Chimera

by Rob Thurman

  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.”

  Chapter 29

  Michael lived.

  It surprised all of us, including me, and I’d seen him do some damn remarkable things in the healing department, although none were as miraculous as this. I survived too, more or less. The bullet that had passed through him and into my shoulder was nothing. As for my leg, a little fancy orthopedic surgery put it back together. I’d limp in cold weather for the rest of my life; it really wasn’t that high a price to pay, considering the work was performed on the second floor of the beach house by an alcoholic surgeon with shaky hands. I felt lucky to have a leg left at all. Beggars can’t be choosers, and neither could those of us on the run.

  The recuperation, Michael’s and mine, gave me time to think. Jericho had never conquered genetic replacement at all, on himself or anyone else. All his successful work must have gone on in the same way it had begun . .
. with embryos. Perhaps he did it with surrogate mothers. Or, hell, for all I knew, he could’ve learned to grow the kids in jars in a lab. Regardless, as he’d said on the beach, he’d made them from scratch. I’d wondered if John had been a relative of Jericho’s, his son maybe. Now my best guess was that Jericho, the ultimate egotist, had cloned himself. If he couldn’t have that fucking festive power of killing with a touch, he’d make another Jericho that did. Only it hadn’t turned out that way. John had had a mind and a will of his own. He’d had a soul; made in a lab, of man and not nature, and he’d had the soul Jericho had lacked. Funny how things worked out—funny enough to break your goddamn heart.

  Naturally, toward the end, Michael was up and around before I was, but in the beginning . . . heavy doses of painkillers and an unswerving belief in him were all that kept me sane, although that sanity was something my father would have debated.

  Anatoly did as I asked; it wasn’t as if he had much choice. I was deadly serious in my threat to him. If he made one misstep, said one wrong word, I would’ve been nothing more than a memory to him. I can’t say he came across as World’s Best Dad, with a mug and shirt on order, once Michael woke up. That had never been him to begin with, but he tried, in a cautious way, to include Michael. If not as a son, he treated him as a rarely seen nephew, with courteous and cautious charm. My father was nothing if not charming . . . when he wanted to be.

  As for Michael, he kept his distance. He’d just embraced a brother; he wasn’t quite ready to welcome a father with open arms. It was for the best, all the way around.

  But when it came to me, it was different. In his eyes, I was his family. And he committed himself to that in the same way he committed to any project or endeavor, be it research or finding the best fast-food burger ever made. He did it with a wholehearted and stubborn ferocity. It was a humbling thing to see. It made it difficult for me to mourn Lukas. I should have, but in the bright light of day I couldn’t. To my conscious mind, Michael was my brother, recovered memories and unfeeling reality be damned. It was only when I slept and the nightmares came that I was able to give Lukas his due, and I gave it to him over and over again.

  Those nightmares in turn brought to mind Michael’s dreams, the ones of sun and horses that he’d mentioned. They hadn’t been his dreams at all; they’d been mine. Or, a more comforting thought, they’d been Lukas’s. He’d had a heart, Lukas . . . far bigger and better than mine was. If he could’ve sent a message of hope to another lost boy, he would have. And if anyone could have received that gift, it would’ve been Michael. Jericho had tried to accelerate psychic growth in his subjects, and he’d succeeded in the darker areas. It could be he had as well in ways not measured in dying cells or exploding organs, but in light and luminous promise.

  What had happened might never be explained, and that was all right. Faith in the unknown can be a tenuous thing for people like me. It was best to let it be what it was—a warm glow close enough to be seen and just far enough away not to be marred by a skeptical touch.

  But faith went only so far. With the Institute still out there, even without Jericho at the helm, I thought it prudent to continue to play rabbit for a while, hiding from any unseen hawks. When the national news carried a piece on a noted St. Louis scientist disappearing, it only cemented my determination.

  In a time of hypersecurity, there were still certain borders that were crossed easily and anonymously enough if one had the cash. With what Anatoly gave us when we left, that wasn’t going to be a problem for a long while. He made me swear to stay alive long enough for him to find us once he wrapped up business for good. I said I’d do my best, but I had my doubts that my father’s elusive day would ever come. I hoped it would. Michael would want a father someday, and a retired crime boss might be better than nothing at all—at least theoretically, as Michael would say.

  Weeks passed, then months, until one day I was sitting at a small table in the hot sun when a suitcase was deposited unceremoniously beside my feet. The dust cloud from it hung in the unmoving air as Saul dropped wearily in the chair across from me. Dressed in an impeccable if impractical white silk shirt and pair of eggplant purple linen pants, he lifted a straw hat from his head to wave before his sweat-beaded face. “This place is like the Everglades on steroids,” he said with wheezing outrage as he ducked a large mosquito. “Jesus, even the bugs are pumping iron. The women though . . . Nice. Very nice.”

  “Nice to see you too, Saul,” I said dryly, moving my cane out of his way and leaning it against the table. Michael, who stood at the cantina door, was flirting shamelessly with our waitress. In addition to fluent horny teenage-ese, he spoke flawless Spanish. Me? I tended to point and grunt a lot. When Michael caught sight of Saul, his face hardened perceptibly into a scowl and he started for us. He’d become rather protective of me, punk-ass kid that he was. I waved him off and flashed an “okay” sign.

  Saul caught the exchange and raised eyebrows over five-hundred-dollar sunglasses. “Hmmm. He’s grown. He must eat you out of house and hovel.” Commandeering my untouched beer, he finished off the bottle in four parched swallows. Afterward, he pulled a handkerchief, an actual English gentleman’s handkerchief—which I was positive they hadn’t made since my grandfather’s time—from his pocket and fastidiously mopped sweat from his neck. Finally, he relaxed, put his feet up in the spare chair, and said calmly, “I have the information you wanted.”

  I knew he had. He wouldn’t have come all this way to deliver bad news. But the statement still had the power to make my pulse jump and my eyes narrow. “You found them?”

  He nodded and cracked a triumphant grin. “They can run, but they can’t hide. I found them, Smirnoff. I found those bastards and I found the kids.”

  We hadn’t forgotten the others, Michael and I. It might take years to be able to go after them, but now we knew where they were. Now we had a start. “Thanks, Saul,” I said with grim satisfaction. “Thanks a whole helluva lot.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Thanks are nice, but I’ll wait for that bonus you promised before I get too excited.” He grunted as he gestured desperately for another beer. “So, Bolivia, eh? It’s not exactly a vacation spot to the stars, is it? What brought you here?”

  “Butch and Sundance,” I said obliquely, a faint smile hovering on my lips.

  He gave me a sideways glance and, fearing the heat had gotten the best of me, held up two fingers for the waitress. She ignored him and, not put off in the slightest by the ferret on his shoulder, continued to give Michael the undivided attention of a pair of stunning dark eyes. His hair was brown again and it suited him. Certainly most of the local girls seemed to think so. Snorting in disgust, Saul turned back to me and commented, “He looks good. Healthy, happy. You guys getting along all right? Like each other okay? Hugs all around?” He grinned again at my exasperated groan, all humor and blinding white teeth. “What? You’re family. That doesn’t mean you’re obligated by law to love each other.”

  The exasperation faded as I watched Michael laugh and take the girl’s hand in his own. He took it with ease. There was no hesitation; no concern that he might lose control and hurt her; no fear that he was a monster. He held her hand as if he were nothing more than an infatuated teenage boy.

  “What’s not to love?” I said simply. “He’s my brother.”

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