Rook

for a while?”
    “It’s tempting,” mused Myfanwy, “but I’ve only just figured out how to make people sweat profusely, and I still want to play with it.”
    “Fair enough.”
    “Anyway, we should probably try to come up with a way to stop this thing.” Myfanwy gestured vaguely at the tableau that surrounded them: the mold, the supine hedgehog man, the frantically chanting cultists. “Goblet here seemed to think the lot of them were veering out of control.”
    “Do we want to call in your boys out in the trailers?”
    “Won’t they get swallowed up by the slime?” asked Myfanwy.
    “Maybe not, with Goblet out of the picture.”
    “I’m not sure—for all we know, it was him keeping it from eating us and digesting the team that went in earlier,” said Myfanwy. She looked around anxiously but was relieved to find that the fungus wasn’t inching its way up her boots. “I think we’re okay for the moment. All the more reason to resolve this issue quickly.”
    “Agreed. I could bash all their heads in, if you’d like,” suggested Shantay, her jewelry glittering with the promise of unspeakable violence.
    “I’m not particularly keen on bludgeoning several dozen British citizens.”
    “Well, then, what do you propose?” For an answer, Myfanwyknelt down by the nearest chanter—a terribly thin woman who looked as if she’d been attempting to live exclusively off photosynthesis. The fungus cupping her face was an angry puce and had draped itself lightly over her frame. Myfanwy reached out and spread her fingers over the woman’s face. Myfanwy’s eyes glazed, and a look of intense concentration came over her.
    There was a reverent pause as Shantay watched expectantly.
    Then she watched less expectantly.
    Then she checked her watch.
    Then she looked at her nails and gave one of them a few quick licks with a file she produced from a pouch.
    Then she went over to Goblet, and gave him a solid kick in the stomach for good measure.
    Then she checked her messages on her mobile phone, listening intently against the chanting.
    Then she glanced at her watch again.
    Then she hummed a few lines from a popular song and got a good close look at each of the people chanting.
    Then her phone rang.
    “Did it ever occur to you that this might require a modicum of concentration?” snapped Myfanwy in irritation, breaking out of her trance. “Did the dramatic pose and the look of profound focus not tip you off?”
    “Sorry,” said Shantay, “but I can’t turn my phone off. I’m Bishop for the Croatoan. What if there’s an emergency?”
    “
Is
it an emergency?” asked Myfanwy icily. Shantay looked at the caller ID and shamefacedly put her phone back on her belt. “Well?”
    “Okay, so in this particular instance it wasn’t an emergency,” admitted Shantay.
    “Who was it?”
    “My mom.”
    “Christ,” muttered Myfanwy, going back into her trance. Shantay sighed and looked around vaguely. It was a little while before she noticed that Myfanwy had begun to bleed from the nose and that her limbs were trembling.
    “Oh, crap!” she exclaimed, dropping to her knees and holding her sleeve up to the Rook’s nose. She called Myfanwy’s name but got no response. Instead, there was a slight increase in the chanting, and the blood continued to flow out of Myfanwy’s nose. Shantay saw a red blush blossoming along her friend’s jawline. She peered more closely and saw that it was actually a dusting of spores. It thickened before Shantay’s eyes and rapidly grew into a fuzzy coating down Myfanwy’s neck and up toward her hairline.
    “Oh God, oh God, oh
God,
” Shantay muttered to herself, frantically trying to comb the growths out of the Rook’s hair. Her fingers became silver, metal curled up over her manicured fingernails, and she clawed along Myfanwy’s camouflage sleeves, scraping off the little mushrooms that had suddenly sprung up. Then, remembering, she held part of her own sleeve to Myfanwy’s streaming nostrils. “Myfanwy, honey, you need to wake the hell up!” she called into the fungus-covered ear.
    Shantay heard a stirring behind her and looked over to see Goblet twitching feebly. He must have had some sort of regeneration ability. Either that or his quills had provided more protection than she’d anticipated. She looked at her silver fingernails and briefly entertained the idea of clawing out his jugular. Instead, she twisted around awkwardly—by this time, she was holding Myfanwy up in