The first breath upon returning from the grave was always the hardest. Max Gallian filled their lungs with air, the freshest they’d had in days, in a single desperate intake. Fingers clasped fruitlessly against the cold steel of the gurney.
They lay, naked except for a thin blue blanket, on a hospital gurney. They weren’t strapped down. Opening their eyes hurt at first, but it helped that the room was dark.
There was a sound, people coughing.
“Who’s there?”
They couldn’t see, not quite yet. This was troubling.
“Rosa Rook’s not done with ya,” a man’s voice answered. “Get up. We were just able to bring ya back accordin’ to the procedure, but you gotta do the other two.”
Other two?
Max squinted against the darkness. Outlines emerged out of a dark blur. Human figures. More gurneys. People on them.
“Wha- what?” they croaked.
“You gotta revive these two,” the man’s voice came again. A hand pointed from one silhouette down at the gurneys. “He said ya could. Ya knew how to bring people back, from a state like this.”
Max was not precisely a necromancer. Truth be told, they were more of an anti-necromancer. The curse of the ghost-blooded was a horrible thing, the veil a torment to pass through. Breaching it was simply… wrong. So what had happened here?
Both bodies had toe tags. One read “Roksana Mahdavi - aka Facet”. The other read “Kamley Saunders - aka Iconoclast”. Both about the same age. Both apparently dead. No breathing. Skin pale, everything motionless.
“What happened to us?” Max asked.
The man answers after a moment’s hesitation. “Rosa Rook. Made some kinda deal with someone on the Other Side. Put you three into a death-trance, I guess it’s called. Like you’re dead, only you’re not. AEGIS had custody of you three, but no point in holdin’ onto a corpse. They turned ya over to their Department 42 for autopsy. That’s how we gotcha.”
Max nodded. But made a deal with who? This is concerning.
“I can bring them back. I require solitude.”
The men looked at each other.
“It means, leave.”
The apparent leader gestured to his fellows, and the pack departed. Max began to speak the words, in a language known only by the dead and dreaming gods of the Afternight.
