“You’ve no . . . idea.” The sun through the window sparkled in a thousand colors. I didn’t know there were a thousand colors. “He grew up, same as me. Stronger now. He’s not a rhino anymore. He’s four or five rhinos. Up the dose. Definitely. Up. Up, up, and away.”
Stefan’s thumb gently peeled back my eyelid. “Been practicing, huh?” I had said that, hadn’t I? Before we’d gone into the pawnshop. “On the healing, I’m guessing. Not even chimeras can fix a deflated lung and blood pooling around your heart in minutes. And somehow you’re doped to the gills, though I didn’t let that guy give you anything. Your pupils are huge.”
“That’s the adrenaline for healing and the endorphins for . . . I’m hungry.” I tried to sit up. Stefan held me down easily with a hand on my forehead and one on my chest. I wasn’t simply hungry. I was starving. I’d pushed my body to extremes I’d hoped I had in me but hadn’t been completely sure about until now. It took massive amounts of energy to do what I’d done, and I needed to replenish it. But when I tried to explain, replenish sounded more like plenrish. I said it several more times until it was less of a word and more a mouthful of oatmeal. That only made me hungrier. Oatmeal . . . Ariel liked oatmeal with brown sugar, cinnamon, and maple syrup. Ariel was hot. Not just hot . . . what’d they say . . . yeah . . . smoking hot.
Did Ariel think I was hot?
“Am I hot?” I asked Stefan. “Smoking hot? Think Ariel thinks I’m smoking hot?”
“Yeah, you’re the sexiest motherfucker on the planet, Misha.” There were so many emotions behind the blood on his face, but right now I could read only two of them. Exasperation. Worry. Too much worry. “Now enough with the endorphins. You must have more in you than you’d find swimming around in fifty marathon runners combined. Cut back on them enough to be lucid, would you?”
The sirens behind us were louder and closer. Who needed to be lucid to know that wasn’t good? “Shit.” Stefan twisted his head. “I made it through the mob years without having to shoot at a cop once. Doesn’t it goddamn figure? Think I can hit the tires of three police cars?”
“Gun.” My tongue felt thick, but I could do the little words. Cake of piece. Or something like that. “Micro. Wave. Gun.”
“Okay, that I approve of. Beats pipe bombs by a mile. Where the hell is it?” He leaned over me, careful not to rest any weight on my chest, and dug around in my duffel bag. “Damn it!” I saved my sympathy. He’d packed the bags when they’d come after Raynor, Ariel, and me.
“Forget? Old. Senile. We need a drugstore . . . adult diapers.”
“Misha, seriously. Dial down the damn endorphins. Jesus, finally.” He yanked the microwave gun out of my backpack, rolled down the window, and, holding me against him with one hand as we rose up off the seat, he leaned out and fired. “Christ, it worked.” As if anything I built wouldn’t work. He fired two more times and there were no more sirens. Easing back inside, he dropped the gun in the floorboards.
“Way to save our ass, kid,” Saul said from the front. “You done good.”
“Always do good. I’m brilliant. The most brilliant genius to. . . .” I lost my train of thought and then caught a more important one. “Still hungry.”
“Saul, emergency kit.” Stefan lifted his hand from my chest and caught the bag that sailed back. Stefan didn’t go anywhere with me, on the run or living our once peacefully mundane lives in Cascade, without food. I didn’t know if chimeras in general required more calories than humans or if it was merely me, but I outate Stefan three times over.
Outate.
Which reminded me again.
Food.
Now.
Hungry.
Stefan had a ham sandwich half—unwrapped. I snatched it clumsily from his hand and took huge bites, swallowing without chewing. While I ate, I did what Stefan suggested and eased back on the endorphins, although I hated to see the rainbows in the streamers of sun disappear. They were nice. They reminded me of home. There they arched over the river and the dam almost every week. It was the reason the bridge that topped the dam was called the Bridge of the Heavens. It made more sense than a golden ladder.
But I wasn’t dead yet, so no Paradise for me.