Basilisk (The Korsak Brothers #2)(71)
“He’s not the only one, is he?”
The moment was here.
“No,” I said, “he’s not.”
It was time for the truth and I told it—the majority of it. There was one thing I held back. Among other things, I told them Peter knew about the cure. What I didn’t tell was the truth of the cure itself. I had to. If I hadn’t, the only cure for the chimeras would be a bullet to their brains. Killing thirteen teenagers and children, murderous or not, would be on Stefan’s and Saul’s consciences for the rest of their lives. I wasn’t going to let them carry that with them, especially when I couldn’t take part of that weight myself.
I wasn’t a killer; it was a vow to myself—not one that I wouldn’t break, but one that I couldn’t.
Not a killer, never again.
I was a liar, though.
And a manipulator.
A deceiver.
A hypocrite.
What good is a conscience if it lets you commit every evil under the sun save one?
No damn good at all.
Chapter 12
After the two-hour drive to Phoenix, we stayed at the first nice motel—hotel—I’d been in. Saul checked the three of us in while Stefan and I made our way cautiously along the shadowy recesses of the lobby. There were potted trees, fresh flowers, and furniture—the kind you could sit in without catching a venereal disease. An art deco–style chandelier of brightly colored blue and purple glass gave the large room an underwater feel. If a dolphin had gone swimming by, I wouldn’t have been surprised.
Or a girl with a mermaid tattoo.
Keeping our heads down, we waited for Saul by the elevators. We’d changed clothes in the car and cleaned the blood and grime from our hands and faces as best we could with napkins and bottled water. We couldn’t do anything about the hair, though. Pouring bottles of water over our heads at a rest stop had the mess going from dusty mop to matted, clumped hair that made the homeless on the streets the salon poster children for great hair care in comparison.
Saul met us and handed us a key card. “You don’t have to go through with this, Skoczinsky.” Stefan was carrying his duffel bag as well as mine, my backpack, and my laptop. The ribs would be better than new in a few hours, but the pain, dull and insistent, hadn’t left. That was why we’d stopped, although there was plenty of daylight left to keep going. The chip, which hopefully remained around Peter’s neck, was headed west toward Los Angeles. Stefan had said if they went on a wild, crazed murdering spree there, it wasn’t as if anyone would notice. LA, after all, was crazy central. We couldn’t do anything about it anyway. We needed time to stop and recuperate.
By “we,” he meant me. Here, I could sleep in a real bed and not in the back of an SUV bumping over every pothole in existence. I could shower in hot water, lie flat, sleep, eat more. The hunger had faded, but it would be back. I hadn’t forced myself to heal this fast before. But I’d never had anything close to these injuries since I’d learned to speed the healing process. When I was seventeen, I couldn’t control my healing very much at all. No chimera could. Your body healed at its own automatic, albeit, accelerated rate.
But as I’d gotten older, my body matured, and that, combined with relentless exercises in healing myself of self-inflicted cuts and burns, turned me into an athlete of healing—the best in the world. I wasn’t invulnerable, but I was harder to kill. Or that was what I’d thought before I’d been run down by a semi and had a house dropped on me. It was a wonder that passing Munchkins hadn’t sung a song and stolen my shoes before running for it up the Yellow Brick Road.
I wondered if I could genetically engineer a flying monkey.
I jerked back to the subject at hand. This time the mental meandering was from exhaustion, and with not too many endorphins. “I wouldn’t blame you,” I said. “Thanks to me, you didn’t come into this with open eyes.”
He considered Stefan first. “Having a friend is a pain in the ass. But you’re easier, Smirnoff. You pay me big bucks for the really entertaining illegal work. The rest of what I do—find someone, lose someone, suggest a reputable hit man, break a kneecap on a slow day, obtain and deliver rolls of plastic, duct tape, and three identical khaki green shirts when all the stores are closed during a Miami hurricane; the usual crap—it gets boring and before you know it I’m watching The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills to see whose skin is stretched the tightest. But you? Lots of money, a yearly Hanukkah card, and occasionally crazy, wild shit that Spielberg would find unbelievable. You keep me on my toes.”
Saul zeroed in on me next. “As for you, you played things close to the chest, but so do I. Occupational hazard. And despite everything, it doesn’t change our plan or hopefully the end result. If anything, it gives us an edge we didn’t have before. Besides, dropping your ass means dropping Stefan, and I like his money too much.” As the elevator dinged—a low, expensive sound that could’ve been an ancient Tibetan gong—Saul grinned and shot me with his finger. “Looks as though you’re stuck with me, Mikey.”
Skoczinsky giveth and Skoczinsky taketh away.
The elevator was paneled in dark, rich wood, intricate crown molding, and a bench against the back wall covered in sedate black and gold striped cloth. The small discreet TV above the doors was the single exception to the British library look. “And books,” I muttered. “What’s a library without books?”