BASILISK: Chimera, Book 2 Chapters 3 & 4

“Why wouldn’t they?” I reassured. He no doubt thought I’d made a mistake. Big brothers were like that…always questioning the younger ones. Never letting us grow up. “I pay them to grow marijuana. It took them a while to get…the hang of it? Right, the hang of it–that’s how they refer to it, but last month they finally said they figured out the correct temperature, hydration, where to get better grow lights and said they have a great crop now.”

He blinked, his darker skin turning nearly as red as a sunburn. Pulling the car over into the emergency lane, he turned back and rested his forehead on the steering wheel and said nothing. I waited about five minutes. It was just a plane and some barely illegal drugs, which I thought should be legal. It was no worse than beer. Of course, I wasn’t allowed to drink beer yet as I wasn’t twenty-one and Stefan was as strict as a TV grandmother on things like that. Plane, drugs only just illegal…and if I could’ve gotten a doctor involved, maybe not illegal at all—surely five minutes was enough to recover from my ‘surprise.’

I patted him on the back. “Are you okay? Was the healthy breakfast too healthy? Did it upset your normal intestinal workings? Do you want a Three Musketeers to counter-act the health?”

“Tui nemnogaya dermo,” he said without lifting his head.

I stopped patting. “You little shit? You called me a little shit. I am as tall as you now. I am not little.”

“But you are a shit. What happened to that agreeable kid who used to be afraid of grocery stores? Who only scared me when he wanted the sex-talk? Where did the pipe bomb building drug lord come from?” He leaned his head back against the head-rest and covered his eyes. “Where did I go wrong?”

I wasn’t offended. In fact if I’d known it would be this much fun, I’d have told Stefan about all my plans…although some of the others might give him a heart attack…at least a year ago. I grinned, even if he couldn’t see it, and punched him hard in the shoulder. “I grew up.”

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FROM ROB:

As you can tell, if you’ve read CHIMERA, Michael has come into his own in almost three years, but is his own quite the right way to go? We’ll see… Also, this excerpt has not been edited yet, so there will be errors. No need to point them out. I have anal-retentive copy editors with the publisher who love doing that. :>*