"Untie me and I'll take you to it," says Iris, quick as a flash. "Please?" I can just about see her batting her eyelids at Laughing Boy. Then she adds: "You'd better cut All-Highest's throat before he wakes up. He was going to sacrifice me—"

I try to shout, She's lying! But nothing comes out of my throat. I am not, in fact, breathing, I realize distantly. Am I dead? I wonder. Am I undead? I'm not one hundred percent clear on the clinical definition of death, but I'm pretty sure that lying trapped in my own unbreathing body meets some of the requirements. I don't know about the continuity of consciousness bit, but maybe it's a side effect of the binding ritual they used. If I had my phone I could go online and google it, but zombie don't surf. I feel the knife blade move, and I really start to panic—

"Nyet. Is already dead. You take me for fool! Where is Fuller Memorandum? Tell and I release."

The knife is at Iris's throat; I lie beside her, paralyzed and apprehensive.

Iris's breath ratchets harshly through her throat. "The file All-Highest is clutching. Be careful, you don't want to touch his skin by accident—"

But she's too late.

Alexei, Laughing Boy, pulls the Fuller Memorandum from my hands. As he does so, he makes momentary contact with one of my fingers. And the inevitable happens, because this torpor that's come over me—the torpor associated with the summoning, and the control of lesser eaters, and with K syndrome—is symptomatic of something else: I'm hungry.

IN THE BACK OF AN AMBULANCE SPEEDING TOWARDS THE ROYAL Surrey Country Hospital with lights and siren, an old man opens his eyes and whispers, "Good job, boy." The paramedic, who is looking at the EEG trace, glances at him in surprise.

The stroke victim tries to sit up, struggling against the straps that hold him on the stretcher. Then he frowns thunderously. "How long was I out?" he asks the paramedic. Then: "Forget that. Turn round—I want you to take me to Brookwood. Immediately!"

SECONDS LATER, BARNES AND HIS MEN COME THROUGH THE DOOR with a strobing flicker of light bombs and a concussive blast of stun grenades. They're ready for business: they've got Mo and her singular instrument ready to suppress any residual occult resistance. But they're too late.

The screaming is mine; I'm yelling my throat out: a weird, warbling abhuman keening that doesn't stop until the squad paramedic gingerly sticks me with a battlefield-grade sedative. Which takes some time: when they find me I'm lying on a vampire prince's bed, covered in gore, with a lump missing from my right arm, and my eyes rolled up in my head so that only the green-glowing whites show. It takes them a while to confirm that I'm safe to approach; and a while longer to get an insulated stretcher down to the chamber and strap me down onto it.