dead, he was bound to demand proof, DNA most likely.
“He’s still alive?”
I wasn’t surprised Michael had gotten the impression that he wasn’t. The stories I told were about him and me, about our mom and grandmother. Our father hadn’t entered into too many of them. That was for two reasons. First, he hadn’t entered our lives any more than he had the stories. He was a busy businessman; he simply wasn’t around often. Second, I wasn’t ready to spill the whole ugly bag of secrets just yet.
“Yeah, he’s alive; just a busy man, that’s all,” I answered evasively. “Hard to reach.”
“Is that who you were talking to last night?” The homey rustle of a Twinkie wrapper didn’t take the bite out of the question.
“You heard?” I made a conscious effort to lighten my suddenly adrenaline-heavy foot on the gas pedal. “I thought you were asleep.”
“I’ve gotten rather good at faking that over the years.” Impassively, he took a bite.
“No, that wasn’t Anatoly on the phone. I haven’t been able to track him down yet.” I tried to mentally reconstruct my half of the conversation with Dmitri last night and came up with some disturbing recollections. I’d mentioned loyalty, I’d mentioned Anatoly, and I’d said the word “dead.” Talk about your triple threats. If Michael had caught any of that, overcoming his suspicion had just become a helluva lot more difficult. Unless . . . unless I came clean. Talk about the devil and the deep blue sea. Which was worse? A deceitful stranger or an honest criminal? I was a bodyguard, not a leg-breaker, but that still didn’t make me as pure as the driven snow. There was no doubt about that, not in my mind.
And Michael wasn’t going to make the decision any easier for me. He didn’t ask any further questions to push me one way or the other. Finishing up his snack, he shifted his attention to the radio and surfed the stations without another word. Hours later, long and silent ones, I chose another hotel. We needed a bathroom, not only for Michael’s peace of mind but for our transformations. And it was mid-transformation when I told my brother the truth.
“Like a movie star,” I commented with a grin, cradling the empty dye box in my hand.
Sitting on the edge of the bathtub, Michael scowled from beneath tufted hair covered in yellow goo. “I think I hate you.”
“Only think?” I snorted. “Hey, I can live with that.” I checked my watch. Per the directions on the box we had ten more minutes. It was enough. “Misha, I have some things to tell you.” Resting the box on the sink, I added dryly, “And as luck would have it, you seem to have some time on your hands.” What type of luck was something that only time would tell.
He caught a dribble of creeping yellow foam making its way down his forehead. “And I have you to thank.” Meticulously, he wiped his hand on some tissue before continuing in the same charm school elocution. “Asshole.” Catching my reaction before I could smother it, he sighed and reached for another tissue. “I’m not very good at that, am I? Cursing.”
I could’ve said practice makes perfect, but I wasn’t sure Michael would ever be able to pull it off. He wasn’t a normal teenager and despite the Institute’s effort to give him the façade of one, I wasn’t sure he ever would appear to be one. “I’m sure you’re loaded with other talents, kiddo,” I came back consolingly.
Something about that hit an obviously sensitive area and his eyes darkened. “You were going to tell me something?”
“Yeah, I was.” I boosted myself to a seat on the sink, scooting the dye box to one side. Taking a breath that somehow evaporated before it reached my lungs, I struggled for the right way to begin. “I told you how I’ve been looking for you all this time. How I hired people who’d made a career of searching for the missing . . . kids, things, info. Whatever. I guess what I didn’t mention is how I paid for it.” Leaning back, I rested my head against the cold glass of the bathroom mirror. I wanted to close my eyes, but that would’ve been the coward’s way out. “I’m in . . . I
The eyes hadn’t left me and I felt an itch of discomfort at the base of my skull. I didn’t want to read disappointment in my brother’s face, and there was no anticipating if I would or not. He didn’t have a normal framework in which to slide this bit of information. Most things he would run into, no matter how mundane to the rest of the world, were going to be impossibly shaped puzzle pieces to him. It would be a while before things began to fit for him. Until then there wasn’t any way to guess how he might react . . . to anything.
“After college, that same business was waiting right there for me. I needed the money, more than I could get from any ordinary job.” I didn’t make any further excuses. It didn’t matter how it had happened or what had driven me; I’d made the choice. “And I stayed in as long as it took.” That had been two days ago. Glancing at my watch, I stood. “Time to wash your hair. Give me a shout if it starts falling out in clumps.” I went through the door and closed it behind me without a backward glance. I could wait on Michael’s reaction. I could wait a good long time.
There was a pause and then I heard the shower running. There was the sound of water for about ten minutes and then ten more minutes of silence. Finally, I knocked on the door. “You still alive in there? Do we need to change your name to Kojak?”
“Who is Kojak?”
The muffled question had me turning the knob and opening the door. “Just an obsession of mine—old cop show.”
A newly blond head turned in my direction. “You wanted to be a policeman?”
“Yeah, yeah. It’s all very tragically poetic, I know.” The quip passed through lips suddenly numb. His hair was the color of a sun-bleached strip of sand, the white gold it had been the day he’d been kidnapped.
He turned back to look at himself in the mirror. “This doesn’t make me him, you know.” His eyes moved to mine in the glass. “I’m sorry, but it doesn’t.”
He was right. The change in hair color didn’t make him Lukas. He was Lukas long before I’d picked up that box of dye. And I would keep telling him that as long as it took for him to realize it was the truth. But sometimes truth worked better in small doses, and tomorrow was soon enough. Sending him out to eat dinner, a few subs I’d picked up before checking in, I went to work on my own transformation.
Twenty minutes later my ponytail was gone. With the length gone, the short black hair had much more of a wave to it. With the curl and olive skin I looked more Greek or Italian than of Russian descent. I tried the scar cover-up. It would do. Unless someone was within six feet of me, I’d pass as smooth faced. Hell, girls would be mistaking me for a male model. I flashed my teeth at myself in the mirror. Yeah, they’d be falling all over themselves. The smile melting into a self-deprecating grimace, I decided there was little I could do about changing forbidding pale eyes. Vasily might have had puppy dog brown, but I had wolf amber; predatory through and through. Sunglasses would have to do the trick there.
In the room I discovered several discarded clear plastic wrappers and no sandwiches. Cocking an eyebrow at Michael, I said wryly, “Thanks for saving me one.” I patted what I liked to think was a lean stomach. “You trying to tell me something?”
Still speeding through the television channels with the remote, he looked up. “Oh. That was rude, wasn’t it?” He appeared disturbed, probably more from a failure in training than from the actual rudeness itself. Michael might not have excelled in his acting class, but I was confident he was an A student in all the rest. I had my doubts that Jericho and his school had much sympathy for poor performers. It made me cold, the thought, and it made me realize I still didn’t know the purpose of the Institute. If Michael didn’t learn to trust me soon, I was going to have to start pushing . . . a lot harder than I wanted to. But for now . . .
“I’ll survive.” Gathering up the refuse, I dumped it in the garbage can beside the bed. “But tomorrow you owe me one big order of cheese fries. Which reminds me.” I searched until I found the vitamins I’d purchased at the drugstore. Tossing him the sealed bottle, I ordered, “One a day. Hopefully that’ll keep alive the cells that don’t run purely on sugar.”
After the painkiller incident I thought he’d appreciate a tamperproof bottle. “What are these?” He didn’t wait for an answer, instead reading the label, then the ingredients. I was waiting for another Freud-channeled crack. I could all but see it hovering on his lips, but he resisted the urge. Maybe he thought of it as atonement for eating my dinner. Peeling open the plastic seal, he pulled out the cotton and chased down a pill with a swallow of soft drink. “You did a good job on your hair. You look completely different.”
“Yeah?” I ran a hand over the shortness of it, the feeling still peculiar. “Since I’m looking for a career change,
