Chimera (34 page)

I didn’t see him. I twisted my head back and forth desperately. Maybe Jericho was wrong. Maybe he was doing this to torment me, to make my final moments as wrenching as he could. That was all it was; it had to be. When I finally brought my eyes back to those glossy black ones, I tried hard to hold on to that hope. It wasn’t easy in the face of the poisonous dark gaze fixed on me as I labored to sit upright in the sand. I wasn’t going to die lying flat in the sand, as if I were just waiting for it.

“Shy, that one,” he mused. “An odd quality in death incarnate.”

“He’s not.” I knew that as well as I’d ever known anything. “He’s not death.”

“Death enters through a thousand doors.” The gun extended toward me. “He’s only one. In time I’ll have all one thousand. And when all my doors open on the world, I alone will hold their keys.”

Then he fired.

The waiting is the hardest part. You learn that from nearly day one. You could be a child waiting for a cookie or a shiny new bike, or a cavity-ridden teenager waiting and dreading the jab of Novocaine with a needle that has no end. You could ask one of a million people waiting for outcomes both good and bad, and they would all tell you the same thing. Anticipation is a bitch; everything else is downhill. Is that true or not? I didn’t know, because what I expected, a bullet to the chest, didn’t happen. But God, I wish it had.

Time didn’t freeze. My life didn’t riffle before me like the pages of a badly drawn comic book. None of the clichés held true. My heart didn’t even have time to pound at a faster, more agonizingly painful rate. By the time you hear the gunshot, it’s too late for that. The bullet has already found its mark. If you’re the one hit, a beating heart may be a moot point. If you’re not the one cradling lead, a living heart isn’t what you want anyway—not anymore.

I looked down at the armful of deadweight, almost puzzled. So, it was God after all, not fate. It was God, and his sparrow had fallen from the sky to rest broken in my lap. Strands of bleached hair were cool against my arm, as cool as the liquid flowing against my chest was warm. The bullet had entered his back and exited his chest to rest in my shoulder. And the blood—the blood was everywhere. It flowed like a river out of him and onto me. I could even smell it on his breath—his shallow, fading breath.

“How could you do something so stupid?” I choked, the words ugly with anguish. “How could you do something so goddamn stupid?” His eyes were only colorless shadows in the moonlight, but I saw him in there still. Aware, he was with me, but beginning to drift away—far away. “Misha.” I rested my forehead on his. “Why?”

“For my brother,” he said simply.

The whisper brushed against my cheek and I watched as the life—the light—began to spill from his face. His skin went so transparent that dark lashes were a brutal contrast when they came to rest—and stayed at rest.

Jericho had known where he was. Charging him would’ve been futile. Instead, Michael had charged me. He’d thrown himself in front of me to take the bullet—my bullet. I pulled him close and blocked out the smell of blood with the scent of shampoo in his hair. Green and herbal, it took me from the beach to an endless field of grass and clover. It was a place without the stink of copper and the fly of fatal lead, a place without despair.

“Isn’t this annoying?”

There was the hiss and purr of sand under approaching shoes. Obviously, he’d overcome his distaste of wearing his victim’s blood, but it didn’t matter. I didn’t open my eyes as he came. I didn’t care. I’d found what I was looking for. After all these years, I’d found it. Damn if I was going to watch Jericho end it all.

“All my time wasted. All the delayed graduations, not to mention moving the entire Institute. Then there’s the money lost.” The footsteps stopped. “But nothing compares to the inconvenience. Nothing approaches the arrogance of your thinking you could interfere in my affairs.” The muzzle of his gun pressed hard against the top of my head, digging into skin and flesh. “My
work
.”

“Pull the trigger already, Frankenstein,” I said without emotion. “Just fucking pull it.”

I felt the air ripple as he leaned closer. “I should take you with me. You remember that examination table in the basement? I could take you apart on one just like it, piece by piece. I could make it last days, weeks if I wanted. No constructive purpose of course.” The laugh hit my skin with an unnatural heat. “Simply for fun. No?” The metal moved to my forehead as I remained silent. “That’s all right. This is fun as well.”

This time I heard the shot. It rang gray and sharp as a titanium bell. I felt the muzzle disappear from my head and I wondered at how easy it was; so very easy. There was no pain; no degrading of consciousness. I could still hear the roar of the waves, could still smell the leafy scent of Michael’s hair. I even felt the ground shudder as a body thudded against it.

“Stefan? Son?”

I opened my eyes to see a face that was a near mirror image of mine. Lines of age, a scattering of white hairs in the black, it was me at sixty. Strange, considering I’d just died at the age of twenty-four. At least I thought I had. “Dad.” I licked dry lips. “Dad, what—what are you doing here?”

“Saving your ass apparently.” He holstered his gun and crouched down beside me. “What the hell is going on, Stoipah?”

My eyes left him to fix irrevocably on a fallen dark figure. Barely three feet away, Jericho sprawled in a boneless huddle in the sand. Lids only half closed, he stared blindly at nothing. His chest didn’t move and the white of his teeth was obscured by blood, inky black as the sky above. Anatoly’s shot had blown out the majority of his throat; he would’ve died instantly. He must have fallen on his gun, because there was no sign of it. And that was no good. I needed it—needed it badly.

“Give me your gun,” I grated.

Eyebrows pulling into a confused V, Anatoly said gruffly, “He’s dead, Stefan.”

“Give me the goddamn gun.”

With no further argument, he shrugged and slipped it into my hand. I cradled Michael with one arm and emptied the clip in Jericho’s head at point-blank range. The shape of his skull changed to something misshapen and horrific. Now the outside of the son of a bitch reflected what lurked underneath.

As my father retrieved his gun from my hand, there was the stir of moving figures around us. It was Anatoly’s men. Jericho’s were either bodies cooling in the grass or long gone. “Have them cut off his head,” I said harshly. That was what was done with vampires, although he was worse than any undead movie monster. Jericho wasn’t coming back this time, not unless he could grow a new head. “Cut it off before they dump him.”

“Stefan . . .”

“Cut it off!”

“All right. Whatever you want. We’ll decapitate the bastard. The boys will enjoy the overtime.” Two of the men, vaguely familiar, drifted up at his snap and dragged off the body.

I felt something in me break at the sight, something hard and dark and bitter. It cracked and shattered beyond repair, and I wasn’t sorry to see it go. Pressing a hand to Michael’s back, I felt the blood seep through my fingers. “Misha?” Nothing. “Dad, we need . . . We need help.” It was the voice of a child, not that of a seasoned thug or newly minted killer. It was the voice of a teenage boy begging his father to make it all right. Please, this time make it all right.

“I’ve already sent Aleksei for a doctor. Stefan, what have you gotten yourself into?” He maneuvered out of the crouch to sit beside me. From the corner of my eye I vaguely noted that the white in his hair was more prevalent than the last time I’d seen him, the shoulders a hair less broad.

I ignored his question. I didn’t have the kind of time or coherence it would take to explain all of it. “I was looking for you,” I said distantly, because everything was distant now—everything except Michael. Lifting him higher in my arms, I could feel his breath against my neck; slow, so slow.

“I heard. That’s why I came to the house. We were in town getting some supplies, but I’ve been staying here for the past few days.” That explained the odd pattern of superficial cleanliness. “I knew you’d eventually show up here if you were in trouble.” His hand touched my leg and came away stained with blood. “I also heard about Lev,” he said with a smile etched out of ice. “My good and loyal friend Lev. I’m sorry to say that in the future, retirement isn’t going to agree with him.” Wiping his hand on his pants, he touched Michael’s arm. “And who is this?”

“Lukas.” It was a bizarre lightscape of ebony and silver that surrounded us. I shouldn’t expect him to recognize his lost son in those conditions, but unrealistically enough I did. “It’s Lukas. I found him.”

“Stefan. My God, Stefan.” He leaned back in shock, wiping blood and sand absently on his pant leg. His hand shook. In all my life I hadn’t once seen his hand shake. “Stefan,” his response bleak and implacable, “he’s not your brother.”

It stunned me, that he didn’t see it . . . didn’t believe me. “He is,” I countered sharply. “He’s Lukas. I know my brother. It’s him.”

“Ah, what an
esportet
.” He ducked his head to rest it in his hands for a moment; then he raised his face to me. It was a mask, a jangled combination of sagging grief and ruthless angles. “Stefan, you saw him. I looked up as we were getting in the car. Your face was in the window. You saw.”

I saw?

I saw. . . . God, I had.

I
had
seen it.

How could I forget that? How could I forget the small figure swathed in a blanket? Blond hair showing beneath a flap of wool, the thin arm hanging limp. Hours after my brother had disappeared, I had looked out my bedroom window to see my father riding away with his body cradled in his lap.

I remembered the weeks after Lukas’s disappearance being hazy, distant. I just hadn’t remembered precisely what had triggered those layers and layers of shock. I thought it had been Lukas’s being taken in front of me. I was wrong.

“When you . . . forgot, I thought it for the best,” Anatoly offered with a thread of pain even he couldn’t hide. “No one could know inside or outside the business. No one, and you were young, hurt. . . . You might have said something.” He sighed and rubbed his eyes. “I buried him with your mother, in secret of course. I let the police go on thinking he was still missing. I let everyone go on thinking that. Because if anyone knew how he had died, they would know whom to come to when I put every one of those bastards into the ground. Which is what I did.” Satisfaction was a cold comfort, but apparently he still embraced it. “The entire Gubin family paid for what they did to Lukas. Every last one of them, from grandfather to the last son.” And no one was the wiser. No one came to arrest Anatoly and none of the other
vors
,
Mafiya
bosses, came looking for a vigilante father out of control. “And in the years after, you didn’t seem to want to remember. You
refused
to remember.”

Nothing more than a snatching gone wrong. It was a common way to negotiate between rival factions. Lukas had died on that beach. I should’ve known it from the sound his skull made when it hit the rock. I should’ve known. His kidnapper had probably dumped his body not far from the beach when he realized Lukas was dead—when he realized my brother was dead. My brother . . .

Michael’s breath hitched and slowed even further. Lost to the world, he felt light in my arms . . . insubstantial as a ghost. Lukas’s ghost, long gone. “Misha, I’m here,” I whispered, but his eyes remained closed.

The eyes . . . and then came another memory, this one not as old. It was a sickening flight back to a dark hallway and a little girl named Wendy. There had been something about her eyes, barely seen in the dim light of the hall. When I’d told Michael that he had Lukas’s eyes, he’d gone still—distant and still. And when he’d talked about his friend John’s resemblance to their captor, he had said that of course his eyes were different from Jericho’s.
Of course
. Why hadn’t I picked up on that? All the children had bicolored eyes. It had to be an unforeseen result of the genetic manipulation. I couldn’t believe Jericho would’ve wanted such a visible marker on his product if he could avoid it. Assassins should be anonymous.

I’d pointed out to Michael that he had my brother’s eyes, and he had known it wasn’t the proof I thought it to be. He’d kept trying to tell me and I’d kept cutting him off. Or he’d cut himself off . . . because wouldn’t it be nice to believe it was true, for a little while, before ruthlessly dragging himself back to reality? But in the end it hadn’t mattered. When it came down to the wire, he hadn’t been able to deny me.

I’d told him over and over. I’d inundated him with stories and so-called evidence he didn’t want to hear. I’d given him a life and a family he had never asked for. I’d given him a hope he didn’t even know he wanted, a hope he didn’t know he desperately needed. It was up to me to decide if what I had done would save him or destroy him.

Michael believed now. And, by God, so would everyone else.

“He’s my brother,” I said with finality. Where the hell was that doctor?

“Stefan, what is this dream world you’ve concocted? This fantasy? What are you thinking?”

“He’s my brother,” I repeated flatly. “He’s my brother and your son. And if you ever say he isn’t or do anything to cause him doubt, I’ll walk away and you will never see me again.”

“Stoipah, what . . .”

“Never.”