Alfred took a hasty step back, and Nicholas’s jaw dropped open. Her eyes rolled in her skull, looking frantically around the room. Her body heaved upwards as if she was trying to sit up, but she collapsed immediately. Nicholas hurried to his feet and leaned over her, putting a hand on her chest and pushing down firmly to keep her still.

“Don’t move yet, it could be dangerous. You must be incredibly frightened and confused, but please try to stay calm. We’re here to help you. I’m going to check your vitals now to make sure everything is working as it should.” Her pupils contracted to tiny dots as she fixed him with a stare. Her mouth slowly began to open and shut repeatedly, silently.

He checked her heart rate again and shined a light in her eyes, and checked her heart rate and reflexes. Her head rolled from side to side as he moved around her, always following him with her wide, dark eyes.

“I think… I think she’s fine,” Nicholas said in disbelief. “Physically, at least. She has all the biological responses a normal living human should.”

“She doesn't seem... entirely well, though,” Alfred muttered to his brother, meeting the girl’s black stare. He repressed a shudder.

“Well, I’m sure being brought back from the dead must be a fairly traumatizing experience. Mentally, who knows what kind of condition she's in? But Alfred, we did it. We actually did it. What no one else has been able to do since the dawn of magic. We brought the dead back to life.” Nicholas stumbled backwards and fell into the chair at the writing desk, one hand pressed to his forehead. “I can’t believe we did it. You were right. What… what does this mean for magic, for humanity? We’ve crossed the final threshold. We did it.”

“Um… Nicholas?” Alfred said.

“I almost feel guilty for doubting you. I’ll admit, I thought you were absolutely insane when you came to me with this idea. I was looking forward to the whole ‘I told you so’ speech when this inevitably failed, but here I am, having to eat my words and admit that you knew what you were talking about. Well, I did all the actual intellectual work, but if you hadn’t convinced me to try it in the first place—”

“Nicholas,” Alfred said again, taking a step away from the bed.

“It was almost easy. I can’t believe we were the first to manage this. I mean, I just suppose nobody before us thought to use the Egyptian spell combined with a summoning to retrieve the soul, while applying alchemy—”

“Nicholas!” Alfred shouted.

“What?”

Alfred pointed at the bed. Nicholas looked around, and saw that the girl had somehow managed to grab the curtain of her four poster bed, and was pulling herself up into a sitting position. Her head lolled about limply as she moved with spasmodic jerks, but whenever her face became visible they could see that her eyes were wide and wild, and her mouth was still endlessly gaping open and closed.

Nicholas jumped to his feet and began to hurry over to the girl’s side to help her, but seemed to think better of it before he made it halfway. He glanced back over his shoulder at Alfred.

“Erm… actually, Alfred, you’re much bigger and stronger than I am, how about you try to get her to lie back down? She really oughtn't to be moving around just yet.”

“I’m not touching her,” Alfred refused point blank, shaking his head. “There’s something wrong with her. She isn’t right. We didn’t do it right.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. She’s just… in shock. She has to re-adjust is all, I’m sure.” Nicholas looked back at the girl doubtfully. Her back arched unnaturally as she attempted to claw her way up the curtains. “…Would you please hand me the poker from the fireplace?” he asked Alfred.

Without taking his eyes off the girl, Alfred shuffled backwards in the direction of the bedroom’s cold and empty hearth, his hand groping behind him until his fingers brushed against the cold iron of the poker’s handle. He grabbed it and hurried to Nicholas’s side, handing it over.

“Be careful,” Alfred muttered, though he made no move to accompany his brother.

“It’s perfectly fine,” Nicholas insisted, his voice perhaps an octave higher than it usually was. He inched toward the bed, only jumping a little when the girl’s head whipped around so she could fix him with her huge, bloodshot eyes.

“Hello,” Nicholas said gently, edging a mite closer, clutching the poker tight with both hands against his chest. “Remember me? From a minute ago? How are you feeling? You really should lie back down, I think, there could be residual—”

The girl lunged at him with a banshee’s screech, her arms outstretched to grab him by the throat.

He screamed and brandished the poker, smacking her away, and she tumbled off of the bed onto the ground in a heap. She was only down for a few seconds, however, before she began to crawl across the floor towards him. Nicholas jabbed the poker at her in an attempt to force her back, or at the very least prevent her from advancing, but she reached out and grabbed the end of it, wrenching it right out of his grasp. He stumbled back, overbalanced, and Alfred just barely caught him. He dragged Nicholas hastily away from the girl.

They watched in mute horror and she used the poker to lever herself to a standing position, her whole body crooked at odd angles as if she’d forgotten which direction her joints were supposed to bend.

“Miss—” Alfred croaked out, but he didn’t get much further than that. She shrieked again, a single high, sustained note of incomprehensible madness, and lunged forward, swinging the poker clumsily at them. They fled, and the poker instead swept all the test tubes and potion bottles off the writing desk.

“My things!” Nicholas cried, but Alfred grabbed his brother by the back of shirt and began hauling him away from the girl. She seemed momentarily distracted by the sound of breaking glass, and she lifted the poker again to bring it down hard on the desk, and then again and again, until the wood began to crack and splinter.

“What do we do, what do we do?” Nicholas blabbered, wringing his hands.

“Get that poker away from her before she brains one of us, first of all,” Alfred replied, looking around the room. The chair of the writing desk had been knocked over as they had scrambled past it, and it was just close enough for him to reach without putting himself within range of the poker. He inched forwards while the girl was still distracted and grabbed the back of the chair by the tips of his fingers, dragging it towards himself and lifting it so he held it with the legs outwards.

“Hey!” he shouted, and the girl froze mid-swing, the poker lifted over her head. “Drop that thing this instant, young lady!”

Her head turned with agonizing slowness until she was looking directly at him. Her mouth opened, but this time, a croaking whisper rattled from her throat.

“You…”

Alfred faltered ever so slightly, and he swallowed hard. “I mean it,” he warned her.

“What have you done to me?” She took a jerky step forwards, and the poker whistled as it cut through the air. Alfred caught it with the legs of the chair, but she hardly seemed to notice and kept advancing without breaking stride.

Alfred backed away, catching each of the blows the girl was raining down again and again on the chair between them, Nicholas retreating behind him.

“Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit,” Nicholas was hissing repeatedly, close to complete panic. “Dear lord, she’s going to kill us!”

“Shut up!” Alfred grunted, though he didn't disagree.

Nicholas’s heel knocked into something as he took another step back, and one of the dozens of candles that had been arranged around the room was knocked over and began to roll away. None of them noticed, until it rolled right into one of the open books that was still laid out on the floor, and the old, dry pages immediately caught fire.

The flames spread with a vengeance, leaping from book to book as if they had a life of their own, and within seconds the fire was utterly out of control. All three of them froze to stare at the growing flames, and they watched as if in a horrified trance as the fire spread from the books to the writing desk, to the window curtains, to the bed, and into the ceiling rafters in a matter of half a minute.

“Oh for God’s sake,” Nicholas squeaked weakly.

His voice seemed to bring the girl back to reality—or whatever she was experiencing as reality—and her violent attention was turned back to them. Before they had time to react, she dropped the poker and ran at them, bursting into a full sprint from only a few feet away.

Alfred just barely caught her upper body between the legs of the chair, but she was close enough to reach out and grab him by the throat. Her nails dug in hard, breaking the tender skin as she pulled him towards her gnashing mouth. Alfred tried to scream, but her iron grip was cutting off his air.

Before his sense of self-preservation could talk him out of it, Nicholas stooped and picked up the abandoned poker that had rolled to his feet. He gave it a wild swing that missed Alfred’s head by inches, cracking the girl upside the skull hard enough to drop her like a sack of bricks.

Alfred scrambled away, coughing and clutching his throat. The fire blazed around them, consuming more and more of the room with every passing moment. Smoke was rapidly filling the air and the heat was beginning to become unbearable. The girl on the floor, already beginning to stir again, was between them and the door.

“What do we do, what do we do?” Nicholas said, more than half hysterically, dropping the bloodied poker as if it had bitten him.

“We cut our losses,” Alfred replied, grabbing his brother by the arm. “It’s time we make our exit. Quick, while she’s down, grab—”

But there wasn’t time. The girl lifted her head from the floor, her rolling eyes finally settling on the brothers. Her head had been split open by Nicholas’s blow and semi-congealed blood poured down her face, staining her hair and nightgown. She didn't seem to notice, and once she remembered how to work her legs she was back on her unsteady feet, advancing again.

“Death! Death!” she threatened—or perhaps pleaded—and bits of bloody hair and skull fragments fell away in chunks as she staggered towards them.

“Alfred!” Nicholas shrieked, unable to run, unable to even look away.

Alfred felt the bile rising up in his throat, but he swallowed it down and dropped to his knees, grabbing the poker Nicholas had let fall. He swiped it at the girl’s ankles, sweeping her legs out from under her just as she reached down to grasp him by the hair. She fell nearly on top of him, pinning him beneath her clumsy, dead weight.

Nicholas broke free from his stupefied horror and shoved her off. She rolled, her limbs windmilling as she went, and Alfred was able to scramble out from under her. He was covered in her blood, dark and sticky and stinking of death.

He didn’t give her a chance to regain her feet a second time. He brought the poker down again and again, holding it in both hands and raising it high above his head with every swing. Blood was splattered across the room and over the brothers with every blow, with every upswing. Nicholas held his hands over his eyes, watching mutely through his barely parted fingers.

                                                         *   *   *

Nearly a full minute later, all was silent in the room, apart from the crackling of the ever spreading flames.

Alfred let the poker fall from his hands. It clattered to the floor, the sound somewhat muffled by the pool of dark viscous liquid it landed in.

“Is she…?” Nicholas asked.

“Very.” Alfred tried to wipe his face with his sleeve, but only succeeded in turning splatters of blood into smears. “Get your stuff.”

“All my books…” Nicholas waved a tremulous hand towards the piles of burning paper.

“Your alchemy tools, then.”

Nicholas shook his head. “I don’t want… I don’t think I’ll be needing them again.”

“Alright.” Alfred straightened up and swept his hair back from his brow. Blood and sweat held it in place. “Time to go then, I think.”

Alfred stepped over the splayed legs of the girl. Nicholas inched all the way around her, trying not to look at the messy lump above her shoulders. When Alfred opened the door, black smoke poured out into the hallway. Nicholas closed it carefully behind them.

When they went down the stairs, they found Mr. and Mrs. Hopkins waiting for them on the landing, looking extremely concerned.

“We heard a lot of—good god, what is that? Is that—is that blood?” Mr. Hopkins stared at them with alarm. Mrs. Hopkins gave a funny little sound halfway between a gasp and a shriek, and swooned. Her husband just barely caught her before she hit the ground.

Alfred cleared his throat. “We regret to inform you that, despite our best efforts, the attempt was ultimately unsuccessful. Our sincerest apologies, and condolences. If we could perhaps have our coats fetched, please?”

“What—what—” Mr. Hopkins kept repeating. There came the sudden sound of wood splintering from upstairs, possibly the bed frame, or a ceiling beam weakened by the fire. Nicholas jumped nearly out of his skin, and Alfred glanced back up the dark stairway.

“On second thought, forget the coats. A little rain never hurt anyone. Come on, Nicholas.” Alfred pushed past the Hopkinses, dragging Nicholas by the wrist behind him. Alfred threw open the front door and marched right out of it into the torrential rain, but Nicholas grabbed the door frame as he passed through and clung to it for dear life, jerking Alfred, who was still holding onto his wrist, to a halt as well.

“Erm, you might want to call the fire department,” Nicholas suggested.

“Fire?” Mr. Hopkins echoed dully.

“Yes, the fire department. There’s a rather bad fire going on upstairs. Ah, yes, that’s the smoke coming down the stairs now. I would recommend evacuating immediately, I think.”

“Our daughter—” warbled Mrs. Hopkins.

“Is—” Nicholas hesitated. Is in a better place seemed neither true nor appropriate. “Is unlikely to be much bothered by the fire anymore. Beside, you know, cremation saves a lot on funeral costs.”

Mr. Hopkins was caught somewhere between throwing a punch, and fainting dead away.

“Time to go,” snarled Alfred, giving Nicholas a firm yank to detach him from the door frame. The brothers didn’t bother to walk stately away from the burning house. They ran, the two wizards soon swallowed by rain and darkness, only the sound of their splashing footsteps lingering behind them.

                                                             END