Basilisk by Rob Thurman Read Free Book Online Page B

long, and I had an excuse. It was a good excuse. People wanted to kill me.
    Other people though, those without targets on their backs, they didn’t have that justification for their why, where, who, when, what, and on and on. Stefan had rented the small house on Fox Creek Road because it would be hard to explain how a handyman could buy it outright and worse trying to pretend we needed a mortgage. Saul Skoczinsky in Miami, Stefan’s link to all things convenient and criminal, sent us good fake IDs. I’d since learned to make better, but banks like their background checks as much as I did. It was best to just rent the run-down ranch house with no neighbors in sight, but that didn’t stop our landlady—Adelaide Sloot’s doppelganger, only with bleached-blond hair—from asking where we were from. Why had we moved? How old was I, because Cascade Falls had a woooonderful high school. There had been so many o ’s in that “wonderful,” I automatically knew she had a relative who taught there, a grandchild who went there, or received a commission for every teen she scooped up and dragged clawing through their doors.
    That was one subject the Institute had been somewhat dead-on about: psychology. People walked around turned inside out. If you knew enough to look, everything you wanted to know about them was there to see—things you didn’t want to know too. The way she clutched Stefan’s arm and hung on every word of his made-up story; the way her eyes didn’t leave his, not once, as she led us through the house on the showing. She’d lost someone who looked like my brother. Maybe they had just had dark hair and an olive complexion, maybe only the brown eyes. They might have died or left her just because people leave. If Stefan had wanted, he could’ve gotten her to rent the place to us for half or maybe a third the price. He could’ve used the woman’s loss, as I’d been taught to use weakness against others. But he didn’t.
    Mr. Ex-Mob paid full price and even painted the place, because it could use it. Patches were peeling off everywhere. I called it the Leprosy House until he finished painting it yellow—yellow paint was on sale that week. Then I called it the Bumblebee House and eventually the Bumble for short. “Are we going back to the Bumble for dinner?” On the inside, I called it home, but home was another word that made the universe notice and then crush you. There was no saying that aloud either—no tempting fate.
    When we pulled up out front on the patch of gravel that was the driveway, Stefan passed through the door first. If we were together, he always did—a somewhat less than bulletproof vest. He was my own Secret Service, only without the cool wardrobe.
    Inside, Stefan went straight to the kitchen table where my laptop was and opened it up as he sat down more heavily than usual. It would be quicker than finding the story on the television. His voice was heavier too. “Any best site or should I just Google ‘dead dad’?” I was surprised those words didn’t fall out of the air to scuff the well-worn tile of the floor.
    I exhaled and reached around him to type in the most informative news site. “Was that a joke?” I asked uncertainly. I didn’t always get jokes, especially dark or grim ones. And just when I would think I was getting better at playing human if not actually getting back to being human, I fell flat on my face. Stefan reached over and took my arm and pulled me down into the chair next to his. The table was round and covered with scratches. I wished I could’ve looked at them instead of Stefan. He didn’t look twenty-seven now. He looked fifteen years older and as tired as if he’d been up for days. If I’d not jumped to conclusions, if I’d figured things out, and told him better, told him right, he wouldn’t look like this. He would look better and