Basilisk (The Korsak Brothers #2)(48)

Fly away, bird. Fly away no more.





Chapter 8


The tracker led us to a house just beyond the outskirts of Laramie. It was the only one at the end of a long gravel road. Its isolation made me think of our house in Cascade Falls—or what had been our house before it had burned. The isolation was the only thing that reminded me. This house needed painting, but it had no Stefan to paint it. Its wooden shutters were split and on the verge of falling off most of the windows. The weeds that made up the yard were taller than my knees. It was all gray. The unpainted concrete porch, the bare, rotting wood, the grime-covered windows—they were the colors of no color at all.

Except. . . .

There were balloons—red, yellow, blue, green, purple; the helium had them bouncing in the breeze. They were tied to the mailbox at the road as people did for birthday parties. When I’d first seen that, fresh out of the Institute, I’d asked Stefan if clowns lived there. What did I know about celebrations and parties? Peter knew, though. Two weeks on the outside and he knew what it had taken me months or longer to learn. How had I missed seeing that in him? Genius beyond customary chimera genius—he was extrapolating information and customs I’d had to learn and he was doing it with what little data the Institute had given us. He was the chimera Einstein, and that not only made him as dangerous as Wendy, but maybe more so with his maturity level and cunning. I was in over my head. We all were, but there was nothing to be done about it. I wanted my brother to stay safe; I wanted Saul . . . well, out of hearing range, but that didn’t matter. We couldn’t let death roam in a pack across the country. If we did, I couldn’t say how long the country would be left.

We were the only option; I was the only cure.

“I don’t think they’re in there. Not anymore.” Stefan had traded his Steyr for one of the tranquilizer guns. “I believe they outfoxed the tracker, Misha.”

I didn’t have a lot of doubt about that either. The homemade banner across the front door that read TOO SLOW, MICHAEL. BYE-BYE and the fact that their GPS signatures hadn’t moved in more than twenty-four hours were sure signs that too slow was me indeed.

Peter had thought of something else that I hadn’t during my escape. Stefan and Saul, not I, had figured out I’d been implanted with a GPS tracking chip. It hadn’t crossed my mind then, but it had crossed Peter’s. I tightened my lips and headed down the grass-spotted driveway toward the house. I managed two steps before Stefan moved in front of me—no surprise there. “When do I lead the way?”

“When you’re sixty, not nineteen, and I’m in the nursing home. And I’m hoping before then we can stop worrying about who goes where first.” Stefan had switched the tranq gun to his left hand and now carried his 9mm in his right.

Behind me, Saul said, “You can both go first. No skin off my nose.”

“You’re bringing up the rear, guarding my flank, aren’t you?” I demanded, for Stefan if not for me. It was hard to gain acceptance as being as efficiently dangerous as an ex-soldier, such as Saul, and an ex-soldier of a different sort, such as Stefan, without their seeing me in action. And while I did want their respect, hurting people to get it . . . That situation hadn’t come yet. I should hope it wouldn’t. Being a man and leaving childhood behind were damn challenging and equally damn confusing.

“I’m not interested in your rear or your flank,” came the breezy reply. “You’re not a woman into thigh-high boots, thongs, or getting the good parts vajazzled, are you?”

I’d been ready to detect his lie. I was not ready for “vajazzle.” I didn’t know what it meant. I didn’t want to know what it meant. My suspicions alone were ghastly enough, and now was not the time to be distracted. Peter and the others were gone; I was ninety-five percent positive. But five percent could kill you the same as ninety-five. One percent could kill you.

If Wendy was inside, she could kill us all.

Stefan kicked down the front door. I had my own tranq gun up and ready to fire. As Stefan had said, aim for the torso and I’d be fine. And while real guns didn’t interest me, I had practiced once with the tranquilizer gun. My aim was more than adequate, and my hand/ eye coordination excellent, which was not a result of denying myself Sara from the coffeehouse’s company and keeping my own company while locked in the bathroom, as Stefan had suggested. That wouldn’t have given me good hand/eye coordination, only repetitive motion injury.

Stefan disappeared into the gloom of the house and I followed. My eyes adjusted quickly and I could see the signs of habitation in the here-and-there streams of sunlight finding their way through gaps in the musty-smelling curtains. Full garbage bags were stacked neatly against one faded green wall. The bags were white but transparent enough for an observer to see they held empty food containers. Pizza boxes, empty tubs of ice cream, microwaved potato skins and fried cheese; bag after bag from fast food hamburger places. There was more, but I looked away to continue visually searching the room. Knowing that Peter and the others were like me when it came to taste and appetite wasn’t helpful to the situation. Anyone locked in a prison where sugar was a concept, not a reality, would flip in the other direction with freedom. That didn’t make us the same, not even close.

Saul darted out from behind me and, moving in a crouch, checked out the rooms off the main one to the right. Stefan handled the one, a dining room, to the left as I made my way to the kitchen. I’d thought the house was abandoned, which was why Peter had chosen it. It wasn’t. The ancient refrigerator was humming noisily. The electricity was working and so was the water. I tested the tap—the water ran cold and clear. It would be with thirteen chimeras making use of it. There’d be no chance to get rusty and orange. The kitchen table was as scarred and rickety as ours had been in Cascade but with only one plastic chair. Whoever had lived here, and I was completely certain it was “lived” in the past tense, had lived here alone.