THE LAST NIGHT
WAREHOUSE DISTRICT
VICTOR paused outside the bland gray building. It was a storage facility. A two-story grid of climate-controlled, room-sized lockers where people abandoned furniture or art or boxes of old clothes. This was as far as Mitch’s camera work had gotten Victor. But it was far enough.
There had been another man, according to Mitch. Glasses and a white coat. Eli, dragged behind him, unconscious.
Those words made no sense. The night of Eli’s transformation, Victor had watched as Eli tried to drink himself into oblivion. But the liquor didn’t even touch him.
After his death, nothing could.
Victor made his way through the ground-floor grid, scanning the roll-up doors for one without a lock. His shoulder had stopped bleeding, but it still ached—he didn’t dampen the pain, needed every sense firing, especially with the charge building in his limbs, threatening to spill over.
Victor heard a male voice—one he didn’t recognize—coming from a storage container on his left. He knelt, fingers curling around the base of the steel door as the voice carried on in a casual, conversational way. He inched the door up one foot, two, holding his breath as he braced for an inevitable rattle or clank. But the voice beyond didn’t stop talking, didn’t even seem to notice.
Victor ducked under the rolling door, and straightened.
Instantly he was hit by a stench, slightly noxious, and far too sweet. Chemical. But he soon forgot the smell as he registered the scene before him.
A tray of hospital-grade tools, a man in a white coat, his back to Victor and his gloves slick with blood as he leaned over a makeshift table. And there, strapped to the surface, Eli.
Blood spilled down his sides from a dozen shallow wounds.
He wasn’t healing.
Victor cleared his throat.
The doctor didn’t jump, didn’t seem at all surprised by Victor’s arrival.
He simply set the scalpel down and turned, revealing a thin face, deep-set eyes behind round glasses.
“You must be Mr. Vale.”
“And who the hell are you?”
“My name,” said the man, “is Dr. Haverty. Come in, take a—” Victor’s hand closed into a fist. The doctor should have buckled, dropped to the floor screaming. He should have at least staggered, gasped in pain. But he didn’t do any of those things. The doctor simply smiled. “. . . seat,” he finished.
Victor didn’t understand. Was the man another type of EO, someone whose own powers rendered him untouchable? But no—Victor had been able to feel June’s nerves, even if he’d had no effect on them. This was different. When he reached for the doctor’s body, Victor felt—nothing. He couldn’t sense the man’s nerves. And suddenly, Victor realized he couldn’t sense his own, either.
Even the building episode, the terrible energy ready to spill over moments before, was now gone.
His body felt . . . like a body.
Dull weight. Clumsy muscle. Nothing more.
“That would be the gas,” explained the doctor. “Remarkable, isn’t it? It’s not technically a gas, of course, just a compressed airborne version of the power-suppressant serum I’m currently testing on Mr. Cardale.”
Victor registered motion over the doctor’s shoulder, but he kept his focus on Haverty. Had the doctor himself turned around, he would have noticed Eli’s fingers reaching out, feeling for the edge of the table—would have seen them find the scalpel Haverty had so foolishly set down. But Haverty’s attention hung on Victor, and so he failed to notice Eli slipping free.
“I’ve read your file,” the doctor continued. “Heard all about your fascinating power. I’d love to witness it myself, but as you can see, I’m in the middle of another—”
Haverty turned to gesture then, finally, at Eli on the table, but Eli was no longer there. He was on his feet now, scalpel flashing in the fluorescent light.
Eli struck, the knife parting the air—and the doctor’s throat.
Haverty staggered back, clutching at his neck, but Eli had always had a deft hand. The scalpel bit swift and deep, severing jugular and windpipe, and the doctor sank to his knees, mouth opening and closing like a fish as blood pooled on the concrete beneath him.
“He never stopped talking,” said Eli curtly.
Victor was very aware of the knife in Eli’s hands, the absence of any weapon in his own. His eyes went to the tray of tools, more scalpels, a bone saw, a clamp.
Eli put a shoe up on Haverty’s back and pushed the doctor’s body over.
“That man can burn in hell.” His dark eyes drifted up. “Victor.” A pause. “You were supposed to stay dead.”
“It didn’t take.”
A grim smile crossed Eli’s face. “I have to say, you don’t look well.” His fingers tightened on the scalpel. “But don’t worry, I’ll put you out of your—”
Victor lunged for the tray of instruments, but Eli knocked it sideways.
Tools scattered across the floor, but before Victor could reach any of them Eli caught him around the middle, and they went down hard, Eli’s scalpel driving down toward Victor’s injured shoulder. He knocked Eli’s arm off course at the last instant and the blade scraped against concrete, drawing sparks.
With Eli unable to heal and Victor unable to hurt—they were finally on equal ground.
Which wasn’t equal at all.
Eli was still built like a twenty-two-year-old quarterback.
Victor was a gaunt thirty-five, and dying.
In the blink of an eye, Eli had forced his elbow up against Victor’s throat, and Victor had to throw all his strength into keeping one arm from stabbing him and the other from crushing his windpipe.
“It always comes down to this, doesn’t it?” said Eli. “To us. To what we did—”
Victor drove a knee up into Eli’s wounded stomach, and Eli reeled, rolling sideways. Victor staggered to his feet, shoes slipping in Haverty’s blood. He caught up one of the fallen instruments, a long thin knife, as Eli lunged at him again. Victor dodged back half a step, and kicked out Eli’s knee. His scalpel-holding hand hit the ground for balance and Victor brought his boot down, pinning hand and blade both to the floor as he swung his own knife toward Eli’s chest.
But Eli got his arm up just in time, and the knife sank into his wrist, blade driving deep, and through. Victor let out a guttural scream, but when he tried to pull free, Eli caught his hand in a vise grip, and twisted. Victor lost his balance and went down, Eli on top of him, the blade now in his grip. He brought it down, and Victor threw his hands up and caught Eli’s wrists, the blood-slicked knife suspended between them.
Eli loomed over him, leaning his weight on the blade. Victor’s arms trembled from the effort, but little by little, he lost ground until the tip of the knife parted the skin of his throat.
* * *
EVERY end may be a new beginning, but every beginning had to end.
Eli Ever understood that, leaning over his old friend.
Victor Vale, weary, bleeding, broken, belonged in the ground.
It was a mercy to put him there.
“My time will come,” he said, as the knifepoint sliced Victor’s skin. “But yours is now. And this time,” he said, “I’ll make sure you—”
A sound tore through the steel room, sudden and deafening.
Eli’s grip faltered as pain, molten hot, tore through his back—through skin and muscle and something deeper.
Victor still lay beneath him, gasping, but alive, and Eli went to finish what he’d started, but the knife hung from his fingers. He couldn’t feel it. Couldn’t feel anything but the pain in his chest.
He looked down, and saw a broad red stain blossoming across his skin.
His breath hitched, copper filling his mouth, and then he was back on the floor of a darkened apartment at Lockland, sitting in a pool of blood, carving lines into his arms and asking God to tell him why, to take the power when he didn’t need it anymore.
Now, as he looked up from the hole in his chest, he saw the girl, her white-blond hair and ice blue eyes, so familiar, beyond the barrel of the gun.
Serena?
But then Eli was falling—
He never hit the ground.