Sun, wind, and horses.
Stefan felt his heart stutter and skip. He wouldn’t have thought that one or two missed beats would hurt that much, but they did. Invisible fingers of agony fastened around that beating hunk of muscle and squeezed once, twice as his lungs staggered in sync—then red, as scarlet as a field of poppies, bloomed behind his eyes, and he was on the beach. There was pale sand, pounding waves, and a sky so blue it couldn’t be real. It was a child’s painting, carefully covering every bit of the paper. Blue and dense enough that you could probably scrape a thick peeling of color away with a thumbnail. He could smell the salt that stung his nose, feel the water that soaked his legs and the warmth of the horse beneath them, the coarse mane he hung on to as he galloped through the surf. There was a wind in his face that made him feel that he could fly. It was one of those moments no one forgets. The exhilaration, the sensation of wind, water, and sun branded forever in the mind of the fourteen-year-old kid.
He couldn’t see his brother, but he could hear him laughing. Behind Stefan, he was on his own horse, sharing the adventure. It was a great memory, there, then—before the blood. Before the red coated the rock and sand, it was better than great, it was the perfect memory. The strippers in his old Mafiya haunts didn’t beat that. Even the first time he fell in love didn’t beat that. Didn’t come close.
The next flash was when he’d saved his brother ten years after his abduction on that same beach. Stefan didn’t see him through his own eyes this time. He wasn’t Stefan anymore. He
was
his brother. He saw himself from his brother’s point of view—a stranger all in black standing in the doorway of his prison, then pulling him out of a place of horror. He felt his confusion, his lack of trust, but years of brainwashed obedience had him allowing the grip on his arm and the tug and run to freedom. The gravel and glass under his bare feet, the pain of the cuts, the ear-ripping explosions of firing guns, and the stars, Stefan felt and saw it all. Pain, blood, and flying bullets, he’d thought that would be what would stick with the kid—Michael—but it was the stars he remembered the most. The students … the prisoners … of the facility weren’t allowed to wander the ground at night and they didn’t have windows in the small cell-like rooms. Death behind him, and, for all he knew, death in front of him, but it was the stars that he saw. Far from any city, deep in the Everglades, the sky might be the color of a Reaper’s cloak, but Death’s robe made the ideal background for a hundred stars.
Brilliant light that shone down on you and could almost make you believe in miracles.
A light that could almost make you believe escape could be real and life was more than being trained to kill, turned into a weapon with no will of your own.
A light that was worth dying to see.
Only Michael had it in him to think that, which was unbelievable, too. A wonder. He was a good kid. A damn good kid. The best. Even dying, Stefan knew that as well as he knew anything in the goddamn world.
Michael left the bullets and the stars behind. The next was a string of emotions: fear, confusion, exasperation, more confusion, bewilderment, denial, annoyance, finally a reluctant acceptance and a sense of belonging. All those emotions had been caused by Stefan, and while he wished the ones at the beginning could’ve been avoided, he was damn proud of the ones he felt … that his brother felt at the end.
Aside from emotions, there was also life in the world outside a concrete/razor-wire wall. Movies, TV, books, people that weren’t instructors or torturers, restaurants, pizza, girls, a smelly ferret, making his own decisions—a life. A real life, something he’d thought impossible. And family, something he thought a fairy tale. Michael had been stunned by that. Amazed. He had family, a concept that even a genius like him could barely comprehend and never have imagined applied to him. Someone cared about him. Someone told him he belonged. Someone would give up everything for him. Someone would give up
their
life for him. He wasn’t alone.
He had his brother. He had Stefan.
Almost impossible to believe, but it was true.
If someone could like dying, Stefan liked that he was reliving Michael’s life and not going through a rerun of his own. This way he didn’t have to wonder if he’d done good by the kid, done good by his brother, he knew. He absolutely
knew
he’d done good. No doubts. Not a one.
The kid could’ve done better than him, he thought in disjointed chunks as he faded further into the darkness, but it was something, it was … what Michael thought so fiercely as that Reaper’s cloak wrapped tighter around Stefan. Family. Brother. You always watched out for your brother, even if he was the older one. You held on to your family because having one was a luxury no one …
no one
could afford to take for granted. You didn’t let your family down and you didn’t let you brother down, no matter how many times he called you a kid.
How did Stefan know that? How did he know what his brother had experienced thought by thought years ago? What he was thinking now? How did he know Michael felt that way—even down to his annoyance at being called a kid? How did he get that last gift?
That’s easy.
Because on the day Stefan died, that kid proved what his brother had known all along.
That damn kid … he was a miracle.
“Hey, kid. I’ll take a black coffee, large. I need something to keep me awake in this boring-ass town.”
I didn’t bother to look up from my book resting on the counter. “I’m not a kid.” I repeated that every day to my brother, not that he listened. I turned a page. My name was actually Michael, but I couldn’t tell the customer that, couldn’t tell anyone that. “And it’s already waiting for you at the end of the counter. That will be three fifty.” I’d seen him come in, a flash in the corner of my eye and heard his loud voice from the sidewalk long before he’d entered. If he were a regular, I’d have given him my immediate attention and the service-friendly smile that exactly echoed the one of the former employee of the month, whose picture was framed on the wall. It was the right kind of smile … friendly but not too stalker-friendly. It said, “I make minimum wage, but it’s a nice day, and you seem like a nice person. How can I help you?” It was natural, nonnoteworthy, and appropriate for the job. It took me two tries in the bathroom mirror to copy it, and I’d used it for every patron since the day the coffee shop had hired me. It was the expected smile—the normal smile.
It was important to be normal.
Very important.
This tourist was my first exception. He’d come in every day for a week, ordering the same thing, tipping the same amount—nothing, and saying the same insult: boring-ass town. Cascade Falls was not a boring-ass town. It was a nice town. It was small and inconspicuous and no one had tried to kill me or my brother here yet. That made it the perfect town really, and I wished that this guy’s new wife—it had to be a new wife, he wasn’t the camping type—had planned their honeymoon elsewhere, because I was tired of hearing him carp every morning. I was tired of him period.
Also, only my brother could get away with calling me kid.
The man, five foot ten, about forty to forty-three, mildly thinning blond hair greasy with the sheen of Rogaine, hazel eyes that blinked with astigmatism or too much alcohol the night before, twenty-two to twentyfive pounds overweight, and with a small crease in his earlobe that indicated possible heart problems due to his body’s inability to cope with his diet, glared at me over the top of sunglasses he hardly needed on a typical Oregon day in the Falls and tossed down three dollar bills and two carefully fished for quarters. He snorted and flicked the tip jar with a finger. “Like you caffeine pushers do anything worth a tip.”
He made his way down to a cardboard cup of coffee, still steaming, that was waiting for him, grabbed it and headed for the door. I could do something worth a tip, quite a few somethings, if that was his complaint, but I doubted he wanted to experience any of them. Although, making him impotent on his honeymoon would be a poetic punishment… .
I shook my head, clearing it. Simply because I could do certain things didn’t mean it was right. I knew right from wrong. My brother Stefan had commented on it once—that I knew right from wrong better than anyone raised in a family of Peace Corps pacifists descended from the bloodlines of Gandhi and Mother Teresa. Considering how I’d actually been raised, he said that made him proud as hell of me. Proud. I ducked my head down to study my book again, but I didn’t see the words, only smears of black ink. Stefan was proud of me and not for what I could do, but for what I refused to do. It was a good feeling, and while it might have been almost three years since he’d first said it, I remembered how it felt then—and all the other times he’d said it since. It was a feeling worth holding on to.
Stefan also said that despite his former career he knew right from wrong too, but before he found me he was beginning to lose his tolerance for it. It was a lie—or maybe a wish that he could actually do away with his conscience. He was different. He’d worked for the Russian Mafiya. He’d done bad things to … well, probably equally bad or corrupt people, but the weak too. The weak always get in over their heads in dark waters. What Stefan had done, he didn’t want to tell me and I didn’t push, but I did my research. You didn’t work as a bodyguard in the Russian mob like Stefan had and still not do some serious damage to people who may or may not deserve it.
Regardless of that and regardless of the things that Stefan had done for me, under that ruthlessness to protect, and the willingness to kill if that’s what it took to keep me safe, there was a part of him that wanted to believe in a world that was fair. He wanted to believe that a concept like right and wrong could be viable. Despite all he’d done and had been forced to do, he wanted to believe. Stefan had heart and he didn’t even know it. Why else would he search for a kidnapped brother for ten years when his … our … own father had given up?
Older brothers, especially ex-mobsters, weren’t supposed to be more naive than their younger ones, but Stefan … sometimes I thought that he was.
If he hadn’t spent almost half of his life looking for me and doing what was necessary to finance that search, I wasn’t sure what Stefan would’ve been. Not what he was, I did know that. When I had been taken—such a simple word—it had ruined lives, and when it came to Stefan, when I had been abducted it had done more than ruin. It had done things I wasn’t sure there were words for. And when it had happened, it had changed my brother as much as it had me—which wasn’t either right or fair. But true as that was, we were both alive and free now, and that was a thousand times more than I’d ever expected or dreamed. Where I had spent most of my life, freedom wasn’t even a concept, only a meaningless word to be looked up in a dictionary.
My brother had made it mean something. Cascade Falls was part of that, which only made me wish I had made that tourist pay for his contempt. And that was a slippery slope. I concentrated on my book and the words swam into focus. I was close, very close to what I was searching for … it was only a matter of months or maybe weeks, I hoped. Seven years of a normal life before I’d been kidnapped—although I couldn’t remember them, ten years of captivity—which I remembered with stark, vivid clarity, and nearly three years of freedom, freedom to do research and now the time was almost right. I was almost there. All the more reason to learn more and do it faster.
“Parker, you’re always studying. If you’re not going to college, why bother?”
Parker wasn’t my real name, but Serafynna didn’t know that. Then again, Serafynna didn’t know how to spell her own name and that made me doubt she cared that my name was actually Michael. Or Mykyl. When it came to Serafynna, I wasn’t too sure that wasn’t how the letters popped up in her brain. I wasn’t sure Serafynna had a brain at all without an MRI to back that up. All that Sera, the nickname was much simpler and it didn’t make my mind twitch, knew was how to put whipped cream on top of the lattes and how to flirt. To “mack,” or hit on guys. Since I didn’t know who Mack was, I went with the other one. Hit. That was more modern than flirt … hit on guys. Whatever.
Saving brain cells for important information outweighed saving them for teenage slang.
In three years I’d learned about flirting and sex, but now … nineteen closing in on twenty, I liked intelligence in girls or women. Sera was entertaining and let me know my hormones were working at top capacity because she was gorgeous … hot, I meant. Hot is what someone my age should say, but she didn’t have it all. I’d come to find out that I needed smart too and Sera had everything except that. She had sunshine bright blond hair—fake, big, turquoise eyes—fake, and she bounced wherever she went. That meant certain things, also fake, on her bounced with her as she went and rarely stopped bouncing. The first time Stefan had met her, he waited until I got off work that night and took me to the drugstore for a box of condoms.
I told him I didn’t need them, and he told me I was an idiot if I didn’t want to play in that sandbox. I was nineteen, he said with a grin, and that’s what nineteen is all about. Knock yourself out.
But I didn’t. I saw her fake colored contacts and thought about the one I wore that turned my one blue eye mossy green to match the other one—two fakes don’t make a reality—thought about her lack upstairs of anything but whipped cream, and it seemed like a waste. We’d lived two years in Bolivia before we came to Cascade Falls. I’d played in sandboxes there, whatever Stefan said. It wasn’t like I was a virgin. But I’d had the experience … experiences. I’d been seventeen before I’d gotten to make my own choices, even a single one. Now that I had three years of making decisions for myself, I wanted to be sure that each one I made now was the best one I could make.