The alchemical preparations were made first. Clouds of multi-colored vapors rose around Nicholas's head as he began mixing arcane powders and liquids at the writing desk, infusing the tinctures with trickles of his magic. When he was eventually satisfied with his results, he was left with three separate potions, which each went into a syringe. They were relatively simple concoctions, just enough to bring a sort of pale echo of life to a body. It would start the heart beating, the lungs breathing, the neurons firing. Without the animas, the spirit, however, that was all the girl would ever be. A living body, without a soul.

With the potions complete, Nicholas applied himself studied the vague Greek account of the Egyptian ritual, attempting to recreate an ancient spell from mis-translations and wishful thinking. In the meantime, Alfred painstakingly prepared one intricate summoning circle on the floorboards around the bed, and a second circle in miniature on the upper part of the dead girl's chest, just below her collar bone.

“Are you ready?” Alfred asked, tossing the pieces of chalk haphazardly back into Nicholas’s bag of wizardry.

“No,” Nicholas sighed, closing the book. “But I don’t think I ever will be. All I have is a translation of a translation of an incantation, and a casual mention that it took five Egyptian priests working together to supply enough energy to feed and maintain the spell.”

“Well, I’ve easily got the same amount of power as three average magicians,” Alfred pointed out. “Plus your own power puts us at the equivalent of four… well, almost four, but I’m sure I can put in a little extra effort and pick up the slack.”

“Really?” said Nicholas, raising a doubtful eyebrow as he placed the three syringes side by side on the bed next to the dead girl. “As you well know, you’re the powerhouse between the two of us, you’ll be doing most of the work, magically speaking. I’d say what we are about to attempt will be as physically straining as, oh, running a marathon. Have you been training for a marathon during the last few months, by chance?”

“I can handle it,” Alfred replied, his lips puckering.

Nicholas looked pointedly at the slight gut that sat on his brother’s broad physique.

“I can handle it,” Alfred repeated heatedly.

Nicholas shrugged. “Then I suppose we’d better get started.”

The brothers positioned themselves on opposite sides of the bed, facing each other over the girl’s body. Nicholas passed Alfred a piece of paper on which he had written the incantation down in neat block letters. He didn’t have one for himself, he had it memorized. Nicholas began the chant, every word slow and deliberate, and Alfred listened to his cadence until he picked up the rhythm.

Then Alfred joined in too, and almost immediately there was a shift in the air. A flood of magic burst out of Alfred’s every pore, hitting the borders of the living world like a tsunami. Something at the edge of reality flickered, and an unseen thread caught. They continued to chant in tandem, and they could feel a tugging sensation inside their minds, but the minutes dragged on and the point of weakness did not grow. Alfred and Nicholas exchanged an uncertain look, unable to speak without interrupting the spell.

Alfred mimed an opening motion with his hands, and then gave a “what’s going on?” shrug.

Nicholas shrugged back, his silently saying “I don’t know, do I?”.

Alfred gestured with his hands as if to say “more, more”.

Nicholas got the message, and closed his eyes. He poured all of his energy into the spell, every last drop of magic he had in his body gathered together and thrust into the ritual. His tensed limbs started to tremble as the physical strain hit him like a sledgehammer, his body overwhelmed by the effort.

It was enough, just barely, and the weak spot in the fabric of reality thinned a little further. Somewhere in the center, a hole began to grow.

The opening between the world of the living and the world of the dead looked like the surface of dark water: almost reflective and full of blackness, far deeper than light could travel.

With the rift created, the incantation was no longer needed to keep it open and the brothers broke off their chant. The power of their magic was still required however, and beads of sweat were breaking across Nicholas’s forehead despite the coldness of the room as he struggled to push his magic to its limits.

“I can take care of the summoning,” Alfred said, looking at Nicholas with a worried frown.

Nicholas just nodded.

Alfred gathered up his own deeper reservoirs of magic and began to summon the spirit of the girl. He could feel the heaviness of her body in the air, and he could feel the way it dragged on something on the other side of the rift. It was a pull that the thing on the other end of the summoning could not fight.

Alfred could sense the spirit drawing nearer. The barbs of the spell dug themselves in deeper the closer to the rift it came, but now he was beginning to feel the strain of maintaining two spells simultaneously.

His attention to the magic he was using to keep the rift open faltered for a moment as he tried to see if he could draw in the spirit faster, and the edges of the rift trembled and began to knit back together. He scrambled to shove a burst of magic back into the veil, but in doing so the summoning spell weakened and he felt the spirit begin to slip away. Sweat beaded on his brow as he struggled to regain control of both spells, the force of his magic sloshing wildly between one and the other. He felt like a man losing his balance on a tightrope, trying not to over correct in either direction as he wobbled dangerously from side to side.

“Alfred,” Nicholas grunted, in the middle of his own crisis and barely able to croak out the word without losing his concentration. “Are you—?”

“I’m fine,” Alfred hissed back. “Just keep going, I’ve got it under control.” Slowly, he was equalizing again, and the rift seemed to stabilize.

The spirit beyond the veil began to be drawn back once again, and while the process was slow going, slow and steady would have to win this race. The effort of maintaining both spells was becoming more and more strenuous with every passing second though, and Alfred clenched his jaw hard in order to keep his teeth from rattling in their sockets.

Somewhere in the strange well-like depths of the rift, vague, pale shapes seemed to be moving, drawing closer. As they came ever nearer, roughly human forms started to emerge from the darkness, as featureless as mist. One of the ghostly figures was being drawn in more swiftly than the others, and within a minute had been pulled right up against the opening. The entity strained against the rift, swelling against the barrier like a rising tide of water, but did not break through. Alfred made a choice, and abandoned the spell that was keeping the rift open entirely to pour every ounce of magic he had into the summoning.

The veil immediately vibrated like a plucked bowstring and began to zip itself shut, fading out of existence in the space of a few seconds, but the force of Alfred’s summoning was enough to wrench the spirit through a moment before it sealed.

Both brothers collapsed to the ground, but Nicholas cried out, “Capture it! Don’t let it dissipate!”

Alfred groaned, rolling over on the floor and pushing himself onto his hands and knees. He screwed his eyes shut and focused only on allowing what little magic he had left to fill the air like smoke, until he felt it surround a spectral energy. He gave a mental tug and the web of his magic tightened, enveloping the dazed ghost and anchoring it to a point just above the girl’s body.

Nicholas used the edge of the bed to pull himself to his feet. He and Alfred looked up and saw the ghost, a pearly, translucent mirror image of the corpse below it. The ghost was looking down at her body, her far-away eyes glazed with confusion. She mouthed something, trying to speak, but the dead had no voices.

“Do it,” grunted Alfred, “inject her. I don’t know how long I can hold her.”

Nicholas immediately grabbed the first syringe, and plunged the four inch needle between her ribs into her heart. “Five minutes,” he panted, leaning on the bed for support. “You just have to hold her for five minutes.”

“And then what?” Alfred asked, a twitch starting up in his right eye. “I think I’m barely going to have the energy to keep this up for that long, I doubt I’ll be able to bind her spirit back into her body when the time comes.”

“I’ll take care of that,” Nicholas assured him.

“You’re exhausted too. Will you have the power?”

“Yes, I will,” Nicholas replied, not meeting Alfred’s gaze. He glanced up at the ghost of the girl, which seemed to be becoming more aware of what was happening. It was struggling in midair, fighting against unseen constraints.

A minute passed.

Then two.

Three.

Four.

Alfred was breathing heavily, still on his hands and knees. He had dropped his head to the floorboards and his hands were clenched into fists, his whole body trembling.

Nicholas stared at his watch, his eyes glued to the second hand, his other hand holding the corpse’s cold wrists, fingers on her pulse. It had started up 45 seconds after the injection, as he had known it would. The effects of his potions were the only reliable parts of this entire insane endeavor. Finally, at 5 minutes, 18 seconds, her pulse was regular and rapid enough to administer the second and third injections.

“Just a few more seconds and then I’ll take over,” he assured Alfred, who only grunted from the floor in response. Nicholas picked up the second syringe and emptied it into the girl, the third following a few moments later. He felt like a drained lake, but he mustered up a tiny trickle of magic that had settled in the well of his stomach and began the binding spell, using the pentacle on the body’s chest as the focus.

Alfred immediately released his hold on the ghost when he felt Nicholas’ binding catch the spirit. He collapsed entirely to the ground, rolling onto his back so he could stare up at the ceiling. Once free, the ghost wrenched away from the bed, but Nicholas’ binding had already entwined her. She fought it as hard as she could, twisting in the air and mouthing silent screams, but she was drawn inexorably down, down. She resisted for nearly a full minute, and both brothers watched in fascinated horror as the will of the girl’s spirit battled against Nicholas’ magic. But the binding of a weak magician was still more powerful than a pale spirit of the dead, and with a bizarre elongation of her insubstantial form, she was sucked down into her own body.

The summoning broke and Nicholas dropped to his knees, just as Alfred found the strength to push himself up onto his. They knelt on either side of the bed, clutching the sheets for support, and stared with bated breath at the body.

With such shallowness that it was almost impossible to be sure it was really happening, her chest began to rise and fall as she took her first breaths.

“Look!” Alfred hissed, but Nicholas waved him to be quiet.

“That’s just the effects of the second injection, force-starting the respiratory and circulatory functions. The third injection reanimates the brain, getting the nervous system active—look, there it goes.”

The girl’s fingers began to twitch, but then the spasms spread across her body and grew more and more powerful until her limbs were jerking around wildly, forcing the brothers to duck to avoid being hit. Her back arched, her head tilted so far backwards that Alfred thought her neck would surely snap, and all the while her arms and her legs thrashed through the air. Alfred struggled to his feet, reaching out to try to push her back down on the bed, afraid she was going to be thrown off it.

“Should we hold her down? She’s going to get hurt like this!”

“Don’t touch her!” Nicholas snapped, and Alfred recoiled. A moment later, the fit ended and the girl went limp again with her limbs sprawled out, her head rolling to one side. “Wait,” Nicholas breathed, his eyes fixed on the girl’s face. He could see her pulse beating steadily in the bulging veins on her neck, but that meant nothing. Nothing yet.

Then her eyes opened.