Page 109 of Villains Series

TWO YEARS AGO

EON

ELI ran his fingers along the shelf where he kept the old case files. His own black folder sat like a stain at the edge of the row, a punctuation mark shifted to fit the growing sentence. Nineteen EOs tracked, hunted, captured, over a period of less than two years. Not bad, considering his limitations.

Eli had insisted on keeping the old folders, telling Stell that past work would inform future cases.

It was a partial truth—there were indeed patterns between EOs, shared traits, the same shadow cast over different faces. But the larger truth was simple: Eli found the markers satisfying. Not as satisfying as wrapping his hands around an EO’s throat, feeling a pulse falter and still beneath his fingers. But an echo of that old calm still accompanied each closed case, the pleasant sense of things askew being set right.

There was another facet to the collection, a grim truth laid bare in the sheer number of folders.

“What have we done?”

Eli muttered to himself.

But it was Victor who answered.

“What makes you think we did anything?”

He looked up and saw the thin blond ghost leaning back against the fiberglass wall.

“The number of EOs,”

said Eli, gesturing to the shelf.

“it’s skyrocketed over the last decade. What if we did something? What if we tore something in the fabric of the world? What if we set something in motion?”

Victor rolled his eyes.

“We are not gods, Eli.”

“But we played God.”

“What if God played God?”

Victor pushed off the wall.

“What if EOs were part of His plan? What if these people, the ones you’ve spent your life slaughtering, were supposed to come back the way they did? What if you’ve been attempting to undo the very work of that higher power you worship?”

“Don’t you ever wonder if it’s our fault?”

Victor tipped his head.

“Tell me, is it blasphemy, or simply arrogance, taking credit for God’s work?”

Eli shook his head.

“You’ve never understood.”

Footsteps sounded nearby.

The wall went clear.

“Who are you talking to?”

asked Stell.

“Myself,”

muttered Eli, waving Victor’s ghost away like a wisp of smoke.

“I’ve been thinking more about that electrokinetic teen…”

He looked up. Stell was dressed for fieldwork, his broad frame cinched into a reinforced black suit.

“How did the extraction go?”

asked Eli, managing to keep most of the disdain out of his voice. He’d spent two weeks researching the EO—Helen Andreas, forty-one, with the ability to disassemble and rebuild structures with a single touch. Eli had given EON’s agents as much insight as he could, considering the confines of his situation.

“Not well,”

said Stell darkly.

“Andreas was dead when we got there.”

Eli frowned. EOs, despite their destructive tendencies, rarely veered toward suicide. Their sense of self-preservation was too strong.

“Was it an accident?”

“Not likely,”

said Stell, holding a photo up to the fiberglass. In it, Andreas lay on the ground, blood pooling beneath her and a small dark circle burrowed into her forehead.

“Interesting,”

said Eli.

“Any leads?”

“No…”

Stell hesitated. There was something he wasn’t saying. Eli waited him out. After a long moment, the man finally went on.

“This wasn’t an isolated incident. Two months ago, another suspected EO was found in the same way, in the basement of a club.”

Stell slid both pages through the slot.

“Will Connelly. We were still monitoring him, since we didn’t have enough data to construe the exact nature of his ability and assess his priority level, but we had suspected it was regenerative. Obviously not a power as efficient as your own, but something like it. At the time we assumed his death was a one-off, a run-in with the wrong people, someone to whom he owed a debt. Now…”

“Once is chance, twice, coincidence,”

said Eli.

“Collect a third, and you have a pattern.”

He looked up from the paper.

“The weapon?”

“Unregistered.”

“Keep the ballistics on file anyway. If he—or she—is actively hunting EOs, it’s only a matter of time before they strike again. In fact,”

continued Eli.

“pull every killing that matches this style of execution over the last…”—Eli considered—“three years.”

“Three? That’s an oddly specific number.”

And it was. Three years—that was how long Eli had been at EON. That was how long he’d been out of work. If there had been another hunter during his tenure, he would have known.

Which meant someone new had taken his place.