Page 214 of Victorious

Victor Vale was good at fighting death.

After all, he’d done it enough times.

In the apartment, when he lifted his glass to Eli and offered to go first.

In the lab, when his pulse faltered on Angie’s table.

In the Falcon Price, when Eli drove a knife between his ribs.

In the graveyard, when Sydney hauled him back.

A hundred times in a hundred different places, when his heart stopped in his chest again and again and again.

Every time so far, he had fought death, and won.

It was, admittedly, a flawed statistic.

After all, everyone was immortal until they weren’t.

And yet, even now, as Victor’s pulse faltered, some innate voice ordered him to fight. The way he had so many times before. But all those times, dying had hurt.

And this time, it didn’t.

This time there was no barbed current.

No nerves on fire.

No heart seizing in his chest.

Just the sense of doors being closed up in an empty house. Of machinery shutting down, piece by piece. His senses withdrawing, vision foxing at the edges.

“Where are we going?” Syd was asking now, up front.

“Wherever you want,” answered Mitch.

Victor’s heart began to lose its rhythm. To dip, and spike, and dip, and slow. He didn’t fight. Just listened to their voices, until the darkness slid across his vision like a thick black marker, blotting out the end.

XVNOW. THEN.

ONE NIGHT LATER

SYDNEY hoisted the shovels on her shoulder as she wove between the old, half-sunken graves.

She knew where she was going, even after eight years.

Eight years—that’s how long it had been, since the night they dug Victor up the first time, and now they were here to put him back.

Mitch walked in her wake—two of him, in fact, sharing the weight—Victor’s body wrapped in his black coat. Dol drifted, listlessly, behind them, nose to the ground like he was trying to catch a scent but couldn’t.

Sydney’s steps slowed as she neared the plot.

She found the right grave, the earth packed down by time, and cold. His name, and nothing more, carved into the headstone.

She stared at the marker, feeling numb.

Mitch had told her she didn’t have to come, but that was ridiculous.

Of course she did.