It turned out I didn’t have to call Stefan. He pulled into the Visitor Center at the same time we made it in. He didn’t look pleased. He didn’t look pleased in the way Rabid Zombie Werewolves from Mutant Hell—it was a real movie; I’d seen it—weren’t pleased. He opened the door of the SUV and stepped out. There was the subtle motion of him putting his gun in the back of his jeans that no ordinary person would notice, twenty-ten vision or not. “What the fuck happened?” he demanded. He could’ve said more, considerably more. Out of nowhere it was my Internet friend from New York. I was in the middle of a park instead of asleep in my motel bed. I’d left everything behind, including my phone . . . everything except Godzilla. He had a bubbling volcano full of questions and he couldn’t ask any of them in front of Ariel.
I had some too, the main one being how he had found me.
“This is your friend? Is he psychic or what? How’d he know where we’d be? And why’s he so angry? What a temper. I don’t know that I’d be friends with someone with that kind of temper.” That was a good one with the way she’d done her best to break my ribs in Raynor’s car. “And could someone kick in the door to the Visitor Center? I have to use the ladies’ room, and I don’t want to go around back and get my ass stung by a scorpion.”
Saul stepped out of the other side of the vehicle. I pointed at him. “He’ll kick it down for you. That’s Bubba, my other friend.”
It was almost worth Raynor’s being left alive to kidnap and plot to see the contortions Saul’s face went through when he was labeled with the fake “Bubba.”
“Yeah, sure, chiquita,” he said dubiously. “I’ll kick it down for you.” It took him a few tries, but once they were inside and I heard the bathroom door slam, both Stefan and I went at it.
“Raynor’s alive. I was out putting money in the vending machine,” I started to explain—I supposed we’d have to leave money to pay for the Visitor Center door too; being a good citizen was frequently frustrating—“and he shot me in the head with a rubber bullet. I woke up, chained, in a car going north. He’s building a new Institute in Montana and was taking me there. One of his goons stumbled across Ariel in Cascade. She was worried about me and had tracked my IPS, although I bounced it around the globe a few hundred times. She’s apparently as smart or smarter than I am.” Which everyone lately appeared to be. “He thought she’d be insurance on my good behavior. She figured out he’s government of some kind. She thought my name was Bernie, but she heard him call me Michael. We escaped when she choked him out with her legs—she takes yoga—while he was driving. The car flipped and we escaped. She doesn’t know I have a brother. I said I’d call a friend from the Visitor Center for help. That’s it.” My short time in person with Ariel had taught me how to spit out a lot of information in very little time. It was useful.
I pointed at him. “You. Go. How’d you find me?”
He stared at me. I remembered when he used to have to look down to meet my eyes. Now that we were the same height, the stare was somehow more intense and as ferociously amber as one of those Rabid Zombie Werewolves.
Shit. I’d been so busy explaining what had happened that I’d forgotten how it had happened.
“We’re on the run and you were shot in the head when you went outside without me,” he said, his voice unnaturally calm for what I knew of my brother.
“A rubber bullet. He might as well have hit me with a Tic Tac.” That wasn’t quite true, but downplaying it was my best hope.
“When you went outside without me.”
“You were asleep. You needed the rest,” I pointed out.
“Without me.”
I opened my mouth, found nothing and no words that were going to turn this around, and closed it.
Stefan apparently approved of the move and answered my question. “I found you because I woke up when your friend Peter the Pied Piper of killer kids called on that phone he left you.” I’d kept it in case he did. It was too cheap to be GPS enabled and he wanted us to find him anyway. “When that happened and I discovered you were gone, I used my own tracker.” He bared his teeth in a savage smile. “They’re like iPhones, right? Everyone has to have one.”
“Your own tracker?” Despite the smile he’d used only against people he was about to beat up or shoot, I was curious—guilty as hell too, but curious. “What’d you track? I know you didn’t plant anything in me when I wasn’t looking.”
“Your rat. One day when you were at work, I took him to the vet and had him chipped. I know it’d break your damn heart if he ran off.” His smile was no less pissed off.
No, what he knew was that at least fifty percent of the time Godzilla was with me and if we ever had to run again, it would be one hundred percent of the time. He’d outthought me when I hadn’t had a clue he was thinking about having to run at all. “That is devious as hell. That is Institute devious,” I said with reluctant admiration.