Vengeful (Villains #2)(38)

Down the hall, and two floors up, he swiped himself into the control room and showed the senior officer the front of his key, where his face hung in holographic detail, right below the word EON.

“Dominic Rusher,” he said with an easy smile, “reporting for duty.”





VIII





FOUR WEEKS AGO


MERIT SUBURBS


STELL ducked under the yellow crime scene tape.

He didn’t flash a badge—didn’t need to. Everyone on the scene worked for EON. For him.

Agent Holtz was standing by the back door. “Sir,” he said eagerly, his tone too bright for the early hour.

“Who called it in?” asked Stell.

“Good Samaritan called the cops. Cops called us.”

“That obvious?”

“Oh yeah,” said Holtz, holding open the door.

Agent Rios was already in the kitchen. Tall, tan, and keen-eyed, she’d been Stell’s second-in-command for nearly four years. She was leaning against the counter, arms crossed, watching a tech photograph a pile of . . . something . . . on the tile floor. A large diamond glinted amid the mess.

“Same profile as the hospital?” asked Stell.

“Looks like it,” said Rios. “Marcella Riggins. Age thirty-two. Spent the last thirteen days in a coma after her husband tried to burn down their house—with her inside. Can’t really blame her for being mad.”

“Mad is conceivable,” said Stell. “Murder is a problem.” He looked around. “How many dead?”

Rios straightened. “Four, we think. It’s kind of hard to tell.” She pointed at the kitchen floor. “One,” she counted, then turned and led him down the hall to a room with a poker table, and a fairly grisly tableau. “Two,” she said, nodding down at a ruined body on the floor. “Three,” she pointed at a withered form only vaguely human. “And four,” she said, gesturing to a pile of dust that coated the back of a chair and spilled onto the felt table. “Hell hath no fury . . .”

Stell counted the chairs. “Survivors?”

“If there were, they didn’t go to the cops. The house belongs to Sam McGuire,” said Rios. “Safe to assume he’s here . . . somewhere.”

Holtz whistled from the doorway. “You ever seen anything like this before?”

Stell considered. He had seen a lot since his first introduction to EOs a decade and a half before. Vale, with his ability to modulate pain; Cardale, with his ability to regenerate; Clarke, with her ability to control—and those were just the start. The tip of the iceberg. He’d since seen EOs who could bend time, move through walls, light themselves on fire, turn themselves to stone.

But this, Stell had to admit, was something new.

He ran his hand through the mess on the felt. “What is this? Ash?”

“As far as we can tell,” said Rios, “it’s Marcus Riggins. What’s left of him. Or maybe this is. Or this.”

“All right,” said Stell, brushing the dust from his palms. “Compile the record. I want records of everything. Everything from the hospital. Everything from here. Shots and specs of every body, every room, every detail, even if you don’t think it matters. It goes in the file.”

Holtz raised his hand like a schoolboy. It was impossible to forget that he was new. “Who’s the file for?”

“Our analyst,” said Stell. But he knew how the agents and techs liked to talk. “You might have heard him called ‘the hunting dog.’”

“Well,” said Holtz, looking around. “Wouldn’t it be easier to bring your dog to the scene, instead of trying to take the whole scene to the dog?”

“Perhaps,” said Stell. “But his leash doesn’t reach this far.”

*

THE lights in the EON cellblocks came on all at once.

Eli Ever opened his eyes, looking up at the cell’s mirrored ceiling, and saw—himself. As always. Clear skin, brown hair, strong jaw; a copy of the boy he’d been at Lockland. A pre-med student at the top of his class, the peak of promise. As if the ice bath hadn’t only stopped his heart, but had frozen time itself.

Fifteen years, and though his face and body remained unchanged, Eli had aged in other ways. His mind had sharpened, hardened. He’d shed some of his more youthful ideals. About himself. About God. But those were the kinds of changes that didn’t show in the reflected glass.

Eli rose from the cot, stretched, and padded barefoot across the private cell that, for nearly five years, had marked the boundaries of his world. He went to the sink and splashed cold water on his face, then crossed to the low shelf that ran against one wall, folders stacked along its length. All of them were beige, ordinary, except for one—a thick black file at the end with a name printed on the front. His name. Eli never reached for that one—didn’t need to—he’d memorized the contents. Instead, his fingers danced along the spines before coming to rest on one considerably thicker than the rest, unmarked, save for a simple black X.

One of his few open cases. A pet project of sorts.

The Hunter.

Eli sat at the table in the center of his cell and flipped back the cover, turned through the pages of the file, skimming past the reports of older killings to the most recent one.