I’d become a shit, my brother thought. I grinned again—nothing theoretical about that.
I really rather had.
Chapter 7
I forgot the satisfaction of knowing my new self and becoming who I was meant to be—a manipulative, slightly amoral shit/genius—when at four a.m. a scream and sizzle/zap woke me up. Preparing for the worst was an excellent hobby. Getting the worst was not as enjoyable. Stefan was already at the door with his Steyr 9mm in hand. He didn’t have to tell me to pack. We’d learned last time. You pack before you go to bed for cases like this. “Watch out for the water,” I cautioned. “I can’t drag a crispy, fried brother to the car and our bags too.”
Avoiding the inch or two of water that had seeped under the door, but not unplugging the cord in case whoever was out there had a friend, he opened the door. Half in and half out of the puddle of water, a man twitched convulsively, eyes rolling back in his head. “Well, he’s not dead, but I’m not sure he’s quite alive either,” Stefan remarked.
I raced across the room and yanked the TV cord from the outlet. “Incompetent,” I muttered at myself. “Older buildings had a less safe wiring configuration and their electrical insulation isn’t always up to code if the owners don’t make the investment, which apparently they didn’t.”
“I’m not crying any tears over it.” Stefan lightly kicked the man’s shoe with his own bare foot. “See the gun? That is not a particularly friendly gun. It’s a Russian GSh-18 pistol, made to carry armor-penetrating rounds. It’s what we used to call a
“Call Saul. Get your shoes and rat while I check to see if there’s anyone else out there.” He was out the door, bare-chested and barefoot. He didn’t look any less dangerous for it. Five minutes later, the three of us were in the parking lot. The still-twitching guy wasn’t
Saul was equally unhappy. His ginger hair was standing on end, there was a sleep crease on his upper cheek, and he was in pajamas—in a way. He saw me wincing and huffed. “This is what you get. If I don’t have a half hour to do it right, I’m not doing it at all. He headed for his SUV, parked several cars from the one we had stolen. Our vehicle had its license plate switched twice over from the fast food place where we’d acquired the Mustang. It paid to take precautions. I started after Stefan when Godzilla jumped off my shoulder after spotting half a discarded Twinkie on the asphalt. I turned, dropped one bag, and caught him in midair to scold him. It was only half a minute, but that was enough time for Stefan to reach for the car door handle.
That was when I saw it.
The lights in the parking lot were dim and old, same as the motel, but I had excellent night vision and it was getting better the more I matured—as were other things. It was good enough now that I saw the oil on the side of the cover over the rear wheel. Fresh and gleaming, two fingerprints of wet amber—as fresh as if someone had just crawled out from under the car but a moment before. And who changed the oil on someone else’s car at four in the morning?
No one.
“Stoipah, no!” I dropped my bags and ran. “Don’t touch the car!”
But it was too late. His fingers had already hooked under the handle. I’d reached him at the same time and tackled him as hard and fast as I could. I might have been frozen when he had fought the man on the car outside Cascade Falls. I wasn’t frozen now. I wouldn’t let myself be again.
The explosion wasn’t huge; only big enough to take out the car and whoever would’ve been standing next to it. We weren’t. We were fifteen feet away, over a scraggly hedge into the other section of the parking lot. The medium-sized fireball behind us heated the air to more than a hundred degrees; the smoke scorched my lungs, but I didn’t care. Beneath me was my brother and although he was wheezing for breath, his face reddened by the heat, he was alive and not tiny pieces spread far and wide for the morning pigeons to peck. “What . . . ?” he said, choking. “How did . . . you know? How . . . did you get us . . . out of range?” It was a good question, considering he had at least thirty pounds on me and all dense muscle.
I pushed up to take the weight off his chest and let him recover his breath more quickly. “I saw the oil on the back of the car. Fresh. Someone had been under it. You don’t crawl under a car at four in the morning unless you’re planting a tracking device or a bomb.” The rest? Mmm. There was truth and there was explanation. Sometimes they could be entirely different things and sometimes they could be the same. In this case, they were the same. “Adrenaline. I’m in my prime. Not a geezer like you. I’m stronger than I was three years ago. I work out with your weights.” I didn’t. Exercise was boring. “You’ve seen me.” He hadn’t, but ordinary people don’t recall every detail of every day.
Truth, explanation, and half of a somewhat white lie. I’d tell him the entire truth later, when the time was right, but for now, half an untruth was what I gave him. I felt like hell saying it, but I saved my brother’s peace of mind, for now, and his life, for good, I hoped. That made it worth it. The car burned behind us and I felt a hand pat my back vigorously. “Small bonfire,” Stefan said with a crooked smile; then, apparently his breath back, he pulled me into a one-armed hug so fierce that even a chimera like me yelped. “Don’t do that again, okay? It’s my job to protect you, not vice versa. I’m the big brother. Me. Got it? If I blow up, I blow up alone. You go with Saul if that happens.”
This time when I pushed up, I stood and held a hand down to him. “No.” The sentiment was true and spoken matter-of-factly; I wasn’t going to change my mind.
He took my hand and got to his feet. “Misha, this is not a game. It’s never been a game. You know that. You almost died for me once. If you actually succeed, don’t think I’m going to stick around. I did it for ten years. I can’t do it again.”
I saw him again as he’d once been: the drowning man. I’d given him what I said I wouldn’t: lies. He gave me the truth.
I wished he’d lied instead.
I glared at him, but what do you say to a truth like that? I wasn’t going to not try to save him if I had the opportunity, but after what Stefan had given up, it would be like spitting in his face to say I wouldn’t try to survive if I could. I couldn’t do that—throw away what he’d given me. “If I’m too slow next time,” I said grudgingly, “I’ll go with Saul. But try not to make that an issue, all right? Be more careful.”
He raised his eyebrows at my tone—he was lucky to have any eyebrows at all after the explosion. “I’ll do my best,” he said with a patience his colleague didn’t share.
“You two stop bitching at each other and get over here by the fucking SUV,” Saul snapped from down the row of parked cars, some littered with burning debris. “Your TV-fried friend might not have left only one present.” He dropped to the cracked parking lot surface and crawled under his vehicle. A minute later he returned. “Nothing.” He then checked the engine. “We’re good to go. Now, get in the damn car!” People were gawking out of the doors of their rooms and there was the unhappy wail of sirens in the distance.
Stefan and I threw our bags in the back and obeyed. This nighttime Saul was much more frightening than the day version. Ginger and gray chest hair, combined with his pajamas, a pair of tight purple silk boxers and that was it. He looked like an obscenely horny children’s dinosaur—but lean and quick with ropy muscle. He charged double for wetwork, he’d said. You can’t do wetwork, you can’t kill, if you’re the size of a four-hundred-pound fake prehistoric lizard.
You could have better taste in clothes and pajamas, though. You could have pajamas, period. Was that too much to ask? The color seared my night vision. I couldn’t imagine what it would do in broad daylight. Hopefully he’d
