XXXVI

TWO NIGHTS LATER

MERIT CEMETERY

Sydney readjusted the shovel on her shoulder.

The air was cold but the night was clear, the moon overhead illuminating the broken gravestones and the dips in the grass as she wove through the cemetery, Dol trotting along beside her. It had been harder to bring him back the second time, but he flanked her now, as if his life were truly tied to hers.

Mitch followed close behind, carrying two more shovels. He’d offered to carry hers, too, but Sydney felt it was important she hold her own. Dominic lagged several yards behind them, buzzed on painkillers and whiskey and tripping every few steps on a clump of weeds or a bit of dislodged rock. She didn’t like him this way—useless from all the liquor and mean from all the pain—but she tried not to think of that. She tried not to think of her own pain, either, of the gunshot still burning a hole in her arm as the muscle and skin slowly healed. She hoped it left a scar, the kind she could see, the kind that would remind her of the moment when everything changed.

Not that Sydney thought she’d ever forget.

She readjusted the shovel on her shoulder, and wondered if Eli would live forever, and how much of forever someone could reasonably remember, especially when nothing left a mark.

Eli, incidentally, had been a press field day.

She and Mitch had seen it on the news. The madman who’d murdered two people at the Falcon Price building, all the while claiming to be some monster-slayer, some hero. The press said he’d killed a young woman in the construction lot, and burned her body before torturing and then murdering an ex-con on the ground floor. The woman’s identity hadn’t been made public— they’d have to go by dental records—but Sydney knew it was Serena. She knew even before she made Mitch hack the coroner’s reports. She could feel the absence of her sister, the place in her where the threads had been. What she didn’t know was why Eli would have done it. But she meant to find out.

The members of the press weren’t nearly as interested in Serena as they were in Eli.

Apparently Eli had stood there over Victor’s body, covered in blood, still holding the knife and shouting that he was a hero. That he’d saved them all. When no one bought the hero line, he tried to claim it had been a fight. But since his opponent was shredded and he didn’t have a scratch on him, that line hadn’t worked so well, either. Add that to the papers found in the satchel in Eli’s hotel room—he clearly didn’t have Victor’s foresight to burn anything that could be construed as evidence—and the profiles on his computer, and Eli’s body count quickly jumped into double digits. The news never touched on the Merit Police Department’s own involvement in a good number of the recent killings, but Eli was now awaiting trial and a psych evaluation.

There was no mention of him being an EO, of course, but then again, why would there be? All it meant for Eli was that if someone shanked him in prison, he’d live to have it happen again. If he were lucky they’d put him in isolation, like Victor. Sydney hoped they didn’t put him in isolation. She thought that maybe if they found out he could heal himself, hurting him would become the most popular game in the facility.

Sydney made a mental note to leak that detail wherever he ended up.

It was too quiet in the cemetery, what with only the sounds of grass-muffled steps in the dark, so Sydney tried to hum the way Victor had when they’d gone to dig up Barry. But it sounded wrong in her mouth, eerie and sad, so she stopped and focused on finding her way by the map drawn in Sharpie on the back of her hand. She’d drawn it in daylight, but the Merit Cemetery, like most things, looked different at night.

Finally she caught sight of the fresh grave, and quickened her pace. The grave was unmarked except for Victor’s book, which Sydney had set like a stone at the top of the patch of dirt that morning, waiting in the shadow of a stone angel for the diggers to finish and go away. That detective, Stell, had been there, too. He’d stayed long enough to watch the simple wood coffin get lowered down into the hole and covered with dirt.

Mitch caught up to her, and the two looked down at the grave for a moment before Sydney drove her shovel into the ground, and set to work. Dol wandered the plots nearby, but never let Sydney out of his sight, and Dominic eventually wandered over, and sat on a gravestone, keeping an eye out for trouble as the other two dug.

Thud.

Thud.

Thud.

They drove their shovels in the ground until the air seemed warmer and the night seemed thinner, and light grazed the far edges of the sky where it met the buildings of Merit. Sometime before dawn, Sydney’s shovel hit wood, and they scraped the last dirt from the top of the coffin, and heaved the lid up.

Sydney looked down at Victor’s body. Then she perched on the edge of the coffin, and pressed her hands against his chest, reaching as far as she could. A moment later, the cold ran up her arms, and caught her breath, and beneath her hands a heartbeat fluttered, as Victor Vale opened his eyes, and smiled.