Basilisk (The Korsak Brothers #2)(28)

He said bitch as lazily as if that were the only thing he ever called women. Stefan, who painted houses for free for needy landladies and undercharged Mrs. Sloot to paint her gingerbread; Stefan, who treated women with the utmost respect—he even hadn’t hurt the one who’d robbed us at gunpoint years ago at a time when we could least afford it. Yet if I hadn’t known him, I’d have believed every word, and I knew I couldn’t have carried that off. He was right. I should stick to being myself—the myself where my outside reflected what my inner biology wished it was.

But was it fair that Stefan had to be the mean one all the time, no matter his past?

No. No, it wasn’t, especially as much as he wanted to leave that part of him behind. Being a drug dealer was much easier online. The reality of being one or pretending to be one . . . I saw now why Stefan had been so upset earlier. Or pissed off—highly pissed off. Maybe there was a reason all Jericho’s children were like me . . . and looked somewhat younger and guiltless at first glance. We were trained to plan if we had to, trained every day of our lives, but we were made to not need to. Our faces were our alibis. Touch, kill, and who would ever suspect a nineteen-year-old who would probably look like a nineteen-year-old until he was thirty?

On the other hand, one look at Stefan and you’d know what he might do. One look at me and no one knew what I could do and that it was much worse than anything Stefan had in him. It was the perfect disguise. Nature would’ve applauded.

It only made me feel like a freak—as if it were only right I should be labeled “Caution,” “Dangerous,” “Biohazard.” That was as far as my thought process went before starting to spiral bleakly downward until Stefan pinched my shoulder hard—he knew; how did he always know?—and went straight for the Cloud-horse siblings the second they walked through the door.

They had rifles, attitude, and sneers, all of which went limp under Stefan flashing his Steyr in their faces before they had time to move. The muzzle set gently over the eye of one of them—that of Jacob, the brother. “Playtime is over, kiddies.” They were barely younger than he was, by two years at the most, but, in experience, I guess kids they were. If they’d used those rifles for anything but shooting rabbits, I’d be surprised. “This is why you look at porn on the Internet, not how to hook up with dealers, because you are not ready, *s. You’re worlds away from swimming in this ocean but damn close to being six feet under that dirt outside. Now, take us to the plane. And if your girlfriend calls the cops, you’ll just be lying on top of that dirt in a pool of your own guts and blood.”

Stefan didn’t want me to be like him, but thanks to him, we had our stuff and were on the plane in fifteen minutes. The Cloud-horses had built a big barnlike building behind a line of pine trees to hide it. I didn’t know where they were hiding the drugs and Stefan didn’t mention it. The two Cloud-horses thought themselves pretty clever, I’m sure, in not bringing it up themselves. They weren’t. What kind of drug dealers show up and don’t want their drugs? But if they were smart, we wouldn’t be standing here in the first place. Smart people don’t grow marijuana and hide planes for strangers on the Internet, no matter how much they have been paid.

“Now.” Stefan stood in the large outbuilding concealing the plane and tapped one of them—Jacob—on top of the head with his gun. It was a friendly tap, if you didn’t count the pain that twisted the lean, brown face. “Which of you is going to take a ride with us? You or your sister?” His sister looked tougher by half, but she stood back with her hands up at shoulder level. When it came down to the bottom line, she came way before her brother apparently. Their rifles had been left outside at Stefan’s order.

Jason stumbled over his words. “What? What the f*ck? We did what you said. What Sebastian said.” He pointed at me. I’d given up looking tough and just looked like what I was: bored. I was bored. Stupidity bored me and there was a massive amount of stupid here. Oddly, this expression seemed more intimidating than the one I’d tried at the store. I was being me now and that, despite Institute training, could be the most frightening thing of all in a person.

I remembered what Wendy at the Institute did when she was bored. It wasn’t a good time to be a rabbit or a guinea pig in the animal lab on those days.

“Be yourself,” Stefan had said.

Let that Frankenstein child you were shine through, I thought.

Shit.

I folded my arms, but didn’t look away from the brother and sister team. Stefan wouldn’t need back up with these two, but better safe than sorry. Now he was saying, “My cousin is learning the business. I want him to know drug dealers can’t be trusted. Too bad that’s a lesson you don’t already know, huh? But don’t worry. It won’t be a long ride and just until we get far enough off the ground to make sure you didn’t screw with the engine. Then we’ll boot you right back out. Fifteen, thirty feet. You’ll be fine . . . if we’re fine. You might break your legs or your spine, but I hear great things about wheelchairs these days.” Jacob moaned and his sister gave it up.

“We screwed with the engine some,” she grunted. “Jake, stop being such a whiny bitch. They’ll fix it. They’ll go and you can go back to knocking up sixteen-year-olds.”

That was my cue. I went over to the Cessna 350 and opened the cowling to peer at the engine. You can’t learn to fly a plane via instructional video if you don’t know what parts go where . . . at least not safely. Luckily, my partners in crime didn’t know anything about planes of any kind. They’d only yanked whatever to them seemed yankable—idiots indeed. Twenty minutes later and after a run-through of the electronic checklist, we were in the air. And, yes, I might have hit the top of one of the pine trees, but that was why I said theoretically so often. It left room for the tiny errors, the learning curve. None of that mattered when I looked at where we were. We were flying in a blue sky, the world and its dangers gone beneath us. It was . . . freedom. It was glory. It was a wonder I’d never seen, although it was an unsteady wonder.