Page 107 of Victorious

He tried to picture it. Crossing to the therapist, wrapping his hands around his throat, feeling the pulse falter, and fail. It should have steadied him. Instead, Eli recoiled from the image, the idea. A primal reflex. Like pulling a hand back from a stove before it burns you.

His feelings toward EOs had always been simple.

His feelings toward Gabriel, it seemed, were not.

It must be some extension of his power, another hurdle Eli would have to find a way to cross.

“Well?” pressed Gabriel. “Tell me the truth. Not as you want it to be, but as it is. Do you want to kill me?”

Eli swallowed, but it was no use.

“No,” he said, through gritted teeth.

Gabriel smiled and set his pencil down on the table. “Well, this has been an … enlightening first session.” He rose to his feet. “Come,” he said, starting toward the door. “Let me walk you back to your room.”

Eli stood, gaze hanging on the sharpened instrument, as if testing the truth of what he’d just said. But he knew the pencil, like everything else, was a test.

He left it where it was and followed Gabriel out.

IVNOW. THEN.

TIME passed strangely in a place like EON.

Without windows to the outside world, it was hard to keep track of hours, days. Eli would have had no sense of it at all, if not for the cycle of the lights in his cell, or the clock on the wall of Gabriel’s office, which now read half past three.

Stell had given him work to do and means to do it. So far, Gabriel had given him nothing but time to wait, and think, and fight the downward pull of Gabriel’s power.

“Let’s talk about your name.”

Eli sighed, dragging his gaze from the clock. “What about it?”

“I’m curious, which came first, the moniker or the ability? Eli Ever. Ever, as in immortal. Did you know what you’d become? Did you will it into being?”

“We had a theory,” he said. “That determination played a part.”

“We, being you and Victor?”

It was the first time Gabriel had said his name. The first time since Eli’s resurrection that he had heard it said aloud. The sound rang through him like a bell. A reminder that he was still out there, somewhere. Unless, of course, Gabriel had already gotten to him.

“Where is he?”

Gabriel shook his head. “I honestly don’t know.”

“Two and a half years is a long time,” countered Eli. “You should have caught him. You could have caught him. He could be here.”

“He’s not,” said Gabriel.

“Would you tell me if he was?”

Gabriel took up a tablet, and tapped it a few times, then offered the device to Eli. On the screen, a grid of videos—footage from a dozen cells that looked identical to his. Three were empty. The others contained figures who sat, or stood, rested, paced. “EON’s current patients. As you can see, Mr. Vale is not among them.”

He could still be lying.

But Eli doubted it.

Victor had more lives than a cat.

“How is it that you never found him?”