Basilisk

At his first step I’d raised the tranquilizer gun. “No one is here but you, are they?”

“No,” he smiled. He pulled a black cord necklace out from under his shirt. Attached to it was a tiny cloth bag. It would hold Wendy’s chip perfectly.

“And you don’t want me for your Manson Mein Kampf family dream-come-true, do you?”

“He catches on.” He applauded once. “Want you? Hardly. You’ve changed, but not enough. And even if you had, this isn’t what it’s all about. We never wanted you, Michael. We want to punish you. You’ve done a very bad thing and you have to pay. And, Michael, you are going to fucking pay and pay and pay.” He was moving up again at a run, but Stefan, who’d had his gun up long ago, had already pulled the trigger. The cartridge hit Peter in the upper leg. He didn’t stagger, much less fall. My cartridge hit the wall he disappeared behind.

Damn, I was certain the dosage would be high enough to knock him out. I started after him, weaving between cots, and then skidded to a stop. Stefan heard it at the same time I did. Half a step behind me, he grabbed my arm and ran, yanking me along with him. He didn’t need to. I was as fast, and running over the top of bodies and their various crushed organs didn’t faze me. Stefan, despite his mob background, flinched slightly but didn’t let it slow him down either. We hit the right wall of the room simultaneously with the semitrailer that crashed through the front of the building. Stefan was knocked to the floor by a falling piece of ceiling. I was thrown forward by the slam of an upended cot against my back.

I’d known the building was structurally unsound by looking at it when we arrived, but I’d underestimated its instability. Perfect for an explosion, I’d thought, and it was a meth lab. I’d been on the alert for trip wires, any evidence that the lab upstairs would be blown. But that would’ve been a repeat of the last attempt on our lives—the establishing of a pattern. Patterns were to be avoided; they ignited suspicion in the authorities. Bought and paid-for indentured assassins were taught to avoid that. But I knew to listen and watch for other traps as well. I was facing down my own who’d received the same training as I had. The instant I heard the full-throttle roar of an engine, I knew. That Stefan knew too didn’t surprise me. The longer we were together, the more I saw how similar our lives had been in the things we’d been taught to do and the things we’d actually done.

It sucked for us both.

It sucked more when the building collapsed on top of us.

“Get away from him, you son of a bitch. Touch him again, and it’ll be the last thing you ever do.”

Stefan. . . .

Only Stefan could put that much grim promise in the word “ever.”

Hazy . . . everything was hazy, lazy, dazy, wavy. No . . . no z’s in wavy. It was dark and bright and red and dark again. The rapid switch didn’t improve the hazy, lazy, dazy any.

“Sir, we’re trying to help him. He could have a crush injury to his chest. That can be fatal, do you understand? He has a pneumothorax—one of his lungs is deflated. He probably has blood building up around his heart. We have to stabilize him now or he’ll die. You got that? He’ll die. Now, get the hell back. Lenny, where the hell are the cops? We need them on this guy.”

Cops. That would be bad. That had the haze fading faster as I felt my adrenaline increasing on its own, doing what a chimera’s body was built to do. I helped it with what I’d learned in the past years. I increased the adrenaline tenfold. That much would be detrimental and lethal to a human; to me, it was fuel accelerating the healing.

“Jesus, he’s going into some serious sinus tach. What the fuck? Four hundred and fifty beats? Jackie, the cardiac monitor is screwed. Get the backup monitor!”

We chimeras would not be good for the mental health of EMTs, paramedics, or any other medical personnel because we made all their medical knowledge useless. I knitted the hole that had been torn in my lung back together, causing massive numbers of cells to rush to meet one another. The three broken ribs would have to wait. I flooded my system with endorphins to dull the pain. There was some small amount of blood around my heart. I had my blood vessels reabsorb it. Opening my eyes, I lifted a hand and pulled the irritating endotracheal tube used to intubate me out of my throat and whacked the EMT on the head with it. It wasn’t very polite of me, as he was trying, in his mind, to save my life, but the only thing he could do was slow the process down and do more harm than good. Stefan knew that, which was why he was threatening to beat the shit out of my would-be angel of mercy.

Said angel of mercy was a balding, chubby man, and I’d left a red mark on the top of his shiny head with the tube. I felt guilty about that until I heard more sirens in the distance. Cops. Either the cops weren’t enthusiastic about coming to this part of town for a truck running into a building, or any other reason, or the fire station was closer. I sat up on the gurney and put my hand out. Stefan, covered in dirt and blood, instantly clasped my arm and lifted me to my feet. The ribs twinged, but that was all. I might’ve overdone it with the endorphins, nature’s morphine. I gave Stefan a loopy smile. “Did a building fall on me?”

“No.” He had his arm around my shoulders and was helping, if helping was half carrying, me to the SUV waiting for us two buildings down. It hadn’t seemed far when we’d parked. It seemed a half-hemisphere walk now. I vaguely noticed his other arm was pointed behind us as he crabbed us along sideways. He was holding his gun on the EMTs. None of them was inclined to die to take me to the hospital for a Snoopy Band-Aid. “You were hit by a semi and then a building fell on you. You are incapable of doing things the easy way, aren’t you?”

“Hit by a semi and lived.” My grin stretched wider.

“Clipped,” Stefan elaborated. He had no grin or smile.

I ignored him. “I’m indestructible.” The s in indestructible was slurred, but I didn’t mind. I was the king. I told Stefan so. “I’m the king. All hail the king.” I decided I felt too good to walk and gave up. Forget the cops; napping on the sidewalk sounded like a great idea. We were about ten feet from the SUV when I decided that. Stefan half lifted me with one arm and carried me like a sack of potatoes the rest of the way, which was no way to treat the king, while Saul opened the door to the backseat from inside. He put his hands under my shoulders and eased me in while Stefan slammed the door behind me. Saul jumped behind the wheel and Stefan reappeared at the other side of the SUV, climbed in, and lifted my head to rest in his lap.

“Get us the hell out of here, Saul.”

“Yeah, like you had to tell me that, oh great master criminal. Jesus.” I could feel the SUV already moving and moving fast from the screech of tires. “What is it with these damn little psychotics and destroying buildings? I nailed one in the chest as he was coming out the back. He had black hair, about eighteen. I think it was that Peter kid. He came out the second-floor window, flipped up over to the roof, and then jumped to the next building. Like goddamn Spiderman. He was weaving, though. I was going to go after him, but then Rome fell. I think you need to juice up your tranq-cure, kid.”

“You’ve no . . . idea.” The sun through the window sparkled in a thousand colors. I didn’t know there were a thousand colors. “He grew up, same as me. Stronger now. He’s not a rhino anymore. He’s four or five rhinos. Up the dose. Definitely. Up. Up, up, and away.”

Stefan’s thumb gently peeled back my eyelid. “Been practicing, huh?” I had said that, hadn’t I? Before we’d gone into the pawnshop. “On the healing, I’m guessing. Not even chimeras can fix a deflated lung and blood pooling around your heart in minutes. And somehow you’re doped to the gills, though I didn’t let that guy give you anything. Your pupils are huge.”

“That’s the adrenaline for healing and the endorphins for . . . I’m hungry.” I tried to sit up. Stefan held me down easily with a hand on my forehead and one on my chest. I wasn’t simply hungry. I was starving. I’d pushed my body to extremes I’d hoped I had in me but hadn’t been completely sure about until now. It took massive amounts of energy to do what I’d done, and I needed to replenish it. But when I tried to explain, replenish sounded more like plenrish. I said it several more times until it was less of a word and more a mouthful of oatmeal. That only made me hungrier. Oatmeal . . . Ariel liked oatmeal with brown sugar, cinnamon, and maple syrup. Ariel was hot. Not just hot . . . what’d they say . . . yeah . . . smoking hot.

Did Ariel think I was hot?

“Am I hot?” I asked Stefan. “Smoking hot? Think Ariel thinks I’m smoking hot?”

“Yeah, you’re the sexiest motherfucker on the planet, Misha.” There were so many emotions behind the blood on his face, but right now I could read only two of them. Exasperation. Worry. Too much worry. “Now enough with the endorphins. You must have more in you than you’d find swimming around in fifty marathon runners combined.