Free Vicious by V. E. Schwab Page B

Which they did freely, tipping imaginary but brimming glasses skyward as they stumbled home. They poured invisible liquor on the concrete as a gift to earth or God or fate or whatever force had let them have their fun and live to know it had been nothing more than that.
    Victor felt warm despite the flurries of snow, alive, and even welcomed the last dregs of pain from his own unpleasant proximity to death. Eli beamed dazedly at the night sky, and then he stepped off the sidewalk. Or tried to. But his heel caught the edge, and he stumbled, landing on his hands and knees among a patch of dirty snow, and tire tracks, and broken glass. He hissed, recoiled, and Victor saw blood, a smear of red against the dingy, snow-dusted street. Eli proceeded to sit on the lip of the curb, tilting his palm toward the nearest streetlamp to get a better look at the gash there, glittering with the remains of someone’s abandoned beer bottle.
    “Ouch,” said Victor, leaning over him to examine the cut and nearly losing his balance. He caught himself on the streetlamp as Eli cursed softly and pulled the largest shard out.
    “Think I’ll need stitches?”
    He held his bloody hand up for Victor to inspect, as if the latter’s vision and judgment were any better than his own right now. Victor squinted, and was about to reply with as much authority as he could muster, when something happened.
    The cut on Eli’s palm began to close.
    The world, which had been swaying in Victor’s vision, came to an abrupt stop. Stray flakes hung in the air, and their breath hovered in clouds over their lips. There was no movement except that of Eli’s flesh healing.
    And Eli must have felt it, because he lowered his hand into his lap, and the two gazed down as the gash that had run from pinkie to thumb knitted itself back together. In moments, the bleeding had stopped—the blood already lost now drying on his skin—and the wound was nothing more than a wrinkle, a faint scar, and then not even that.
    The cut was just … gone.
    Hours passed in blinks as the two let it sink in, what that meant, what they had done. It was extraordinary.
    It was ExtraOrdinary.
    Eli rubbed his thumb over the fresh skin of his palm, but Victor was the first to speak, and when he did, it was with an eloquence and composure perfectly befitting the situation.
    “Holy shit.”
    *   *   *
    VICTOR stared up at the place where the lip of their apartment building’s roof met the cloudy night. Every time he closed his eyes he felt like he was falling over, getting closer and closer to the brick, so he tried to keep them open, focusing on that strange seam overhead.
    “Are you coming?” asked Eli.
    He was holding the door open, practically bouncing in his eagerness to get inside and find something else that could physically wound him. Zeal burned in his eyes. And while Victor didn’t exactly blame him, he had no desire to sit around and watch Eli stab himself all night. He’d watched him try all the way home, leaving a dotted red trail in the snow from the blood that escaped before the wounds could heal. He’d seen the ability. Eli was an EO, in the (regenerating) flesh. Victor had felt something when Eli had come back to life seemingly EO-free: relief. With Eli’s new abilities being thrust into his wavering line of vision all the way home, Victor’s relief had dissolved into a ripple of panic. He would be relegated to sidekick, note-taker, the brick wall to bounce ideas off of.
    No.
    “Vic, you coming or not?”
    Curiosity and jealousy ate at Victor in equal parts, and the only way he knew to stifle both, to quell the urge to wound Eli himself—or at least to try—was to walk away.
    He shook his head, then stopped abruptly when the world continued swinging side to side.
    “Go on,” he said, mustering a smile that came nowhere near his eyes. “Go play with some sharp objects. I need to take a walk.” He descended the stairs, and nearly fell twice in three