Chapter 2

“Michael.”

The classroom was gray. Everything was gray at the Institute. There were no windows in the room. There were thirteen students, including two more Michaels—Michael Two and Michael Four. But I was the first Michael. I didn’t need a numbered designation. Our creator, Jericho—that was what he called himself—our creator, had thought it humorous to name us after the lost children of Peter Pan. In the story, Michael, Peter, Lily, and Wendy hadn’t been among the lost. In the Institute they were. Every child here was as lost as he could possibly be.

“Yes, Instructor,” I said promptly. You were always quick and you always performed above average or you wouldn’t be around much longer to fail at both of those things.

“Name the proper technique for avoiding suspicion in scenario twenty-seven.”

Scenario twenty-seven was smiling wide and shaking the hand of the president like a good Boy Scout, essay-writer, or boy who’d saved the lives of a burning preschool full of babies. Whatever story it took to get you within touching distance of a man someone, it didn’t matter who, wanted to die. “After inducing a fatal heart attack or aneurysm, he falls, and I cry and ask for my mother.”

“Mommy. At your age, you ask for your mommy,” the Instructor corrected me.

I nodded. “Yes, Instructor. I ask for my mommy.”

My hands were folded and the desk was cool under my skin. I was eight or close to eight. I didn’t know for sure. I’d say young, but there was no such thing as young at the Institute. I had no idea what an eight-year-old in the outside world would do after killing a head of state, but the Instructors told us what to do, how to emotionally manipulate, how to imitate the real thing—a genuine person. Imitation—it was what the best predators did. The biology Instructor told us that.

It would turn out that nothing they’d taught us had been as effective as they’d thought. Killing they hadn’t had to teach us. Killing had been stamped on our genes. Killing was as easy as breathing.

Being human was a hundred times harder.

“Misha?”

Misha, the Russian nickname for Michael, was my real-life name, no matter how much I sucked at real life today. Actually, Lukas was my birth name, but I didn’t remember it. Since I had lived with the name Michael for all the time I did remember, Lukas was one thing too many when Stefan had shown up. I’d been rescued, dragged into a world that I didn’t know from true experience but only through books, movies, and field trips. I’d been told I had a brother . . . every second there had been something new, something strange, something frightening. And although a monster had given me the name Michael, it was the only familiar thing I’d had then—on the run as I was. I was stubborn and kept it, like a security blanket. Stefan had seen I’d needed it and had gone along. Lukas’s memories were gone. In the time since my brother had found me, I hadn’t gotten a single one of those memories back, so Lukas himself was basically gone. I did my best to make sure Michael was the next best thing.

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.

Godzilla, naturally, didn’t care if Stefan liked him or not. Neither did Mothra, the blue jay with the broken wing, or Gamera the snapping turtle that was so old he might have been here before the town itself had been founded. Mothra pecked Stefan’s head if he went too close to the storeroom, which Mothra had claimed as his own, and Gamera, who I would have thought was too ancient to be aware of people or his surroundings, slept in Stefan’s closet and snapped at him every day when he reached for his shoes.

Stefan would glare at me, mutter, but finally nurse his sore finger and say, “Maybe you’ll be a vet.” He thought I was trying to make up for the lab animals I’d been ordered to kill in the Institute to hone the skills they’d forced on us, and I was . . . in the only way I could. Fixing up strays right and left, saving lives to make up for the ones I’d been compelled to take. As if you could ever make up for even a single life you’d snatched away . . . but I tried, knowing it wasn’t good enough. It wouldn’t ever be good enough; yet it was all I could do.

But that wasn’t my only reason for the animals . . . for playing doctor. No, not by a long shot.

Sometimes being smart wasn’t enough. You had to be smarter.

You had to be better.

You had to evolve.

Sometimes you had to be the very best or your days on the run would be short. My time with Stefan was the only real life I’d known, but I wanted more, and to get that, I would do what I had to. The animals were part of that—a huge part.

Maybe later, if I had a chance, I would be a vet. Animals had ulterior motives, same as people, but theirs were much easier to understand. “Misha? You might want to go to your room or outside while I read this.” Stefan’s grin was long gone and his face . . . I didn’t want to say what I saw on his face, so I was a coward and I went outside with Godzilla draped around my neck. I’d watched the news piece on Anatoly. He hadn’t died quickly or painlessly, from what the autopsy had said. The saw marks on his bone had been made before he died. That said more than enough. The time we’d spent in South Carolina—the few months I’d known him while Stefan and I recovered from gunshot wounds—he’d looked so much like Stefan. Bad father, bad human being; it didn’t matter. He had saved us both by shooting Jericho. More important, he had saved my brother. I didn’t want to see his fate when it was reflected in Stefan’s face—a younger mirror of Anatoly—so I left.

Outside, I sat on the small front porch, cracked as it was and tilting, and looked at the trees across the road. They were soothing. Green green green. Nothing but green. Green was my second-favorite color.

Years ago I’d been asked that question.

“What is your favorite color?”

The Institute wasn’t a school, not the kind most people knew about, and Dr. John Jericho Hooker wasn’t an instructor. I hadn’t doubted then that he was our creator. Now maybe I thought he was part creator of some, corrupter of others—like me—but in the end it didn’t matter. He’d been the most frightening son of a bitch on the face of the earth. Cursing was automatic at that memory. When Jericho asked you to do something, you did it. When he asked you a question, you answered it. Years ago in that prison, Jericho had asked me my favorite color.

I’d thought carefully. This was a year or so after the question of the Instructor on what to do when I killed a president. I couldn’t see how giving my true feelings could hurt in this one case. “Blue.” The blue of sky, the blue of ocean. The blue of my dreams.

Jericho’s ebony eyes stared unblinking at me. His prosthetic hand, replacing the one taken by one of his students—one of his creations who was much braver than I’d been in those days—rested on his desk. “What is your favorite color?”

I’d shown no fear. Those who showed fear were weak, and the weak did not often “graduate” from the Institute, although they did graduate from life . . . early. I thought again. I’d seen the movies, the books. I’d seen the trees and the grass on the screen and in the pictures. “Green.”

Those frozen artificial fingers clicked against the top of the desk and the eyes narrowed. “Michael, what is your favorite color?”

Third time was the charm. I’d read that before in those same books. But third time was never the charm here. That I was offered a third time was beyond the best I could’ve hoped for. Yet here it was, my third and last chance.

It was so simple. I couldn’t believe I’d been fooled twice before. I knew the answer—the right one this time. I knew what he wanted to hear. “I don’t have a favorite color.”

“Good. You’re learning. You have no thoughts but the ones I give you. Do not forget that.” His lips curved, the creator pleased that his experiment had performed adequately. That was what I was—an experiment; less than human, different from human, but made to be a reaper of them.

I was glad he was dead. If Stefan’s father had ever done anything right, it was in killing Jericho. Frankenstein had died on a beach like the one where I had been ripped from the real world. It didn’t get any more fitting than that.

It was a story I hadn’t made Stefan repeat time and time again, as much as I wanted to in an effort to get back those vanished memories. He told it once, and once was enough. He’d . . . fractured when he’d told me, like winter ice cracked and shattered by the first warm spring day. It was days before he was back to his usual self. How could I ask again? I’d memorized what he’d said, though, the whole thing and the bits and pieces added throughout the next few years, of what my life had been before the Institute. Anatoly had been big in the Mafiya. He and his wife, Anya, had emigrated from Russia and we were born here. Anatoly had brought the mob with him or the mob had brought him, but whichever, their children had lived a privileged life. When Lukas—I could think of that long-ago child only as Lukas, not me—was seven and Stefan was fourteen, they’d lived in a big house on a private beach near Miami. They’d been given horses for their Christmas presents and when the adult all-day Christmas party started, they’d taken those horses and gone to that beach to race the wind.

He said it was his idea . . . as if that made it his fault. A fourteen-year-old kid wanting to ride horses on the beach with his brother and he said it as if it were a capital crime. Whatever he’d said, it had probably been my—Lukas’s—idea—a big adventure to a seven-year-old. It didn’t make it my fault either. It was only Jericho’s fault. He made killers out of chimeras and that was what I was—a chimera.

Chimeras started out as twins in utero, but then something would go wrong and one embryo would absorb the other. If you were fraternal twins, you could end up with two sets of separate DNA. Human squared. It didn’t mean anything, normally; you just had two sets of DNA, not comic book superpowers. That was true until Jericho came along and made a difference that nature had never intended.

Stefan said he didn’t know how he found out about Lukas—through hospital records most likely; blood tests from his birth—but he had found out and he’d come for his chimera. The surprising part, unbelievable in a way, was he’d waited so long before adding a new one to his collection of other children, the majority of whom had been fetuses implanted in surrogate mothers for pay—drug-addicted and hopeless people no one would miss when they didn’t show up again. Marcus Bellucci, the man we’d thought was his academic rival, had told us that. He hadn’t been a rival, though, or the fountain of information we’d thought he’d been; he’d been a combination of silent partner and silent alarm. He’d warned Jericho when we’d tracked him down and shown up asking questions; then when Jericho died, he’d disappeared.

The Institute had to have a creator.

The Institute was still out there and we knew where. We hadn’t forgotten those left behind. Ten years or the seventeen it had felt like, I wouldn’t leave anyone there to be discarded if the twisting and brainwashing didn’t take hold. And the brainwashed needed to be saved as much as the potentially expendable who fought it off. Nearly three years later we hadn’t made a move to save anyone yet, because what do you do with the brainwashed?

Not all of the students were like me. I’d hated what I could do. Not all others had. What do you do with genetically manipulated killers who have been taught to enjoy killing? When they’d as soon kill you as take your hand to be rescued. . . .

What do you do?

Godzilla mrrrped again and then bit my thumb for attention. I sucked the blood away, then watched as the puncture clotted immediately. In less than a half hour it would be gone. We healed quickly, Jericho’s children—a much better talent than killing. I rubbed the ferret’s head with the fingers of my other hand. With just that touch and a thought, I could’ve shut down the vessels to his heart, his brain. Or I could’ve opened them so wide that there wouldn’t be enough blood pressure to keep his heart beating. I could’ve weakened the walls of his organs until they ripped open, or could have caused them to literally explode. Only a touch and a thought. That was what Jericho had made out of me . . . and every child in the Institute. I could kill but I couldn’t undo a lifetime of conditioning with that same touch.

So what did you do to save those who didn’t want to be saved?

It was a hard question and blind hope was not much of an answer. Neither was a leap of faith. Jericho’s children weren’t built for faith. Not that it mattered, because we were built for determination—success no matter the cost. “No weakness, no limitations, no mercy” was the credo we repeated aloud at the beginning of every single class.

No weakness. No limitations. No mercy.

That, not that it was meant to, was going to help me now, because despite those who might not want to be saved, there was a way, whether they knew it or not. Look at me.

I was saved.

I was smart.

And I was working on it.


Not a born killer, but an engineered one. Taken. Rebuilt. Changed. That was what Stefan knew had happened to me. I’d wondered what Stefan would be if his brother hadn’t been kidnapped. I didn’t wonder the same thing at all about me, because it was beyond imagination. I couldn’t picture it or fantasize about it. It was impossible, and it was for the best, I thought. If I could have dreamed up an alternative to the life that I had lived under Jericho, the memories of the Institute would’ve done what it couldn’t do now—crush me.

Godzilla wrapped around my arm and sniffled, puzzled, for the vanished blood from where he’d bitten me. Like me, he had a bit of a killer in him. When Stefan found that out, about the Michael Korsak compared to the Lukas Korsak—the killer part of me, when he’d found out what I was—he hadn’t been afraid of me or what I could do. Not for a moment. I would’ve known it if he had; I’d have seen it on his face . . . in his eyes, but I’d seen nothing but acceptance. To him I wasn’t an assassin-in-training or a human bullet all the way down to the genetic level. I was his brother, pure and simple, and nothing else made a difference.

He’d actually been a little exasperated that I wouldn’t use what I had in me to protect myself. The drunk outside the bakery was one thing. But when someone attacked me with every intent of murdering me or, worse, taking me back to the Institute, it wasn’t the same. With that kind of adrenaline running through me, starting something was easy. Stopping it wouldn’t be. Stopping it could be impossible.

It had happened once, before Stefan pulled me out of the Institute. As a test—to them it had been only another test—a guard had been sent to kill me. Instead, I had been the one to kill . . . if only once. Wasn’t once far more than enough? It wasn’t going to happen again.

Jericho had changed me in biological ways, but I wouldn’t give his dead corpse the satisfaction of ever having changed who I was as a person. He gave me the genetic skills to be a psychic executioner, but that didn’t mean I had to use them. And, as far as I was concerned, he could rot in his grave for eternity before I became the assassin he wanted.

“Hey, kid.” Stefan sat beside me on the porch. “Have a Fluffernut sandwich.”

He handed me one of the two I’d made for him that morning. I took it out of the plastic sandwich bag and fed a bite to the ferret. The kid issue I simply gave up on for the day. I was nineteen for God’s sake, nineteen and made to kill, but when it came to Stefan, I wasn’t sure he’d let himself ever see me as anything but a little brother. “Do you know what happened . . . to Anatoly?” I should’ve phrased it better. I knew very well what had happened. According to the news report, someone had taken an electric saw to various parts of him. If Anatoly had been alive, and he most likely had been, since the saw had probably been just an interrogation tool, he’d most likely considered anything that happened besides that as merely incidental.

Stefan knew what I meant, though. “No. No idea who snatched him. Mafiya or the Institute trying to track us down.” By “us,” he meant me, but it was nice of him to spread the blame around. “It wasn’t the FBI. They wanted him the most, but, despite Gitmo, no one at the government’s using power saws to get info.” He fed a bite of his own sandwich to Godzilla too. A first—but it was hard to have an appetite when someone had cut up your father with the equivalent of a chain saw while he was still alive.

He cleared his throat. His voice had gotten thick on the word “saw.” “But he couldn’t have given us up. Just as when he was on the run from the FBI and wouldn’t tell me where he was . . . for my own good.” The smile was both hard and regretful. “I didn’t tell him where you and I were. I was more honest, though. I told him it was for our own good, and it turned out I was right.”

“The saw makes me think the mob. There were several vors”—mob bosses—“who’d lost a helluva lot of their territory and power if Anatoly had come back. And that place you were . . .” He hardly ever said “Institute.” It was worse than the foulest word out there for him, from the way he acted. He went on. “It doesn’t seem their style. Torture, yeah, but not with something you could buy at Home Depot. More something scientific and a damn sight worse probably.”

He offered another bite to Godzilla, who considered him and this gesture of goodwill with bright black eyes before biting Stefan’s forefinger and taking the morsel of sandwich. He purred contentedly as he ate the slightly bloodstained bread and peanut butter. I plopped the ferret on the other side of me, but Stefan didn’t seem to notice the slow drops of blood hitting the concrete, scarlet on gray, like the sun setting into a cloud-shrouded, tornado-spawning storm.

I had a feeling that one way or another what had happened to Anatoly would start that storm.

“I called Saul. He’s on some tantric sex yoga retreat or something. Trying to keep up with some women twenty years younger than him,” Stefan said with a darkly amused twist of his lips. “Not that that would have him disconnecting from the outside world and the money that goes with it. He didn’t know anything more than we did, but he’s looking into it—if he can untangle himself from whatever knot he’s tied himself into. Probably has his foot stuck up his own. . . .” He coughed and ate a bite of the sandwich.

I narrowed my eyes. “Nineteen—Jesus, going on twenty. I know about sex, tantric and otherwise.”

He shrugged and swallowed the bite. “Face it, Michael. In some ways you’ll always be the little brother.” His words echoed what I’d thought only seconds ago.

In some ways, always the little brother. In some ways, always seven years old and laughing on a beach. I didn’t need any psych class flashbacks to the Institute to know that wasn’t healthy for either of us. But before I could say anything, Sheriff Kash Simmons drove up in front of the house. The first time I met him, he’d shaken my hand solemnly and said his name was Kash for Johnny Cash and it was my privilege to call him sir. What it was about this town that accounted for no one being able to spell their own names was going to have to remain a mystery, but why the sheriff was idling his gold and brown official car in front of our happy yellow house wasn’t one. The blobby tourist was in the back pointing at me, his mouth moving a mile a minute.

Sheriff Simmons turned off the car and stepped out, giving that same automatic hitch to his belt that all lawgivers in every movie or every TV show did. He had the Stetson, the shades; it was like one of those hyperrealistic video games. Was the Law here to kick ass and take names? No. They didn’t need any names—just more ass to kick. I’d learned a lot of slang and cursing from certain games. But when I’d earned points from accidentally backing over a prostitute, I decided to take all of the experience with a grain of salt.

When we’d first come to town, Stefan had laid down certain rules and sayings for keeping me safe. One of them had been regarding the cops, two total, in Cascade Falls. He told me, “No matter what you do, Misha, no matter absolutely fucking what. . . .” I’d waited for the epic brotherly promise, Dead or alive, I will come for you. I will save you. If I have to claw myself out of my own grave, I will save you. Something like that. I watched a lot of movies, owned a lot of movies. Hundreds. Maybe that was too many, but they did give me great expectations.

What Stefan had actually said had been, “No matter what you do, Misha, no matter absolutely fucking what . . . we can always get bail in this podunk town. So don’t sweat it.”

It was good advice, straight from his mob days.

I’d been a little disappointed. There was a certain lack of No matter what, I will find you! or They can take our land, but they can never take our liberty! Movies do leave you with certain anticipations in some instances. He’d more than made up for it back in Bolivia when he’d told me that if anyone in a uniform grabbed me, I was to kill every last motherfucker wearing one and run for my life. He’d been less concerned with the consequences to my morals than to the consequences to my physical body I carried them around in. And logically he’d been right.

But I wouldn’t have done it, and he knew that too. That was the reason it was a long time before I was able to go anywhere by myself. He’d been my shadow until Cascade Falls, which he eventually deemed safe enough for me.

My background checks on every citizen and the homeless man who lived down by the river with his dog helped. I also got a background on the dog, whom I took a can of Alpo to every day. He was a nice dog. His name was Ralphy, obtained at the pound two counties over—mixed breed, neutered, approximately five years old, and he smelled, but none of us are perfect. This was true of background checks too—they were effective when it came to dogs but useless when it came to tourists. There were too many, too little warning, and not enough time.

Now, here we were . . . about to find out if he’d been right about that bail.

Stefan stayed sitting, and I stood, looking innocent as a lamb—I knew I did as I’d practiced that expression in the mirror many times too. I’d had to. Innocence hadn’t come as easily as the coffeehouse employee-of-the-month expression. Innocence took a great deal of work; it was something no student from the Institute could ever claim. The tourist got out of the car behind the sheriff, his mouth moving. “It had to be that punk. He put something in my coffee. He’s been giving me attitude the whole week. Little bastard probably tried to poison me.”

People—always jumping to the wrong conclusions. Okay, jumping to the wrong methods. And I hadn’t hurt him. I hadn’t. I had inconvenienced him, but I hadn’t hurt him. It was an important distinction. I . . . had . . . not . . . hurt . . . him.

Whether he deserved it or not.

Sheriff Simmons hefted his belt again with one hand and rubbed his mustache with the other. He was young for a sheriff. The mustache, skimpy at best, was overcompensation. He didn’t appear that concerned, however, which was good. I could all but see the thought running through his mind: Of course mild-mannered, well-behaved Parker Alonzo hadn’t poisoned this whiny-ass tourist and if I had, maybe I deserved a medal. But he had a job to do or at least go through the motions of doing.

“This fella—excuse me, sir—Mr. Mitchell says he became violently ill after drinking the coffee you served him, Parker.” The sheriff yawned and continued to question me in a tone more bored than any that could be found in the world. “That’s not so, is it, Parker? You trying to poison this fella? Mr. Mitchell, I mean.”

“No, Sheriff, sir,” I said, shocked—terribly shocked. Goodhearted Parker whom every parent in town knew and wished their kids were like? Never. “I was walking down the sidewalk to take Stefan his lunch when this guy started yelling at me. I didn’t want to get into trouble, and I was kind of worried, you know. Sort of. He’s twice my size.” Three times was more like it, but I was playing nice, although too little, too late. That slippery slope had me now, but I kept the teenage talk flowing. “I kept going, but, like, I could smell the alcohol on him. I hate to say it . . . er . . . sir,” I added earnestly. Hand to God and light a candle for the tourist’s alcoholic soul, I was that earnest. “But I did. He smelled like Old Bob down at the river.”

“Bullshit.” Mitchell, the tourist—with vomit fumes instead of alcohol now, snarled. “I wasn’t drunk.” Which could be true. He could’ve only been buzzed? . . . Yes, buzzed was what they called it. “And I grabbed the spiteful little shit. Shook him good. You be rude to me, that’s what you get. And then he told me—”

Stefan cut him off. “You touched my brother?” The sheriff’s car hadn’t gotten him standing, but that did. “You grabbed him? You shook him?” I slanted a glance to see Stefan’s eyes go that wolf amber . . . slits of pale brutal brown. “You called him names that I’ll bet your mother should’ve put on your birth certificate? Is that what you did, shithead?” He seemed to get bigger somehow. “Well? Is it?”

Before the sheriff’s sunglasses had a chance to slide down his nose more than a fraction at “Harry’s” sudden change of temperament, Stefan was punching the tourist in the nose, which resulted in an explosion of blood. He then aimed the same fist at the man’s oversized gut, causing yet another episode of vomiting, which he had to be tired of by now—before waiting until the man dropped to the ground and following up with a hard, solid kick to the ribs.

I looked up to see Sheriff Simmons peering over the top of his reflective glasses, his eyebrows raised. He didn’t reach for his gun or move. He didn’t look wary . . . but he should have. He was seeing Stefan, the real Stefan for the first time. Harry, the gingerbread-painting, fence-repairing, gutter-cleaning, toss-back-a-beer-on-Friday-nights-at-the-local-bar-and-talk- football, all-around laid-back guy, had just added ass kicking to his resume. And not ordinary ass kicking. In the split second of speed and very purposeful brutality, the sheriff had seen Stefan Korsak of the Mafiya. He’d seen the man who hadn’t wanted to choose a life of violence, but when he had, he’d made sure he was extremely good at it.

What he’d done in that second was only a fraction of what he could do. But then he remembered he wasn’t Stefan here. He blinked, and the bared teeth and wolf eyes were gone and he was Happy Harry again—the gingerbread man. “My old man was in the marines.” He gave a sheepish shrug but didn’t back down. “He taught me a thing or two. He also taught me you don’t pick on kids or family. This guy did both.”

“And I think he’ll regret that—once he stops puking.” The sheriff pushed up his sunglasses and let it go—what he’d seen and what he had to suspect, because it had turned out a few weeks ago that Stefan was right.

In Cascade Falls you could get bail for anything.

Two weeks ago, Stefan had gotten in a bar fight on his usual have-to-be-ordinary-to-fit-in-Friday routine. I’d told him that wasn’t the way to avoid notice, the same thing he was always telling me to do. But he’d shrugged and said, “It was the whole damn bar going at it. If I hadn’t swung back when that guy punched me, I would’ve stood out. Exception that proves the rule.” The bail had been only five hundred dollars. When I’d paid it and picked him up, he’d shrugged, wadded up the receipt, and tossed it in the backseat. “ ‘Harry Alonzo’ now has a record. Actually, that’s my first time behind bars, believe it or not, which means no worry about comparing fingerprints,” he’d said.

This time there was no bail. The folks of Cascade Falls liked their tourists for the most part. But they didn’t like ones that messed with their citizens. The sheriff waited until the one on the ground stopped puking, handcuffed him, and shoved him into the back of the car. “Assaulting a minor is no way to spend your vacation, son.” Before he pushed his sunglasses back up, he winked at me to let me know it was a good time to pretend to be as young as I looked—seventeen instead of the twenty I almost was. “You call us next time you have some out-of-towner giving you trouble, Parker. Harry,” he said, tipping his hat, “nice moves. You done your daddy proud.” Then he was in the car and gone.

Maybe he’d recognized one of his own—a soldier of sorts. Although, from the premature beer belly on Sheriff Simmons, it’d been a long time since he’d kicked anyone in the ribs, which was, if you thought about it, great cardiovascular exercise. I’d have to look into the sheriff again. I’d underestimated him and his skills, former or not. I was really beginning to lose faith in my background checks.

Stefan folded his arms. “If I had a woodshed you hadn’t blown up, I’d take you behind it and beat some sense into you.”

I didn’t bother to roll my eyes, the threat not worthy of a response.

“Seriously, what did I tell you, Misha? Don’t let anyone see what you can do. Although making that fat bastard puke his guts up in the street. . . .” He swallowed the grin that surfaced and went for a more somber tone. “If it’s to save your life, do what you have to do. Absolutely anything you have to do. If it’s just a jackass messing with you, come get me and I’ll make him sorry his father bought that on-sale cheap-ass expired condom. But if it’s not life or death, keep what you can do secret, okay? Or we’ll have more than the Mafiya and that hellish place that took you after us.”

I said pointedly, “Because pounding him to a pulp was much more subtle.”

“No, but it’s not science fiction, so do what I tell you, all right? Now, are you done testing those teenage boundaries? The ones you missed while you were under that bastard who took you? Get it all out of your system, defying the big brother?”

Yeah, my brother was smarter than I have given him credit for sometimes. In matters of emotion, he was five Mensa levels smarter than I was. “He was a dick,” I said stubbornly.

“Michael, in life you’ll discover there are a million times more dicks in the world than there are shitheads to fucking hang them on,” he snorted. “It’s not right. It’s not fair, but we have to work around it. You keep your Superman powers out of sight and I’ll beat the crap out of anyone who messes with my family. Illegal, sure, but not science fiction.”

Superman . . . that was so far off base, I didn’t bother to go there. Like any other nineteen-year-old, I wanted to take care of myself. But unlike any other nineteen-year-old, I could take care of myself. I could take care of myself in a way that could leave the streets littered with bodies. My brother was right. He usually was. And like any other nineteen-year-old, that made me sulk for a while.

But, hey, the word “dick” had come to me naturally. That was something.

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