“Yes. Ugh.” I shudder. “She’d keep them in line alright.” Janice: devops person, has purple highlights and an undercut, was semiserious about martial arts before she turned PHANG. She’s probably a sixtieth Dan black belt by now. “Wait, who else did you say lived there?”

  “Dick.” I can’t tell if she’s swearing or naming him. “You remember Dick?” (Dick is the sleazeball vampire who got put on a performance improvement plan for fucking the residual human resources.) Mo sighs deeply and her gaze turns inward. “I propose we visit Pete after work. If he’s murdered Dick we can help him dispose of the body: nobody in HR needs to know.”

  The District Line at rush hour isn’t my favorite thing, but it gets us there just before sunset. “What would you like for dinner?” Mo asks as we walk toward the vampire safe house.

  My stomach rumbles. “South Indian?” I suggest, absolutely not because we just passed a restaurant advertising all-day thalis.

  “Hmm.” She pushes an entryphone buzzer and shows her face to the camera. “Capital Laundry Services—” The lock clicks open and I follow her into the daylight-free porch.

  Janice is waiting in the living room. If you discount her pallor—which is normal-for-goth—you could mistake her for any other thirtyish, no-nonsense IT contractor on her day off. “Mo.” Pause. “Bob.” Pause. “What brings you here?”

  “We’re here to see Pete,” Mo says.

  I clear my throat. “We’re told he isn’t doing well. Thought he might like some friendly faces.”

  For a moment I think I mis-stepped and she’s about to rip my face off and piss down my throat: but Janice slumps slightly, then shrugs. “Yeah, I think he would.” She glances at Mo. “How well do you know him?”

  “I was matron of honor at his and Sandy’s wedding.” Mo elbows me: “This one helped organize the stag night.”

  “How is he doing, really?” I ask. “I know he was turned against his will, then there was some sort of prisoner exchange and Him Upstairs replaced his V-symbs with the local strain? Er, unclear on the details, but I can’t imagine he’s terribly happy with any of that.” I scratch my head, then glance at the doorway to make sure he’s not lurking on the threshold. “In fact, I’m half-surprised he didn’t go for a noonday stroll.”

  “Bob.”

  Mo elbows me again, but Janice nods.

  “Yeah: you and me both, but he takes the ‘suicide is a mortal sin’ line seriously. Listen, before you go upstairs I’d better check that he’s not been pouring his rations down the drain again. If he’s starving—”

  Mo stands up. “We’re both immune to V-symbs,” she says, as I say, “He won’t hurt us.”

  Mo continues: “If it helps, think of this as an intervention, not a visit.” By rights I ought to be petrified right now—blood bags shouldn’t party in a Phi Alpha Ng house—but humanity is something I only see in the rear-view mirror these days. As for Mo, she’s an Auditor, which means she’s got the root password to the fuckery the Laundry oath of office installs on our gray matter.

  “Top of the stairs, second door on the right,” Janice says grimly. “I’ll be right here if you need me.”

  Mo and I head upstairs.

  * * *

  It is a fact that most assassins need a regular day job to support themselves: they can’t make ends meet with the stabby side hustle alone.

  Unless they live and practice their calling in a violent hellhole where mass murder doesn’t make the front page news, there is almost never enough work to keep an assassin busy. So, much like the state executioner, the assassin is an occasional contractor. England’s last hangman was a pub landlord who, once in a while, nipped out after closing time to pull a different lever from the beer engines. And today’s assassin has just arrived on the Eurostar from Paris. She’s on her way to Maida Vale Studios because that’s where the BBC Symphony Orchestra is recording this week, and music is her main line of work.

  In addition to broadcasting and recording concerts for the BBC, the orchestra performs regularly at the major London venues—including the Proms concerts held in the Albert Hall. Although she isn’t a full-time member of the orchestra, the assassin is a conservatory-trained violinist, and often fills in when a member of the regular string ensemble is unavailable.

  The assassin read the background dossiers the Senior Auditor provided, including the history of Operation Freudstein and the disaster at the Last Last Night of the Proms. And she also knows why it was necessary. Because that very reason is rattling its chains in her violin case right now.

  The violin has been whispering seductive lies in the back of her skull ever since she collected it in Paris. Unbearable falsehoods that could only be worse if they were true. She is aware, thanks to her briefing, that Dr. O’Brien carried this occult parasite around for years—as did Dr. Armstrong, O’Brien’s predecessor. And she’s carried a white violin of her own in decades past—but that was a child’s practice instrument beside the Stradivarius from Hell.

  There’s a difference between reading about something and experiencing it for yourself. And just six hours of carrying this damnable violin has left her numb with horror. It’s an undead nightmare in a backpack, a white and osseous doom. It makes her skin crawl. As soon as she gets to the studio she rushes to the instrument room, desperate to stash it inside a warded cupboard. It will, she hopes, be safe behind burglar alarms and a powerful containment grid. As soon as she’s secured it she padlocks the door and flees. It’s still only half-awake, but she feels like if she spends too much time close to it her mind will melt like a candle at a nuclear test.

  Before she collected Lecter she’d thought the reports of its potency were overblown, but she can’t kid herself anymore: she is not in fact a top-rated government sorcerer. She’s been many things—heiress, nurse practitioner, classical violinist, personal assistant to a haunted genius, assassin—but she’s not Dr. O’Brien.

  Unfortunately Dr. O’Brien is personally known to the Prime Minister. There’s no guarantee that she hasn’t been subtly Renfielded, compromised by a cranial rootkit installed at such a low level that even her oath of office might not override it.

  The assassin is an External Asset who was unofficially retired from the field several years ago—kept on the books, but given no missions, don’t call us, we’ll call you—she was probably passed over as insignificant. When she was reactivated a few weeks ago it came as a big surprise. Who could have imagined that? Unless, of course, her retirement had been part of a contingency plan laid down years ago …

  Quite how the Senior Auditor has retained sufficient autonomy to ordain acts of high treason is a mystery. But the Senior Auditor also arranged for the Black Pharaoh to take over the government in the first place. Obviously you do not sit down and do a deal with the living avatar of an Elder God unless you have done your homework well in advance, and triple-checked your work.

  The assassin has heard rumors of a program called Continuity Operations, and received the clear understanding that this is real Death-Before-Disclosure stuff. Quite what purpose Continuity Operations serves is unclear to her, and that’s probably for the best. You can’t betray what you don’t know, after all. But she suspects—you don’t have to be a Brain Genius like the Organ Master to see this coming—that her assignment is part of some sort of scheme to kneecap the New Management.

  She intends to go through with it—it’s a goal she supports—but she’s not stupid: she’s looking to secure an escape route, and is prepared to drop everything and run for her life at the first sign that the Black Pharaoh has noticed the egregore is waking up. As for her former lover, he’s more than capable of looking out for himself. (Only the substantial payout for a successful mission could induce her to work with him again.)

  Meanwhile: the string section is due to practice tomorrow morning. She won’t be playing either white violin, but there’s a perfectly serviceable Cremonese instrument she can carry to and from practice on the tube without worrying unduly about insurance. (Her story is that she has a vintage Guarneri del Gesù as well, but it’s with a restorer.) When it’s time to play for real she’ll be wearing Dr. O’Brien’s face.

  And then hell will be loose on Earth, for the strings of the King in Yellow are back.

  * * *

  Mo knocks on the bedroom door. Nothing happens for a while: we exchange a look, then she knocks again.

  After about a minute I start to get twitchy. And Mo has begun to shift her weight from one foot to the other. I touch her arm: “Allow me?” I ask, then I open my inner eye.

  Normally the inner eye stays firmly shut—there are too many people out there and seeing their souls gives me a headache—but I need it now. There is indeed someone alive inside the room, a mind surrounded by the numinous susurration of eaters (or in this case, V-symbionts). Which is a relief; it means he hasn’t topped himself. But he feels oddly dim, dark even. Pete is depressed.

  I nod at Mo. “Go on,” I say, so she opens the door and steps inside.

  It’s pitch-black in Pete’s vampire lair, the lights out and the windows firmly shuttered. My first impression is that it stinks, the peculiar sourness of unwashed clothes and despair of someone sheltering in their room like a wounded animal hiding in its den, waiting to learn if it will live or die.

  “Pete?” Mo’s voice is low and gentle. “I’m going to turn on the light now. You should close your eyes.” Then the light goes on.

  You’ve probably seen student halls of residence or a house in multiple occupation. Perhaps you’re also familiar with the hangover aftermath of exam finals and a three-day bender? Or with students who, due to stress or illness, go into a doom spiral of depression? Well, this is like that, only Pete isn’t a student. He’s a responsible adult with a PhD, a motorbike, a wife, and a toddler. Part of his job is providing pastoral care to people going through horrendous shit, giving them the steadfast nonjudgmental support they need without batting an eye or showing any sign of stress. Which makes his own meltdown all the more horrific.

  Pete is curled up on top of an unmade bed with a pillow clamped over his head. He’s fully dressed apart from his shoes and one sock. There are fast food wrappers, drained beer cans, and bottles of cheap spirits all over the carpet. (PHANGs need to eat and go to the toilet just like the rest of us: the mandatory blood meals are an unwelcome extra.) Judging by the smell, one or more forgotten snacks have crawled beneath the bed to die.

  “Pete.” Mo touches his bare ankle. “Are you awake?”

  A sound trickles from under the pillow.

  “I’ll be back in a sec,” I say, and head downstairs. To Janice: “Where do you keep the cleaning supplies?”

  By the time I get back to Pete’s room Mo has gotten the pillow away from him and she is sitting on the bed with his head on her thigh. She’s talking quietly but he’s not replying. I get busy collecting the rubbish. I have to remember to breathe through my mouth; I refuse to even look at the door of the en suite bathroom until I’ve got the bedroom under control.

  “—We only learned you were here today, which is why we’re visiting. Your phone’s going to voicemail, have you left it somewhere? I wanted to call Sandy, but we thought we should get the story from you first. How bad is it?”

  Pete groans quietly. “They turned me.”

  “We heard.” Mo rubs his shoulder. I’m glad it’s her: I’m not great at this kind of emotional labor so I stick to collecting cans—I remember too late to upend them over a dead coffee mug in case they’re not completely empty—then get down on my knees and start searching under the bed.

  “I thought I understood. I mean, I was with Brains and Derek and Yarisol—she was wearing Iris Carpenter’s daughter’s face—and that was horrible enough, but then I got bloodshot. Yarisol killed the shooter and the symbionts used the link to take me as a replacement host.”

  Holy crap, I think. Mo strokes his hair: he’s shaking like a frightened dog in a thunderstorm. “What about Derek?”

  Pete shudders. “I don’t remember.” (I tie off the first waste sack, then start filling another.) “It was—have you ever had the kind of nightmare where you’re a passenger as somebody else moves your body around like a meat puppet?”

  I clear my throat: Eater of Souls here. Mo doesn’t spare me a glance.

  “It wasn’t a nightmare,” he says dully. “He, it—whoever it was—made me attack Derek and bite his throat. I fed on him. It was awful. But it was also wonderful and that’s when I knew I was damned, even before Mhari brought the Black Pharaoh to me and He turned me again.”

  It comes out in fits and starts. Pete has a degree in social work. On top of that, he has a PhD in theology. He reads Aramaic, Classical Greek, Latin, and motorcycle maintenance manuals. He’s absolutely not a knuckleheaded biblical literalist: he’s an academic who lectures on how the current consensus bible contains various pieces of second-century Jesus fanfic, how Genesis contains bits of three different incompatible creation myths, not to mention the badly erased traces of Jehovah’s wife Asherah (before she got scrubbed out of the Bible by the patriarchal priesthood). He’s blessed same-sex marriages in his church, and got an earful from his bishop. So for Pete to start throwing around words like damned is pretty alarming.

  “There’s no way out,” he mourns. “Can’t kill myself, Sandy and Elinor would never forgive me. And my parents. Everyone who depends on me.” (He sobs quietly.) “It’s a mortal sin, but that’s kind of beside the point when you’re already damned. But I can’t carry on like this either, because the blood is the life.”

  I ran the numbers years ago, when I was on the OPERA CAPE committee: V-symbionts rely on their host to find them a succession of victims. A healthy but abstemious PHANG can’t help but drain 150 quality-adjusted life-years from their victims every twelve months. Two entire lifetimes, in other words. If the PHANG refuses to feed, the V-symbionts turn on them instead …

  The hell of it is that PHANGs are potentially immortal. We don’t know for sure, but Old George and Basil Northcote-Robinson (both very dead, and good riddance) were turned at least two centuries ago. They must have drained four hundred victims between them. Almost certainly more.

  “Even if by existing I can be a net force for good in this world—which is pretty fucking unlikely, given I’m a vampire—I don’t want to watch Sandy and Ellie grow old and die. But I can’t turn them either! That would compound the sin. It’s an actual living hell on Earth.”

  He sits up a bit, and gets his head out of Mo’s lap, which is a promising start, but if you could bottle the despair in his voice the Met would buy it by the gallon to spray at demonstrators.

  “Well, this is all very depressing,” I say with deliberate emphasis—Mo glares at me—“but can I tempt you downstairs for pizza, while we run the washing machine and brainstorm what to do in the short term? I mean, the really immediate short term? Because I can’t imagine Sandy’s very happy about you hiding in your Fortress of Solitude, and I can absolutely guarantee that Elinor is too young to understand. And also, we might just have an ulterior—”

  “—Bob, now is not the time—”

  “—Motive because we’ve been given a job to do and tag you’re it for the team?”

  Suddenly my back is rammed up against the wall and a vampire is baring his centimeter-long canines at me and hissing. “Did you not hear a fucking word I said?” Pete’s grabbed me by the throat but he’s not actively trying to throttle me, and when I look past his shoulder I can see Mo rolling her eyes at me as if to say, What did you expect? And also, ew, Pete’s breath is caustic.

  “Yours is a Giardiniera with Romana base and a side of Bruschetta Originale from Pizza Express, right?” I squeeze out. “This late it’ll take an hour to get here, just time for a shower and a shave first while we run the hoover over the carpet, eh?” Behind Pete Mo is performative-dancing facepalm with a side of you suck, but Pete’s pupils aren’t in beast mode and he’s not sniffing my jugular, so I think he’s still in control. “After you’ve eaten I’ll set up a FaceTime call with Sandy and Ellie because when did you last talk to them? Also we can order in dessert—tiramisu, right?—and make coffee. Work can wait…”

  Pete drops me. “You are an ass—I mean, a very naughty boy,” he says, surprisingly mildly for someone who just had me by the throat. He huffs, almost a laugh, and I swear his canines shorten visibly. “I’ll listen once I’m fed and I promise I won’t make any decisions while I’m hangry. Okay?”

  I tip Mo the nod as Pete turns toward the bathroom and she nods back, then slips downstairs to ask Janice if there’s an untouched blood ration in the kitchen fridge. And then we’ll see. Right?

  * * *

  It’s Thursday afternoon, and Candy is sick.

  The royal pups lead a pampered, albeit regimented, life. There are currently five residents in the Corgi Room at the Palace: the two elderly corgis, Holly and Willow, and three dorgis—royal corgi/dachshund crossbreeds—including Candy.

  Each dog has a wicker basket of his or her own, raised above the floor to avoid draughts. In the morning they’re fed a breakfast of specially baked dog biscuits, prepared to a royal recipe; for high tea they dine on fresh rabbit or beef in gravy, prepared by a gourmet chef. Each dog has a bowl bearing its name, and they’re trained not to raid one another’s food. There is no longer a permanent vet in residence for the dogs, but two of the veterinarians who work with the horses have a secondary specialty in canine medicine. Someone visits the Corgi Room every week, or more frequently if called in—like today.

  “I really don’t know what’s wrong with her,” the royal dog trainer tells the vet. “She seemed a bit quieter than usual after evening exercise yesterday but I didn’t think anything of it. No diarrhea or other digestive troubles. But this morning she was off her food completely—refuses to touch it, didn’t want to mess with Vulcan’s either. Whiny and subdued, refused to get out of her basket at first. And now…”

  The vet watches the dog out of the corner of her eye to avoid agitating her—the dogs pick up on human unease—but there seems little point. The other corgis are outside, exercising with two footmen. Meanwhile Candy lies in her basket, breathing in shallow pants, clearly not paying attention to anyone. She’s four years old and normally a rambunctious troublemaker—but not today.