It was still pouring rain when they arrived at the Hopkins’s residence. The butler answered the door almost immediately, but the brothers were soaked in the short time between exiting the cab and stepping over the threshold.

"If I may take your coats and hats, please," the butler asked curtly. "If you will wait in the drawing room, I shall summon Mr. and Mrs. Hopkins."

The Hopkinses were not a long time coming. Dressed in black, the husband’s arm around his wife’s shoulders, they greeted Alfred and Nicholas.

“Do you… do you think you can help?” Mrs. Hopkins asked them at once. Her wide, red rimmed eyes were carefully guarded, afraid of the answer.

“Of course!” said Alfred, at the same moment Nicholas said, “Probably not.” The brothers shot each other identical glares.

“We will have to take a look at the, erm, circumstances in person before we can be certain of anything,” Alfred amended.

“You should know that no attempt at what you are asking has ever been successful,” Nicholas warned the couple.

“We know,” said Mr. Hopkins. “But we're willing to try anything.”

The bereaved couple led the brothers back into the front hall and up a narrow flight of stairs to the second floor.

It took Nicholas several minutes longer than the others to reach the landing. He was slowed down by the massive bag he half dragged behind him, stuffed to bursting with heavy books on the history of magic; alchemical theory; biographies of various historical warlocks and wizards; and grimoires full of every kind of spell there was, including several that he had invented himself. Whatever space in the bag that wasn’t taken up by books had been crammed with candles; dried herbs; the body parts of various animals; and test tubes full of unnatural liquids. The bag weighed nearly as much as Nicholas himself, and he struggled red-faced and sweating to drag it up the stairs, step by step.

“Oughtn’t we help him?” Mr. Hopkins asked Alfred as they stood at the top of the landing and watched Nicholas’s slow progress.

“No, that would only hurt his pride,” Alfred replied.

Eventually Nicholas made it, winded and sweating.

“Her room is right down here,” said Mrs. Hopkins, and the small party headed to the room at the very end of the hall. Mr. Hopkins opened the bedroom door for them, and Alfred and Nicholas stepped inside.

All of the lights within had been extinguished, and it took several seconds for their eyes to adjust to the darkness.

The young woman lay on her back on the bed, her hands folded over her chest. Her dark hair was long and loose, the depth of its color at a stark contrast to her bloodless flesh. Sunken eyes and hollow cheeks seemed to take up most of her face.

“She looks awfully dead to me,” Nicholas whispered out of the corner of his mouth.

“Try a little positive thinking for once,” Alfred hissed back, and turned to face the Hopkinses. “I would highly recommend that the two of you wait downstairs while we work. The magical process can sometimes be... disturbing to the uninitiated.”

“Y-yes, of course,” stammered Mr. Hopkins, looking more than a little alarmed. He took his wife by the arm and began to draw her away.

Before they got far, Nicholas turned away from the dead girl and added, “Oh, and whatever you may hear, or think you hear, please don’t interrupt. If the door is closed, let it stay closed. We shall come fetch you when we have finished, whatever the results may be.”

Mr. and Mrs. Hopkins scurried out of the room, almost slamming the door behind them.

Alfred rounded on Nicholas. “Oh good going. Lord knows what they are going to think we’re doing up here now!”

“I just don’t want them barging in before we’ve finished,” snapped Nicholas testily. “In 1514, an Italian alchemist successful brought a three day dead woman back to life, for all of six minutes. Most of which she spent screaming, before dying in agony for a second time. Do you really want this girl’s parents to witness something like that?”

Alfred had to admit that Nicholas made a decent point, and with only a little more bickering, the brothers began to make their preparations.

The curtains of the four poster bed were drawn back and secured in place. Stumps of old candles were carefully arranged according to points of power about the room, dripping wax onto the hardwood floor and creating a fire hazard. Nicholas pulled out dozens books and spread them across the floor, each one opened to the page he needed to reference. In the meantime, Alfred set up the other supplies on a writing desk against one wall. With a row of delicate test tubes neatly arranged on one side, and a foggy jar labeled “eye of newt” on the other, it was a strange spectrum of the scientific to the supernatural.

“Alright,” Nicholas said, on his hands and knees with his nose nearly pressed to the pages of one book, “the alchemical process for revivification is fairly straight forward, I should have everything we need. How many syringes did I bring?”

“Uh, three? No, four.”

“That’ll do. That Italian alchemist I mentioned earlier relied solely on alchemy in his attempt, and while I’d say it was the most successful to date, it was obviously still deeply flawed. Now over here,” he crawled over to another book and scanned the page until he found the passage he was looking for, “it says that Ancient Egyptian magicians were able to use incantations to thin the barrier between the worlds of the living and the dead. They didn’t record their methods, but the ancient Greeks did, and a partial account of how it was does was preserved… of course, you can’t always trust second hand Greek accounts. And if we even somehow can get her spirit back from the other side, we still need to capture it somehow, and then find a way to anchor it back in her body. It will never work unless we can figure that bit out.”

“Can she… possess her own body?” suggested Alfred.

“Demons possess, spirits do not.”

“Huh. You can summon spirits, can’t you? They do it in seances all the time.”

“Spirits that haven’t already passed on. I suppose a ghost could theoretically be bound to something, that's essentially what a haunting is, after all... But we still can’t even get that far. A departed soul, one that has passed out of this world, is unreachable. While the Egyptian spell was able to thin the veil enough to be able to call back those who have already crossed, I don’t think it was able to pull them back into the living world. As far as I understand it, it only made it possible for them to communicate across the void.”

“What if we did the veil… thinning… thing, and then we tried to summon her? If we weaken the barrier enough, could a summoning yank her over to our side?”

“I have no idea. That would require an obscene amount of magical power, plus a pretty strong physical anchor for her to be drawn towards. Something that was deeply connected to her in life, that we could use to focus the summoning on; something that would draw her soul towards it like a magnet.”

Alfred looked pointedly towards the girl’s corpse on the bed.

“Er, yes, something like that. That would do.”

“Right,” Alfred nodded with finality. “So we weaken the barrier between life and death; summon the girl’s spirit back through to our side using her corpse as a spiritual fishing lure; I capture her ghost in a magical barrier before it has time to dissipate; and then we just draw her soul back into her body and bind her there. Snip snap, job’s done. That doesn’t sound too hard to me.”

Nicholas stared incredulously at his brother. “Yes, right, and you can walk all the way around the entire world if you just keep putting one foot in front of the other. Never mind the oceans and all the sharks.”

“Well we’re certainly not going to get anywhere by just sitting here talking about all the reasons we’re doomed to failure, are we?” Alfred snapped back.

Nicholas rubbed the back of his neck, grimacing. “I suppose you’re right, as much as I hate to admit it. Besides, the girl is already dead. We can’t make it any worse,” he parroted his brother’s argument, sounding more as though he was trying to convince himself than as if he honestly believed it.