longer broken—bones were difficult—but I was getting there.
“I’m listening.”
I moved to scrubbing the dirt from my neck and chest. The EMTs hadn’t wasted any time in cutting my shirt down the middle to slap on the electrodes hooked up to the cardiac monitor. “You are? I thought you were putting on a wig and grabbing a butcher knife. I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop.”
“Norman Bates? I doubt I could find an old lady’s dress that would fit my manly shoulders. Think the Terminator instead, and, yeah, I’m listening.” There was the creak of the door frame as he leaned against it. “You told us the rest, but the healing thing, but you were pretty succinct. You don’t seem a hundred percent sure about that. As you’re most often one hundred and fifty percent positive about everything you set out to accomplish, it seems weird. And no bragging on your brilliance? That’s not you. You’re your number one fan.”
One hundred and fifty? I was one hundred percent positive on the cure, seventy-five at best on being able to deliver it. “People are different from birds and chipmunks. They’re bigger and I haven’t healed one before.” Belatedly I remembered this wasn’t quite true and added, “Except for the kid in the taco joint. I cured his tonsillitis, the little monster. I should’ve left him as he was. Oh . . . and I worked on that cut on your forehead from the plane crash. I barely gave it a boost, enough so you won’t have another scar with my name on it.” Another memory popped up. “Ahhh, yeah, and you and Saul. The chlorine gas in Laramie was the real thing, not a weak version. I didn’t exactly tell the truth on that one either.”
“You don’t exactly have telling the truth down to an art, do you?” he commented mildly. I’d have felt better if he’d growled it. I was still waiting on that other shoe. “Regardless, whether you can heal other people a little or a lot, that seems like a good thing to me.”
It did? I sat in a puddle of water as the dirt ran off me in streams. I’d told him, but not clearly enough. “The healing isn’t about healing, Stefan. It’s good to have, but that’s not why I learned how. It’s about Wendy.
“If we can’t get the drop on Wendy, surprise her and take her down before she knows we’re there, then I have to be able to protect us. This was the best thing I could think of to try.” We’d always planned on rescuing those left in the Institute and I’d known all that time it wasn’t Bellucci we had to worry about. It was Wendy.
As Wendy’s abilities were purely destructive, I might be able to keep her from killing us at a distance by blocking her with the same ability, only turned on its end. Reconstructive. Opposites collide and cancel each other out. All we needed was a second to shoot her with the tranq gun. Three years I’d been thinking and practicing. If I managed to buy us that one second, I’d be damn grateful. Hard work had made me more than Jericho could’ve guessed and three years of fully maturing on top of that made me ten times what I’d once been. My chances seemed good . . . until I thought of what three years of growing up might have done for Wendy.
I was hoping practice made perfect.
I leaned my head back against the shower wall and let the water beat down on me. My eyelids drooped and I was headed fast for sleep when Stefan spoke again. “And the cure? If you have some doubts about Wendy, what about this cure? Will it work—now that you’ve included me in your need-to-know circle that was formerly you and the ferret?”
I winced and it wasn’t my ribs. Exhaling, I put a hand on the edge of the tub, heaved myself up, and turned off the shower. I caught the towel he tossed me and dried off. When I looped it around my hips, I repeated what I’d been thinking. “The cure is one hundred percent effective. If I have a chance to give it, it’ll work. There’s no question about that.”
“None?” He moved aside to let me out. I took the few steps necessary, dropped the towel, and climbed under the covers and cool sheets. They felt better against me than any clothes I owned. If we did survive, I was sneaking more money from the Caymans for better sheets. I rolled carefully onto my stomach, increased my endorphins enough to take away the remaining pain, and closed my eyes. “Peter looked goddamn perky as he ran off with not one but two darts in him,” he pointed out.
“I’ll quadruple the dose. I promise you, Stefan. It will work.” The world was slipping slowly away. Cocooned in warmth and darkness, I didn’t mind.
“You want me to trust you on it?” Right before I heard Stefan shut the shower door, I heard him murmur, “When you think why I should, Misha, you let me know.”
He’d trusted me time and time again, but I’d lied time and time again—calling it anything but lying to fool myself. When was too much? When did that last straw come along? It was lucky that I had time to sleep on it, because right then I didn’t have a good answer for his question or mine.
The only one I had, the only true rebuttal, neither of us would want to hear.
Days ago I’d been thinking I wouldn’t lie to my brother, but I had been, more or less, for three years. Call them lies or omissions or secrets—all the things we said we wouldn’t do—but at the end of the day we never failed to. Sometimes they were a convenience or a habit or at times the only kindness you could give someone. Stefan should know that.
He had a secret too and it colored every part of his life.
And mine.
I woke up to the smell of eggs, bacon, coffee, and pancakes. I savored the moment: soft bed, sheets that weren’t comparable to one-ply toilet paper, and no pain. My ribs were whole and healed.
“Room service. I know that has to be high on your list of the most incredible things invented in the history of time,” Stefan said.
“You can’t eat a pyramid.” I opened my eyes and sat up. Through the curtains, I could see the sun rising. “I slept that long?”
“Hit by a truck and a building. That sort of thing deserves a few extra hours. Give yourself a break.” He was already at the table, munching on bacon. “And if you want any food, you’d better hurry. I’ve had too much fast food lately.”
I climbed out of bed, dressed, and took a seat to rapidly fill my plate. He wasn’t serious, but food was just below sex in life’s great pleasures. I wasn’t taking any chances. “I thought about what I said last night.” He started, pouring more coffee. The scrapes and tiny cuts on his face were going to make shaving a bitch this morning. “And I was an asshole. Your badass mobster big brother got his delicate feelings hurt and I projected.”
He covered the smile, faint but there, with his cup of coffee. After he swallowed, he added, “See? I listen to all your psycho-techno babble. My eyes glaze over, yeah, but I listen.” He picked up a triangle of toast before dropping it, interest gone. “It’s not that I don’t trust you, Misha. It’s that after all this time, you don’t trust me. Buying planes, recruiting drug dealers, the pipe bomb thing—
I leaned back in the chair and pushed away my plate before I took a single bite. It took one painful topic to kill both our appetites. “I didn’t keep it to myself because I don’t trust you. Well, except for the pipe bombs. You never would’ve gone for that. It was because I want to be normal, Stefan. I want to be like my big brother. Isn’t that what all younger brothers want? When they’re little, they tag along. When they’re grown, they want to be half the man their brother is.”
I ran fingers through my bed hair and made it worse by ruthlessly scrubbing my scalp. “Keeping you up to date every day on my progress at becoming more different and less human wasn’t my idea of a good time. I’m not like everyone else. I’m not like you, but I wanted to pretend I was. I wanted you to, hell, forget that I’m not.
“So we’re both idiots.” He pushed my plate back in front of me. “No, you’re not like me. You’re better. A better person, a better goddamn everything. Now, eat your breakfast. And if you open your mouth to say you aren’t everything I know you are, I’ll stuff a bagel in it. Plain. Without cream cheese.” Healthy food—the ultimate threat.
“We are idiots, aren’t we?” I took a bite of the blackberry pancakes covered in syrup and butter. “In the future, if I do sort of accidentally keep some things to myself, will you know it has nothing to do with trust? That it’s not you; it’s me.”
““It’s not you; it’s me.’ Jesus. You’re something else.” The grin was quick. “We’re not breaking up, Misha. And, yeah, I’ll know. Eat.”
Now that my secrets were out, it was time to work on Stefan’s. I had another bite of my pancakes before moving on to the bacon as I sidled into the subject slowly. I’d made bombs. Stefan’s secret was one I was going to have to defuse.
