And they were saying he was dead.
I told Sara I felt sick, and then I went to the bathroom and threw up, nice and loud—no finger needed. Genetic skills, I had them in spades. And you don’t tell stories you can’t back up. You always do what needs to be done to provide evidence to support your deception. I hadn’t learned that from Stefan. I’d learned it at the Institute—the place Stefan had rescued me from. The Institute had thousands of lessons and some hung around, lingered—when I was awake, when I was asleep. They most likely would my whole life. When it came to making people think what you wanted, a small number of those lessons were harmless, the rest considerably less so, but all were efficient.
I was nothing if not extremely efficient.
My trip to the bathroom got me a “Shit, Parker, sweetie. Are you okay?” from Sara and a call to someone else to replace me. Ben Jansen. Ben liked the bouncing as much as I did—or as much as Stefan said I should.
Stefan . . . he should know better. He shouldn’t have done this. There was protective and overprotective; then there was something so far beyond that—a word hadn’t been invented for it yet—and that was what Stefan practiced. Anatoly was dead; it was all over the news, and Stefan hadn’t told me. He hadn’t called me to let me know. How could he think I wouldn’t find out? I didn’t know, but I did know it had to stop. Nearly three years free and twice I’d saved his life; it was a two-way street now. He had to trust me with the bad as well as the good. I wasn’t a kid anymore, no matter what he called me. I could more than carry my own weight.
The coffee shop door shut behind me and I started down the sidewalk with my hands in my pockets, heading to my car. It was seven years old, gray, and a Toyota. They were virtually invisible. That was mob and Institute knowledge, oddly coinciding. Low tech meets high tech, with the same purpose: clean getaways. Of course, the Institute expected no getaway would be necessary if you did your job adequately. I guessed we’d fooled them, because Cascade Falls was a clean getaway so far.
In the distance I could see through the trees the silver glint of the Bridge of the Heavens crossing the Columbia River. When we’d picked this place to live, Stefan had quirked his lips. “Bridge of the Heavens,” he’d said. “How about that, Misha? That must mean this is Paradise.” Sometimes he could be a little thick, my brother. He didn’t always get that everywhere I went outside of the Institute was Paradise. If there was actually a Hell, the Institute would make it seem like Paradise too. Hell would be a walk in the park. Hell would be nothing.
“Hey, smart-ass. You get tired of ripping people off with your high-priced shit?” The words, tainted with bile, came from out of nowhere, or nowhere if your attention was not in the here and now, and mine wasn’t.
Stupid. How could I be so careless and stupid? Anatoly was no excuse. You were always ready. Always.
It was the tourist. He was sitting on the wrought-iron bench, always freshly painted bright blue, outside Printz’s Bakery. I noticed that every day. The swirls of iron reflected the exact same color of the sky overhead. It was one more detail about Cascade Falls that made me . . . happy, I guess, and made it my home. The tourist wasn’t one of those warm, small-town features. There wasn’t anything warm about him at all, except his sweat. He had a cheese Danish the size of a four-year-old’s head in one hand and a smear of buttery cheese on his chin as he glared at me. As I’d thought earlier—his body had its work cut out in taking care of him.
But it wasn’t my job to take care of him, unlike his unlucky heart, and I ignored him and kept walking. That was normal too and being normal was the best move I could make now. Do as a normal teenager would do. Only I was barely still a teenager and I was nothing close to normal. But I played the game as I’d been taught. Normal teenagers usually aren’t polite to annoying people—or assholes—and that meant I walked on as if I hadn’t heard him.
Stefan would definitely say this guy was an asshole. He wouldn’t be wrong.
“Shithead, I’m talking to you.” I’d only just passed him when there was a hand grabbing my arm to give me a shake. From the smell, he’d put something in the coffee after he’d left the shop. Cheese, alcohol, coffee, and natural halitosis—I’d smelled better things and I’d smelled worse. People almost always smelled worse on the inside than the outside.
The Institute had had anatomy classes and enough cadavers to make Harvard Medical School jealous. The Institute taught its students to hurt people, taught them to use what had been stamped on their genes. But I hadn’t wanted to hurt anyone. I hadn’t wanted to kill anyone. The thought of it, in self-defense or not, had made me sick. That didn’t mean I wasn’t forced to learn and it didn’t mean I hadn’t killed.
Once.