by V. E. Schwab
So Victor was right. It had been a setup. Eli had staged a killing as a rescue. He had to admit, it was one way to get away with murder.
“I mean, I’m dead, right? This isn’t some shit prank?”
“You were dead,” said Victor. “Now, thanks to my friend, Sydney, you’re a bit less dead.”
Barry was spluttering curses and crackling like a sparkler. “What did you do?” He spat at Sydney. “You broke me.” Sydney frowned as he continued to short out, lighting up the grave in a strange, camera-flash kind of way. She had never resurrected an EO before. She wasn’t sure if all the pieces would—could—come back. “You broke my power, you little—”
“We have a job for you,” cut in Victor.
“Fuck off, does it look like I want a job? I want to get out of this fucking coffin.”
“I think you want to take this job.”
“Blow me. You’re Victor Vale, right? Ever told me about you when he was trying to recruit me.”
“It’s nice that he remembers,” said Victor, his patience wearing thin.
“Yeah, think you’re high and mighty, causing pain and shit? Well I’m not afraid of you.” He flickered in and out again. “Got that? Let me out and I’ll show you pain.”
Sydney watched Victor’s hand tighten into a fist, and felt the air hum around her, but Barry didn’t seem to feel anything. Something was wrong. She’d gone through the motions, given him a second chance, but he hadn’t come back the way the ordinary humans had, not all the way. The air stopped humming, and the man in the coffin cackled.
“Hah, see? Your little bitch messed up, didn’t she? I don’t feel a thing! You can’t hurt me!”
At that, Victor straightened.
“Oh, sure I can,” he said pleasantly. “I can shut the lid. Put the dirt back. Walk away. Hey,” he called up to Sydney, who was still swinging her legs over the side of the grave. “How long would it take for an undead to become dead again?”
Sydney wanted to explain to Victor that the people she resurrected weren’t undead, they were alive, and, as far as she could tell, they were perfectly mortal—well, aside from this little nerve issue—but she knew where he was going with this and what he wanted to hear, so she looked down at Barry Lynch, and shrugged dramatically. “I’ve never seen an undead go dead again on their own. So I’m guessing forever.”
“That’s a long time,” said Victor. Barry’s cursing and his taunts had died away. “Why don’t we let you think on it? Come back in a few days?” Sydney tossed Victor his shovel, and a spray of dirt tumbled down on the coffin lid like rain.
“Okay, wait, wait, wait, wait,” begged Barry, trying to claw his way out of the coffin and finding his feet trapped. Victor had nailed his pants to the wooden floorboards before they got started. It had been Sydney’s idea, actually, just to be safe. Now Barry panicked and flickered and began to whimper, and Victor rested the spade under the man’s chin and smiled.
“So you’ll take the job?”
XXXVI
LAST NIGHT
THE ESQUIRE HOTEL
“WHAT happened back there, Sydney?”
Victor was still knocking dirt off his boots as they climbed the stairs to the hotel room—he didn’t like elevators—with Sydney taking the steps two at a time beside him.
“Why didn’t Barry come back the way he should?”
Sydney chewed her lip. “I don’t know,” she said, winded from the climb. “I’ve been trying to figure it out. Maybe … maybe it’s because EOs have already had their second chance?”
“Did it feel different?” pressed Victor. “When you tried to resurrect him?”
She wrapped her arms around herself, and nodded. “It didn’t feel right. Normally, it’s like there’s this thread, something to grab onto, but with him, it was hard to reach, and it kept slipping. I didn’t get a good hold.”
Victor was quiet until they reached the seventh floor.
“If you had to try again…” but his question faded as they reached their room. There were voices beyond the door, low and urgent. Victor slid the gun from his back as he turned the key and the door swung open on the hotel suite, only the back of Mitch’s tattooed head peering over the couch in front of a TV. The voices continued on the screen in black-and-white. Victor sighed, shoulders loosening, and put the gun away. He should have known it was nothing, should have felt the absence of new bodies. He chalked up the slipup to distraction as Sydney bobbed past him into the apartment and the people on the screen argued on in dapper suits and hushed voices. Mitch had a thing for classics. Victor had arranged on numerous occasions to have the TV in the prison commons, which was usually programmed to sports or old sitcoms, set to show old black-and-whites instead. He appreciated Mitch’s incongruities. They made him interesting.
Sydney tugged off her shoes by the door and went to scrub the grave dirt and the lingering feel of the dead from beneath her fingernails. The giant black dog looked up from the floor beside the couch as she passed, tail thumping. Somewhere after reviving the dog and before leaving to revive Barry, Victor had cleaned the lingering blood and grime off Dol’s fur, and the beast almost looked normal as it got to its feet and followed Sydney lazily from the room.
“Hey, Vic,” called Mitch, waving without looking away from the tuxedoed men on the screen. The laptop sat beside him, and hooked up to it was a small, very new printer that hadn’t been there when they left.
“I don’t keep you around to warm the couch, Mitch,” said Victor as he crossed into the kitchen.
“You find Barry?”
“I did.” Victor poured himself a glass of water and slumped against the counter, watching the bubbles flee to the top of the glass.
“He agree to deliver your message?”
“He did.”
“So where is he? I know you didn’t actually let him go?”
“Of course not.” Victor smiled. “I put him back for the night.”
“That’s cold.”
Victor shrugged, and took a sip. “I’ll let him out in the morning to run his errand. And what have you been up to?” he said, tipping the glass toward him. “I hate to interrupt Casablanca for business but…”
Mitch stood and stretched. “You ready for the world’s biggest case of good news–bad news?”
“Go on.”
“The search matrix is still sifting.” He held out a folder. “But here’s what we’ve got so far. Each one’s got enough markers to make them EO candidates.” Victor took it, and began to spread the pages out on the counter. There were eight in total.
“That’s the good news,” said Mitch.
Victor stared down at the profiles. Each page had a block of text, lines of stolen information—names and ages and brief medical summaries following brief lines on their respective accidents or traumas, psych notes, police reports, antipsychotic and painkiller prescriptions. Information distilled, messy lives made neat. Beside the text on each profile was a picture. A man in his late fifties. A pretty girl with black hair. A teenage boy. All of the photos were candids, the subjects’ eyes looking at or around the camera, but never directly at the photographer. And all of the photos had been x-ed out with a thick black Sharpie.
“What’s with the x’s?” asked Victor.
“That’s the bad news. They’re all dead.”
Victor looked up sharply. “All of them?”
Mitch looked sadly, almost reverently, at the papers. “Looks like your hunch about Eli was right. These are just the Merit area, like you asked. When I started getting hits, I opened a new search, and expanded the parameters to cover the last ten years and most of the country. I didn’t print those results—too many—but there’s definitely a pattern.”
Victor’s gaze drifted back down to the files, and stuck. He couldn’t tear his eyes from the thick black x’s on the photos. Perhaps he should feel responsible for unleashing a monster on the world, for the bodies that monster left in his wake—after all, he made Eli what he was, he urge
d him to test his theory, he brought him back from the dead, he took away Angie—but as he stared down into the faces of the dead, all he felt was a kind of quiet joy, a vindication. He’d been right about Eli all along. Eli could preach all he liked about Victor being a devil in stolen skin, but the proof of Eli’s own evil was spread across the counter, on display.
“This guy is doing damage,” said Mitch as he lifted another, much, much smaller stack from beside the printer, and set them on the counter, faceup. “But here’s a positive postscript for you.” Three pictures gazed, glanced, or stared up at Victor, unaware. A fourth was in the process of printing itself out with a soft buzzing sound. When the machine spit it out, Mitch paused the movie and delivered the sheet to the counter. None of the photos were crossed out.
“They’re still alive?”
Mitch nodded. “For now.”
Sydney reappeared just then in sweats and a T-shirt, trailed by Dol. Victor wondered absently if things brought back by the girl felt a connection to her, or if Dol simply possessed the usual unconditional affection inherent in most canines, and appreciated the fact that he was tall enough to look Sydney in the eyes. She patted his head absently and grabbed a soda from the fridge, climbing onto one of the counter stools, clutching the can in both her hands.
Victor was stacking the dead and set them aside. There was no need for Sydney to look at them right now.
“You okay?” he asked.
She nodded. “I always feel strange after. Cold.”
“Wouldn’t you rather have a hot drink, then?” asked Mitch.
“No. I like holding this. I like knowing at least I’m warmer than the can.”
Mitch shrugged. Sydney leaned forward to look at the four profiles while the program plodded on in the background.
“They’re all EOs?” she whispered.
“Not necessarily,” said Victor, “but if we’re lucky, one or two.”
Victor’s eyes skimmed the collage of private information that ran beside the photos. Three of the potentials were young, but one was older. Sydney reached over and took up one of the profiles. It was a girl named Beth Kirk, and she had bright-blue hair.
“How do we know which one he’ll go after first? Where do we start?”
“Matrix can only do so much,” said Mitch. “We’ll have to guess. Pick one and hope we get there before Eli.”
Victor shrugged. “No need. They’re irrelevant now.” He didn’t care about the blue-haired girl, or any of them for that matter. He was more interested in what the dead proved about Eli than what the living offered him. He’d meant them only as bait anyway, to be dug up and used as lures, but Sydney herself—her gift, and the message they’d made with it—had rendered these EOs extraneous to his plans.
Sydney looked appalled by his answer. “But we have to warn them.”
Victor plucked Beth Kirk’s profile from her grip, and set it facedown on the counter.
“Would you rather I warn them,” he asked gently, “or save them?” He watched the anger slide from her face. “It’s a waste, going after the victims instead of the killer. And when Eli gets our message, we won’t even need to hunt him down.”
“Why’s that?” she asked.
Victor’s mouth quirked up. “Because he’ll be hunting us.”
2
AN EXTRAORDINARY DAY
I
THIS MORNING
TERNIS COLLEGE
ELI Ever sat in the back of the history seminar, tracing the wood grain of the desk and waiting for the lecture to end. The class was being taught in an auditorium at Ternis College, an exclusive private school half an hour or so outside Merit city limits. Three rows in front of him, and two spaces to the left, sat a girl with blue hair named Beth. It wasn’t such a strange thing, the hair, but Eli happened to know that Beth only started dying it that color after it had all gone white. The white was the product of trauma, a trauma that had nearly killed her. Technically it had, in fact. For four and a half minutes.
Yet here Beth was, alive and attentively taking notes on the Revolutionary War or the Spanish American War or World War II—Eli wasn’t even sure what the name of the course was, let alone which conflict the professor was currently teaching—while the blue strands fell around her face, and trailed across her paper.
Eli couldn’t stand history. He figured it probably hadn’t changed that much in the ten years since he’d taken it, just another one of Lockland University’s many prerequisites, meant to round every student into a smooth little ball of knowledge. He stared at the ceiling, then at the spaces between the professor’s half-cursive, half-print notes, then back at the blue hair, then at the clock. Class was nearly over. His pulse quickened as he pulled the slim dossier out of his satchel, the one Serena had put together for him. It explained, in painstaking detail, the blue-haired girl’s history, her accident—tragic, really, the sole survivor of a nasty crash—and her subsequent recovery. He brushed his fingertips over the photo of Beth, wondering where it had come from. He rather liked that hair.
The clock ticked on, and Eli slid the dossier back into his bag, and pushed a pair of thick-framed glasses up his nose—they were plain glass, not prescription, but he’d noticed the trend around the Ternis College campus and followed suit. Looking the part age-wise was never a problem, of course, but styles changed, almost too fast for him to keep track. Beth could choose to stand out if she wanted, but Eli did everything in his power to blend in.
The professor finished his lecture a few blessed minutes early, and wished them all a good weekend. Chairs scraped. Bags were hoisted. Eli rose and followed the blue hair out of the auditorium and down the hall, carried on a wave of students. When they reached the outer door, he held it open for her. She thanked him, tucked a cobalt strand behind her ear, and headed across the campus.
Eli followed.
As he walked, he felt for the place in his jacket where his gun would be, a product of habit, but the pocket was empty. The dossier had told him enough to make him wary of anything that might succumb to magnetism, so he’d left the weapon in his glove box. He’d have to do this the old-fashioned way, which was fine. He didn’t often let himself indulge, but he couldn’t deny that there was something simple and satisfying about using his hands.
Ternis was a small school, one of those cozy private affairs made up of mismatched buildings and an abundance of tree-lined paths. Beth and he were both on one of the larger paths that bisected the campus, and there were enough students around to keep Eli’s pursuit from seeming at all conspicuous. He crossed the campus at a safe distance, enjoying the morning, taking in the crisp spring air, the beauty of the late afternoon sky and the first green leaves. One of them pulled loose from a tree and landed on the girl’s blue hair, and Eli admired the way it made both colors seem brighter as he slipped his gloves on.
When they were almost to the parking lot, Eli began to pick up his pace, closing the gap between them until he was within arm’s reach.
“Hey!” he called behind her, feigning breathlessness.
The girl slowed, and turned to look at him, but kept walking. Soon he was beside her.
“It’s Beth, right?”
“Yeah,” she said. “You’re in Phillips’s history section with me.”
Only for the past two classes, but he’d been sure to catch her eye both times.
“Sure am,” said Eli, flashing his best college-kid grin. “I’m Nicholas.” Eli had always liked the name. Nicholas and Frederick and Peter, those were the ones he found himself using the most. They were important names, the kind held by rulers, conquerors, kings. He and Beth passed through the parking lot, row after row of cars, the school shrinking in the distance behind them.
“Sorry, can I ask you a favor?” asked Eli.
“What’s up?” Beth tucked a stray lock of hair behind her ear.
“I don’t know where my head was during class,” he said, “but I missed the assignment. Did you write it down?”
“Sure
,” she said as they reached her car.
“Thanks,” he said, biting his lip. “I guess there were better things to look at than the board.”
She giggled shyly as she set the bag on the hood and unzipped it, digging around inside.
“Anything’s better than the board,” she said, pulling out her notebook.
Beth had just turned to face him with the notes when his hand closed around her throat, and he slammed her back into the side of the car. She gasped, and he tightened his grip. She dropped the notebook and clawed at his face, raking the black-rimmed glasses off, carving deep scratches across his skin. He felt blood trickle over his cheek but didn’t bother wiping it away. The car behind her began to shake, the metal trying to bend, but she was too new to her power and the car was too heavy, and she was running out of air and fight.
There had been a time when he spoke to the EOs, tried to impart to them the logic, the necessity, of his actions, tried to make them understand before they died, that they were already dead, already ash, held together by something dark but feeble. But they didn’t listen, and in the end, his actions conveyed what his words had failed to. He’d made an exception for Serena’s little sister, and look where that had gotten him. No, words were wasted on them all.
So Eli pinned the girl against the car, and waited patiently until the struggle slowed, and weakened, and stopped. He stood very, very still, and relished the ensuing moment of quiet. It always came to him, right here, when the light—he’d say the life, but that wasn’t right, it wasn’t life, only something posing as life—went out of their eyes. A moment of peace, a measure of balance being restored to the world. The unnatural made natural.
Then the moment passed, and he peeled his gloved fingers away from the girl’s throat and watched her body slide down the warped metal of the car door and onto the concrete, blue hair falling across her face. Eli crossed himself as the angry red scratches on his cheek knitted and healed, leaving only smooth, clear skin beneath the drying blood. He knelt to retrieve his prop glasses from the ground beside the body. His cell rang as he straightened them on his nose, and he fished the phone from his coat.
