“There’s got to be a fire exit,” Mo tells herself. “Where … of course, it’ll be at the opposite end of the lounge. Past the toilets.” She glances round, taking stock.
They’re in the wide corridor leading to the staircase, cloakroom, and the side passage to the chapel. The screams of despair and agony from the communion ceremony beyond the chapel door tell their own tale: the other parasites, the hosts of the Inner Temple—segmented worms, suckling off the rich gonadal blood supply as they control the minds of their mounts—writhe directionlessly, as if cut off from whatever ghastly fount of will directed them. “Where—”
Cassie grips her arm. “The toilets are beyond the lounge, along another corridor.” She points back the way they’ve come, through the lounge and the orgiastic feasting feeders and the screaming, panicking guests. Cassie’s features sharpen as her glamour falls away; she’s gathering her mana, and Mo feels a spasm of relief at the quivering, barely restrained power she feels through the alf?r’s wrist. “We must choose: we can go through the feeders, or past the worms, but—”
Mo instinctively raises her free hand to the glittering borrowed necklace she wears. “This ward’s good for about three minutes. Can you handle the feeders?”
Cassie bares her teeth in an expression that is very unlike a smile. “Watch me.”
“Good.” Mo’s necklace is one of Persephone’s specials; a tiny thread of pearls dangles from the central diadem, and she tugs it viciously until it comes free. She remembers something Bob once said, jokingly, as he lit off a Hand of Glory: Once you pull out the pin, Mr. Hand Grenade stops being your friend. “Let’s go,” she says as the concealed high-end ward lights off, making her teeth buzz with a taste of electricity and regrets.
Cassie lets go of her wrist and doubles back towards the lounge. The wall sconces and spots have gone out, replaced by dim emergency lights, and the first couple of feeders are staggering towards the corridor, still getting used to controlling their fleshbodies. As Cassie approaches they look up, green-glowing eyes casting hollow shadows across their cheekbones: a B-list pop starlet and a posh boy in a half-unbuttoned dress shirt, bow tie dangling. There’s nothing human about their expressions, just a shared feral hunger. They lurch towards her, and Mo, still invisible, murmurs the macro to release one of the canned exorcisms stored in her bracelets. The pop starlet drops like a puppet with severed strings; the boy’s body collapses across her. Cassie glances round. “Waste not thy ammunition,” she says, in the horribly accented dialect of Old Enochian that is the alf?r High Tongue.
“But you”—Mo scans swiftly: they’re still in the corridor and Cassie is concealed from most of the lounge by one wall—“I’m warded, you’re not.”
“Oh, but I am.” In the gloom, Cassie’s smile is terrifying. “My magi can feed my will from a distance, you know.”
Mo bites her tongue. The alf?r magi are castrated PHANGs, bound to service, and the power they can deploy or funnel to Cassie is fueled by blood and lives. “Damn.” She supposes she’s wasted an exorcism macro. But this is not the time for cost-value calculations; swallowing her gorge, Mo shelves the matter for later. “Let’s go,” she says tensely, “clock’s ticking.”
Cassie slithers along the wall like a human shadow, renewing some of her glamour to mimic Mo’s invisibility. She glides, feet not leaving the ground, and sways to avoid a stumbling body in the dark. Mo follows close behind, a trigger word ready on her tongue. There’s a sharp scream, suddenly cut off, from across the room as one of the few still-living humans succumbs to a feeder.
They’re halfway across the room when Mo hears a crash from behind. She looks round and sees a side door banging open across the lounge: an emergency exit from the vestry room attached to the chapel. “Shit,” she mutters, then looks back just as Cassie comes face-to-face with another feeder. It begins to reach for her, and Mo’s heart hammers madly for a moment as Cassie leans into its killing embrace—then the glowing eyes go out and the dead body collapses at her feet. “Go,” she urges, “Schiller’s people are coming!”
Men and women, mostly naked, are spilling into the lounge from the chapel. Mad-eyed and bloodied about the crotch, the men sport impossible, grotesque erections that writhe and squirm like elephantine trunks, cyclostomal mouths opening and closing in a crunch of needle-sharp teeth. The handmaids are maenads, blood spattering their legs, the engorged heads of their parasites peeping out between their thighs and gnashing at the air. They’re only recently inducted and not yet fully under the control of the Lord of the New Flesh, but they are far from mindless as they fan out into the room and work their way into the crowd of feeders, banishing them with a touch. Some of the feeders are aware enough to try to flee, and this leads to a crush at the entrance to the passage to the toilets—directly in Cassie’s path.
Cassie scythes into the milling crowd of feeder-possessed bodies, cutting a path through them like a bowling ball through skittles. Mo hurries to keep up. Behind her she hears a cry: “Catch them!”
“Go,” she urges.
Cassie is slowing. “It stings, in my head,” she complains. “Like wasps!”
“Well, fuck.” Mo swallows, then drops her invisibility and utters the macro to release another blast of banishment at the bodies crowding around them. She’s running out fast. “Coming through! Clear the toilet! Ladies first!”
The remaining feeders shuffle aside, almost as if her urgency means something to their tiny, abhumanly hungry minds—then there’s a crack of gunfire, painfully loud in the confined space, and an answering wet thud and a spray of blood from one of the bodies. “RunRun!” Cassie shouts, and leaps forward. Mo hikes up her gown and kicks her shoes off as she scurries after, and the next shot goes wide, missing her shoulder. Then Cassie is at the end of the corridor and slams into the crash bar on the emergency exit, and Mo follows her onto a steep steel staircase and keeps going.
The emergency stairs tops out in a small vestibule with another crash-barred door, this time warning that it’s alarmed. Mo grabs Cassie’s shoulder before she can open it. “Listen,” she says, panting, “we know what’s behind us; who’s in front?” Footsteps clang from the lower flight.
“Don’t know don’t care just go.” Cassie is febrile, bouncing from foot to foot. “Follow me close!” And before Mo can say anything else she shoves through the exit.
Mo’s earpiece begins to hiss as the door opens. “MADCAP to CANDID, hard contact with SO19! Shots exchanged! CANDID, respond!”
“CANDID here, I’ve got Cassie, exiting via the kitchen block at rear.” Cassie is creeping along a narrow servants’ corridor, windows onto the back garden admitting a wan moonlight glow. “Bad guys in pursuit, shots fired. What’s your position?”