And then I feel a horrible visceral pain, as if someone has stuck a barbed knife through my umbilical.

"Come to this vessel!" shrieks Iris. "Come now!"

I convulse: the pain is unspeakable. And I feel the tugging. If I travel with it, the pain lessens slightly. "Obey me! Enter the empty vessel! On pain of eternal torment, I instruct you to enter!"

I drift down from the canopy, watching the ripples of nightmare twitch and spiral above me, still seeking. What the fuck?

"Enter! Enter! Enter!" Iris yodels. And as I lie on my back, looking up at the canopy above me, the pain in my guts evaporates.

What the fucking fuck? I close my eyes, and resume my gurgling, muffled invocation. For a moment, I'd swear I was having an out-of-body experience . . .

Then a coherent picture forms in my mind's eye.

It's like this. Iris is trying to summon up the Eater of Souls and bind it into my body where, among other things, it'll eat my soul and take up permanent residence. But the Eater of Souls is otherwise occupied right now. But Iris doesn't know this—she doesn't have TEAPOT clearance.

Meanwhile, I have just been trying to vacate my body all on my own, in order to summon up the feeders in the night, because if a bunch of Goatfuckers are trying to sacrifice me, I might as well fuck 'em as hard as I can. Again: it's not Iris's fault for failing to anticipate this, because she's never had to visit the Funny Farm. She's not really much of a demonologist. And she's such a good manager she's never had reason to see me when I'm seriously pissed off.

Here's the upshot: Iris's invocation has got a dangling pointer, an un-initialized variable pointing to an absent preta. But there's a soul in the vicinity, cut free—mostly—from its body. So instead of hooking onto the Eater of Souls, the preta manger, it latched onto me. So she's just spent fuck knows how much carefully hoarded ritual mojo to bind me into my own flesh.

Like she said: "Fatal accidents never have just a single cause, they happen at the end of a whole series of errors." Well, Iris has strung about five errors together and she's about to go down hard, because I'm about to turn fatal on her.

I open my eyes again and stare at the canopy overhead.

The feeders in the night are dispersing—but they're not going back from whence they came. They're rippling outwards, through the temple towards the walls. This body's occupied. But outside the doors, the vessels I've been prepping are waiting.