Vengeful

by V. E. Schwab

  And when he did that, Victor warmed.

  Turned toward Eli like a face toward a mirror. Like to like. It frightened and thrilled Eli, to be seen, and to see himself reflected. Not all of himself—they were still so different—but there was something vital, a core of the same precious metal glinting through the rock.

  Lightning flashed arterial lines of blue over the rooftop, and seconds later, the world around them shook with a concussive force. Eli felt the tremor through his bones. He loved storms—they made him feel small, a single stitch in a vast pattern, a drop of water in a downpour.

  Moments later, the rain began to fall.

  In seconds, the first drops became a downpour.

  “Shit,” muttered Victor, springing up from his seat.

  He jogged toward the roof door.

  Eli rose, but didn’t follow. Within seconds he was soaked through.

  “You coming?” shouted Victor over the rain.

  “You go ahead,” said Eli, the downpour erasing his voice. He tipped his head back and let himself be swallowed by the storm.

  An hour later, Eli padded barefoot across the apartment, dripping rainwater in his wake.

  Victor’s door was closed, the lights out.

  After reaching his room, Eli peeled off his soaked clothes and sank into his chair as the storm faded beyond the windows.

  Two in the morning, classes starting the next day, but sleep still eluded him.

  His cell phone sat on the desk, a handful of texts from Angie, but Eli wasn’t in the mood for that, and anyhow, she was probably asleep by now. He ran a hand through his damp hair, slicking it back, and tapped his computer awake.

  Something stuck with him, from the roof. The image of the lightning in his palm. Eli had spent the better part of the summer studying electromagnetism in the human body. The literal and metaphorical spark of life. Now, drifting in that exhausted early-hours space, the darkened room and the artificial light of the laptop keeping him conscious if not fully awake, his fingers slid over the keyboard, and he began to search.

  For what, he wasn’t exactly sure.

  One screen, one page, one site, gave way to another, Eli’s attention wandering between articles and essays and forums like a mind lost in a dream. But Eli wasn’t lost. He was just trying to find the thread. He’d encountered a theory, some weeks before, on another insomniac night. Over the last month, it had grown roots, fed on his focus.

  Eli still didn’t know what made him click that first link. Victor would have blamed idle curiosity, or fatigue, but in Eli’s trancelike state it felt eerily familiar. A hand resting over his own. A blessing. A push.

  The theory Eli had discovered was this: that sudden, extreme trauma could lead to a cataclysmic, even permanent shift in physical nature and ability. That through life-or-death trauma, people could be rewired, remade.

  It was pseudoscience at best.

  But pseudoscience wasn’t automatically wrong. It was simply a theory that hadn’t been adequately proven. What if it could be? After all, people in duress did extraordinary things. Claimed feats of strength, moments of heightened ability. Was the leap so extreme? Could something happen in that life-or-death moment, that tunnel between darkness and light? Was it madness, to believe? Or arrogance, to not?

  The page loaded, and Eli’s heart quickened as he stared at the word across the top of the screen.

  ExtraOrdinary.

  XXIII

  ONE AND A HALF YEARS AGO

  EON

  ELI knelt on the cell floor, a dozen pages spread before him. He’d narrowed the massive stack of killings to thirty. And then twenty. And now, at last, to six.

  Malcolm Jones. Theodore Goslin. Ian Hausbender. Amy Tao. Alice Clayton. Ethan Barrymore.

  Three drug dealers, two doctors, and a pharmacist.

  He slipped the first three pages through the slot. “Run the ballistics in these against your executed EOs.”

  Stell turned through the papers. “There are a hundred gang and cartel killings in this pile. Why these three?”

  “A magician doesn’t reveal his secrets,” said Eli blandly.

  “And you’re not a magician—you’re a murderer.”

  Eli sighed. “How could I forget?” He nodded at the massive stack from which he’d culled the six names. “There are a hundred and seven gang and cartel killings in there, to be exact. Eighty-three of which we can rule out because they don’t fit the clean point-blank execution model I requested. Of the remaining twenty-four, fourteen had records for specializing in illegal weapons, ten in pharmaceuticals. Given the fact that your target has used the same gun for each and every execution, I decided to assume this wasn’t about acquiring weapons. We can narrow the list down even further because Jones’s, Goslin’s, and Hausbender’s executions all involved other victims, which, in addition to furthering my theory that the man you’re looking for is using a supernatural method of compulsion on his victims, negates the need for multiple samples from each scene, rendering three out of the original ten.”

  “You’re sure it’s a man?”

  “I’m not sure of anything,” said Eli, “but the odds favor a male killer. Female killers are rarer, and they tend to prefer more hands-on methods.”

  “And you think he’s after drug dealers?” asked Stell.

  Eli shook his head. “I think he’s after drugs.” He retrieved the other three profiles from the floor. “My theory is that your killer is either an addict, or very sick. Which brings me to these. Amy Tao, Alice Clayton, and Ethan Barrymore. The first two are doctors, the third is a pharmacist.”

  Stell paced beyond the fiberglass wall. “And the dead EOs? How do they factor in?”

  “I stand by my theory that our hunter was—and probably still is—targeting specific abilities. Andreas’s was destructive, but also restorative. Connelly’s regenerative.”

  “Which supports your theory that he’s sick.”

  There was, thought Eli, a grudging respect in Stell’s voice.

  “It’s still only a theory,” he demurred. “Let’s start by confirming the ballistics.”

  * * *

  THE results came back two days later.

  Alice Clayton and Malcolm Jones.

  A doctor and a drug dealer, added to the tally of three dead EOs.

  Eli’s picture was growing. But it was still missing something.

  He kept coming back to the gun.

  Their hunter was methodical, precise—he had to know that varying the style of execution would have helped cover the trail. And yet he’d chosen to maintain a single technique. There were reasons people adhered to such a pattern—sometimes it was a signature, other times a matter of comfort, or precision, but in this case Eli had a feeling that the killer didn’t want to get their hands dirty. Shooting was cold, efficient, and distant. But it was also clean. Sterile. It could be done at a distance, with no risk of biological data at the scene. The killer’s choice of weapon, despite the drawbacks of pattern, suggested they cared more about maintaining their own anonymity than hiding the trail of bodies. Which in turn suggested that the killer’s DNA was already in the system.

  An EO who was known to authorities.

  Eli’s pulse quickened as pieces clicked together in the back of his mind.

  It was madness. Irrational. Impulsive. But Eli felt again that gentle pressure at his back, guiding him forward as he booted the computer and started searching for strange or sudden deaths in the practicing medical field.

  Eli spent the next forty-eight sleepless hours skimming every database and obit and news story. He knew he was making leaps instead of strides, but the ground was smooth and sloped beneath his feet. So instead of catching himself, Eli let gravity do the work.

  And then, finally, he found an obituary for Dr. Adam Porter. A leading neurologist, discovered dead after hours at a private practice. It had been a heart attack, according to the coroner’s report, but not at his desk, or on the way to his car, or safely at home. No, the body h
ad been found on the hospital linoleum floor, next to a smoking MRI, its power blown.

  A freak accident.

  A massive current.

  The patient records from that night were missing, a neat hole carved out in a busy schedule, but Eli could read the outline by the edges it left behind.

  He knew the shape.

  He’d seen it before.

  Angie’s body, twisted on the floor of the lab at Lockland, her back arched, mouth open, the last seconds of her life immortalized by pain.

  A heart attack, they’d said.

  A freak accident.

  A massive current.

  And at the center of both, an EO with the skill to hunt, the ability to manipulate his victim’s bodies. Someone already in the system—because they were supposed to be dead.

  “I killed you,” muttered Eli.

  Victor appeared again, as if summoned. Cold blue eyes and a cunning smirk. “You did.”

  “Then how?”

  “Do you really need to ask?”

  Eli clenched his teeth.

  Sydney Clarke.

  Serena had insisted on dispatching her little sister herself. Obviously her resolve had wavered. Sydney was still alive.

  The girl who had a nasty habit of bringing people back. And of bringing EOs back wrong, too. Eli had seen it for himself when Sydney resurrected one of his prior kills, sent him back like a toy on the fritz, a note from Victor in hand.

  I made a friend.

  Now Eli got to his feet and looked up into the nearest camera. “Stell?” he asked, first quietly, and then louder.

  A cool voice responded via the intercom. “The director is unavailable.”

  “When will he be back?” he demanded, but the voice didn’t answer.

  Eli bristled. He needed to see Stell, needed to look him in the eyes, ask him how he could be so stupid, ask him why he didn’t burn the body.

  He looked around for something to use, some way to get the director’s attention.

  But everything was bolted down. Except, of course, for him. He slammed his fist into the fiberglass wall.

  There was a low tone as the walls began to charge.

  “Inmate,” ordered the disembodied voice. “Stand down.”

  Eli did not. He hit the fiberglass a second time. An alarm went off, and an instant later, a burst of electricity shot up Eli’s arm and sent him staggering backward, his pulse losing rhythm for a single measure before it settled. He started toward the wall a third time, but before his fist connected, the lights cut out, and Eli was plunged into absolute black.

  The sensory deprivation was so sudden, the darkness was so absolute, Eli felt like he was falling. He reached out to brace himself and stumbled, searched several seconds for the metal chair before sinking into it to wait.

  Why didn’t you burn the body?

  Why didn’t you . . .

  But as Eli sat in the dark, playing the question over and over in his mind, he felt that invisible hand, the one that had been a guide for so long, now pulling him back. If Eli gave Victor over to Stell, over to EON, they would take him alive. Put him in a cell. No. Eli would not—could not—allow those half measures. Victor was too dangerous, he had to be put down, and Stell had already failed once.

  Eli wouldn’t entrust the task to him a second time.

  The lights came up, the far wall went clear, and the director stormed into sight, dressed in a tailored black suit, his tie loose at the throat.

  “What the hell?” demanded Stell. “You better have something groundbreaking after that stunt.”

  Eli faltered for only a second, then straightened, committed to his course.

  “Actually,” he said coldly. “I hit a dead end.”

  It wasn’t a lie.

  Suspicion flickered across Stell’s face. “That’s surprising, given how you’ve spent the last week. You seemed to be making strides.”

  Eli swore inwardly. He’d been so stunned by the discovery, so eager for the confrontation, and so startled by his own recanting, he hadn’t considered the ramifications of changing his mind. The whiplash. A break in the pattern.

  “Where did it fall apart?” pressed Stell.

  “It hasn’t,” said Eli. “I just don’t have any more leads.”

  “Then why the fuck did you call for me?” demanded the director.

  Eli had made a mistake. He wasn’t prone to making mistakes, except where Victor Vale was concerned. Victor had always possessed the unnerving ability to get under Eli’s skin, interrupt his focus. And now Eli needed to disrupt Stell’s own, find a way to redirect his attention, twist suspicion into . . . something easier. Anger—that was such a loud emotion.

  “I guess,” said Eli, infusing his voice with as much derision as he could muster, “I wanted to see what you would do. Now I know.”

  Stell looked at him, mouth open in surprise. And then, predictably, it crumpled into fury. “Do you want me to send you back to the lab?”

  “That threat is beginning to feel stale.”

  Stell drew back, as if struck. “Is it?” he said darkly. “Allow me to refresh your memory.”

  Eli tensed as Stell raised his wristwatch to his mouth and spoke into a hidden comm, the words too low for him to hear.

  “Wait,” started Eli, his voice cut off by a metallic scrape overhead. Four small sprinklers emerged from the ceiling at the front of the cell. Icy water rained down, soaking Eli through in seconds.

  He started to back up, but Stell’s voice made him stop.

  “Don’t you dare retreat.”

  Eli held his ground. “Fine.” He looked down at his hands, then up at Stell. “I won’t melt.”

  “I know,” said the director grimly.

  Eli barely heard the hum over the sound of the water. He realized too late what was happening, managed just a step toward the fiberglass before the current hit him.

  It was everywhere. Tearing up his legs, arcing through his chest, lighting every nerve. Eli buckled to his hands and knees as the electricity tore through him, conducted through the water. Enough volts to level a small beast, but Eli’s own regeneration kept him conscious, caught in a suspended state of electrocution.

  His jaw locked, a low, animal sound tearing between his teeth.

  Stell turned and stormed away, his hand lifting in an almost dismissive motion. The wall went solid, white, and several terrible lurching seconds later, the current finally died. Eli collapsed to his side on the slick floor as the sprinklers slowed, and stopped.

  He rolled onto his back, chest heaving.

  And then, slowly, Eli got up, and crossed to the desk, sinking into the chair before the computer. Since the system was twinned with Stell’s, the director would be able to pull up everything, be able to read the lines, if not the space between them.

  Eli began to query other deaths, other causes, other leads. He couldn’t bury the search that led him to Adam Porter, that missing link, but he could keep Stell from following the clean pattern of Eli’s own thoughts. With every subsequent search, Eli frayed the thread, ventured down a course he’d earlier abandoned. Hopefully it would read as frustration with his own failure, a furious need to find the truth.

  But as his fingers flew over the keyboard, creating a tangled web of false leads and dead ends, his own thoughts coalesced into a single, smooth train.

  Eli would save Victor for himself.

  XXIV

  FOUR WEEKS AGO

  EON

  ELI had spent the better part of an hour listening to Stell talk about his new target. Marcella Renee Riggins, mob wife turned murderess. He flipped through the pages in the file as the director spoke, setting aside the newspaper clipping and the EON-issued backstory, focusing instead on the crime scene stills from the hospital—the bed with its rusted bar, its ruined sheets, and the much more striking hole in the hospital room wall.

  “. . . nearly died in a fire, seems to be burning everything—and everyone—she can get her hands on—”

 
“She’s not burning them,” said Eli, skimming the photos.

  “The piles of ash beg to differ.”

  Eli traced a finger along the hole in the wall, then flipped to the crime scene close-up of the debris on the kitchen floor.

  He rose and pressed the photo against the fiberglass. “Do you see that? The edges of the diamond?”

  Stell squinted. “It looks dirty. Which would make sense, considering it’s sitting in a pile of human remains.”

  “It’s not dirty,” said Eli. “It’s graphite.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  Obviously. “Marcella isn’t burning things. She’s eroding them. If she’d been using heat, you might have been able to combat it with extreme cold. But with a corrosive ability like this, you’re better off killing her.”

  Stell crossed his arms. “Is that the only advice you have to offer?”

  “In this case, it’s certainly the best,” said Eli. He had seen power like Marcella’s before. Raw, destructive, boundless. There was no place for power like that in this world. She would carve a swathe of chaos, until she was put down. “Do you know the half-life of carbon?”

  “Off the top of my head?” asked Stell.

  “It’s nearly six thousand years. How long do you think it took her to kill the person wearing that diamond? How long do you think it will take her to penetrate whatever armor your men are wearing?”

  “It won’t be the first time our agents have gone up against someone with a touch-based ability.”

  “And assuming you capture her, do you even have a cell capable of containing someone with these powers?”

  “Every power has its limits.”

  “Just listen—”

  “I don’t need to,” cut in Stell. “Your philosophy is hardly a mystery at this point, Eli. If it were up to you, EON would never salvage anyone.”