Basilisk

he’d waited so long before adding a new one to his collection of other children, the majority of whom had been fetuses implanted in surrogate mothers for pay—drug-addicted and hopeless people no one would miss when they didn’t show up again. Marcus Bellucci, the man we’d thought was his academic rival, had told us that. He hadn’t been a rival, though, or the fountain of information we’d thought he’d been; he’d been a combination of silent partner and silent alarm. He’d warned Jericho when we’d tracked him down and shown up asking questions; then when Jericho died, he’d disappeared.

The Institute had to have a creator.

The Institute was still out there and we knew where. We hadn’t forgotten those left behind. Ten years or the seventeen it had felt like, I wouldn’t leave anyone there to be discarded if the twisting and brainwashing didn’t take hold. And the brainwashed needed to be saved as much as the potentially expendable who fought it off. Nearly three years later we hadn’t made a move to save anyone yet, because what do you do with the brainwashed?

Not all of the students were like me. I’d hated what I could do. Not all others had. What do you do with genetically manipulated killers who have been taught to enjoy killing? When they’d as soon kill you as take your hand to be rescued. . . .

What do you do?

Godzilla mrrrped again and then bit my thumb for attention. I sucked the blood away, then watched as the puncture clotted immediately. In less than a half hour it would be gone. We healed quickly, Jericho’s children—a much better talent than killing. I rubbed the ferret’s head with the fingers of my other hand. With just that touch and a thought, I could’ve shut down the vessels to his heart, his brain. Or I could’ve opened them so wide that there wouldn’t be enough blood pressure to keep his heart beating. I could’ve weakened the walls of his organs until they ripped open, or could have caused them to literally explode. Only a touch and a thought. That was what Jericho had made out of me . . . and every child in the Institute. I could kill but I couldn’t undo a lifetime of conditioning with that same touch.

So what did you do to save those who didn’t want to be saved?

It was a hard question and blind hope was not much of an answer. Neither was a leap of faith. Jericho’s children weren’t built for faith. Not that it mattered, because we were built for determination—success no matter the cost. “No weakness, no limitations, no mercy” was the credo we repeated aloud at the beginning of every single class.

No weakness. No limitations. No mercy.

That, not that it was meant to, was going to help me now, because despite those who might not want to be saved, there was a way, whether they knew it or not. Look at me.

I was saved.

I was smart.

And I was working on it.

Not a born killer, but an engineered one. Taken. Rebuilt. Changed. That was what Stefan knew had happened to me. I’d wondered what Stefan would be if his brother hadn’t been kidnapped. I didn’t wonder the same thing at all about me, because it was beyond imagination. I couldn’t picture it or fantasize about it. It was impossible, and it was for the best, I thought. If I could have dreamed up an alternative to the life that I had lived under Jericho, the memories of the Institute would’ve done what it couldn’t do now—crush me.

Godzilla wrapped around my arm and sniffled, puzzled, for the vanished blood from where he’d bitten me. Like me, he had a bit of a killer in him. When Stefan found that out, about the Michael Korsak compared to the Lukas Korsak—the killer part of me, when he’d found out what I was—he hadn’t been afraid of me or what I could do. Not for a moment. I would’ve known it if he had; I’d have seen it on his face . . . in his eyes, but I’d seen nothing but acceptance. To him I wasn’t an assassin-in-training or a human bullet all the way down to the genetic level. I was his brother, pure and simple, and nothing else made a difference.

He’d actually been a little exasperated that I wouldn’t use what I had in me to protect myself. The drunk outside the bakery was one thing. But when someone attacked me with every intent of murdering me or, worse, taking me back to the Institute, it wasn’t the same. With that kind of adrenaline running through me, starting something was easy. Stopping it wouldn’t be. Stopping it could be impossible.

It had happened once, before Stefan pulled me out of the Institute. As a test—to them it had been only another test—a guard had been sent to kill me. Instead, I had been the one to kill . . . if only once. Wasn’t once far more than enough? It wasn’t going to happen again.

Jericho had changed me in biological ways, but I wouldn’t give his dead corpse the satisfaction of ever having changed who I was as a person. He gave me the genetic skills to be a psychic executioner, but that didn’t mean I had to use them. And, as far as I was concerned, he could rot in his grave for eternity before I became the assassin he wanted.

“Hey, kid.” Stefan sat beside me on the porch. “Have a Fluffernut sandwich.”

He handed me one of the two I’d made for him that morning. I took it out of the plastic sandwich bag and fed a bite to the ferret. The kid issue I simply gave up on for the day. I was nineteen for God’s sake, nineteen and made to kill, but when it came to Stefan, I wasn’t sure he’d let himself ever see me as anything but a little brother. “Do you know what happened . . . to Anatoly?” I should’ve phrased it better. I knew very well what had happened. According to the news report, someone had taken an electric saw to various parts of him. If Anatoly had been alive, and he most likely had been, since the saw had probably been just an interrogation tool, he’d most likely considered anything that happened besides that as merely incidental.

Stefan knew what I meant, though. “No. No idea who snatched him. Mafiya or the Institute trying to track us down.” By “us,” he meant me, but it was nice of him to spread the blame around. “It wasn’t the FBI. They wanted him the most, but, despite Gitmo, no one at the government’s using power saws to get info.” He fed a bite of his own sandwich to Godzilla too. A first—but it was hard to have an appetite when someone had cut up your father with the equivalent of a chain saw while he was still alive.

He cleared his throat. His voice had gotten thick on the word “saw.” “But he couldn’t have given us up. Just as when he was on the run from the FBI and wouldn’t tell me where he was . . . for my own good.” The smile was both hard and regretful. “I didn’t tell him where you and I were. I was more honest, though. I told him it was for our own good, and it turned out I was right.”

“The saw makes me think the mob. There were several vors”—mob bosses —“who’d lost a helluva lot of their territory and power if Anatoly had come back. And that place you were . . .” He hardly ever said “Institute.” It was worse than the foulest word out there for him, from the way he acted. He went on. “It doesn’t seem their style. Torture, yeah, but not with something you could buy at Home Depot. More something scientific and a damn sight worse probably.”

He offered another bite to Godzilla, who considered him and this gesture of goodwill with bright black eyes before biting Stefan’s forefinger and taking the morsel of sandwich. He purred contentedly as he ate the slightly bloodstained bread and peanut butter. I plopped the ferret on the other side of me, but Stefan didn’t seem to notice the slow drops of blood hitting the concrete, scarlet on gray, like the sun setting into a cloud-shrouded, tornado- spawning storm.

I had a feeling that one way or another what had happened to Anatoly would start that storm.

“I called Saul. He’s on some tantric sex yoga retreat or something. Trying to keep up with some women twenty years younger than him,” Stefan said with a darkly amused twist of his lips. “Not that that would have him disconnecting from the outside world and the money that goes with it. He didn’t know anything more than we did, but he’s looking into it—if he can untangle himself from whatever knot he’s tied himself into. Probably has his foot stuck up his own. . . .” He coughed and ate a bite of the sandwich.

I narrowed my eyes. “Nineteen—Jesus, going on twenty. I know about sex, tantric and otherwise.”

He shrugged and swallowed the bite. “Face it, Michael. In some ways you’ll always be the little brother.” His words echoed what I’d thought only seconds ago.

In some ways, always the little brother. In some ways, always seven years old and laughing on a beach. I didn’t need any psych class flashbacks to the Institute to know that wasn’t healthy for either of us. But before I could say anything, Sheriff Kash Simmons drove up in front of the house. The first time I met him, he’d shaken my hand solemnly and said his name was Kash for Johnny Cash and it was my privilege to call him sir. What it was about this town that accounted for no one being able to spell their own names was going to have to remain a