This happens every month or two. Usually she’s gone for a couple of days, sometimes only for a few hours, but on one notable occasion she disappeared for nearly a month. It’s not her they need so much as her bone-white violin and its human attendant. (I hate that fucking thing.) It’s an Erich Zahn original, one of a double-handful fabricated in Weimar Germany. You can’t get the materials to make any more of them, and you wouldn’t want to unless you were a particularly macabre serial killer. The reason the organization needs it is summed up in the now-tattered sticker Mo added to the case several years ago: THIS MACHINE KILLS DEMONS. But to do that, it needs a violinist. And she’s very proficient. Too proficient: if she was less good at it they’d take the thing away from her and give it to some other poor bastard who I wasn’t married to.

Presently I hear the clatter of her hanging up. “Got time for coffee?” I ask as her footsteps come closer.

“I think so,” she says, and I flick the switch on the filter machine. “They’ve booked me onto a six o’clock flight out of London City, but there’s plenty of time. Hand luggage only.” It’s dark in the kitchen, and she’s as pale as a ghost in the twilight glow of the LEDs on the microwave oven. “Speaking of which.”

“I got your bag,” I say as the coffee begins to burble and spit.

“Oh, Bob.” She puts the violin case down on the table, then comes towards me. We embrace awkwardly. She rests her chin on my shoulder. There’s an unpleasant tension in the back of her neck. “I’d better get dressed soon.” She makes no move to pull away.

“Can you say where you’re going? Or how long you’ll be?”

“No, except it’s outside the Schengen Area, meaning I need a passport, and no, but probably not more than two nights. Maybe less. If you need to know more, you can yell at Danny White, or someone else in OpExec.”

That tears it. OpExec don’t deal with trivial stuff, paranormal parking tickets and the like: if she’s working for them on this assignment, then she’s probably going to come home with her heart—if not her sanity—in pieces. (Assuming she does come home, but that’s a given in our line of work, for both of us: it’s not a risk-free occupation.) Most likely she’s on her way to one of the less-well-equipped countries—the UK has an unusually large and proficient OCCINT service—to help disinfect an ulcer in the skin of reality. There will be plenty of backup and support, but she’s still going to have to do heartbreaking things to people who probably don’t understand why the pale woman with the bone-white violin and blood dripping from her fingertips is coming for them. Innocent bystanders, collateral damage, victims the monsters just haven’t gotten around to eating yet—and the monsters themselves. She has to deal with them all. And here she is, shivering naked in the kitchen at dead of night, and not just with the cold.