“Hold your hands straight out to either side, palms up. Speak or move and I’ll shoot you.” American accent, midcontinental twang.
Mo’s heart hammers thunderously. She can see the hole in the center of the cracked windscreen laminate now. She can’t see beyond the crazing, can’t tell if Zero’s dead body sprawls behind the wheel or if he somehow got away, but the driver’s door is closed so the odds are looking bad. Cassie doesn’t drive, does she? Where is she, anyway? Mo subvocalizes a macro, feels a tingle of power and sees ghost-lights in her mind’s eye, dotted around the courtyard. Two, in particular, might be crouching human forms, half-obscured behind a parked Maybach.
“Turn around slowly. Face me.”
Mo obeys. The woman is one of Schiller’s Valkyries, a straight-haired, blue-eyed blonde in a bloodstained white shift, her face a rictus of barely suppressed rage. There’s something faintly familiar about her. Any hope of escape withers at the sight of the Glock she holds in a two-handed shooter’s stance, five meters away; it’s aimed directly at Mo’s chest, and a red speckle of laser light from the tube clamped to its barrel tells its own story.
“You’re one of them, aren’t you,” the woman snarls. “Heretics and infidels! Servants of the Old Enemy! You did this!”
Mo licks her lips and takes a calculated risk. “Did what?”
“Everything!” the woman shouts. “Violated the Inner Temple! Shattered our Lord’s sanctum! Made me look like a fool in front of my boss and half the cabinet!” The penny drops: Mo is facing Ms. Overholt, the special advisor to the Minister for Magic. She’s working herself up into a frenzy of self-righteous hatred and Mo is absolutely certain that she’s going to pull the trigger in the next few seconds, but she’s clearly trained—the muzzle of the pistol never wavers. Mo works her suddenly dry mouth, reading a last desperate command—
Gravel rattles by her feet, and a fey, singsong voice calls out: “Over he-ere!”
Overholt spins and fires rapidly into the darkness as Mo dives for the grass behind her and yanks her invisibility around her like a caul, putting everything she’s got into it. The pistol is a rapid pulse of thunder, three rounds at a time—she must have an extended magazine, Mo realizes, and that’s really bad news: Glocks start at fifteen and go up from there—
Cassie’s silvery laughter echoes from the stables. “I know what you did!” she sings at Overholt. “You thought you could keep us out with your silly magic circle but we’re faster and smarter and better than you-hoo!”
Another three-round burst goes wild as Overholt spins round again and fires over Mo’s prone shadow-shrouded body. She grabs at the sod, terrified to release her grip on invisibility for long enough to speak another word of command before Overholt looks away. Where is Cassie? What’s she playing at? Then Mo realizes: when the barrier came down, Cassie reacquired her connection to her fount of power, and the OCCULUS team will be on their way in, with Alex and some unspecified heavy backup. All she has to do is stay alive—
Overholt turns to scan once more, then, without warning, throws back her head and shrieks. It’s an unearthly scream, appallingly loud: tendons stand out on the side of her neck as she vents a noise not meant for human lungs. Gooseflesh prickles on Mo’s body as Overholt’s hair begins to fan out in a halo around her head and she stretches onto the tips of her toes. Then she begins to rise, her eyes glowing as she gathers an aura of mana around her like a huge static charge prevented from seeking a path to earth. The muzzle of her gun is glowing now, the eerie green of a feeder’s eyes, and Overholt’s scream dopplers down into a ground-shaking roar of thwarted rage.
“You!” The thing that animates her howls at the night, at something or someone approaching across the lawn. Mo dares not look round, but raises her hand to her ear and taps her earpiece. “Okay Google, tell application OFCUT active ward maximum strength now,” she mumbles.
“Hello, I don’t understand that—”
Fuck. Computers. “Okay Google, tell app OFCUT active ward maximum strength now,” she speaks and scoots backwards as fast as she can on hands and knees, but Overholt is paying her no attention and she can’t tell whether it’s because her invisibility shield has held or because the unseen thing she’s reversing towards is so pants-wettingly terrifying—
“Yes, I can do that!” her phone warmly assures her, just as she stubs her left big toe painfully on someone’s shod foot and suppresses a yelp.
“Ah, Chief Inspector! We meet again!” says a posh, avuncular, and utterly unwelcome male voice. “Having a spot of bother, are we? This is your lucky day: your Dr. Armstrong asked me to stage an intervention on your behalf.” He raises his voice and addresses Overholt in a tone that drops several hundred degrees in temperature. “This is my fiefdom. Your False Pretender is banished. Leave now in peace, or I will not be merciful.”
“You!” Anneka Overholt rumbles. Then the thing speaking through her larynx switches to Old Enochian, inflected in an accent like fingernails scraping down a blackboard and the drowning screams of waterboarded prisoners. “Emperor of Centipedes and ruler of corpses! I will eat your slaves and shit worshipers and you will rue the day you challenged me!” Then she begins to chant, uttering noises that periodically overload Mo’s hearing so that the horrific phrases seem to stutter and stumble between bursts of static.
“Oh, do shut up; you’re boring me.”
Mo can’t help herself: she whimpers. Every hair on her body is standing on end with the backwash from the thaumaturgic firepower converging on Anneka and the Mandate. She tries to crawl away, but her limbs aren’t answering her brain’s most urgent commands. The loss of control is mortifying and fills her with the horror of the bone-white violin. Going to die now, she realizes, despairing. A mind-numbingly powerful blanket of sorcerous power sweeps past her, rippling through the earth like the tracks of a main battle tank rumbling past her head at a range of centimeters; then the night lights up the green-white of a lightning strike with a pulse of noise so loud that it feels like a door slamming on her head.
The Mandate giggles. “Is that the best you can do?” he demands. “Why don’t you go back to sleep?”
Then he snaps his fingers and the world ends for a few seconds.
*
Darkness. A smell of burned hair. Mo moans quietly. She hurts, everywhere.
“Mo? Can you hear me?” She recognizes the voice. Pain rasps across her right shoulder. “Mo?” Someone prodding her.
“Hurts,” she manages.
“I’m not surprised.” Alex sounds worried.
“Is she alive?” Cassie demands excitedly.
The pain is subsiding. “Backwash.” She tries to open her eyes—they sting, but she succeeds with the second attempt. As the pain recedes she begins to notice other things. The back of her left arm is sticky. Her eyelids don’t want to stay open. Redness. “How bad. Am I?”