32.6

 

It begins with a sound they feel rather than hear; a vibration in the bones of those who have them and in the core of those who don’t. Rosin still has a skeletal structure, but it vibrates most jarringly in her inner ears, where it makes he nauseous and dizzy. Steve is clutching at the doorframe to keep himself upright, and even Paul has woken, though his face is pale. He slides from the chair onto his knees, tries to stand and vomits right there on the carpet. The stink of regurgitated chips and beans permeates the room, and Roisin dry heaves herself before remembers she is above such human reactions. The Nephilim sniffs the air, more curious than disgusted and the assistant has not moved a muscle.

“What was that?” Steve looks across to Paul. “You okay?”

Paul wipes his mouth with the cuff of his shirt and gives an upward nod. “Must have been a bad pint.” He looks curiously at the assistant. “What’s up with her? Is she meditating or something?”

Roisin nods. “Something like that.”

“You have to tell him she houses a ghoul,” Namaan tells her, and she replies with a single shake of her head.

“He doesn’t need to know,” she replies in the same language.

Astaroth pipes up, his voice, still in the Nephilim’s language, slightly raised above the vibration. “He’s right. What if she’s infected him?”

“With what?”

“Diseases. All sorts of gunk in a ghoul bite.” The angel shrugs, twisting his head as if he has something stuck in his ear. “Could be anything.” The pressure in the room rises as the void warps and the wall twists one way and then the other like someone has painted an Esher mural over the faded paper. “oh dear.” The lights flicker. The walls ripple. The air folds inward like a collapsing lung.

Steve backs up into the hall, just far enough that whatever is happening to the room stops affecting him. Paul crawls across to the assistant and puts his arms around her, as if to shield her from an active shooter. The Nephilim freezes, his eyes wide, then steps in front of Roisin as if to protect her.

Astaroth doesn’t move, except for the one fingernail he’s jabbed into his ear, which he extracts. He barely glances at the puce coloured gobbet that adheres to his nail before wiping it onto the wall. He just says, quietly: “He’s here.”

And then, like the Escher painting the folding reality reminded her of, there is a smear of absence; a stutter in reality and growing void in a spot that resolves only because the world decided it should be there and Hasmed appears at right angles to them, his feet resting easily against the wall as if it were the floorboards. He stands in the centre of the wall between the door and the rear window, tall and thin and terrible, but wrong.

His wings flicker between forms — folded, unfurled, fractured, absent. His outline blurs at the edges, as though he is being erased and redrawn simultaneously. His eyes — those empty wells — glitch between hollow stillness and frantic, searching motion.

The void around him spasms as he stumbles. Gravity tries to right itself around him, causing the floor to tilt violently and Paul to be thrown to the back wall and then reverts to normal. His wings flicker and he tilts himself to match their floor, moving from wall to carpet as easily as one stair to the next. A sword appears in one hand, a pair of scales in the other. Both disappear and are re-drawn as a machete and a small, electronic cocaine scale. Both disappear again. He is filled in by what must be the Vid, but gives the appearance, at least to Roisin, of the static between stations on an old TV set.

Roisin feels a pressure behind her ribs as the mantle tries to make sense of the behaviour; wh he isn’t attacking her as they expected. Then it dawns on her. He’s not attacking because he’s malfunctioning. The code he was written with; his specific set of instructions of what to remove from Creation, has been corrupted.

By her.

Hasmed’s voice emerges in overlapping layers, distorted and trembling: “She… has changed.” The void ripples from his wings but reaches no further than a few centimetres before dispersing again. “She is not Famine. She is not Knowledge. She is not role.” His wings snap open, then freeze mid‑motion. “She is… uncatalogued.”