“Does it hurt?” she asked.
“Not right now,” he said, sidestepping the question.
“But when it happens,” she persisted. “Does it hurt then?”
Victor exhaled, clouding the air. “Yes.”
“How long does it hurt?” she asked. “How bad does it get? What does it feel like when you—”
“Sydney.”
“I want to know,” she said, voice catching. “I need to know.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s my fault. Because I did this to you.” Victor started to shake his head, but she cut him off. “Tell me. Tell me the truth. You’ve been lying for all this time, the least you can do is tell me how it feels.”
“It feels like dying.”
Sydney’s breath caught, as if hit. Victor sighed and stepped to the balcony’s edge, the railing slick with ice. He ran his hand over the surface, cold pricking his fingers. “Did I ever tell you how I got my power?”
Syd shook her head, the blond bob swaying side to side. He knew he hadn’t. He’d told her his last thoughts once, but nothing more. It wasn’t a matter of trust or distrust so much as the simple fact that they’d both left their pasts behind, ones filled with a few things they wanted to remember, and many more things they didn’t.
“Most EOs are the result of accidents,” he said, studying the snow. “But Eli and I were different. We set out to find a way to effect the change. Incidentally, it’s remarkably difficult to do. Dying with intent, reviving with control. Finding a way to end a life but keep it in arm’s reach, and all without rendering the body unusable. On top of that, you need a method that strips enough control from the subject to make them afraid, because you need the chemical properties induced by fear and adrenaline to trigger a somatic change.”
Victor craned his head and considered the sky.
“It wasn’t my first try,” he said quietly. “The night I died. I’d already tried once, and failed. An overdose, which, it turned out, provided too much control, and not enough fear. So I set out to try again. Eli had already succeeded, and I was determined to match him. I created a situation in which I couldn’t take back control. One in which there was nothing but fear. And pain.”
“How?” whispered Sydney.
Victor closed his eyes and saw Angie, one hand resting on the control panel.
“I convinced someone to torture me.”
Syd drew a short breath behind him. Victor kept talking.
“I was strapped to a steel table, and hooked up to an electrical current. There was a dial, and someone to turn it, and the pain went up when the dial was turned, and I told them not to stop until my heart did.” Victor pressed his palms against the icy rail. “People have an idea of pain,” he said. “They think they know what it is, how it feels, but that’s just an idea. It’s a very different thing when it becomes concrete.” He turned back toward her. “So when you ask me what the episodes feel like—they feel like dying all over again. Like someone turning up the dial inside me until I break.”
Sydney’s face was white. “I did this,” she said under her breath, fingers gripping her knees. “I did this to you.”
Victor went to Sydney’s chair and knelt before it.
“Sydney, I am alive because of you,” he said firmly. Tears spilled down Syd’s cheeks. Victor reached out and touched her shoulder. “You saved me.”
She met his eyes then, ice blue laced with red. “But I broke you.”
“No,” he started, then stopped. An idea flickered through his mind. The first spark of a thought, bright but brittle. He shielded its fragile heat, trying to coax it into something stronger, and as it kindled, he realized—
He’d been looking in the wrong place. Searching for ordinary solutions.
But Victor wasn’t ordinary. What had happened to him wasn’t ordinary.
An EO had broken his power.
He needed an EO to fix it.
IX
TWO YEARS AGO
SOUTH BROUGHTON
IT was amazing what passed for music.
Victor leaned against the bar as sound blared out from the stage, where a group of men slammed their hands against their instruments. The upside, he supposed, was the way they drowned out the rising sound in his own head. The downside was the ache forming in its place.
“Hey!” shouted the bartender. “Get you a drink?”
Victor twisted back toward the bar. Toward the man behind the counter.
Will Connelly was six-foot-three, with a square jaw, a shock of black hair, and all the markers of a potential EO.
Victor had done his homework, had instructed Mitch to rebuild a search matrix, the same one Eli, and then the police, had used to find EOs, the same one that had led Victor to Dominic.
It had taken two months to track down the first lead—a woman down south who could reverse age, but not injury—another three to find the second—a man who could take things apart and put them back together, sadly a skill which didn’t really apply to living things.
Finding other EOs was hard enough.
Finding specific ones, with restorative abilities, was even harder.
Their latest lead was Will Connelly, who’d bailed from a hospital bed, sans discharge, a mere two days after his accident. The doctors had been stunned.
That suggested a healing ability.
The question was whether he could heal Victor.
So far, no one could.
“Well?” called Connelly over the music.
“Glen Ardoch,” Victor called back, nodding at a bottle on the back wall. It was empty.
“Gotta grab some more,” said Connelly, flagging another bartender before ducking out from under the bar. Victor waited a moment, then followed, trailing the other man down the hall. Connelly’s hand was on the open storeroom door when Victor caught up.
“I’ve changed my order.”
The bartender swung around, and Victor gave him a single forceful shove, tipping Connelly down the flight of stairs.
It wasn’t a long flight, but there was a wall of metal kegs at the bottom and the bartender crashed against them with a noise that would have called attention, if not for the wailing of the band overhead.
Victor followed, taking the steps at a more leisurely pace as the man straightened, clutching his elbow. “You broke my fucking arm!”
“Well, then,” said Victor, “I suggest you fix it.”
Connelly’s expression changed. “What? What are you ta—”
Victor flicked his fingers and the bartender staggered, biting back a scream.
There was no need to quiet him. The bass from the club overhead would have been loud enough to drown out a murder.
“Okay!” gasped Connelly. “Okay.”
Victor’s hold dropped away, and the bartender straightened. He took a few steadying breaths, and then his whole body shuddered, the motion so small and fast it seemed more a vibration than a shiver. As if he were rewinding. A fraction of a second, and his arm hung easily at his side, the pain gone from his face.
“Good,” said Victor. “Now, fix me.”
Connelly’s face crumpled in confusion. “I can’t.”
Victor flexed, and the man staggered back into the crates and kegs. “I—can’t—” he gasped. “Don’t you think—if I could help other people—I would? Hell—I’d be a—fucking messiah. Not working—in this shithole bar.”