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in here, you’re going down.”
    “What? Trigger ‘mal’—what? Do you mean this?” But when I raised my arm to show them the snake, Jack’s hands went out protectively in front of Jones and Stone.
    Jack pulled something from the inner pocket of his leatherjacket. I half expected a gun, but instead it was one of those whip-thin, segmented car antennas. He pointed it at me menacingly, the button tip waving from the sudden movement.
    People around the office ducked behind desks or took up other defensive postures.
    It was like I had a bomb strapped to my chest, not just a butt-ugly tattoo around my arm.
    Meanwhile, Jack began tracing a series of lines and circles in the air with his car antenna. Underneath his leather jacket, the Wi-Fi indicator on his T-shirt pulsated brightly.
    My skin itched under the tattoo.
    “What’s going on?” I asked, my eyes frantically searching for a sane answer to this sudden, bizarre turn of events.
    “You don’t know?” Jack paused in the middle of his fourth downward swipe. He shook his head, as if he’d lost track of something. “Bollocks. Do you know how hard it is to spell in binary? Now I’m going to have to start over.”
    “Start what over?” I was so confused that I was on the verge of weeping from frustration.
    Jack must have seen the tears I held back glistening at the corners of my eyes. He dropped the point of the antenna, and frowned into my face, “Are you serious? You have no idea what’s happening?”
    “No,” I said. “You’re all acting like I’m the mad tattooed bomber, and I don’t know why, especially since I had nothing to do with this stupid snake on my arm. One minute, I was doing a normal autopsy like a regular, sane person, and the next this…this…thing jumps out from behind the heart and now it’s on my arm.” I looked to where Officer Jones glared at me from behind Jack’s shoulder. “You should understand,” I said to Jones. Turning to Stone, I added, “You, too. You’re the ones who brought him to me.”
    “Who?” Jones asked.
    “The body! The necromancer, of course!” I yelled.
    “The necromancer,” Officer Jones said slowly, his brows still knit tightly, as if he was trying to unravel a particularly difficult puzzle. “You’re saying this spell isn’t yours? That it came out of the necromancer?”
    Spell?
    Not
that
again.
    “Can we please have a conversation that doesn’t use the word ‘spell’?” I asked.
    “Not until you explain that,” Jones said, pointing to my arm.
    Explain it? How could I?
    Slowly, so as not to alarm anyone, I lifted my arm to inspect the ink. I tried to see what it was that had armed police officers cowering behind their desks. The snake’s eye stared back at me with a kind of dark, unblinking intelligence. I had to admit that, if I were looking at this several months ago, I’d have had no trouble believing it was an evil spell.
    All around the room, people held their breath. A blond woman crouching behind her chair watched me with wide eyes and her hand clasped over her mouth, as if holding back the urge to scream. Were they all afraid of the tattoo because they thought it held some kind of magic? Magic that I was assured by many doctors wasn’t
supposed
to be real?
    The two uniformed cops and Jack waited for my response to their question. I didn’t have an answer I felt comfortable giving. I had no experience with people asking me the details of my delusions and treating them as though they were real or important.
    Finally, I said, “I don’t really know anything about allthis. I mean, I really, really don’t like to think about this too hard, but this thing on my arm started out three-dimensional and came out of the corpse sort of”—what was that word Jack had used?—“unnaturally. Like, as an attack snake.”
    When everyone continued to look at me as if they expected me to explode, I finally gave an exasperated sigh. “Believe me, I don’t like this any more than you do. I