Victor stared at the wall as if it were still a window. “He doesn’t know how patient you are,” he said. “Doesn’t know you like I do.” Eli cleaned the blood from his hand. “No,” he said softly. “No one ever has.”

“Are you scared?” he asked. “Terrified,” said Eli. “Weren’t you?”

“Good-bye, Victor,” he said. And then he drove the knife in.

Victor smiled at the challenge. A quick step forward, and Eli tried to step back on instinct but met the wall and Victor met him.

“Who are you talking to?” asked Stell. “Myself,” muttered Eli, waving Victor’s ghost away like a wisp of smoke.

Eli blamed himself. Victor was right, he’d played God, even as he asked for His help. And God in His mercy and might had saved Eli’s life, but destroyed everything that touched it.

He twisted it, and pain exploded behind Eli’s eyes, a dozen colors. He groaned and began to slide down the wall, but Victor hoisted him up by the handle.

Victor caught his balance and straightened in time to see Eli run his hand through several hundred dollars’ worth of coke, brushing it all into the sink.

“I think I need…,” he started. Victor assumed the line would end with “a doctor” but instead Eli met his eyes in the mirror, and smiled—not his best—and said, “A drink.” Victor managed to pull his own mouth into something like a smile, then, too. “That I can do.”

“So you're in it for the science.” “Better that than faith—”

Eli loomed over him, leaning his weight on the blade. Victor’s arms trembled from the effort, but little by little, he lost ground until the tip of the knife parted the skin of his throat.

A decade could shape a man, change everything about him. It had changed Victor. What about Eli? Who had he become?

And it didn’t matter, anyway, because Victor didn’t see his lips move. He didn’t see anything but the dark-haired man caught midstride as he wove through the crowd, away from them and toward the front door, hand reaching out for the handle.

“Maybe you’re in Hell.” You don’t believe in Hell, thought Eli. The corner of Victor’s mouth twitched. “But you do.”

“Well, if you see them,” called the girl, “thank Serena for the apartment. Oh, and tell Eli he sucks.” “Will do,” called Victor as the three made their way back to the car.

“I have to say, you don’t look well.” His fingers tightened on the scalpel. “But don’t worry, I’ll put you out of your—” Victor lunged for the tray of instruments, but Eli knocked it sideways.

The other boy swung his legs off the bed and stood. He was an inch or two taller than Eli, but all angles, edges.

“I watch you, and it’s like watching two people.”

For once Victor had the natural advantage, and even though it was the smallest, most inconsequential kind of thing, the way a name fell from the tongue, he liked having something Eli didn’t. Something Eli wanted.

He looked up and saw the thin blond ghost leaning back against the fiberglass wall.

“Enough,” said Victor. Behind his eyes, the dial turned up. Eli screamed. “You aren’t some avenging angel, Eli,” he said. “You’re not blessed, or divine, or burdened. You’re a science experiment.”