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
