“Speak then,” boomed the priest, “while you may. Answer our questions and return to your rest.”
He nodded at the general, who cleared his throat.
“Who was your primary contact at the FSB?”
Yeshevsky’s body crab-walked left, right, left, with that unnerving speed.
Alex had done some research into golems and glumae last year, but she had no idea how she’d fight that thing if it came running at her. It was moving from brass letter to brass letter on the floor, as if the whole room was a Ouija board, the corpse skittering over it like a planchet, the scribe documenting each pause from above.
Every so often, the body would slow and the priest would add something to the fire, producing that same blue smoke. The snake would rouse itself, slither across the floor, and bite Yeshevsky again, juicing him with whatever strange venom it possessed in its fangs.
It’s just a body, Alex reminded herself. But that wasn’t entirely true.
Some part of Yeshevsky’s consciousness had been drawn back into it to answer questions for the blustering general. Would it vanish beyond the Veil when this sick bit of business was done? Would it be whole, or would it return to the afterlife damaged by the horror of being crammed back into a lifeless corpse?
This was why Grays steered clear of Book and Snake. Not because their tomb looked like a mausoleum, but because the dead weren’t meant to be treated this way.
Alex considered the veiled and bowed heads of the Lettermen, the scribe.
You’re right to hide your faces, she thought. When your time comes,someone’s going to be waiting for payback on the other side.
3
It turned out taking dictation letter by letter from a reanimated corpse took a long time, and it was 2 a.m. when they finally finished the ritual.
Alex wiped away the chalk circle and made sure to stay far from the eyeline of the high priest. She didn’t think it would be good for her new and improved make-no-waves policy if she kneed some esteemed alum in the nuts.
“Calista,” she said quietly, flagging down the delegation president.
“Thank you so much, Alex! I mean Virgil.” She giggled. “It all went so well.”
“Jacob Yeshevsky might disagree.”
She laughed again. “True.”
“What happens to him now?”
“The family thinks he’s being cremated, so they’ll still get his ashes. No harm done.”
Alex cast a glance at the crate where Yeshevsky’s body had been stowed.
When the general had gotten his answers and the ritual concluded with a final strike of the gong, the body hadn’t simply collapsed. They’d had to wait for it to tire, clambering over the letters. Whatever it was saying, no one was bothering to transcribe it, and the sight of that corpse dancing frantically over the floor, building word after word, maybe gibberish or a cry from beyond the grave or the recipe for his grandmother’s banana bread, had somehow been worse than anything that had come before.
“No harm done,” Alex echoed. “What was he spelling out there, at the end?”
“Something about mother’s milk or the Milky Way.”
“It doesn’t mean anything,” the high priest said. He’d removed his veil and robes and was dressed in a white linen shirt and pants as if he’d just sauntered off of a beach in Santorini. “Just a glitch. It happens. Worse when the corpse isn’t fresh.”
Alex slung her backpack over her shoulder, eager to be gone. “Sure.”
“Maybe it was a reference to the space program,” Calista said, glancing at the alum as if for approval.
“We’re having drinks in the—” the high priest began.
But Alex was already shoving her way out of the temple room and down the hall. She didn’t slow her steps until she was free of the Book and Snake tomb and the stink of roses, the air still warm with the last gasp of summer, beneath a starless New Haven sky.
Alex was surprised to find Dawes waiting at the Hutch, sitting cross-legged and barefoot on the rug in cargo shorts and a white T-shirt, her index cards arranged in neat piles around her, her hair tucked into a lopsided bun. She’d placed her Tevas neatly by the door.
“Well?” she asked. “How did it go?”
“The body got free and I had to bring it down with the Phantom Loop.”
“Oh God.”
“Yup,” Alex said as she headed into the bathroom. “Lassoed that thing and rode it all the way to Stamford.” “Alex,” Dawes scolded.
“It went fine. But…” Alex stripped off her clothes, eager to be rid of the smell of the uncanny. “I don’t know. The corpse kind of ran down at the end.
Started in about the Milky Way or mother’s milk or milk for his undead cereal. It was fucking grim.” She turned on the shower. “Did you tell Anselm we can’t meet with the new Praetor on Saturday?” When Dawes didn’t answer, Alex repeated the question. “I can’t meet with the new Praetor on Saturday, okay?”
A long moment later, Dawes said, “I told Anselm. But that only buys us a week. Maybe … Maybe the Praetor will have an open mind.”
Alex doubted it. There were plenty of rogues in Lethe’s history—Lee De Forest, who had caused a campus-wide blackout and been suspended as a result; hell, one of the founders, Hiram Bingham III, hadn’t known anything about archaeology and had still scurried off to Peru to steal a few artifacts—
but there was no chance Lethe had chosen some kind of maverick to serve as Praetor now, not after what had happened last year. And not with Alex in the
