Chimera (The Korsak Brothers #1)(59)
A single cold finger climbed my spine as if it were a ladder. Psychic. I didn’t know exactly how to classify what Michael and the other Institute children could do, but it had to occupy some twisted corner of the psychic realm. “Psychic? What the hell?”
“I know. As we said in the van, he’s a goddamn fruit loop. He calculated that if they would be stronger and faster, they would also have a heightened psychic ability. Of course, if he’d ever bothered to demonstrate all those abilities himself, maybe he wouldn’t be the pariah he is today.” I heard him yawn. “Shit, maybe I’m a chimera myself. Twice the sexy jammed into one body. Now that’s a science project worth the bucks.”
“Bucks? How about cents?” I replied absently. Michael had come out of the bathroom. Bare-chested, he was wearing a pair of my jeans that bagged ridiculously on him and a towel hanging around his neck. My eyes went instantly to the incision on his lower back. He’d said it hadn’t hurt when he’d gotten up this morning, and now I could see why.
It was gone.
The only sign the surgery had ever taken place was the thinnest of silvery lines, nearly invisible to the naked eye. I felt my mouth go dry. Stronger or faster, I didn’t know if there was truth in that or not, but Jericho had certainly proved resilient. It had to be the same resiliency that Michael was exhibiting. The recollection of his tattered feet from the night of the rescue hit me. The next day he’d said they were fine when I’d asked and had seemed puzzled by the question. At the time I’d thought he was reacting to a concern he was unfamiliar with, but it could’ve been simple confusion over what he thought a pointless question. Of course they’d been fine, no doubt completely healed.
Turning, he blocked my view as he dumped the towel and pulled on a long sleeve T-shirt. He caught me staring and raised his eyebrows in question. Shaking my head, I strong-armed my attention back to the phone conversation. Saul was still indignantly jabbering about my cheap shot and I interrupted without mercy. “So, you say he’s a pariah. Then what’s he been doing lately?”
“Once his pet theory became his only theory, he literally dropped out of sight. The scientific community probably wasn’t very sorry to see him go. The chimera line was on shaky ground, but then he went over the edge. Psychic research isn’t any more accepted now than it ever was, not when it comes to the big boys. These are the guys who have their eyes on the Nobel, and they don’t have the patience for anything that isn’t one hundred percent for that goal.”
“Then there’s nothing else? About the kids or the compound?”
“Nada. For nearly twenty years he’s been off the radar. Forgotten except for textbooks and old articles.” There was the explosive pop of a soft drink can being opened and then a long slurp. “But with what was in that room we saw there, he couldn’t have been up to anything good. And that’s above and beyond kidnapping kids.”
“Was there anything in the news?” Saul had made the 911 call the night we’d broken in, but I hadn’t heard anything on the radio over the following days regarding captive children held in a walled compound.
“Not a thing. Not a damn word. And if that doesn’t scream government connections out the ass, I don’t know what does. I even sent one of my people out there to take a casual look. It’s still locked up, but the guards are gone. I’m betting everyone else is too. They’ve pulled up stakes.”
And taken the children with them. I had my brother back, but there had to be more than thirty families out there whose sons and daughters and brothers and sisters were still missing—worse than missing. While I wished we’d been able to take more of them with us, I realized it might not have been so simple. The thought of that tiny porcelain Wendy on the loose in public was bone-chilling. As she skipped down the sidewalk, her fair hair floating behind her like spider silk, her huge eyes would be wax doll empty as people collapsed in showers of blood all about her. Wendy was a victim, I knew that, but was she a salvageable one?
I didn’t think she was. I really didn’t. But some would be like Michael or Peter. Some could be saved. But without the help of the authorities, I couldn’t guess how a large-scale operation like that could be pulled off—not now at any rate, but I wouldn’t forget those kids, and I didn’t think Saul would either. “Keep your ears open, Saul. Just in case. Okay?”
He promised he would, then hung up. Damn, I’d forgotten to ask if he knew how Jericho had lost his hand. The information probably wouldn’t be useful, but you never knew.
“What did you find out?”
Damp hair neatly combed, Michael was sitting cross-legged on the other bed opposite me. Skin pink, eyes bright, he was apparently healthy as a horse. Yeah, a horse whose racing was done in healing, not on the track. Scrubbing both hands across my face, I filled him in on what Saul had told me. That Jericho was involved in genetics wasn’t news, but the chimera aspect was. I mentioned the stronger, faster, and smarter, keeping the accelerated healing to myself. I wanted to discuss that separately.
Michael was a chimera; that couldn’t be avoided. The question was whether he had been born one or whether genetic manipulation had taken place after he was kidnapped. Saul had mentioned a chimera could be found by way of a blood test. If Michael was a natural chimera like Jericho, that information could’ve been obtained surreptitiously from the hospital where Lukas was born or from his pediatrician. I had a hard time buying that natural chimeras had always been among us and no one had noticed their so-called superhuman qualities. Maybe Jericho had been the first of his kind, a new breed of chimera. And it wasn’t that far a jump to believe Jericho could have used his knowledge of genetics to somehow force other normal chimeras into the same mutation. That had led to the creation of the accelerated healing and fatal talent for cellular destruction, although so far Jericho hadn’t shown any signs of the latter. That must have been an “improvement” that he stumbled upon during the process. He’d made something amazing and frightening, half wonderful and half dire. He was a cruel god, Jericho.