Basilisk c-2

by Rob Thurman

  I didn’t need a gun.

  “You forgot your lunch,” I said, before repeating for the third time, “and I’m not a kid.” I’d had the bag in the car and had planned on driving it over to him at noon. Now it was an excuse for a few more minutes to stall and think how to go about this. He was only protecting me, or thought he was. I had to get him to see that he wasn’t. Not anymore, not by holding back vital information. It was time to treat me as an equal, not as a little brother.

  He caught the bag I tossed up to him. I made him lunch every day. I’d considered writing his name on the side in marker, but my newfound sense of humor might get my hair ruffled with that one. And raised in the Institute or not, trained for an obedience and passivity that, in my case, never really took, I was not putting up with that at all.

  Lunches were only part of it. I tried to take care of Stefan for all he’d done for me. He said I was an idiot and that it wasn’t necessary and something else after that, but I’d tuned him out by then. He was as overprotective of me, physically and emotionally, as he accused me of being of him. When it came to arguments over who didn’t owe anyone anything, I ignored him and did what I wanted—I gave him what he did deserve . . . or the best I could.

  He could talk forever, but he wasn’t going to change my mind about that. Besides, it made me happy, and he liked his brother happy, so he huffed and let it go. I’d discovered peanut butter and Marshmallow Fluff sandwiches were the very best things in the world and that was what I made him every day—two of them in a brown paper bag. I didn’t think people carried their lunches in brown bags anymore, but I’d seen it once in an old movie at the Institute and the image had branded itself onto my brain as the ideal family moment—the handing over of the brown-paper-bag lunch before sending Junior on his way. That was the way it was done and that was the way I was going to do it.

  Movies were how I learned a good deal about life in the Institute—where there was no peanut butter or marshmallow. Three years in the real world hadn’t changed movies or me as much as I’d thought it would. Stefan said there was nothing wrong with that. I liked movies and real life . . . though it wasn’t always one hundred percent likable. I didn’t blame myself for preferring the fake version once in a while. Stefan wasn’t actually thick. He was smarter than I was in a lot of ways.

  He opened up the bag I’d tossed and caught the whiff of peanut butter and Fluff. I know, because I did too. The smell made me hungry. His lips twitched with a particular amusement I hadn’t quite figured out yet before he rolled the top back shut to wait for lunchtime. “Thanks, kiddo.”

  “For the fourth time, I’m not a kid. I’m an adult.” I folded my arms and gave him a grim frown. “Nineteen. Almost twenty. A goddamn adult.”

  “ ‘Goddamn,’ huh? We’re having a serious moment here. And legally maybe you are an adult, but you’re kind of scrawny.” He grinned. He always grinned or smiled or bumped my shoulder. He kidded about calling me a puppy, but you’d have thought he was the most harmless, puppylike grown man with matching puppy brown eyes if that was all you saw—him with me. When you saw him with other people, he was different—harder, cynical, not to be messed with. When you saw him with people who wanted to hurt us, he was lethal. Period. And his smiles then were nothing near puppyish. They were the smile of a wolf before its jaws closed on its prey, and those brown eyes went pure rapacious amber.

  Stefan could go from puppy to predator in a heartbeat and then end yours.

  Right now he looked like a happy Labrador. The scar that ran along his jaw from his chin almost to his eyebrow only made his grin look wider. He yawned, up and out to work before dawn, and looked me up and down with a dubious snort. “If adult were measured in pounds, I don’t know . . . it’d be close.”

  I let my frown deepen. I’d grown since I’d been with my brother. I’d gone from five foot nine to five foot eleven, the same height as Stefan, but I was . . . not skinny, but light, built like a runner. Considering our lives, that was a good thing. I was just your average teenager with average brown hair and slightly less average green eyes. One of my eyes was blue and the other green. Far too distinctive, which was why I wore a colored contact lens to give me matching green eyes. To the people in town, I was nothing out of the ordinary—as we’d planned and as being in hiding required.

  I was stalling, but I had to stop. It wasn’t going to be pleasant, but it was time for the truth. “This is serious. I am an adult and you have to accept that. I mean it. Stop being so overprotective.”

  “I swear,” he said, a puzzled furrow appearing between his brows. The Institute had a class on reading facial expressions. I was seventy percent effective at it—not that great among my peers, but passable. I could tell if someone was uncomfortable by a crease, whether it was physical or emotional distress by a line, and the cause of it by a flicker of their eyes toward the source. I could diagnose an STD faster than any doctor and without having to see one single crotch scratch.

  “I don’t have a clue why your panties are in a wad,” Stefan went on.

  “Did you think I wouldn’t find out?” I tilted my head, trying to figure it all out. “Unlike you, who just reads the comics”—a lie; that was only every other day—“I watch the news every day.” As well as reading it online . . . every day, several times a day, alert for any pertinent fact that someone was on to us.

  “And?” he asked, looking more confused than before.

  Oh, shit.

  That cursing came naturally for the third time today. I didn’t have to check my mental folder for it. I’d made a mistake, a big one. I stopped frowning and ran a hand in unconscious imitation of him over my brown hair. I could’ve kept my face from tensing—in the acting class at the Institute we learned that perfect assassins are perfect actors—but I didn’t. Because that would have been a lie and I wouldn’t lie to Stefan. Not unless it was for his own good. “You don’t know. About Anatoly. You don’t know.”

  Because he was painting. Because he wasn’t by a TV. Because he didn’t listen to the radio that often while working.

  Maybe I wasn’t smart. Maybe I was as idiotic as they come.

  I took a step backward, the longtime natural instinct of a former prisoner, then reversed to take one forward, a new instinct, hard won. “He’s . . . gone. I’m sorry, Stefan. They found his body. He’s been dead for about four weeks. Anatoly’s gone.”

  The lunch bag didn’t drop from his hand, but I saw his fingers loosen. He was stunned and why wouldn’t he be? Anatoly was dead. His father was dead.

  Then his fingers tightened and the paper bag crumpled under his hand. I could guess, sort of, what he might be thinking, his first thought. We’d talked about Anatoly since my rescue and I’d gotten a fair picture of Stefan and his relationship. Anatoly and mine, not as much, but I knew Stefan and his father—our father—as much as I could. What do you think when your father dies, when he never was a father at all but an imitation at best? How can you love and respect a man who ordered people killed as easily as he ordered dinner in a restaurant? You pretend, I guess. Pretend, and when that man dies, you mourn what should’ve been . . . what you wish could’ve been, not what actually was.

  Stefan had said he’d never killed anyone in the mob and I believed him, but if it had come down to it . . . if it had been kill them to have the money to save me, I knew what his decision would’ve been. He would’ve killed his own soul for me. He thought that made him and Anatoly not so different. He was wrong. Anatoly had done it for the money and the power. Stefan would’ve done it to save me, because Anatoly wouldn’t give him the money then to chase ghosts. To Anatoly, that was what I’d been. He’d given up on me when Stefan never had. No matter what Stefan thought, he was nothing like our father. And I only called Anatoly our father aloud and in my mind for Stefan.

  Stefan had told me once that he didn’t know that Anatoly didn’t love his sons, because he didn’t know for sure that he didn’t. Murderers could love their own—couldn’t they? I did
n’t know, and I didn’t think Stefan knew for sure, but I agreed they could. It was what he had wanted to hear. That was something I’d learned on my own, not at the Institute.

  “Stefan?”

  He blinked at the sound of his name, his real name, and corrected me automatically—“Harry.” Here we were Harry and Parker Alonzo, not Stefan and Michael Korsak. Stefan and Michael Korsak were on at least two kill lists. Fake names kept it that way, because you came off those kill lists only when you were dead. I’d picked the names . . . from another old movie, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. It was my favorite, though it was older than I was.

  Stefan had snorted when I’d suggested it and promptly said that if I wanted to call myself Sundance, he supported my bold and very personal decision.

  I’d called him an ass, another curse word I’d learned to use, and gave him Harry. It was Sundance’s real name and I used Parker, Butch’s last name. He was the smart one after all, I’d told my brother smugly, although I wasn’t being too bright right now. Harry was also the name of Stefan’s horse that was shot and killed on the beach the day I was taken by the Institute. I thought that might bother him, but he’d said no . . . that we leave memorials scattered through our lives in different ways. Gravestones were frozen in time, but memories you could take with you anywhere. Names too—you could keep them with you always. He hadn’t thought Harry would mind.

  “Harry,” I corrected myself with my frown returning, this one directed at my own forgetfulness. I was better than that and had been trained to be exceptional in all areas of deception. I wasn’t being exceptional now. “We should go home. I’ll tell Mrs. Sloot that a pipe burst. It’s flooding the bathroom. You have to go home and fix it.” I turned to go inside the house, but then I hesitated long enough to say over my shoulder, “I’m . . . as I said—I didn’t think . . . I’m sorry.” It was the most awkward handful of words to come out of my mouth probably ever. It was self-conscious and tongue-tied five times over, but it seemed to mean something to Stefan. The darkness in his eyes lightened a little.

  He cleared his throat and replied, “Thanks, but he was your father too, even if you don’t remember.”

  I nodded silently and went on into the big house with trim the color of half-fresh mint green and half-faded lavender. As I did, I heard the lid being hammered back onto the paint can. Anatoly was gone and there was Stefan covered with paint, doing a job his father would’ve had hired someone to in turn hire someone else to actually do. If it didn’t involve a gun or a knife, manual labor was far beneath him, I imagined. But he was the man who’d bought Stefan his first bike or at least had been the one to give it to him after having his own handyman put it together. Stefan had mentioned the bike. Anatoly probably wasn’t there for school things . . . whatever school things there were—plays or football. But he’d been there for Christmases, Thanksgivings, birthdays, at least half the nights of the week. I’d seen the pictures when recuperating in South Carolina. I doubt he’d hugged Stefan much, though, except when he was younger than three. A web strung together from what Stefan had told me and what logic trumped. That was what I thought and with years of being near the top of my class in psychological training, and, with a failing grade being a failure at survival, I thought I guessed right.

  Stefan had once said Anatoly thought I’d hung the sun and the moon—that I was special. I honestly didn’t care what Anatoly had thought about long-ago Lukas. Contrary to popular belief, it isn’t the thought that counts. What did count was a rescue ten years later by a brother who had refused to give up.

  I knocked on the door to the house and as the sign, painted in loops and whirls with tulips and roses, told me to, I went on inside. There, Mrs. Sloot—“Adelaide, sweetie. Call me Adelaide”—tried to stuff me with sugar cookies. “Such a skinny boy.” I might be almost six feet, but I didn’t look nineteen. Seventeen was the best I could hope for, but I could’ve looked fifty and still had grandmotherly women trying to shove food down me. It happened all the time.

  I learned to live with it, take the cookies, and be grateful I was too old for them to pinch my cheek—although the lady in one of the tourist shops in town had, only a different cheek. I hadn’t told Stefan. He would either laugh or break her arm, and arm breaking wasn’t part of the whole lying low thing. “Yes, Miss Adelaide, water’s everywhere. Harry’s going home to fix it.”

  Her poodle jumped at my feet, then nipped me on the ankle as she tsked about our bad luck and gave me another cookie. “Oh, Parker, sweetie, look at my new tchotchke. I know you like animals. Sookie-Sue loves you. You’ll think it’s cute as can be.” I did like animals and Sookie-Sue was the first one to not like me back, but. . . .

  It was too late. She’d shoved a small statue into my hand. It was an armadillo, I guessed dubiously, dressed like a clown, with a happy pointy smile, soulless red eyes, and balloons held in a gloved hand. It was the ugliest thing I’d ever seen. “It’s nice,” I lied effortlessly. I hadn’t been an enthusiastic student at the Institute, but I had been a good one. Sookie-Sue nipped me again. I sighed patiently, but I did like all animals, including the ones that made it a challenge, and I didn’t nudge her away. “What is it?”

  Adelaide pursed her lips, coated with bright orangered lipstick to match her hair, and her drawn-on eye-brows arched. “I told you, dear: it’s a tchotchke.”

  My own eyebrows, and I actually had some, went up at the answer.

  She scooped up Sookie-Sue. “Teenagers these days. Don’t know a thing. A gewgaw, knickknack, bit of froufrou.”

  Stefan’s hand landed on my shoulder and he said with the friendly handyman’s persona he’d perfected, “Useless dust collector, Park. Don’t you start collecting’em.”

  “Ah.” I handed it back to her with as much care as I would for something not nearly as hideous and worthless and corrected my mental file of Adelaide Thomasina Sloot from mostly harmless with three unpaid parking tickets to bizarre, dusty, possible automotive maniac, with the ‘harmless’ designation to definitely be reevaluated at a later date.

  Background checks were useless if you didn’t update them frequently.

  “Let’s go home and get that mess cleaned up.” Stefan steered me toward the door.

  My mess. It wasn’t all over the bathroom floor, but it was all over just the same. All that training . . . I wonder if the Institute knew how unreliable it was. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t, and you never were quite sure which would be which. The Institute’s students didn’t fit in, no matter how many classes they gave us. We couldn’t always act like normal people. We could manipulate them, but not act like them . . . not be normal people. Of all the training they’d given us, in the end we were good for only one thing; we could excel at only one thing over those normal people.

  Killing them.

  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 a
sk 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.