The next morning John was gone, but the stain of blood on the couch arm had grown swollen and dense, the spot staring at him like an empty eye socket. Victor searched the house for John or signs of him with desperate curiosity until his phone rang. He answered and John’s voice blasted through the receiver:

“Hello, Victor, ol’ boy! I don’t know what you did to me last night but I feel right as rain! Some real magic you’ve got in that office of yours!”

Victor laughed with relief, welcomed his good friend, John, and told him he’d see him soon but to be sure to rest up.

“You gave your head quite the bang, after all.”

The next day, John was knocking on his front door, yelling about how his tics were back and demanding more of the magic that made him feel right as rain. After an explosive argument, Victor finally agreed. He escorted John to the couch—any trace of blood cleaned off the arm by now—and slipped into his bathroom with a syringe. When he stepped out, Victor told John to close his eyes. Only when John did so did Victor press the needle into John’s vein, slowly injecting the contents into his dear friend.

“My god, Victor. Is that blood?”

Victor looked up to see John’s eyes wide open in disobedience, directed at the procedure as the last few drops were pumped into him. Victor scowled and told him not to worry the slightest bit about it, for it was just medicine in its clinical phase, and quickly shooed him out the house, watching covetously as John skittered down the driveway.

A flurry of calls came to Victor’s home office line that night—calls not from John but from acquaintances and strangers demanding the magic for any sum of money. Before Victor could scream “What the bloody devil do you mean?!” John came knocking on his front door, a huge grin plastered across his guileless face.

“Victor, my dear friend! We are both about to be wealthier than god!”

And Victor, seeing John’s crooked smile and wonderful twinkle that brought him so much joy, obliged.

John managed the appointments and accounts, kept the secret he dared not discuss, and tamed the masses, while Victor tended to people’s ailments, ridding them of their torment for a period of time. During that time, he slowly began to realize what injecting his blood truly did. The drug he had become. The stain of dotted arms from injections spreading across the town. The happy, deluded faces of those who wore those scars proudly.

The God he had become.

Weeks later, as he and John were having drinks in Victor’s newly furnished dining room to celebrate their success, Victor stood with the eerie ease of someone in complete control, stepped over to John, who sat so unsuspectingly in his chair with a nice single malt scotch sloshing around his crystal glass, and loomed. John looked up at Victor, grimaced at the ice-cold gaze of his piercing blue eyes, and said: