Roger’s voice was still the same, as familiar as ever. It only made the contrast with his new body worse.
“I did what I always wanted to do, Cooper. You wouldn’t understand.”
“You’re right about that,” Gretchen said, looking at him with horror.
It almost didn’t seem
to matter when Monroe got out of the car and shifted at once into a giant, poison-green snake with an enormous, leathery black cobra hood.
Sure, his fangs were dripping with venom. Sure, he could make them see things. But he was nothing compared to Roger. Even Gretchen, who’d said several times that she was scared of snakes, didn’t flinch.
Monroe’s ego had always been touchy. Cooper distantly wondered if it bothered him that he was no longer the scariest guy in any given room.
“Roger’s a chimera now,” Phil explained. His voice throbbed with a mixture of revulsion and awe.
“Chimeras aren’t like that,” Gretchen snapped. “They’re part lion, part goat, and part snake. They’re natural, they’re supposed to exist. They’re not... whatever the hell this is.”
“Details, details,” Phil said, and laughed. His laugh sounded nervous now, though. Maybe he didn’t like the way Roger was looking at him. “He’s a mutt, like you, only at least he did it on purpose. He finally broke through. He’s part basilisk, part jaguar, part dragon—and part who knows what.”
“The whole is greater than the sum of the parts,” Roger said, thrashing his long scorpion’s tail. His eyes were still fixed on Phil.
They were oil-black eyes, with slit-like pupils in a bloody crimson. No wonder Phil didn’t like having them trained on him.
“How?” Cooper finally said. He sounded just as stunned as he did horrified.
“It took a long time to wear down the immunity. And more bites, from more people, than you’d ever believe. I tested it on someone else first, obviously. After that first go-around with Monroe, I learned to always have a guinea pig. But when it worked on him, I knew it would work on me.”
“You did this to someone else?” Cooper said disbelievingly. “Did he agree to that?”
“Sacrifices had to be made.”
“Just not by you? What happened to the guy you did this to?”
“Who cares?” Roger said. “I’m finally what I’ve wanted to be my whole life. Phil’s right—I finally broke through.”
“You finally broke your own soul,” Cooper said.
“You’ve wanted to be this your whole life?” Gretchen said.
They were all treated to the terrifying sight of chimera-Roger smiling. A long, snakelike tongue flicked out of his mouth, tasting the air.
“No,” Roger said. “I always wanted everything. Now I have it, and I’m not losing it.”
In a flash, Cooper understood why Roger wasn’t looking at him even half as much as he was looking at Phil.
Cooper had never come face-to-face with Roger’s true nature before. Roger had always presented Cooper with a carefully maintained front, playacting the kind of benevolent, fatherly boss that Martin Powell just naturally was. The act had been good—good enough for Cooper to always dismiss the little niggling things that had bothered him, like Roger’s passionate desire to take on as many of Monroe’s basilisk skills as he could.
But now, he saw Roger for what he really was. He wasn’t much of a man anymore, if he had ever been much of one at all. He was a monstrosity who wanted only to grab and hold onto everything he could. He was cunning and manipulative.
And more than anything else, he was selfish.
Phil had been counting on his team loyally coming to his rescue—but Roger hadn’t come up the mountain to save him. Roger didn’t have any sense of loyalty, not really. All he had were temporary arrangements, places where his greed intersected with someone else’s enough for them to be useful to him.
Phil had been useful to him once. But now that Cooper and Gretchen knew the truth—and now that Roger knew that word of Cooper’s innocence might have spread—Phil was nothing more than a liability. Absolute, concrete proof that Phil was alive was the only thing that could irrevocably prove Cooper’s innocence—and the only thing that could destroy the lie that Roger had spent his life maintaining.
Roger wasn’t here to rescue Phil. Roger was here to kill him.
All of that flitted through Cooper’s mind in a millisecond, and then he barreled into Phil, knocking him down to the ground.