by Rob Thurman
He scowled, his small face twisting and turning red. With blond hair and an oversized head, he looked about three, but he hit as if he were age eight at least. His hand smacked mine hard and then he tried to wrestle the bag from it. His skin was warm against mine, too warm. “Taco!”
“Oh my God, I am so sorry.” A woman, presumably the mother of the budding Antichrist, rushed over and grabbed him around the waist to pull him back. Her hair was blond too, her skin tan, and she weighed about a hundred and five pounds, which could be why she was unsuccessful. He hung on tight to my hand and shirt, and this time the scream of “Taco!” almost shattered the window and door glass of the fast food restaurant.
Three booths down, Saul, now dressed in more than purple spandex, had buried his face in arms folded on the table and was shaking with not-so-silent laughter, the bastard. The mother pulled again and this time managed to pry the Satan spawn off me. Chimeras I was used to. Normal children who also had the ability to maim and terrify were a new experience. “Sorry, sorry,” she apologized again as he began kicking rapidly at her legs. “He has tonsillitis and it’s making him cranky. He’s having them taken out tomorrow morning.”
I edged out of the booth, my bag of food and my Mountain Dew cautiously hidden behind me. “He doesn’t have tonsillitis.” The screaming became louder. “My father’s a doctor,” I lied without compunction. “I’d have him rechecked before they do surgery.” Again the screaming notched up. She appeared confused, forehead wrinkling, and I tossed a bit of convincing logic to go with the rest. “If he can scream like five hundred demons from Hell, the little shit, I think . . . my father would think if he did have tonsillitis, it’s cleared up now.” That was when I found out where the kid learned to kick so ferociously.
In the SUV, I sulked and nursed my wounded pride. The bruise on my shin from the woman’s shoe would be faded already and on the verge of disappearing altogether, but my temper remained dark. The little monster deserved tonsillitis. Too bad. I should’ve left well enough alone. Saul was yukking it up in the backseat while Stefan tried and failed to look sympathetic behind the wheel. “Why did she do that?” I mumbled around a mouthful of chili cheese fries. “I didn’t do anything wrong.” I’d actually done something right. I’d saved Damien from an unnecessary surgery. I missed my movies, but thanks to that kid there was one I wouldn’t miss. All that boy needed was a tricycle, because he already had Satan in his corner.
“You called her sweet little baby boy a demon from Hell. Worse yet, a shit. Moms don’t like that.” Stefan swallowed his laughter in to the most unconvincing cough I’d ever heard.
“I did not.” Okay, yes, I did call him a shit, but not a demon. “I said he screamed like a demon from Hell. I didn’t say he was a demon from Hell. He’s Satan at least. I was assaulted by the Omen and you have no pity at all, do you?” I frowned.
“You faced down the Russian mob and the Institute and you can’t handle a toddler?” Stefan grinned. “How much pity do you think you deserve?”
Finishing the fries and with the tacos long gone, I decided now was a good time to talk to someone less judgmental, in addition to one with no knowledge of the attack of the evil taco thief. What was I anyway? Meals on Wheels? His mother had money and taco-buying ability. Obviously she had no foresight or spirit of preparation in the face of the purely sinister demands of her own child, but it wasn’t as if anyone could hold me accountable for that.
If Ariel wasn’t online, I’d see if there was any suspicious rash of deaths in Laramie, other than the ones I’d already found dated last week. There hadn’t been any more yet, but with Peter and the others there, and according to the Institute’s GPS tracker they were, it was only a matter of time. I grabbed my laptop and opened it as I tipped back the cup for the last swallow of Mountain Dew. I loved caffeine almost as much as grease and sugar. Stefan took in the sight and drawled, “Greek Gods live on Mount Olympus. Geek Gods live on Mountain Dew.”
“Drug dealer, pilot, ex-assassin-in-training, genius, geek, and hot.” I didn’t bother to gift him with a glance. “Can you claim that many talents?” I started typing and hacked into the nearest secure WiFi. The free, unsecured kind didn’t last past the parking lot of the coffee shop or bookstore that hosted it.
“That is damn talented,” Saul said from behind. “Maybe I should think of hiring you as a subcontractor. God knows I make no moral judgments. I make money. That’s it. Things are much simpler that way.”
“Simple in the way you assisted Stefan in liberating me from a heavily guarded, virtual fort at the risk of your blindingly horrific neon shirt?” I asked as I zipped through a firewall, typing on. God knew I couldn’t forget that shirt.
“It was a lot of mon—You liked that shirt?” I turned my head to see him give a pleased grin and then change it into a scowl as he finished his excuse. “It was a lot of money. It had nothing to do with saving your polysyllabic ass. It was only about the money. It’s never about anything but the money, you brat.”
I dismissed him, saying, “You’re lying. Your voice is half a pitch higher, pupils slightly dilated, you touched your collar twice, and you said never—never means at least once if not always. I could go on. Would you like me to?” Saul had a soft spot to have done what he did, one beyond his friendship with Stefan. I wondered what it was. I didn’t ask, but I wondered.
I also didn’t give him a chance to reply. Instilling fear in your subject at first opportunity ensures better behavior faster. In this case, better behavior would be Saul no longer annoying me. “Besides your refusal to admit morality, we could talk about your extreme womanizing. Overcompensation and denial so blatant it should require little comment, except to you perhaps.” I studied him intensely. “Psychology is a hobby of mine. I could produce some notes for you to study. They might assist in your personal development. Except for your love of spandex. I can’t comment on that. It’s too horrifying.”
“He’s shitting me, right?” Saul directed the question to Stefan with more than a little desperation.
“Oh, I very well could and you would never know it,” I answered placidly, before Stefan had a chance, and returned to my computer. “I could give you an Oedipal complex in less than three minutes if you want to put it to the test. In six minutes I could turn you into an agoraphobic germophobe with profound hoarding proclivities. Those last two aren’t easily combined, but I have faith I could pull it off. It’s up to you.”
“Yeah, thanks, but I’ll pass,” Saul muttered; then, more softly, in hopes I couldn’t hear, he added, “Brat.”
“Grown men can’t be brats.” I sent Ariel an IM. “We can be bastards, though. Do you like your hair, Saul? And your ability to semi-please women with your equally semi-erections? Do you want to keep those?”
Ahhh, and there it was.
Silence.
The next hour remained blessedly quiet. Ariel wasn’t around and Laramie hadn’t suffered any clusters of peculiar if natural-appearing deaths for eight days, the same as when I’d looked into it yesterday. Five heart attacks, six aneurysms, and four people who abruptly fell over dead with no cause determined. It had all happened last Wednesday and it reeked of Institute tactics. Leave no sign behind . . . unless your owner wanted to send a message. Peter and the others were following training, but they’d stop soon. Where was the satisfaction in having all that power if you couldn’t get the recognition—the fear—it deserved? There would be more deaths and they would become more and more bizarre and obviously unnatural. There would be more wings of blood when Wendy cut loose—flocks and flocks of them. She, without any help at all, was perfectly capable of wiping Laramie off the face of the map. There would be red, red wings as far as the eye could see.
Fly away, bird. Fly away no more.
Chapter 8
The tracker led us to a house just beyond the outskirts of Laramie. It was the only one at the end of a long gravel road. Its isolation made me think of our house in Cascade Falls—or what had been our house b
efore it had burned. The isolation was the only thing that reminded me. This house needed painting, but it had no Stefan to paint it. Its wooden shutters were split and on the verge of falling off most of the windows. The weeds that made up the yard were taller than my knees. It was all gray. The unpainted concrete porch, the bare, rotting wood, the grime-covered windows—they were the colors of no color at all.
Except. . . .
There were balloons—red, yellow, blue, green, purple; the helium had them bouncing in the breeze. They were tied to the mailbox at the road as people did for birthday parties. When I’d first seen that, fresh out of the Institute, I’d asked Stefan if clowns lived there. What did I know about celebrations and parties? Peter knew, though. Two weeks on the outside and he knew what it had taken me months or longer to learn. How had I missed seeing that in him? Genius beyond customary chimera genius—he was extrapolating information and customs I’d had to learn and he was doing it with what little data the Institute had given us. He was the chimera Einstein, and that not only made him as dangerous as Wendy, but maybe more so with his maturity level and cunning. I was in over my head. We all were, but there was nothing to be done about it. I wanted my brother to stay safe; I wanted Saul . . . well, out of hearing range, but that didn’t matter. We couldn’t let death roam in a pack across the country. If we did, I couldn’t say how long the country would be left.
We were the only option; I was the only cure.
“I don’t think they’re in there. Not anymore.” Stefan had traded his Steyr for one of the tranquilizer guns. “I believe they outfoxed the tracker, Misha.”
I didn’t have a lot of doubt about that either. The homemade banner across the front door that read TOO SLOW, MICHAEL. BYE-BYE and the fact that their GPS signatures hadn’t moved in more than twenty-four hours were sure signs that too slow was me indeed.
Peter had thought of something else that I hadn’t during my escape. Stefan and Saul, not I, had figured out I’d been implanted with a GPS tracking chip. It hadn’t crossed my mind then, but it had crossed Peter’s. I tightened my lips and headed down the grass-spotted driveway toward the house. I managed two steps before Stefan moved in front of me—no surprise there. “When do I lead the way?”
“When you’re sixty, not nineteen, and I’m in the nursing home. And I’m hoping before then we can stop worrying about who goes where first.” Stefan had switched the tranq gun to his left hand and now carried his 9mm in his right.
Behind me, Saul said, “You can both go first. No skin off my nose.”
“You’re bringing up the rear, guarding my flank, aren’t you?” I demanded, for Stefan if not for me. It was hard to gain acceptance as being as efficiently dangerous as an ex-soldier, such as Saul, and an ex-soldier of a different sort, such as Stefan, without their seeing me in action. And while I did want their respect, hurting people to get it . . . That situation hadn’t come yet. I should hope it wouldn’t. Being a man and leaving childhood behind were damn challenging and equally damn confusing.
“I’m not interested in your rear or your flank,” came the breezy reply. “You’re not a woman into thigh-high boots, thongs, or getting the good parts vajazzled, are you?”
I’d been ready to detect his lie. I was not ready for “vajazzle.” I didn’t know what it meant. I didn’t want to know what it meant. My suspicions alone were ghastly enough, and now was not the time to be distracted. Peter and the others were gone; I was ninety-five percent positive. But five percent could kill you the same as ninety-five. One percent could kill you.
If Wendy was inside, she could kill us all.
Stefan kicked down the front door. I had my own tranq gun up and ready to fire. As Stefan had said, aim for the torso and I’d be fine. And while real guns didn’t interest me, I had practiced once with the tranquilizer gun. My aim was more than adequate, and my hand/ eye coordination excellent, which was not a result of denying myself Sara from the coffeehouse’s company and keeping my own company while locked in the bathroom, as Stefan had suggested. That wouldn’t have given me good hand/eye coordination, only repetitive motion injury.
Stefan disappeared into the gloom of the house and I followed. My eyes adjusted quickly and I could see the signs of habitation in the here-and-there streams of sunlight finding their way through gaps in the musty-smelling curtains. Full garbage bags were stacked neatly against one faded green wall. The bags were white but transparent enough for an observer to see they held empty food containers. Pizza boxes, empty tubs of ice cream, microwaved potato skins and fried cheese; bag after bag from fast food hamburger places. There was more, but I looked away to continue visually searching the room. Knowing that Peter and the others were like me when it came to taste and appetite wasn’t helpful to the situation. Anyone locked in a prison where sugar was a concept, not a reality, would flip in the other direction with freedom. That didn’t make us the same, not even close.
Saul darted out from behind me and, moving in a crouch, checked out the rooms off the main one to the right. Stefan handled the one, a dining room, to the left as I made my way to the kitchen. I’d thought the house was abandoned, which was why Peter had chosen it. It wasn’t. The ancient refrigerator was humming noisily. The electricity was working and so was the water. I tested the tap—the water ran cold and clear. It would be with thirteen chimeras making use of it. There’d be no chance to get rusty and orange. The kitchen table was as scarred and rickety as ours had been in Cascade but with only one plastic chair. Whoever had lived here, and I was completely certain it was “lived” in the past tense, had lived here alone.
On the table was a chipped mug and in the mug was a pile of small pieces of metal—GPS chips. “They figured that out damn quick, didn’t they?” Stefan remarked grimly at my shoulder. “How’d they know where they were? And how’d they get them out? With a butcher knife?” He waved a hand at a butcher block knife holder on the counter. It and the knives were dusty with disuse. Our absent owner wasn’t into cooking. No, they hadn’t used those knives.
I put the gun on the table and pulled up my sleeve to absently trace a finger across my forearm. Beneath my touch a cut instantly opened. Chimeras, except for Wendy, were bred to block harm from other chimeras, but harming yourself was another story. You had only to open that internal door you kept locked from others like you. “That’s how. As for knowing the chips were planted at the base of the spine as mine had been, if you knew you had a chip, you could search and find it within yourself. I didn’t know, so I didn’t look. Peter’s smarter than I am, Stefan. Much smarter than I remember him being. You should know that. You should know that things have gotten more difficult.” I pulled my sleeve back down as the cut began to heal. “More . . . lethal. We should send Saul back to Miami.”
If Stefan had gone for it, I would’ve added that he should head somewhere far away too. Let a chimera deal with an impending chimera apocalypse. But that wasn’t going to happen. I knew my brother too well there.
“You really should’ve slept with that girl at the coffee shop.” Stefan had both hands full, but he had a free elbow to poke me lightly in the ribs. I didn’t know how an elbow could be reassuring, but it was.
“I really should have.” I sighed and reached past the mug for a cell phone resting there. There was one voice mail. I thought for a fraction of a second, then punched in the only password it could possibly be: Jericho. The father of us all. Bellucci had been nothing but the most distant of reflections, an ego with nothing to back it up. The phone pinged in my ear and I heard Peter’s voice, smooth and convincing as any lawyer on the TV commercials telling you he’d get you millions for your fender bender. “Michael, Michael, how can you be with your family when you can’t keep up? Can’t catch up? I thought you were better than that. You always lacked a love for the work, but I’d hoped the outside world had changed you. After all, our god chased after you and didn’t come home again. No one could have predicted that.”
No, no chimera could, and Peter couldn’t
know I had nothing to do with Jericho’s death. Even that monster I couldn’t kill. There had been failures before me—chimeras who weren’t genetically perfect, not strong enough to kill. I had been the only one strong enough, but I had refused.
“We have things to do, Michael. Many things. Entertaining things. We can’t wait forever on you, but I’m not writing you off, brother. If you’re worthy, you’ll find us. Don’t forget you are one of us.”
The voice mail disconnected in my ear. Peter’s voice disappeared.
It wasn’t true. I wasn’t like them, not in the ways that counted.
And they were not my family.
“Are you all right?” Stefan’s elbow nudged me again. “I heard the voice. It was that kid Peter. What did the son of a bitch say?”
“That he wants me to find him, but I’m just not trying hard enough.” I wanted to throw the phone against the wall. I didn’t. When you could kill with the touch of a hand, when you were taught to want it and do it exceptionally well, you were also trained to not lose your temper. No one wanted to buy an assassin who got pissed off that he was served fish instead of chicken and would exterminate you instead of your enemies. Obedience was a must. The Institute had failed there with me and failed with Peter too. Peter’s disobedience had been more catastrophic than mine. I wondered how his temper training had taken.
“There’s something in the backyard.” Saul joined us. Like Stefan, he had a tranq gun in one hand and a real one in the other. He peered in the mug at the bits of metal encrusted with dried blood. “Yum. There’s a new way to get your daily iron. Chug it in your coffee.”
“What’s out there?” Stefan headed for the window over the cracked and stained sink.
