Iris tenses as her followers leave, and it’s then that she makes her bid for freedom, stamping hard on the inside of my right shin and trying to elbow me in the guts. “Let me go!” she shouts.
I feel the pain in my leg as if from a great distance, and the elbow in my abdomen is just a mild nuisance. “I don’t think so,” I say, and tighten my grip on her. “You don’t know what’s going on out there,” I add. She keeps struggling, so I force her facedown on her own altar. “You made a really big mistake,” I explain, as the feeder with the shotgun stalks after the last fleeing worshiper, and reaches for the door.
“Fuck you!” she snarls.
The feeder with the shotgun draws the door shut. You may rise now, I call silently to the ones who wait patiently outside, and I feel them begin to stir in their niches, shaking the cobwebs from their uneasy bones.
“You made several procedural mistakes, Iris.” I don’t need to shout now, but my ears are still ringing. “You tried to summon up a preta but it didn’t occur to you to check first to see if it was already incarnate. Which it was, leaving you with an invocation and no target. So it latched onto the first available unhomed soul in the neighborhood, and it just happened to be mine. You’re an idiot, Iris: you bound me into my own body. And you’ve just killed us both.”
She’s still tense but she stops struggling. She’s listening, I think. “You’ve killed me, because I-You know what happens to demonologists who run code in their head? You made a big mistake, giving me time to think about what was happening. Suicide invocations are always among the most powerful, and you put me in the middle of the biggest graveyard in the country, with all that untapped necromantic go-juice. Bet you thought it would make your summoning easier, didn’t you? Well, it worked for me. But I’m dead, Iris. I don’t know how long this binding is going to hold up, and when the field collapses I’ll be just another corpse.”
The ringing in my ears is subsiding, almost enough to hear the muffled banging and screams from outside the door. Oh dear, it sounds as if they want in again. Can’t those people make up their minds?
“I don’t believe you,” she says. “Ford’s report…”
“Angleton arranged it. He knew we had a leak; Amsterdam proved it, but he’d already spotted the classic signs. He briefed Dr. Mike to put out a plausible line in bullshit, intending to drive you guys into a frenzy of self-exposure. I don’t think he expected you to go quite this far, trying to bind the Eater of Souls and turn it loose inside the Laundry, though.”
She’s shivering. Fear or rage, I can’t tell-not that it matters. Dimly and distantly I realize that fear and rage is what I should be feeling, but all I seem to be able to muster up right now is a vague malevolent joy. Ah, schadenfreude.
Fetch the taser, I tell my minion. I could kill her, but she knows too much. So I need to lock her down until the seventh cavalry arrive, even if I fall apart before then. And maybe get us the hell out of this crypt before the things in the air tonight get loose and come looking for me.
“How are you doing this?” she says in a loud whisper. “You shouldn’t even be alive-”
“I’m one of them, Iris, weren’t you listening? I’m possessed, recursively.” Take aim, I tell my feeder. You don’t want this one, she tastes bad. “Which is, on the face of it, nuts-I’ve never heard of such a thing-but we learn something new every day, don’t we?”
I let go of her abruptly and step clear to give my minion a clear line of fire. She straightens up and begins to turn, and I realize I miscalculated as she raises her sickle. I duck as she lets fly and the feeder shoots, all at the same time. Iris collapses; something nicks my shoulder and falls off. Stand back, I tell my feeder. Then I walk over to the bed and collect the black sacrificial cords. The sickle did some damage, I realize, and I appear to be bleeding, but I can worry about that once I get Iris tied up.
By the time I finish binding her wrists and ankles, I’m beginning to feel oddly weak. The noises outside the door to the crypt have died down. Go to sleep, I tell my feeders; they crawl and writhe outside in the tunnels, happy and replete with the feast of new flesh, and need little urging to fall into a state of torpor. It’s becoming hard to think clearly. I know there’s something I ought to be doing, but… oh, that. I take the ring-bound black folder from Iris’s improvised altar and tuck it under my arm, then I look at my patient feeder, who stands by the altar with a vacant expression, his eyes luminous in the dark. Go to the entrance to the chapel. Open the doors. A truck will come with men. Lead them here, then sleep.
He turns and shuffles towards the door, grateful and obedient to the Eater of Souls for granting him this brief existence. Then I am alone in the crypt with Iris. Who has begun to recover from her tasering, and tries to squirm aside as I walk past her to the bed. “Hasta la vista,” I tell her: “Give my regards to the Auditors.”
Then I keel over on the dusty black satin sheets, dead to the world.
THERE IS CHAOS IN THE CHAPEL AS THE CULTISTS DESPERATELY prepare to defend the perimeter.
On the roof, the surviving guards-Benjamin is not among them-have taken up positions around the corners, pointing their guns out at the sea of bodies that slowly shuffle towards the building. Below them, the worshipers on the ground mill and rush in near-terror until three of their number, better organized and equipped than the rest, gather them into groups and set the unarmed to dragging pews into position to form an improvised barricade, while those who bear arms prepare to defend against the creeping wave of darkness.
Crouching behind the gargoyle at the southwest corner, Michael Digby (orthodontic technician, from Chelmsford) glances sideways at the cowled head of his principale, the sergeant-at-arms responsible for the coven’s guard. “What are we going to do, sir?” he asks quietly.
“What does it look like, soldier?” Clive Morton (retail manager, from Dorking) studies the darkness with dilated pupils.
Digby looks back to the field of fire in front of the chapel as a brief snap of gunfire knocks over a clump of drunkenly walking figures that have shuffled out of the long shadows cast by the floodlights in the chapel doorway. “Looks like zombies, sir. Thousands of ’em.”
“Right. And we’re going to hold out here until dawn, or until All-Highest figures out how to drive them away, or we run out of ammunition. That answer your question?”
“You mean the only plan is to stand behind a few feet of church benches?”
“Beats having your soul eaten…”
Down below them, the worshipers have dragged the bench seats into position in an arc around the entrance and steps leading up to the chapel. Their fellows inside the building have lifted up the heavy wooden tables and tipped them against the windows, barring entry. They think they’re safe, as long as the armed men on the roof can pick off any shuffling revenants that enter the circle of light. But death is already among them.
Alexei from Novosibirsk idles in the darkness behind the worshipers, lurking in the vestry where a cultist guard now lies beneath a pile of moth-eaten curtains.
Alexei is seriously annoyed, but professionally detached from the cock-up and chaos going on around him. The operation has not gone in accordance with earlier plans. He has, as expected, succeeded in infiltrating the vestibule area; the seething chaos outside, accompanied by a panicking mob erupting from the depths of the chapel, has made things run much more easily than anticipated-up to a point. But the ward around his neck is hot to the touch, smoking faintly with a stench of burned hair. And his radio has clicked three times-panic signals from soldiers unable to take their assigned places. Once is happenstance but twice is enemy action, and thrice is a fuck-up. Something has gone wrong, and he can no longer count on backup from Yuri and Anton. Finally, as if all of that isn’t bad enough, the dead are rising.