The last normal day of Eve’s life began much like any other Sunday: she slept in an hour later than on a regular workday, then travelled by tube and overground to her parents’ house.
After graduation she had moved in with her then-boyfriend for a few months, but they’d split up under the pressure of sixty-hour work weeks and sharing a bedsit-sized flat while in their first training-wheels relationship. (Also, their sex life had been lacking a certain something—which she only discovered later.) She’d moved out again, into a room in an HMO shared with three other millennial girls all straining for a grip on the bottom rung of corporate serfdom: a baby solicitor, a freshly minted hospital doctor who only ever came home to snore, and a junior marketing manager. Still, it was better than going back to her old bedroom in the wilderness beyond Heathrow, even though her digs were just as far from the office and cost her a thousand a month more than her parents’ spare bedroom.
By turning up around noon, Evie ensured that Mum would already be out. Her church-going had gone from mildly serious to moderately alarming over the past five years, as she drifted from a wooly mainstream C of E congregation towards a hardcore evangelical import from the USA. If Evie turned up too early Mum would try to get her to come along. She hated to say no, but something about the eight-hour-long audience participation services with the meals and the singing and the readings from their weird apocrypha—The Apocalypse of St. Enoch the Divine?—resonated in all the wrong ways with her magic. She’d been to one service and sneaked out halfway through after throwing up in the ladies’—just the memory of it left her distinctly nauseous.
The combination of religious faith and actual ritual power made Evie deeply uneasy. It was as bad as if her mum was a habitual drunk-driver, so she reacted by pretending to herself that it wasn’t happening. And the easiest way to make that work was to avoid any reminder of it.
That lunchtime she found Dad in his den (really a windowless closet off the side of the living room, which he’d fitted out with shelves, a comfy chair, and a fold-down desk bolted to the wall), wearing his threadbare sorcerer’s robe over jogging pants and a gray sweatshirt with a coffee stain on the front. “Hey, Daddy.” She leaned forward to kiss his bald spot. “How’s life treating you?”
Her father sighed uneasily then smiled for her. He picked up the leatherbound journal he’d been writing in and closed it then stood up, a trifle creakily. “I’ll make tea,” he said. With his back turned, he added, “I’m worried about your mother.”
Oh crap. Evie dutifully tensed up, even though—she hated to admit this even in the privacy of her own head—Mum was increasingly alien to her these days, her eyes coming alive with enthusiasm only when she tried to overshare her faith with someone who made the mistake of asking how she was. Evie followed Dad out to the kitchen. “Is it her church habit again?”
Dad shoved the jug kettle under the tap and filled it. White noise washed out conversation for a few moments. He closed the lid, placed it back on its base, and turned it on in silence, lost in thought as he prepared the teapot and measured out the correct quantity of his precious breakfast tea leaves. It was a calming ritual he carried out every day, for as long as she could remember. Now his hands were shaking. “It’s cancer,” he finally said. “Cancer and church. One or the other I think I could handle.”
Evie felt a momentary sense of unreality, the instant in which, stepping off a curb, one sees the oncoming dump truck: the instant in which one is committed to that fatal footfall, toes caught in mid-stride and unable to avoid the disaster, but aware of rushing towards one. “What kind of cancer?” she heard her voice ask.
The kettle came to a rolling boil and switched off. Dad filled the teapot before continuing. “Bowel cancer,” he said, calmly enough. “She was too embarrassed to talk about the spotting. Her GP noticed something wrong during her health MoT and referred her for screening.”
“Oh crap—sorry.” Dad normally didn’t like it when his little girl swore, but either he didn’t notice or he chose to ignore it this once.
“Her pastor told her to ignore the doctors and trust in the Lord,” Dad added, as calmly as if he were discussing the weather. “She doesn’t like the idea of chemo, Evie. I’ve had enough of this church. I intend to take them down. Will you help?”
And there it was, the moment of impact, and she found herself nodding and going along. “Sure. Which one are they, anyway? I mean, is she still with the Promise, uh, the—”
“The Golden Promise Ministries, yes. Bunch of gold-digging prosperity gospel charlatans.” Dad’s tone was even, but there was a quietly venomous undernote to his voice that his daughter could barely recognize. “Evie, I’m not going to let my wife die just to line the pockets of a high-rolling American preacher in a ten-thousand-pound suit. She was sane before he got his claws into her. She’ll thank us once she’s back in her right mind and the cancer’s in remission.”
Evie’s tongue froze to the roof of her mouth. “She won’t consent,” she said carefully. “Have you got medical power of attorney?”
“No.” Her father looked grim. “Never thought we’d need it, and now it’s too late. It’s much harder if the subject refuses consent.”
“So you’re going to do it without her willing…”
For a moment Dad was distraught. “Do you think I want to? Do you think I shouldn’t? They’ve planted something in her head, Evie, and it’s growing, there’s less of her with every week that goes by.”
She blinked at him. “You mean, they literally planted something in her? Like what, one of the lesser daemones?”
“Yes, exactly that. You can see it in her mouth when she eats—she’s avoiding the dentist, did you know that?” He spoke harshly. “It’s eating her soul, and I intend to kill it.”
“That’s—” Her breath caught. “She’s definitely possessed?”
Her father stood stiffly, as if his knees ached. Of a sudden Evie realized that he was, in fact, old: or at least middle-aged, which from a twenty-three-year-old perspective was the same thing. Hair thinning and graying to ashy silver, belly sagging over the waistband of the jeans he wore on his day off, a reminder that he’d met her mother after a rock concert in 1980. “Come with me,” he said.
Evie trailed him upstairs to what had once been her bedroom. It had been repurposed at some point in the last few months, her own detritus boxed up and stripped out, Mum’s hand clearly at work. A dressing table had been installed in place of her desk, bearing a small and obscenely personal shrine. Gilt-framed photographs of a smiling toothy preacher man surrounded a stainless steel cross big enough to crucify her childhood Barbie; a Bible rested before it, oddly disproportionate.
“What the heck?” Evie asked her father, backing up against the wall to which she’d once taped posters of Take That.
“Look.” Dad picked up the Bible and riffled the pages, turning to the New Testament—no, turning past the New Testament. “Look at the apocrypha in this thing. Try to read them.”
Evie took the book with nerveless fingers. “I don’t think I can.” A dizzying sense of wrongness swept over her. It was open at a title page: The Final Codex.
“Then let me show you. Here.” Her father flipped forward. “The Apocalypse of St. Enoch the Divine, does that ring any bells? No? Good, because it shouldn’t.” He frowned at her. “It’s a summoning ritual, Evie, one that purports to bring about the return of the Christ-child. Only that’s tosh and nonsense, every initiate knows he isn’t sleeping under some damned pyramid on a dead moon—” He stopped and cleared his throat—“still, it summons something. Opens a door that should have been welded shut and buried under a tectonic subduction zone eons ago,” he said bitterly. “It’s hers. She sleeps in here, now. Her Church forbids non-reproductive sexual activity of any kind—or even contact with the opposite sex—and she’s post-menopause.”
“Dad.” Evie winced. “Too much information.”
“I want to save her.” He looked haggard.
Evie bit her lower lip. “How?”
“We need an exorcism to get rid of that goddamned tongue-leech. Which means I need rather more mana than I’ve got to hand here … I’m going to have to consecrate the tools in a place of power where the family Lares can hear me. Which means going back to the manse again. Are you with me?”
“Shit.” She winced again. “Sorry, Dad … yes, I’ll come and spot for you. When do you want to do it?”
Her father glanced at his wristwatch. “Now is as good a time as any, don’t you think? Jeremy’s staying with his loser friends—” a curl of the lip emphasized Dad’s opinion of art students in general and Imp’s choice in flatmates in particular—“so at least he’s out of the way. Your mother won’t be home until after seven, and it’s nearly noon. If we’re discreet we can be there and back and get everything prepared in time for tea. I’ll slip her something to make her dozy and we can perform the rite in our—I mean my—bedroom.”
There were so many holes in Dad’s plan that Evie ached every day thereafter, whenever she thought about the horrible risk they’d taken in the name of her mother’s sanity. Yet at the time it all seemed reasonable and sensible. They’d taken the course of least resistance. Mum would thank them afterwards, wouldn’t she? Never mind that Dad knew, going in, that it would take more power than he could normally channel. Never mind that Dad intended to petition the family Lares—the domain-specific micro-deities with whom his ancestors had made a blood pact—to grant him that power. Never mind that it came at the price of the inter-generational curse that had struck out so many names in the family spell book. Never mind that the curse was why her grandfather had nailed shut the doors and buried guardians at all four quarters of the grounds, then fled the house he’d grown up in. Never mind that power always came at a cost, and the price of the family bloodline was paid in blood by every second generation.
Never mind that the price was too high, and that Dad wasn’t the one who’d pay it. Mum was in desperate danger, her very soul in peril of mutilation by feeders from beyond the walls of the world: and ever-dutiful Evie had always been more eager to oblige than was prudent.
Under the New Management, everybody knew that magic was real, and that occult beasties generally found muggles tasty with ketchup. What Rupert had overlooked was the possibility that an overly autonomous agent with an overly realistic fear of magic might eschew magical transit shortcuts entirely, in favor of something he understood.
The Bond knew better than to set foot on a faerie path alone, without so much as a cold iron horseshoe or a bag of salt about his person—at least, not unless his life was already in danger. Consequently, his hansom-hijacking hijinks set his arrival time back behind the team of Transnistrian insurance loss adjusters. But it also meant that they didn’t overtake him before reaching the misty warrens of Whitechapel.
(This was not entirely the Bond’s fault. Rupert was leery about employing minions with a working grasp of magic. He only used them if he had a noose around their throat, and that in turn necessitated a degree of micromanagement: cameras in every corner of their offices, accommodation in a secure dormitory attic, escorted at all times by a bodyguard assigned by the Bigge Organization. That sort of thing.)
But wherever the blame might lie, going off the map—even briefly—had cost the Bond his lead, and picking up a local guide had cost him even more time.
“It’s in ’ere,” said Ned, pointing at a dark backstreet opening off the yard they stood in. The yard was fitfully illuminated by a gas lamp bolted to the back wall of an unusually well-kept house. (Its ground-floor windows were all bricked up: presumably it was the home of someone who chose to live in Whitechapel and could afford the lighting as a deterrent against burglars.) Ned spat: the mist hereabouts was so thick that it swallowed his expectoration before it hit the cobblestones. “Not gunn’ any further. Pay me.”
The Bond produced a coin and held it just out of reach. “Why not?” he asked.
“Them Piss-Gavey boys will fuck you up.” Ned’s idiolect warped towards modernity when he swore: or perhaps scatology was less prone to updating than other linguistic elements.
“How.” The Bond paused. “What do they do?”
“Issa molly house, but it ain’t like the others. Lads who go in ter try their luck fer a shilling, e’en if they come out again they’re nivver right in the head.” Ned spat behind him. “’S not right. ’S’not fucking right. What they do in there—”
The Bond flipped Ned the coin, a silver sixpence, and he dived to grab it. The Bond was pretty sure that a molly house was a gay brothel. Well, they could keep their fucking hands off him. Assuming it was a knocking shop, of course—it was called a reading room, and he was here for a book, so fuck, a library in a molly house would do. “You can piss off now,” he told Ned, giving him a hard stare. Ned tugged his cap down, shoved the coin in his cheek, then staggered away up a narrow yard beside the building with the lamp. The Bond allowed him to go: his silence wasn’t worth the price of a bullet. But a few seconds later there was a muffled thud and a sound that the Bond recognized as a body falling on pavement. Then a metallic chink and a clatter of something bouncing off the bricks.
The Bond bolted sideways and flung himself around a corner, drawing one of his pistols. He crouched and crab-walked away from the yard, keeping his head down. A couple seconds passed, then the gut-shaking crack of a fragmentation grenade reverberated from the walls. Ears ringing, the Bond barely heard the ping of shrapnel hitting the opposite wall. He loped back to the entrance, raised his gun and braced his wrist, careful to keep one eye closed. As he covered the alley Ned had chosen, a shadow emerged from the mist, and he squeezed the trigger.
A Glock 18 outwardly resembles a regular Glock 17 semiautomatic pistol—except that it was developed specially for the elite Austrian EKO Cobra counter-terrorist unit. It’s capable of burst and fully automatic fire at 1200 rounds per minute, making it one of the smallest submachine guns on the market.
The Bond wasn’t one to spray and pray: he aimed and squeezed the trigger repeatedly, three-round bursts that set the mist swirling beneath the shattered streetlamp. A scream, cut off sharply, told him he’d hit someone. Whether it was Ned or his assailant was impossible to tell. He ducked back into the alley and darted back down it as hastily as he dared, relying for night vision on the eye he’d screwed shut against his muzzle flash. He counted as he ran. He’d fired three bursts, giving him twenty-four rounds left. He reached for a spare magazine with his free hand. Both his guns had the extended, 33-round magazine, but his accuracy shooting left-handed would be compromised and he could swap magazines faster than he could swap guns.
As he neared the corner of the building the harsh crack of a modern Kalashnikov sent him diving for the ground. He was up against professionals; he’d tried to outflank them from behind the building and they’d done exactly the same thing. But it was suppressive fire—they hadn’t seen him, of that he was sure. Which meant they were ahead of him and trying to cover their entry—
As he lay on his back aiming his gun towards the corner of the building, someone opened up on full auto. But they were firing away from him. Interesting. The Bond’s lips drew back in a feral rictus. He rolled over and scrambled to his knees just as a different gun started firing, single shots, much louder, like a shotgun. So two factions were shooting at each other now? This is going to be fun, he thought, reloading his pistol, then reaching under his coat for a concussion grenade as he stealthily approached the end of the alley.
Half deafened by the gunfire-induced tinnitus ringing in his ears, the Bond missed a tinkling as of malevolent glass windchimes, following him up the alleyway.
Alexei was having a really bad night.
First they’d missed the asshole assassin even though they’d run through the building like Satan’s laxative. He was almost certainly ahead of them—he might be the kind of bastard to hide in a closet long enough to shoot them in the back, but he wasn’t a coward and Alexei’s back was still intact, so their target had to be in the lead. The banging open door on the darkness and mist proved it conclusively. So Alexei was on edge as he and his team followed the directions to the ley line route from the graveyard. Although they did cheat slightly; the instructions took no account of the utility of night-vision goggles on a moonless night as they flitted along the fog-bound sunken road into London’s past.
“Fuck this dogshit haze,” Yuri complained when they slowed for a regular breather, an hour down the lane. “No telling when you’re going to trip on a tree root or run into a low branch if you keep pushing it.”
“Tough.” Alexei grunted. “Have deadline, no time to waste.” Although it was true. On a good night in the woods his guys were ghosts, moving silently through ground cover. But something was wrong tonight. Alexei had caught a thin branch like a horsewhip across the face. Then Igor had nearly broken his leg on a hidden pothole, and Yevgeny had sprained his ankle on one of the lurking, hostile tree roots Yuri was rabbiting on about. It was almost like the road didn’t want them here. And that fucking glassy laugh he could swear he kept hearing—it had to be a hallucination, didn’t it? Maybe his mask seal hadn’t been as tight as he thought and he’d caught a whiff of happy gas. The impulse to turn and hose down the road behind him with steel-jacketed disinfectant was strong—but not quite strong enough to break fire discipline. Alexei was a professional, and so were his guys, and nobody was about to start shooting at shadows. Yet.
The plague pit at the end of the sunken trail was something special, and no mistake. His crew went through it with hackles raised and guns twitching outward, covering each other with eyes wide open as Alexei whacked on the locked mausoleum gate with the butt of his gun until it unfroze and opened with a screech like the waking dead. He hustled out onto the sidewalk—pavement, the Brits called it—and tried to breathe a sigh of relief, but relief wouldn’t come: not now, not here, not with tentacles of mist coiling lasciviously around his ankles.
“Have you reconsidered decision to apply for a career as insurance loss adjuster?” Yevgeny asked mordantly. “Maybe should have pick something safe instead? Like test pilot for zero-zero ejector seat?”
They pressed on into the dank, narrow streets of Whitechapel, sticking close together with guns held close, stocks folded for concealment beneath their overcoats. They only passed a handful of locals, and one group clustered outside a bar who grunted a challenge at them. “Are with Vigilance Committee!” Alexei glared at them and twitched his coat aside far enough to reveal a gun barrel. They backed down.
The mist grew thicker as the alleyways and backstreets grew darker and narrower. Alexei was half-tempted to go off-map and start blasting holes through the rotten brickwork and decaying wooden doors to either side, to punch a demolition tunnel through the obstacle course of urban architecture lying between them and the decadent nobles’ reading room. But no: their supply of pyros was strictly limited to whatever Yuri and Igor had packed in their leather satchels (typically a kilo of C4 and a brace of flash-bangs), and there was no telling what kind of unwanted attention they might attract if they started blowing shit up. This was London in 1888, but not the London the history books described. This was a London born of the folkloric horror myths that future London told about its past. A London in which magic had never guttered and died, a London liminal and unstable in its absolute form, crumbling away in the yellowish pea-souper smog clouds that pervaded the frayed edges of reality.
Whenever Alexei glanced over his shoulder he had the most disturbing feeling that the street behind him was not the one he’d just walked down but a hasty substitute, swapped in from some eldritch continuum of crapsack dipshittery stalked by the ghosts of maniacal serial killers and adorable Dickensian street urchins; where every barber’s shop was owned by a grinning slasher with a meat pie sideline, and every bedroom window offered a glimpse into the life of a soiled dove waiting for her Leather Apron lover. This was not the real Whitechapel of 1888 but the Whitechapel of the clichéd collective unconscious: pencilled, drawn, and inked from the scripts that London told about itself.
“Fuck this shit up its left nostril—” Igor began to complain, then emitted a strange, burbling gurgle. A moment later there was a thud of a body falling.
Alexei spun in place, flipping his AK-12 up and out as he scanned for threats. Around him the other five—no, four now—did likewise. Yevgeny dropped to his knees over a mound in the mist while Yuri and Boris took up positions. “He’s a goner,” Yevgeny reported after only a couple of seconds. “Both carotid arteries severed. Very clean work.”
Alexei swore some more in the privacy of his head: a howl of pure rage and frustration directed at the night and mist around them. “Boris, get his satchel and piece. Guys, follow me. Shoot anything that moves.”
They strode through the alleyway shoulder to shoulder. It wasn’t far if the map was telling the truth. Silvery giggles like shattered window glass echoed faintly from above, behind, and the sewer grates below, taunting: but Alexei and his crew held their itchy trigger fingers for now. If Tinkerbell wanted to fuck around with the Transnistrian loss-adjusters, she was about to find her life insurance renewal premium had just gone to infinity. But they were too professional to light up the street without a target.
They had a mission to accomplish. And the reading room was just around the next corner.
“Bring me my sedan chair, minion,” Rupert announced: “Failing that, ready my helicopter. Flight plan for Barclays London Heliport.” He paused momentarily to think. Ms. Starkey would know what to do, but this understudy … “Have the Bentley waiting for me when I get there,” he added, “and prepare my suite at HQ. You—” he addressed the naked woman lying on his bed—“see yourself out, there’s a good girl.” She snivelled something in response, but his attention was already directed elsewhere.
In principle it was possible to have his pilot set down in Kensington Park, within walking distance of HQ—but the police tended to frown on it. Something about babysitting for the royals living at the palace next door, and stopping random joggers from getting sucked into the pedestrian cuisinart or tail rotor or whatever the technical term for it was. By the time all the red tape was sorted out it’d be faster to set down at the heliport in Battersea and drive, just like any other prole. He’d tried to get planning permission for a helipad on the roof a few years ago but got knocked back. (Maybe it was time to ask Ms. Starkey to revisit the application process again, when she got back to work? Perhaps a bigger donation next time, or better blackmail material. That sort of thing usually did the trick.)
Rupert ended the call and sighed heavily. “You just can’t get the staff these days,” he announced as he began to button his shirt.
Eve was out of the loop (and most interestingly so, having left HQ in the company of a bodyguard Rupert didn’t remember authorizing her to hire). This was unusual enough that the Security Desk had discreetly paged him. The Bond was also incommunicado despite having been ordered to report in frequently. Rupe had hoped that a brisk BJ would clear the free-floating anxiety that was fogging his usual analytical brilliance, but in a moment of post-orgasmic clarity he realized that the only thing that would exorcise his personal demons would be the certain knowledge that his chess pieces were still on the board, in play, and on his side.
Hence the helicopter ride.
Cocooned in the Versace-designed luxury cabin of his AgustaWestland AW109E Power Elite, Rupert hunched over his BlackBerry in a black humor. He needed that book, he realized, not like a market acquisition or a hostile takeover or a pretty blonde whore, but like the next hit of heroin, or maybe a life raft after his yacht foundered. This need was no mere desire, it was a matter of raw animal survival. The more he thought about it, the more the Prime Minister’s subliminally encoded message in the Mansion House speech freaked him out. The PM was a benign horror, but a horror nonetheless, and not one inclined to shower mercy on the worshippers of his rivals.
***Rupert***
His vision doubled: his head struck the restraint behind his seat as his jaw clamped shut. An icy sweat drenched the small of his back.
***Rupert***
The voice inside his head was louder than thunder and softer than a silk noose around his throat.
He tugged his headset off hastily. The thunder of the rotors overhead was a whisper on the breeze compared to the call he answered. “Master?” he said aloud, before he remembered to verbalize inwardly. “My Lord?”
***The Book of Dead Names calls to me, Rupert. What have you achieved?***
Rupert squeezed his eyes shut, a gut-loosening fear churning his stomach contents like wavecrests before an onrushing storm. The Mute Poet seldom spoke quite so clearly, and never tried to micromanage his priesthood. Perhaps that’s why it had been the PM’s faction who achieved the first-mover advantage, executing their adroit takeover of the government before any of the rival faith communities—the Red Skull Society, the Cult of the Mute Poet, the Chelsea Flower Show—got their shit sufficiently together to immanentize even a minor eschatological reality excursion. The PM was, unlike most of the other long-absent Gods, forward-looking to the point of almost integrating into human society: he reputedly knew how to use email, which put him light years ahead of Tony Blair. But the Poet had been speaking to Rupert for a couple of years, his demands becoming increasingly urgent and specific. And now this. It was a breakthrough, indicative of the Poet’s awakening into this realm. Previously it took a successful rite of unholy communion to get a peep out of him, using the larynx and auditory nerves of a freshly sacrificed victim as a hotline. A megaphone blast delivered straight into Rupert’s head was new, and also betokened an unaccustomed sense of urgency on the part of a weakly godlike entity whose clock ticks were measured in millennia.
“I have my best people working on obtaining it, My Lord. I expect results very soon.”
Rupert reached for the cocktail cabinet, which was currently stocked with bottles of Fijian spring water and Goldschläger (the latter because everything palatable in this month’s load-out had already been quaffed, and the valet service hadn’t restocked the chopper yet). He twisted the lid off a water bottle and gulped from it, wetting his bone-dry mouth.
“Rivals attempted to intervene, but I put a stop to that,” he added. “However, the Prime Minister…”
***The Black Pharaoh is of no concern. Time is fleeting. The next suitable conjunction for the Rite of Embodiment begins in less than two months. There will be another opportunity a lunar year hence, but the Path of Flowery Death is opening right now and Xipe Totec stirs.***
“I hate those Aztec fuckers,” Rupert complained before he realized he’d spoken aloud. Mortified, he ground his teeth together. The Mute Poet was kind-hearted and enlightened compared to the followers of the Red Skull cult, appropriated and imported into Europe in the sixteenth century by Spanish occult treasure hunters returning from Mesoamerica. If the reign of the Black Pharaoh was bad enough, the return of the Flayed God would be … well, it would not go well for the Mute Poet Fan Club in general and Rupert de Montfort Bigge in particular, given his role as Lord High Adept of the Inner Chamber.
***Your devotion is recognized. Bend every sinew to the recovery of my liturgy, bring it to me immediately and without delay, and I will smile upon you. Otherwise … not.***
And Rupert was suddenly alone in his skull again.
It was not quite one o’clock in the afternoon when Evie and her father crossed the park and stood across the quiet street from the chained-shut gates of the ancestral family manse.
Later she would have plenty of time to regret her lack of foresight. But she’d been coming here with Dad since she was sixteen, not every month but often enough that breaking into someone else’s locked-up property had come to feel almost routine. Indeed, over the past two years Dad had roped in Imp from time to time, saying he was old enough to walk the boundaries and reinforce the wards, doing his bit to help lock down the family wyrd. But today there was no Imp. It was just her and Dad on a little-travelled street. Which simply meant there were fewer bodies to share the guilt.
Dad had shown Evie that the trick to breaking and entering was to hide in plain sight. They approached the chained-up gate openly, carrying clipboards and wearing high-visibility work vests. Dad pretended to open the padlock with a key, but he’d charmed the lock long ago so that it would open at a touch for any who bore their blood. He swung the gate wide open, and Evie strolled in and stared up at the house while he made a show of closing and relocking it. Dad triggered another spell macro that blinded the CCTV to their presence. Then he began his rounds, pacing the perimeter of the overgrown garden, pushing through the knee-high grass and the wildly overgrown hedge to check on the bones and ribbons and the skeins of silver wire fine as cobwebs that bore the charge of stored magic, or mana, that deflected curiosity and dampened desire in anyone who crossed the threshold of the grounds.
Eleven pottery urns were buried in two rows, flanking the path leading to the front door. For generations their family had grown up with dogs: their loyal pets lived on in a tenuous afterlife, penning in the Lares that haunted their humans. Eve had helped Dad bury Nono here about four years ago, the most recent (and the last) arrival in the canine cemetery. The security company who patrolled these buildings had long since stopped trying to bring dog patrols round: the mutts went bugfuck, whining and trying to bolt. As for Evie, she felt a sad and tremulous comfort, as of a wooly presence leaning an imaginary shoulder against her hip, shaking at the specific frequency of a dog wagging its tail. There’d be no new additions. Not unless Evie or Imp started families of their own and brought puppies home to play with a new generation of Starkeys. And that couldn’t be allowed to happen.
“Let’s do it round the back,” Dad proposed after they finished walking the perimeter. “Keep watch while I set up.”
Evie nodded, and stared at the boarded-up windows at the back of the house. The high stone wall between the garden and the park was capped with broken bottle glass embedded in cement to keep trespassers out. Just inside the wall, trees that had barely been saplings when Grandpa sold the manse had matured, growing up warped from the weight of the walls. They spread their branches above Dad’s workspace, a flattened square of grass where he’d spread a tartan rug weighted down with the paraphernalia of his trade: a small brass bell, an athame, his latest notebook—a continuation of the family spell book—and a skull. Eventually he opened his day pack and lifted out a lunchbox and a stainless steel flask, the ritual offerings of food and wine for the Lares. Rather than scribing a pentacle or summoning circle as he would on a hard surface, he laid it out carefully using skeins of braided silk cord. Then, with Evie anchoring one corner of the ritual space, he took up his own position and began the opening propitiation.
The rite was familiar and her part came easily to Evie. It was the first thing they did, every time—an offering of food and drink and a symbolic re-establishment of the ties that bound the Lares to the Starkey family. There was no set time or season for it, nor any significant sacrifice or purification ritual required. It was more like watering a plant or feeding the family dog than actual magic. This time, however, Dad followed it with a more alarming rider. “Lend me your mana,” he politely requested, “to aid us, your family, in our time of need.” He raised the skull and turned in place, presenting it to the four quarters, and Evie could swear that faint green striations glowed in the recesses of its eye sockets. “Lend me your blood, your bone, your sinew, your spirit: your blood to live, your bone to strengthen, your sinew to bind, your spirit to drive the hungry ghosts from the soul of my wife.” For a moment Evie felt a tightening in her scalp and a buzzing tingle in her fingertips, almost as if she had been brought before the regard of something ancient and unsleeping. Then it passed, and her father bowed his head. “Thank you,” said Dad, and he returned the skull to the crimson velvet bag it lived in. “And so, the contract is sustained.” Evie’s skin crawled as if someone had cast a handful of soil across the mouth of her future grave.
Dad was uncharacteristically quiet on the way home. Usually these rituals put him in a cheerful mood. As often as not he’d stop in a pub for a pint by way of unwinding. Evie found these refreshment stops useful, because he relaxed enough to explain what they had just done, both the superficialities (which as often as not she already understood) and the deeper significance. But this time Dad headed straight for the tube station, lips drawn tight and crow’s feet deepening around his eyes.
“Dad, what was that at the end about sustaining the contract?” she asked as they turned the corner onto their street. A fine rain had started, tickling her face and the backs of her hands. “Is there something I should—”
“You needn’t worry about it.” Dad shut her down casually, irritating her: as with most parents, he sometimes forgot that his offspring were adults and reverted to treating her like a six-year-old. He wasn’t totally oblivious—there was no pretty little head to talk down to here—but Evie knew a snow job when she heard one, and the tension in his jaw was obvious. “It’s nothing important.”
“The only contract with the Lares I’m aware of is the one that requires—” she swallowed—“you know what? I don’t want to know.”
Her father drew a deep breath as he unlocked the front door. “That’s right, you don’t want to know,” he admitted sadly. “It’ll make sense afterwards. Not to your detriment,” he added hastily. “I wouldn’t lay that on you.”
“Fucksake, Dad,” she said, not unkindly. She hadn’t asked to be born under the family curse, any more than one might ask to be born with a genetic disease or a high risk of hereditary breast cancer. But at least the curse came with side benefits—unlike the ailments, if you could call an ability to harness the power of dreams a benefit when it could so easily slide sideways into nightmare.
“Just remember not to call me Abraham,” he snarked. Then the gloom cloud dropped again. “I’d never do that to one of my kids. Although Jeremy has tempted me a time or two.”
The nature of the family’s relationship with their Lares was contractual: in every second generation the family would provide the Lares with a sacrifice, and in return the Lares would provide the family with the power to walk through dreams and warp dreams into reality.
When Great-great-great-to-the-nth-gramps had signed in blood on the dotted line, it had probably seemed like a superb bargain to a sociopathic pre-Victorian paterfamilias. Life was cheap in those days and the family had grown rich and powerful trading in powerful artifacts, visiting other realms. As recently as 1900, one in five infants died before the age of five: a century earlier, it had been closer to two in five. What was another child’s life cut short in sorrow and pain, if it was the price of safety and prosperity for their siblings and nieces and nephews? Great-great-grandma had birthed twelve babes, of which eight survived to adulthood. Great-grandpa was one of the survivors. Group selection was the term for it in evolutionary biology: sacrificing a life to enhance the survival prospects of one’s kin.
But the drought of magic had coincided with the onset of the demographic transition, the birthrate plummeting even as the survival rate among infants rocketed, and the sacrificial pact grew onerous. One infant among many was few: one among few amounted to many. Grandpa’s sacrificed sibling, his name struck through in the family spell book, had been the last, for Grandpa had only the one brother, and had been guilt-stricken thereafter. Dad was an only child. Evie and Imp were two, and Dad had declined to ritually slit either of their throats, although Mum’s melancholia—
“Dad, did Mum ever try to—” Her mouth dried up as he led her into the bedroom and pushed the bed to one side, revealing a pre-scribed containment circle.
“Yes,” he said, after staring at his feet in silence for almost a minute. “We’d hoped that the contract might be fulfilled if, if—”
“—An early termination?”
“—Was not acceptable to the Lares.” He nodded slowly, caught up in decades-old grief. “The contract specified it had to be a natural born child. She tried, Evie, she did it to protect you both. It didn’t work.”
“There must be another way around it, surely?”
“Not that we could find.” He sighed. “Magic’s easier now, though. It may not be necessary any more. Or there might be new possibilities. Cloning, maybe. Something with stem cells. Who knows?” He draped a cloth across the bedside table and then laid the skull upon it, an improvised altar for a scratch-built ritual exorcism. “It’ll only become an issue if you or Jeremy want to have children.”
“I’d dissolve the contract with the Lares first,” she warned him. “Walk away from the power.”
“Yes, well, you wouldn’t be the first to try to do that. Unfortunately life has a way of making liars of us, for all our good intentions.” He carefully scribed a trail of sea salt around the circle. “Our ancestor didn’t have the foresight to add a termination clause, so it runs in perpetuity. There’s a write-up in volume four and a commentary in volume nine of the annals. The price of forfeiture tends to be the life of the contracted party. In fact, the whole goddamn binding is a trade of power for death. The whole point of the sacrifice is to deflect the death onto someone else, rather than the adept’s own head.”
Life sucked but it sucked less than the alternative, Evie would freely admit. Also, the way magic was becoming easier these days gave her a prickly premonition. It wasn’t just that she was gaining experience, becoming more proficient. Something fundamental was shifting in the world, and in the long term it would be to their benefit. Maybe they wouldn’t need the grotesque pact with the Lares for much longer. Maybe she and Imp would acquire sufficient power in their own right that they’d be able to break free of it. The future beckoned, offering hope for the kind of prosperity their family hadn’t known since Great-granddad’s days.
Presently all was in position. Dad checked his watch. “Your mother should be home in an hour or so. We should cook tea, Evie. You can say you did it as a treat? She’ll like it if she thinks you’re learning to look after yourself.”
“Huh.” Evie sniffed, mildly offended: “Just because you don’t want to, Dad!” But she headed for the kitchen all the same, calling, “Why don’t you make yourself useful and lay the table?” over her shoulder.
“I’ll do that.” Her father shuffled through into the dining room and began assembling place mats and cutlery. “Your mother will feel sleepy after supper and want to go and have a lie-down,” he called.
“Do I want to know?” Evie asked. “Where do you even get roofies, anyway?”
“I’d never do that to Jenny!” His offense was tangible. “As long as she sits in her usual place she’ll find it hard to keep her eyes open.”
“Ah, volume six, section three?” She mentally patted herself on the back as she raided the freezer for Sunday’s ready meal and then set to work peeling spuds and preparing fresh vegetables to go with it. Gravy would come last.
“That would be your great-grandfather’s memorandum on sleep disorders and their treatment, yes. It was a regular money-spinner before modern tranquilizers came along.”
“Got it.” Evie pulled out the roasting pan, turned on the oven, and got the rosemary, sea salt, and olive oil ready. The saucepan full of potatoes was already simmering. She drained them and readied them for roasting as her father scribed a soporific ward on the underside of her mother’s chair.
Finally, with the food in the oven and the good silverware set out (and a bottle of burgundy uncorked to breathe), she followed Dad upstairs to lay out the trappings of the exorcism grid under the bed Mum slept in these days: bell, hand-cast clay vessel, ritually purified stopper, the skull in which the Lares’ flame rode, like a kitsch prop from a sixties horror B-movie—
And then the front door lock unlatched, and nothing more stood between Evie and the end of her childhood.
A burst of automatic gunfire from the lobby at the front of the building rattled Imp’s teeth in his head. “Get down!” shouted Wendy, who ignored her own advice and darted for the spiral staircase up to the mezzanine gangway. Eve crouched, cradling the leatherbound volume in her arms. Glass marbles floated around her head, catching the gaslight like a shattered halo. Game Boy squeaked and dived behind the librarian’s desk at the front of the room.
A moment later there was another burst of gunfire—Imp couldn’t tell who was shooting slower pistol bullets and who was spraying assault rifle rounds, but the two shooters were audibly different. A body fell backwards through the doors at the front of the reading room, then rolled sideways to a seated position and put three rounds through the door at waist height. The shots reverberated, deafening in the confined space. “Get the table!” shouted the new arrival. “Barricade!”
“Do it,” snapped Eve. To the prone gunman: “Are you hit?”
Del tipped the table at the front of the room over on its side, and shoved it towards the doorway. A moment later Game Boy shot out from behind the front desk, grabbed a table leg, and did something odd that somehow levered it up on one edge, so that the table top was vertical right behind the doors.
“Not hit,” the gunman gasped. He wore immaculate formal evening attire and had somehow kept his hat on through the firefight, but his white gloves were stained gray with gun oil and he stank of burned powder. He pulled a magazine from inside his cloak and reloaded his submachine gun. “Sitrep, ma’am?”
“Who’s out—” Boom. Eve winced as the room was shaken by a concussive blast. A thin shower of plaster dust rattled from the front cornice.
“Looks like they brought a grenade launcher, ma’am. Sorry.” The Gammon didn’t look sorry; he looked cold-bloodedly professional as he rolled to his feet and rapidly took stock. “You, you, and you—” he pointed at Game Boy, Imp, and Doc—“if you want to live, start moving furniture fast. We’ve got maybe three minutes, then they’ll force entry through the windows—”
The hiss and thud of an arrow met the crash of breaking glass and a climactic scream, dwindling: “No they won’t,” Wendy called down.
“Who the fuck are they?” Imp asked, finally getting a grip. He glared at the Gammon. “And who the fuck are you?”
“He’s with me.” Eve rested a hand on Imp’s shoulder. “Listen,” she told the Gammon, “we need to make sure whoever’s out there gets this book, then we need to follow them—not too close—and retrieve it when they die.”
The Gammon stared at her, hard. “Why can’t you just swipe it?” he asked. “It’s not as if there’s a librarian on duty. Ma’am.”
Eve smiled tightly. “It’s cursed. If you take it out of the library that would be stealing and you’d die, sweetie. Unauthorized withdrawals are not permitted.”
Suddenly the Gammon’s eyes narrowed. “So it’s a weapon.”
“A weapon?” Game Boy squeaked.
“We need to make an exit,” Imp announced. “Me and Doc, and—Wendy—we have to go first. You and Evie need to make it look like we’re retreating. Del and Game Boy, can you guys hide? Or, I dunno, play dead?”
Del kicked off first: “You have got to be fucking—”
“—Bad guys shoot their way in, find dead bodies and a book while Eve and—”
“—Sergeant Franke—”
“—Retreat under cover. Bad guys take the book and GTFO. Game Boy, you follow them until they drop dead, then you’re merely picking the book up and handing it to Del. Doc and I will make sure nobody looks at you, and we’re outta here. Plausible?”
“I love it when a plan comes together,” Franke quoted, deadpan.
Boom. Another shower of plaster dust. Imp’s ears were ringing, almost loudly enough to drown out the hoarse shrieking from outside.
“How many are there?” Eve demanded as a protracted burst of gunfire rattled what was left of the window glass.
Franke froze, looking thoughtful: “Too many—and that’s not an AK.” He flicked on a flashlight clamped to his gun and lit up the back wall of the library. There was a discreet door beside the spiral staircase at the far end of the catwalk. “Go there. Go now! Go! Go! Go!”
“Do as he says, kids, unless you want to play with our new friends,” Eve announced. She walked towards the middle of the room and carefully positioned the book on the floor, facedown. “I renounce custody,” she declared formally. “Whatever you do, don’t touch it now: it’s armed—metaphorically, at least.”
“Fuck it, this is a very bad plan,” Game Boy complained quietly. He headed towards the back of the library, where a series of bays jutted into the room, and disappeared between two upright bookcases.
There was a crash from beyond the front doors and the table wobbled. Wendy briefly popped her head up to check out a window, then ducked down again; she picked up her skirts and raced down the spiral staircase. “’Ware grenades!” she warned.
Imp grabbed the handle of the small door at the back of the library and twisted. “It’s locked!”
“Shift.” Wendy pushed him aside. “In or out?” she asked over her shoulder.
“Out,” said the Gammon, raising his gun to cover the front entrance from behind a trolley laden with unsorted volumes waiting to be reshelved.
“Good call.” Wendy’s hands were suddenly filled with a battering ram. “A hand here?”
“What do I do?” Doc took the weight of the rear of the ram.
“Count of three: one … two … three … go!” Together they swung the ram at the doorknob. The door splintered around the lock as it crashed open, revealing an unlit staircase leading down past shelves of supplies.
Imp directed: “Into the basement, everyone except Game Boy and Del. Remember the book won’t kill anyone unless they take it without permission. We’ll wait near the exit and follow the trail of bodies.”
“Fucksake,” grated Del, melting into the shadows near the spiral staircase. A moment later Game Boy emerged and lay prone atop one of the bookcases, face to the wall. In the torchlit twilight he resembled a decorative molding. Del followed him, taking up a symmetrical position on the other side of the room.
“Good luck to you, too,” Eve said coolly. Del flipped her off as Imp and Doc trotted down the stairs. There was another crash from the other end of the room and the table lurched inward as their assailants tried to ram the front doors. Eve glanced at Franke: “Remember, we need to make it look good, but at least one of them has to survive.”
“You know it’s risky, ma’am?”
“Don’t talk to me about risk: I’ve been living on borrowed time ever since he was born.” She jerked her chin at the cellar door, where Imp had just vanished into the shadows.
Franke focussed on the table blocking the entrance. “Here they come,” he breathed, switching from flashlight to laser sight. A red firefly danced across the underside of the table. “In three, two—” Glass shattered high above them; gaslight caught the tumble of two canisters to the middle of the floor. “Grenades!” snapped the Gammon. “Get out!”
He squeezed off a short burst at the back of the door just as the front doors crashed inwards and the two canisters hit the tiles. “Cover!” he shouted. Eve’s halo of glass marbles shimmered and erupted towards the doorway as the Gammon fired three more rounds and darted back into the basement stairwell. Eve was close on his heels: she pushed the damaged door shut behind them moments before a brilliant light and concussion lit up the room and the gunmen stormed in.