Basilisk

was really beginning to lose faith in my background checks.

Stefan folded his arms. “If I had a woodshed you hadn’t blown up, I’d take you behind it and beat some sense into you.”

I didn’t bother to roll my eyes, the threat not worthy of a response.

“Seriously, what did I tell you, Misha? Don’t let anyone see what you can do. Although making that fat bastard puke his guts up in the street. . . .” He swallowed the grin that surfaced and went for a more somber tone. “If it’s to save your life, do what you have to do. Absolutely anything you have to do. If it’s just a jackass messing with you, come get me and I’ll make him sorry his father bought that on-sale cheap-ass expired condom. But if it’s not life or death, keep what you can do secret, okay? Or we’ll have more than the Mafiya and that hellish place that took you after us.”

I said pointedly, “Because pounding him to a pulp was much more subtle.”

“No, but it’s not science fiction, so do what I tell you, all right? Now, are you done testing those teenage boundaries? The ones you missed while you were under that bastard who took you? Get it all out of your system, defying the big brother?”

Yeah, my brother was smarter than I have given him credit for sometimes. In matters of emotion, he was five Mensa levels smarter than I was. “He was a dick,” I said stubbornly.

“Michael, in life you’ll discover there are a million times more dicks in the world than there are shitheads to fucking hang them on,” he snorted. “It’s not right. It’s not fair, but we have to work around it. You keep your Superman powers out of sight and I’ll beat the crap out of anyone who messes with my family. Illegal, sure, but not science fiction.”

Superman . . . that was so far off base, I didn’t bother to go there. Like any other nineteen-year-old, I wanted to take care of myself. But unlike any other nineteen-year-old, I could take care of myself. I could take care of myself in a way that could leave the streets littered with bodies. My brother was right. He usually was. And like any other nineteen-year-old, that made me sulk for a while.

But, hey, the word “dick” had come to me naturally. That was something.

Chapter 3

“You be kind to Stefan. He deserves that.”

“Kind” was an odd word to come from a man who may have killed as many as the man who’d kidnapped his son, but he’d meant it. It was the only thing he’d meant as he’d talked to me the time when both Stefan and I had been shot by Jericho and his men. I was different then . . . and now. . . . I’d healed much faster than Stefan, although I’d been shot in the chest and he’d been shot in the leg. The bullet had broken his thighbone, which caused him to limp in cold weather. Me? Who they’d thought would die long before the AMA-booted doctor would show up? I barely had a scar.

It had been when I’d been closer to healthy and whole and Stefan knocked out on pain meds in that South Carolina safe house that Anatoly had said that to me.

“Be kind to Stefan. He deserves that.”

He’d been right and I hadn’t had to hear it from him. Stefan did deserve it. Stefan hadn’t given up on his brother—he had saved me, and he didn’t lie to me. Anatoly had done none of those things. He never even said my name, either of them, not Lukas or the “Michael” the Institute had given me. He’d been polite, for a killer, but weren’t we all killers in that beach house/ makeshift hospital? Stefan had said that Anatoly was my father, but I hadn’t trusted the older man for a second.

Now, though, looking at what was left of him on my computer screen, I wished I’d tried to find out more of who’d been behind the killer. Was there more to him? I’d had the skills at reading people, same as now, but I hadn’t used them. Everything, the entire world, was so damn new then that Stefan was all I needed and all I could handle. I didn’t want or need a father, I’d thought at the time, especially one who’d given up on me.

“Be kind to Stefan.” I remembered those words.

I looked at the bones and chunks of decomposed flesh on the screen. He’d been in a lake. Lake Michigan. Floaters aren’t pretty and I honestly couldn’t remember if I’d learned that at the Institute or on one of the thousand TV cop shows since. Wherever I’d heard it, it was right. He was roadkill marinated in a swampy Everglades ditch. He was in pieces and the pieces didn’t fit together to make anything that looked human. They’d identified him by dental records. I clicked on the next picture. These weren’t the kind available to your average Internet surfer, but I wasn’t your average anything. If there was a place that cybertendrils didn’t extend into, I hadn’t found it yet. Chimeras were trained to fool people. I’d found that fooling machines was far easier. If there was a data stream, I rode it; a path of pixels, I walked it. I saw it all, saw through everything as if it were made of glass.

Not like Anatoly.

“Be kind to Stefan,” he had said. He hadn’t been much of a human before or after he died, I’d thought, but he’d loved his son. He hadn’t loved me; I could tell. I didn’t read him, but I didn’t have to search his face or catalog his movements and words to know that. Love is easy to see; no effort required. Other emotions took effort, but love was simple. I didn’t know why he hadn’t accepted me like Stefan had. Maybe I’d been gone too long. Maybe he’d wiped me out of his heart and mind. The reason didn’t matter.

I did know it now, but it didn’t matter. Anatoly had ceased to matter to existence itself.

I couldn’t read him emotionally any better today than then—it was hard to read pieces. But I could read what had been done to him. Brutal, vicious, and messy, but effective. I could’ve done it more quickly and neatly, but there weren’t many of my kind around. Others had to make do with chain saws. This hadn’t been done for punishment or fun. It would’ve taken too long. Psychopaths, such as the Mafiya, as much as they liked chain saws, were generally into immediate gratification. This had been done methodically by someone looking for information.

I searched the screen. I’d seen Anatoly and what had been done to him. It was what was behind his tangible, rotting memory that I’d noticed: a man. He was in all the pictures. In the ones where they’d pulled Anatoly’s remains from the lake, loading him into the coroner’s van, in the autopsy room—he was always there. The suit, short fringe of dark hair, opaque sunglasses, and inscrutable expression said government, but his dedication in following the body from place to place implied more dedication than FBI or IRS, the major bloodhounds on Anatoly’s tail according to Stefan.

I clicked on the next picture and zoomed in on those deep-set black eyes in the one picture where he’d removed the glasses. Not entirely inscrutable. There was interest there, a deep and passionate desire. But for what? Anatoly was beyond indictment and prison. What was left that could be that fascinating?

The knock on my bedroom door had me automatically switching to another computer window. Stefan stuck his head in. He looked at the computer screen and groaned, appearing more than a little worried. “Again? Seriously, kiddo, you’ve got that live girl at the coffee shop made of mostly human parts, you’ve got porn at your fingertips, and you’re wasting your time on that?”

I glanced at the Lolcats site. “There has to be a logic to it. It’s idiotic, but people say it’s funny. Unless all people are idiots, I’m missing something. I’m going to figure it out.” It wasn’t strictly a lie. It was not volunteering information and . . . waiting. And waiting wasn’t wrong, not if you thought of it in the correct way. My mind was an Olympic gymnast at twisting and bending to see things in the manner that benefited me the most.

“Cats are intelligent.” It was a diversion, but it was also true. “If they could talk, then I’m quite sure they could spell.” My eyes were drawn back to the screen and the idiotic U haz hareball on fut under the picture of an evidently highly annoyed cat biting someone’s ankle. There had to be something to it . . . but what in God’s name it was, I couldn’t figure out. “Maybe their owners can’t spell, but they could.”

“Misha.” His lips quirked. He was tired and darkness was in him, shadows filling up a flesh and blood pitcher. “Thanks for taking one of the more crappy days and making it better.”

“By making a tourist vomit and giving you a chance to take out your frustrations by kicking him in the stomach?” I asked curiously, tearing my eyes away from the screen before it burned my retinas with its idiocy.

The grin was quick and fleeting, but it was there. “Don’t do it again, but, yeah, I enjoyed it. I shouldn’t have—a few of my old ways creeping back. But sometimes you need a distraction, and you, little brother, are always that. I needed it today. Now, get your ass off the computer and go to bed. It’s past midnight and we both