“There’s always a price,” I muttered, and took another series of pictures.

“These bodies are probably covered in a shell of frustrated bacteria by now. Don’t touch them, and we’re washing our hands as soon as we get out of here.”

That was enough to make me glance away from my phone. “What? Why?”

“Because I don’t want to explain to your father why I let you melt, that’s why.” Alice stood, moving away from the bodies. “Take your pictures, and then let’s get out of here. I feel the strong need to bathe myself in bleach.”

“. . . oh.” Magic didn’t supersede the natural world: it just modified it for a while, making some things more possible and other things less likely. Preserving flesh beyond the usual rot-by date would mean keeping the bacteria that would normally be breaking it down at bay. Not destroying it—not unless you wanted the flesh to be preserved forever. Which brought me to my next question: “How do people eat things they’ve preserved with these spells if they’re always covered in flesh-eating bacteria?”

“There’s another set of spells you can use to break the seal when you’re ready. Sort of a low-grade local sterilization. It’s still not what I’d call safe, but it’s better than what you’d get if you decided to lick the contents of your pantry.”

I wrinkled my nose. “Grandma, that’s gross.”

“Maybe so, but it’s true.” Alice stepped daintily over Poppy’s legs, walking back over to me. “Do you have all the pictures you need?”

“Yes.” I looked around one last time. The bodies of the dead seemed to look at me accusingly. I should have saved them. Maybe not all of them—I couldn’t have known anything was wrong when Raisa and Graham had died—but the more recent deaths were absolutely on my head. I just needed to make sure there weren’t going to be any more. “Dad should be able to narrow down the school of magic from what we’ve got so far.”

“Good; let’s get out of here.” Alice started for the door. I followed her.

We were halfway there when it slammed shut and two shadows peeled away from the walls, resolving into rangy male bogeymen in dark jeans and button-down shirts. One of them was holding a pair of knives. The other had a sawed-off shotgun. Both grinned, showing their teeth in what was probably meant to be a threatening display. We were petite human women in a room full of corpses, after all. By all rights, we should have been terrified.

Too bad we’d never been very good at doing what by all rights we should have done.

“You’re not going anywhere,” said one bogeyman. The other didn’t say anything: he just kept grinning, which was either intended to freak us out, or . . . no, he didn’t look like a naturally jubilant person. He was trying to freak us out.

“Oh?” asked Alice. Her voice was suddenly an octave higher, filled with the sort of confusion I was used to hearing from first-year dance students. She sounded like she only had two brain cells left, and they were engaged in a fight to the death over who got to pick today’s shade of eyeliner. “Are you sure? Because I thought we were going over there.”

She pointed to the door. Her hand was empty. Anyone who’d ever met her would have recognized that as a final opportunity for escape. If they backed down now, Grandma might not feel obligated to kill them.

The bogeyman with the shotgun racked a shell into position. “We were hired to keep this room secure. We’ll get paid extra for the pair of you. You’re pretty. Our boss might like your corpses for his little art project.”

“Oh, wow, how much do you know about the sculpture?” I made my eyes big and round, trying to project innocence in his direction as hard as I could. I was better at coquettish banter than I was at seeming like butter wouldn’t melt in my mouth, but it was worth a try. I couldn’t let Alice have all the fun. “It’s really avant-garde. Like, is that real meat?”

“Those are human bodies, bitch, and you’re going to join them,” replied the bogeyman.

Alice and I exchanged a look.

“Sexist,” I said.

“Speciesist,” she said.

“Asshole,” I said.

“Agreed,” she said.

“Eyes front while I’m killing you,” snapped the bogeyman, who’d been looking increasingly confused throughout this exchange. Apparently, his targets weren’t supposed to banter.

Here’s the thing about chatting when you’re expected to shut up and let yourself be attacked: if you do it carelessly, it can get you gutted. But if you do it well, before things get bad, it can put your enemies so far off-balance that they don’t know what to do next. It’s confusing and difficult and problematic. Spider-Man is a master of the art of the battlefield quip. Since he’s fictional, the rest of us have to make do with a blank expression and a perky comment about the size of the enemy’s knives.