Vicious (3 page)

“The message has to be sent,” said Victor. He didn’t stop digging.

“Well then, maybe we could send a
different
message,” she said under her breath.

“It has to be done, Syd,” he said, finally looking up. “So try to think of something pleasant.”

She sighed, and started digging again. A few scoops of dirt later, she stopped. She was almost afraid to ask.

“What are
you
thinking of, Victor?”

He flashed a small, dangerous smile. “I’m thinking about what a lovely night it is.”

They both knew it was a lie, but Sydney decided she’d rather not know the truth.

*   *   *

VICTOR
wasn’t thinking of the weather.

He hardly felt the cold through his coat. He was too busy trying to picture what Eli’s face would look like when he received their message. Trying to picture the shock, the anger, and threaded through it all, the fear. Fear because it could only mean one thing.

Victor was out. Victor was free.

And Victor was coming for Eli—just as he’d promised he would.

He sunk the shovel into the cold earth with a satisfying thud.

IV

TEN YEARS AGO

LOCKLAND UNIVERSITY

“YOU’RE
seriously not going to tell me what that was about?” asked Victor as he followed Eli through the massive double doors and into the Lockland International Dining Suite, more commonly known as LIDS.

Eli didn’t answer as he scanned the eating hall for Angie.

The whole place resembled a theme park, in Victor’s opinion, all the mundane trappings of a cafeteria hidden beneath plastic and plaster facades that were out of scale and out of place beside each other. Circling a quad-sized stretch of tables, eleven eatery options each boasted different menus in different fonts with different decor. By the doors was a bistro, complete with a low little gate erected for a waiting line. Next to it Italian music played, several pizza ovens gaping behind the counter. Across the way the Thai, Chinese, and sushi places sat in paper-lantern colors, bright and primary and inviting. Joining these were a burger joint, a carving station, a comfort food kitchen, a salad bar, a smoothie shop, and a basic café.

Angie Knight was sitting near the Italian eatery, twirling pasta on her fork, her coppery curls wandering into her eyes as she read a book pinned beneath her tray. A small prickle ran through Victor when he spotted her, the voyeuristic thrill of seeing someone before they see you, of being able to simply watch. But the moment ended when Eli saw her, too, and caught her gaze without a word. They were like magnets, thought Victor, each with their own pull. They showed it every day in class, and around campus, people always drifting
toward
them. Even Victor felt the draw. And then when they got close enough to each other … well. Angie’s arms were around Eli’s neck in an instant, her perfect lips against his.

Victor looked away, giving them a moment of privacy, which was absurd considering their public display of affection was very … public. A female professor looked up from a folded paper several tables over, one eyebrow quirking before she turned the page with a loud crack. Eventually, Eli and Angie managed to pry themselves apart and she acknowledged Victor with a hug, a gesture that was simple but genuine, all the warmth, but none of the heat.

And that was okay. He was not in love with Angie Knight. She didn’t belong to him. Even though he met her first, even though
he’d
been a magnet for her once, and she’d wandered toward him in LIDS that first week of school freshman year, and they’d had smoothies because it was still ungodly hot out even in September, and her face was red from track and his was red from her. Even though she hadn’t even
met
Eli until sophomore year when
Victor
brought his new roommate to sit with him at dinner because it seemed like good karma.

Fucking karma,
he thought as Angie pulled away and floated back to her seat.

Eli grabbed soup and Victor bought Chinese, and the three sat in the growing noise of the eating hall and ate and made mindless conversation, even though Victor desperately wanted to find out what the hell Eli was thinking picking
EOs
as a thesis. But Victor knew better than to interrogate him in front of Angie. Angie Knight was a
force.
A force with long legs and the most severe case of curiosity that Victor had ever encountered. She was only twenty, had been coveted by the top schools since she could drive, had been given a dozen business cards followed by a dozen offers and just as many follow-ups, both subtle and not-so-subtle bribes, and here she was at Lockland. She’d recently accepted an offer from an engineering firm, and upon graduation would be the youngest—and, Victor wagered, the brightest—employee of their company. She wouldn’t even be able to drink yet.

Besides, judging by the looks the other students had given Eli when he made his thesis selection, word would reach her soon enough.

Finally, after a lunch dotted with pauses and occasional warning glances from Eli, the bell rang and Angie left for her next class. She wasn’t even supposed to
have
a next class, but she’d taken on an extra elective. Eli and Victor sat and watched her cloud of red hair bob away with all the glee of someone off to eat cake, not explore forensic chemistry or mechanical efficacy or whatever she’d picked up as a pet project this time.

Or rather, Eli watched her go, and Victor watched Eli watch her, something twisting in his stomach. It wasn’t just that Eli stole Angie from Victor—that was bad enough—but somehow Angie had stolen Eli from him, too. The more interesting Eli, anyway. Not the one with perfect teeth and an easy laugh, but the one beneath that was glittering and sharp, like broken glass. It was in those jagged pieces that Victor saw something he recognized. Something dangerous, and hungry. But when Eli was with Angie, it never showed. He was a model boyfriend, caring, attentive, and
dull,
and Victor found himself studying his friend in Angie’s wake, searching for signs of life.

Several quiet minutes passed as the eating halls thinned and emptied, and then Victor lost patience and kicked Eli under the wood table. His eyes drifted lazily up from his food.

“Yes?”

“Why EOs?”

Eli’s face slowly, slowly, began to open, and Victor felt his chest loosen with relief as Eli’s darker self peeked through.

“Do you believe in them?” asked Eli, drawing patterns in what was left of his soup.

Victor hesitated, chewing on a piece of lemon chicken.
EO. ExtraOrdinary.
He had heard of them, the way people hear about any phenomena, from believer sites and the occasional late-night exposé where “experts” analyze grainy footage of a man lifting a car or a woman engulfed in fire without burning. Hearing
about
EOs and believing
in
EOs were very different things, and he couldn’t tell by Eli’s tone which camp he fell into. He couldn’t tell which camp Eli wanted
him
to fall into, either, which made answering infinitely harder.

“Well,” prompted Eli. “Do you believe?”

“I don’t know,” Victor said truthfully, “if it’s a matter of believing…”

“Everything starts with belief,” countered Eli. “With faith.”

Victor cringed. It was a kink in his understanding of Eli, the latter’s reliance on religion. Victor did his best to overlook it, but it was a constant snag in their dialogues. Eli must have sensed he was losing him.

“With wonder, then,” he amended. “Do you ever
wonder?
”

Victor wondered about lots of things. He wondered about himself (whether he was broken, or special, or better, or worse) and about other people (whether they were all really as stupid as they seemed). He wondered about Angie—what would happen if he told her how he felt, what it would be like if she chose him. He wondered about life, and people, and science, and magic, and God, and whether he believed in any of them.

“I do,” he said slowly.

“Well, when you wonder something,” said Eli, “doesn’t that mean part of you
wants
to believe in it? I think we want to prove things, in life, more than we want to disprove them. We
want
to believe.”

“And you want to believe in superheroes.” Victor’s voice was carefully devoid of judgment, but he couldn’t smother the smile that crept across his mouth. He hoped Eli wouldn’t take offense, would only see it as good humor—levity, not mockery—but he didn’t. His face snapped shut.

“Fine, yeah, it’s stupid, right? You caught me. I didn’t give a shit about the thesis. I just wanted to see if Lyne would let me get away with it,” he said, flashing a rather hollow smile and pushing up from the table. “That’s all.”

“Wait,” said Victor. “It’s not all.”

“That’s
all.
”

Eli turned, dumped his tray, and walked out before Victor could say more.

*   *   *

VICTOR
always kept a Sharpie in his back pocket.

As he wandered the aisles of the library searching for books to kick-start his own thesis, his fingers itched to take it out. His failed conversation with Eli had set him on edge, and he longed to find his quiet, his peace, his personal Zen, in the slow obliteration of someone else’s words. He managed to make his way to the medical section without incident, adding a book on the human nervous system to one he’d already picked up on psychology. After finding a few smaller texts on adrenal glands and human impulse, he checked out, careful to keep his fingertips—permanently stained from his art projects—hidden in his pockets or under the lip of the counter while the librarian looked over the books. There had been a few complaints during his time at Lockland about books being “vandalized,” if not outright “ruined.” The librarian looked at him over the stack as if his crimes were written on his face instead of his fingers, before finally scanning in the books and handing them back.

Back in the university-issued apartment he shared with Eli, Victor unpacked his bag. He knelt in his bedroom and slid the marked-up self-help book onto a low shelf beside two others he’d checked out and altered, silently pleased that no return calls had been placed on any of them yet. The books on adrenaline he left on his desk. He heard the front door open and shut and wandered into the living room a few minutes later to find Eli flopping down onto the couch. He’d set a stack of books and stapled printouts on the university-issued wooden coffee table, but when he saw Victor come in, he reached instead for a magazine and began to flip through it, feigning boredom. The books on the table were on everything from brain function under stress to human will, anatomy, psychosomatic responses … but the printouts were different. Victor picked up one of them and sank into a chair to read it. Eli frowned faintly as he did it, but didn’t stop him. The printouts were captures from Web sites, message boards, forums. They would never been seen as admissible sources.

“Tell me the truth,” said Victor, tossing the pages back onto the table between them.

“About what?” asked Eli absently. Victor stared, blue eyes unblinking, until Eli finally set the magazine aside, sat up, and pivoted, setting his feet firmly on the ground so he could mirror Victor’s position. “Because I think they might be real,” he said.
“Might,”
he emphasized. “But I’m willing to consider the possibility.”

Victor was surprised at the sincerity in his friend’s voice.

“Go on,” he said, offering his best
trust me
face.

Eli ran his fingers over the stack of books. “Try to look at it like this. In comic books there are two ways a hero is made. Nature and nurture. You have Superman, who was born the way he was, and Spider-Man, who was made that way. You with me?”

“I am.”

“If you do even a basic Web search for EOs”—here he gestured at the printouts—“you find the same divide. Some people claiming that EOs are born ExtraOrdinary, and others suggesting everything from radioactive goo and poisonous insects to random chance. Let’s say you manage to find an EO, so you’ve got the proof they
do
exist, the question becomes how. Are they born? Or are they
made
?”

Victor watched the way that Eli’s eyes took on a sheen when he spoke of EOs, and the change in his tone—lower, more urgent—matched with the nervously shifting muscles in his face as he tried to hide his excitement. The zeal peeked through at the corners of his mouth, the fascination around his eyes, the energy in his jaw. Victor watched his friend, mesmerized by the transformation. He himself could mimic most emotions and pass them off as his, but mimicking only went so far, and he knew he could never match this …
fervor.
He didn’t even try. Instead he kept calm, listened, his eyes attentive and reverent so that Eli wouldn’t be discouraged, wouldn’t retreat.

The last thing Victor wanted him to do was retreat. It had taken nearly two years of friendship to crack through the charming, candy shell and find the thing Victor had always known lurked within. And now, slouching around a coffee table stacked with low-res screen shots of sites run by grown men in their parents’ basements, it was as if Eliot Cardale had found God. Even better, as if he had found God and wanted to keep it a secret but couldn’t. It shone through his skin like light.

“So,” said Victor slowly, “let’s assume EOs do exist. You’re going to figure out
how.
”

Eli flashed him the kind of smile a cult leader would covet. “That’s the idea.”

V

LAST NIGHT

MERIT CEMETERY

THUD
.

Thud
.

Thud
.

“How long were you in prison?” asked Sydney, trying to fill the quiet. The sound of digging, when combined with Victor’s absent humming, wasn’t helping her nerves.

“Too long,” answered Victor.