Vicious

by V. E. Schwab

  * * *

  ELI crossed the parking lot as his mind spun over what to do next. The peace he’d felt in the stairwell had been replaced by a prickling energy and the voice in his head that whispered go. It wasn’t guilt, or even panic, more like self-preservation. He reached his car, and slid the key into the door, and that’s when he heard the steps behind him.

  “Mr. Cardale.”

  Go growled the thing in his head, so clear and so tempting, but something else held him in place. He turned the key in the car door, locking it with a small click.

  “Can I help you?” he asked, turning toward the man. He was broad-shouldered and tall, with black hair.

  “My name is Detective Stell. Were you coming or going?”

  Eli pulled the key from the door. “Coming. I thought I should tell Professor Lyne. About Victor, that is. They were close.”

  “I’ll walk with you.”

  Eli nodded, and took a step from the car before frowning. “I’ll leave my bag here,” he said, unlocking the door and tossing the backpack—folders and hard drive and all—into the backseat. “I don’t feel up to class today.”

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” said Detective Stell automatically.

  Eli counted the steps back to the pre-med labs. He got to thirty-four before he heard the sirens, and looked up sharply. Beside him, Stell swore and picked up his pace.

  They’d found Lyne’s body, then.

  Run run run, hissed the thing in Eli’s head. It sang in the same tone and speed as the sirens.

  And he did run, but not away. His feet carried him toward the building’s entrance, and through, following the emergency response team as it made its way to the base of the stairs. When Eli saw the body, he made a strangled sound. Stell pulled him away, and Eli let his legs go out beneath him, knees hitting the cold floor with a crack. He winced even as the bruises bloomed and faded under his pant legs.

  “Come on, son,” Stell was saying, pulling him back. But Eli’s gaze was leveled on the scene. Everything was playing out as it should, as it needed to, the loose threads being snipped. Until he saw the janitor, leaning against the wall, watching, frowning in the way people frown when they’re puzzling out a riddle.

  Shit, thought Eli, but he must have said it aloud, because Stell tugged him to his feet and said, “Shit indeed. Let’s go.”

  There were too many deaths too fast. He knew he’d be a suspect. Had to be. Run, said the thing in his head, urgent, and then pleading, plucking his muscles and nerves. But he couldn’t. If he ran now, they’d follow.

  So he didn’t run. In fact, he played the part of victim pretty well. Devastated, angry, traumatized, and above all, cooperative.

  When Detective Stell pointed out that everyone around him was either dead or close to it, Eli did his best to look heartbroken. He explained Victor’s jealousy, both over his girlfriend, and over his rank in the class. Victor had always been a step behind. He must have snapped. People do.

  When Detective Stell asked Eli about his thesis, he explained that it had been his, until Victor usurped it, went behind his back and started working with Lyne. And then he leaned in, and told Stell that Victor hadn’t been himself the past few days, that something was different, wrong, and that if he survived—he was still in ICU—they should all be very careful.

  Eli’s thesis was waived, in light of the trauma. Trauma. The word haunted him through his police questioning and his academic meetings all the way to the school-sanctioned single apartment they’d moved him into. Trauma. The word that had helped him crack the code, helped him pinpoint the origins of EOs. Trauma became a kind of hall pass. If only they knew how much trauma he had sustained. They didn’t.

  He stood in the new apartment with the lights off, and let his backpack—they’d never searched the car for it—fall to the floor beside him. It was the first time he’d been alone—truly alone—since he’d left the party in search of Victor. And for a moment, the gap between what he should feel and what he felt snapped shut. Tears began to stream down Eli’s face as he sank to his knees on the hardwood floor.

  “Why is this happening?” he whispered to the empty room. He wasn’t sure if he meant the sudden and ferocious sadness or Lyne’s murder or Angie’s death or Victor’s change or the fact that he was still here in the middle of all of it, unscathed.

  Unscathed. That was exactly what it was. He had wanted strength, begged for it as the ice water leached the heat and life from his body, but he’d been given this. Resilience. Invincibility. But why?

  EOs are wrong, and I am an EO, so I must be wrong. It was the simplest of equations, but it wasn’t right. Somehow, it wasn’t right. He knew in his heart with a strange and simple certainty that EOs were wrong. That they shouldn’t exist. But he felt with equal certainty that he wasn’t wrong, not in the same way. Different, yes, undeniably different, but not wrong. He thought back to what he’d said in the stairwell. The words had spilled out on their own.

  But it’s a trade, Professor, with God or the devil …

  Could that be the difference? He’d seen a demon wearing his best friend’s skin, but Eli didn’t feel like there was any evil in himself. If anything, he felt hands, strong and steady, guiding him when he pulled the trigger, when he snapped Lyne’s neck, when he didn’t run from Stell. Those moments of peace, of certainty, they felt like faith.

  But he needed a sign. God had seemed, in the past few days, like a match-light next to the sun of Eli’s discoveries, but now he felt like a boy again, needing sanction, approval. He pulled a pocketknife from his jeans, and clicked it open.

  “Would You take it back?” he asked the dark apartment. “If I were no longer of Your making, You would take this power back, wouldn’t You?” Tears glistened in his eyes. “Wouldn’t You?”

  He cut deep, carving a line from elbow to wrist, wincing as blood welled and spilled instantly, dripping to the floor. “You’d let me die.” He switched hands and carved a matching line down his other arm, but before he’d reached his wrist, the wounds were closing, leaving only smooth skin, and a small pool of blood.

  “Wouldn’t You?” He cut deeper, through to bone, over and over, until the floor was red. Until he’d given his life to God a hundred times, and a hundred times had it given back. Until the fear and the doubt had all been bled out of him. And then he set the knife aside with shaking hands. Eli dipped his fingertips in the slick of red, crossed himself, and got back to his feet.

  V

  AROUND NOON

  THE ESQUIRE HOTEL

  ELI parked on the street.

  He hadn’t trusted hotel garages since an incident with an earth-shaking EO three years earlier. It had taken him two full hours to heal, and that was only after he managed to dig himself out of the rubble. Besides, the check-ins and checkouts, tickets and tolls and barricades … garages made quick exits impossible. So Eli parked, crossed the road, and passed through the hotel’s elegant entry, a stone and light marquee announcing Merit’s pride, THE ESQUIRE. It had been Serena’s choice, and he hadn’t been in the mood to defy her. They’d only been there a couple days, since the mishap with Sydney. He’d really hoped the girl would bleed to death in the woods, that maybe one or two of the bullets he’d fired after her would find skin instead of wood and air. But the drawing in his pocket—and the dead-undead-dead-again Barry Lynch suggested otherwise.

  “Afternoon, Mr. Hill.”

  It took Eli a moment to remember that he was Mr. Hill, and then he smiled, and nodded at the woman behind the front desk. Serena was better than a fake ID. He hadn’t had to present any ID, in fact, when they checked in. Or a credit card. She did come in handy. He didn’t like being so dependent on someone else, but he managed to twist it in his mind, to assure himself that while Serena made things easier, smoother, she was sparing him effort that he was more than capable of exerting, if necessary. In this way, she wasn’t essential, only terribly convenient.

  Halfway to the elevator, Eli passed a man. He made a quick
mental profile of the stranger, half out of habit and half out of a gut feeling of wrongness, a kind of sixth sense acquired over a decade of studying people as if they were all spot-the-difference pictures. The hotel was expensive, sleek, the majority of its clientele in suits. This man was wearing something that might pass for a suit, but he was massive, tattoos peeking out from his pushed-up sleeves and collar. He was reading something as he walked, and never looked up, and the woman behind the desk didn’t seem concerned, so Eli shelved the man’s face somewhere in mental reach, and went upstairs.

  He took the elevator to the ninth floor and let himself in. The suite was pleasant yet sparse, with an open kitchen, floor-to-ceiling windows, and a balcony-aided view over Merit. But no Serena. Eli tossed his satchel onto the couch and sat down at the desk in the corner where a laptop sat on top of a daily paper. He woke the device and, as the Merit Police database loaded, pulled the folded drawing from his pocket and set it on the desk, smoothing its corners. The database gave a small chirp, and he entered through the digital back door Officer Dane and Detective Stell had set up for him.

  He then scrolled through the folders until he found the file he was looking for. Beth Kirk stared at him, blue hair framing her face. He stared back at her for a moment, and then dragged the profile into the trash.

  VI

  TEN YEARS AGO

  LOCKLAND UNIVERSITY

  ELI was sitting in the school-sanctioned single apartment, eating Chinese takeout from LIDS, when the report came on the news. Dale Sykes, a custodian at Lockland University, had been involved in a fatal hit-and-run accident while walking home from work the night before. Eli speared another piece of broccoli. He hadn’t meant to do it. That is to say, he hadn’t set out in his car with the intent to kill the janitor. But he had unearthed Sykes’s rotation schedule, and he had gotten in his car at the same time that Sykes clocked out of his once-a-week night shift, and he had seen him crossing the road, and he had sped up. But it was a series of circumstances lined up in such a way that any one of them could so easily have shifted in a matter of seconds and spared the man’s life. It was the only way Eli could think of to give the janitor a chance, or rather, to give God a chance to intervene. Sykes wasn’t an EO, no, but he was a loose end, and as Eli’s car drove over him with a thud-thud, and that moment of quiet filled Eli’s chest, he knew he’d done the right thing.

  Now he sat slumped in a chair at the kitchen table while the story played out on-screen, and looked over his Chinese food at two stacks of paper. The first was made up of his own thesis notes, specifically early case studies—Web site stills, testimonies, and the like. The second stack held the contents of Lyne’s blue folder. Eli’s theory on the causation of EOness was there, but Lyne had added his own notes on the circumstances and factors used to identify a potential EO. To near death experiences the professor had added a term Eli had heard him use before, Post-Traumatic Death Disorder, or the psychological instabilities resulting from the NDE, and another one that must be new, Rebirth Principle, or the patients’ desire either to escape the life they had before, or to redefine themselves based on their ability.

  Eli had crinkled his nose at the second one. He didn’t like recognizing himself in these notes. He had a good reason for reading them, though. Because what he’d felt when he drove over Dale Sykes was the same thing he felt when he tried to end Victor’s life. Purpose. And he was beginning to figure out what that purpose was.

  EOs were an affront to nature, to God; that he knew. They were unnatural and they were strong, but Eli would always be stronger. His power was a shield against theirs, impenetrable. He could do what ordinary people couldn’t. He could stop them.

  But he had to find them first. Which is why he was combing through the research, pairing Lyne’s methods with the case studies, hoping one of them would give him a place to start.

  Victor had always been better at these kinds of puzzles. He could take one look and see the connective threads, no matter how thin. But Eli persisted, scouring his files as the news in the background came and went and came again, and finally he found it. A lead. From a newspaper article Eli had saved on a whim. A man’s family had been killed in a freak accident, crushed to death. It had happened only a few months after he himself had nearly died in a building collapse. Only his first name—Wallace—was given, and the paper, which came from a city about an hour away, called him a local. Eli stared at the name for several minutes before digging up a screenshot of an online forum, one of those sites where 99.5 percent of the people are hacks looking for a little attention. But Eli had been thorough, and printed it off anyway. He’d even found a list of members who belonged to the site. One of them, a Wallace47, had only posted once on a buried thread. It was dated last year, between his own accident and that of his family’s. All it said was No one is safe near me.

  It wasn’t much, but it was a start. And as he tossed his takeout container in the trash and snapped the television off, Eli wanted to go, to run, not away, but toward something. He had a goal. A mission.

  But he knew he had to wait. He counted down the days until graduation, all the while feeling the attention of the professors, the counselors, and the cops on him like the sun in summer. At first it was glaring, but eventually, as the months wore on, it lessened until, by the time he took his exams, most even forgot to look concerned when he entered the room. When the year finally ended, he packed casually, did a last, lazy pass through his place, and locked the door. He slid the key into a school-sanctioned white envelope and dropped it off in the mailbox outside residential services.

  And then, and only then, when the campus of Lockland had vanished in the distance, Eli shrugged off the name Cardale in favor of Ever, and went out to seek his purpose.

  * * *

  ELI didn’t enjoy killing.

  He did quite like the moment after. The glorious quiet that filled the air as his broken bones healed and his torn skin closed, and he knew that God approved.

  But the killing itself was messier than he anticipated.

  And he didn’t like the term. Killing. What about removal? Removal was a better word. It made the targets sound less like humans, which they weren’t really … semantics. Regardless, it was messy. The profusion of violence on television had led Eli to believe that killing was clean. The small cough of a gun. The quick jab of a knife. A moment of shock.

  The camera cuts away and life goes on.

  Easy.

  And to be fair, Lyne’s death had been easy. So had Sykes’s, really, since the car had done the work. But as Eli peeled a blood-soaked pair of latex gloves from his hands, he found himself wishing the camera would cut to a more pleasant moment.

  Wallace had put up a fight. Late fifties, but ox-strong. He’d even bent one of Eli’s favorite knives before snapping it right in two.

  Eli leaned against the brick wall and waited for his ribs to notch back into place before hauling the body toward the nearest pile of trash. The night was warm and he checked himself for blood before leaving the alley, the quiet already fading, leaving a strange sadness in its wake.

  He felt lost again. Purposeless. Even with his lead, it had taken him three weeks to find the EO. It was a slow, clumsy pursuit. He’d wanted to be sure. He’d needed proof. After all, what if he guessed wrong? Eli had no desire to rack up a body count of humans. Lyne and Sykes had been exceptions, victims of circumstance, their deaths unfortunate, but necessary. And, if Eli was being honest with himself, sloppy. He knew he could do better. Wallace had been an improvement. As with any pursuit, there was a learning curve, but he firmly believed in the old saying.

  Practice makes perfect.

  VII

  AROUND NOON

  THE ESQUIRE HOTEL

  VICTOR and Sydney sat in the hotel room, eating cold pizza and looking over the profiles Mitch had set out for them. Mitch himself had gone to run an errand, and even though Victor’s eyes tracked over the profile of a middle-aged man named Zachary Flinch, his mind was far more
on the cell phone—ready and within reach on the counter beside him—and on the name Stell, than his papers. His fingers tapped out a quiet beat on his leg. On the opposite side of his phone sat the profile of a younger man named Dominic Rusher.

  Sydney sat perched on a nearby stool, finishing her second slice of pizza. Victor saw her steal a glance at Eli’s newspaper photo, tucked beneath the corner of the third profile, which belonged to the blue-haired Beth Kirk. He watched as she reached out and drew the article free, staring down at it with her wide, blue eyes.

  “Don’t worry, Syd,” said Victor. “I’ll make him hurt.”

  For a moment she was quiet, her face a mask. And then it cracked. “When he came after me,” she said, “he told me it was for the greater good.” She spat the last three words. “He said I was unnatural. That I went against God. That was the reason he gave for trying to kill me. I didn’t think it was a very good reason.” She swallowed. “But it was enough for my sister to hand me over.”

  Victor frowned. The issue of Sydney’s sister, Serena, still bothered him. Why hadn’t Eli killed her yet? He seemed hell-bent on killing everyone else.

  “I’m sure it’s complicated,” he said, looking up from the profile in his hands. “What can your sister do?”

  Sydney hesitated. “I don’t know. She never showed me. She was supposed to, but then her boyfriend kind of shot me. Why?”

  “Because,” he said, “Eli’s keeping her around. There must be a reason. She must be valuable to him.”

  Sydney looked down, and shrugged.

  “But,” added Victor, “if it were based on value alone, he would have kept you around. His loss is my gain.”

  A ghost of a smile crossed Sydney’s mouth. She tossed her pizza crust to the black mass on the floor. Dol perked and caught it before it hit the ground. He then hoisted himself to his feet, and made his way around the counter to Victor, eyeing his crust expectantly. Victor fed it to him, and gave the dog’s ears—which came to his stomach, even sitting on the stool—a short scratch. He looked from the beast to Sydney. He really was collecting strays.