“When you went outside without me.”
“You were asleep. You needed the rest,” I pointed out.
“Without me.”
I opened my mouth, found nothing and no words that were going to turn this around, and closed it.
Stefan apparently approved of the move and answered my question. “I found you because I woke up when your friend Peter the Pied Piper of killer kids called on that phone he left you.” I’d kept it in case he did. It was too cheap to be GPS enabled and he wanted us to find him anyway. “When that happened and I discovered you were gone, I used my own tracker.” He bared his teeth in a savage smile. “They’re like iPhones, right? Everyone has to have one.”
“Your own tracker?” Despite the smile he’d used only against people he was about to beat up or shoot, I was curious—guilty as hell too, but curious. “What’d you track? I know you didn’t plant anything in me when I wasn’t looking.”
“Your rat. One day when you were at work, I took him to the vet and had him chipped. I know it’d break your damn heart if he ran off.” His smile was no less pissed off.
No, what he knew was that at least fifty percent of the time Godzilla was with me and if we ever had to run again, it would be one hundred percent of the time. He’d outthought me when I hadn’t had a clue he was thinking about having to run at all. “That is devious as hell. That is Institute devious,” I said with reluctant admiration.
“You bet your ass it is.” This time the smile disappeared. Lines bracketed the side of his mouth and I could tell he was more tired now than when I’d “helped” him sleep. “What did you do, Michael?” There was no Misha now. He knew what I’d done. I’d used my genetic abilities on him, though I was doing it for him. It was a violation, a huge one. That deserved my Institute name. “I would’ve woken up when you opened the door. After the mob, after what you and I lived through before, I would’ve woken up and we both know it.”
I was an ass. I hadn’t meant to be. I’d tried to do a good thing, but we were in a situation where there were no good things, only the right things. I hadn’t done the right thing. I’d been careless. “You were tired. I was only going to be out there two minutes. I wanted you to be able to sleep. I thought I was helping, but clearly I fucked up.”
He stared at me for another second. “Fucked up doesn’t begin to cover it.” He headed back to the SUV. “Let’s go. We have to get rid of your girlfriend somehow and get back to finding Peter and his goddamn posse. And we have Raynor back on our asses. I assume he’s not as dead as we’d hoped or you would’ve told me.”
I’d disappointed him. There hadn’t been a time Stefan had been disappointed in me—until now. I felt as if I’d been kicked in the stomach, a kick much worse than the ones Ariel doled out. I would’ve rather he went back to being angry with me. “Stefan,” I said quietly, “I’m sorry. I’m. . . .” I was what? What else was there to say? He’d thought he’d lost a brother again and if my healing abilities hadn’t quadrupled since I was seventeen and if he hadn’t chipped Godzilla, he might have. He was right. Fucked up didn’t cover it and neither did “sorry.” Nothing did.
I walked in silence behind him. I had issues. Anyone raised at the Institute would, but I hadn’t felt this worthless and guilty in my life. Each step I took felt mired in quicksand. He was the sole family I had and I’d let him down.
Where was my genius now?
Stefan exhaled, stopped, turned; then he hooked an arm around my neck and squeezed. “Still your brother, Misha. I love the hell out of you, jackass. We’ll write this off as lesson learned, all right? Now, get your girlfriend. Apparently she has a black belt in yoga but takes as long as a ninety-year-old woman to pee.”
My shoulders slumped in relief at his willingness to forgive. “Why is it men piss and women pee?”
“Okay, loving you a little less,” he snorted. “Go.”
I started to, but paused. “Wait. You said Peter called. When you answered instead of me, what did he say to you?”
He shook his head. “You don’t need to know. You tried to do something for my own good. I
That wasn’t going to happen.
“Go without you? What happened to lesson learned?” I leaned against the SUV beside him. “I think I’ll stick around. ‘Bubba’ can hurry her up.”
Stefan’s lips twitched. “What if he flirts with her?”
“First, he’s in his forties. That’s disgusting. Second, if she did take him up on it, she’d kill him. His heart would give out before the Viagra kicked in.”
“There’s something to be said for dying a happy man,” he commented, eyebrows raised.
“No, there’s not.” My mood at being forgiven abruptly deflated.
“No?” The eyebrows went a fraction higher and his lips twitched again.
“No,” I said darkly, moving to the hood to see inside the Visitor Center.
Seriously, how long did it take someone to go to the bathroom?
I worried about how we were going to explain to Ariel how Stefan and Saul were waiting for us before we had a chance to call them. Despite her comment, she wasn’t going to buy psychic. Her four-year-old sister with the horse morgue and human hair shoes might buy it, but not a woman who was, I couldn’t deny any longer, more intelligent than I was. But it turned out not to be a problem. I was given a humbling example of how experience in duplicity edged out genius without trying.
They said nothing.
In the back with me, Ariel, Dr. Ariel Annabelle Mac-Leod, verbally poked and prodded Saul and Stefan relentlessly for two hours on how they’d known where we were. Neither of them said one word. The louder and more persistent she was, the denser the silence became. At one point, Stefan dozed off while Saul drove, which was the equivalent of sleeping through a tornado siren two feet from your ear. That was when Ariel turned her frustrated attention back to me, but it was too late. I’d learned by example. Everything she asked about Raynor, the Institute, if the two up front were indeed “fucking psychic Men in Black,” if the sky was blue and the grass was green, I smiled, shrugged, and kept my mouth shut. I half expected another attack with purple footwear, but it didn’t happen. She finally gave up, folded her arms, and started reciting Pi. If we were going to ignore her, she could do the same, but she was also Ariel. She could ignore us and annoy us, except for a snoring Stefan, by assaulting our eardrums all at the same time. She was up to the eight-hundred and seventy-fifth decimal—I wasn’t intimidated as I could go up to a thousand—when Saul decided he needed a bathroom break of his own.
How did I know since he wasn’t talking? I could feel, literally, his bladder aching. When little kids read their comics and wished for superpowers, I couldn’t imagine any of them wishing for that one.
Like now. Thank God he didn’t have prostate problems yet.
He picked an off-ramp on the trail back to Tucson, and Peter, and stopped at a McDonald’s packed with the breakfast rush. We looped the building twice before finding someone pulling out and taking their parking spot. The second we stopped, Ariel opened her door and said the first thing since she’d started on Pi. “I have to go to the bathroom and I’m starving. That government asshole took my purse. So one of you as-yet-indefinable assholes hand over some cash.”
Saul grunted but handed her a five. She flipped him off with a perfectly appropriate doctorly finger and said, “Thanks, big spender. That might buy me a sausage and biscuit but no OJ. I’ll be sure to name my scurvy after you.” Then out of nowhere, she turned and kissed me. It wasn’t a long kiss, but it was warm and firm with the sweet taste of tongue, and abruptly she was gone, flouncing her way into the restaurant. I wasn’t being sexist when I said flouncing. Ariel didn’t flounce. She walked with a strong and determined gait, but her skirt flounced. It couldn’t help it. It looked made of filmy scarves. If you’re a scarf, you don’t have much choice: flutter or flounce. Between the kiss and the flounce, I smiled. I couldn’t help myself.
Saul sighed as Stefan yawned and straightened. “Okay, Smirnoff, now that you slept through the make-out
