Chimera (The Korsak Brothers #1)(24)
“No one’s behind us yet, but it won’t be long.” Saul twisted his neck to watch out the back window. “Can’t this piece of shit go any faster?”
“Maybe if we lightened the load by dumping your bony ass.” Pessimistically, I put more pressure on the gas pedal and was rewarded by a slight surge of the engine and rattle of the van body. With one hand on the steering wheel, I used the other to skim off my mask. “Burn that, would you? It has a nice helping of my DNA on it.” I touched a finger to the still-wet blood on my jaw. Luckily it was the side of my face that was already scarred. Not much more damage could be done there. “Chances are they’ll guess who I am soon enough, but better safe than sorry.” If they were the ones who had originally taken Lukas, they were bound to know something of his family. And who else besides his family would come looking for him?
Fishing for his lighter, Saul set the mask on fire and let it slip out of the window to follow the cell phone. It was a small comet trailing sparks as it was swallowed by the night. As he pressed the button to raise the window, I looked into the mirror again to see Lukas tilting his head to get a look at my face. The fleeting warmth I felt at the first sign of normal curiosity in him melted to nothingness as I saw the complete lack of recognition in his eyes. I don’t know what I’d expected. He had no memory of his own name. Seeing my face so changed from my fourteen-year-old self wasn’t likely to trigger a recollection, but . . . shit, hope springs eternal.
Turning my head, I said lightly to him, “Don’t worry, Lukas. You always were the pretty one in the family.”
He didn’t return my forced smile but only leaned back in his seat as Saul sniped, “Speak for yourself. If pretty’s in this van, he’s sitting right here. Clooney’s got nothing on me.”
The chuckle that hung like an aborted sneeze in the back of my throat was unexpected. There were no two ways about it; I was going to miss Saul. Hurtling down the road in a shot-up van with a brother who didn’t know me from Adam and with pursuers who couldn’t be far behind, I should’ve had nothing but anxiety, desperation, and the black and red sketched images of fallen bodies in my thoughts. We weren’t friends, Skoczinsky and I, I’d told myself a few times before, offhandedly blaming it on an inner lack in us both. Maybe that was true, or maybe I was fooling myself and any deficiency lay solely with me. If Saul and I weren’t friends . . . well, I suddenly wished like hell we were. I was going to miss the son of a bitch.
If I lived that long.
Chapter 10
We dumped the van a few miles out. The two cars, nondescript blue with conveniently muddied license plates, were waiting where we had left them down a side road. A dirt trail was a better description, one filled with holes that rattled our bones before I put what was left of our ride into park. We moved quickly with the ever-present thought that time was ticking away faster than water swirling down a drain. Stripping off my black shirt, I revealed a long sleeve gray shirt. It was damned sedate compared to the stomach-churning spin of colors Saul seemed to prefer in his shirts, and I pretty much expected the automatically disparaging curl of his lip.
The all-black outfit might not attract the attention of a cop in the same way as would a gun resting on the dashboard, but the cat burglar look still might snag an extra glance. Lukas would be fine in his white scrub pajamas. From a distance it was indistinguishable from a T-shirt. If that hadn’t been the case, I had a duffel bag full of my clothes in the backseat. I could’ve given him a sweatshirt, although it would’ve swallowed him. Only one or two inches shorter than my five foot eleven, he was a much slighter build—not skinny, but definitely lean. If our babushka Lena were still alive, she would’ve been stuffing him with food, trying to fatten him up. “Lukas, get in the car.” I wadded up the black shirt and tossed it onto the back floorboards.
He stood beside the van, watching as Saul and I moved around—always watching. By turns he seemed like a child, innocent and confused by the ways of the world, or an old man, uninterested and not particularly astonished by the turn of events. There were quite a few people in him, and not one of them was the Lukas I remembered; It was yet one more thing I simply didn’t have time to ponder, not now.
“Michael.”
I looked up from stashing my gun beneath the driver’s seat of the car. The sheer determination projected behind the response caught my attention when I thought nothing less than gunfire would have. “What?”
“My name is Michael.” From the obstinate set of his jaw I realized we’d reached a glitch in what so far had been a fairly successful run. “Test or not, call me by my name. Call me Michael.”
I hesitated at the car door, then took a step toward him, halting when he took the same telling step backward. I knew what to say, because, after all, it was the truth. Look, I know you have no idea what’s going on, I could tell him, but you have to trust me when I tell you that you are Lukas Korsak. You’re my brother, and I’ve come to take you home. P.S. Great jammies. See there? Easy as pie. Delusional I was not, and I didn’t need Saul’s murmur of “Not the time” to know better than to get into it all now.
“Okay, Michael it is,” I conceded, and was rewarded with a slight loosening of his wiry frame. I continued with a hard-won casual tone. “Could you hop in the car, Michael? We’re in something of a hurry here.”