Basilisk (The Korsak Brothers #2)(64)
Stefan’s lips twitched. “What if he flirts with her?”
“First, he’s in his forties. That’s disgusting. Second, if she did take him up on it, she’d kill him. His heart would give out before the Viagra kicked in.”
“There’s something to be said for dying a happy man,” he commented, eyebrows raised.
“No, there’s not.” My mood at being forgiven abruptly deflated.
“No?” The eyebrows went a fraction higher and his lips twitched again.
“No,” I said darkly, moving to the hood to see inside the Visitor Center.
Seriously, how long did it take someone to go to the bathroom?
I worried about how we were going to explain to Ariel how Stefan and Saul were waiting for us before we had a chance to call them. Despite her comment, she wasn’t going to buy psychic. Her four-year-old sister with the horse morgue and human hair shoes might buy it, but not a woman who was, I couldn’t deny any longer, more intelligent than I was. But it turned out not to be a problem. I was given a humbling example of how experience in duplicity edged out genius without trying.
They said nothing.
In the back with me, Ariel, Dr. Ariel Annabelle Mac-Leod, verbally poked and prodded Saul and Stefan relentlessly for two hours on how they’d known where we were. Neither of them said one word. The louder and more persistent she was, the denser the silence became. At one point, Stefan dozed off while Saul drove, which was the equivalent of sleeping through a tornado siren two feet from your ear. That was when Ariel turned her frustrated attention back to me, but it was too late. I’d learned by example. Everything she asked about Raynor, the Institute, if the two up front were indeed “f*cking psychic Men in Black,” if the sky was blue and the grass was green, I smiled, shrugged, and kept my mouth shut. I half expected another attack with purple footwear, but it didn’t happen. She finally gave up, folded her arms, and started reciting Pi. If we were going to ignore her, she could do the same, but she was also Ariel. She could ignore us and annoy us, except for a snoring Stefan, by assaulting our eardrums all at the same time. She was up to the eight-hundred and seventy-fifth decimal—I wasn’t intimidated as I could go up to a thousand—when Saul decided he needed a bathroom break of his own.
How did I know since he wasn’t talking? I could feel, literally, his bladder aching. When little kids read their comics and wished for superpowers, I couldn’t imagine any of them wishing for that one. Wolverine, Magneto’s distracted. He needs to piss like a racehorse. Make your move! It wasn’t as if I could feel every ache and creak of a person’s body, and I had to be extremely close to them to feel anything at all, but if it was painful enough and the proximity was there, I could often feel more than I wanted.
Like now. Thank God he didn’t have prostate problems yet.
He picked an off-ramp on the trail back to Tucson, and Peter, and stopped at a McDonald’s packed with the breakfast rush. We looped the building twice before finding someone pulling out and taking their parking spot. The second we stopped, Ariel opened her door and said the first thing since she’d started on Pi. “I have to go to the bathroom and I’m starving. That government * took my purse. So one of you as-yet-indefinable *s hand over some cash.”
Saul grunted but handed her a five. She flipped him off with a perfectly appropriate doctorly finger and said, “Thanks, big spender. That might buy me a sausage and biscuit but no OJ. I’ll be sure to name my scurvy after you.” Then out of nowhere, she turned and kissed me. It wasn’t a long kiss, but it was warm and firm with the sweet taste of tongue, and abruptly she was gone, flouncing her way into the restaurant. I wasn’t being sexist when I said flouncing. Ariel didn’t flounce. She walked with a strong and determined gait, but her skirt flounced. It couldn’t help it. It looked made of filmy scarves. If you’re a scarf, you don’t have much choice: flutter or flounce. Between the kiss and the flounce, I smiled. I couldn’t help myself.
Saul sighed as Stefan yawned and straightened. “Okay, Smirnoff, now that you slept through the make-out session, what are we going to do with the mouth that ate the continent? Send her home? Bury her in a shallow grave? What?”
Stefan tilted his head to look back at me at Saul’s news. I shrugged again. It had worked for me so far for the past hour. He was caught between a teasing smirk and a frown, I could tell, but settled on a frown. “Raynor took her,” he said. “He has her ID. He knows who she is, where she lives. If we send her home, there’s a chance he might snatch her again to get at Misha. We’ll have to stash her someplace. With someone we trust until this is all over. She damn sure can’t come along.” He left it unsaid that it would be more dangerous than sending her home.
He rubbed his face. I could hear the scrape of his palm over the bristle of his beard. “You know anyone out here you trust, Saul?”
Saul yawned himself, his bladder complaining more. “I have people that subcontract for me, sure. I have people like that all over the country. But someone I trust? In my business? Yeah, right. How about you? You have anyone you trust?”
Stefan groaned, low and resigned. “Besides the two guys sitting in the car with me? No. Shit.”
Saul undid his seat belt. “Well, keep thinking. Gotta shake the snake before I explode.” He got out and disappeared inside after Ariel. The difference was twofold: His clothing didn’t flounce—blinded, but no flouncing. The second difference was that he came back. Ariel didn’t.