Vengeful (Villains #2)(7)

IV





FIVE YEARS AGO


PERSHING


TWO weeks after his resurrection, the buzzing started.

At first, it was negligible—a faint humming in his ears, a tinnitus so subtle Victor first took it for a straining light bulb, a car engine, the murmur of a television rooms away. But it didn’t go away.

Almost a month later, Victor found himself looking around the hotel lobby, straining to find a possible source for the sound.

“What is it?” asked Sydney.

“You hear it too?”

Sydney’s brow furrowed in confusion. “Hear what?”

Victor realized she hadn’t been asking about the noise, only his distraction. He shook his head. “Nothing,” he said, turning back to the desk.

“Mr. Stockbridge,” said the woman, addressing Victor, “I see you’re with us for the next three nights. Welcome to the Plaza Hotel.”

They never did stay long, bounced instead from city to city, sometimes choosing hotels, and other times rentals. They never traveled in a straight line, didn’t stay at places with any regularity, or in any particular order.

“How would you like to pay?”

Victor drew a billfold from his pocket. “Cash.”

Money wasn’t a problem—according to Mitch it was nothing but a sequence of ones and zeroes, digital coinage in a fictional bank. His favorite new hobby was skimming minute quantities of cash, pennies on the dollar, consolidating the gain into hundreds of accounts. Instead of leaving no footprint, he created too many to follow. The result was large rooms, plush beds, and space, the kind Victor had longed for and lacked in prison.

The sound inched higher.

“Are you okay?” asked Syd, studying him. She’d been studying him since the graveyard, scrutinizing his every gesture, every step, as if he might suddenly crumble, turn to ash.

“I’m fine,” lied Victor.

But the noise followed him to the elevators. It followed him up to the room, an elegant suite with two bedrooms and a sofa. It followed him to bed and up again, shifting subtly, escalating from sound alone to sound and sensation. A slight prickle in his limbs. Not pain, exactly, but something more unpleasant. Persistent. It dogged him, growing louder, stronger, until, in a fit of annoyance, Victor switched his circuits off, turned the dial down to nothing, numbness. The prickling vanished, but the buzzing only softened to a faint and far-off static. Something he could almost ignore.

Almost.

He sat on the edge of his bed, feeling feverish, ill. When was the last time he’d been sick? He couldn’t even remember. But with every passing minute, the feeling worsened, until Victor finally rose, crossing the suite and taking up his coat.

“Where are you going?” asked Sydney, curled on the sofa with a book.

“To get some air,” he said, already slipping through the door.

He was halfway to the elevator when it hit him.

Pain.

It came out of nowhere, sharp as a knife through his chest. He gasped and caught himself on the wall, fought to stay upright as another wave tore through him, sudden and violent and impossible. The dials were still down, his nerves still muted, but it didn’t seem to matter. Something was overriding his circuits, his power, his will.

The lights glared down, haloing as his vision blurred. The hallway swayed. Victor forced himself past the elevator to the stairwell. He barely made it through the door before his body lit again with pain, and his knee buckled, cracking hard against the concrete. He tried to rise, but his muscles spasmed, and his heart lurched, and he went down on the landing.

His jaw locked as pain arced through him, unlike anything he’d felt in years. Ten years. The lab, the strap between his teeth, the cold of the metal table, the excruciating pain of the current as it fried his nerves, tore his muscles, stopped his heart.

Victor had to move.

But he couldn’t get up. Couldn’t speak. Couldn’t breathe. An invisible hand turned the dial up, and up, and up, until finally, mercifully, everything went black.

*

VICTOR came to on the stairwell floor.

The first thing he felt was relief—relief that the world was finally quiet, the infernal buzzing gone. The second thing he felt was Mitch’s hand shaking his shoulder. Victor rolled onto his side and vomited bile and blood and bad memories onto the landing.

It was dark, the light overhead shorted out, and he could just make out the relief on Mitch’s face.

“Jesus,” he said, slumping backward. “You weren’t breathing. You didn’t have a pulse. I thought you were dead.”

“I think I was,” said Victor, wiping his mouth.

“What do you mean?” demanded Mitch. “What happened?”

Victor shook his head slowly. “I don’t know.” It wasn’t a comfortable thing for Victor, not knowing, certainly wasn’t something he cared to admit to. He rose to his feet, bracing himself against the stairwell wall. He’d been a fool to kill his sensitivity. He should have been studying the progression of symptoms. Should have measured the escalation. Should have known what Sydney seemed to sense: that he was cracked, if not broken.

“Victor,” started Mitch.

“How did you find me?”

Mitch held up his cell. “Dominic. He called me, freaking out, said you took it back, that it was like before, when you were dead. I tried to call you but you didn’t answer. I was heading for the elevator when I saw the light burned out in the stairs.” He shook his head. “Had a bad feeling—”