Vengeful (Villains #2)(124)

Eli pressed himself against her, head bowed in a strange, almost loving embrace as at last the steel collar around his throat rusted, fell away.

Eli smiled through the agony, his final chains gone.

The ground beneath them was wearing visibly now. Eli tightened his grip, his body screaming in protest. “I’ve killed fifty EOs,” he hissed, “and you’re nowhere near the strongest.”

Marcella’s power wicked through the air. The bronze statue a dozen feet away began to rust, crumble. The pillars swayed, unsteady, and the whole building trembled, brittle, the marble beneath their feet wearing away, the same way Eli’s body did, layer by layer.

The marble thinned like melting ice beneath them, first translucent, then transparent.

“It appears,” said Marcella, “that we are evenly matched.”

“No,” said Eli as the floor splintered, cracked. “You can still die.”

Eli slammed his foot down into the fragile marble, and it shattered beneath them.

*

VICTOR was halfway to his feet, one hand clutching his wounded shoulder, when the floor gave way. He staggered backward, boots searching for solid ground as the force of the crash rippled through the building.

Only once he was beyond the wave of destruction did Victor see the full scope of what had happened.

It was like a blast turned inward, an implosion.

One second Eli and Marcella were tangled together, engulfed in light at the center of the atrium, and the next they were gone, plunging like meteors through the marble floor. The force of the collapse set off a chain reaction. The walls shook. The pillars toppled. The glass dome cracked and shattered.

The hole was vast, a drop of twenty, maybe thirty feet onto solid stone floor.

There was no sign of June, but Victor saw Stell nearby, unconscious, one foot pinned beneath a broken pillar.

The building stopped shaking. Victor stepped to the edge of the hole and looked down. Marcella lay stretched at the bottom of the chasm, her limbs draped over broken stone, her black hair loose and her head tilted at a wrong angle.

Rubble shifted, and Eli staggered to his feet beside her, naked and bloody, his broken bones knitting themselves back together as he rose. He looked down at Marcella’s body, and crossed himself, and then he craned his head and looked up through the broken floor.

His eyes met Victor’s, and for a second neither man moved.

Run, thought Victor, and he could see the response in Eli’s coiled frame.

Chase me.

A rock came free near Eli’s bare foot, skittering down the pile of rubble, and both surged into motion.

Eli spun, climbing over the wreckage, as Victor turned, searching for another way down. The nearest stairs had collapsed, the elevator was unresponsive. He finally found a stairwell, and took the steps two and three and four at a time, lunging down to the lower level, to the wreckage and the remains of Marcella Morgan.

But by the time Victor got there, Eli was already gone.





XIX





THE LAST NIGHT


THE OLD COURTHOUSE


THE building was a ruin, the tangle of stone still shifting and settling, as Eli climbed out of the wreckage. Dust and glass rained down around him as he pried open a door, found a back stairwell intact, and climbed. The door at the top opened onto a parking garage. Sirens wailed nearby as he strode, naked, across the concrete toward the side street.

It had been hard to walk away from Victor.

There would be time for him again. But first, Eli needed to put distance between himself and the courthouse—and EON’s reach.

“Excuse me, sir,” called a security guard, approaching, “you can’t—”

Eli slammed his fist into the man’s jaw.

The guard dropped like a stone, and Eli stripped him, tugging on the stolen uniform as he stepped around the arm of the parking barrier and out into the alley.

It had been five years since Eli’s arrest, longer still since the last time he needed to disappear. Amazing how quickly the mind went down old paths. Eli felt calm, in control, his thoughts ticking off with soothing linearity.

Now, he just needed to—

Pain lanced his side.

Eli winced, and looked down to see a dart jutting between his ribs. He pulled the dart free and held it up to the light, squinting at the dregs of an electric blue liquid in the vial. A strange shiver ran through him. A tightness in his chest.

Footsteps sounded behind him, slow and steady, and Eli turned around, only to find a ghost.

A monster.

A devil in a white lab coat, deep-set eyes peering out from behind round glasses.

Dr. Haverty.

Eli’s mouth went dry. He flashed back to steel tables slick with blood, felt hands inside his open chest, but despite the bile rising in his throat, Eli forced himself to hold his ground.

“All our time together,” he said, tossing the dart away, “and you really thought something like that would work?”

Haverty cocked his head, glasses shining. “Let’s find out.” The doctor swung the gun up, and fired a second dart into Eli’s chest.

Eli looked down, expecting to see the neon liquid, but the contents of this vial were clear. He plucked out the dart.

“I don’t sleep,” he said, tossing it away, “but I still dream. And I’ve so often dreamed of killing you.”