“Right. That wasn’t my intention.”

“’Course not. None of us expected a kid like you to come into the picture, for better or for worse. I didn’t, and I doubt Renée did. But you showed up, and suddenly I had a comrade, and Renée had a lover, and none of us realized that we were sitting on top of a big tower of mystery and lies until you hopped up there with us and the whole thing collapsed.”

“Sorry I ruined your romantic conspiracy.”

“You didn’t ruin anything,” he says. “Everyone’s to blame, no one’s to blame, yadda yadda yadda. But no matter whose fault it was, you screwed up, whether you knew it or not. It was a mistake, but the intentions behind it weren’t noble. I don’t know how I feel about you anymore, Locke, but I will say that you have some apologies to make. Me, I’m flexible. I can bounce back from this. But Randall and Renée both love you, and you don’t currently deserve that love. Neither do I, for that matter. You do realize how much they care about you, right?”

“Yeah, I have an idea.” I puff heavily on my cigarette and try to fill Casey’s room with smoke. His ceiling fan makes it quiver, then disappear in a flurry of thin wisps. “So what’re you going to do now?”

He takes a minute and then smiles sadly. “I don’t know. I don’t think I’m going to try and make a strategy about this. No more plans and hiding and conspiracy. Just take everything one step at a time and have a good time. Drink a little more. Meet some boys, get on with life. We’ll see where we end up after this, as friends. I like you, Locke, but after all of this, I don’t trust you. Even more, I don’t trust myself around you.”

I keep my head down, trying to contact some of the venom, the dark bond that made us friends. It’s gone, though, tossed away by Casey in favor of common sense, and I can’t blame him. The venom and I are alone in this one, back where we started.

One left to go.

I TURNED off the faucet and rolled up my sleeves. The razor felt cold in my hand as I pushed my fists into the warm water filling the sink. My eyes went up to my reflection in the bathroom mirror: Locke Vinetti, superhero, protector, brother, friend. Take a good look, you miserable bastard.

“I’m giving you to the count of three,” I said to my reflection. “Then I cut myself to ribbons and die, and something tells me that’ll piss you off.”

No change. I pressed the blade’s edge to my wrist.

“One.”

Nothing.

“Two.”

The mirror seemed to vibrate. I closed my eyes.

“Three.”

I opened them and there it was. The song of the city personified, my dark power-the venom. It was horrible, spidery, like a mass of shadow trying to imitate a real person. About eight glossy eyes stared back at me, glinting with just the slightest hint of crimson, blinking in random sequence.

“Leave.”

“Who are you to give orders to me?”

“I want you out, you hear me? Leave me and never come back.”

“Did that thing from the future frighten you? You’re Blacklight. You don’t need to be afraid of anything.”

“Just leave. I can be Blacklight without you.”

Laughter boomed throughout the bathroom. “Idiot,” snarled the thing in the mirror. “Blind, sad little boy. The city’s song is always present, but the only way you harness it is through me. I am the doorway, the conduit. All you provide is a host, a being to make my power tangible.” Its eyes flared bright. “We can do such things together, Locke. Your brother? Renée? Forget them. Humans. They want a weak, usable version of you, but I love you just the way you are. We can do whatever we want. Steal and kill and rule. Sounds fun, huh?”

I pressed the razor down harder. Ignore it. “Go now.”

It stared at me for a second and muttered, “As you wish.” It slunk off my form, twisting and scuttling until it got to the bathroom door. It turned and stared back at me through the mirror. “Enjoy your decision. Have fun living and dying as nothing special.”

It slipped under the reflection of the bathroom door, and it was gone. I’d gotten rid of it, finally, for good. I was no longer a monster, a superhero; I wasn’t outstanding or different.

It took me far too long to take the razor off my wrist.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

BE CAREFUL,” SAYS Andrew as he ushers me into his apartment. “Like I said, kid gloves and all that, right?”

“Right,” I whisper. Each step makes me feel a little colder, and a little older, in my flesh. I am not going to be able to make everything better in a couple of minutes, and I need to remember that. In the meantime, be ready for anything and everything.

Her door is closed, but the halo of light around its borders tells me that she’s inside. Taped to the door is a piece of paper, reading, in scrawled handwriting, “I AM THE ROUGH BEAST. I SLOUCH TOWARD BETHLEHEM TO BE BORN.” Yeats. Not promising.

I raise my fist, which weighs about six million tons, and rap it three times against her door.

“Who is it?” comes a muffled voice.

“Renée, it’s me,” I say softly.

Silence.

“I wanted to come by to see you. I know you’re not happy with me, but I miss you. I’m terrified that you’ll never talk to me again, and I don’t think I could live with that. I love you, and I’m so, so sorry.”

More silence. The clink and shuffle of slight movement, not much else.

“I can leave if you want-”

The door flies open, and there she is. All the prepared speeches I had backlogged in my mind melt instantly. She’s a mess. All she wears is a black wife-beater and a pair of panties. Her eyes are tinged red and sunken into her face, surrounded by clumps of dried makeup. Her hair’s ragged, spiky, shooting in a million different directions at once; one look at it lets me know that there was no method-she just grabbed a pair of scissors and went for it. But it’s her lips, her perfect lips, that send me back-cracked in places, with a white film of semi-dead skin over them, like the way you imagine crackheads or people in the old folks’ home or all those other kinds of people who you find instinctually repulsive, no matter how nice they are.

“Afternoon,” she says, looking into my eyes with the expression of a snake. She can see my feelings, as hard as I try to hide them. “Sorry I repulse you, didn’t know I had company. Can I offer you a drink?”

“Can I come in?”

She turns and walks into her room, leaving the door open as a sign that she doesn’t care what I do. I try to make as little noise as possible in some feeble attempt to keep this low-key. She makes a round of her dressers and cabinets and bedposts, lighting every candle in the room.

“How have you been?”

“Well!” she chimes, whipping toward me with a maniacal smile on her face. “I flushed all my medication down the toilet. I haven’t slept in two days, which is weird, ’cause I’ve been drinking like a fiend. How do you think I’ve been?” With the last sentence, she tosses a third-full bottle of gin at me. I just manage to catch it and set it down on her bed. I see. So this is bugfuck.

“You know you shouldn’t be drinking.”

“Oh, you’re right!” she snaps, her voice betraying her unwavering smile. “I should…I should go find one of my friends and beat the shit out of them! THAT will help! That’s the…the…the only way to do it, right? Well, guess what, sweetheart, not all of us have some expendable kinda supply of hate in us, y’know? We can’t all summon our inner demon to make everything better. Would you prefer it if I was cutting, maybe?”

The words yank at my heart, and for a second I feel something familiar.

“That’s unfair.”

“So’s LIFE!” she bellows, and in a single movement throws a lit candle at me. I dodge, but a drop of wax hits me in the cheek, sending a jolt of pain through my face. “Things never go right. People never stop hurting one another. It’s all bullshit, and I was a moron to think you would be any different.”