Vengeful (Villains #2)(53)

Angie laughed, a small, affectionate sound. “You’re such a weirdo sometimes.”

“Only sometimes?” asked Victor. “I’ll have to try harder.” Those blue eyes flicked to Eli. “Normal is overrated.”

Eli tensed—a small, inward clenching that didn’t reach his face. Normal is overrated. Spoken like someone who didn’t have to work so hard at it. Who hadn’t needed normal to survive.

Victor cleared his throat. “Angie here is the brightest light in our engineering department.”

She rolled her eyes. “Victor’s too proud to fish for praise, but he’s top of the pre-med class.”

“But you haven’t heard,” said Victor soberly. “Eli here is going to give me a run for my money.”

Angie eyed him with newfound interest. “Is that so?”

Eli smiled. “I’ll do my best.”





XXI





TWO YEARS AGO


EON


“YOU were right,” said Stell.

Eli rose from his cot. “Don’t sound so disappointed.”

“We pulled the execution-style killings, then ran those deaths through our system to see if any of them had EO markers.” Stell fed a piece of paper through the slot in the wall. “Meet Justin Gladwell.”

Eli took it, staring down at the sparsely detailed profile, the mug shot of a man in his thirties with a two-day-old shadow. “Gunned down nearly a year ago. Abilities unknown. He wasn’t even on our radar.”

“They’re outpacing you,” said Eli, spreading the three profiles on his table. Justin Gladwell. Will Connelly. Helen Andreas. “Congratulations. You appear to have a new hunter.”

“And you,” said Stell, “appear to have a copycat.”

Eli bristled a little. He didn’t care for the idea of a surrogate. “No,” he said, considering the series of corpses. “I would have tailored their deaths to suit. Would have made it look . . . organic. This person . . .”—he rapped his fingers on the table—“is preoccupied by something else.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean,” said Eli, “that the killer clearly sees the executions as necessary, but I doubt it’s their sole objective.”

“We need to find this person as soon as possible,” said Stell.

“You want me to hunt a hunter.”

Stell raised a brow. “Is that going to be a problem?”

“On the contrary,” said Eli. “I’ve been waiting for a challenge.” He crossed his arms, studying the pictures. “One thing’s almost certain.”

“What’s that?”

“Your hunter is an EO.”

Stell stiffened. “How do you know?”

“Well, I don’t know,” said Eli. “I can only hypothesize. But what are the odds of an ordinary human successfully executing three distinct EOs without the slightest signs of resistance?” Eli held Gladwell’s photograph up to the fiberglass. “A single, consistently positioned, point-blank headshot, in all three cases. A level of accuracy that means one of two things—either the shooter is an expert marksman, or the victims didn’t put up a fight. Blood spray suggests they were conscious and upright when they were shot. Which means they simply stood there. Do you know many ordinary people who could convince or compel a person to go so willingly to their death?”

Eli didn’t wait for an answer. He shook his head, studying the pictures, his thoughts turning. One week. Two months. Nine months.

“These killings are far apart,” he mused. “Which suggests that either your hunter isn’t very good at finding EOs, or they’re not looking for all EOs.”

“You think they’re targeting specific people?”

“Or specific abilities,” said Eli.

“Any ideas?”

Eli steepled his fingers.

Determining an EO’s abilities postmortem was an impossible task. Abilities were hyperspecific, informed not only by the way in which the EO died, but also by their reason for wanting to live. He could speculate—but Eli hated speculating. It was dangerous, and inefficient. Educated guesswork was still guesswork, not a substitute for firsthand experience. Paper clues could only tell you so much—look at Sydney and Serena Clarke. The same near-death experience—a deep plunge in a frozen lake—resulting in two wildly disparate abilities. People were individual. Their psychology was specific. The trick, then, was to aim for vague shapes. Focus only on the outlines, the broadest conditions, and collect enough of those that he could find the pattern, the picture.

“Give me everything you can on these three,” he said, sweeping his hand over the photos. “They may be dead, but that doesn’t mean they don’t still have secrets to tell.”

Eli pointed at a box by Stell’s feet. “What are those?”

Stell nudged it with his shoe. “These,” he said, “are all the execution-style killings that fit the hunter’s MO, but not the EO profile.”

Humans. Of course. He hadn’t considered that the hunter’s scope might go beyond EOs. But that was because his own hadn’t. What a careless assumption. “Can I see them?”

The box was too big for the fiberglass cubby, so Stell had to feed the papers through, a handful at a time. “What are you thinking?” Stell asked as Eli set the ream of paper on the table.