Basilisk

Chapter 8

The tracker led us to a house just beyond the outskirts of Laramie. It was the only one at the end of a long gravel road. Its isolation made me think of our house in Cascade Falls—or what had been our house before it had burned. The isolation was the only thing that reminded me. This house needed painting, but it had no Stefan to paint it. Its wooden shutters were split and on the verge of falling off most of the windows. The weeds that made up the yard were taller than my knees. It was all gray. The unpainted concrete porch, the bare, rotting wood, the grime-covered windows—they were the colors of no color at all.

Except. . . .

There were balloons—red, yellow, blue, green, purple; the helium had them bouncing in the breeze. They were tied to the mailbox at the road as people did for birthday parties. When I’d first seen that, fresh out of the Institute, I’d asked Stefan if clowns lived there. What did I know about celebrations and parties? Peter knew, though. Two weeks on the outside and he knew what it had taken me months or longer to learn. How had I missed seeing that in him? Genius beyond customary chimera genius—he was extrapolating information and customs I’d had to learn and he was doing it with what little data the Institute had given us. He was the chimera Einstein, and that not only made him as dangerous as Wendy, but maybe more so with his maturity level and cunning. I was in over my head. We all were, but there was nothing to be done about it. I wanted my brother to stay safe; I wanted Saul . . . well, out of hearing range, but that didn’t matter. We couldn’t let death roam in a pack across the country. If we did, I couldn’t say how long the country would be left.

We were the only option; I was the only cure.

“I don’t think they’re in there. Not anymore.” Stefan had traded his Steyr for one of the tranquilizer guns. “I believe they outfoxed the tracker, Misha.”

I didn’t have a lot of doubt about that either. The homemade banner across the front door that read TOO SLOW, MICHAEL. BYE-BYE and the fact that their GPS signatures hadn’t moved in more than twenty-four hours were sure signs that too slow was me indeed.

Peter had thought of something else that I hadn’t during my escape. Stefan and Saul, not I, had figured out I’d been implanted with a GPS tracking chip. It hadn’t crossed my mind then, but it had crossed Peter’s. I tightened my lips and headed down the grass-spotted driveway toward the house. I managed two steps before Stefan moved in front of me—no surprise there. “When do I lead the way?”

“When you’re sixty, not nineteen, and I’m in the nursing home. And I’m hoping before then we can stop worrying about who goes where first.” Stefan had switched the tranq gun to his left hand and now carried his 9mm in his right.

Behind me, Saul said, “You can both go first. No skin off my nose.”

“You’re bringing up the rear, guarding my flank, aren’t you?” I demanded, for Stefan if not for me. It was hard to gain acceptance as being as efficiently dangerous as an ex-soldier, such as Saul, and an ex-soldier of a different sort, such as Stefan, without their seeing me in action. And while I did want their respect, hurting people to get it . . . That situation hadn’t come yet. I should hope it wouldn’t. Being a man and leaving childhood behind were damn challenging and equally damn confusing.

“I’m not interested in your rear or your flank,” came the breezy reply. “You’re not a woman into thigh-high boots, thongs, or getting the good parts vajazzled, are you?”

I’d been ready to detect his lie. I was not ready for “vajazzle.” I didn’t know what it meant. I didn’t want to know what it meant. My suspicions alone were ghastly enough, and now was not the time to be distracted. Peter and the others were gone; I was ninety-five percent positive. But five percent could kill you the same as ninety-five. One percent could kill you.

If Wendy was inside, she could kill us all.

Stefan kicked down the front door. I had my own tranq gun up and ready to fire. As Stefan had said, aim for the torso and I’d be fine. And while real guns didn’t interest me, I had practiced once with the tranquilizer gun. My aim was more than adequate, and my hand/ eye coordination excellent, which was not a result of denying myself Sara from the coffeehouse’s company and keeping my own company while locked in the bathroom, as Stefan had suggested. That wouldn’t have given me good hand/eye coordination, only repetitive motion injury.

Stefan disappeared into the gloom of the house and I followed. My eyes adjusted quickly and I could see the signs of habitation in the here-and-there streams of sunlight finding their way through gaps in the musty-smelling curtains. Full garbage bags were stacked neatly against one faded green wall. The bags were white but transparent enough for an observer to see they held empty food containers. Pizza boxes, empty tubs of ice cream, microwaved potato skins and fried cheese; bag after bag from fast food hamburger places. There was more, but I looked away to continue visually searching the room. Knowing that Peter and the others were like me when it came to taste and appetite wasn’t helpful to the situation. Anyone locked in a prison where sugar was a concept, not a reality, would flip in the other direction with freedom. That didn’t make us the same, not even close.

Saul darted out from behind me and, moving in a crouch, checked out the rooms off the main one to the right. Stefan handled the one, a dining room, to the left as I made my way to the kitchen. I’d thought the house was abandoned, which was why Peter had chosen it. It wasn’t. The ancient refrigerator was humming noisily. The electricity was working and so was the water. I tested the tap—the water ran cold and clear. It would be with thirteen chimeras making use of it. There’d be no chance to get rusty and orange. The kitchen table was as scarred and rickety as ours had been in Cascade but with only one plastic chair. Whoever had lived here, and I was completely certain it was “lived” in the past tense, had lived here alone.

On the table was a chipped mug and in the mug was a pile of small pieces of metal—GPS chips. “They figured that out damn quick, didn’t they?” Stefan remarked grimly at my shoulder. “How’d they know where they were? And how’d they get them out? With a butcher knife?” He waved a hand at a butcher block knife holder on the counter. It and the knives were dusty with disuse. Our absent owner wasn’t into cooking. No, they hadn’t used those knives.

I put the gun on the table and pulled up my sleeve to absently trace a finger across my forearm. Beneath my touch a cut instantly opened. Chimeras, except for Wendy, were bred to block harm from other chimeras, but harming yourself was another story. You had only to open that internal door you kept locked from others like you. “That’s how. As for knowing the chips were planted at the base of the spine as mine had been, if you knew you had a chip, you could search and find it within yourself. I didn’t know, so I didn’t look. Peter’s smarter than I am, Stefan. Much smarter than I remember him being. You should know that. You should know that things have gotten more difficult.” I pulled my sleeve back down as the cut began to heal. “More . . . lethal. We should send Saul back to Miami.”

If Stefan had gone for it, I would’ve added that he should head somewhere far away too. Let a chimera deal with an impending chimera apocalypse. But that wasn’t going to happen. I knew my brother too well there.

“You really should’ve slept with that girl at the coffee shop.” Stefan had both hands full, but he had a free elbow to poke me lightly in the ribs. I didn’t know how an elbow could be reassuring, but it was.

“I really should have.” I sighed and reached past the mug for a cell phone resting there. There was one voice mail. I thought for a fraction of a second, then punched in the only password it could possibly be: Jericho. The father of us all. Bellucci had been nothing but the most distant of reflections, an ego with nothing to back it up. The phone pinged in my ear and I heard Peter’s voice, smooth and convincing as any lawyer on the TV commercials telling you he’d get you millions for your fender bender. “Michael, Michael, how can you be with your family when you can’t keep up? Can’t catch up? I thought you were better than that. You always lacked a love for the work, but I’d hoped the outside world had changed you. After all, our god chased after you and didn’t come home again. No one could have predicted that.”

No, no chimera could, and Peter couldn’t know I had nothing to do with Jericho’s death. Even that monster I couldn’t kill. There had been failures before me—chimeras who weren’t genetically perfect, not strong enough to kill. I had been the only one strong enough, but I had refused.

“We have things to do, Michael. Many things. Entertaining things. We can’t wait forever on you, but I’m not writing you off, brother. If you’re worthy, you’ll find us. Don’t forget you are one of us.”

The voice mail disconnected in my ear. Peter’s voice disappeared.

It wasn’t true. I wasn’t like them, not in the ways that counted.

And they were not my family.

“Are you all right?” Stefan’s elbow nudged me again. “I heard the voice. It was that kid Peter. What did the son of a bitch say?”

“That he wants me to find him, but I’m just not trying hard enough.” I wanted to throw the phone against the wall. I didn’t. When you could kill with the touch of a hand, when you were taught to want it and do it exceptionally well, you were also trained to not lose your temper. No one wanted to buy an assassin who got pissed off that he was served fish instead of chicken and would exterminate you instead of your enemies. Obedience was a must. The Institute had failed there with me and failed with Peter too. Peter’s disobedience had been more catastrophic than mine. I wondered how his temper training had taken.

“There’s something in the backyard.” Saul joined us. Like Stefan, he had a tranq gun in one hand and a real one in the other. He peered in the mug at the bits of metal encrusted with dried blood. “Yum. There’s a new way to get your daily iron. Chug it in your coffee.”

“What’s out there?” Stefan headed for the window over the cracked and stained sink.

“Looks like a body.” Saul shrugged. It was the kind you saw in ex-military people: been there, killed that. “Smells like a body. I cracked a window for a whiff. Someone had to own this mansion before the kiddies moved in.”

“Shit.” Stefan stared out the window. “Another one bites the dust. Could be worse. I just hope it’s not another Zombie Bob. I’ll go check it out. You two look around and see if you can find something, anything that points to where they’re going next.”

“I already have that. I’ll explain later.” I slipped the cheap phone into my jacket pocket. “So we can all check out the body. I can tell how long they were here by the decomposition rate.” The helium in the balloons gave me an estimate as to how long they’d been gone. The bright balls, though still floating, were beginning to dip. They’d left three to five days ago.

“Looking at dead bodies doesn’t bother you, Mikey?” Saul asked with a bemused note that thrummed under the words.

You didn’t have to be ex-military for that to be true. I shoved the tranquilizer gun into the back waistband of my jeans. “I’ve dissected dead bodies; I’ve been surrounded by dead bodies; I’ve made dead bodies,” I said flatly. “I wish they did bother me. You bother me, though. One more ‘Mikey’ and every time you see a woman, you’ll piss your pants, then vomit, and maybe, just maybe, lose control of your bowels. Good luck finding a thong lover who’s willing to take you on then.”

Stefan, who’d also put away his tranq gun but kept his Steyr, grabbed a handful of my shirt and ushered me toward the back door. “Enough. No more jealousy. It’s not becoming to a genius. Now, get your ass in gear.”

As he hustled me with enough annoyance to let me know I was somehow screwing up, I sputtered internally. Jealous of Saul? Why in the world would I be jealous of Saul? Because Stefan had a friend who was here and now when, for the past three years, Stefan and I had been each other’s sole support system, unable to trust our neighbors and fellow employees? That Stefan was family, my family, my brother, my friend, and the only person who had ever been any of those things to me? And that I didn’t want to share him because there had to be people out there less . . . challenging than I was—the little brother Frankenstein experiment, and he might realize that if given the chance?

All right, that was completely psychologically healthy. Not fucked-up in the slightest. Stefan gave me encouraging pushes toward other people, and I yanked him back with my background checks and my occasional infliction of gastric reflux on his rare dates. I was a genius and an idiot wrapped into one, but most of all . . . I was a dick. And unlike other things in my life, there was nothing theoretical about that.

“Sorry, Saul,” I grumbled. “I won’t turn your body and its ability to process Viagra against you.” At his elderly fortysomething, he was bound to require it. “Just, seriously, don’t call me Mikey, all right?”

A hard smack hit my back and Saul’s gloating grin didn’t have to be seen—only imagined, clear as a bell. “Sure thing . . . Mikey.”

I really did hate him.

The body, a man in his seventies, was sprawled in the tall weeds by a detached concrete building—too big to be a shed, too small to be a garage. The decomposition was more advanced than that of those in the Institute, but Wyoming had had some rare rain over the past week and the coyotes hadn’t let some fast food of their own pass by. Both Stefan and Saul leaned in for a closer look and then stepped back a few paces when the smell truly hit them. To me it wasn’t any worse than the smell of cooking cabbage coming from the Institute cafeteria—different but no worse, and in some ways, not as bad. Cabbage was disgusting.

“They came straight here from the Institute.” I straightened from my crouch. “He was about a month away from a massive stroke. A dead man walking, isn’t that what they say? No challenge, no fun. They didn’t bother to play with him. One of them simply blew out his aorta and down he went.”

“I’d say that’s something at least, but I’m not sure it is.” Stefan was slowly picking up on these chimeras being nothing like me. That was good. It would make him more careful. “Let’s take a look in the outbuilding, then get the hell out of here while you explain how we’re going to track down this pack of rabid human wolves and fix them.”

“Kids did this,” Saul mused. “I know what you guys have said, but it’s weird to see.”

“This?” I shook my head and tossed him my own phone. “This is nothing. If they had it in them, you could almost call it a mercy killing. Here. I transferred some of the Institute video onto it. Take a look. You might want to see for yourself what all of this really is.”

Stefan tried the handle on the metal door. It was locked. He tried kicking it down as he had the front door of the house, but he only ended up cursing. “I think that poor bastard thought Y2K was the end times and planned on riding it out here. You can pick the lock or I can shoot it out.”

“How do you know I can pick locks?” I asked suspiciously.

“Assassin, drug lord, bomber, hacker, man of a million identities. Now that you’ve come out of the closet as a master criminal and not the little brother who can’t understand Lolcats, I’m pretty sure there’s not much out there illegal that you can’t do.” He didn’t appear pleased at that, only tired. “You grew up to be me. It’s not what I wanted, Misha.”

“It’s not real,” I said quietly. “It’s not forever. It’s only until we’re safe for good. And I don’t make any money off any of it. I’m a pro bono criminal.” I tried to smile. It didn’t feel real either. “We’re the only ones who benefit from it and that benefit is staying alive. It’s not the same as what you had to do.” I didn’t want to disappoint Stefan, but I didn’t want him dead either. I’d do what I had to, just as he had.

I fished inside my jeans pocket for a tiny packet of metal tools rolled up in a piece of felt. As I went to work on the lock, I heard Saul make a sound. If there was a word for it, that particular mixture of horror and disbelief, I didn’t know what it was. I could hear the tinny screams from my phone and then Peter’s and Wendy’s voices. But the time I had the door unlocked, Saul gave the phone back to me. “Okay,” he said, brusque and pale under that leathery Miami tan. “I’ve seen it. I get it now. Let’s go.” I noticed he’d dropped the phone into my hand without touching my fingers. I had a feeling there would be no more “Mikey’s” from now on. I’d wanted respect. I had it. I hadn’t wanted fear, but I had that too.

If wishes were horses, they’d kick you in the gut and, when you were down, dump a steaming load of manure on your head. Why didn’t useless homilies ever tell it to you straight?

“We’re in.” I put away the picks and my phone.

“Good job, vors.” Vors—it meant boss in the Mafiya. This time the comment was said with an exasperated light swat to my jaw and a reluctant pride to the compliment. “Sorry I came down on you, kid. You’re doing the best you can, which is better than I did.” Then the sugary sweet, birthday-cake-frosting moment was over—one of the moments guys aren’t supposed to acknowledge—and Stefan was pushing open the door cautiously. It was dark inside, darker than the house had been. Here there was only one tiny window set up high in the back wall. I could make out the shape of a riding lawn mower, some tools against the right wall—a rake and shovel were most likely. I could see the cables running up the walls. This place was wired for electricity. So where was the switch? I had just spotted it, halfway back on the left wall—a stupid and inconvenient place to put it—when I saw something else almost at the same time. Less than half a second separated the discoveries.

It was a girl. She looked four or maybe five; it was impossible to tell in murk this thick. She was standing in a back far corner, facing into it—a bad girl who was sent for a time-out, nose to the wall. She had bright blond hair, but not as blond as Wendy’s. It was tied back in two ponytails. There might have been ribbons . . . I narrowed my eyes, and the gloom and shadows lightened. Ribbons, blue ribbons. Her dress was blue as well, her socks pale, probably white, her shoes gone. She didn’t move, didn’t say a word. She was a child left to die alone in a locked building, too afraid to turn and ask for help, too terrified to know we were better than the ones who left her there.

Except. . . .

She wasn’t crying for help because she wasn’t breathing. She wasn’t turning toward us and freedom because her heart wasn’t beating. I couldn’t hear it or sense it. I couldn’t feel the life in her because there was no life. There hadn’t been any life in her, not for a moment. I knew life. You couldn’t steal it if you didn’t recognize it and any chimera would know what she was—a fake; a life-sized doll.

A trap.

But Stefan wasn’t a chimera. He was a man and a good one. He had been taught by his bodyguard days to be cautious and suspicious, but this was a little girl and not one he’d seen on the Institute video. To him, all he would see was that she wasn’t a chimera. To human eyes it was too dark to recognize she wasn’t anything at all. Before I could open my mouth to tell him to stop, he was there, turning the toy around. It didn’t matter that he felt the plastic under his hand and backed up immediately. It was too late. The wire was tripped and the cloud that billowed was as thick as a summer storm.

Chlorine gas—it was easy enough to make. Rob your kitchen or bathroom of ammonia and bleach and Mr. Charles Darwin stepped in. You could scrub your toilet and die with a brush in one hand and People magazine in the other, or you could be a chimera, smarter than you had any natural right to be, and use it. You could gather enough, put it in a container, seal it, connect it to a trip wire that was attached to a doll cute enough to pass for the real thing, and you had a way to kill two men almost instantly . . . or however many men happened to be with the Institute escapee trailing you. It wasn’t a good way to go, the gas. Your lungs scarred nearly immediately from the corrosive fumes, then filled with fluid, drowning you. If mixed right, it was fatal.

If you were a chimera yourself, it was mildly inconvenient. We were made to be predators, not victims.

I didn’t bother to yell Stefan’s name. It would be time wasted. I ran for him, grabbed his arm as he started to stagger, then raced back toward the door. Along the way, Saul was starting to drop to his knees. I used my other hand to grab his shirt, another brain-bleed-colored monstrosity, and yanked him along too. The rectangle of light we’d entered through wasn’t far, but in a cage of poison gas, far is relative and time is not your friend. I managed to get them outside, each step seemingly mired in mud as thick and cloying as molasses and quicksand, before dropping them in the grass as I slammed the door shut behind us. Then I grabbed each by the shirt collar and dragged them farther away. Little gas would escape that sturdy metal door, but I wasn’t much for playing odds, especially when it came to the lives of my brother and my friend.

I sat between them in the scratchy, high-arching weeds and laid a hand on each of their chests. “It’s okay. Chlorine gas is easy to make, but Peter hasn’t been out of the Institute long enough to know the Internet is usually wrong. He didn’t get the mixture right. The ratios were incorrect for a lethal blend. It’s nasty, but no worse than pepper spray. Take some deep breaths. You’ll be all right.”

That was when the small concrete building exploded. Interesting fact: Not only could you make chlorine gas out of bleach, you could also make plastic explosive. It was more likely you’d blow yourself up while stirring the pot than succeed in your “recipe,” but that was why funeral homes had closed caskets . . . to carry your many varied moronic pieces to Heaven or God or whatever you believed in.

I bent my head, hands on Stefan’s and Saul’s chests as they coughed. Fragments of concrete flew over and past while the dry grass–weed mixture all around us smoldered and caught fire. It had rained once, but once wasn’t enough to save this place. A chip of metal or concrete hit my jaw, then flew on, leaving a jagged slice behind. I felt the clotting begin and the skin knitting back together. There wouldn’t be a scar. I’d healed fast at seventeen. Now I healed at a speed I didn’t want Stefan to know about. I’d been different long before he’d found me. Now I was different to the tenth power. I didn’t want to be. I wanted to be more human, not less. I wanted to be like my brother.

This was one of the less times, but the rapidly disappearing wound on my face wasn’t something I wanted him to see or a truth I wanted to spill. Not yet. I’d said it a hundred times to myself over the past year.

Just . . . not yet.

Stefan coughed hoarsely and Saul, whom I might not hate after all, choked out, “Been . . . pepper sprayed. This . . . is . . . worse.”

“Pepper sprayed. You.” Stefan coughed explosively again, then managed to get up on his elbows. “Not . . . surprised.” He looked around, eyes streaming from the gas. “Holy shit. We’re on fire.”

“Only a little,” I said, exaggerating or rather underestimating some, but it was a triage moment. You had to breathe before you could run. “Catch your breath and we’ll make it out of here before we’re charcoal.” I felt his and Saul’s hearts beating under my hands, fast with adrenaline but healthy and whole. There were no arrhythmias. Chances were approximately seventy-nine percent that we would make it out of here without being barbecued as they’d wanted to do to Wilbur. I had a flashback to the Institute and brightly colored videos. What had poor Wilbur ever done to anyone? Or the spider, Charlotte? Or Bambi’s mother?

That Disney guy had been an excessively cruel man.

The building blew up a second time, what was left of it. Stefan took matters into his own hands. “Breathe . . . later,” he wheezed as he got to his knees and then to his feet—unsteady and weaving, but upright. “Run now.” Saul followed suit. They were tough, for humans, both of them. Strong. It had helped them survive their lives and it helped us survive now. We did as Stefan said—we ran. Saul’s khakis caught fire once. I patted out the flame when he would’ve paused to do it himself and pushed him on. We ran around the house instead of cutting through. Who knew what traps could be waiting in there that we’d simply missed the first time or were waiting their turn.

At the SUV, I climbed behind the wheel while Stefan all but fell into the passenger seat and Saul literally dived into the back, nearly squashing Godzilla. I started the engine and tore down the gravel road as fast as the SUV would go without sliding on the gravel and off the road. I didn’t think the house would explode as well, but naturally with all things Peter in the past two days. . . .

I was wrong.

A smoke detector wired to more homemade explosives would do the trick. That was how I would’ve done it, but with Peter showing himself to be more intelligent than I was, guessing was all I could do. The vehicle rocked, but we were out of range, barely, although part of the roof landed close enough behind us to momentarily lift the back wheels inches off the road. They smacked back down and I kept driving. Stefan was hanging on to the door handle. He hadn’t had time to fasten his seat belt—safety first, he’d always told me, the hypocrite. But I would let it go this time. “I guess I should be grateful you stuck to pipe bombs,” he said, his voice hoarse from his coughing. “This Peter might not know shit about chlorine gas, but he knows explosives out the ass.”

“Sometimes you get lucky,” I said darkly, jerking the steering wheel and spinning the SUV in a tight circle at the end of the road—a dead end. Why was life so damn appropriate when you least wanted it to be? I headed back the way we’d come, weaving around the pieces of roof and wall in the road.

“If Peter wants you to catch up with him, why is he trying to kill you?” Stefan finally put on his seat belt after I smacked his arm repeatedly and pointed at it.

“Because if these minor problems stop me, then I’m not deserving enough to find or join them.” I steered around a flaming piece of drywall.

“That was minor? You’re kidding, right? Two explosions and not-quite-good-enough chlorine gas is minor?” Saul sat up in the back and rubbed his chest as if it should ache. He took his hand away and frowned as if surprised that it didn’t.

“Chimeras can kill with a touch, but other people, nonchimeras”—humans, in other words—“kill in other ways. The Institute taught us all the ways there are to accomplish that, to be on our guard against the weaker . . . I mean, normal people.” Chasing daily after those genetically the same as me, if not mentally, made it easy to forget who was normal and who was not. “They didn’t get into specifics on how to make those types of weapons. We didn’t need to make them—we just had to know what we might be up against. But give one of us chimeras the Internet and we don’t have to be in the same state to kill you. We specialize in assassinations that look like natural deaths. Peter isn’t interested in whether they look natural or not now. He’s free. They all are. Free to kill in any way they like.”

“Like a buffet.” Stefan exhaled, leaning back in his seat. “They’ve found new toys to play with and after a virtual lifetime of solitary confinement, why wouldn’t they want the different and the new? If it weren’t for the trying-to-kill-us part of all this, it would be hard to blame them.” His eyes flicked to the rearview mirror to watch the burning foundation of what was left of the house behind us. “You said you had a way to find them despite their removing their chips. I don’t doubt your genius, kiddo, but how?”

“There were only twelve chips in that mug.” I took a hand off the steering wheel and for the first time in my life ruffled his hair, wavy and thick as a dog’s undercoat, in mockery of what he’d done to me more than a time or two when I was younger. Turnabout was fair play. I wanted to see how he liked it. “I’ll teach you about counting sometime. I might get you up to twenty if we try really, really hard.”

“I’d call you a shit again, but it’s not helping with your behavior, so it’s a waste of breath I could use. And both hands on the wheel.” He didn’t swat my hand, though, which was considerate in view of how many times I’d swatted him. “Are you telling me, in your own thoughtful way, that one of them kept a chip? Why?”

“I think Peter is curious about me. With my escape—with me went Jericho. That will make him more curious. Jericho was our creator. It’s almost unbelievable he could die. Peter wants a look at me, to see if the outside world has changed me to make me more like him.” I turned off the gravel road onto a paved one. It was empty except for us. “That doesn’t mean the chip is in one of them—one of them could be carrying it in a pocket for all I know. They could be rid of it in seconds. They might’ve split up, too, although I don’t think that’s likely. Peter’s charisma, his ‘family’ brainwashing, and his intelligence are vital to keep them all from going wild and getting noticed. They want to kill and they will kill, as often as possible, but they don’t want to be revealed for what they are for the first time ever and possibly put down. They need guidance. Peter is doing that.”

“Sounds like a fun guy.” Saul had his phone in hand in the back. “I’d better call nine-one-one before that shit burns down all of Wyoming.”

I ignored him. He could save Wyoming, which made him the good citizen of the hour. However, I had other things on my mind. “This is a guess, Stefan. All of it. Keep that in mind, okay? I can’t predict Peter. He’s not the same as other chimeras and not the same as me. He’s—what do they say?—a mystery. He’s a mystery.”

“A goddamn, arson-loving mystery,” Stefan corrected.

“That too,” I agreed.

“And same as you said, nothing like you,” he added.

“I know.” Or I hoped, and hope was the best you could do sometimes.

I drove for an hour after talking Stefan through recalculating the tracker to focus from a mass of chips to only one—it had Wendy’s ID code because the universe sucked that way—before I noticed the cop behind us. He was far back but closing fast. With the explosions, I’d avoided the interstate in case of the state police, Hazmat, or fire trucks. What had happened at the house would bring in the federal responders on top of the state and city ones. It was best to stay out of sight. But it turned out a deputy had better sight and intelligence than I’d given the locals credit for.

Instead of joining the circus that had to be surrounding what would be left of the house and building by now, he was out trolling the local country roads for any suspicious vehicles. And with our stolen Utah license plate, we were out of place, off Laramie’s beaten tourist track, and that definitely was worth investigating.

“He’s sniffed us out.” Stefan had swiveled in his seat when he saw my quick look at the rearview mirror. “Smart cops can screw your shit up, especially when you don’t have the Family’s money looking out for you. Damn.”

“Your boss paid off policemen?” I asked. “Like in the movies? As in The Godfather?” The same as the movies—it shouldn’t have left a type of celebrity tingle down my spine, but I forgave myself. I was going through serious movie withdrawal these past two days.

“In his day, he paid off policemen, police chiefs, judges, senators.” Stefan turned a forbidding look on me. “Do not be getting any ideas, Misha. You’re already full of enough of them to be Lex Luthor. Now pull over and let’s deal with this guy. Saul, don’t kill him.”

“What am I? An idiot?” came the answer from the backseat. “It’s hard to run a business from death row. No, thanks.”

I pulled the SUV over just as the sheriff’s department car turned on its light and sirens. When the deputy climbed out of the car, his face was blank, but I could see a twitch of displeasure in his jaw. He hadn’t gotten to play with his toy car nearly as much as he would’ve liked to. I already had my fake license in hand. . . . The registration and insurance from the glove compartment wouldn’t match, but I expected to take care of our cop problem before it came to that. Or so I thought.

The deputy had drawn his gun and had run from his car to ours, shouting, “Get out of the car! Get out of the vehicle, all of you, hands behind your head, and lie flat on the ground! Do it now!”

“Fuck,” Stefan muttered, and, cop or not, he slid his hand inside his jacket for his gun. He’d have good intentions; that was my brother—following those good intentions all the way to an internal Hell, though those intentions had saved me. He’d doubtlessly try for a leg shot, but you never knew what would happen when you were trying not to kill someone and you were both armed.

I had planned to touch the deputy’s hand when he took my license and put him to sleep. I’d say it was now time to improvise, but chimeras didn’t improvise. We moved to plan four. Plans two and three were based on a less aggressive and less intelligent deputy—balls and brains, irritating. I’d already rolled down the window and had to keep my voice low as to not be heard by the Law Enforcer of the Year outside. “Stefan, I have diabetes.” I didn’t ask if he got it or understood. My brother was smart too.

I opened the driver’s door and stepped out. I wavered a little, hands up but too floppy and uncoordinated to cup behind my head. My license fell from fumbling fingers into the dirt where we were pulled off the road. “I . . . I don’t feel so . . . where . . . I? What’s going on?” As soon as the “on” left my mouth, I bent and projectile vomited, Exorcist style. Linda Blair would’ve given me a ten out of ten for style and a record-breaking eleven for velocity. The splatter of my lunch on his shiny mirror-bright shoes distracted the deputy as I fell to the ground, to the side of my recycled lunch—that much into The Exorcist I was not—and began having a full-blown seizure. I flailed, convulsed, foamed a little at the mouth for veracity, and decreased the circulation to my lips to turn them temporarily cyanotic blue.

Stefan came boiling out of the car. “He’s diabetic! He’s going into ketoacidosis. That’s a diabetic coma, you dumb country shit. Help me hold him down.” He yelled back at the car, “Jack, call nine-one-one!”

The deputy had seen a lot of faked illnesses in his day; that was the nature of being a cop. Fake pregnancies, fake grandpa’s-having-chest-pain, fake kidswallowed-the-dog’s-squeaky-toy, all to get out of a speeding ticket. But he had never seen anyone who could vomit and turn cyanotic at the drop of a hat. He was smart, though. He didn’t drop his gun, but he stepped closer—close enough that one of my flailing hands smacked his leg. Cloth didn’t stop the touch. It was too flimsy an armor. He went down, loose-limbed and easy as Godzilla did for his afternoon ferret nap. Stefan grabbed the gun from his hand as he fell, explaining, “No need for baby to accidentally shoot us as he goes sleepy-time. Good job, Misha.” No Good job, Misha, except for risking your life when I could’ve risked mine instead and probably gotten shot in the process. Not even a Good job, kiddo. I couldn’t imagine I appeared proud while at the same time wiping the foam and traces of vomit off my mouth . . . but I was. Proud as hell. It was good to be the little brother, but it was also good to be an equal—a partner.

Stefan nodded at the deputy’s car. “Don’t forget that while you’re on a roll. You’re the computer genius. See if the car has a camera. Are we on video, can you erase it if we are, or do we need to blow the damn thing up?”

Computer genius? “I’m the everything genius”—I frowned—“and that seems either your or Saul’s criminally inclined abilities are up to something that simple.”

Stefan grinned. “You’re the newbie in this elite fighting force. I wouldn’t want to take away that rite of initiation.”

“Initiation?”

“You know,” he said, his grin wider and, I thought, more evil, “where we make you do all the scut work while we sit back, drink beer, and criticize your technique. We all go through it. Saul peeled potatoes in the military. I mopped up the restrooms in the strip club. Good times, Misha. Welcome aboard.”

“Stop playing around, you jackasses.” Saul had his own window down now. “He could have called for backup. Let’s get out of here before our secret weapon with a double-oh-seven in puke has to spray the entire sheriff’s department.”

I was going to have to commit one way or the other on Saul’s not being that bad or being a demon from Hell who deserved a thousand agonizing deaths.

But I had scut work to do and that decision would have to wait. While Stefan dragged the deputy off to a safe distance, I blew up the car with the three pipe bombs I had left. It was quicker and more efficient. I also ended up thinking that being a partner wasn’t all chocolate pancakes, sex with a smart girl, and late-night movies. How fair was it that the genius had to be the cleanup crew, too? I continued to bitch to myself. I’d worked too hard for this. I’d ride out this “newbie” thing and then it would be all chocolate pancakes, sex with a smart and pretty girl, and late-night movies. And if I had to build a state-of-the-art smart and pretty Fembot to make that happen, I’d do it. The real thing was difficult to find while being on the run from killers or chasing killers or both. Maybe I’d give her a pink wig, the same color pink as Ariel’s hair.

I’d better stock up on WD-40.

In minutes we were back on the road with yet another explosion in our rearview mirror. I drove several miles until we saw the first opportunity to steal another license plate—Wyoming this time—from an abandoned rust bucket on the side of the road. This time we were headed toward Tucson, Arizona, Wendy’s chip beckoning the way. It wasn’t a tingle that went down my spine this time. It was a chill.

Icy as winter’s first breath and a dying man’s last.