Vicious

  “I’m not that Sydney anymore.”

  Serena’s face fell. Her grip tightened on the gun.

  “We’re going for a walk,” she said.

  Sydney cast glances around the room, even as her feet followed Serena toward the door with the same simple obedience that had possessed her hands to offer up the phone. Treacherous limbs. She wanted to leave a note, a clue, something, but Serena got impatient and grabbed her sleeve, shoving her toward the hall. Dol sat in the middle of the room, whining as they passed.

  “Can I bring him?”

  Serena paused, and ejected the magazine of the gun to check the number of rounds.

  “Okay,” she said, snapping it shut again. “Where’s his leash?”

  “He doesn’t have one.”

  Serena held open the door and sighed.

  “Follow Sydney,” she said to Dol, and the dog sprang to his feet and loped over, pressing himself against the girl’s side.

  Serena led Sydney and Dol down the concrete stairs that ran beside the elevator, all the way to the parking garage, an open-walled structure pressed against the Esquire’s spine. The place smelled like gas, the light was dim, and the air was biting cold, a sideways wind ripping through in short, sharp gusts.

  “Are we driving somewhere?” asked Sydney, pulling the coat close around her.

  “No,” said Serena, turning on her sister. She brought the gun up to Sydney’s forehead, rested it against her skin, between her watery blue eyes. Dol growled. Sydney brought a hand up and rested it against his back to quiet him, but didn’t take her gaze off Serena, even though it was a struggle to focus her vision around the barrel of the gun.

  “We used to have the same eyes,” said Serena. “Yours are paler now.”

  “I like that we’re finally different,” said Sydney, fighting back a shiver. “I don’t want to be you.”

  Silence fell between the sisters. A silence full of shifting pieces.

  “I don’t need you to be me,” said Serena at last. “But I need you to be brave. I need you to be strong.”

  Sydney squeezed her eyes shut. “I’m not afraid.”

  * * *

  SERENA stood in the garage with her finger on the trigger, the barrel resting between Sydney’s eyes, and froze. The girl on the other side of the gun was and was not her sister. Maybe Eli was wrong and all EOs weren’t broken, at least not in the same way. Or maybe Eli was right and the Sydney she knew was gone, but still, this new Sydney wasn’t hollowed out, wasn’t dark, wasn’t truly dead. This Sydney was alive in a way the other had never been. It shone through her skin.

  Serena’s fingers loosened on the gun, and she let it slide from her sister’s face. Sydney kept her eyes squeezed shut. The gun had left a mark on her forehead, a small dent where she’d leaned into the weapon, and Serena reached out and smoothed it away with her thumb. Only then did Sydney’s eyes drift open, the strength in them wavering.

  “Why—,” she started.

  “I need you to listen now,” cut in Serena in her even tone, the one that no one—not even Eli—knew how to refuse. An absolute power. “I need you to do as I say.” She pressed the gun into Sydney’s hands, and then took her by the shoulders and squeezed.

  “Go,” she said.

  “Where?” asked Sydney.

  “Somewhere safe.”

  Serena let go and gave her sister a small push backward, away, a gesture that once might have been playful, normal. But the look in her eyes and the gun in Sydney’s hands and the cold night hardening around them served as a vivid reminder that nothing was normal now. Sydney tucked the gun into her coat, but didn’t take her eyes from her sister, and didn’t move.

  “Go,” snapped Serena.

  This time, Sydney did as she was told. She turned, clutched the scruff of Dol’s neck, and the two bolted between the cars. Serena watched until her sister was a speck of red, and then nothing. At least she’d have a chance.

  A phone rang in the pocket of Serena’s coat. She rubbed her eyes, and answered.

  “I’m here,” said Eli. “Where are you?”

  Serena straightened. “I’m on my way.”

  XXXIII

  TWENTY MINUTES UNTIL MIDNIGHT

  THE FALCON PRICE PROJECT

  SYDNEY ran.

  She cut through the Esquire’s parking garage and onto a side street that looped back around to the front of the hotel, and ended up a few yards to the left of the main doors. A cop stood several feet away, his back to her as he sipped a coffee and talked on his cell. Sydney felt the weight of the gun in her pocket—as if the hidden firearm would draw more attention than a missing girl in a bright red coat clutching the collar of a giant black dog—but the cop never turned around. It was late and the cars on the main road were sparse, the traffic clumping as the night wore on, and Sydney and Dol sprinted across the street, unnoticed.

  She knew exactly where she was going.

  Serena hadn’t told Sydney to go home. She hadn’t told her to run away. She’d told her to go somewhere safe. And over the course of the last week, safe had ceased to be a place for Sydney, and had become a person.

  Specifically, safe had become Victor.

  Which is why Sydney ran to the only place she knew Victor would be (at least, according to the profile he’d had her put up on the police database that night, the one she’d read through a dozen times while waiting and then working up the nerve to hit the Post button).

  The Falcon Price high-rise project.

  Down the block, the construction site was a spot of dark in the city, like a shadow between streetlights. There was a thin shell of wood surrounding the abandoned high-rise, two-story walls, the kind people loved to vandalize because they were both temporary and highly visible. The shell was plastered with posters and signs, tagged here and there by street art, and underneath it all, a few construction permits, and a building company logo.

  Officially, there was only one way onto the construction site, through a front gate—also made of wooden sheeting—which had spent the last few months chained shut.

  But earlier that day, when Mitch had brought her here to revive Officer Dane, he’d shown her another way in, not through the chained-off gate, but around the back of the building, through a place in the shell where two broad panels of wood overlapped slightly. He’d widened the gap between the sheets to let them through, the panels snapping shut again behind them. Sydney knew she could squeeze into the construction site without touching the walls, since even when the panels hung closed there was a small triangle of space near the bottom. She let go of Dol’s neck, and worried the dog would bolt, but he didn’t, only stood there watching Sydney crawl through the gap. Dol looked both distressed by Sydney’s decision, and determined to follow her. When she made it to the other side and stood, brushing dirt from her pants, the dog crouched down, and squirmed through the gap in the boards.

  “Good dog,” she whispered as he stood and shook off.

  Inside the wooden shell was a kind of yard, a large stretch of dirt strewn with bits of metal and plywood and bags of concrete. The yard was dark, shadows on shadows making the path from the wall to the building dangerous. The building itself towered, unfinished, a steel and concrete skeleton draped in layers of plastic sheeting like gauze.

  But on the ground floor, several layers of plastic in, Sydney could make out a light.

  It was diffused so much that if the yard hadn’t been so dark, she might not have noticed it. But she did. Dol pressed himself against her side. Sydney stood in the yard, unsure what to do. Was Victor here already? It wasn’t midnight yet, was it? She didn’t have her phone, couldn’t tell by the moon even if she knew how to read the moon because there was no moon above, only a thick layer of clouds, glowing faintly with reflected city light.

  As for the light within the high-rise, it was steady, constant, more like a lamp than a flashlight, and somehow that gave Sydney comfort. Someone had set it there, had prepared, had planned. Victor planned things. But when
she took a step toward the building, Dol barred her path. When she went around him, his jaws circled her forearm, and held fast. She twisted, but couldn’t get free, and even though the dog was careful not to bite down, his grip was solid.

  “Let go,” she hissed. The dog didn’t budge.

  And then, on the other side of the building, beyond the thin wood shell, a car door slammed. Dol dropped Sydney’s arm as his head snapped toward the sound. The noise, sharp and metallic, reminded Sydney of a gunshot, and sent her pulse spiking, the word safe safe safe safe pounding with the blood in her ears. She sprinted for the building, for the sheets and the steel and the shelter, tripping over a stray iron bar before reaching the hollow high-rise frame. Dol followed, and the two vanished into the Falcon Price as, somewhere, on the opposite side, someone dragged the front gate open.

  * * *

  MITCH slammed the car door, and watched Victor and Dominic drive away. He’d planned to circle around to the back of the high-rise, pry open the loose wooden panel, and get in that way, but when he stepped up to the front gate, he saw it wasn’t necessary. The chains had been cut, the snaking metal coiled on the ground at his feet. Someone was already inside.

  “Great,” whispered Mitch, withdrawing the gun Victor had given him.

  Incidentally, Mitch had always hated guns, and the events of the evening hadn’t made him any fonder. He pushed open the gate, wincing as the hinges screwed into the wood responded with a metallic whine. The yard was dark and, as far as he could tell, empty. He ejected the magazine on the gun, checked it, put it back, and rapped the barrel of the weapon nervously against his palm as he made his way to the center of the yard, halfway between the wooden shell of the fence and the steel skeleton of the high-rise, to a patch of dirt that was as open as possible.

  A faint glow coming from the high-rise did little to illuminate him, but given his size and the sheer lack of other people, Mitch felt painfully confident he would be noticed, and soon. A stack of wooden beams, tarped against the weather, sat a few feet away, and Mitch sank onto them, checked his gun a second time, and waited.

  * * *

  SERENA’S phone rang again as she crossed the street, making her way down the now nearly deserted block toward the Falcon Price high-rise.

  “Serena,” said the caller. It wasn’t Eli’s voice.

  “Detective Stell,” she replied. She could hear the open and close of a car door.

  “We’re on our way now,” he said. The line was muffled for a moment while the phone’s speaker was covered and orders were given.

  “Remember,” she said, “you’re to stay outside the fence—”

  “I know the orders,” he said. “That’s not why I called.”

  Serena saw the signage of the abandoned high-rise, and slowed her pace. “Then what is it?”

  “Mr. Ever had me send officers to a bar to clean up after an incident. There was supposed to be a body.”

  “Yeah, Mitchell Turner’s,” she said.

  “Only I get a call from the officers just now. There was no body. No signs of a body, either.” Serena’s boots slowed, and stopped. “I don’t know what’s going on,” said Stell, “but that’s the second time things haven’t lined up and—”

  “And you didn’t call Eli,” she cut in softly.

  “I’m sorry if that was wrong…”

  “Why did you call me instead?”

  “I trust you,” he answered, without hesitation.

  “And Eli?”

  “I trust you,” he said again, and Serena’s heart fluttered a little, both at the officer’s small display of evasion, the defiance of it, and at her own control over him. She started walking again.

  “You did well,” she said as she reached the wooden walls of the construction site. And there, through the gap in the broken gate, she saw Mitch’s hulking form. “I’ll take care of it,” she whispered, “trust me.”

  “I do,” said Detective Stell.

  Serena hung up, and pushed the metal gate open.

  XXXIV

  TEN MINUTES UNTIL MIDNIGHT

  THE FALCON PRICE PROJECT

  MITCH thought he heard something from the building behind him, but when he strained to listen, the sounds that made it into the yard were so broken and faint that they could have been wind through the plastic sheeting, or a loose pipe. He might have gone to see, but Victor’s orders had been explicit, and even if he felt like challenging them, it was at that moment that the front gate that surrounded the bones of the high-rise groaned inward again, and a girl stepped into the yard.

  She looked like Sydney, thought Mitch. If Sydney had grown a foot taller and several years older. The same blond hair curled down into eyes that were somehow bright and blue, even in the dark. It had to be Serena.

  When she saw Mitch waiting, she crossed her arms.

  “Mr. Turner,” she said, stepping forward, her black boots weaving effortlessly through the debris of the construction yard. “You have an impressive resilience to death. Is this Sydney’s work?”

  “Call me a cat,” said Mitch, pushing up off the planks. “I’m still working through my own nine lives. And just so you know,” he added, raising his gun, “I like to think there’s a special place in hell for girls who feed their little sisters to wolves.”

  Serena’s face fell. “You should be careful, playing with guns,” she said. “Sooner or later you’re going to get shot.”

  Mitch cocked the gun. “The novelty wore off when your boyfriend played target practice with my chest.”

  “Yet here you are,” said Serena. Her voice had a slow, almost lazy sweetness to it. “Clearly his message wasn’t impactful enough.”

  Mitch tightened his grip on the gun, and leveled it at her.

  Serena only smiled. “Let’s point that in a safer direction,” she said. “Place the gun against your temple.”

  Mitch did everything he could to keep his hand still, but it was as if it no longer belonged to him. His elbow softened, his arm bent, and his fingers turned, shifting position until the barrel of the gun came to rest against the side of his head.

  He swallowed.

  “There are worse ways to die,” said Serena. “And worse things to do than die. I promise I’ll make it quick.”

  Mitch looked at her, this girl so much like Sydney, and yet so much less. He couldn’t look at her eyes—at once brighter than her sister’s, but empty in a bad way, a dead way—so he watched her lips as they formed the words.

  “Pull the trigger.”

  And he did.

  * * *

  SYDNEY and Dol were halfway toward the glowing center of the high-rise’s ground floor when she heard the sound of footsteps—not hers, or the dog’s, but heavier—and froze in her tracks. She’d only been with Victor and Mitch a few days, but it had been long enough to grow familiar with the sounds they both made. Not just their voices, but the way they sounded when they weren’t speaking, the way they breathed and laughed and moved, the way they filled a space, and traveled through it.

  Mitch was huge, but his steps were careful, as if he knew his size and didn’t want to accidentally crush anything. Victor was almost silent, footfalls as smooth and hushed as everything else about him.

  The steps Sydney heard now through several layers of plastic sheeting were louder, the proud clip of nice shoes. Eli had worn nice shoes. Despite the cold and the fact that he was dating a college girl, and the fact that he looked like a college boy, he’d had on leather shoes beneath his jeans when she met him. Shoes that made a sharp sound when he walked.

  Sydney held her breath, and slid Serena’s gun from her coat pocket, clicking the safety off. Serena had showed her once, how to use a gun, but this one was a little too big for her grip, too heavy and ill-weighted from the silencer screwed on to the end. She looked behind her, and wondered if she could find her way back through the maze of plastic curtains and into the lot before Eli would …

  Her thoughts trailed off as she realized that the footsteps
had stopped.

  She checked the curtains to every side for moving shadows, but there were none, so she crept forward, through another plastic sheet, the light brighter here, only a few curtains between her and the source. Victor should be here by now. She couldn’t hear him, but that was because he was so quiet, she told herself. He was always quiet. And safe.

  Sydney, look at me, he’d said. No one is going to hurt you. Do you know why? Because I’ll hurt them first.

  Safe. Safe. Safe.

  She pulled aside the last curtain. She just had to find Victor, and he would keep her safe.

  Eli was sitting in a chair in the middle of the room, a table made of wooden planks on cinder blocks displaying what looked like a set of kitchen knives, all gleaming beneath the light of a lamp. The lamp had no shade, and the bulb lit the whole room, from curtain to curtain, and Eli in between. A gun dangled loosely from his hand, and his eyes were far-off, unfocused.

  Until he saw Sydney.

  “What’s this?” he asked, standing. “A little monster.”

  Sydney didn’t wait. She raised Serena’s gun and fired once at Eli’s face. The weapon was heavy and her aim was off, but even though the blowback knocked the gun from her grip, the bullet still found Eli’s jaw and sent him reeling, clutching his face, blood and bone between his fingers. She spun, and tried to run away, but his hand shot out and caught her sleeve, and even though he couldn’t keep hold, the sudden change of course sent her stumbling to her hands and knees on the concrete.

  Dol lunged forward as Sydney rolled onto her back and Eli straightened, jaw cracking and snapping and healing, leaving only a smear of blood on his skin as he raised his gun and pulled the trigger.

  * * *

  CLICK.

  One small sound after Mitch pulled the trigger, the sound made by the internal spring driving the firing pin to bypass the bullet and hit the mechanical stop. Because there were no bullets.

  The gun was empty.

  Mitch should know; he had checked it three times to make sure.

  Now he watched the surprise spread across Serena’s face, watched it turn to confusion, and begin to shift into something harder, but it never made it there, because that’s when the darkness parted. The shadows behind Serena Clarke stirred and drew apart, and two men stepped into being out of nothing. Dominic stood, holding a red gas canister while Victor took a single stride up behind Serena, brought a knife to her throat, and drew it cleanly across.