came apart. But, see, that’s why you’re the perfect candidate for this kind of trial.” Haverty took up the syringe. “You always have been.”

He plunged the needle into Eli’s neck.

It hurt, like cold water racing through his veins.

But the strangest thing wasn’t the sensation of pain. It was the spark of memory—a bathtub filled with cracking ice. Pale fingers, trailing through the frigid water. Music on the radio.

Victor Vale, leaning against the sink.

You ready?

“Now,” said Haverty, dragging Eli back to the present. “Let us try again.”

XXI

THE LAST NIGHT

XXII

WAREHOUSE DISTRICT

VICTOR paused outside the bland gray building. It was a storage facility. A two-story grid of climate-controlled, room-sized lockers where people abandoned furniture or art or boxes of old clothes. This was as far as Mitch’s camera work had gotten Victor. But it was far enough.

There had been another man, according to Mitch. Glasses and a white coat. Eli, dragged behind him, unconscious.

Those words made no sense. The night of Eli’s transformation, Victor had watched as Eli tried to drink himself into oblivion. But the liquor didn’t even touch him.

After his death, nothing could.

Victor made his way through the ground-floor grid, scanning the roll-up doors for one without a lock. His shoulder had stopped bleeding, but it still ached—he didn’t dampen the pain, needed every sense firing, especially with the charge building in his limbs, threatening to spill over.

Victor heard a male voice—one he didn’t recognize—coming from a storage container on his left. He knelt, fingers curling around the base of the steel door as the voice carried on in a casual, conversational way.

He inched the door up one foot, two, holding his breath as he braced for an inevitable rattle or clank. But the voice beyond didn’t stop talking, didn’t even seem to notice.

Victor ducked under the rolling door, and straightened.

Instantly he was hit by a stench, slightly noxious, and far too sweet.

Chemical. But he soon forgot the smell as he registered the scene before him.

A tray of hospital-grade tools, a man in a white coat, his back to Victor and his gloves slick with blood as he leaned over a makeshift table. And there, strapped to the surface, Eli.

Blood spilled down his sides from a dozen shallow wounds.

He wasn’t healing.

Victor cleared his throat.

The doctor didn’t jump, didn’t seem at all surprised by Victor’s arrival.

He simply set the scalpel down and turned, revealing a thin face, deep-set eyes behind round glasses.

“You must be Mr. Vale.”

“And who the hell are you?”

“My name,” said the man, “is Dr. Haverty. Come in, take a—”