Basilisk (The Korsak Brothers #2)(52)

This was one of the less times, but the rapidly disappearing wound on my face wasn’t something I wanted him to see or a truth I wanted to spill. Not yet. I’d said it a hundred times to myself over the past year.

Just . . . not yet.

Stefan coughed hoarsely and Saul, whom I might not hate after all, choked out, “Been . . . pepper sprayed. This . . . is . . . worse.”

“Pepper sprayed. You.” Stefan coughed explosively again, then managed to get up on his elbows. “Not . . . surprised.” He looked around, eyes streaming from the gas. “Holy shit. We’re on fire.”

“Only a little,” I said, exaggerating or rather underestimating some, but it was a triage moment. You had to breathe before you could run. “Catch your breath and we’ll make it out of here before we’re charcoal.” I felt his and Saul’s hearts beating under my hands, fast with adrenaline but healthy and whole. There were no arrhythmias. Chances were approximately seventy-nine percent that we would make it out of here without being barbecued as they’d wanted to do to Wilbur. I had a flashback to the Institute and brightly colored videos. What had poor Wilbur ever done to anyone? Or the spider, Charlotte? Or Bambi’s mother?

That Disney guy had been an excessively cruel man.

The building blew up a second time, what was left of it. Stefan took matters into his own hands. “Breathe . . . later,” he wheezed as he got to his knees and then to his feet—unsteady and weaving, but upright. “Run now.” Saul followed suit. They were tough, for humans, both of them. Strong. It had helped them survive their lives and it helped us survive now. We did as Stefan said—we ran. Saul’s khakis caught fire once. I patted out the flame when he would’ve paused to do it himself and pushed him on. We ran around the house instead of cutting through. Who knew what traps could be waiting in there that we’d simply missed the first time or were waiting their turn.

At the SUV, I climbed behind the wheel while Stefan all but fell into the passenger seat and Saul literally dived into the back, nearly squashing Godzilla. I started the engine and tore down the gravel road as fast as the SUV would go without sliding on the gravel and off the road. I didn’t think the house would explode as well, but naturally with all things Peter in the past two days. . . .

I was wrong.

A smoke detector wired to more homemade explosives would do the trick. That was how I would’ve done it, but with Peter showing himself to be more intelligent than I was, guessing was all I could do. The vehicle rocked, but we were out of range, barely, although part of the roof landed close enough behind us to momentarily lift the back wheels inches off the road. They smacked back down and I kept driving. Stefan was hanging on to the door handle. He hadn’t had time to fasten his seat belt—safety first, he’d always told me, the hypocrite. But I would let it go this time. “I guess I should be grateful you stuck to pipe bombs,” he said, his voice hoarse from his coughing. “This Peter might not know shit about chlorine gas, but he knows explosives out the ass.”

“Sometimes you get lucky,” I said darkly, jerking the steering wheel and spinning the SUV in a tight circle at the end of the road—a dead end. Why was life so damn appropriate when you least wanted it to be? I headed back the way we’d come, weaving around the pieces of roof and wall in the road.

“If Peter wants you to catch up with him, why is he trying to kill you?” Stefan finally put on his seat belt after I smacked his arm repeatedly and pointed at it.

“Because if these minor problems stop me, then I’m not deserving enough to find or join them.” I steered around a flaming piece of drywall.

“That was minor? You’re kidding, right? Two explosions and not-quite-good-enough chlorine gas is minor?” Saul sat up in the back and rubbed his chest as if it should ache. He took his hand away and frowned as if surprised that it didn’t.

“Chimeras can kill with a touch, but other people, nonchimeras”—humans, in other words—“kill in other ways. The Institute taught us all the ways there are to accomplish that, to be on our guard against the weaker . . . I mean, normal people.” Chasing daily after those genetically the same as me, if not mentally, made it easy to forget who was normal and who was not. “They didn’t get into specifics on how to make those types of weapons. We didn’t need to make them—we just had to know what we might be up against. But give one of us chimeras the Internet and we don’t have to be in the same state to kill you. We specialize in assassinations that look like natural deaths. Peter isn’t interested in whether they look natural or not now. He’s free. They all are. Free to kill in any way they like.”

“Like a buffet.” Stefan exhaled, leaning back in his seat. “They’ve found new toys to play with and after a virtual lifetime of solitary confinement, why wouldn’t they want the different and the new? If it weren’t for the trying-to-kill-us part of all this, it would be hard to blame them.” His eyes flicked to the rearview mirror to watch the burning foundation of what was left of the house behind us. “You said you had a way to find them despite their removing their chips. I don’t doubt your genius, kiddo, but how?”

“There were only twelve chips in that mug.” I took a hand off the steering wheel and for the first time in my life ruffled his hair, wavy and thick as a dog’s undercoat, in mockery of what he’d done to me more than a time or two when I was younger. Turnabout was fair play. I wanted to see how he liked it. “I’ll teach you about counting sometime. I might get you up to twenty if we try really, really hard.”