Vengeful

I picked up Vengeful because Vicious left me annoyed in the best way. It came out in 2018 from Tor Books, 480 pages in the edition tied to ISBN 9780765387530, and it is book two in the Villains series. Victor Vale is alive when he should be dead. Eli Ever is locked up when he should be free. A new ExtraOrdinary called Marcella Riggins is building an empire in Merit while both men bleed out in their own ways. I wanted a rematch. What I got was stranger and sadder, a book about what revival costs after the thrill fades.

If you liked the first book for lab notes and cold water and moral rot, start here with expectations shifted. This is less a duel and more a city story. Merit itself feels sick. Clubs, docks, police rooms, safe houses. Everyone is tired. Powers still come from near death. Recovery still hurts. But now the question is what you do with extra years you stole.

Victor is dying by inches

When we meet Victor again, Sydney Clarke has already paid for him. She pulled him back at the end of the last book. That kind of return has a price, and Victor carries it in his body. He shakes. He sleeps badly. His power over pain still works, but using it wears him thin. Mitch Turner, the big gentle hacker who drives and cooks and fixes locks, watches him the way you watch a friend who will not admit he needs a doctor.

They hide in Merit in small flats with blackout curtains. Sydney is older now, still young, still trailed by Dol the dog she brought back. She practices control. She tries not to use her gift because each use takes something from her. Victor tells her to save herself first. She hears him and disobeys in the way kids do when they love someone difficult. Their scenes together are my favorite parts because they are quiet. Cereal. Homework left undone. A nightlight. Mitch teaching her to pick a lock and then telling her never to use it unless someone needs help. Victor checking that she eats before a job. None of them say family. They act like it when no one is watching.

Victor spends his energy hunting for a way to stabilize himself. He tracks EO rumors, coroner reports, hospital whispers. He bribes where he can. He threatens where he must, then sits on curbs afterward with his hands shaking. Schwab keeps him honest. He is not becoming kind. He is becoming aware that his time is short, and that clarity makes him both more ruthless and more careful with Sydney. He wants Eli dead, still. But he also wants Sydney to have a life after him.

Marcella does not ask permission

Marcella Riggins is the engine of this book. Before her death she was the wife of a Merit crime boss, polished in public and furious in private. People underestimated her because she smiled at parties. Her husband had her killed, or allowed it, which tells you what kind of marriage it was. She died angry and came back with a power that matches her temper. She can break things at close range. Glass. Concrete. Bone. It starts small, cracks in a mirror, then grows as she tests limits in empty rooms.

Schwab writes her rise with patience. Marcella does not storm a club on night one. She learns who moves money in Merit. She finds which lieutenants are loyal to her husband and which are loyal to cash. She takes an apartment under another name. She buys good clothes with stolen cards. She watches. Then she starts removing people, one at a time, in ways that look like accidents until the pattern scares smarter men.

She also collects EOs. She likes having rare tools. June becomes important here, a shifter who can borrow faces and voices for a while. June is slippery in a way that makes every scene with her tense. You never know who is speaking. Marcella uses June to get into rooms, to listen, to replace people for short jobs. There are other young EOs pulled into her orbit, kids really, promised safety and pay and respect. Marcella gives them food and rooms and rules. She also makes clear what happens if they cross her. It is protection with teeth.

I found Marcella more frightening than Eli because she is practical. Eli prays before he kills. Marcella checks her makeup after. She wants the city, not purity. She will work with Victor if it helps. She will use Eli if she can reach him. She studies both men the way she once studied seating charts at charity dinners, looking for weakness. A detective who starts connecting broken bodies to her clubs gets too close and learns how fast Marcella moves from charm to harm. That turn never feels cartoonish. It feels like someone who decided long ago that softness gets you buried.

Her marriage flashbacks are brief and ugly. Dinners where her husband corrects her in front of guests. Money she cannot touch though her name is on accounts. A friend who warns her and then stops calling. Schwab does not linger. A few pages here and there explain why Marcella will never beg again. When she finally sits in her husband chair, it does not read as triumph. It reads as someone taking back air.

Eli in a concrete box

Eli Ever, who called himself a hero while hunting his own kind, is now property of the state in all but name. A quiet government unit keeps him in a cell built to hold healers. Lights always on. Hands restrained in ways that stop him from harming himself to trigger healing on purpose. Doctors come with needles and questions. Handlers log everything. They want to know how EOs work, how to spot them, how to stop them.

Eli hates it with a holy anger. He still believes he was chosen. He tells himself the cell is a test. He recites verses in his head to keep time. When agents ask about Victor, he smiles in a way that makes new guards nervous. He gives them nothing useful, or gives them truths arranged to point toward his own release. Interrogation scenes are slow and claustrophobic. A metal table. A paper cup. Eli asking for a Bible and being told no, then yes, then pages missing. He reads anyway.

What makes these chapters work is that Eli is not broken. He is bored and furious, which is dangerous. He studies shift changes. He learns which nurse will meet his eyes and which will not. He tests the cell the way he once tested lab equipment, tapping walls, counting seconds between checks. A handler who thinks faith talk will open him up finds herself outmatched. Eli has spent years turning guilt about Angie into mission. A locked room will not undo that in weeks.

There is also fear underneath. Healing does not stop pain. It only erases damage after. The unit knows this and uses it. Eli endures by praying silently and by picturing Victor dead. Revenge steadies him more than scripture now, though he would never say so aloud.

Sydney refuses to be a battery

Sydney Clarke might be the moral center, though she would roll her eyes at that phrase. She is a teenager who has seen too much and still wants normal things. School. Music. A dog asleep on her feet. She loves Victor in her fierce blunt way and hates that loving him means watching him fade. She offers to fix him with her power. He refuses. She tries anyway in small ways that cost her sleep and color in her face. Mitch catches her once, pale in a bathroom, and carries her to bed without scolding. He just sits nearby until she wakes.

Her chapters show how heavy it is to be wanted for what you can do. Marcella wants her. The unit wants her. Victor wants to hide her. Sydney wants to choose. She practices saying no. She asks Mitch hard questions about death that he answers badly and honestly. He tells her stories about his own time inside, about learning to cook with little. Those talks do more for her than any lecture on powers.

Her bond with Dol carries a lot of weight without becoming cute. The dog follows her everywhere, warm and solid. When Sydney is scared, she puts a hand on Dol fur. When Victor is cruel in the strategic way he uses to push people away for their own good, Sydney goes to Dol first, then to Mitch. Animals in this book are not symbols. They are comfort and consequence. Bringing something back does not clean the death. It stains the return.

One late scene stopped me cold. Sydney stands over someone she could save and chooses not to, or chooses to wait, because saving would kill her and leave Victor alone. It is not framed as heroic. It is framed as a kid learning limits while shaking. I respected that Schwab let her be selfish and wise at once. Not every gift must be spent the moment it is needed. Sometimes keeping yourself alive is the right call, even if it feels like abandonment.

Merit starts to burn

The middle of the book braids three hunts. Marcella hunts EOs and territory. Victor hunts a cure and Eli. The unit hunts Victor and Marcella while trying to keep Eli caged. Merit feels smaller as those lines cross. A club basement with a drain. A parking garage with bad lights. A house on a hill where Marcella holds court. Schwab moves between crews in short scenes that end on cuts. A door opening. A phone lighting up. A face that is not the right face.

June steals several chapters. Infiltrating as a guard, as a lover, as a driver. Each change costs focus and leaves June raw after. There is a long sequence in a hotel service corridor where June switches twice in minutes to stay ahead of cameras, then sits in a laundry room shaking. It humanizes a power that could feel like a trick.

Victor and Marcella meet, and those rooms crackle. Both are planners. Both survived people who tried to bury them. They circle each other with offers that are threats. Marcella wants Victor pain control for interrogations and Sydney return for insurance. Victor wants Marcella reach and money and access to the facility. Neither trusts the other for a second. Their negotiation over dinner, with Mitch parked outside and June listening as staff, is one of the best sustained scenes. Polite smiles. Accurate threats. Dessert ordered and uneaten.

The cops in Merit are outmatched but not stupid. A detective who worked EO deaths in the first book keeps a board with strings and photos. She knows something systematic is happening even if reports call it gang violence. Her scenes are brief and grounded. Coffee gone cold. Overtime denied.

The reckoning at the house

Everything gathers at Marcella property for a long night that mixes siege, rescue, and betrayal. Victor goes in damaged and knowing it. Sydney goes where she should not because she will not let Victor die alone. Mitch goes because someone has to hold the light and the wheel. Eli, out or nearly out depending on how you count freedom when alarms ring, moves toward the same address with his own debt to settle. June is inside already, wearing a face that will not hold much longer.

Schwab stages this without losing track. Pain powers flare and fail. Healing knits and tears. Marcella breaks floors and people when cornered. Water shows up again, tubs and pools and rain on stone, because drowning remains the only reliable switch for healers. A fight on wet tile left me breathless. Victor trying to hold Eli under while his own arms give out. Sydney screaming for him to stop because stopping might save him. Mitch dragging her back while shouting names. Marcella watching for a moment too long because she admires spite even when it ruins plans.

No one wins clean. That is the point and the strength. Marcella loses people she actually valued, which dents her more than lost blocks. Victor lives but pays visibly, thinner and grayer, carried partway by Mitch. Eli survives to preach and bleed and promise another round. Sydney pays most again, which angered me and felt true. Kids who love broken adults often cover the bill. She walks out leaning on Dol and Mitch, awake when she should be asleep, alive in a way that feels borrowed.

I will not detail who dies in which room because the order matters and you should feel it unspoiled. Know that deaths land with weight. A young EO who joked over cards does not get up. A guard who showed Eli small kindnesses faces consequences. Marcella husband story closes in a way that is not justice but is final. The house itself, all glass and stone bought with blood money, ends cracked and wet and empty. Merit will fill it with new predators by spring. That is the bleak joke everyone understands.

What worked for me was scope. Vicious was a lab and a grudge. Vengeful is a city and a system. EOs are no longer rumor. They are inventory for gangs and governments. That expansion justifies the page count. The 480 pages earn their length through new institutions, not just longer fights.

What dragged was repetition in the middle third. How many times can Victor cough blood and hide it. How many times can Eli be needled and pray. After the third cycle I got it. The plot could have trimmed one safe house move and one interrogation without losing force.

Still, as a sequel about debts, it satisfies and complicates. It argues that revenge is not a finish line but a habit. Victor wants Eli dead and also wants Sydney free, and those wants fight inside every plan. Eli wants purity and also wants Victor to suffer first, which soils his prayers. Marcella wants control and also wants to never be small again, which makes her both monster and mirror. I closed the book tired in a good way, thinking about Sydney asleep with Dol breathing against her leg while adults plot in kitchens. Someone in that flat needs to choose rest. No one does yet.

Content notes. Near death drowning, suffocation, and revival with medical detail. Gun violence, stabbings, broken bones from destruction power. Torture via pain control and lab style restraint with needles. Death of young adults and side characters. Child endangerment with a teenager in combat zones. Animal revival with a dog, no new animal death on page. Strong language. Adult relationships and implied intimacy. Grief over a sister and friends. Drowning scenes are intense and repeated.