Then Cassie screams—with rage, not fear—and her hair stands on end and I feel static ripple up and down my skin as she lets rip with all the mojo she’s able to draw from the alf?r Host.
I manage to duck aside and raise an arm to cover my eyes, which is a really good idea because the heat flash feels like an oven door opening in my face. It’s terrifying. For a moment I’m standing just to one side as Cassie channels the combined thaum flux of the entire Host of Air and Darkness, such of it as is confined within the giant magical ward that surrounds the camp. It’s like holding up one end of a USB phone charger cable next to a 400kV national grid transformer farm. Thousands of alf?r and a couple dozen magi, their tame PHANG sorcerers, are all feeding her will, and there’s a deafening double bang and a spray of burning red fat across the side of my face as both headless bodies collapse to the floor, arterial gouts spraying from the stumps of their necks.
Shit! Shit! Panic! No, don’t panic, if she wanted me dead I’d be … well. I straighten up and open my eyes and instantly regret it as the vision in my right eye goes red and blurry and something unspeakable trickles down my neck. I take a deep breath, air heavy with the aroma of fresh blood and hot poached brains. Another deep breath.
“Who, who were—?” Alex demands, sounding as almost-panicky as I feel. Then, a moment later: “Crap, that tastes horrible—what the fuck are they?”
I wipe the worst of the blood and gore off the side of my face and peer down at the bodies. There’s a familiar-ish silver cross pinned to the lapel of the woman’s suit jacket and something inside her is still alive—I leap backwards, shuddering, as her blouse twitches like John Hurt’s stomach in Alien.
“Adversary,” I say unnecessarily. “Johnny, sitrep.”
“Two down in the guardroom … Captain Marks, I’m afraid … Headshot with suppressed pistol.” Johnny pauses to breathe heavily between sentences. “Jesus, Bob, looks like we got ’ere just in time.”
Jesus … I am having a flashback to Denver and the streets of London, but these aren’t Schiller’s tongue-eaten congregation: this is something new and deadly. The blonde not-a-lawyer would fit Schiller’s peculiarly specific taste in handmaids, though. I try to ignore what’s left of her scalp trickling down the wall. There’s something alive in her body. I focus on it. Something alive and thinking, a finger, no, a tentacle, of a greater will—her skirt twitches then wrinkles as something cylindrical that’s probably white underneath a film of blood begins to worm out from under her hem, and I recognize it as the source of the hideous, disgusting, no-good mind-taste. “Fuck me, this one’s still alive,” I say, just as Johnny raises the silenced Glock with both hands and pumps three rounds into it.
“That one too!” Cassie says merrily and points at the other headless body’s tented crotch, where something is twitching and pushing to get out. “Shoot it kill it burn it with fire! YesYes!”
Johnny unloads the rest of the magazine into the alien nightmare. In the ear-ringing silence that follows when he ceases fire I hear a moaning hiccuping noise: the vampire is throwing up behind the sofa.
I take another deep breath, force my stomach to shut the fuck up and stop churning, and manage to look as calm and professional as I can with bits of the Sleeper’s hit squad trickling down my face. “Well, I think you’ve just seen the other side’s counteroffer,” I tell Cassie, and force myself to smile as I look Death in the eye and Death cutes at me shamelessly. Then I turn to Alex. “Would you like some more time to think about it, or shall I swear you in right now so we can be on our way?”
*
Breaking out of a military prison camp is not supposed to be easy. However, there are two unexpected but useful side effects of our arrival having coincided so neatly with the arrival of the hit squad from the other side: namely, the availability of a couple of headless bodies.
“Sometimes it pays to be subtle,” I tell Cassie, while Johnny tries to scare up a couple of clean towels in the other room of the briefing suite, “but this isn’t one of them.” I smile and Alex flinches slightly. I can only imagine I must look as much of a fright as he does. “Johnny and I are going to walk out of here disguised as ourselves. And you and Cassie are going to walk out of here disguised as these two”—I bend over and open the dead man’s suit jacket, then start going through his wallet—“if your girlfriend can glam you up. Can you?” I ask.
Cassie’s eyes have gone all deer-in-the-headlights and she looks wan and shaky—no surprise in view of the massive jolt of power she just channelled—but she manages to nod. “Easy enough,” she says dismissively, “while I have the Host to draw on.”
A horrible thought occurs to me. “But we’re going outside the wire—the binding ward. That’s going to cut you off, isn’t it?”
She shrugs. “But by that point we’ll be outside the camp, YesYes?” I find the key fob for a Mercedes. Jackpot. “They won’t see us once we are in a car.”
“That’s the idea.” I don’t tell her about the buttoned-up Challenger MBTs hull-down on the hills around the camp. That kind of heavy metal blocks alf?r death-spells. Also, unlike most NATO main battle tanks, Challengers retain the ability to fire high-explosive shells that can blow up buildings and take out soft-skinned targets, as well as armor-penetrating hypervelocity spikes for kebabing enemy armor. If this works we’ll be out of range before the tanks get the call …
“We’re both lawyers: you’re civilian and I’m military, so we’re going to walk out of here casually talking shop, then get in our cars and drive away. You can follow Johnny and me and we’ll swap vehicles once we reach—what is it?”
Alex is shaking his head. “I’m not licensed to drive a car,” he says. “Low-capacity motorbikes only. And Cassie—”
“I can’t drive!” Her face wrinkles pathetically. “I am a miserable failure at humaning!”
I count to ten. “Alex, do you know how to drive a car? Where the controls are? In theory?”
“Um.” He gives an annoying bobblehead nod. “I think so?”
“Well then.” I smile at him. “We’re going to add driving without insurance and taking without owner’s consent to your charge sheet, which currently stands at aiding and abetting murder, breaking out of prison, waging illegal war, giving aid and comfort to the enemy, and”—I draw a blank—“forget it, if you don’t feel good about driving you can ride shotgun with Johnny and I’ll drive Cassie, or vice versa.”
“Whee! I’ll go with you!” Cassie, unlike Alex, seems to actually be enjoying this meeting. She’s probably bored out of her skull here, and I’m the most exciting thing that’s happened all week. I just hope it doesn’t all end in tears.
Johnny steps back inside. He’s got the worst of the gore off his uniform and he tosses me a kitchen roll. “You ready to rock, me old cock?”