Kirchner called me up one morning in March and asked if I'd come down – nothing urgent, but he wanted to see me when I had a moment. Since I had nothing but moments, really, I told him I'd come down as soon as I got my boots on.

"Step on in," he said, holding the door to his office -- not his exam room -- open for me. "How are you?"

"Pretty good," I said, sitting down in front of the desk. He leaned against the edge rather than sitting on the other side and looked down at me thoughtfully. "I'm hoping I should be feeling pretty good."

"I think so, yes," he said. "How's the hand?"

I held up my left hand and waggled the fingers. The bandage I wore was lighter now, just a pad with medical tape to hold it on, and the stitches had all fallen out. "Healing up."

"I'll get you some scar cream before you go," he said.

"But that's not why I'm here, is it?" I asked. He shook his head.

"No. I've finally talked the city hospital into sending your most recent tests out here -- it took me a while but I thought I should make sure you hadn't incurred any extra damage."

"I didn't have an attack," I said.

"You mean when you went out to Chicago?"

"Yeah."

"Funny thing about that trip to Chicago," Kirchner said. "In your records, your injury is listed as a human bite wound, not a dog. And it says you were airlifted in with another patient. Who..." he shuffled through some paperwork on his desk, picking a file out of the chaos, "is also a patient of mine."

"Ah," I said, trying to calculate how much trouble I was in. "Lucas."

He nodded, opening the file and studying it. "A very...unique boy, Lucas. I hope he's well. All of this is by way of saying I know more about what happened than most in the village. Confidentiality, of course, requires me not to share any of this," he added. "Besides, it's not really the point."

I watched him, bewildered now. "What is the point, then?" I asked.

"You say you had no attack when you were bitten."

"That's right."

"Can you tell me when the last time you felt any arrhythmia was?" he asked.

I thought about it. "Not recently."

"How long?"

"I don't know," I said. I did know -- but I didn't really want to admit I'd had at least two arrhythmias without telling him. After all, they'd said to expect them...

He looked at me.

"Three months, maybe," I said.

He nodded and got up, walking around his desk and picking up an oversized envelope, which he passed across to me. Still confused, I pulled out the papers inside, the x-ray films, the charts and graphs. It looked to me like gibberish.

"Listen, I don't have a medical degree," I said, spreading them out in front of me.

"Those are the results of tests performed on you when you were in Chicago," he said. "They're not what anyone expected, which is why it took me a while to get them. They had to do some verification that there hadn't been a mix-up."

"Oh," I said in a small voice. I thought, I should have known better. I'd really believed that Lucas had healed me when he'd touched me on the chest to reset my heart, the night he'd shown himself to be Nameless. But of course belief wasn't a luxury afforded to me -- I needed to have facts.

"So, six months?" I asked, looking up at Kirchner, who frowned. "Or three? Should I be in hospice care?"

"What -- no!" he said, looking startled. "No, Christopher -- sorry, I'm so sorry, that wasn't what I meant at all. You're not in any danger."

I exhaled with relief. "Then what do these say?"

"They say...well, they say they've found nothing," he said, sitting down to face me across the desk.

I blinked at him. "Isn't that a good thing?"

"Well, it is, and it isn't. It's perplexing," he explained. "These tests show a perfectly healthy heart. No irregularities, nothing at all wrong with the tissue itself. None of the weakness that we should be seeing, especially after Halloween. Far as they can tell you're a perfectly healthy young man."

"Did they mix up my tests?" I asked.

"That's what I thought, but they assure me they double-checked, hence the delay. And I have to say, having been your doctor for three years....this is your heart, Christopher," he said, reaching over to pick up what looked to me like a blobby, grainy green-and-black photograph of someone's thumb. "Only thing I can think is that maybe you got some hemlock in it when you -- went with Lucas to Chicago," he added, giving the words a slight sardonic twist. "But there aren't any known applications of hemlock for heart conditions, so that's basically hoodoo, and I can't explain it. Can you?"

I looked down at my hand, turned it over so that it was palm-up. I didn't even know what to think. I wondered if it was possible to be an atheist and still have a crisis of faith.

"I think I know what happened," I said, after a while.