“When a person is dying, you don’t stop to wait for their permission to intervene medically. You know that. You acted on that. The same is true now, for you.”
I’d never even imagined this side of Doomsday. I assumed she didn’t have a nurturing bone in her body. Tough love is still love, though.
“You were right,” Vasilis said. “She was too far gone to heal. We should have soothed her wounds instead of trying to directly reverse the damage. Is that what you want to hear?”
“That’s true,” Doomsday said, “but it’s immaterial. I could have been wrong. You did what you felt you had to, which is always ethically better than doing nothing.”
“Then what are we going to talk about?”
“We’re going to talk about Barrow. Because I don’t know the first thing about emotional support, but I want to get you problem solving instead. I want you to worry about this later. Soon, even. Think of problem solving right now as your emotional tourniquet to stop the bleeding before you can get real support.”
“What does this mean?” Brynn asked, and showed Vasilis a photo of the Greek carving over the door. Vulture and Thursday, who hadn’t yet seen it, stood behind him to look as well.
“None that are living may pass.”
Doomsday nodded. “That’s about what I figured.” She steepled her fingers. “How long have you known that Sebastian Miller was responsible for the resurrection of Isola and Gertrude?”
“I didn’t know.”
“You’re not an idiot.”
“It was only a guess.”
“You’re lucky I’m not in a blaming-people mood,” Doomsday said. “Blaming-people moods are the opposite of getting-shit-done moods, and I’m in a getting-shit-done mood.”
Vasilis nodded weakly. “I had no idea when Isola came back. She wouldn’t talk to us. But when Gertrude came back too, yeah, I suspected.”
“Was he ever in here, ever checking out books on magic?”
“All the good stuff is closed to the public. It’s all up here.”
Thursday nodded.
“He did check out a book on modern Greek, last winter. Returned it not a week later. I was disappointed, because it would be nice to have people locally I could talk to.”
“That’s how he knew the right words for the barrier,” Doomsday said.
“My hand went through the barrier without burning,” I said.
“Let me see it,” Vasilis said. I showed him. He whispered arcane words, throwing them forcefully from his lungs as though afraid of them, then held his hands above my hands. My left hand, my undamaged hand, glowed red. My right hand was unchanged.
“This hand . . .” he said. “It doesn’t have a soul.”
“Cool,” I said. Brynn laughed a little, then got self-conscious. “What does that mean?”
“Practically? Almost nothing. Enough wounds like that one, and you’ll die, but I don’t think it’ll have any effect on you other than that.”
“Okay,” Thursday said. “This is easy enough. The barrier won’t let anyone through who’s living. An undead hand doesn’t count as living. I bet Isola and Gertrude don’t either. Get one of them to head on through, find out what happened.”
“They won’t do it,” I said. “Think about it. They’ve got to know more than they’re telling us already. If they wanted to help more, they’d have offered.”
“Gertrude’s probably in on it,” Thursday said. “They’re married, after all.”
“I get resurrecting your dead wife,” I said. “But I wonder, why Isola?”
“We resurrect Heather,” Vasilis said. “To get through the barrier.”
I looked at Doomsday, expecting her to shoot him down.
“Yeah,” Doomsday said, instead. She put her hand to her cheek, scratching in thought. “Yeah, that would work. She’d be able to go through the boundary.”
“Are you fucking kidding?” Thursday asked.
“Thing is,” Doomsday said, still thinking it over, “I don’t think we could do it without The Book of Barrow. I only know a few of his minor rituals, not resurrection. Also . . . don’t you have to end a life to bring one back?”
“Yes,” he said. “Well, you can bring them back temporarily, as long as the ritual is still being cast. But if you don’t give Barrow his due at the end of the ritual . . . right back to death the person goes.”
“This is really obviously a shit idea,” Thursday said.
“Why?” Doomsday asked. “Are you telling me that if you could bring Heather back, right now, that you wouldn’t do it?”
“It’s unnatural,” Thursday said.
“It’s fucking magic,” Doomsday said. “None of it’s any more or less natural than anything else. I’m not here to just learn about this stuff in the abstract. I’m here to gain and wield power.”
“Over others?” Thursday asked.
“No goddammit, not over others. Everything is power. A fucking gun is power. I used one once to end three lives, but it wasn’t because I wanted to wield power over them, it’s that I needed them to stop wielding power over me. There’s a pretty fucking massive power imbalance in this world, and I don’t see why we should be afraid to correct it.”
Doomsday stood up, bringing her teacup with her, taking a long sip.
“Are humans supposed to fly? I don’t know. We built airplanes, though. Are we supposed to bring back the dead? I don’t know, but EMTs do it all the time. It’s not a question of whether or not it’s ethical to bring Heather back from the dead. It’s whether or not we can, and whether or not it will further our aims.” She turned to face Vasilis. “If it’s a life for a life, will you do it? Will you die for her?”
“Yes,” Vasilis answered, but then doubt clouded his features. “I don’t know.”
“Moot point,” Vulture said. “We don’t have the book. Maybe he’s got it on him, but I bet it’s on the other side of that barrier. I say we send a drone.”
Doomsday laughed.
“I wasn’t joking,” Vulture said. “We get a drone to fly down there with a camera.”
“Where the hell would we get a drone?” Doomsday asked.
“Oh, like I’m the one with the unrealistic plan? I’m not the one planning human sacrifice and reanimating corpses.”
“Oh, shit, wait,” Doomsday said.
“What?”
