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“You guys?” I asked Wilder and Perry.
“Will we be able to interact with the memory?” Perry asked.
“Not much. You can ask Carlos questions to see if it fires anything new, but you won’t be able to touch or speak to any part of the projection. It’s just coming from his mind, it’s not real. What we’re going to see is only as good as what he remembers. Mind you, he may have seen something that didn’t register as important in his interviews that we’ll understand as being very important. Make sense?”
Perry nodded and pulled a notebook from his pocket.
I was actually stunned by how open he was to this whole idea. Three years ago I’d have been laughed out of a police station or locked up in a psych ward for proposing something like this, and now here we were, standing around a vital piece of police evidence, with a material witness on hand, and the cop was letting me lead the show.
Guess I better not fuck it up.
“All right, now everyone stay quiet.”
I used the barbeque lighter to ignite the two tapered candles, then holding them with their wicks touching, I lowered them into the pot and laid them facing each other among the herbs and flowers. A vaguely pleasant, aromatic smoke unfurled from the pot, billowing up over my head. A small pop told me the flame had already heated enough to break the dried eyes. I dropped the beeswax in next, blinking through the white smoke until I saw it melt, pooling with the yellow and white wax from the candles.
This pot would be a total write-off when this was over.
“Oh, goddess, whose breath is life,
my offering to you is warm on this night.
Oh, goddess, with powers divine,
come for my present, if thy will would be mine.
Oh, Mnemosyne, whose sight never dims,
Join us this night and bless us with your whims.”
I unscrewed the top of the jar and was assaulted by a powerful whiff of formaldehyde. The chemical itself, in too great a quantity, might mess up the balance in the pot. I swallowed hard and held my breath, then reached my hand into the jar.
The brain was slimy and had a spongelike consistency when I dug my fingers into it and pulled it from its suspended-liquid home. It was so slippery I almost dropped it, and had to bite back a curse before it jumped out and spoiled the whole spell.
I used both hands and eased the twenty-pound brain into the smoking pot. Normally something wet and that size would snuff out a small flame, but the fire rose to meet it, perhaps fueled by the formaldehyde, and ignited so quickly I had to scoot back a few inches. Now things were cooking—literally—and the alley stank of burning brain meat.
The amber was last, and this was the part where I needed to be really careful.
“Here is the dreamer, coming to wake,
We would that his dreams were ours to take,
If goddess is willing to answer our call,
This fractured dream will reveal all.”
I tossed the amber into the pot and leapt back a moment before the fire exploded upward in an enormous amethyst plume, filling the whole alley with bright purple light. Ashes rained down over us, falling like huge snowflakes, and we all held our breath.
Had I done it?
I glanced over at Carlos, terrified I might have gotten the last couplet wrong and really messed him up in the process. He was standing stock-still, staring straight ahead, as if he was no longer seeing us at all.
Since I’d been the one standing in his shoes the last time I’d been present for this spell, I had no idea if this was a good sign or not.
Then the body lying at my feet stood up.
Chapter Twenty-Two
It took me an embarrassing amount of time to realize that the thing coming from the corpse was actually a projection. As soon as he walked through me, my mind was set at ease that it was not some zombie version of the victim returning from the dead with a hunger for flesh.
