Basilisk (The Korsak Brothers #2)(82)

Yet a shot cracked clear and loud all the same.

As the material over Wendy’s chest blackened, then turned red, her eyes widened—the cat suddenly finding out what it is to be the mouse—and she tumbled backward over the edge, lost to the lethal churn of water at the base of the dam. But not before I heard screams in the hills beside the river, fainter than the rifle shot but as fatal. Wendy had taken her killer and his waiting comrades with her.

I staggered to my feet, yanking at Stefan with one hand, then at Saul, and started firing my tranquilizer gun at the chimeras who had halted at Wendy’s fall, milling about, momentarily lost. But as I thought at the Institute, they were the varsity team. They were the ones who lived and breathed to kill and they didn’t need a Wendy to do that.

With all three of us firing, several fell, but they were quick . . . like me. Smart . . . I didn’t think so much of that about myself anymore. They were predators from the moment one cell split to become two. This was what they were born to do and no one on Earth was better at it than they were. I tried to keep between them and Stefan and Saul. They couldn’t hurt me. But, as I’d thought, they were smart. One tackled me to the road, taking me and my gun out of commission for a few seconds until I touched him and he fell at my side. I didn’t have to touch now, except Wendy had drained me, and touching was much easier and faster until I recovered. He didn’t move again. I’d done what no chimera before Wendy had been capable of—I manipulated the cells of my own kind.

I wasn’t Wendy, but I wasn’t Michael either, not anymore.

Back up on my feet, I fired at another chimera, another Peter . . . Peter Three. He stumbled and collapsed and I turned. . . .

Too late, I turned. Stefan had turned too. It was only a tranq gun, and the boy was nine at best. He could’ve walked right out of The Brady Bunch, one of those old TV shows that had been on cheap hotel TVs as early-morning reruns when we’d been trying to escape the Institute the first time. The same curls, freckles, happy smile, but with a hand that struck faster than a cobra. It hit in the center of Stefan’s chest and I felt it. I felt Stefan’s heart stutter, I felt it stop, and then I felt it tear in half. I felt him die. I’d worked so hard on blocking Wendy’s type of deadly ability, I hadn’t had the resources to block the usual chimera kind as well.

Saul shot the boy in the back and he probably shot more. I didn’t notice and I didn’t care. I ran, dropping my gun and falling on my knees by Stefan’s side. When this had all begun days ago, I’d imagined Raynor’s fake tourist shooting Stefan, I’d seen the image of his eyes, turning from the brown I knew to the gray of the clouded sky. I’d imagined wrong. They stayed brown, the brown I saw over a breakfast table, that laughed when I did something idiotic or clever or pretty much anything at all, the brown of a brother who hadn’t taken one day of our years together for granted. It was the brown of a brother who wasn’t going to leave me, no matter what he or God or reality thought.

I wasn’t going to let that happen.

I put my hand over his chest in the same spot the other chimera had snatched his life away and closed my eyes. If he’d just stopped Stefan’s heart, it would’ve been simple. But he’d torn it apart and that wasn’t simple at all. Ragged edges—I couldn’t see, but I could feel. They had been viciously torn. How could I join those back together again? God, how?

No. No. I had to remember what I’d learned.

It was flesh, not bone. Bone was difficult; flesh was easy. Wasn’t it? Hadn’t I said so? Hadn’t I proved so? And a heart, that was merely—shit, Stoipah, don’t—that was only the engine that kept the entire body running. You could do without one of those for a good four or five minutes without brain damage; if the body was cold, hypothermic, then longer. I dropped his body temperature like a rock as I carefully put his heart back together, bit by bit. It had to be right, had to be perfect or it wouldn’t work. It wouldn’t. . . .

I stopped thinking and healed—that and nothing more. I poured every ounce of my ability from me into him. I did the impossible. I made his heart whole again but it didn’t beat.

I raised his temperature back to normal but it didn’t beat.

I was terrified, desperate, desolate, and f*cking pissed off, and I gave it the biggest bio-electrical jolt I could manage. I gave him everything I had and felt the blackness creeping around the edges of my vision as I slumped across his unmoving chest.

You never let your brother down. You never let your brother down. You never let your brother down.

Until you do.

The darkness was complete. I didn’t know for how long, but when I opened my eyes, I felt a hand patting my back and saw breakfast brown eyes smiling at me. “You’re a miracle, kid. Did I ever tell you that?”

“Don’t call me kid.” I swiped at my eyes, which weren’t wet; I didn’t care what anyone said. “Ah, Jesus. Call me kid whenever the f*ck you want.”

If I let my big brother hug me, I wasn’t going to admit to that either.

Theoretically.



Saul helped us both up. Stefan was steadier than I was, but that was from all the energy I’d expended. Big boys don’t cry and all that manly crap. Around us all the chimeras save one were down and unconscious. Saul shrugged. “She didn’t try to attack us. She didn’t do anything at all. I thought you might want to talk to her before whacking her with the cure.” Both he and Stefan stepped back, not too far, but enough to give us the illusion of privacy.