it. Not off by a single note, not once. And then there was this.” I pointed a finger beside my eye to indicate where her mermaid tattoo was. Temporary or permanent; that didn’t matter. It was Disney, and that did. She apparently had fonder memories of those cartoons from Institute days gone by than I did.

“Too good.” She laughed as I’d heard her do many times before, but this time I was positive it wasn’t an act. “Undone by my own brilliance. I do like you, Misha. I really do. It took being with you in person to find that out. Which is why I let Raynor ‘catch’ your girlfriend. I wanted to meet you, know you in real life, not just as pixels. Before that, I honestly didn’t know I could like someone. I didn’t know how. None of us do, do we?”