“Stoipah, no!” I dropped my bags and ran. “Don’t touch the car!”
But it was too late. His fingers had already hooked under the handle. I’d reached him at the same time and tackled him as hard and fast as I could. I might have been frozen when he had fought the man on the car outside Cascade Falls. I wasn’t frozen now. I wouldn’t let myself be again.
The explosion wasn’t huge; only big enough to take out the car and whoever would’ve been standing next to it. We weren’t. We were fifteen feet away, over a scraggly hedge into the other section of the parking lot. The medium-sized fireball behind us heated the air to more than a hundred degrees; the smoke scorched my lungs, but I didn’t care. Beneath me was my brother and although he was wheezing for breath, his face reddened by the heat, he was alive and not tiny pieces spread far and wide for the morning pigeons to peck. “What . . . ?” he said, choking. “How did . . . you know? How . . . did you get us . . . out of range?” It was a good question, considering he had at least thirty pounds on me and all dense muscle.
I pushed up to take the weight off his chest and let him recover his breath more quickly. “I saw the oil on the back of the car. Fresh. Someone had been under it. You don’t crawl under a car at four in the morning unless you’re planting a tracking device or a bomb.” The rest? Mmm. There was truth and there was explanation. Sometimes they could be entirely different things and sometimes they could be the same. In this case, they were the same. “Adrenaline. I’m in my prime. Not a geezer like you. I’m stronger than I was three years ago. I work out with your weights.” I didn’t. Exercise was boring. “You’ve seen me.” He hadn’t, but ordinary people don’t recall every detail of every day.
Truth, explanation, and half of a somewhat white lie. I’d tell him the entire truth later, when the time was right, but for now, half an untruth was what I gave him. I felt like hell saying it, but I saved my brother’s peace of mind, for now, and his life, for good, I hoped. That made it worth it. The car burned behind us and I felt a hand pat my back vigorously. “Small bonfire,” Stefan said with a crooked smile; then, apparently his breath back, he pulled me into a one-armed hug so fierce that even a chimera like me yelped. “Don’t do that again, okay? It’s my job to protect you, not vice versa. I’m the big brother. Me. Got it? If I blow up, I blow up alone. You go with Saul if that happens.”
This time when I pushed up, I stood and held a hand down to him. “No.” The sentiment was true and spoken matter-of-factly; I wasn’t going to change my mind.
He took my hand and got to his feet. “Misha, this is not a game. It’s never been a game. You know that. You almost died for me once. If you actually succeed, don’t think I’m going to stick around. I did it for ten years. I can’t do it again.”
I saw him again as he’d once been: the drowning man. I’d given him what I said I wouldn’t: lies. He gave me the truth.
I wished he’d lied instead.
I glared at him, but what do you say to a truth like that? I wasn’t going to not try to save him if I had the opportunity, but after what Stefan had given up, it would be like spitting in his face to say I wouldn’t try to survive if I could. I couldn’t do that—throw away what he’d given me. “If I’m too slow next time,” I said grudgingly, “I’ll go with Saul. But try not to make that an issue, all right? Be more careful.”
He raised his eyebrows at my tone—he was lucky to have any eyebrows at all after the explosion. “I’ll do my best,” he said with a patience his colleague didn’t share.
“You two stop bitching at each other and get over here by the fucking SUV,” Saul snapped from down the row of parked cars, some littered with burning debris. “Your TV-fried friend might not have left only one present.” He dropped to the cracked parking lot surface and crawled under his vehicle. A minute later he returned. “Nothing.” He then checked the engine. “We’re good to go. Now, get in the damn car!” People were gawking out of the doors of their rooms and there was the unhappy wail of sirens in the distance.