Vengeful (Villains #2)(81)

But sometimes, you had to have a little faith.

Marcella marched across the penthouse to the shattered floor-to-ceiling windows, the jagged rim of glass gaping open like a mouth. She touched the edge, and the remaining shards crumbled, crystals caught up and swept away by a gust of cold night air as Marcella stepped through the empty window, heels grinding on glass and sand and debris.

This, she thought, crossing the balcony, is why you don’t hide.

This, she thought, lifting her own gun, is why you let them see your strength.

Marcella squinted through the flash and spark of Jonathan’s shine, trying to find the flares of light that marked the sniper’s rifle in the dark as she fired, again and again, emptying her clip into the night.





XIV





TWO WEEKS AGO


DOWNTOWN WHITTON


SYDNEY ran her fingers over the small bones.

Dol had found the bird in the gutter earlier that day, if it could be called a bird—it was a gnarled mess of sinew and feather, a single ruined wing. It was pitiful to start with, and worse still after Syd had pried it from the big dog’s mouth, and now it lay sadly on a worn kitchen towel atop her borrowed bed. Dol watched, his chin resting on the comforter.

Somewhere beyond the doors, Mitch was making dinner, and humming an old song. They each had their own ways of coping with the stress, the fear, the hope. She turned her attention to the bird.

“What do you think?” she asked Dol.

The dog sighed, still sulking over the stolen prize. She scratched his ears—the closer he was, the stronger she could feel the threads that bound them, and the easier it was to remind her fingers what they were searching for.

Sydney took a deep breath, glanced at the red metal tin beside the bed, and then closed her eyes. She felt her way forward, let her hands come to rest on the sad remains, and reached.

It felt like a long fall.

It felt like emptiness and cold.

It felt like forever—and then Syd registered the faint blush of light, the twist and curl of a thread. No, not a thread. A dozen wisp-thin filaments, fragments scattered across the black stretch behind her eyes. They swam across her vision like fish, darting away from her touch, and Sydney’s lungs began to ache, but she didn’t give up. Slowly, painstakingly, she gathered the filaments, imagined fitting the fraying threads back together. Knotting them.

It took hours. Days. Years.

And only an instant.

As she tied the final knot, the thread glimmered, pulsed, became a flutter of feathers against her palm.

Sydney’s eyes flew open as the bird moved beneath her fingers.

A sound escaped her throat, half laugh, half sob, a mixture of victory and shock, and then the sound was overtaken by the furious wing-beats and the squawk of a very surprised pigeon trying to escape the confines of her grip.

It pecked at her knuckles, and Sydney let go—a rookie mistake, as the bird took flight in the narrow room, searching for freedom, bouncing off the light fixture and the window, Dol bobbing his head as if trying to catch airborne apples.

Sydney lunged for the window and threw it open, and the bird escaped into the night in a flurry of gray feathers.

She stared after it, amazed.

She’d done it.

It was a bird, not a human, but Sydney had still taken only a few mangled bones and made the creature whole. Brought it back to life.

In seconds, she was across the room, prying the lid off the red metal tin. The last—the only—pieces of Serena Clarke lay nested inside, wrapped in a scrap of fabric. Sydney reached for them, heart racing—and stopped.

Her hand hovered over the remains.

What if it wasn’t enough?

A bird wasn’t a girl. If she tried, and failed, she’d never get another chance.

If she tried, and failed—but what else could she do? The rest of Serena was ash, scattered across a city hundreds of miles away.

Would it make a difference?

Sydney had never wondered if the where mattered as much as the what, but now, as she nestled the lid back on the tin, she thought, Ghosts are tied to the place where they died. She didn’t believe in ghosts, but she had to believe in something—that thread of light, the closest thing she could find to a soul. If there was any of Serena left, beyond the bones in this box, it would be there.

Sydney would just have to wait.





XV





TWO WEEKS AGO


CAPSTONE


STELL’S plane had landed at dawn. He didn’t know why a video conference wouldn’t suffice, but the board had insisted on his presence, and short of outright defiance, Stell had had no choice but to go.

In his absence, he’d left Rios with strict instructions. No procedures were to be put into effect in his absence. No commands given or followed unless they came expressly from him.

The last thing Stell needed was a mutiny.

Now he stared across the nondescript conference table at five nondescript faces atop nondescript suits. Stell suspected that by the time he left the room, he wouldn’t be able to pick any of them out of a lineup, let alone a crowd.

“First a failed EO capture,” said the woman in black, “now a failed extermination.”

“You’ve made quite a mess,” added the man in gray.

“We’ve faced difficult EOs before,” said Stell. “It’s only a matter of time—”