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
