There was something worse about seeing her like this a second time, as if they knew each other. Looking at Tara now, Alex could see it had only been the blond hair that made her think of Hellie. Hellie had been strong. Her body remembered the soccer and softball she’d played in high school, and she could surf and skateboard like a girl out of Seventeen magazine. This girl was built like Alex, ropy, but weak.
Tara’s knees looked brownish gray. There was stubble near her bikini area, red razor bumps like a rash. She had a tattoo of a parrot at her hip and below it was written Key West in looping scrawl. Her right arm had an ugly realistic portrait of a young girl on it. A daughter? A niece? Her own face as a child? There was a pirate flag and a ship on cresting 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.
She’d broken through the Book and Snake gates and walked to Yorkside Pizza, where she’d eaten two pies and then lain down in one of the ovens in an attempt to get warm. A Lethe delegate had been present and was able to quickly quarantine the area and, through a serious of compulsions, convince the customers the girl was part of a performance-art piece. The owner was Greek and less easily swayed. He had long carried a gouri given to him by his mother—specifically the blue “evil eye” or mati, which stymied any attempts at compulsion. Cash proved far more effective. At the owner’s request, Lethe also stepped in to make sure Yorkside retained its lease when the majority of other businesses were forced out of Yale’s premiere shopping district by rising rents designed to bring in upscale retailers. The local businesses along Elm and Broadway had vanished, making way for prestige brands and chain stores, but Yorkside Pizza remained.
So since Tara couldn’t talk, her body would have to. Alex had discovered a ritual to reveal harm, something simpler, lighter, used for diagnosis or for when a patient or witness was unable to speak. It had been invented by Girolamo Fracastoro to discover who had poisoned an Italian countess after she’d keeled over, foaming at the mouth, at her own wedding feast.
Alex didn’t want to put her hand into the haze above the gruesome wounds on Tara’s chest. But that was what she’d come here to do. She took a breath and thrust her fingers forward.
She was on the ground, a boy’s face above her—Lance. Sometimes she loved him, but lately things had been… The thought left her. She felt herself open her mouth, tasted something acrid on her tongue. Lance was smiling. They were on their way… where? She felt only excitement, anticipation, the world beginning to blur.
“I’m sorry,” Lance said.
She was on her back, staring up at the sky. The streetlights seemed far away; everything was moving, and the cathedral beside her melted into a building that blotted out the few stars. It was quiet but she could hear something, like a boot squelching in mud. Thunk squelch, thunk squelch. She saw a body looming above her, saw the knife, understood the sound was her own blood and bone breaking open as the blade sawed away at her. Why didn’t she feel it? What was real and what wasn’t?
“Close your eyes,” said an unfamiliar voice. She did and was gone.
Alex stumbled backward, clutching her chest. She could still hear that horrible squelching sound, feel the warm wet spreading over her chest. But no pain? How had there been no pain? Had she been high? High enough not to feel being stabbed? Lance had drugged her first. He’d told her he was sorry. He must have been high too.
So there was her answer. Tara and Lance had clearly been messing with something other than weed. No doubt by now Turner had been through their apartment, found whatever weird shit they were using and selling. Alex had no way of knowing what Lance had been thinking that night, but if he’d been taking some kind of hallucinogen it could be anything.