by Rob Thurman
I’d thought Raynor was smart, and he was, and from his files I knew he did love interrogation. That might have been his problem. He was used to torture, used to victims already put through more than any mind or body should have to suffer. He was used to the broken.
Ariel was not broken.
She was an adamantine spirit who’d just been told the best she could hope for was a miserable death here or something worse in someplace called the Basement. You didn’t need to be a genius to figure out it was better to die quickly than pick behind what was beyond those two doors. You didn’t need to be a genius, but she was one.
A genius who took yoga.
She raised her hips off the seat, lunged forward, wrapped her long legs around the metal extension of the driver’s headrest, and proceeded to do her best to choke Raynor to death. Having had a tracheotomy, he was down by ten points already. He couldn’t scream through his mouth and he couldn’t scream through his speaking valve either. Her knees—damn sexy knees—covered that completely. I could see her thighs ripple with muscle as she tightened the grip.
The fact that I was looking at her thighs while the car was careening across the interstate was not my fault. Her skirt was short to begin with. Now it was up around her waist as she did her best to save our lives. The saving-our-lives part should’ve distracted me from her panties, tiny and green with pink bows on each side, but it didn’t . . . and were those rhinestones glittering below her navel and disappearing under her panties? I had the feeling I now knew what “vajazzled” meant.
That was when the car hit the guardrail and flipped. There wasn’t anything I could do to prepare myself, chained as I was, except for bracing my legs against the floor. My head slammed against the window, then against the seat in front of me. I hung upside down briefly, the cuffs tearing at my wrists. My skin gave way where the metal didn’t. Abruptly we were back upright. Outside I saw tufts of dried grass and I guessed we’d gone completely over the rail and down a mild embankment. Raynor was unconscious and Ariel was now in the front passenger seat. Whether she’d been thrown there or had climbed didn’t matter. She was making the most of the moment.
“Where’s the key?” she demanded, her skirt fluttering back down into place. For the second time in days I was damning gravity. “Misha, this is an escape, okay? Stop looking at my ass and tell me where this son of a bitch put the key to your chains.”
I avoided the ass issue—there was no correct comment for that. If I was looking at her ass, then I was too perverted to care about saving my life, and if I wasn’t looking, then she’d want to know why I wasn’t looking. I went with the simple truth. “I don’t know. I was unconscious when he put them on me.” More like three-fourths dead, but we didn’t need to go into that. “Check his suit pocket, then his pants pocket.”
“Oh, fun for me. Having to stick my hand next to a psycho’s wienerschnitzel.” She searched his suit jacket pockets first and found nothing. “Wonderful,” she snapped before gamely going into his pants pocket. “Whoops, I was wrong. Not a wienerschnitzel. Closer to a cocktail weenie. Doesn’t it figure. Massive ego, teeny weenie. Ah ha!” Triumphantly, she held up the keys, reached across him to undo the childproof locks to the doors, and had me unchained in less than three seconds. “Don’t look so worried, Misha.” She wrinkled her nose. “I’m not an S&M queen. I worked as a magician’s assistant one summer. I can also hold my breath for three minutes under water. You wouldn’t believe how popular that made me when I turned eighteen.”
I could imagine all right and now wasn’t the time for it, but for once my body didn’t obey me. I found out it was not impossible to run with an erection, but it was somewhat uncomfortable. We headed away from the interstate. No one was going to pick up two people hitching for a ride at four in the morning and I didn’t want to run into any police. That was a complication to avoid. I hated leaving Raynor alive, but if I had been the killer I refused to be, I couldn’t kill him in front of Ariel anyway. That would be a much bigger complication than the police.
That meant we ran. If only two hours had passed since Raynor had kidnapped me from the motel in Springerville, we were still in Arizona. All we had to do was find a phone and have Stefan and Saul come get us. However, in the ambient light of a sickle moon, it looked as if we were in a popular Arizona attraction, the Petrified Forest. There weren’t a lot of phones there. Petrified or otherwise.
Chapter 10
Ariel leaped over fallen stone tree trunks with as much grace and style as if it were an event in the Olympics and she were being judged. All tens. She also didn’t stumble a single time. Considering we were away from the highway lights and going by the limited light of the moon, that was impressive. I didn’t stumble either, but chimeras had excellent night vision and mine had only become better as I matured, the same as everything else.
“You have great night vision,” I said as we ran, neither of us winded so far.
“You have no idea. My brother, not the hacker, but my other brother, is a pilot. His vision is twenty-ten. My whole family is freakishly talented, apart from my sister. She’s four and tells everyone she’s an alien or a visitor from an alternate dimension, depending on her mood. She collects toy horses, then covers them up with little blankets for bedtime, except she covers them all up—including their heads. Her room looks like a fluffy pink horse morgue. She also wants to design shoes made out of human hair. She doesn’t say where she’s going to get the human hair, though, so when I go home to visit, I tend to lock the door. By the way, I was going to ask if that was a ferret in your pocket or were you just happy to see me, but I already saw the hard-on, so I’ll just go with nice ferret.”
I grinned. With Ariel, there was no point in being embarrassed or you’d spend every minute of the day bright red. “Thanks. His name’s Godzilla.”
“The ferret or your penis?”
“I’ll let you guess.” I stopped to get my bearings. Looking up at the position of the stars, I started running again, bearing to the right.
“With my night vision and the ability to visually measure to within approximately one centimeter, do you really want me to?” She was laughing again. Not many people laughed after being kidnapped, being involved in a car wreck, and having to use yoga skills to choke out an evil son of a bitch.
Godzilla poked his head farther out of my jacket pocket and chirped curiously. “I think I’d rather you didn’t. Godzilla, meet Ariel. Ariel, meet Godzilla. He bites pretty much every chance he gets. I think the Visitor Center is this way. We can call for help.”
I didn’t say call my brother. I’d been careful not to give out any details about Stefan or to mention that he even existed when e-mailing or talking to Ariel. I’d been taking a risk with her from the beginning by investigating the genetics issue, and growing to know each other hadn’t made the risk any less. I hadn’t been willing to add Stefan into that mix. When she asked about family, I told her my parents were dead and my sister had been in the Peace Corps but died in a plane crash in Africa. That tended to limit questions and made me as sympathetic an orphan as a grown man could possibly be.
“It is? How do you know? Have you been here before? You know, when you weren’t running from a crazed psychopath with deep, dark, and mysterious designs on you that you haven’t bothered to explain yet?”
Since I’d met Ariel online, I’d noticed she never used one word when five hundred would do. Just as she never wore one color when there were at least seven right at hand. “Yes, I’ve been here before.” I picked the question that could get me in the least amount of trouble. And saying, no, but I had memorized the maps of every state we’d passed through so far in case escape routes were needed wasn’t something I was willing to offer. It wasn’t as if I could pass it off as an interesting hobby.
“So, if we find the Visitor Center”—she sailed over another petrified tree—“and we break in to use their phone, who are we going to call? That guy’s government, the kind of government that the government it
self barely knows exists. He can eat police for breakfast and make prisoners disappear forever. The police can’t help us with whatever bizarre thing you’re involved in. Oh, hey, my little sister would kill me if I didn’t ask: Are you an alien? This is just like all the movies where peaceful aliens come to Earth and the evil government tries to dissect them. Although I highly doubt any alien would come here. I believe in aliens. Trillions upon trillions of galaxies; we can’t be the only intelligent life out there. But with all our fighting, wars, disease, poverty, and reality TV, we’re like the meth–central, white-trash trailer park of our corner of the Milky Way. No alien would stop here to gas up. And who could blame them?”
There’d been a question in there somewhere. Now, what had it been again? Right. Whom were we going to call. “I have a friend who lives close to here. I’ll call him.”
It turned out I didn’t have to call Stefan. He pulled into the Visitor Center at the same time we made it in. He didn’t look pleased. He didn’t look pleased in the way Rabid Zombie Werewolves from Mutant Hell—it was a real movie; I’d seen it—weren’t pleased. He opened the door of the SUV and stepped out. There was the subtle motion of him putting his gun in the back of his jeans that no ordinary person would notice, twenty-ten vision or not. “What the fuck happened?” he demanded. He could’ve said more, considerably more. Out of nowhere it was my Internet friend from New York. I was in the middle of a park instead of asleep in my motel bed. I’d left everything behind, including my phone . . . everything except Godzilla. He had a bubbling volcano full of questions and he couldn’t ask any of them in front of Ariel.
I had some too, the main one being how he had found me.
“This is your friend? Is he psychic or what? How’d he know where we’d be? And why’s he so angry? What a temper. I don’t know that I’d be friends with someone with that kind of temper.” That was a good one with the way she’d done her best to break my ribs in Raynor’s car. “And could someone kick in the door to the Visitor Center? I have to use the ladies’ room, and I don’t want to go around back and get my ass stung by a scorpion.”
Saul stepped out of the other side of the vehicle. I pointed at him. “He’ll kick it down for you. That’s Bubba, my other friend.”
It was almost worth Raynor’s being left alive to kidnap and plot to see the contortions Saul’s face went through when he was labeled with the fake “Bubba.”
“Yeah, sure, chiquita,” he said dubiously. “I’ll kick it down for you.” It took him a few tries, but once they were inside and I heard the bathroom door slam, both Stefan and I went at it.
“Raynor’s alive. I was out putting money in the vending machine,” I started to explain—I supposed we’d have to leave money to pay for the Visitor Center door too; being a good citizen was frequently frustrating—“and he shot me in the head with a rubber bullet. I woke up, chained, in a car going north. He’s building a new Institute in Montana and was taking me there. One of his goons stumbled across Ariel in Cascade. She was worried about me and had tracked my IPS, although I bounced it around the globe a few hundred times. She’s apparently as smart or smarter than I am.” Which everyone lately appeared to be. “He thought she’d be insurance on my good behavior. She figured out he’s government of some kind. She thought my name was Bernie, but she heard him call me Michael. We escaped when she choked him out with her legs—she takes yoga—while he was driving. The car flipped and we escaped. She doesn’t know I have a brother. I said I’d call a friend from the Visitor Center for help. That’s it.” My short time in person with Ariel had taught me how to spit out a lot of information in very little time. It was useful.
I pointed at him. “You. Go. How’d you find me?”
He stared at me. I remembered when he used to have to look down to meet my eyes. Now that we were the same height, the stare was somehow more intense and as ferociously amber as one of those Rabid Zombie Werewolves.
Shit. I’d been so busy explaining what had happened that I’d forgotten how it had happened.
“We’re on the run and you were shot in the head when you went outside without me,” he said, his voice unnaturally calm for what I knew of my brother.
“A rubber bullet. He might as well have hit me with a Tic Tac.” That wasn’t quite true, but downplaying it was my best hope.
“When you went outside without me.”
“You were asleep. You needed the rest,” I pointed out.
“Without me.”
I opened my mouth, found nothing and no words that were going to turn this around, and closed it.
Stefan apparently approved of the move and answered my question. “I found you because I woke up when your friend Peter the Pied Piper of killer kids called on that phone he left you.” I’d kept it in case he did. It was too cheap to be GPS enabled and he wanted us to find him anyway. “When that happened and I discovered you were gone, I used my own tracker.” He bared his teeth in a savage smile. “They’re like iPhones, right? Everyone has to have one.”
“Your own tracker?” Despite the smile he’d used only against people he was about to beat up or shoot, I was curious—guilty as hell too, but curious. “What’d you track? I know you didn’t plant anything in me when I wasn’t looking.”
“Your rat. One day when you were at work, I took him to the vet and had him chipped. I know it’d break your damn heart if he ran off.” His smile was no less pissed off.
No, what he knew was that at least fifty percent of the time Godzilla was with me and if we ever had to run again, it would be one hundred percent of the time. He’d outthought me when I hadn’t had a clue he was thinking about having to run at all. “That is devious as hell. That is Institute devious,” I said with reluctant admiration.
“You bet your ass it is.” This time the smile disappeared. Lines bracketed the side of his mouth and I could tell he was more tired now than when I’d “helped” him sleep. “What did you do, Michael?” There was no Misha now. He knew what I’d done. I’d used my genetic abilities on him, though I was doing it for him. It was a violation, a huge one. That deserved my Institute name. “I would’ve woken up when you opened the door. After the mob, after what you and I lived through before, I would’ve woken up and we both know it.”
I was an ass. I hadn’t meant to be. I’d tried to do a good thing, but we were in a situation where there were no good things, only the right things. I hadn’t done the right thing. I’d been careless. “You were tired. I was only going to be out there two minutes. I wanted you to be able to sleep. I thought I was helping, but clearly I fucked up.”
He stared at me for another second. “Fucked up doesn’t begin to cover it.” He headed back to the SUV. “Let’s go. We have to get rid of your girlfriend somehow and get back to finding Peter and his goddamn posse. And we have Raynor back on our asses. I assume he’s not as dead as we’d hoped or you would’ve told me.”
I’d disappointed him. There hadn’t been a time Stefan had been disappointed in me—until now. I felt as if I’d been kicked in the stomach, a kick much worse than the ones Ariel doled out. I would’ve rather he went back to being angry with me. “Stefan,” I said quietly, “I’m sorry. I’m. . . .” I was what? What else was there to say? He’d thought he’d lost a brother again and if my healing abilities hadn’t quadrupled since I was seventeen and if he hadn’t chipped Godzilla, he might have. He was right. Fucked up didn’t cover it and neither did “sorry.” Nothing did.
I walked in silence behind him. I had issues. Anyone raised at the Institute would, but I hadn’t felt this worthless and guilty in my life. Each step I took felt mired in quicksand. He was the sole family I had and I’d let him down.
Where was my genius now?
Stefan exhaled, stopped, turned; then he hooked an arm around my neck and squeezed. “Still your brother, Misha. I love the hell out of you, jackass. We’ll write this off as lesson learned, all right? Now, get your girlfriend. Apparently she has a black belt in yoga but takes as long as a nine
ty-year-old woman to pee.”
My shoulders slumped in relief at his willingness to forgive. “Why is it men piss and women pee?”
“Okay, loving you a little less,” he snorted. “Go.”
I started to, but paused. “Wait. You said Peter called. When you answered instead of me, what did he say to you?”
He shook his head. “You don’t need to know. You tried to do something for my own good. I know this is for your own good. So go get the girlfriend.” He checked his gun, replaced it, and covered it with his shirt. He didn’t know he’d done it. The move was completely automatic, caused by the memory of what Peter had told him. Peter said he was curious about me. Peter was not curious about Stefan in the slightest except in how many varied ways he could dispose of him.
That wasn’t going to happen.
“Go without you? What happened to lesson learned?” I leaned against the SUV beside him. “I think I’ll stick around. ‘Bubba’ can hurry her up.”
Stefan’s lips twitched. “What if he flirts with her?”
“First, he’s in his forties. That’s disgusting. Second, if she did take him up on it, she’d kill him. His heart would give out before the Viagra kicked in.”
“There’s something to be said for dying a happy man,” he commented, eyebrows raised.
“No, there’s not.” My mood at being forgiven abruptly deflated.
“No?” The eyebrows went a fraction higher and his lips twitched again.
“No,” I said darkly, moving to the hood to see inside the Visitor Center.
Seriously, how long did it take someone to go to the bathroom?
