Vicious

VI

A WEEK AGO

WRIGHTON PENITENTIARY

Prison was less important than what it afforded Victor. Namely, time.

Five years in isolation gave him time to think.

Four years in integration (thanks to budget cuts and the lack of evidence that Vale was in any way abnormal) gave him time to practice. And 463 inmates to practice on.

And the last seven months had given him time to plan this moment.

“Did you know,” said Victor, skimming a book from the prison library on anatomy (he thought it particularly foolish to endow inmates with a detailed sense of the positions of vital organs, but there you go), “that when you take away a person’s fear of pain, you take away their fear of death? You make them, in their own eyes, immortal. Which of course they’re not, but what’s the saying? We are all immortal until proven otherwise?”

“Something like that,” said Mitch, who was a bit preoccupied.

Mitch was Victor’s cellmate at Wrighton Federal Penitentiary. Victor was fond of Mitch, in part because Mitch was thoroughly unconcerned with prison politics, and in part because he was clever. People didn’t seem to catch on because of the man’s size, but Victor saw the talent, and put it to good use. For instance, Mitch was presently trying to short out a security camera with a gum wrapper, a cigarette, and a small piece of wire Victor had secured for him three days before.

“Got it,” said Mitch a few moments later, when Victor was thumbing through the chapter on the nervous system. He set the book aside, and flexed his fingers as the guard came down the aisle.

“Shall we?” he asked as the air began to hum.

Mitch took a long look around their cell, and nodded. “After you.”

VII

TWO DAYS AGO

ON THE ROAD

The rain hit the car in waves. There was so much of it that the wiper blades did nothing to clear it away, only managed to move it around on the windows, but neither Mitch nor Victor complained. After all, the car was stolen. And obviously stolen well; they’d been driving it without incident for almost a week, ever since they swiped it from a rest stop a few miles from the prison.

The car passed a sign that pronounced MERIT—23 MILES.

Mitch drove and Victor stared out past the downpour at the world as it flew by. It felt so fast. Everything felt fast after being in a cell for ten years. Everything felt free. For the first few days they had driven aimlessly, the need to move outweighing the need for a destination. Victor hadn’t known where they were driving. He hadn’t decided yet where to start the search. Ten years was long enough to plan the details of the prison break down to the minutiae. Within an hour he had new clothes, within a day he had money, but a week out and he still didn’t have a place to start looking for Eli.

Until that morning.

He’d picked up The National Mark, a nationwide paper, from a gas station, flipping absently through, and fate had smiled at him. Or at least, someone had smiled. Smiled straight up from a photo printed to the right of a news article titled:

CIVILIAN HERO SAVES BANK

The bank was located in Merit, a sprawling metropolis halfway between Wrighton’s barbed-wire walls and Lockland’s wrought-iron fences. He and Mitch had been heading there for no other reason than the fact that it was somewhere to go. A city full of people Victor could question, persuade, coerce. And a city that was already showing promise, he thought, lifting the folded paper.

He had bought the copy of The National Mark, but taken only that page, slipping it into his folder almost reverently. It was a start.

Now Victor closed his eyes, and tipped his head back against the seat while Mitch drove.

Where are you, Eli? he wondered.

Where are you where are you where are you where are you?

The question echoed in his head. He’d wondered it every day for a decade. Some days absently, and others with such an intense need to know that it hurt. It actually hurt, and for Victor, that was something. His body settled back into the seat as the world sped by. They hadn’t taken the freeway—most escaped convicts knew better than that—but the speed limit on the two-lane highway was more than satisfactory. Anything was better than standing still.

Sometime later, the car hit a small pothole, and the bump jarred Victor from his reverie. He blinked, and turned his head to watch the trees that bordered the road zip past. He rolled down the window halfway to feel that speed, ignoring Mitch’s protests about the rain splashing into the car. He didn’t care about the water or the seats. He needed to feel it. It was dusk, and in the last dregs of the day Victor caught sight of a shape moving down the side of the road. It was small, head bowed and clutching at itself as it trudged down the narrow shoulder of the highway. Victor’s car passed it before he frowned and spoke up.

“Mitch, go back.”

“For what?”

Victor turned his attention to the massive man behind the wheel. “Don’t make me ask again.”

Mitch didn’t. He threw the car into reverse, the tires slipping on the wet pavement. They passed the figure again, but this time going backward. Mitch shifted the car again into drive, and crawled up alongside the shape. Victor rolled down his window the rest of the way, the rain pressing in.

“You all right?” he asked over the rain.

The figure didn’t respond. Victor felt something prickle at the edge of his senses, humming. Pain. It wasn’t his.

“Stop the car,” he said, and this time Mitch put the vehicle promptly—a little too promptly—into park. Victor got out, zipped his coat up to his throat, and began to walk alongside the stranger. He was a good two heads taller.

“You’re hurt,” he said to the bundle of wet clothes. It wasn’t the arms crossed tightly over the form’s chest that gave it away, or the dark stain on one sleeve, darker even than the rain, or the way the figure pulled back sharply when he reached out a hand. Victor smelled pain the way a wolf smelled blood. Tuned to it.

“Stop,” he said, and this time the person’s steps dragged to a halt. The rain fell, steady and cold, around them. “Get in the car.” The figure looked up at him then, and the wet hood of the coat fell back onto a pair of narrow shoulders. Water blue eyes, fierce behind smudged black liner, stared up at him from a young face. Victor knew pain too well to be fooled by the defiant look, the set jaw around which wet blond hair curled and stuck. She couldn’t be more than twelve, thirteen maybe.

“Come on,” he pressed, gesturing to the car that had stopped beside them.

The girl just stared at him.

“What’s going to happen to you?” he asked. “Couldn’t be worse than what already has.”

When she made no motion toward the car, he sighed and pointed at her arm.

“Let me look at that.” He reached out, letting his fingers graze her jacket. The air around his hand crackled the way it always did, and the girl let out a barely audible breath of relief. She rubbed at her sleeve.

“Hey, stop that,” he warned, knocking her hand away from the wound. “I didn’t fix it.”

Her eyes danced between his hand and her sleeve, and back again.

“I’m cold,” she said.

“I’m Victor,” he said, and she offered him a small, exhausted flicker of a smile. “Now what do you say we get out of the rain?”

VIII

LAST NIGHT

MERIT CEMETERY

“You’re not a bad person,” repeated Sydney, flinging dirt onto the moonlit grass. “But Eli is.”

“Yes. Eli is.”

“But he didn’t go to prison.”

“No.”

“Do you think he’ll get the message?” she asked, pointing at the grave.

“I’m pretty sure,” said Victor. “And if he doesn’t, your sister will.”

Sydney’s stomach twisted at the thought of Serena. In her mind, her big sister was two different people, two images overlapping in a way that blurred both, and made her feel dizzy, ill.

There was the Serena from before the lake. The Serena who’d knelt on the floor in front of her the day she left for college— they both knew she was abandoning Sydney to the toxic, empty house—and who used her thumb to wipe tears from Sydney’s cheek, saying over and over, I’m not gone, I’m not gone.

And then there was the Serena from after the lake. The Serena whose eyes were cold and whose smile was hollow, and who made things happen with only words. The one who lured Sydney into a field with a body, cooing at her to show her trick, and then looking sad when she did. The one who turned her back when her boyfriend raised his gun.

“I don’t want to see Serena,” said Sydney.

“I know,” said Victor. “But I want to see Eli.”

“Why?” she asked. “You can’t kill him.”

“That may be.” His fingers curled around the shovel. “But half the fun is trying.”

IX

TEN YEARS AGO

LOCKLAND UNIVERSITY

When Eli picked up Victor from the airport a few days before the start of spring semester, he was wearing the kind of smile that made Victor nervous. Eli had as many different smiles as ice cream shops had flavors, and this one said he had a secret. Victor didn’t want to care, but he did. And since he couldn’t seem to keep himself from caring, he was determined to at least keep himself from showing it.