Page 10 of Victorious

A low sound, like air escaping from a punctured tire.

Gabriel looked up in time to see the triangular head of a snake rising up from Paul’s chest. Straight through skin and cotton, like some awful magic trick.

At the same time, the whole room went dark. The lights didn’t cut off, but shadows appeared to be rushing in—or rather, rushing out of Paul’s prone body. Spreading like a stain until they overtook the lamps and the overhead fixture, smothering every source of light, leaving just enough to see the glinting eyes of the serpent, the glossy diamonds on its skin, as it freed itself, inch by inch, from his patient’s sternum.

Paul whimpered in his sleep, but Gabriel didn’t move. He sat, breath held, watching in stunned silence as the snake spilled onto the floor, followed by a second and a third.

“Paul,” he said as evenly as he could. “It’s time to wake up.”

But Paul didn’t hear him.

The first snake whispered over the floor and grazed his ankle. The air caught in his throat.

Gabriel Gray was a methodical man. One who’d seen a magic act when he was eight and devoted the next three days to unpicking each and every illusion, proving it was nothing more than sleight of hand.

Up until that moment, he thought what he was witnessing might be some form of hallucination, but the thing that brushed against his sock was solid.

Whatever was happening, it was undeniably real.

“Paul,” Gabriel said, through gritted teeth, an edge of warning in his voice. “Can you hear me?”

The first snake coiled beneath his chair as, across the table, the second and third began to wind themselves around Paul’s body.

“I need you to wake up.”

Paul whispered, “No, no,” but it was through the fog of sleep.

Gabriel didn’t know what was happening, or how, didn’t know if these visions, these dreams made manifest, could hurt, or even kill, but they were real enough to rumple the fabric of Paul’s shirt, to push the air from his lungs as they coiled around his shoulders, real enough to turn their bared fangs on Gabriel as he rose from his chair.

He hurtled forward as one of the snakes lunged for him, grabbing Paul’s shoulder right before it could sink its fangs into his forearm, and then, Paul’s eyes were flying open—

And the snakes were gone.

They didn’t dissolve or break apart like smoke.

One moment they were there and the next, they weren’t. Had never been.

The darkness vanished, too. The lights in the office burned clean and white, and Gabriel was standing, breathless and unbitten, over Paul, who was blinking up at him, trying to shake off the haze of sleep.

He let go of Paul’s shoulder and sank onto the edge of the low table before his legs failed him. Paul sat up, and looked around at the office, either relieved or disappointed to see it intact. Unharmed.

Paul met his eyes. “Well,” he said in a shaky voice. “Was it real?”

It should have been an easy question.

After all, Gabriel had seen the snakes with his own eyes. Watched them rise out of Paul’s nightmare-stricken chest and slither across the polished floor. Heard them hiss and felt their scales against his skin. His arm still hummed faintly from the near contact of those fangs.

And yet, when he opened his mouth, nothing came out.

Was it real?

Yes or no. The two answers stood before him, like branching roads.

The first was short, and clear, its end abrupt, while the second bent swiftly out of sight, its end unknown.

If he said yes, he’d be discredited, and Paul would disappear—behind the walls of an institution, or worse (if one delusion proved true, why not another?), into some government lab. Either way, he’d never see his patient again. And he would never understand what he’d just witnessed.

And Gabriel Gray wanted to understand. Needed to. Was sure that he could, if given time, cooperation, trust.