I’m not sure what I saw through the open portal. My memory is full of confused, jumbled-up images of tentacles and lobster-claws and crazy-ass stuff looking like industrial robots made out of raw sewage and compound eyes the size of my head. I can’t really say what it was, though, because my inner ears were ringing. It was total sensory overload, backlit by shimmering curtains of light and electrical discharges and the screaming of damned telemarketers in hell. Okay, I made that last bit up. But it was raw.

“Close, dammit! Close!” I yelled in Enochian. The door-zombie moaned incoherently and stumbled, collapsing against the portal, just as a bouquet of tentacles reached across the threshold and wrapped themselves around my bomb-carrier zombie in something that was probably not intended as a loving embrace.

My bomb carrier groaned piteously, with an inner voice so loud that I could feel it in my head even over the unholy din from the tentacle monster. I shuddered. I’ve never actually seen something kill a feeder in the night before—disembodiment is all very well, but something told me my minion wouldn’t be coming back for sloppy seconds. But he’d stepped up to the threshold, and he was carrying the basilisk gun, and he’d pushed the self-timer “start” button . . . “Close the fucking door before I invent a whole new hell to banish you to!” I screamed at the door-corpse. (I am taking a liberty here. I had, and have, no idea what the Enochian for “fuck” is. Probably because the beings who invented that language didn’t have anything remotely approximating mammalian genitalia. Even before their final extinction rendered the whole point moot.)

I shoved, hard, with my mind. So hard, in fact, that everything began to turn gray and my ears—my physical ears—began to ring. K syndrome here I come, I thought with a resigned sense of futility. Angleton was in front of me, approaching the edge of the outer ward, but I could tell this wasn’t going to work—

There was a soundless flash of light and a deep, resonant thud, as of a gigantic door slamming on the other side of a wall. I felt it in my gut as I stumbled. Another flicker: I couldn’t see properly—

“Cut the ward, boy, cut it now!” Angleton snarled over his shoulder.

The ward? Oh, right. I fumbled with my phone and hit the “off” icon on the control app. The light show began to fade. “Hang on, have we closed the portal?” I asked.