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my fingertips. I look around. It seems so normal, doesn’t it? Not like a disaster scene. Bob just hangs around with a stupid, stunned expression on his face.
    â€œShe’s a vampire,” I say numbly.
    â€œSo is
that
.” He nods in the direction of the hall door, pointing at Lecter and his quick-release carapace.
    â€œThat’s . . . different.” I don’t know why I should feel defensive. Lecter wanted to kill Bob, didn’t he? First he wanted to kill Mhari, then . . . Bob.
    â€œThe difference is, now it wants me dead.” Bob looks at me. He’s tired and careworn, and there’s something else. “You know that, don’t you?”
    â€œWhen it turned on you, it was horrible.” I shudder. I can’t seem to stop shaking. The paranoia, the suspicion: they say there’s no smoke without fire, but what if an enemy is laying a smoke screen to justify terrible acts? “Oh God, that was awful.”
You should be dead, Bob,
something whispers at the back of my mind. Lecter is too powerful. “Bob, how did you stop it? You shouldn’t have been able to . . .”
    â€œAngleton’s dead.”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œThe Code Red last night. The intruder was a, an ancient PHANG. He killed Angleton.”
    â€œOh my God. Oh my God.”
    I lose the plot completely for a few seconds. Stupid me. I reach for him across the infinite gulf of the kitchen table and he’s still there, only different. He takes my hand. “You’re
him
now.” Angleton is another of our ancient monsters, the mortal vessel of the Eater of Souls. One of the night haunts upon whose shoulders the Laundry rests. For years he’s used Bob as a footstool, dropping tidbits of lore in front of him, sharing abilities, but over these past two years, Bob’s become something more: the ritual at Brookwood, where the Brotherhood of the Black Pharaoh tried to sacrifice him, changed something in him. Now he’s different. The way he managed to break through Lecter’s siren song . . .
    â€œNot really,” he demurs. I feel a flicker of sullen resentment: his talent for self-deprecation borders on willful blindness. “But I have access to a lot of, of—” He falls silent. “Stuff.”
    Unpalatable facts:
    Bob and I have come this far together by treating life as a three-legged race, relying on one another to keep us sane when we simply can’t face up to what we’re doing anymore. I’ve come to count on our relationship working like this, but in the space of a couple of hours the rug has been pulled from under my feet.
    This is a new and unfamiliar Bob. Whether he’s lying or not, whether he was hosting an innocent sleepover in a safe house or carrying on an affair in my own bed while I was away, pales into insignificance compared to the unwelcome realization that he isn’t just Bob anymore, but Bob with eldritch necromantic strings attached. He’s finally stepped across a threshold I passed long ago, realized that he has responsibilities larger than his own life. And it means we’re into terra incognita.
    â€œWhat are you going to do?” I ask him.
    â€œI should destroy that thing.” His expression as he looks at thehall doorway is venomous, but I can tell from the set of his shoulders that he knows how futile the suggestion is. I feel a pang of mild resentment. I’d like to be rid of the violin, too; what does he think carrying it does to me?
    â€œThey won’t let you. The organization needs it. It’s all I can do to keep squashing the proposals to make more of them.”
    â€œYes, but if I don’t it’s going to try and kill me again,” he points out.
    I try to plot a way out of the cleft stick we find ourselves in. Of course, there isn’t one. “I can’t let go of it.” I chew my lip. “If I let go of it—return it to Supplies,