Chimera

Chapter 15

It rained during the night. A sheet of water had turned half of the parking lot into a rippling reservoir. A trick of the morning light made the depth of scant inches seem bottomless. When you’re a kid, something like that is so . . . shit, “miraculous” is the only word. Just a little thing, but through a child’s eyes it would be a lake so crystal clear that you could sail across glass to the distant shore. There would be trees that blazed autumn colors year-round, animals with the silver eyes of a benevolent moon, and amber gold grass would sing with every whisper of the wind.

It would also be a shore where children had never learned to kill.

I stepped into the massive puddle and broke the illusion. Water soaked through my sneakers as I popped the trunk to the car. My eyes burned from lack of sleep and even the rays of a cloud-shrouded sun felt like needles. Michael had slept a few hours, from what I could tell, but I hadn’t. I don’t think I’d once closed my eyes the entire night. Michael had finally come through with some hard information, as I’d wanted. Ask and you shall receive, right? Unfortunately, what he had told me was right on the edge of being more than I could handle. I’d once thought my brother had been taken by a sexual predator, a twisted perverse monster. I was wrong and I was right. There had been a predator. There had been a monster. But sexual abuse had nothing to do with the nightmare Michael had lived through.

There are all kinds of monsters.

Yeah, all kinds. And the one that had taken Michael was even worse than the pale slavering creepers with long probing fingers I’d concocted in my nightmares. Placing the duffel bag in the trunk, I slammed the lid with unnecessary force. The sound echoed through the deserted lot and sent a knot of birds screeching angrily toward the sky. Crouching, I checked the fasteners on the license plate to make sure they were tight. I’d switched the plates with another car last night just after we’d checked in. The original one was bound to be in the state cops’ computer system as stolen by now. The Toyota was an older car without any of that satellite transponder crap that made life so difficult; I’d made certain of that. For some reason that thought tugged hard at my mind. Unable to catch the kite tail meaning of it as it flew, I gave up and shook it off. If I kept changing plates, I could get a few days before I had to get us a new ride.

“Here’s your soft drink.”

I looked up, startled by Michael’s presence at my elbow. I’d sent him across the lot to a soft drink machine against the building. “Sorry. I was thinking.” Taking the can, I popped the tab and took a swallow and reveled in the life-giving caffeine. “Thanks.”

Rubbing a finger in the condensation tracking the metal of his can, he asked diffidently, “Am I still invited? Or should I catch a bus?”

The can dimpled musically under my clenched grip. He thought I’d desert him, that I was afraid of him. He thought I saw him through his eyes, as he saw himself . . . as yet another monster. Clearing my throat, I growled, “Get in the car, Freud, or you won’t see sugar for a week.”

The relief in his eyes came and went so quickly that it was possible I imagined it, but I don’t think I did. When we were in the car, I rested a hand on the wheel. I could feel the weight of his gaze centered on the small bruise on the back of my wrist. I pulled my sleeve down farther to cover it. “A bus?” I said, hoping to divert his attention. Rolling my eyes, I started the car. “You wouldn’t have the first clue how to catch a bus.”

He frowned instantly. “I took . . .”

I finished the sentence with him. “A class.” I laughed and after a second he smiled along with me. It was a small smile, and hesitant, but it was genuine. Sobering, I offered, “You’re my brother, Misha. As far as I’m concerned, you walk on water. Nothing you could say or do will change that.”

“Except sink?” The smile quirked, then disappeared as his eyes were dragged with obvious reluctance back to my bruise. “No one at the Institute can do anything good. No one who lasts.”

He’d said that last night too. He’d said and done quite a few things. At one point he’d touched a single fingertip to my arm. I’d felt a numbness, then a brief sharp pain as blood cells ruptured beneath my skin. It was then that the story he’d told me seemed as if it could be true—true in the way that violence and disease are true . . . in the way that death and murder are true. And suddenly I wasn’t a big fan of the truth as everything I’d known and believed exploded as thoroughly as my blood had.

“You’re good, Michael,” I said fiercely. “It’s not what you can do that decides that. It’s what you choose to do.” It was a lesson that had taken me too damn long to learn. I didn’t have a single doubt that he would learn it more quickly than I had, if he didn’t know it already. Of course it could be I wasn’t the best one to advise him on choices, because if one day we saw Jericho again, it was a good bet I would choose to make that his last day.

“I hope you find him.” He saw the question on my face and elaborated pensively. “Lukas. You’re a good big brother to him.”

“I’m a good big brother to you,” I corrected firmly. He wanted to believe, I knew he did, but he just couldn’t make that leap of faith. Not yet. Considering what I now knew of his life at the Institute, the fact that he trusted me at all, even if only in the tiniest measure, was a miracle. That he was alive and sane was an even bigger one. One more and the pope would have him up for sainthood.

I, on the other hand, would never be mistaken for a saint. And with what I had boiling in me now after hearing Michael’s tale, the chances of that happening dropped drastically. He’d said Jericho had made them special, and the son of a bitch had. He’d made them so special that most could kill with a mere touch. Some could do worse. Bodies had been warped from nature’s plan. A little girl . . . a very special little girl . . . had nearly destroyed the flesh of my hand without laying a finger on me. If her hand had actually touched mine, I’d be missing that appendage now or I would be dead.

This same little girl had chosen to stay with the man who’d done this to her. The mental had been twisted along with the physical. And why not? That was much easier to do. Hadn’t I convinced myself that my blue fingernails had nothing to do with a small girl with long blond hair? Hadn’t I dismissed it as nothing at all?

I had told Michael about her. Her name was Wendy, he’d said, and Wendy was scary. What had felt like freezing cold was actually blood vessels constricting, cutting off the warming flow of blood. And she hadn’t done it because she was afraid of me; Wendy wasn’t afraid of anything. She simply enjoyed inflicting pain. She was one of the thirty children or so the Institute held. The number fluctuated. New children, usually around the age of three, were brought in when the numbers decreased due to graduations . . . or other reasons. The kids who weren’t working out, who didn’t have a talent sufficiently powerful or destructive, were the ones who disappeared in the middle of the night.

Like Peter.

He wasn’t the first of Michael’s roommates to be spirited away not to be seen again. Peter couldn’t do what Michael and Wendy could—not on a scale large enough to matter. No bruises; no blood; no, the most he could muster was a mildly painful tingle barely worse than a tickle. When it became apparent that was not going to change, Peter’s time was up.

The names had triggered something in my mind—Michael, Wendy, Peter—and then it hit me. Michael verified it. All the kids were named Michael, Wendy, Peter, and John; lost children from the land of Pan. Jericho had quite the sense of whimsy—for a malignant cancer.

My Wendy, the angel carved from the ice of a grave, was actually Wendy Three. Peter had been Peter Two. Michael . . . Michael was simply Michael. He was the first, no number needed, and he remembered no other name; no other identity. His first memory was of classes, meals in the tomblike silence of the cafeteria, and cradling white mice in his hand only to watch them die. White fur was stained with red as blood spurted from tiny mouths. “I cried,” he’d said, so matter-of-factly. He had been so goddamn, heartbreakingly matter-of-fact. He cried . . . the first time, but never again. Jericho didn’t like tears and Jericho didn’t like weakness. The mice progressed to rabbits to cats and then to pigs. Michael wore their blood blankly and without any outer emotion. That it shredded him like glass in places that couldn’t be seen was something he didn’t have to spell out to me.

It was some time before Michael learned to control the darkness that coiled and struck blindly within him. It was even longer before he was allowed to have physical contact with another human.

After Jericho forced him to kill a man, he didn’t care if he touched another person as long as he lived.

It was a test, he had explained, as if it were perfectly normal. Sent on a bogus errand to carry a message to one of the gate guards, Michael was attacked by a strange man as he passed the building’s edge. He was pinned against the wall with a knife to his throat. He had told me that if he’d had time to think, things might have turned out differently. But there was no time, only instinct, and instinct took no prisoners.

The man died. With Michael’s hand spread on his chest, his heart stuttered, then burst like overripe fruit. It was a test . . . just a test. Jericho liked to see how his subjects performed in a variety of conditions. It accounted for the confusing reaction I’d received from Michael when we’d first rescued him. He kept asking if it was a test. He thought he had failed because he hadn’t hurt me.

It also explained what had happened when I’d tended to his cut feet. Not used to that kind of attention, he’d kept his hand hovering over my head. He had been ready to protect himself. It was lucky for me that I hadn’t made any sudden moves. Michael wouldn’t have killed me, I knew that. He wasn’t a killer no matter what Jericho had manipulated him into doing in the past. But he could’ve easily injured me in self-defense.

With just a touch.

“Um, Stefan? How long are we going to sit here?”

Jerking my attention back to the present, I grimaced. “Sorry.” Putting the car in gear, I pulled out of the parking lot. “It’s a lot for me to process. Things like this don’t happen in the real world.” The dark blue mark on my wrist mocked me. “I mean, sure, they can make designer fish that glow and splice jellyfish genes into a monkey, but this is people we’re talking about. Kids.” I’d seen that room in the basement and for all I knew it was one among many, but it was still hard to conceive. It was science fiction with a barbwire twist of horror. “How did that bastard do it?”

“I don’t know.” He shrugged, but I could see it was a question he’d thought about endlessly. “They were careful not to mention the science of it around us. I do know that they would take us downstairs. We’d lie on the bed and they would give us a shot or sometimes gas.” Closing his eyes, he shook his head. “I never remembered anything after that . . . just waking up in my room. And I’d be cold. Freezing for hours.”

I had to consciously relax my fingers clenched on the wheel. “How often?” It came out roughly and I cleared my throat. “How often did they take you down there?”

“Often enough I’ve lost count.” The sun struggled through the clouds and made a halo of blond hair. “Once I woke up with an incision.” Leaning forward, he touched the small of his back. “Here. But that was the only time.”

The only time, as if its happening just once made it better. I tried to find something to focus on, something normal in a world that so unexpectedly was anything but. “My name.” That was something and a good something at that. “You said my name.”

Eyebrows now several shades darker than his hair winged skyward. “And?”

“It’s a first,” I grumbled. “Let me revel, all right?”

“You’re awfully easy to please.” He pulled at the bottom of his new shirt bearing the logo of a popular sports team. We’d purchased the purple and gold long sleeve jersey at the drugstore. He’d given me the same dubious look then that he was giving me now. “Are you sure you’re a mobster?”

“Ex-mobster.” It bore repeating, so I repeated it. “Ex.”

“Where are we going then, Mr. Ex-mobster sir?”

Where were we going? It was a good question.

I was rapidly racing down my list of options. The first had been to get away scot-free. That was profoundly optimistic, I know, but one can hope, right?

Wrong.

The second possibility was one that had been lurking in the back of my mind well before we raided the compound. And I’d exercised it the night before last by calling Dmitri with the intention of finding a place to hide. He could’ve steered me to a safe house. Michael and I would have disappeared in the hairy bosom of the family for as long as it took. Konstantin, however, had managed to bring that plan to a crashing halt. Even dead, the man had the ability to bust the balls of everyone around him.

“There’s a house,” I said slowly, turning over the thought in my mind. “It’s in North Carolina. It belonged to a friend of Babushka.” A gentleman friend as our grandmother Lena had said with pursed and moral lips, I remembered with wry affection. “He left it to her when he died. Nobody knows about it now but Anatoly and me. I think that’s our best bet.”

“I bow to your superior judgment,” he offered with suspicious blandness.

The kid was smart. God, was he smart. He was also a world-class smart-ass; far drier than I, but a smart-ass all the same. That had changed from our long-ago childhood, but I didn’t mind the dig. We Korsaks were known for our mouthy quality. At least, to be more honest, I was. Regardless of our shared sarcasm genes, it was also another step down the road of recovery. It was a road that would probably never end for Michael, but that didn’t matter—not as long as he kept making the journey.

“You come up with a better plan, kid, you let me know.” Keeping my eye on the road, I leaned over and snagged the bag beside his leg. “Here. Read one of your books.” I had directed him to pick out a few at the store. He had chosen three: a murder mystery, a Western, and a horror novel, to my surprise. I would’ve thought his life had been horror enough. Maybe in comparison, the novel would be a mild scare . . . a dark fairy tale. He chose the Western and began reading with one knee propped on the dashboard.

The cover was emblazoned with the typical square-jawed hero in a Stetson. On horseback he stampeded a herd of mustangs through a rocky arroyo. None of them had Annie’s flirty ways or Harry’s black-tipped ears. “Horses, huh?”

His eyes flickered sideways at me, almost with resignation. “I’ve dreamed of horses. All my life.”

That straightened me in the seat instantly. “You know what that means?” He’d carried a memory with him. Jericho . . . the Institute . . . Neither had been able to take his past away from him, not completely. “Michael . . .”

“It doesn’t mean anything.” He turned his attention back to the book and turned a page.

“Doesn’t mean anything? Jesus, Misha, if you were going to remember anything, that would be it.” It was a huge part of when he had been taken. “How can you explain that away?”

“You’ve seen what I can do.” He kept his eyes on the paperback. “Why do you think it stops there? Seeing something that doesn’t belong to me, dreaming it—how is that any harder than turning someone’s internal organs into liquid meat?” Turning a page, he read on.

Michael might think he didn’t believe, but if that was the case, why had he told me? Why indeed. Heartened, I was about to turn on the radio, when without warning my thoughts took off on a tangent—a highly unpleasant one. I’d asked him when I’d first rescued him why they were training him, what their purpose was. He hadn’t answered me then; he didn’t have to now.

Trained to kill, but not as a spy. He was given a deadly ability, but not to use as a last resort. A normal boy had been warped into an engine of destruction, pure and simple.

“You’re a weapon,” I said quietly, my smile long gone. “A living weapon. They tried to make you into the ultimate assassin, didn’t they? You and all the kids. Assassins who don’t need knives or guns. For sale to the highest bidder.”

He raised his hand and shaped it. Pointing an index finger at me, he dropped the hammer with a softly muttered pa-pow.

And he didn’t raise his eyes from the printed page to look at me, not once.