“Right,” I say, and look at Johnny. “Can you get that?” I ask him. And check the outer office, I don’t say aloud. Johnny knows what to do.
A moment later we’re alone. I smile at Alex, keeping my teeth to myself; the glamoured mask echoes my facial expressions. He’s not much to look at. Twenty-four years old, about one-eighty centimeters, skinny at seventy kilos. Dark hair cut in an I-don’t-care nerd crop parted on the left, brown eyes, trying to grow a beard, bless. I took an instant dislike to him the first time we met, possibly because he thought I was a burglar, but I’ve got to admit he did a bang-up job in Yorkshire—which is why he’s banged up right now, unfortunately. Then I glance at Cassie. She looks to be about twenty-two-ish, with turquoise hair in a pixie cut and high cheekbones. She’s taller than Alex, and slightly built: pretty in an elfin kind of way, before you notice that the tops of her multiply-pierced ears rise to short points. She’s more Mr. Spock than Galadriel, though; with the right hairdo she could pass for normal. While Alex is dressed in M&S office casual, Cassie is clearly an invader from the perkygoth dimension: she looks like she just stepped out of a Shadowrun LARP. Which I take as a clear warning sign that she’s one hell of a lot more socially aware than her dutiful nerd-boy minder and companion. Here is a woman who knows how to work on people’s misconceptions, who has absorbed a shitload of cultural tropes about elves, and who is playing to the peanut gallery for all she’s worth. But two can play at that game.
“What’s this about, anyway?” asks Alex, a guarded expression on his face. He’s not quite in guilty schoolboy mode, but not far off, and if we slide into adversarial mode this isn’t going to work, so I lean back in my armchair and try to look nonchalant as I check him out with my inner eye. He seems to be clean: no sign of obvious tampering, beyond the spent geas his companion briefly had him under. Then I glance at Cassie and nearly fall off my chair.
“You’re not a lawyer! NoNoNo you naughty magus—no, wait, what are you?”
Cassie stands so fast that I recoil instinctively and Alex is suddenly in full-on defensive boyfriend mode with added fangs and glowing eyes, and I’m still shaking my head and blinking away afterimages because fuck me so that’s what the Host of Air and Darkness’s binding geas looks like—“Wait!” I raise a hand and rip my face off.
“You! What are you doing here?” Alex demands, then after a slightly-too-long pause, “Sir?” He licks his lips. “Is it something to do with what happened to the oath, yesterday?”
Well fuck of course he’d have felt it. Even if the binding geas is flaky when it comes to PHANGs. I shake my head, trying to dislodge the sweat trickling down my nose. No going back now. “The government has been rooted by hostiles under cover of the chaos and the agency is under attack by the Cabinet Office,” I say bluntly. “When I say under attack, I mean we’ve been defunded and everyone is out of a job, except for those who are being rounded up and arrested. There is a contingency plan for surviving this sort of thing and I am here to retrieve you for Continuity Operations. The standard formulation of the oath was broken in the process. I’m meant to swear you in, then get you out of here.”
“Who is he, Alex?” Cassie gives me the dirty old man stink-eye and I can feel the fine hairs on the back of my neck prickling under the heat of her gaze.
“This is Mr. Howard, like I told you about,” Alex tells her. Back to me: “What happens if I don’t want to come?”
Decision time. I cross my fingers mentally. “Then you have a big problem. The government is setting up a replacement agency, but they’re not keeping anyone on and they don’t seem to have made any provision for feeding you—the PHANGs—during the transition period.” Alex winces at feeding: so our boy has issues? Interesting. “They may be willing to hang you out to dry, but we are not.”
“This ‘we’ you’re using—you mean what? Continuity Operations? What is that?”
Cassie punches him lightly on the arm. “The ones he is geas-bound by, can’t you see? It’s obvious!” She points at something behind my head. “Can’t you see them, fang-boy?”
I take a deep breath. “If you swear the new oath and come with me now, I can take you to Mhari who will explain everything. But we don’t have time to go over it now.” Dammit, where’s Johnny? He’s taking too long. I pick up my mask and shake it to try to get the moisture out. “We’ve got to get you out of the camp before the enemy get their hands on you.”
Alex’s eyes widen and something feral shows in Cassie’s expression and for a numb instant I think I’ve lost them but then I realize that the door behind me is opening and it’s not Johnny. I begin to stand up as I turn my head and see a straight-haired ice-blonde supermodel in a black suit that screams barrister. She’s clutching a stack of legal case notes but something about her feels hinky, and behind her there’s another suit, this time male and there really is something wrong, it’s in their minds, they’re not hosts to the dreaming tongue eaters but soul-ridden by something hungry and—
“Who are you?” demands the woman. “What are you doing with my clients?” Raising her paperwork defensively in front of her as the thing in her mind hisses hungrily at me and writhes—
“Stand aside,” the dead-voiced male lawyer tells her and he’s one of them too and it’s making my head hurt with its hunger and I think he’s got a gun—
Johnny punches him in the kidneys and he drops the gun as the blonde woman dumps her stack of papers and takes a little step, then tries to kickbox me in the left eye with her spike heel. I dodge and open my inner mouth and bite and there’s a stabbing electric pain and smoke as the ward she’s wearing shatters and she stumbles, but she’s still coming and the lump I bit out of her soul tastes absolutely foul and utterly not human at all. I’m trying to remember the Enochian command word for the stun macro I memorized but I fumble it and Suit Number Two is not going down but turns and lays into Johnny in a blur of jabs and feints that Johnny barely manages to block, and his mind isn’t normal either—