Rob Thurman: Basilisk

Stefan had started his pickup truck, ladder and paint loaded in the back, but he hadn’t pulled out of the driveway yet. His hand was on my shoulder, giving me a light shake. I left the Institute and came back to the here and now, almost as emotionally lost as I’d been then. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I should’ve known you wouldn’t have seen the news. I shouldn’t have thought you’d be keeping it to yourself . . . I should’ve thought and not thought a lot of things.” I managed to shut up and dive for the glove compartment.

Since Stefan had brought me out of Willy Wonka’s Assassin Factory, as his friend Saul called it, he’d always stocked the cars and trucks we owned with Three Musketeers. He’d said they were my favorite before I’d been snatched and they were my favorite now—a seven-year hole in my memories didn’t make a difference there.

Comfort food was always comfort food. That was one of the first things Stefan taught me and, unlike the teachings of my old instructors, his lessons were always right and true. I held on to the candy bar and felt the chocolate and filler squash under my fingers. “I’m sorry. I screwed up. He was your father. I don’t remember him being my father, but he was yours and I’m sorry.”

“He was, but you’re my brother.” He wrapped his arm around my neck and pulled me close enough to rest his forehead against mine. After all this time, I still felt a knee-jerk reaction to tense up, but I didn’t. Stefan had taught me I didn’t need to and if I did, it would make him feel like shit. I wasn’t going to do that.

“Some family you’re born with,” he said, “and some family you’re goddamn lucky to have. You’d better know which one you are. Got it? And you didn’t screw up. Burning down our garage, now that was a screwup, but this . . . this is just family shit. Nobody gets that off the bat and it’s always messy.” He bumped his head against mine, a light knock for every word. “You . . . did . . . not . . . screw . . . up.”

“Burning down the garage was a possible side effect of my experiment. An acceptable risk,” I muttered, trying to sound annoyed and failing, before straightening to hand him the Three Musketeers. “Comfort food,” I explained.

He accepted it and curled his lips. “You’re a good kid, Misha. The goddamn best.”

I could’ve said, again, that I wasn’t a kid, but this time I was a little smarter and kept my mouth shut.

And I didn’t burn down the garage—only half of it. Big brothers—they couldn’t let the little things go. I almost managed to smile to myself at the thought. Life I might not ever get a handle on, but the brother thing—that I would. I refused to believe anything else.

People are strange.

That’s a polite way of saying people are nosy, snooping, and meddling. I didn’t consider myself those things merely because I’d used the Internet to gather a file on every citizen in town. It was a small town, so it didn’t take long, and I had an excuse. It was a good excuse. People wanted to kill me.

Other people though, those without targets on their backs, they didn’t have that justification for their why, where, who, when, what, and on and on. Stefan had rented the small house on Fox Creek Road because it would be hard to explain how a handyman could buy it outright and worse trying to pretend we needed a mortgage. Saul Skoczinsky in Miami, Stefan’s link to all things convenient and criminal, sent us good fake IDs. I’d since learned to make better, but banks like their background checks as much as I did. It was best to just rent the run-down ranch house with no neighbors in sight, but that didn’t stop our landlady—Adelaide Sloot’s doppelganger, only with bleached-blond hair—from asking where we were from. Why had we moved? How old was I, because Cascade Falls had a woooonderful high school. There had been so many o ’s in that “wonderful,” I automatically knew she had a relative who taught there, a grandchild who went there, or received a commission for every teen she scooped up and dragged clawing through their doors.

That was one subject the Institute had been somewhat dead-on about: psychology. People walked around turned inside out. If you knew enough to look, everything you wanted to know about them was there to see—things you didn’t want to know too. The way she clutched Stefan’s arm and hung on every word of his made-up story; the way her eyes didn’t leave his, not once, as she led us through the house on the showing. She’d lost someone who looked like my brother. Maybe they had just had dark hair and an olive complexion, maybe only the brown eyes. They might have died or left her just because people leave. If Stefan had wanted, he could’ve gotten her to rent the place to us for half or maybe a third the price. He could’ve used the woman’s loss, as I’d been taught to use weakness against others. But he didn’t.

Mr. Ex-Mob paid full price and even painted the place, because it could use it. Patches were peeling off everywhere. I called it the Leprosy House until he finished painting it yellow—yellow paint was on sale that week. Then I called it the Bumblebee House and eventually the Bumble for short. “Are we going back to the Bumble for dinner?” On the inside, I called it home, but home was another word that made the universe notice and then crush you. There was no saying that aloud either—no tempting fate.

When we pulled up out front on the patch of gravel that was the driveway, Stefan passed through the door first. If we were together, he always did—a somewhat less than bulletproof vest. He was my own Secret Service, only without the cool wardrobe.

Inside, Stefan went straight to the kitchen table where my laptop was and opened it up as he sat down more heavily than usual. It would be quicker than finding the story on the television. His voice was heavier too. “Any best site or should I just Google ‘dead dad’?” I was surprised those words didn’t fall out of the air to scuff the well-worn tile of the floor.

I exhaled and reached around him to type in the most informative news site. “Was that a joke?” I asked uncertainly. I didn’t always get jokes, especially dark or grim ones. And just when I would think I was getting better at playing human if not actually getting back to being human, I fell flat on my face. Stefan reached over and took my arm and pulled me down into the chair next to his. The table was round and covered with scratches. I wished I could’ve looked at them instead of Stefan. He didn’t look twenty-seven now. He looked fifteen years older and as tired as if he’d been up for days. If I’d not jumped to conclusions, if I’d figured things out, and told him better, told him right, he wouldn’t look like this. He would look better and feel better, because I would’ve done better.

For a brief second I wished I’d done more to that asshole of a tourist, because then I might have felt better, stronger, more able to cope. But that was wrong, more than wrong, and I knew it. It didn’t change the feeling, however. It did manage to add to the guilt, though. Wonderful.

“It was a joke,” he said, squeezing my arm lightly. “A very bad gallows humor joke, and I’m sorry I made it. In my former line of business, it was the only humor we had. Not-so-good humor for not-so-good people. Smack me if I do it again.” He squeezed again, then let go to start typing and then to read, eyes staring unblinking at the screen.

As he did, Godzilla came slinking across the living room floor and climbed my leg to perch in my lap and rest his chin on the table. All those scratches on the wood were from him, but there was no food there now, which meant he had no interest. I stroked his back with one finger; he made a contented mrrrp sound and casually gnawed the edge of the table with his sharp teeth. Stefan pretended to only tolerate the ferret. Hmm, that wasn’t quite right. Stefan did only tolerate Godzilla, calling him a stinky psychopathic carpet shark, but he did tolerate him for my sake and that said more than if he’d genuinely liked him.