“I”—I can talk, Mhari realizes, surprised—“before the Bank, I worked for a, a rather secret division of the civil service. I was”—allowed to leave, classified as a liability—“allowed to transition to the private sector, but they have these, uh, brainwashing-like capabilities that operate like our ability to, you know, that make it impossible to talk about what you did there without their permission, and I was, obviously, not able to talk about them . . . before.” Her head’s spinning. I shouldn’t be able to say this stuff, she tells herself. How can I say this stuff? The geas, does vampirism defeat it?

“What?” Oscar looks puzzled. “What sort of stuff did they do?”

Her fork pauses, a blood-tinted slice of rare steak impaled upon the moment of the present. “They’re the branch of the secret intelligence services that deals with occult threats. Like us.”

“They’re the—” Oscar stops. “No. I’m not going to say you’re crazy.” He chuckles briefly, then a dyspeptic frown steals all sign of amusement from his face. “We’re fucking vampires, of course there’s going to be a government department. It’s in the rules.” He peers at her intently. “What did you do for this agency?”

“Admin and management. HR dogsbody.” She resumes eating, feeling her pulse slow towards normality again. “I saw, uh, something I shouldn’t have. When I was at university. They’ve got a habit of picking up witnesses and finding make-work for them to keep them under observation for a while. Sometimes for life. I was there for three or four years. God it was tedious. Eventually they figured I wasn’t a practitioner and they could let me go under a compulsion to keep my trap shut. They even sorted out a bunch of job interviews for me—there’s a standard exit procedure.”

“You said, practitioner. You mean we’re muggles? Something like that?”

Oscar and Pippa have spawned, so they’ve clearly been exposed to the Harry Potter virus along the way. Mhari frowns minutely. “It doesn’t work quite like that.” She thinks for a moment. “There’s not a huge gap between what their practitioners do and what our pigs get up to. They have a saying, magic is a branch of applied mathematics.” Her eyes widen as she drops her fork. “Oh. Shit. Excuse me.” She covers her mouth.

“Oh shit indeed.” Oscar takes a deep breath. “Well, that changes a lot of things. Why didn’t you tell me earlier?”

“Because I couldn’t! I didn’t know I could talk about it!” Her barely exaggerated distress is sufficiently obvious that Oscar feels compelled to do the gentlemanly thing, offering her a linen napkin to use as a tissue. She dabs at her eyes, then pushes her plate away. “I don’t feel hungry. I feel stupid.”