On the tabletop, a half-assembled golem blinked milky eyes as a spinal cord waiting for hips and legs twitched like a tail. Pete skirted it as widely as she could, but the eyes still rolled after her and teeth unfettered by a tongue chattered.

Just beyond the table was a door, iron bubbled with rust and age. It had no visible handle that Pete could see, and she pried her fingers into the cracks at the edge and only succeeded in bloodying her nails. "Sod your aunt," she hissed in frustration.

The ceiling of the theater had no skylight or vent, and the walls, for all their age, were bricked tightly with mortar and moss. The golem on the table hissed at Pete, jerking its arms as it tried to reach for her.

Pete leaned against the wall and shut her eyes, trying to keep her panic in check enough so that she wouldn't scream. She'd be all right. One way or another, she'd be all right.

Jack, should have listened to Jack, should have known that you running off would go this way. Now what will you do? All of the normal whispers and shivers of magic that Pete had come to recognize in her renewed time with Jack faded in the operating theater and her skin felt slick with something else, cold and silken as spoiled milk.

This is the Black. People die here, and usually because someone's decided to kill them.

"Shut up, Jack. Since when are you bloody right about anything?" Pete muttered. She tried her mobile, got no signal underground, and paced a few times, keeping clear of the golem. She was truly, properly fucked. Trapped in here until Grinchley or Perkins decided what to do with her.

"They'll find my bones when they knock-mis place down to make a motorway," Pete said. The golem keened and hissed. "Be quiet!" Pete shouted at it, because it was better than crying in frustration.

A groaning and scrabbling began from outside the iron door, and Pete steeled herself for anything, but Perkins appeared, pushing open the massive gate with some effort.

He caught sight of the first golem, still and spent on the floor. "Oh," Perkins said. "Oh, dear."

Pete snatched up a scalpel from the rolling tray by the surgery, which also held bundles of half-rotted herbs and a black candle smeared in blood alongside the precise row of instruments, and stepped into Perkin's view. "He was a lightweight."

Perkins turned to her, his eyes glittering. "Do you have any idea how long it takes to animate one of those, you stupid girl? You've cost me months."

Pete allowed herself a smirk that she did not feel. "Well, it's not exactly a model airplane, is it?"

Snarling, Perkins raised his hand, black mist crackling with ice trailing from his fingertips. "Pain," he said simply, and Pete felt every muscle, every tendon and joint in her, seize with the worst kind of agony. It was fever-pain and torn muscles and a dull rusty nail in her flesh all at once.

A high buzzing scream cut the air, hers, and she fell back against the surgery table, vision blacking out. The half-golem on the table latched its teeth around her wrist and the cold pressure against her bones sent her into panic.

Pete heaved against the golem, and the flesh of her wrist tore as the golem went flying through the air with a hiss, landing on Perkins like a sack of lead pipes. Pete scattered the herbs and the candle, feeling her hand grow slick and warm as blood pumped out of the tear in her skin. The cold wet magic in the room shifted, loosened, and the golem let out a scream of victory.

Perkins fell over and the golem clawed at his face and chest, latching its teeth to his throat and gnawing with fierce desire until Perkins's neck artery fountained blood and he gurgled, going still. The golem continued to eat, blood flowing through it and onto the floor through its loose-ended entrails.

The pain Perkins had laid on her lessened slowly after he died, not at all like Pete would have expected from a spell, but it did lessen and she did climb the slippery stone steps back into the too-bright scrub room, which she saw now also held an altar of bones and pickled bits of skin and flesh in jars. A skull grinned at her from the center of an omega symbol wrought into clay. Pete wished fleetingly for Jack, he'd be able to tell her what she had to do for sure, but she settled for kicking over the altar and was relieved to feel the familiar prickles along her neck and scalp return as the flow of magic pulsed into the emptiness left by Perkins.

A tremble in her knees warned Pete that she was losing too much blood, and she saw her wrist was still pumping. "Bugger all." She tore off the bottom of her T-shirt and wrapped it tightly around the golem bite. It wasn't bleeding enough to have nicked a vein, but it hurt and there was a film of greenish spittle on the wound. "I'd bloody well better not start craving brains," Pete said, trying the door that led away from the upstairs of the house.

It opened smoothly and led Pete down another flight of slanted stone steps into a catacomb that paralleled the operating theater. She only had to listen to the groans and cries from behind the tiny barred doors on either side of the hallway to realize that it wasn't a catacomb—this was a dungeon.

Hands reached for Pete as she stepped into the shadow, some human and emaciated, some stiff and black with final-stage decomposition. Skin and blood sloughed off and re-grew, and rats scattered and hissed farther back in the dark.

Someone latched on to the arm of Pete's jacket. "Help… me…" A man dressed in bum's rags clung to her, face drawn into a rictus of desperation.

Pete recoiled. "Human?"

"Yes," sobbed the man. "Oh, God, yes. They offered me a hot meal… took me off the street… he uses us for parts, don't you see? Spare parts." He proffered his other arm to Pete, severed at the elbow with a clumsily cauterized wound.

The door of the man's cell wasn't locked, just bolted from the outside. Pete slid the bolt back and said, "Run. Don't stop."

The man didn't thank her. He staggered out and back along the gauntlet of shrieks and snarls, crying and stumbling until he vanished up the stairs.

Remains of Perkins's magic stared at Pete from behind every door she passed, all the way down the deceptively long corridor until she reached the end, the rear of the house. Men and women, young and old, most of them clumsily reanimated to spit or cry, some of them chewing on their own limbs, or each other. The air was rank with decomposition the farther Pete walked.

Some of the subjects had symbols or sigils painted on the doors of their cells and Pete rubbed them out when she could, hoping fervently that she wasn't turning off any electric fences designed to keep in rabid dogs as she did.

"Bitch!" something hissed from behind one of the doors. "I'll pull your eyes out and roll them on my tongue!" The hiss started up a cacophony of other noises, curses and threats filtered through ruined tongues and toothless mouths.

"You're welcome, you wanker," Pete muttered, moving on rapidly to the corridor's end, lit with an old-fashioned oil lantern.

The vault room was locked with an iron key that hung on a nail next to the rusty hinges. Pete started to scoff at Grinchley's idea of security, then realized that no one could be expected to walk along the trail of nightmares behind her to actually get here except Perkins and Grinchley himself.

Pete turned the ancient lock with no small amount of effort and went inside. The vault room was packed with cases and compact shelving, everything arranged in no particular order. Three human skulls of varying size and age grinned at Pete from the nearest cabinet, and a stuffed Feejee mermaid perched in a gilt birdcage. Every inch of the room was crammed with objects of magic and vileness, human and animal body parts, books bound in skin, statues whose eyes followed Pete as she moved among the shelves.