Vicious (12 page)

“Mitch,” he called back. “See she gets to bed.”

And with that he closed the door behind him.

XXV

TEN YEARS AGO

LOCKLAND UNIVERSITY

VICTOR
didn’t revive Angie. He didn’t try. He knew he should, or should want to, but the last thing he needed was more evidence of himself at the crime scene. He swallowed hard, cringing both at his ability to be so rational at a moment like this, and at the thought of the term. Crime. Scene. Besides, he could
feel
that she was dead. No charge. No energy.

So he did the only thing he could think to do. He called Eli.

“Where the
hell
are you, Vale?” A car door slammed in the background. “You think this shit is funny—”

“Angie’s dead.”

Victor hadn’t been sure whether or not he would say that, but the words had formed and spilled out before he could catch them. He’d expected them to hurt his throat, to lodge in his chest, but they flowed out unrestricted. He knew he should be panicking, but he felt numb, and the numbness made him calm. Was it shock, he wondered, this steadiness that came to him now, that had been so easy to summon with Angie dying at his feet? Or was it something else? He listened to the silence on the other end of the phone until Eli broke it.

“How?” growled Eli.

“It was an accident,” said Victor, maneuvering his cell so he could pull his shirt back on. He’d had to step around Angie’s body to reach it. He didn’t look at her.

“What did you do?”

“She was helping me with a test. I had an idea and it worked and—”

“What do you mean it worked?” Eli’s tone went cold.

“I mean … I mean it worked this time.” He let it sink in. Eli clearly understood, because he stayed quiet. He was listening. Victor had his attention, and he liked that. But he was surprised that Eli seemed more interested in his experiment than in Angie. Angie, who had always kept his monsters back. Angie, who was always getting in the way. No, she had been more than a distraction to both of them, hadn’t she? Victor looked down at the body then, expecting to feel some shade of the guilt that had washed over him when he’d lied to her before, but there was nothing. He wondered if Eli had felt this strange detachment, too, when he woke up on the bathroom floor. Like everything was real, but nothing mattered.

“Tell me what happened,” pressed Eli, losing patience.

Victor gazed around the room at the table, the straps, the machines that had once hummed but now appeared to have burned out, fuses blown. The whole place was dark.

“Where are you?” he snapped when Victor didn’t answer.

“The labs,” he said. “We were—” The pain came out of nowhere. His pulse quickened, the air thrummed, and a breath later Victor doubled over. It crackled over him, through him, lit up his skin and his bones and every inch of muscle in between.

“You were
what
?” demanded Eli.

Victor clutched at the table, biting back a scream. The pain was horrific, as if every muscle in his body had cramped. As if he were being electrocuted all over again.
Stop,
he thought.
Stop,
he begged. And then he finally pictured the pain as a switch, and snapped it off, and it was gone.

His pulse dropped, the air thinned, and he felt
nothing.
Victor was left gasping, dazed. He’d dropped the phone to the linoleum. He reached down a shaking hand and lifted the cell back to his ear.

Eli was practically shouting. “Look,” he was saying, “just stay there. I don’t know what you’ve done, but stay there. You hear me? Don’t move.”

And Victor might have actually stayed put, if he hadn’t heard the double-click.

The landline in their apartment had been provided by the university. It made a faint double-click when it was lifted from its spot on the wall. Now, as Eli spoke to him on his cell and instructed him to stay put, and as Victor tried to get his coat on, he could just make out that small double-click in the background. He frowned. A double-click, followed by three tonal taps: 9-1-1.

“Don’t move,” Eli said again. “I’ll be right there.”

Victor nodded carefully, forgetting how easy it was to lie when he didn’t have to look Eli in the face.

“Okay,” he said, “I’ll be here.” He hung up.

Victor finished pulling on his coat, and cast a last glance at the room. This was a mess. Aside from the body, the scene didn’t scream murder, but the contorted shape of Angie’s corpse showed it wasn’t exactly natural, either. He took a sanitary wipe from a box in the corner and cleaned the bars on the table, resisting the urge to wipe down every object in the room. Then it
would
look like a crime. He knew he was written on this lab, somewhere, despite how careful he’d been. He knew he was probably on the security footage, too. But he was out of time.

Victor Vale left the lab, and then he ran.

*   *   *

AS
he made his way toward the apartment—he needed to speak to Eli in person, needed to make him understand—he marveled at how good he felt physically. High from the chase, and from the kill, but free from pain. Then, at the edge of a streetlight, he looked down and saw his hand was bleeding. He must have caught it on something. But he didn’t feel it. And not just in the adrenaline-blots-out-minor-injuries way. He didn’t feel it at
all.
He tried to summon that strange humming air, tried to lower his own pain threshold a fraction, just to see how he was
really
faring, and ended up doubled over, bracing himself against a light post.

Not so good, then.

He definitely felt like he’d died. Again. His hands ached from gripping the handles on the table, and he wondered if any bones were broken. Every muscle in the rest of his body groaned, and his head hurt so much he thought he might be sick. When the sidewalk began to tip, he threw the switch back. Pain blinked out. He gave himself a moment to breathe, to regain himself, and straightened in the pool of light. He felt
nothing.
And right now, nothing felt amazing. Nothing felt heavenly. He tipped his head back, and laughed. Not one of those maniacal laughs. Not even a loud laugh.

A cough of a laugh, an amazed exhale.

But even if it had been louder, no one would have heard it, not over the sirens.

The two squad cars screeched to a stop in front of him, and Victor hardly had time to process their arrival before he was thrown to the concrete, cuffed, and a black hood thrust over his head. He felt himself being shoved into the backseat of the cop car.

The hood was an interesting touch, but Victor supremely disliked the sensation of being blindfolded. The car would turn, and his weight would shift, and without any visual cues or physical discomfort to orient himself, he’d nearly topple over. They seemed to be taking the turns purposefully fast.

Victor realized that he could react. Fight back without having to touch them. Without even having to
see
them. But he restrained himself.

It seemed unnecessarily dangerous to hurt the cops while they were driving. Just because he could turn his own pain off didn’t mean he wouldn’t die if they wrecked the vehicle, so he focused his attention on staying calm. Which was, again, too easy, given all that had happened. The calm troubled him; the fact that the physical absence of pain could elicit such a mental absence of panic was at once unnerving and rather fascinating. If he weren’t currently in the back of a cop car, he would have wanted to make a thesis note.

The car turned hard, slamming him against the door, and Victor swore, not out of pain so much as habit. The cuffs dug into his wrists and when he felt something warm and wet run down his fingers, he decided to lower his threshold. Feeling nothing could lead to injury, and he wasn’t Eli. He couldn’t heal. He tried to feel. Just a little and—

Victor gasped and tipped his head against the seat. Hot pain tore through his wrists where the metal dug in, and magnified, his threshold plummeting. He clenched his jaw and tried to find balance. Tried to find normal. Sensation was nuanced. Not on and off, but an entire spectrum, a dial with hundreds of notches, not a switch. He closed his eyes despite the darkness of the hood, and found a place between numb and normal. His wrists ached dully, something closer to stiffness than sharp pain.

This was going to take some getting used to.

Finally the car stopped, the door opened, and a pair of hands guided him out.

“Can you take the hood off?” he asked the darkness. “Don’t you have to read me rights? Did I miss that part?”

The person guiding him nudged him to the right and his shoulder clipped a wall. Campus police, maybe? He heard a door open, and felt a slight change in the sounds of the space. This new room had almost no furniture and smooth walls, he could tell by the echo. A chair screeched back, someone pushed Victor down into it, uncuffed one of his hands and recuffed them both to a place on a metal table. Footsteps faded, and were gone.

A door closed.

The room was silent.

A door opened. Footsteps drew closer. And then at last the hood came off. The room was very, very bright, and a man sat down across from him, broad-shouldered, black-haired, and unamused. Victor looked around at the interrogation room, which was smaller than he imagined, and a bit shabbier. It was also locked from the outside. Any stunt in here would be an utter waste.

“Mr. Vale, my name is Detective Stell.”

“I thought those hoods were only used for spies and terrorists and bad action movies,” said Victor, referring to the pile of black fabric now sitting between them. “Is it even legal?”

“Our officers are trained to use their judgment in order to protect themselves,” said Detective Stell.

“Is my eyesight a threat?”

Stell sighed. “Do you know what an EO is, Mr. Vale?”

He felt his pulse tick up at the word, the air buzzing faintly around him, but swallowed, willed himself to find his calm. He nodded slightly. “I’ve heard of them.”

“And do you know what happens when someone shouts EO?” Victor shook his head. “Every time someone makes a 911 call and uses that word, I have to get up out of bed, and come all the way down to the station to check things out. Doesn’t matter if the call-in’s a prank by some kids, or the ravings of a homeless man. I have to take it seriously.”

Victor furrowed his brow. “Sorry someone wasted your time, sir.”

Stell rubbed his eyes. “Did they, Mr. Vale?”

Victor gave a tight laugh. “You can’t be serious. Someone told you I was an EO”—he already knew who, of course—“and you actually believe them? What the hell kind of ExtraOrdinary am I supposed to be?” Victor stood but the cuffs were locked firmly to the table.

“Sit down, Mr. Vale.” Stell pretended to examine his papers. “The student who called in the report, a Mr. Cardale, also said that you confessed to the murder of student Angela Knight.” His eyes flicked up. “Now, even if I want to overlook this EO business, and I’m not saying I do, I take a body pretty damn seriously. And that’s what we’ve got on our hands over at Lockland’s engineering school. So, is any of this true?”

Victor sat and took a few long, deep breaths. Then he shook his head. “Eli’s been drinking.”

“Is that so?” Stell sounded unconvinced.

Victor watched a drop of blood fall from the cuffs to the table. He was careful to keep his eyes on the one, two, three drops as he spoke. “I was at the labs when Angie died.” He knew the security cameras would show as much. “I needed to get away from a party, and she came and picked me up. I didn’t want to go home, and she said she had work to do … it’s thesis time and all … so I went with her to the engineering school. I left the room for a couple minutes, just to get a drink, and when I came back … I saw her on the floor and called Eli—”

“You didn’t call 911.”

“I was upset. Distraught.”

“You don’t seem distraught.”

“No, now I’m pissed off. And in shock. And cuffed to a table.” Victor raised his voice, because now seemed like an appropriate time to do so. “Look, Eli was drunk. Maybe he still is. He told me it was my fault. I kept trying to explain that it had been a heart attack, or a malfunction in the equipment—Angie was always messing around with voltage—but he wouldn’t listen. He said he’d call the police. So I left. Made my way home to
talk
to him. And that’s where I was heading when the cops showed up.” He looked up at the detective, and gestured to their current situation. “As for this EO stuff, I’m as confused as you are. Eli’s been working too hard. His thesis is on EOs, did he tell you that? He’s obsessed with them. Paranoid. Doesn’t sleep, doesn’t eat, just works on his theories.”

“No,” said Stell across the table, making a note. “Mr. Cardale neglected to mention that.” He finished writing, and tossed the pen aside.

“This is insane,” said Victor. “I’m not a murderer, and I’m not an EO. I’m a pre-med student.” At least the last one was true.

Stell looked at his watch. “We’ll keep you overnight in a holding cell,” he explained. “Meanwhile, I’ll send someone over to see Mr. Cardale, test his blood alcohol level, and get his full statement. If, in the morning, we have proof that Mr. Cardale’s testimony is compromised, and no evidence ties you to the death of Angela Knight, we’ll let you go. You’ll still be a suspect, understand? That’s the best I can do right now. Sound good?”

No. It didn’t sound good at all. But Victor would make do. The hood stayed off as an officer led him to the cell, and on the way he made careful note of the number of cops and the number of doors and the time it took to reach the holding area. Victor had always been a problem-solver. His problems had certainly been growing bigger, but the rules still held. The steps to solving a problem, from elementary math to breaking out of a police station, remained the same. A simple matter of understanding the problem, and selecting the best solution. Victor was now in a cell. The cell was small and square and came complete with bars and a man who was twice his age and smelled like piss and tobacco. A guard sat at the end of a hallway reading a paper.