Stell’s stomach dropped.
“It gets worse,” said Holtz, producing the rusted remains of Eli’s collar, broken, useless.
Stell swept the shards from Holtz’s hand, and they rained down onto the ruined floor.
“Call in everyone we have,” he ordered. “And find Cardale.”
XX
THE LAST NIGHT
LOCATION UNCERTAIN
THE first thing Eli noticed was the smell.
The antiseptic odor of a lab, but beneath that, something sickly sweet. Like rot. Or chloroform. His other senses caught up, registered a too-bright light. Dull steel. His head was cotton, his thoughts syrup. Eli didn’t remember what it felt like to be drunk—it had been so long since anything affected him—but he thought it must have been more pleasant. This—the dry-mouthed, head-pounding longing to retch—was not.
He tried to sit up.
Couldn’t.
He was lying on a plastic sheet on top of a crate, his wrists zip-tied to the wood slats beneath. A strap ran across his mouth, holding his head down against the crate. Eli’s fingers felt for something, anything, found only plastic.
“Not as fancy as my old lab, I know,” said Haverty, swimming into focus. “But it will have to do. Needs must, and all.” The doctor dipped out of Eli’s sight, but never stopped talking. “I still have friends in EON, you know, and when they told me you were being released, well—I don’t know if you believe in fate, Mr. Cardale”—he heard tools being shifted on a metal tray—“but surely you can see the poetry in our reunion. You are, after all, the reason for my breakthrough. It’s only right that you’re now going to be my first true test subject.”
Haverty reappeared, holding a syringe in Eli’s line of sight. That same electric blue liquid danced inside.
“This,” he said, “is, as you might have guessed, a power suppressant.”
Haverty brought the blade to Eli’s chest and pressed down. The skin parted, blood welled, but as Haverty withdrew the knife, Eli kept bleeding. The pain continued too, a dull throb, until slowly, Eli felt the wound drag itself back together.
“Ah, I see,” mused Haverty. “I erred on the side of a low dose, to start. I gave the last subject too much too fast and he just kind of . . . came apart. But, see, that’s why you’re the perfect candidate for this kind of trial.” Haverty took up the syringe. “You always have been.” He plunged the needle into Eli’s neck.
It hurt, like cold water racing through his veins.
But the strangest thing wasn’t the sensation of pain. It was the spark of memory—a bathtub filled with cracking ice. Pale fingers, trailing through the frigid water. Music on the radio.
Victor Vale, leaning against the sink.
You ready?
“Now,” said Haverty, dragging Eli back to the present. “Let us try again.”
XXI
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.