Page 149 of Victorious

The pain was just enough to make the dream around her flicker like a candle.

Just enough to let her glimpse the other world—the real one—grimy and dark, the table, a plank of chipped plywood, Eli on the other side, his dark eyes hanging on her even as his forehead furrowed in confusion.

“Where are we?” he asked.

Sydney and Serena answered at the same time. “Home.”

Syd loosened her grip on the jagged piece and the kitchen swam back into focus.

“It’s always been our happy place,” Serena added, lighting the candles on the cake.

It had been, thought Syd—until it wasn’t. Until her sister went to college, and she was left to haunt the empty house. Until the week before her twelfth birthday, when Serena showed up at the door with a picnic basket and a promise to make this year’s celebration something special.

“You know, Serena,” said Eli. “It’s been awhile.”

“Has it?” she mused absently.

“Eight years.”

From the corner of her eye, Syd saw her sister pause.

“I wonder why it took so long,” pressed Eli, “for Sydney here to bring you back.”

A shadow crept, cloudlike, across Serena’s face. The house shivered in displeasure. This shift, the closest thing she’d seen to a glitch.

Syd shook her head. “I wasn’t strong enough,” she said. It wasn’t a lie. For several of those years, she hadn’t been. And then—

“Happy birthday!” Serena declared, setting the finished cake down on the table, the top covered in burning rainbow candles. How many, exactly, Sydney couldn’t tell. Every time she tried to count, the image blurred. Or maybe her vision did, the candle flames reduced to a halo of fuzzy light.

“Did you think of a good wish?”

“Yes.” She glared at Eli. “I want him dead.”

Serena pursed her lips, the way she used to when she’d chosen a game, and Syd refused to play along. Only now, a cold wind blew through the house. The lights flickered.

“Don’t be rude,” she warned.

Sydney changed tactics, tried using Serena’s words, instead. “You said we don’t need anyone else. Now that we have each other. That means we don’t need him.”

Her sister hummed, as if considering. “True,” she said, before curling a hand against the back of Eli’s neck. “But I’ve missed him.”

An unwelcome reminder that once upon a time, Eli and Serena had been on the same side. He might have been the one who shot Sydney, but her sister was the one who set the lure, and reeled her in, and stood by while it happened. He had convinced Serena that all EOs were broken. That they deserved to die. And she had helped him.

Sydney crossed her arms. “You asked me what I wished for. I want him dead.”

“I think you’re forgetting,” said Eli. “You already killed me.”

“Yeah, well, it obviously didn’t stick,” she snapped. “Besides, you shot me f—”

“Enough,” ordered Serena with so much force the ceiling splintered, the chandelier went dark. When she sighed, the air plumed white with cold.

She took her seat between them, and the world steadied, smoothed.

“Now.” She looked pointedly from Syd, to Eli, and back to Syd. Her fingers twitched on the table, and a kitchen knife appeared beside the cake.

“Eli,” said Serena, spinning the knife to offer him the handle, not the blade. “Why don’t you do the honors?”

“Wait,” protested Sydney as his fingers closed around the weapon.