Basilisk (The Korsak Brothers #2)(37)



“You’re not taking him anywhere.” Stefan’s words were as dark as Raynor’s eyes.

“Oh, but I think I am. I can take him, and I am, or I can blow out his brains and then do the same to you. You seem fond of your little killer pet. Ah . . . it must be the family thing and all that. Am I right? If that’s so, I’d think you’d rather know he’s alive than know he’s one of two corpses in an SUV that smells of ferret.” The smile was wider. “Now, this is what you’re going to do. You’re going to shoot yourself in each leg. I’m sure you have a silencer, so it won’t be heard—no doubt this would be the case with a careful, cautious man such as yourself with your wide range of career experience in that area. Do try not to scream, if you please. And then, when you’ve done that, you will throw your gun—who am I fooling?—you will throw all of your guns into the back where you can’t reach them.”

“Then?” Stefan asked, the darkness suddenly gone from his voice. It was empty—lacking in emotion, lacking in inflection, lacking in humanity itself, and if Raynor had been half as intelligent as I’d thought he was, he would’ve dropped his own gun and run.

“Then Michael and I take a drive, but have no worries. I do want him alive. He’s a valuable commodity, which oddly the two of you have never made use of, but no accounting for business acumen. Oh, and you can be certain my car won’t have an Institute GPS tracker in it as this one you stole does.”

I shifted my glance to Stefan and now he was smiling. I wouldn’t have thought I’d see a smile that equaled Wendy’s, but this one did. Sliding my gaze back to Raynor, I smiled myself. What it looked like, I had no idea. It wasn’t one I’d practiced. It was genuine and sprang from a place of surgical blades and ice-cold metal and human flesh floating in jars. “Asshole,” I said, “did you think we didn’t know that?” Raynor’s own smile faded into a split second of confusion. A split second was all he had time for.

The driver’s window to the truck parked next to us slid down. Raynor turned swiftly at the soft sound and right into the short metal baton Saul slammed across his throat. Mr. Homeland Security fell to the asphalt instantly. He’d dropped his gun to grab at his throat with both hands. From the strangled sounds and the rapid color change from red to blue, his trachea had been shattered by Saul’s blow. He was about five minutes away from death by asphyxiation.

I wasn’t sympathetic. While I wouldn’t kill, I did recognize that in the world we lived in there were people who deserved the ultimate punishment. Anyone involved in the Institute deserved it. Anyone who sent a sandwich-eating idiot to shoot my brother deserved it. Anyone who wanted to sell me as if I were nothing more than a sniper rifle deserved it.

Saul grinned, his white-streaked ginger beard a strange frame to such a homicidally happy flash of teeth. “Okay, I’d rather really be at Caesar’s instead of faking it over the phone, but wetwork costs you double. That makes my bank account get a boner like there’s no tomorrow.” He started to open the door. “I’d better finish the job before he attracts attention, kicking and gasping like a headless chicken. Nice suit, though. I wonder where he bought it.”

Before he could, there was a shout. “Hey, what’s going on? What are you doing to that guy? What the f*ck? Someone call the police!”

Good Samaritans more often for those on the run were Inconvenient Samaritans. “Shit. Civilians. I hate civilians.” Saul swore, slammed his door shut, started the truck, and drove off, the vehicle’s tires squealing. Stefan was right behind him. We’d been parked too close, as planned for the ambush of Raynor, for either car to swerve enough to put an end to the government agent without colliding with each other. He would have to take the full five minutes to die as no ambulance would get there in time. It wasn’t as if things were ending differently for him, I told myself. If the rebellion at the Institute hadn’t happened and Raynor had managed to get Wendy out to chase after me—free in the world as she was now, it would’ve been the same. Chases could be long and boring. Wendy didn’t like boring. Eventually she would’ve had to find some way to entertain herself. Wendy would’ve eaten him for lunch.

We just saved her the time.





Chapter 6


We hadn’t had to wait long at all for Raynor to show up in that parking lot. What we’d found at the Institute hadn’t made us forget about him. He wasn’t thirteen chimeras loose in the world, but he was smart and dangerous. He’d found Anatoly. He’d found us. He’d remained very much a threat, if the lesser one. We had enough on our plate to keep looking over our shoulders for him. It was another lesson that Institute and Mafiya teaching agreed on. If one threat is out of reach, take care of the one that isn’t. Raynor had to be taken care of, one way or the other. I didn’t know what had disturbed Stefan more when we’d both come to the separate but nearly simultaneous conclusion: that I could think like an ex-mobster or that he could think like a trained genetic assassin.

I’d have to ask him later, when he wasn’t expecting it, to see how fiercely his brain would cramp. Brothers did that—joked around with each other. The three primary sources of information in my life now had taught me that: Stefan, movies, and the Internet. I’d gotten good at it in the past few years—so good that sometimes when I opened my mouth, Stefan’s eye would twitch before I said a single word.

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