Angie. No. He jumped down from the table to find her writhing on the floor, still screaming in pain, and he thought stop! but the electrical buzzing in the room continued to grow around him. Stop. She clutched her chest.
Victor tried to help her up but Angie cried out even louder when he touched her and he stumbled back, confusion and panic pouring through him. The buzzing, he thought. He had to turn it down. He closed his eyes and tried to imagine it as a dial, tried to imagine turning some invisible device. He tried to feel calm. Numb. He was surprised by how easily it came to him in the midst of chaos, the calm. And then he realized how horribly quiet the room had gone. Victor opened his eyes, and saw Angie sprawled on the floor, head back, eyes open, red hair a cloud around her face. The humming in the air had faded to a tingle, and then to nothing, but it was still too late.
Angie Knight was dead.
XXIV
TWO DAYS AGO
THE ESQUIRE HOTEL
THE hotel room was pain and noise and chaos.
Victor came to, dazed, trapped between the school lab and the hotel room, Angie’s scream in his head and Sydney’s in his ears. Sydney? But the girl was nowhere to be seen, and he was being pinned back against the couch by Mitch, whose whole body was shaking visibly from the effort, but unbudging as the room hummed around them.
“Turn it off,” growled Mitch under his breath, and Victor woke fully. His eyes narrowed, the humming died, and everything in Mitch slackened, all signs of pain gone. He let go of Victor’s shoulders, and slumped back onto a chair.
Victor took a low, steadying breath, and ran his hand slowly over his face and through his hair, before his attention settled on Mitch.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
Mitch looked tired, unamused, but safe. It wasn’t the first time he’d had to intervene. Victor knew that when he had bad dreams, other people always suffered.
“I’m swell,” Mitch said, “but not too sure about her.” He pointed to a nearby shape in too large sweats, and Victor’s gaze swiveled to Sydney, who sat on the floor, dazed. He’d shut down their nerves the moment he realized what was happening, or at least dulled them as much as he was safely able, so he knew she was physically all right. But she did look shaken. A pang of guilt, something foreign after a decade in jail, nudged his ribs.
“Sorry,” he said quietly. He reached out to help her up, but thought better. Instead he stood, and made his way toward the hall bathroom.
“Mitch,” he called back. “See she gets to bed.”
And with that he closed the door behind him.
XXV
TEN YEARS AGO
LOCKLAND UNIVERSITY
VICTOR didn’t revive Angie. He didn’t try. He knew he should, or should want to, but the last thing he needed was more evidence of himself at the crime scene. He swallowed hard, cringing both at his ability to be so rational at a moment like this, and at the thought of the term. Crime. Scene. Besides, he could feel that she was dead. No charge. No energy.
So he did the only thing he could think to do. He called Eli.
“Where the hell are you, Vale?” A car door slammed in the background. “You think this shit is funny—”
“Angie’s dead.”
Victor hadn’t been sure whether or not he would say that, but the words had formed and spilled out before he could catch them. He’d expected them to hurt his throat, to lodge in his chest, but they flowed out unrestricted. He knew he should be panicking, but he felt numb, and the numbness made him calm. Was it shock, he wondered, this steadiness that came to him now, that had been so easy to summon with Angie dying at his feet? Or was it something else? He listened to the silence on the other end of the phone until Eli broke it.
“How?” growled Eli.
“It was an accident,” said Victor, maneuvering his cell so he could pull his shirt back on. He’d had to step around Angie’s body to reach it. He didn’t look at her.
“What did you do?”
“She was helping me with a test. I had an idea and it worked and—”
“What do you mean it worked?” Eli’s tone went cold.
“I mean … I mean it worked this time.” He let it sink in. Eli clearly understood, because he stayed quiet. He was listening. Victor had his attention, and he liked that. But he was surprised that Eli seemed more interested in his experiment than in Angie. Angie, who had always kept his monsters back. Angie, who was always getting in the way. No, she had been more than a distraction to both of them, hadn’t she? Victor looked down at the body then, expecting to feel some shade of the guilt that had washed over him when he’d lied to her before, but there was nothing. He wondered if Eli had felt this strange detachment, too, when he woke up on the bathroom floor. Like everything was real, but nothing mattered.
“Tell me what happened,” pressed Eli, losing patience.
Victor gazed around the room at the table, the straps, the machines that had once hummed but now appeared to have burned out, fuses blown. The whole place was dark.