“M—ma’am! Angela Cortez, Security Ops Two!” Cortez attempts to stand to attention. She’s short, bubbly, and entirely too enthusiastic for a day like this, but Mo manages to summon up a smile from somewhere.

  “At ease! I’m Dr. O’Brien. You can call me Mo.” Behind Cortez, the whirring and clanking resumes, accompanied by a scraping noise as if somebody is pushing an empty filing cabinet along the bare concrete floor. There is also a stench, rapidly growing stronger, that even the HEPA filters in the air conditioning can’t overcome. “I see what you mean about Harry 61 being ripe…”

  Cortez steps away from the entrance. “Oh, there’s a boot barrier? Good thing I came along: 61 is bad at stairs!” As she speaks, Harry 61 enters the lobby.

  Laundry site security relies heavily on Residual Human Resources: zombies, to everyone else. They’re what you get when a low-level eater gets bound to a human cadaver. You do not want to let an RHR touch you because the eater can jump bodies via touch, much like a high-tension electric current. Mo—and Ops Two Cortez—wear wards, grounding devices that protect them against having their minds eaten: random intruders are not so fortunately equipped. RHRs are dead, by definition, and after a few days they begin to rot. The turnover is high, and horror movies to the contrary, embalming fluid and mummification don’t help.

  Sixty-one is an RHR nearing the end of its service life: a Harry. A Harry is an animated skeleton straight out of a Ray Harryhausen movie. The decaying RHR is debrided almost down to the bone (maggot baths are involved), then Tech Support wires it into a motorized steel exoskeleton to keep it moving. The eater anchored to the skull controls the exoskeleton through a rat’s nest of electronics and keeps it shambling around terrifying the civilians for a few months longer.

  Eventually all good things come to an end, and 61 is stinking up the subbasement intolerably. It’s time to banish the eater animating 61, recycle the Raspberry Pi and the motors, have the coroner sign off on the mortal residue, and indent for another body.

  “That’s the main containment grid.” Mo points at the large circle she prepared. “I want you to park 61 inside the inner circle. It’s very important that 61 is completely inside, and that the diagram is unbroken and unsmudged. Can you put it there?”

  “Sure! Do you mind if I video it for our YouTube channel?”

  Mo bites her lip. There is an official agency YouTube channel these days, and the New Management is big on demystifying the ineffable for shits and giggles. Still, it strikes her as a terrible idea for numerous reasons. Finally she delivers her mildest reply: “You know, decommissioning an RHR isn’t entirely safe. You might want to watch it on CCTV instead.”

  Cortez looks at her appealingly, all big eyes and innocence. “But I’m warded! And the CCTV in here is ancient and there’s no output to capture”—because it’s a classified site: letting randos plug memory sticks into the feed would be a security hole—“Are you sure I can’t stay and watch?”

  Big brown eyes and she’s barely more than a kid. Mo shrugs. “I want you inside that smaller circle at all times. You will be inside it before I start, and you will remain inside it until I say the words all clear, even if the fire alarm goes off or you need the loo. Don’t let any part of your body cross that line or you will die: it will take quite a while, and it will hurt all the time you’re dying. Do you understand?”

  “I got that! I had to do a Manifestation Security refresher last month, I’ve seen the, uh…” She trails off. Obviously she’s alluding to the workplace accidents showreel all new security personnel are required to sit through. “But there’s only room for one of us in there! What about you, miss? Is it safe for you to be out there?”

  Mo lets it all hang out for a moment: “That’s what we’re here to find out.”

  “What? But—”

  “Look, just park 61 right there, all right? Inside the containment where it can’t get at us. I’ll be fine, I’m warded too.” And I have extra protection, she adds silently. But Cortez has no need to know about Mo’s special sauce.

  Cortez looks doubtful, but raises the battered Xbox controller with a pentacle duct-taped to it and maneuvers Harry 61 into the magic circle. The motorized skeleton stinks abominably and lurches as it moves—the left patella is crumbling, some of the metatarsals in the right foot are hanging by a sinew, and the collar bone is fractured—but she has it going where she wants.

  “Okay, hold it right there.” Mo squats and reviews the annotations on the grid for a third time, making sure that she hasn’t left anything out and the necessary guardrail lines are all clear and unbroken. After she’s satisfied with them, she checks the safety circle around Cortez.

  She tries to ignore the coldly hostile and utterly inhuman mind locked inside the jail of decaying meat and bone watching her from inside the circle. Cortez’s presence is a lively spark of warm humanity inside the figurative bars of the magical shark cage. She’s pulled out a shiny new iPhone 6 Plus and is fiddling with the camera, framing Harry for the viewers.

  “I’ll be ready to go in about two minutes,” she tells Cortez.

  “I’m good here!” The security guard smiles as she pokes at her phone screen. Mo returns to the lobby area and types up a report on her setup. When she returns, things are just as they were. Well, almost: Harry has turned to orient toward her. For a dead guy he looks disturbingly aware. Luminous tendrils of light shine in the depths of his eye sockets: Who were you, anyway, when you were human? Mo wonders. (The New Management seems to have a bottomless supply of corpses for experimental use these days.)

  “Okay, ready to go,” says Mo, nerving herself. “And we are live in three, two, one—”

  * * *

  Because Harry 61 is looking directly at Mo, she sees the apprehension on its fleshless grinning face, awareness of its own end turning its aura black as she opens her mouth and speaks in a tongue that predates humanity. There’s a bare metal instruction set beneath the operating system of reality, and sufficiently powerful sorcerers can program it directly: Mo knows this microcode. “Go,” she utters in Old Enochian, and throughout the test area un-life comes to an abrupt end.

  The skeleton collapses inside its motorized gibbet cage. Small bones disarticulate and fall through gaps in the armature, clattering to the floor. The writhing light in the eye sockets disappears. Finally, the joint motors, reacting to a sensor reading, whirr as they lower the charnel assemblage to the floor.

  “Wow.” Cortez’s voice is hushed. “Was it that simple?”

  “Don’t move!” Mo snaps. Banishment isn’t always instantaneous, and a wisp of malice remains. It twirls in the air like smoke from an extinguished candle, invisible to a non-sorcerer’s eyes. Class Threes are sufficiently self-aware that escape attempts are a very real problem, and if this one anticipated its decommissioning it might have—

  There. Outside the containment grid there’s a thin spot in the universe. Mo can feel such things, with a new and disturbing sense that only really emerged after she survived the Non-Survivable Incident at Nether Stowe House.

  “Don’t move,” she repeats. “It’s not gone.” The Class Three is still hanging around like a stale fart in the quantum foam beneath normal spacetime. It’s angry—or as angry as a consciousness with no brain and no glands can be—and it’s looking for a new body to steal. It’s out for revenge and it’s not trapped inside the two-dimensional magic circle right now. “Are you?” she says, glaring at the twist in spacetime.

  The PA system emits a crackle of static, then an eerie hiss of white noise.

  “Of course not, because then this would be too easy.” Mo snorts. Then she glances at SO.2 Cortez. Angela is standing inside the safety circle, phone still pointed at the fallen Harry, but every muscle is rigid. Mo can see the whites of her eyes, shining with terror. Shit just got real. The disembodied eater is not only uncontained, it’s infiltrated the protective circle: the only thing keeping Cortez alive right now is her standard issue necklace ward, which is smoking because it wasn’t designed to protect against a Class Three for long.

  “Attend me!” Mo snaps in Old Enochian. She crab-walks around Cortez’s safety cell toward the wisp of malice hanging in the air. “Attack me, not her! It’s me you want!”

  For a split second Mo flashes back to a night in a hotel in Amsterdam, tentacular appendages coming out of the wallpaper to wrap an icy chill around her. For a moment she relives the frozen terror and sense of helplessness as she sees a hole in space opening to suck her in. But she knows what to do now, and she’s one of the most powerful sorcerers Mahogany Row has trained up in the past three decades. That night lies twelve years in her past. She’s spent every month since then training for some asshole extraterrestrial to try it again, to drag her shrieking into a back alley nightmare and feed to satiation on her horror and despair—but this time she has a black belt in necromantic self-defense.

  Mo draws a deep breath, and on her exhalation she utters a deplorable word. It hangs on the air, shimmering like the end of all things, unbearable and growing in power until she inhales once more, and draws it back inside to drown it in silence.

  “Ohh,” Cortez moans, staggering but somehow keeping a grip on her smartphone. “I, ugh, I don’t feel so good. Is this normal?” A drop of blood rolls from one nostril, then her eyes droop and she collapses. Mo manages to catch her just in time. She’s still breathing, which is more than can be said for Harry 61, who is a pile of crematory ashes and a red-glowing, half-melted cage inside the containment grid. The ceiling, meanwhile, has acquired another scorch mark.

  “Let’s get you next door and have a sit-down while I call the first aider,” Mo tells her. She pulls Cortez’s arm over her shoulder and tries to stand. “You can stop filming now, the show’s over.”

  Which is entirely true. There’s no way in hell Public Relations will allow that particular footage to go up on the organization’s YouTube channel.

  “We’re done here.”

  * * *

  Paperwork: we hates it. Especially when it’s the kind of paperwork that sneaks up behind you with a cosh and forces you to do a full debrief on an impromptu joint operation with the police about a major incident in which shots were fired. Thankfully nobody was seriously injured: animated cardboard Daleks exterminate suboptimally. Spizz is under arrest in hospital recovering from a tasing, questions are being asked about Inspector Angel’s robust approach to youth crime (which would come as a surprise to precisely no one who knows what happened in Sandford), and I only avoid being cornered and interviewed by the media by hiding in a cleaning supplies closet.

  The upshot is, my assigned day of convincing skeptics that magic is real has been wasted, it’s nearly eight o’clock when I get home, and I’m going to spend tomorrow morning meeting with a Professional Standards jobsworth and an Auditor, even though West Midlands Police have already got everything down in triplicate.

  At least I have my phone. I warned Mo I’d be late so she’s already eaten. When I slouch through the living room door with my microwave meal on a lap tray I find her curled up on the sofa with a half-empty glass of wine and the cat: that’s when I realize I should have poured myself a glass of wine, too.

  I park my arse in the armchair and hunch protectively over my beef bourguignon before Spooky can teleport across the room. (He’s a cat. I swear they’re like the weeping angels from Doctor Who: close your eyes for an instant and when you open them again your dinner is in the feline digester.) I chow down as fast as possible because I missed lunch, thanks to Kid Dalek. Mo has registered that I’m hangry so she leaves me to it until I sigh and put my tray on the coffee table. “How was your day, dear?” she asks, with a secretive smile that suggests she has a very good idea how it was, but is leaving me room to vent.

  “My day? Let me tell you all the ways—” I stop so abruptly I nearly swallow my tongue. “Nah, I’ll still be going tomorrow if I get started. How was yours?”

  “I swear I spent it all in meetings with time wasters.” Crow’s feet appear at the corners of her eyes. “Nearly got lost on my way to a lunchtime off-site which was a complete waste, and I only got back in time to snatch half an hour in the lab. So. How about you, again?”

  “I think”—I check the time and reach for the TV remote—“it’s top of the hour. Mind if I put the news on?”

  She rolls her eyes: “If you must—”

  “—No, really.” I pull up BBC News 24 and there it is, the Birmingham Bull Ring with a smoldering Dalek behind crime scene tape. “Ah, dammit.”

  “Is this a”—her gaze sharpens—“Bob, was that you?”

  The newsreader chirps up: “Drama in Birmingham today as teenage supervillain lays siege to comic shop with animated space robots! Dramatic scenes as armed police evacuated the center of—”

  I switch it off again. “Dammit.”

  “Bob. What have I told you about—”

  “—I had a choice: go help the police fight Daleks, or spend the day arguing with a room full of magic denialists. What would you do?”

  She puts her empty glass down. “That calls for a refill,” she says, and fetches an extra glass and another bottle of wine. She pours and raises her glass to me: “To escaping from meetings with time-wasters.”

  “To that!” I take a mouthful. It’s the cheap Sainsbury’s Bordeaux, but it’s not bad: medium dry, tastes of dead grapes. (I’m trying to develop a palate, don’t harsh me.) Then I do a double take. “Who did you escape from?”

  “I had a very frustrating argument with a rather creepy doctor—he was right about medical confidentiality but I’m still going to have to get the Cabinet Office to overrule him—then decommissioned a rotter in the subbasement. It was scheduled for the dump—one leg was falling off—but anyway, it turned out to be a Class Three—” (I fail to freak out only because she’s explaining this over a glass of wine.) “—It turns out my technique works fine, but an eager chipmunk from Security wanted to video it for the YouTube channel and her ward was time-expired. She’s spending the night in hospital for observation until the brain swelling recedes.”

  “You did the”—I wave my free hand in a vague circle—“thing? Without a fiddle?”

  “I don’t have the fiddle anymore,” she retorts. “It went back to Carcosa!” Banished, and a bloody good thing, too: that bloody violin once tried to kill me.

  “So you talked it to death. With your larynx.”

  She raises an index finger: “It was a one-word kill.” She looks both smug and shaken, as she should be.

  “Wow.” I drink some more wine until I’m sure I’ve got a lid on my anxiety. “That’s quite the exorcism.”

  She looks at me sharply, then her face softens and she asks, “When did we get so bad-ass?”

  “Some time after…” I trail off. Mo takes another mouthful and strokes the puddle of black fur in her lap. Spooky buzzes sleepily, then stretches a pawful of fluffdaggers toward her knee. (Spooky, in case you’re wondering, is just a cat. According to the vet he’s female: Mo has so far resisted my attempts to rename her Stabby on account of her favorite form of social interaction with humans.) “It began about six years ago?”

  She shakes her head. “Eight. That’s when they gave me Lecter.” The bone violin.

  “Huh. That works. It’s about when I got entangled with … you know.” The Eater of Souls, an unfortunate spiritual infestation I ended up with when the Cult of the Black Pharaoh tried to sacrifice me in an attempt to summon it, not realizing it was already bound to my then boss, Angleton. (There’s a school of thought that Bob Howard died and I’m just the Eater of Souls wearing his body and memories like a skin-suit, thinking I’m still him. It’s nonsense, of course, but if I was an undead horror pretending to be me that’s exactly what it—I mean, I—would say, isn’t it?) I discover that my glass is mysteriously empty, as is the bottle on the coffee table.

  “I think I’d better”—I do a double take when I realize it’s past ten o’clock and I have an early start tomorrow—“I’d better have a quick shower.”

  “I wonder what happened to Lecter?” Mo asks as I carry our dirty dishes out. And I shiver, because that’s a question I hope we never learn the answer to.

  * * *

  At the same time that Bob and Mo are killing a bottle of wine and trying not to scare each other with their workday anecdotes, the assassin pushes a buzzer beside a dusty storefront on a busy shopping street in the 4th arrondissement of Paris. The Centre Pompidou looms at the far end of the road, but it’s late and the crowds thinned after the shops closed. Tourists and locals wander between restaurants and bars, but nobody is paying attention to the shadowy doorway.

  After a minute, someone shuffles toward the door. A light flickers on inside, and the resident calls, “Go away! We’re closed.”

  The assassin buzzes again, tapping out A-R-T in Morse code: short-long, short-long-short, long.

  A moment later a deadbolt rattles, then the door swings open.

  “You’re late,” a short, angry cactus of a woman snaps at her.

  “Eurostar delays.” The assassin pushes the door shut with one gloved hand, then follows the shopkeeper down a narrow tunnel between racks of music scores and shelves of sequencers, amplifiers, keyboards, and less scrutable boxes with MIDI interfaces. At the back of the shop the owner leads her past a curtain into a cramped room with a dragon’s hoard of stringed instruments. “Is it ready?”

  “I don’t know, are you ready?” The shopkeeper is offensively blunt. “I want it gone: I don’t want it in my shop another minute.” She bends behind a counter, wheezing and swearing under her breath, then lays a nylon carrying case on the counter.

  The assassin carefully unzips the carrier to inspect the violin. It’s made of a yellowing ivory-like substance, bonded together from numerous strips and scraps. To those who can sense magic, a shimmering heat haze of malice seems to boil off it, like the radiation flux at Chernobyl after the B reactor blew its top and sprayed fallout over half of Europe. The radiation then was so strong that bystanders could feel their skin prickling with the healthy warm flush of radioactive decay. The evil intent emanating from the open instrument case is so powerful it’s a wonder that milk isn’t curdling and the catacomb occupants rising within a five-kilometer radius.