"Don't care. He's got to die." I can see a snarl building in Julian's chest, sense the tension in the set of his jaw. I've stopped breathing: if I move—

"Gareth failed the All-Highest." Jonquil is standing behind Julian now. "He was weak. He surrendered to a naff little glamour. Are you going to surrender to a stupid impulse, Julian? Are you weak? Do you want to hear what All-Highest will say if you damage the vessel?"

For a moment Julian does nothing—then he breathes out. "No." He squints at me along the barrel of his gun. "You're going to die, meat. And I'm going to watch you go." The shotgun swings away suddenly, pointing at the floor.

"What are we going to do with that?" he asks Jonquil, gesturing sideways at Gareth's body.

"Drag it downstairs and stack it with the others." She shrugs dismissively.

"The vessel's phone—"

"This for his phone." She kicks the NecronomiPod; it caroms off the wall and skids beneath the chest of drawers. "Gareth's safe to touch now. Get him downstairs."

"How are you going to move the prisoner?"

"I'm sure he can walk." Jonquil rests a hand on my right shoulder. I shudder. "You can walk, can't you, Mr. Howard? Please say you can walk? Because if you can't—" She moves her hand a couple of centimeters down my arm and squeezes.

"I can walk!" I yelp, gasping for breath. "Let me . . . up ..."

Julian grabs me under the left armpit—the undamaged one—and heaves me to my knees. I try to get my feet under me, and everything goes gray for a few seconds, but I don't faint. I'm just gasping for breath and dizzy, and a bit nauseous, and my right arm feels awful.

"That's good," says Jonquil, taking my right elbow as Julian lets go and bends down to pick up their phone-fiddling former friend. "Now you're just going to step this way, Mr. Howard, and then you're going to follow Julian downstairs and get in the back of the car and sit quietly, aren't you?"

I nod. Bastard Goatfuckers. If they think a blood-soaked man with his arms handcuffed behind his back won't draw attention in the average London suburban street—

Shit, I think despairingly as I reach the bottom of the staircase and Julian opens a side door onto a garage, for B-Team cultists these two have really got their shit together. Jonquil opens the rear door of the silver Mercedes saloon and Julian grunts as he slides Gareth's body onto the passenger seat and positions the corpse so that it looks like it's sleeping. Then he opens the boot of the silver Mercedes saloon and pushes me into it headfirst, so that I land on my right arm in a blaze of agony. And that's the last clear thought I think for a while.

14. The mummy's tomb