Page 40 of Victorious

She was dying for a cigarette. She’d given up smoking the year before, and most of the time she could manage, but it had been a long day. A long week. A few months since Stell’s death.

She’d liked her predecessor well enough.

But he’d fucked up. Letting an EO like Eli Ever loose, just to catch Marcella Riggins. Who, admittedly, had posed a problem for the human agents, but still. Look how that turned out. The courthouse reduced to rubble, Riggins buried beneath it. Ever on ice. Stell in the ground.

All of them dead.

It had been a shit show, keeping the whole thing out of the news.

Spinning the gala disaster into a terror attack, paying off the press, dealing with witnesses.

Then again, cleaning up messes was Helena’s forte.

It was why she’d gotten the job.

Unlike the rest of the board, all of whom had the usual agency acronyms beside their names, her background was in crisis management. She’d been a fixer, once upon a time, and now she’d been deployed to fix this. If it had been up to her, she would have torched the entire program. Burned what she could and buried the rest.

But the board wanted EON up and running, back to work.

So here she was. Helming a max security prison for people who shouldn’t even exist. Trying to protect the outside world from knowing they did.

Helena had gone to see Dr. Gray as a matter of procedure—dotting i’s and crossing t’s. She hadn’t intended to offer him a job, but being a good fixer meant knowing how to pivot in the face of opportunity.

The board wanted to understand the EOs in its care, in hopes of finding a way to maximize—or at least to monetize—their investment. Helena had neither the time nor the inclination to get inside an EO’s head. But Gabriel Gray might. He’d once been the highest recommended therapist at Merit General. Best case, he could help her understand the prisoners. Worst, he could be the one to interface with them.

It was a risk, opening the door instead of closing it, but Helena had made her living balancing risk against reward, and she was very good at guessing the tipping point, landing on the right side. And if she overshot, well—Gray could be handled easily enough.

Right now, Helena had other problems.

“Get me Rios,” she said, addressing Evanson, who stood waiting just inside the door. As the grim-faced man nodded, and slipped out, Helena rubbed her eyes and tapped the touchscreen on her desk, confronting a thornier issue.

Stell’s murder.

At first glance, the scene had looked like a suicide, the gun still in the late director’s hand. But street footage showed an EO leaving after the gun went off, a flash of light against the curtains. She swiped a finger and the file migrated from the tablet to the wall, the EO’s face grainy but more than recognizable.

Victor Vale.

According to Stell’s extensive notes, Vale was the first EO he’d ever encountered, the first he caught, the flashpoint of his lifelong obsession with superpowered entities. The reason he left the force and established EON.

And the reason he was dead.

So far, much to EON’s general—and Helena’s specific—embarrassment, no one had been able to find Stell’s killer.

There was a second file on Vale, courtesy of an inmate—Eli Ever.

Ever had spent ten years hunting down and executing EOs, driven by some kind of God complex, a spiritual conviction that his ability to heal had been given to him expressly for that purpose. Following Ever’s arrest, Stell had deputized him to use his talents on behalf of EON. One of his cases had involved a figure known as the Hunter, an EO believed to be targeting other superpowered people, just as Ever once had.

Ever had somehow deduced that the killer in question was Vale, even though he was meant to be dead. If anyone could find and catch the late director’s murderer, it was probably him. Unfortunately, he’d taken a bullet to the heart six months before, and his powers hadn’t saved him.

“What a mess,” she muttered as a knock sounded on the door. “Come in.”

Evanson entered, followed by Lilian Rios, still in her tactical gear, EON ghosted black on black across her chest.

Evanson started to return to his post by the door, but Helena waved him out. After an instant’s pause, he obeyed, leaving the two women alone.

Helena looked the field agent up and down.

She had a soldier’s bearing, and wore her short, dark hair slicked back, her gaze tactfully averted. But Helena didn’t miss the look that flashed across her face, the tension in her jaw, when she saw the images on the wall.