Page 179 of Victorious

June was fickle, but Victor knew she hadn’t vanished for no reason.

Something had frightened her enough to flee.

He waited for her to explain, but she didn’t.

As the seconds dragged past, Victor felt his impatience rising, along with the urge to force the story out of her. But June was immune to coercion, and so he waited.

And finally, she spoke.

Eyes on the passing world, she told him about an EON agent named Rios. An EO. Of the call she’d gotten, and the trap it turned out to be, of her near-capture, and her close escape. As she talked, something flickered across her face. Something Victor recognized, but had never seen on June.

Pain.

But Victor was hung up on another detail.

“You couldn’t steal the agents’ bodies.”

She shook her head. “It made no sense,” she said, “they should have been fair game, since they were human. But there was nothing there to take. Like they were already—”

“Dead?” ventured Victor.

“Yeah. Except dead people usually don’t fight that well.”

Victor considered this. Like June, he had no power over corpses. They felt no pain, possessed no animating current. He had been able to take hold of the agents’ bodies, albeit briefly, and the connections had felt slippery. Wrong.

Which suggested that Gabriel Gray wasn’t just controlling them.

He was resurrecting them.

And based on June’s story, and Rios’s sudden change, that ability extended to EOs as well.

Victor’s mind spun over the implications.

“I tried to live a normal life,” she mused, toes flexing on the dash. “I thought it would be nice.”

“And was it?”

A one-shouldered shrug.

“Well, don’t take it personally,” said Victor. “Some of us aren’t meant for ordinary lives.”

June flashed a rueful smile, kept her gaze out the window as she murmured, “I’m sorry.” The words seemed to take them both by surprise.

“For leaving?”

She shook her head. “For not coming back.”

“You’re here now,” he said, matter-of-factly. As if that was all that mattered. Because at the moment, it was. “But you could have told—”

He was cut off by the unmistakable wail of a siren.

Red and blue lights lit up the back window, and the air turned leaden in the truck. Mitch’s head snapped up, and Victor crackled his knuckles. A gun appeared in June’s hand with the easy grace of a magician producing plastic flowers.

But the lights belonged to an emergency vehicle, and it sailed past them.

A few moments later, they found out why.

So far, the stretch of road had been deserted. But just ahead, a car had veered across the lanes, and into a pole. The driver sat on the shoulder, holding a bloody compress to his head as a paramedic shone a penlight in his eyes.