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“Because you don’t think I’m a bad person,” he said. “And I don’t want to prove you wrong.”
“You have an ability that goes against nature, and it’s dangerous. You’re dangerous.” Her mouth quirked. “Says the boy trying to kill me.”
“I’m dangerous. I shouldn’t exist. But what gives you the right to kill me?” “Because I can.” “Bad answer,”
SERENA Clarke spent half her time wishing she were dead, and the other half telling everyone around her what to do, and wishing someone wouldn’t do it.
“Important things like empathy and balance and fear and consequence. Those things that might temper their abilities, they’re missing. Tell me I’m wrong. Tell me you feel all those things the way you did before.”
Even though we come back, something stays dead. Lost. We forget something of who we were. It’s scary and wonderful and monstrous.”
“You’re the hero…,” she said, finding his eyes, “… of your own story, anyway.”
“Hold up,” said Eli, shrugging his coat off. “This is my favorite. I’d rather not have holes in it.”
“Just because I heal,” he said, reaching past her for his shirt, “doesn’t mean that didn’t hurt.”
“Will you sleep with that one, too?” she asked, and Eli laughed. “Seduction is hardly part of my method.” “Well, then, I feel special.” “You are.” It came out in a whisper. And it was true. Special. Different.
Eli was fascinated by kitchens. By the way people ordered their lives, the cabinets they used, the places they kept food, and the food they choose to keep. He’d spent the last decade studying people, and it was amazing how much could be gleaned from their homes. Their bedrooms, and bathrooms, and closets, of course, but also their kitchens.
Victor leaned back in the foldout chair, locking his fingers behind his head. A switchblade dangled loosely from one hand, the flat of the blade skimming his pale hair. It wasn’t strictly necessary, but his talent was most effective when it amplified an existing source of pain.
it had been so long since he’d stretched, so long since he’d let go. It cleared his head. It calmed him.
It wasn’t that he shied away from killing; people simply weren’t any good to him dead. After all, pain didn’t have much effect on corpses.
“Because the whole point was to show you.” “That you’ve lost it?” She pouted. “No. That I’m more use to you alive.”
Her sister’s power made Serena ill, not because of the talent itself but because it meant she was broken the way Serena was broken, the way Eli was broken. Missing pieces.
“Does he deserve a second chance?” she asked softly. “Don’t think of it that way,” said Victor. “He only gets a moment. Just long enough to answer a question.”
Victor checked his watch. It was already four. “Never put off till tomorrow what you can do today.” “I get the feeling that’s not what Thomas Jefferson meant,” muttered Mitch.
Trouble followed him like a shadow, clinging to him no matter how much good light he tried to stand in. In his hands, good things broke and bad things grew.
Mitch’s curse, his maldición, as a Spanish foster mother had called it, was that bad things had a way of happening around him.
Fires smothered instead of spread.
Sure, there would always be believers, but it helped that the vast majority of EOs didn’t want to be believed in, and those that did, well, they’d saved Eli the trouble of hunting them down.
A hero. Wasn’t he? Heroes saved the world from villains, from evil. Heroes sacrificed themselves to do it. Was he not bloodying his hands and his soul to set the world right? Did he not sacrifice himself every time he stripped away an EO’s stolen life?
His murders, his removals, weren’t like golf or porn or poker, some stereotypically male hobby that he didn’t want to share. They were rituals, sacrosanct. Part of his covenant.
“Victor means what he says,”
“He’s not a bad man,” she said. “There are no good men in this game,” said Mitch. But Sydney didn’t care about good. She wasn’t sure she believed in it. “I’m not afraid of Victor.” “I know.” He sounded sad when he said it.
Victor didn’t ask him why he stayed so close, but he didn’t tell him not to, either.
He didn’t look at his plate, either, not exactly. His eyes had an unfocused intensity, as if he were somewhere else, unconcerned with the cage around him or the monsters inside. Like a predator, Mitch realized one day.
His survival—or revival, rather—should have been cause for celebration, for joy. Instead, everything and everyone had fled. That, or he had pushed them away.
Serena knocked, wondering what would scare a man enough to throw his life away after he’d beaten death itself to keep it.
“I didn’t want to die alone,” he muttered. “That’s all. Down there in the dark, I didn’t want to die alone, but I didn’t want this. Can you make them stop?”
“You have such a complex,” she snapped. “You always have to be in control.” Eli gave a low, mocking laugh. “Says the siren.” “I just wanted to help.”
“One of these days, Serena,” he whispered, “you’re going to forget to say that.”
so he closed his eyes and tried to find quiet, peace. He didn’t picture sprawling fields or blue skies or water drops. He pictured squeezing the trigger three times, blood blossoming on Eli’s chest in the same pattern it had on his, pictured carving lines into Eli’s skin, watching them fade so he could do it over again, over and over and over.
Are you afraid?
“If you want to find Eli, and Eli wants to find you, why do you have to go through all this? Why can’t you just find each other?”
Victor couldn’t help but wonder if becoming an EO had hollowed her out the way it had him, had all of them—cut the ties of something vital and human. He wasn’t protecting her, not by treating her like a normal kid. She wasn’t normal.
The first person to act sacrifices the element of surprise, and I can’t afford to do that right now.
Someone could call themselves a hero and still walk around killing dozens. Someone else could be labeled a villain for trying to stop them. Plenty of humans were monstrous, and plenty of monsters knew how to play at being human. The difference between Victor and Eli, he suspected, wasn’t their opinion on EOs. It was their reaction to them.
