Basilisk

session, what are we going to do with the mouth that ate the continent? Send her home? Bury her in a shallow grave? What?”

Stefan tilted his head to look back at me at Saul’s news. I shrugged again. It had worked for me so far for the past hour. He was caught between a teasing smirk and a frown, I could tell, but settled on a frown. “Raynor took her,” he said. “He has her ID. He knows who she is, where she lives. If we send her home, there’s a chance he might snatch her again to get at Misha. We’ll have to stash her someplace. With someone we trust until this is all over. She damn sure can’t come along.” He left it unsaid that it would be more dangerous than sending her home.

He rubbed his face. I could hear the scrape of his palm over the bristle of his beard. “You know anyone out here you trust, Saul?”

Saul yawned himself, his bladder complaining more. “I have people that subcontract for me, sure. I have people like that all over the country. But someone I trust? In my business? Yeah, right. How about you? You have anyone you trust?”

Stefan groaned, low and resigned. “Besides the two guys sitting in the car with me? No. Shit.”

Saul undid his seat belt. “Well, keep thinking. Gotta shake the snake before I explode.” He got out and disappeared inside after Ariel. The difference was twofold: His clothing didn’t flounce—blinded, but no flouncing. The second difference was that he came back. Ariel didn’t.

Stefan and I went in to search for her, but she was gone. I checked out the women’s restroom myself. That was one good thing about growing up without ingrained social customs. You didn’t care when you were caught doing what traditionally you weren’t supposed to do. And naturally I was caught peering under occupied stall doors and was summarily hustled back out into the parking lot. Compared to the whole of my life, I had no problem with being called a pervert and a line cutter. I knew I was only one of the two.

Stefan stood with me on the asphalt. “She must’ve gone out the other side. Hitched a ride maybe. I don’t know, but she’s gone. I ran the perimeter. I’d have seen that pink hair if she was on foot, but nothing. She’s just . . . gone.”

I nodded. “I’m not surprised.” And I wasn’t. I’d rather expected it. “Can you go back in and get me something to eat? I’ve been banned.”

He studied me, more than baffled. “You’re not worried about her? Pretend all you want, but I know you like her. You’re not worried Raynor will catch her again?”

I more than liked her, but that wasn’t the issue. “She’s smart, Stefan. Smarter than I will ever be, and if I’m saying that, with my ego, you know it means something. If she doesn’t want to be caught, she won’t be. You think I make great fake IDs? If she wants to make any, they could blow mine out of the water.” I no longer wondered if that was the correct phrase. I knew. A few days of chasing Peter and running from Raynor and my brain was in overdrive. Cascade Falls had been good, better than good, and I missed it, but it hadn’t stretched me; it hadn’t pushed me. I was learning much more now because I had to. Necessity wasn’t the mother of invention. Desperation was. “Ariel will be fine. Probably better than we’ll be. And she’ll be safer than with anything we could do for her.”

If anything, he was more bemused than before. “You believe that?”

“No, I know that. I’ve known her for two years now. It doesn’t matter if it was on the Internet or with video cams. With my psychological and profile training, I would know her—genuinely know her, her personality, what she would do, what she wouldn’t do, everything that makes her her. I would know all of that even if we’d only written letters once a month. She will do the smart thing and that is to not be with us, near us, or anyone we might think we could trust with her. Trust me on this, Stefan. Just . . . trust me.” I gave him a light shove toward the restaurant. I’d said all I could say for now. “And I’ll see Ariel again someday. I can guarantee it. One hundred percent.” It wasn’t a lie. I believed it wholeheartedly. I knew it as I knew her.

“Pancakes and biscuits and gravy,” I ordered to get him moving. “Oh, and hash browns. Four of them. And I know they don’t make milkshakes this early, but maybe could you bribe the manager? Chocolate?”

He narrowed his eyes but started walking. He knew I wasn’t lying. I liked Ariel too much to lie about that. It was embarrassingly plain to see. But he also suspected I wasn’t sharing everything. He let it go, though, and did what I asked him. He trusted me. “You are one weird kid, Misha.”

“I’m not a kid, remember?” And for the first time since I’d been complaining about the term, I knew it was true—I knew it for an absolute fact. I wasn’t a kid, not compared to my twenty-seven-year-old ex- Mafiya bodyguard brother, not compared to the ancient Saul, not compared to anyone. I wasn’t a kid. I would never be one again. I also knew now you shouldn’t wish your youth and pseudo-innocence away.

You’d never get it back.

Chapter 11

We found Peter in Tucson.

He was waiting for us. If he was losing confidence that we’d catch up, I didn’t question the logic. But we had other things come up and they would come up again. Raynor couldn’t track me . . . or Godzilla, being in the dark there about ferret chipping, but he had to have an Institute tracker of his own. He would be following Wendy’s chip the same as we were. Peter and the rest of the chimeras, us, and a government sociopath—it was a parade no one wanted to see.

Outside the SUV’s window, I could see the city. I didn’t need a map to know we were in South Tucson. I’d already memorized the map I’d Googled on the computer. It wasn’t Cascade—not a coffeehouse or bakery in sight. There were crumbling buildings and cold, hard faces. I knew why Peter had chosen this particular place in the city. The old man they’d killed in Laramie hadn’t been a challenge. Now Peter was looking for one, or at least more entertainment value.

Stefan was driving now and he clicked the locks shut. “We’re too busy to kick some wannabe-carjacker’s ass right now,” he explained. “Dealt with that crap all the time in Miami. Wannabes. It gets real boring real fast kicking the baby fat off some fifteen-year-old gang-banger with an HK. You have any people working down here, Saul?”

He blew out a puff of air ripe with disgust. “Nope. I tried recruiting some locals a few times, but they kept getting whacked after a few weeks or months. A waste of time. This is a kill zone, pure and simple.”

Peter’s kind of place. I glanced down at the GPS tracker. “Turn left, then left again. They’re less than three blocks from here on the right.” I gave him the address. Discarding the tracker beside me, I pulled the case with the tranq guns out from under Saul’s seat and started unloading them.

“You know that if we park here and live to tell the tale of how we cured a horde of psychotic murdering kids, we’ll have to walk home. The SUV will be gone the instant we’re out of sight,” Saul said.

“That won’t be a problem.” I handed him one of the oversized tranquilizer guns and Stefan the other as he steered with one hand.

“No?” Saul questioned skeptically. “Why is that?”

“People know. Normal people too. They’re in that building up there.” I pointed at the windshield toward the corner ahead of us where a two-level pueblo-style building squatted in a precarious heap at the intersection of two streets. “And everyone in that building is dead. The people around here might not smell them yet or maybe they do, but either way, anyone who was in there is dead. The most oblivious person in the world couldn’t walk past it and not know. They’ll cross the street to avoid it. Instinct. It’s left over from a time when instinct was the only thing that kept early man from being eaten by a giant Canis dirus. No one will come near the building or bother the car.”

“A Canis what?” That would be Saul. Again.

“A dire wolf. A big-ass Pleistocene wolf. A three-hundred-pound people-eating puppy. Woof, woof.” I took a gun of my own out of the case and then closed it.

“Smart-ass.” Saul shifted the tranq gun to one hand while pulling his own gun with the other, once again prepared for any situation. “Why are we trying so hard to save these kids? They killed an entire building full of people. They kill and they love it. If they were normal people, we’d wait until they were old enough, slap ’em on death row, and give them their last booster shot. Jesus, Stefan, Michael, they’re too dangerous to let live. They’re