“Be kind to Stefan.” I remembered those words.
I looked at the bones and chunks of decomposed flesh on the screen. He’d been in a lake. Lake Michigan. Floaters aren’t pretty and I honestly couldn’t remember if I’d learned that at the Institute or on one of the thousand TV cop shows since. Wherever I’d heard it, it was right. He was roadkill marinated in a swampy Everglades ditch. He was in pieces and the pieces didn’t fit together to make anything that looked human. They’d identified him by dental records. I clicked on the next picture. These weren’t the kind available to your average Internet surfer, but I wasn’t your average anything. If there was a place that cybertendrils didn’t extend into, I hadn’t found it yet. Chimeras were trained to fool people. I’d found that fooling machines was far easier. If there was a data stream, I rode it; a path of pixels, I walked it. I saw it all, saw through everything as if it were made of glass.
Not like Anatoly.
“Be kind to Stefan,” he had said. He hadn’t been much of a human before or after he died, I’d thought, but he’d loved his son. He hadn’t loved me; I could tell. I didn’t read him, but I didn’t have to search his face or catalog his movements and words to know that. Love is easy to see; no effort required. Other emotions took effort, but love was simple. I didn’t know why he hadn’t accepted me like Stefan had. Maybe I’d been gone too long. Maybe he’d wiped me out of his heart and mind. The reason didn’t matter.
I did know it now, but it didn’t matter. Anatoly had ceased to matter to existence itself.
I couldn’t read him emotionally any better today than then—it was hard to read pieces. But I could read what had been done to him. Brutal, vicious, and messy, but effective. I could’ve done it more quickly and neatly, but there weren’t many of my kind around. Others had to make do with chain saws. This hadn’t been done for punishment or fun. It would’ve taken too long. Psychopaths, such as the Mafiya, as much as they liked chain saws, were generally into immediate gratification. This had been done methodically by someone looking for information.
I searched the screen. I’d seen Anatoly and what had been done to him. It was what was behind his tangible, rotting memory that I’d noticed: a man. He was in all the pictures. In the ones where they’d pulled Anatoly’s remains from the lake, loading him into the coroner’s van, in the autopsy room—he was always there. The suit, short fringe of dark hair, opaque sunglasses, and inscrutable expression said government, but his dedication in following the body from place to place implied more dedication than FBI or IRS, the major bloodhounds on Anatoly’s tail according to Stefan.
I clicked on the next picture and zoomed in on those deep-set black eyes in the one picture where he’d removed the glasses. Not entirely inscrutable. There was interest there, a deep and passionate desire. But for what? Anatoly was beyond indictment and prison. What was left that could be that fascinating?
The knock on my bedroom door had me automatically switching to another computer window. Stefan stuck his head in. He looked at the computer screen and groaned, appearing more than a little worried. “Again? Seriously, kiddo, you’ve got that live girl at the coffee shop made of mostly human parts, you’ve got porn at your fingertips, and you’re wasting your time on that?”
I glanced at the Lolcats site. “There has to be a logic to it. It’s idiotic, but people say it’s funny. Unless all people are idiots, I’m missing something. I’m going to figure it out.” It wasn’t strictly a lie. It was not volunteering information and . . . waiting. And waiting wasn’t wrong, not if you thought of it in the correct way. My mind was an Olympic gymnast at twisting and bending to see things in the manner that benefited me the most.
“Cats are intelligent.” It was a diversion, but it was also true. “If they could talk, then I’m quite sure they could spell.” My eyes were drawn back to the screen and the idiotic U haz hareball on fut under the picture of an evidently highly annoyed cat biting someone’s ankle. There had to be something to it . . . but what in God’s name it was, I couldn’t figure out. “Maybe their owners can’t spell, but they could.”
“Misha.” His lips quirked. He was tired and darkness was in him, shadows filling up a flesh and blood pitcher. “Thanks for taking one of the more crappy days and making it better.”