“Right.” Johnny’s eyes narrow. “’Scuse me for saying this, mate, but you’re in no condition to go anywhere right now.”
“But she needs me—” Anxiety rises and surges over my defenses: I feel the pinprick popping of defensive wards deflagrating all around, unprotected minds wriggling like so many shell-shucked tasty oysters as their bodies fall, retching, to the ground for a hundred meters in all directions—
“Don’t.” Johnny raises a warning hand as the soldier behind him keels over in a dead faint. “By right of oath I bind you”—verses in Old Enochian salted with English codewords roll out, and the thing in the back of my head listens incuriously—“Ruby. Seminole. Kriegspiel. Hatchet. Lock down and make safe—” In the background I hear a hollow bang, very different from an explosion, and the crunch and crackle of a vehicle impacting a building, its driver unconscious. The part of me that’s still me, still Bob, feels a stab of guilty remorse, but the part of me that’s the Eater of Souls doesn’t give a shit, being more irritated (if anything) by Johnny’s use of my oath’s override facility. “Abstain from feeding, feel no hunger”—the great hollow antipressure inside me recedes slightly—“be calm, all is in hand.”
My eyes close. Johnny recites the override words again. “Bob. Can you hear me?”
“Yeah.” I feel tired. Desperately tired. So tired I could sleep for a thousand years.
“Bob, open yer eyes. Come on, wake up! We need you.”
I open my eyes. On the floor behind him, a soldier lies as if asleep except for a trickle of blood running from his left nostril. “Oh shit, did I—”
Johnny bends over him. “’E’s breathing but ’e’s out for the count.” He rolls the body over into the recovery position, then stands up. “Come on, we’ve got a chopper to catch.”
“But I can’t—”
All of a sudden Johnny McTavish is up close, right in my face, doing his best drill sergeant act, and as he used to be a sergeant in the French Foreign Legion it’s not exactly an act: “Howard you miserable worm, get your fucking shit together right now and move it! Because the next time I hear you say can’t I will take your can’t and shove it so far up your ass you can give yourself a tonsillectomy by biting. Is that understood? Do you fucking hear me?” With every fuck he shoves me so that I’m constantly off-balance and then he’s behind me and grabbing my shoulders and aiming me at the doorway. “We have a fucking helicopter to catch and if you want to see yer trouble and strife again you will quick march double time—”
We’re going, my rational brain realizes. We’re going to Nether Stowe House. We’re really going. The paralysis and terror falls away behind me, replaced by uncertainty.
I’m not sure what we’re going to find when we get there, but it can’t be anything good.
*
Mhari lies on the shelf in the walk-in wardrobe, counting the minutes. After rather too many of them pass for comfort, her phone vibrates again. It’s a message from Persephone: I’m trying to dislodge the fleas. Hold on.
Dammit, what now? she asks herself, gritting her teeth. She waits a while longer, then she hears the muffled, vaguely familiar chimes of unsilenced phones receiving incoming messages in the living room. There are voices, low and hard to interpret—then the bedroom door opens abruptly. She cowers back inside the closet as the bedroom light comes on. “She’s still out,” says the older guard.
“Look, we can go now,” the youngster says from outside the door, “can’t we?”
“Huh. I suppose so. You got it too.”
“’S’what I said.”
“Well, then.” The guard pauses in the doorway for a few seconds, then switches out the light. “Nighty night, and may the Lord have mercy on your soul.”
The door closes and Mhari relaxes infinitesimally. That was too close, she thinks shakily. For a while she’d considered jumping down and looking for somewhere more comfortable to hang out. But still she waits, and after another minute she hears footsteps, and then the beeping of the neutered burglar alarm followed by the rattle of the front door closing.
“All clear,” Persephone calls quietly through the bedroom door.
“Don’t turn the light”—Mhari jumps down—“on. Okay, you can do it now.” Persephone flicks the switch, and Mhari sees her expression: the older woman looks as if she’s swallowed a live mouse. “What is it?” She follows Persephone’s gaze, and turns to look at the bed. “Oh. Fuck.”
The beeping from the suite’s burglar alarm stops as the alarm hits the point in its cycle where it would normally arm itself but, thanks to Persephone’s firmware crack, lapses into catatonia. “You can say that again,” Persephone says grimly.
“What do we do now?”
“We get the civilian out—” Persephone stops and takes a deep breath. “What a mess.” She takes another breath. “I think I saw her handbag on the living room table. Go see if she’s got a phone or any ID in it while I look for the keys to this crap.”
Mhari does as she’s told without arguing because Persephone’s expression frightens her. Society ladies aren’t supposed to do homicidal rage in public. ’Seph is doing a good job of bottling it up, betraying it only through a certain tightness about the mouth and her unusually clipped diction, but Mhari can tell she’s boiling. Truth be told, Mhari’s pretty upset too. She’d read the report and knew what Schiller’s Church did in their compound in Colorado to runaway teens who wouldn’t be missed, but there’s a difference between reading the dry facts and interrupting a kidnapping in progress. There is indeed a handbag in the living room that hadn’t been there earlier: a Louis Vuitton, not counterfeit if Mhari is any judge, and the contents tell their own story. In addition to makeup and tissues there’s a purse containing the driving license and credit cards of an Angela McCarthy, MS. She also carries university ID and a couple of library cards in the same name—also condoms, lube, iPhone, and a slim business card wallet. The cards carry just her name, a Gmail address, and usernames on Tinder and Ashley Madison. So, a postgrad student who’s hard up for cash, moonlighting in an older profession. London is a horrifyingly expensive city to study in; most students need to work, and a surprising number of the prettier ones try sex work.
Mhari takes the bag through into the bedroom. Persephone has found a bunch of keys in the drawer full of restraints, and as Mhari enters ’Seph manages to unlock the leg irons. Angela is still unconscious, her shallow breathy inhalations telling their own story. “We’ve got to get her out,” Mhari says. “Shall I call an ambulance?”
Persephone pauses. “If we do that, we blow the mission. Traceless infiltration, remember? And the portal’s only good for two bodies.”