“No one.” He shook his head.
“Are you telling me the truth, Raynor? I want you to look at those chimeras. You shouldn’t worry about collecting them. They’re not killers anymore. No use to you. What I did to them,” I said, thinking I’d let him wonder exactly what that might have been, “I can do to you, but for what you’ve done and allowed to continue and wanted, I could leave you the very goddamn picture of drooling subintelligence. Someone would have to change your diapers for the rest of your life. With your dignity and vanity, I don’t think you’d like that.” I leaned in closer until he could feel my breath on him. I made it cold—the touch of a corpse. “On the other hand, leaving you alive and sane if you’re cooperative means nothing to me either. Only results matter. So go find that cylinder and save lives, including your own.” I took my hand from his shoulder. “I’m not like you, Raynor. I’ll always be better, because I’m not a killer.”
It was a lie.
I had killed him—the moment I’d let go. I’d weakened a vessel in his brain and destroyed all the pain receptors in the meninges. They wouldn’t register the pressure of the leaking blood. There’d be no headaches to warn him. He had three days maximum and when he died, death would be in a split second. He would never know it was coming.
As I’d said, I had killed him for what he’d done and what he’d allowed to be done at the Institute, but more than that, I had killed him for what he knew. He knew about Stefan and me. But his successor wouldn’t. There’d be no murder board of a mob murder Stefan hadn’t committed to be stumbled across. There wouldn’t be a picture of a little boy with bicolored eyes like mine. His successor wouldn’t know Stefan existed, but Raynor did. And he’d come for us again. At least for me, and Stefan might die trying to protect me. Raynor might wait a few years, but he’d come. Men like Raynor didn’t give up. Men like Raynor, Jericho, Bellucci, they never gave up. Monsters didn’t.
Stefan had done his best to keep me true to myself, although he’d been clear that self-defense was justifiable and to go for it if I had to. I’d refused all that time. I’d told him I wouldn’t be the killer they had made me. I’d said I wouldn’t kill, not even to save my life.
But there was one life I would kill for. I’d been blind because I’d wanted to be. There had been that false image that had fooled my mind of Raynor’s man killing Stefan when we’d first fled Cascade. In my mind’s eye I’d seen him pulling his trigger, yet I’d refused to let it go any further, that thought. I’d seen it and then I’d unseen it. Felt it and buried it. Saw its face in intimate detail, yet couldn’t tell you a single feature.
I hadn’t let my own brain recognize this choice would come, undoing everything I had built the new Michael/Misha on. The games I played in my head where thoughts could be knotted and hidden away ended as one of my own kind had killed Stefan when he was less than ten feet from me.
I wouldn’t kill for myself, but I would kill for my brother.
And I didn’t regret it, not for a moment. It didn’t make me a monster or a freak, saving my family. It made me what I’d wanted to be all along.
It made me human.
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Epilogue
Raynor did as I told him, if only to save his own life from Ariel’s work. He died two and a half days later. I checked the obituaries. He had a nice-looking picture and an Armani suit. I wasn’t surprised. Saul went back to Miami and if he blocked our numbers from now on, I wouldn’t blame him. We took our time in picking another town. It didn’t matter where it was really, only that it was home. We chose different names and jobs. I went with Wyatt, and Stefan was John Henry. Although Doc Holliday was rolling over in his grave at Stefan’s poker skills and I still didn’t care much about guns, my love of Westerns and Western aliases would never die. Instead of being a house painter, Stefan was a car salesman and surprisingly good at it despite his wolfish looks. Once he pounced on them in the car lot, I thought people were afraid to not buy a car from him. He was employee of the month more than once, which embarrassed the hell out of him. I had a copy of the picture made and hung it in the living room to give him shit. That’s what brothers do—give each other shit.
And we were brothers. What he knew and what I knew in the privacy of our own hearts didn’t change that.
I had two jobs. I worked at the library part-time and spent four days a week at what had to be the last video store left in America—what could be more perfect? I could both feed and entertain the mind. I’d moved movie night from Wednesday to Sunday, but I didn’t give it up. I loved the fantasy of movies, maybe more so now.