Vicious

Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2013

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Chapters 63-66Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 63 Summary

Outside the bar, Dominic runs into Victor, who warns him about Eli. Victor takes Dominic’s pain away and offers “one night’s worth of work for a lifetime without pain” (313). Victor then gives the pain back briefly, and Dominic agrees to help.

Eli enters the bar bathroom and locks the door, so he and Mitch are alone. Trapped, Mitch admits he told Dominic to run. Eli asks where Victor is and Mitch responds, “you’ll see him soon enough” (315). Eli shoots Mitch.

Outside, Dominic explains how he can travel unseen across distances, and that while it takes no time in the physical world, it takes him time in whatever place he travels through. Victor expresses concern about Mitch, and Dominic says Mitch offered to cover him because the man who wanted to kill him was in the bar. Victor demands Dominic take him inside, and Dominic uses his power to take them into the bathroom, where Mitch lies on the floor, still alive thanks to a bullet-proof vest. The men clean up the blood and use Dominic’s power to travel to the meeting place for the confrontation with Eli.

Chapter 64 Summary

At the hotel, Serena finishes her third shower but still feels unclean after watching Eli kill the EO. She logs onto the police database and finds Victor’s profile. For a moment, she considers not telling Eli, but she knows that the two men want to find each other too much to be deterred. As she dials Eli’s number, she thinks about how Victor saved Sydney and “almost [wishes] he stood a fighting chance” against Eli (323).

Chapter 65 Summary

Outside the bar, Eli calls Stell to clean up Mitch’s body, believing he killed him. Serena calls about Victor’s profile and the location of the midnight confrontation: the building where Victor murdered the police officer. Eli instructs her to have the police on standby but not to enter the building.

At the hotel, Serena sees a dog wander onto a balcony, followed by Sydney. Serena counts balconies to figure out which room Sydney is in.

Chapter 66 Summary

Dominic takes Mitch and Victor outside, where they hear an approaching police car. Knowing it’s there for Mitch’s body—which isn’t where it should be—Dominic uses his power again to get them across to where Victor parked his car. They hide and watch as one officer enters the bar and the other mans the door. Victor makes to shoot the man outside but before he can, his partner radios, and the man goes inside. Relieved, Victor, Mitch, and Dominic get in the car and head downtown “as the minutes ticked away toward midnight” (330).

Chapters 63-66 Analysis

Dominic Rusher’s EO ability comes the closest to a traditional comic book hero power. One of the main tropes of comic book fiction is that heroes have a power which has a weakness. Dominic’s power allows him to traverse distances without time passing in the real world—only in the shadow-type realm where he travels. The weakness to this power is that Dominic has to walk to his destination, using the same amount of energy he would if he walked there in real-time. Using the power also expends energy, meaning if he travels a very long distance, it could leave him exhausted and injured.

In Chapter 63, Victor takes all of Dominic’s pain away and offers Dominic a pain-free life in exchange for his help. Traditionally, pain is viewed as something to be avoided. Here, Victor uses pain as currency, making use of the human desire to be free of it. Dominic’s ready acceptance of Victor’s offer shows how willing he is to relinquish his pain. Again, Schwab portrays the exchange as manipulative and transactional; Victor does not offer to alleviate Dominic’s pain out of generosity, but uses Dominic’s misery to bend the other EO to his own personal vendetta.

In Chapter 64, Serena laments Victor’s impending fight against Eli. She still grapples with her feelings toward EOs and Sydney, and she feels grateful toward Victor for saving her sister. Her belief in Eli’s cause wains, even as she keeps telling the police Eli is a hero. Schwab suggests that what one believes and what one tells others are sometimes two different things, echoing the doubts and insecurities that plague all of the EOs throughout the novel.