waves, a Bettie Page zombie girl in heels and black lingerie. The cameo on Tara’s inner
arm looked newer, the ink fresh and dark, though the text was nearly illegible in that tired
Gothic font: Rather die than doubt. Song lyrics, but Alex couldn’t remember what they were from.
She wondered if her own tattoos would reappear if she died or if the art would live inside the address moths forever.
Enough stalling. Alex took out her notes. The first part of the ritual was easy, a chant.
Sanguis saltido—but you couldn’t just say the words; you had to sing them. It felt utterly obscene to do in that empty, echoing room, but she made herself sing the chant: Sanguis
saltido! Salire! Saltare! No tune was specified, only allegro. It was on her second round through that she realized she was singing the words to the tune of the Twizzlers jingle. So chewy. So fruity. So happy and oh so juicy. But if that’s what it took to make the blood dance … She knew it was working when Tara’s lips began to pink.
Now things were going to get worse. The blood chant was only intended to start Tara’s
circulation and loosen rigor so that Alex could get her mouth open. Alex took hold of Tara’s chin, trying to ignore the newly warm, pliant feel of her skin, and wiggled the girl’s jaw open.
She took the scarab from the plastic bag in her back pocket and placed it gently on Tara’s tongue. Then she took the tin from her other pocket and began to trace waxy patterns over Tara’s body with the balm inside, trying to think about anything but the dead
skin beneath her fingertips. Feet, shins, thighs, stomach, breasts, collarbone, down Tara’s arms to her wrists and middle fingers. Finally, starting at the navel, she drew a line bisecting Tara’s torso up to her throat, her chin, and to the crown of her head.
Alex realized she’d forgotten to bring a lighter. She needed fire. There was a desk next
to the door, beneath a messy whiteboard. The big drawers were locked, but the narrow top
drawer slid open. A pink plastic lighter lay beside a pack of Marlboros.
Alex took the lighter and held the flame just above the places she’d applied the balm,
retracing her path up Tara’s body. As she did, a faint haze appeared over the skin, like heat rising off blacktop, the air seeming to wave and shimmer. The effect was denser in certain
spots, so thick it blurred and vibrated as if seen through the spinning spokes of a wheel.
Alex put the lighter back in the drawer. She reached out to the blur above Tara’s elbow,
ran her hand through the shimmer. In a rush, she was racing down the street on a bicycle.
In front of her, a car door flew open in her path. She hit the brakes, failed to stop, struck the door at an angle, clipping her arm. Pain shot through her. Alex hissed and drew back
her hand, cradling her arm as if the broken bone had been hers and not Tara’s.
The haze above Tara was a map of all the harm done to her body—flickers over her tattoos and where her ears had been pierced, dense clumping above her broken arm, a tiny
dim spiral over a pockmark left by a BB on her cheek, the murky darkness that hung suspended over the wounds in her chest.
In Lethe’s books, Alex had found no way to make Tara talk or any way to reach her on
the other side of the Veil—at least, nothing that was achievable without the help of one of
the societies. Even if Alex could have managed it, many of the rituals she’d found made it
clear that speaking to the newly dead usually risked raising them, and that was always a
dangerous proposition. No one could be brought back from beyond the Veil permanently,
and hauling a reluctant soul back into its body could be wildly unpredictable. Book and Snake specialized in necromancy and had created numerous safeguards for their rituals, but even they sometimes lost control once a Gray found its way to a body. In the late seventies, they’d tried to summon the spirit of Jennie Cramer, the legendary Belle of New
Haven, into the body of a teenage girl from Camden, who had frozen to death when she’d
passed out drunk in her car during a blizzard. Instead, it was the Camden girl who had returned, shivering with cold and possessed of the ferocious strength of the newly dead.