Victor’s cell rang.
He dropped the paper and lifted the phone, all in one motion. “Yes?”
“Got him,” said Mitch.
“Dane or Stell?”
“Dane. And I even found us a room.”
“Where?” asked Victor, pulling on his coat.
“Look out your window.”
Victor strode up to the floor-to-ceiling panes, and took in the view. Across the road, and two buildings down, was the skeleton of a high-rise. Wooden construction walls encircled the scaffolding, a banner that read FALCON PRICE was plastered on the front, but there were no workers. The project had either been paused, or abandoned.
“Perfect,” said Victor. “I’m on my way.”
He hung up, and saw Sydney already off her stool and clutching her own red coat, waiting. He couldn’t help but think she had the same expression as Dol, expectant, hopeful.
“No, Sydney,” he said. “I need you to stay here.”
“Why?” she asked.
“Because you don’t think I’m a bad person,” he said. “And I don’t want to prove you wrong.”
* * *
VICTOR wound his way through the plastic sheeting that cordoned off the unfinished spaces of the high-rise’s ground floor, his steps echoing off concrete and steel. The fine coat of dust on the more exposed outer rooms of the building suggested a recently abandoned project, but the quality of the materials and the prime location made him think it wouldn’t stay abandoned for very long. Buildings in transition were perfect places for meetings like this.
A few veils of tarp later, he found Mitch and a man in a foldout chair. Mitch looked bored. The man in the chair looked indignant and, under that, terrified. Victor could practically feel the fear, a fainter version of the radarlike ripple caused by pain. The man was lean, with short dark hair, and a sharp jaw. His hands were bound behind his back with duct tape, and he was still in his uniform, the collar darkened in places by blood. The blood came from his cheek, or his nose, or perhaps both, Victor couldn’t quite tell. A few drops had dripped onto the badge over his heart.
“I have to admit,” said Victor, “I was hoping for Stell.”
“You said either one would do. Stell was out. I caught this one on a smoke break,” said Mitch.
Victor smiled beatifically as he turned his attention to the man in the chair. “Smoking’s bad for you, Officer Dane.”
Officer Dane said something, but the duct tape over his mouth made it unintelligible.
“You don’t know me,” continued Victor. He put his boot on the side of the foldout chair, and tipped it. Officer Dane tumbled out, hitting the floor with a crack and a muffled yelp, and Victor caught the chair before it fell, turned it in one lithe motion, and sat down. “I’m a friend of a friend. And I’d greatly appreciate your help.” He sat forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “I want you to tell me your access codes to the police database.”
Officer Dane frowned. So did Mitch.
“Vic,” he said, hunching over so Dane wouldn’t hear. “What do you need that for? I hacked you in.”
Victor didn’t seem to care if the officer overheard. “You gave me eyes, and I’m grateful. But I want to make a post, and in order to do that, I need a recognized ID.” It was time to send another message, and Victor wanted every detail perfect. The flagged profiles had author tags, and as Mitch himself had pointed out, all of them belonged to one of two people: Stell or Dane.
“Besides,” said Victor, sliding to his feet, “this way’s more fun.”
The air in the room began to hum, the exposed skeleton of the building reflecting back the energy until the whole space buzzed.
“You should wait outside,” he said to Mitch.
Victor had perfected his art, could pick a person out of a crowd and drop them like a stone, but he still didn’t like bystanders. Just in case. Now and then he got a touch too zealous, and the pain spilled over, leaked into others. Mitch knew him well enough, and didn’t ask questions, just tugged a veil of plastic tarp aside, and left. Victor watched him go, flexing his fingers as if he needed them supple. He felt a faint pang of guilt at involving Mitch in this at all. It’s not as though hacking was the only reason the man had ended up in such a high security prison, but still. Abducting an officer was a serious offense. Not as serious as the crimes Victor himself was about to commit, of course, but given Mitch’s record, it wouldn’t look good. He’d considered dismissing his friend as soon as they were on the free side of the Wrighton Penitentiary fence, but the simple fact was that Victor didn’t possess superhuman strength, and someone would have to help him dispose of bodies. That, and he’d grown rather accustomed to Mitch’s presence. He sighed, and turned his attention to the officer, who was trying to speak. Victor crouched, his knee digging down into the man’s chest as he peeled the duct tape back.
“You don’t know what you’re doing,” growled Officer Dane. “You’ll fry for this.”
Victor smiled quietly. “Not with your help.”
“Why should I help you?”
Victor returned the tape to his mouth, and stood.
“Oh, you shouldn’t.” The hum in the air sharpened, and Officer Dane’s body spasmed, his scream muffled by the tape. “But you will.”
VIII
THIS AFTERNOON
THE ESQUIRE HOTEL
ELI was still staring down at the gridded screen of the police database when he heard the door open behind him. He tapped the screen, closing the profile of a suspected EO named Dominic Rusher just as a pair of slim arms wrapped around his shoulders, and a pair of lips grazed his ear.
“Where have you been?” he asked.
“Looking for Sydney.”
He tensed. “And?”
“No luck yet, but I’ve put the word out. At least we’ll have a few more pairs of eyes. How was the bank?”
“I don’t trust Stell,” said Eli for the hundredth time.
Serena sighed. “How was Barry Lynch?”
“Dead again by the time I got there.” He lifted the childlike drawing from the desk, handed it blindly back to her. “But he left this.”
He felt the drawing plucked from his fingers, and a moment later, Serena said, “I didn’t know Victor was so thin.”
“This isn’t a time for joking,” snapped Eli.
Serena spun his chair to face her. Her eyes were cold as ice. “You’re right,” she said. “You told me you killed Sydney.”
“I thought I did.”
Serena leaned down, and slid the prop glasses from Eli’s face. He’d forgotten he was still wearing them. She tucked them into her hair like a makeshift headband, and kissed him, not on the lips, but between the eyes, the place that wrinkled whenever he resisted her.
“Did you really?” she breathed against him.
He forced his skin to smooth beneath her kiss. It was easier to think when she wasn’t looking in his eyes.
“I did.”
He sighed inwardly with relief as he said it. Two small words—half truth at most—and nothing more. It was hard, and it left him drained, but there was no doubt, he was getting better at holding back.
She pulled away enough to hold him with her cold blue eyes. He could see the devil in them, silver-tongued and cunning, and Eli thought, not for the first time, that he should have killed her when he had the chance.
IX
LAST FALL
UNIVERSITY OF MERIT
THE music was loud enough to shake the pictures on the walls. An angel and a wizard made out on the stairs. Two naughty cats tugged a vampire between them, a guy with yellow contacts howled, and someone spilled a Solo cup of cheap beer near Eli’s feet.
He snagged the horns from a devil by the front door, and set them on top of his head. He’d seen the girl walk in, flanked by a Barbie and a Catholic schoolgirl flaunting numerous uniform infractions, but she was in jeans and a polo, blond hair loose, falling over her shoulders. He’d lost sight of her for only a moment, and now her
friends were there, weaving through the crowd with interlocking fingers held over their heads, but she was gone. She should have stood out, the lack of costume conspicuous at a Halloween party, but she was nowhere to be found.
He swept through the house, avoiding the attempts of several pretty undergrads to delay him. It was flattering, and after all, he looked the part—he’d looked the part for ten years—but he was here on business. And then, after several unsuccessful tours of the first floor, she found him. A hand pulled him onto the stairs, into the shadows.
“Hi there,” whispered the girl. All the music, and the shouting, and somehow he could still hear her.
“Hi,” he breathed against her.
Her fingers intertwined with his as she led him up the stairs, away from the deafening party, and into a bedroom that wasn’t hers, judging by the way she glanced around before stepping through. College girls, thought Eli cheerfully. You had to love them. He pulled the door shut behind him and the world in the room became blissfully quiet, the music dulled into a kind of thrum. The lights were off and they left them off, the only illumination pouring in through the window in the form of moonlight and street lamps.
“A Halloween party and no costume?” teased Eli.
The girl pulled a magnifying glass from her back pocket.
“Sherlock,” she explained. Her movements were slow, almost sleepy. Her eyes were the color of water in winter and he didn’t know what her power was. He hadn’t studied her long enough, hadn’t waited for a demonstration, or rather, had been studying and waiting for weeks, but hadn’t been able to catch sight of the ability, whatever it was, so he’d decided to get a bit closer. It broke his rules and he knew it, and yet here he was.
“And you are?” she asked. Eli realized he was too tall for her to see. He bowed his head and pointed to the horns balanced on top. They were red and sequined, and glittered in the darkened room.
“Mephistopheles,” he said. She laughed. She was an English major. He knew that much. And it was fitting, he thought. One devil to lure another.
“Original,” she said with a bored smile. Serena Clarke. That was the name in his notes. She was beautiful in the most careless way. The little makeup she wore looked like an afterthought, and Eli had a hard time breaking her gaze. He was used to pretty girls, but Serena was different, more. When she pulled him in for a kiss, he nearly forgot the chloroform in his back pocket. Her hands slid down his spine to his jeans and he peeled them away just before her fingers skimmed the bottle and the folded cloth. He guided her hands up the wall and over her head, pinning them there as they kissed. She tasted like cold water.
He’d meant to push her out the window.
Instead he let her push him back onto a stranger’s bed. The chloroform dug into his hip, but when he looked away from her she guided his eyes and his attention back with only a finger and a smile and a whispered command. A thrill ran through him. One he hadn’t felt in years. Longing.
“Kiss me,” she said, and he did. Eli couldn’t, for the life of him, not kiss her, and as his lips found hers, she pinned his hands above him playfully, her blond hair tickling his face.
“Who are you?” she asked. Eli had decided that tonight his name would be Gill, but when he opened his mouth what came out was, “Eli Ever.”
What the hell?
“How alliterative,” said Serena. “What brings you to the party?”
“I came to find you.” The words came out before Eli even noticed he was talking. He stiffened under her, and somewhere in his mind, he knew that this was bad, knew he needed to get up. But when he went to free himself, the girl cooed, “Don’t go, lie still,” and his body betrayed him, relaxing beneath her fingers even as his heart hammered in his chest.
“You stand out,” she said. “I’ve seen you before. Last week.”
Actually, Eli had been following her for two weeks, hoping to catch a glimpse of her ability. No such luck. Until now. He willed his body to move, but it wanted to lie beneath her. He wanted to lie beneath her.
“Are you following me?” She said it almost playfully, but Eli answered, “Yes.”
“Why?” she asked, letting go of his hands, but still straddling him.
Eli managed to push himself onto his elbows. He fought the answer down like bile. Don’t say to kill you. Don’t say to kill you. Don’t say to kill you. He felt the words claw their way up his throat.
“To kill you.”
The girl frowned decidedly, but didn’t move. “Why?”
The answer poured out. “You’re an EO,” he said. “You have an ability that goes against nature, and it’s dangerous. You’re dangerous.”
Her mouth quirked. “Says the boy trying to kill me.”
“I don’t expect you to understand—”
“I do, but you’re not going to kill me tonight, Eli.” She said it so casually. He must have frowned, because she added, “Don’t look so disappointed. You can always try again tomorrow.”
The room was dark and the party thudded on beyond the walls. The girl leaned forward and plucked the red sequined horns from his dark hair, nestling them in her own blond waves. She was lovely, and he struggled to think straight, to remember why she had to die.
And then she said, “You’re right, you know.”
“About what?” asked Eli. His thoughts felt slow.
“I’m dangerous. I shouldn’t exist. But what gives you the right to kill me?”
“Because I can.”
“Bad answer,” she said, running her fingers along his jaw. And then she let her body slip down on top of his, jean to jean and hip to hip and skin to skin.
“Kiss me again,” she ordered. And he did.
* * *
SERENA Clarke spent half her time wishing she were dead, and the other half telling everyone around her what to do, and wishing someone wouldn’t do it.
She’d asked to leave the hospital, and the sea of staff had practically parted to let her pass before her IV was even out. It had been pleasant, at first, getting her way so easily, if not a little foreign. Serena had always been strong, always ready to fight for something she wanted. But suddenly there was no need, because the fight had gone out of everyone else. The world went limp around her, a complacent glaze filling the eyes of anyone she met and spoke to. The lack of opposition, of tension, became maddening. Her parents simply nodded when she said she wanted to go back to school. Her teachers ceased to be a challenge. Her friends bent and bent and bent to every whim. Boys lost their fire, gave her anything she wanted, and anything she didn’t want, but was bored enough to ask for.
Where before Serena’s world had bowed beneath the strength of her will, now it simply bowed. She didn’t have to argue, she didn’t have to try.
She felt like a ghost.
And worst of all, Serena hated to admit how easy and addictive it was, getting her way, even when it made her miserable. Every time she got tired of trying to make people fight her, she would slink back into the comfort of control. She couldn’t turn it off. Even when she didn’t order, even when she only suggested, only asked, they did it.
She felt like a god.
She dreamed of people who could fight back. Of wills strong enough to resist her.
And then one night, she got mad—truly mad—at the boy she was seeing, at the stupid, glazed look in his eyes that she knew too well, and when he refused to fight her, refused to deny her, because for some infuriating reason she couldn’t order him to do that, his desire to bend superseding any attempt at violence, she told him to go jump off a bridge.
And he did.
Serena remembered sitting cross-legged on her bed and listening to the news, her friends huddled on the comforter around her—but not touching; there seemed to be a thin wall separating them from her, fear, or maybe awe—and it was then she realized that she wasn’t a ghost, or a god.
She was a monster.
* * *
ELI examined the small blue card the girl had slipped in his po
cket the night before. On one side she’d written the name of a café off the main library—the Light Post, it was called—along with a time, 2 p.m. On the other side, she’d written Scheherazade—she’d even spelled it correctly. Eli knew the reference, of course. Arabian Nights. The woman who told the sultan stories and never finished at night, lest he kill her. Instead she drew the stories over until the next day.
As he made his way through U of Merit’s campus, he felt hungover for the first time in a decade, his head heavy and his thoughts slow. It had taken him most of the morning to drag fully free of the girl’s compulsion, to think of her as a target. Only a target.
He slipped the card back into his pocket. He knew Serena wouldn’t show up. She’d be a fool to come anywhere near him after last night. After he’d admitted his intentions. And yet there she was, sitting on the patio of the Light Post wearing sunglasses and a dark blue sweater, her blond hair wisping around her face.
“Do you have a death wish?” Eli asked, standing beside the table.
She shrugged. “I’ve done it once. The novelty must be wearing off.” She gestured to the empty chair across from her. Eli weighed his options, but he couldn’t exactly kill her in the middle of campus, so he sat down.
“Serena,” she said, sliding the sunglasses on top of her head. In the daylight, her eyes were even lighter. “But you already know my name.” She sipped her coffee. Eli said nothing. “Why do you want to kill me?” she asked. “And don’t say because you can.”
The moment Eli’s thoughts formed they were sliding across his tongue. He frowned as the words spilled out. “EOs are unnatural.”
“You said that already.”
“My best friend became one, and I saw the change. Like a devil had climbed into his skin. He killed my girlfriend, and then he tried to kill me.” He bit into his tongue and managed to stem the flow of words. Was it her eyes, or her voice that was compelling him?
“So you go around blaming every other EO you can find,” said Serena. “Punishing them in his place?”