Aggravation was one of the easier emotions to identify and use. Simple irritability could be escalated to an attention-drawing rage with the few right words. Then, while chaos ensued, you could slip away and be within touching reach of your target within seconds. A chimera didn’t need seconds. We needed only the most fleeting of touches.
I blinked and shook my head slightly. Other old habits, pre-Stefan ones, were coming back as well. Not habits, lessons. And I could forget them if I tried hard enough . . . not today or tomorrow. I still needed them, but someday, when freedom was permanent.
“That’s three names now, four if you count Parker. One more and I’m just getting it over with and calling you Cher. So, Misha,” he said, emphasizing it carefully, sarcasm in every letter, “what do you think they’ll do now that they’re out? Peter and his Dickensian gang of would-be criminals? What would they want?”
Dickens, Charles. Born 1812; died 1870. I shuffled through my memory. Fiction, boring, gray, and grim . . . unless the orphans were singing about starvation on stage. That might rev it up some, but I had never watched it and didn’t plan to, so that was a theory unproved. “Dickensian? I guess they are Dickensian, if Oliver Twist ever made anyone vomit up their own intestines.”
No longer irritated, but blank, Stefan looked over at his gun. It was the kind of emotional vacuum some people—good people—needed to do what was necessary. “I know. I don’t want to. Hell, they are kids, but, yeah, I know.”
But he didn’t. He didn’t know. He only thought he did and he might as well jump off the Empire State Building if he couldn’t do better.
“For the last time, Stefan, they aren’t kids,” I emphasized. “ ‘Kid’ is a measure of age in the outside world. In the Institute, it has no meaning. Look at what Wendy did, and she’s ten. You wouldn’t ask a rattlesnake how old it was, would you? Age doesn’t matter. From ten to eighteen”—which covered Peter to Wendy—“any of them can and will kill you, given the slightest opportunity. And that is what they want.” I stroked Godzilla as he slept, chirring in his sleep, paws twitching. “They’re not like me, Stefan. Not these thirteen.” It was an unfortunate number, just as history claimed it to be.
“They like what they are and what they can do. They like it more than anything. They aren’t going to settle down in some little town.” I felt another pang at losing Cascade Falls, shoved it down, and pushed on. “They are going to kill people. And I doubt there will be any rhyme or reason to it. They’re out of the assassin factory and in the chocolate factory. Every day is dessert Sunday and everyone they come across is potentially . . .”—I shrugged as unease tightened my spine—“dead meat.” I’d almost said “victim,” but that made it too desperate, too gut-wrenching. When facing the Institute’s best and worst in one, we’d have to be as cold as they were or we wouldn’t have a chance of surviving. Pit emotion against a chimera and you would die.
Stefan looked at me with a more familiar expression. He didn’t get it, despite what he said. “No, they’re not like you. I get that, believe it or not.” He got up to move to the bathroom, shoving my head lightly as he passed me. “I’m glad you get it too.” He closed the door behind him, and I heard the shower start. I fell back across the bed and stared at the dingy yellow ceiling. No, he didn’t get it and he wasn’t going to. He couldn’t understand Institute-born were never kids, never children. It was the damn age thing; otherwise he would’ve gotten it and known a murderer when he saw one. I wasn’t the only one who’d spent years surrounded by killers. Stefan had done his time too. He was like me in that way.
We were two peas in a poisonous pod—or two peas who’d escaped their pod and were living the life they wanted. Hardworking, good people who wouldn’t hurt a fly if they had their way. I noticed Stefan’s gun was gone. It would be with him in the bathroom and I remembered the man he’d shot only this morning.
Okay, maybe we fell somewhere in between.
Sitting up, I reached for the laptop in my duffel bag and checked to see if Ariel was online. She kept both late and early hours, the same as I did. She’d once said there was so much to do in life that she would sleep when she was dead. I pointed out she was a Buddhist and would never be dead, only reincarnated. She said I was a smart-ass. And I was smart, but I hadn’t meant to be an ass. It was a clear supposition: You can’t sleep when you’re dead if you’re never actually dead. Then she said she was Buddhist only on Tuesdays. She practiced a different religion or philosophy every day. How else could you learn?