Vengeful (Villains #2)(39)

The EO’s name was Jack Linden. A mechanic three hundred miles west of Merit. He’d slipped through EON’s algorithm, but not, apparently, the Hunter’s notice. A crime scene photo showed the EO on his back, amid a sea of tools. He’d been gunned down at point-blank range. Eli ran a finger absently over the entry wound.

A pressure seal sounded nearby, and a few seconds later the far wall of Eli’s cell turned clear, dissolving from solid white to fiberglass. A thickset man with salt-and-pepper hair stood on the other side, carrying another file, and, as always, a mug of coffee. The last fifteen years might not have touched Eli, but every single one had left its mark on Stell.

The man nodded at the beige folder in Eli’s hands. “Any new theories?”

Eli let the file fall shut. “No,” he said, setting it aside and rising from his chair. “What can I do for you, Director?”

“There’s a new case,” said Stell, setting the file and mug in the fiberglass cubby. “I want your thoughts.”

Eli approached the barrier and collected both offerings.

“Marcella Riggins,” he read aloud, returning to his seat and taking a long, slow sip of his drink.

Eli didn’t need coffee, just as he didn’t need to eat or sleep, but some habits were psychological. The steaming mug was a small piece of change in a static world. A concession, a prop, but one that allowed him to pretend, if only for a moment, that he was still human.

Eli set the coffee aside and began to turn through the file. It wasn’t enough—it was never enough—but it was all they would give him. A stack of paper and Stell’s power of observation. And so he flicked through page after page, skimming the evidence, the aftermath, before finally pausing on a photo of human remains, a diamond glinting in the ash. He set the file aside and met Stell’s waiting gaze.

“All right,” said Eli. “Shall we begin?”





IX





FIVE YEARS AGO


LOCATION UNCERTAIN


AFTER Eli killed Victor, it was all a blur.

First, the chaos. The red and blue lights, the sirens, the officers storming through the Falcon Price, and the horrible realization they weren’t on his side.

Then came the cuffs, so tight they cut into Eli’s wrists, and the black hood, swallowing the sight of Victor’s corpse and the blood-slicked concrete, muffling the voices and the orders and the slammed doors, erasing everything but Eli’s own breath, his pounding heart, his desperate words.

Burn the body. Burn the body. Burn the body.

Then came the cell—more like a concrete box than a room—and Eli slamming his fists against the door over and over until his fingers broke, and healed, broke, and healed, the only evidence the blood left smeared across the steel.

And then, in the end, there was the lab.

Hands forcing Eli down, cold steel on his back and straps cinched so tight they cut into skin, pale sterile walls and too-bright lights and the chemical smell of disinfectant.

In the center of it all, a man in white, his face swimming above Eli’s. Dark eyes set deep behind black glasses. Hands drawing on plastic gloves.

“My name,” said the man, “is Dr. Haverty.”

He selected a scalpel as he spoke.

“Welcome to my lab.”

Leaned in close.

“We are going to understand each other.”

And then he began to cut. Dissect—that was the word for it when the subject was dead. Vivisect—that was the word when they were still alive. But when they couldn’t die?

What was the word for that?

Eli’s faith had faltered in that room.

He had found Hell in that room.

And the only sign of God was that, no matter what Haverty did, Eli continued to survive.

Whether he wanted to or not.

*

TIME unraveled in Haverty’s lab.

Eli thought he knew pain, but pain for him had become a bright and fleeting thing, an instant’s discomfort. In the doctor’s hands, it became a solid state.

“Your regeneration truly is remarkable,” said the doctor, retrieving the scalpel with bloodstained gloves. “Shall we find its limit?”

You’re not blessed, Victor had said. You’re a science experiment.

Those words came back to Eli now.

And so did Victor.

Eli saw him in the lab, watched him circle the table at Haverty’s back, slip in and out of Eli’s line of sight as he studied the doctor’s incisions.

“Maybe you’re in Hell.”

You don’t believe in Hell, thought Eli.

The corner of Victor’s mouth twitched. “But you do.”

Every night, Eli would collapse onto his cot, shivering and sick from the hours pinned to the steel table.

And every morning, it would start again.

Eli’s power had a single flaw—and ten years after Victor first discovered it, so did Haverty. Eli’s body, for all its regeneration, couldn’t reject foreign objects; if they were small enough, he healed around them. If they were large enough—a knife, a saw, a clamp, his body wouldn’t heal at all.

The first time Dr. Haverty cut out Eli’s heart, he thought he might finally die. The doctor held it up for him to see before cutting it free, and for a fraction of a second Eli’s pulse faltered, failed, the equipment screamed. But by the time Haverty set the heart in its sterile tray, there was a new one already beating in Eli’s open chest.