“But it’s eating her soul—” Evie lost it and went straight back to the bathroom. It was a couple of minutes before she could speak again. “Fuck.”
“Why doesn’t somebody stop them?” she demanded, when she could face the bedroom again.
“How?” Her father shrugged, and for a few seconds the entire weight of the world was mirrored in his expression of despair. “They’re too powerful, Evie. They’ve got the government wrapped around their little finger—their head preacher man is best mates with the Prime Minister. They’ve got thousands of communicants who’ve taken the host, like your—like Jenny.” He swallowed. “If you take them on, they’ll steamroller you. Put you on a plane to Colorado Springs and make you one of them. Evie, we’re small fry. We can’t—”
“You can’t.” Her eyes burned with rage. “I’ll find a way, Dad, that I promise you.” She picked up her mother’s hand. “That I promise her. This is evil, and I’m not going to stand for it. Whatever it takes—I’ll do it.” Her back straightened.
“You can help me right now by checking my circle and lighting the candles, love.” While they’d been talking, dusk had fallen and the bedroom had dimmed to twilight. “We can discuss what you might be able to do—might—about the Golden Promise Ministries some other time. Assuming they fail to raise their sleeper,” he added in an undertone. “If they succeed, we’re all fucked.”
And without further ado they began their half-assed and foredoomed attempt to exorcise her mother.
The style of invocation her family used was long on preparation and props but short on chanting. Dad had already diagrammed the precise integration of forces he wanted to produce on an expanse of paper tucked under the bed. It was a simple exclusionary ward, to force out anything non-human—and by human, he’d been careful to include in his definition the human microbiome, and endosymbionts like mitochondria. (As his ancestors had discovered the hard way, failing to do so had varied and drastic consequences ranging from explosive diarrhea to sudden death.) What it boiled down to was an occult vermifuge. The Lares’ mana or stored power, bottled up in the inscribed skull like an osseous Leyden jar, would surge through the grid and burn out anything that didn’t belong inside it. Simple, powerful, foolproof.
Dad was already breathing heavily and sweating as they started. “Are you feeling okay?” Evie asked.
He nodded tensely. “I’ll be fine.” His brow wrinkled in concentration as he chanted instructions to the reined entities in the skull, invoking the long-ago pact his family had made with them.
Mum lay on her back, mouth slightly agape, snoring softly as Dad chanted. Evie echoed Dad’s invocation, but something felt wrong even though the ritual objects were all beginning to glow softly with the radiance that bespoke an operational summoning. She felt oddly hollow. And Dad seemed to notice it, too: his voice rose, his ritual commands growing emphatic.
Evie licked dry lips. This isn’t working, she thought. Why isn’t it working?
The bell sitting on the floor at her feet, at the end of the bed, chimed softly, and she startled.
“In the name of our ancient agreement I command thee to—”
“A sacrifice has not been made,” tinkled the bell, and somehow Evie understood exactly what it was saying, what the Lares were conveying through the medium of metal. It was a language not English, but something much older that plugged straight into Broca’s area in her frontal lobe, generating speech in a form she could understand. “Broken dependency. Backtracking. Failed to initialize compact. Make sacrifice or die.”
“What—” Alarmed, Evie tried to step away from the circle, but her legs refused to obey her.
Dad looked up at her in horror. “Evie!”
“—Does it mean?” she heard herself asking.
“Oh god. Oh god. Oh god. The curse.”
Of course, Evie realized distantly, Mum refused to have any more kids because she couldn’t bear to let Dad sacrifice one of them—as if Dad would ever do that to me or Jerm—Her father was no psychopath, nor even an abused and damaged teenager like Grandpa with his endless guilt over what was behind the painted-over door on the top floor of the house he couldn’t bear to live in any longer—
“Make sacrifice or die,” demanded the Lares.
—One must die in every two generations, that the pact with the Lares be renewed: and now Eve found herself staring into her father’s eyes as his pupils blew out, darkening in the twilight—
“Can we abort?” she asked.
Her father shook his head. “Not at this stage, no…” He swallowed as he stared at her. “I’m sorry, Evie: be strong for me,” he said, raising the athame, the ceremonial knife. Then, before she could stop him, he said, “Take me instead.”
Alexei and his crew stormed the library. There were defenders: at least one with a submachine gun, and a joker with a bow. They fucked up Boris but good. He was up on the roof with Yuri, scoping out the interior and positioning to drop stun grenades inside, when he took an arrow to the knee and fell off the roof. They were all wearing ballistic vests, but arrows were much slower and heavier than bullets and he lost his balance and fell. Fuck. The occupants retreated and Alexei’s crew wasted vital minutes checking the offices in the back and upstairs, making sure nobody was sneaking around behind them, before they discovered the targets had barricaded the fucking doors with an oak table or something. At which point Alexei saw red. The forced entry went smoothly but when they rammed the table out of the way they were too late: a door at the other end was already closing, and although Yevgeny wasted half a magazine on it, there was no likelihood of a kill. With his
