Margaret was about to ask how they were going to do that when she was basically a bloated sausage with arms and legs, when Verune waved his hand and her body levitated off the floor. He used his powers to pull her alongside him as he waddled into the kitchen. They were halfway toward the broken door when two men stepped out of the doorway, with guns in their hands.

The two men were clearly infected: their eyes bloodshot, their skin wan and sickly; their expressions haggard. But, unlike the first batch, these two still had their marbles. The looks on their faces told Margaret they were scared out of their minds.

She recognized one of them: Brock; the blond hunk. He had a better physique than Eyvan, except for his ass-cleft of a chin. Alas, he lacked her young lover’s brains, and that deficit was on full display when—over the sounds of Margaret’s startled screams—he pointed his gun at Verune and pulled the trigger.

The Lassedite raised his hand. “Fleoganin stan.”

Brock’s bullet came to a standstill, hovering about a foot in front of Verune’s face. Brock fired two more times; both bullets stopped alongside their sibling.

Brock’s companion staggered in shock, falling onto his backside.

“What the fuck?” Brock said.

“Insolence,” Verune muttered.

He flicked his claws at his attacker.

The air sang as the three bullets blasted into Brock’s face. They pierced clean through his skull, leaving three holes bored into his skull. For a split second, Margaret could see clean through to the other side, and then Brock toppled backward, dead as doorknob.

A voice screamed. “Brock!”

It came from the secret doorway.

“Stop!” Margaret yelled. “Stop shooting! It’s me! It’s Margaret”

“Mrs. Revenel!?” Brock’s companion bellowed. He gave Margaret a wide-eyed stare. “What the hell happened to you?”

His words drew more folks out of the compound. Each and every one of them staggered in shock and terror as they laid eyes on Margaret and Verune.

“Is. Is sh-ee floating…?” one of them said, emaciated and breathless.

“If you value your lives,” the Lassedite said, “set down your weapons and surrender.”

One of them, a young man, suddenly lowered to his knees.

“What are you doing?” another asked.

The young man pointed at Verune and hissed. “That’s the hummingbird robe!”

“Indeed it is,” Verune replied.

“But that’s not Lassedite Bishop!”

“Lower your weapons,” Verune demanded. “Now.” His voice rumbled through the kitchen.

“Listen to the man,” Margaret said. “This is Mordwell Verune you’re talking to.”

Gasps rippled across the room.

“The missing Lassedite?”

“The one and only,” Verune answered.

“That’s not possible!”

Verune thrummed in amusement. “My child, with the Angel, all things are possible.”

Verune offered a demonstration. Waving a hand, he lowered Margaret to the floor and then levitated several of the Innocents in her place.

Much to Margaret’s relief, the next sound she heard was the clack of guns being set onto the floor as the Innocents lowered to their knees.

“The ‘missing’ Lassedite is missing no longer,” Verune said. “I am the Lassedite Returned, head of the Last Church, agent of the Godhead, and an incipient divine beast. By the Angel’s hand, I was plucked from my time into yours. The Last Days have come. This plague is a thing of Hell itself. But the Angel has not abandoned us. We changelings are the Chosen Blessèd. By the Godhead’s power, we are being transfigured into divine beasts, gifted with the powers of the Hallowed Beast Itself. We shall lead the fight against the forces of Hell, and guide the righteous to Paradise.”

“Divine beasts?” someone asked.

By the Angel, Margaret thought, is that Connor? She stared at the speaker.

The skin on his arms was starting to peel off.

“How can you be divine beasts? You’re monsters! Man-eaters!” Connor asked.

Verune shook his head. “It is basic theology. To the wicked, good seems evil, just as evil seems good. Even the Lass herself could not stare at the Sun’s holy Light without burning her eyes. No one is without sin, not even the Lass. Only God is perfect and unblemished. And, so as with the Sun, so as with us as well.”

Verune’s words resonated through the chaos of the room—the toppled cabinets, the spilled kitchenware, the smears of blood and ooze; the broken limbs.

“If we seem monstrous,” he said, “it is only because you see the horror of your own damnation. Part of our duties as divine beasts is to devour the bodies of the wicked and the unworthy. Our strength comes from its destruction. Only the righteous and the faithful will see us as we truly are, for that majesty is a presentiment of the glory they will know in Paradise, once we carry their souls beyond this world. And, it is my privilege and honor to lead the Godhead’s army of divine beasts, and to see the righteous borne away to Paradise.”

Margaret shivered, thrilled.

The power. The glory.

It would be hers. She would get her just reward.

She almost considered eating the Innocents just to speed on her changes. Yes, they weren’t demons, but, as Verune had said: no one is without sin. And she would eat that sin and destroy it, and grow strong.

“And, to that end,” Margaret interjected, “Lassedite Verune is going to be using the compound to train and guide divine beasts like me.” She shook her head. “At least, that’s what the plan was.” She looked at her terrorists. “What happened here?”

The Innocents looked at one another. Eventually, a young woman stepped forward. Margaret recognized her as Diane.

“Follow me, Mrs. Revenel,” she said. She bowed to Verune. “You too, your Holiness.”

Diane led Verune and Margaret through the secret doorway, into what had once been the foyer of the Innocents’ compound at 1337 Petta Drive. The room had been redecorated; its minimalist furnishings were bedazzled in human carnage. The metal door lay in a crumpled wreck against the wall, dripping with fluid. It had crushed several bodies when Steyphan had blasted it off its hinges, splattering black ooze, dried blood, and green spores splattered all over the room. Dried infection ooze bound bits of fingernails and fingertips to the walls where mindless hands had eroded them with rabid clawing.

Some of the gruesome new décor had taken a life of its own. In several places, the fungus was growing along the walls and floor, spreading out like roots from the handful of intact corpses that lay on the floor, utterly motionless. Fruiting bodies had begun to crest up from the corpses.

Eyvan, and Lizzie entered behind Margaret and Verune, with Steyphan coming up in the rear. The Innocents gasped at the sight of the snake-man, and then yelled as he stopped in the middle of the doorway and shouted. “Lass! What the hell is that?”

The Innocents’ compound was a grid of square rooms, connected to one another four to a side, except for the rooms at the edges. All of the doors could be sealed independently of one another.

Not counting the doorway behind them, there were three others in the foyer, and of the three only the one opposite the entrance was open; it led to the lounge.

That must have been where this group had been hiding.

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It was also what had made Steyphan scream.

The Innocents watched in terror as Eyvan and Lizzie approached the open door. Steyphan followed behind them, cautiously slithering forward.

The lounge was a mess—not as much of a mess as the foyer, but still a mess. There was food packaging everywhere. But that wasn’t what everyone was staring at.

They were staring at the door on the other end of the lounge.

All of the doors had built-in plastic windows.

In the silence, Margaret could just make out wild, thumping sounds and jagged, rasping screams. A shiver tickled all the way down her belly.

“Beast’s teeth…” Eyvan whispered, making the Bond-sign.

Verune made the Bond-sign as well. Not a word left his lips. He lowered Margaret to the floor with a wave of his hand.

By craning her neck, Margaret caught glimpses of feral infected bashing and the door. Trails of black ooze trickled down the plastic where the rabid things’ attempts to break through the doorway had snapped their fingers off their hands.

Lizzie said something to the effect of, “Shit, there are more,” and Margaret couldn’t agree more.

Verune turned to the Innocents. “What happened here?” he asked.

One of Margaret’s Innocents launched into a cough-riddled explanation.

It was a horror story through and through.

Apparently, it all started when one of their more recent recruits, a young man by the name of Willem had arrived at the bar after-hours, several days before. He’d looked like a corpse on two legs, stumbling into the bar, collapsing on the kitchen floor before he’d even made it into the compound. He’d been taken into the compound for medical attention right away.

“We’d hardly closed the door behind us when he exploded. The green stuff was… everywhere,” Diane explained. Coughing, she shook her head.

“We couldn’t get out,” someone added.

As Margaret listened, she noticed that, slowly but surely, her stomach was shrinking. The biomass was being distributed across her body. She could feel it crawling through her, lengthening her—feeding the growth of what she was pretty sure was a tail.

“That green stuff is spores,” Steyphan explained. “They’re highly caustic. They must have damaged the door’s hydraulics.”

“Is that why we couldn’t get out?” someone said.

The snake-man nodded gravely.

“The people who were in the room rapidly fell ill. It was like the life was being sucked out of them.”

“But not Jon Goldmouth,” Connor added. “While everyone was getting sick, Jon seemed fine.”

“You shouldn’t have let him in, Diane,” one of the guys said.

Diane coughed terribly. She wept in pain. “I already told you, I didn’t know. How could I?”

“What happened to this Mr. Goldmouth?” Verune asked.

Connor stepped forward. “He started saying he was dead.” He wept. “We didn’t think much of it at the time, but then more of us fell sick, and then, Holy Angel… then Beatrice died—”

“—And we caught Jon eating her dead body in the middle of the night!” someone interjected.

“That’s when he started to change,” Connor said.

“For future reference,” Margaret said, “that’s pretty much what happened to me.”

“What happened to Errol?” Eyvan asked.

“He ordered Jon to be locked away,” Diane said. “And anyone else who displayed changes or hunger or whatever got locked away with him.”

“What happened to the people in the room with Willem?” Steyphan asked.

“They turned into monsters.”

“The ones we killed,” Steyphan muttered.

“They were honest-to-goodness zombies!”

Verune cocked his head, puzzled. “Zombies?”

“Animated corpses, your Holiness,” Eyvan answered. “They are a staple of horror fiction. Often, it’s because there’s a virus or some other contagion which turns its victims into zombies. Zombies exist only to spread the contagion to others.”

“Perhaps the demons are using the Green Death to create these zombies,” Verune said. He turned to Steyphan. “Considering what you told me, that would seem to be an ideal method for Hell to raise its armies of darkness.”

The Innocents nodded, murmuring in agreement.

“But how did they turn into zombies?” Margaret asked. “What happened? Did it just start all of a sudden?”

Diane just stared. “I don’t know. It just… started.” She trembled.

“It was because of Errol,” Connor added.

“Errol?” Margaret gasped. “He became one of those things?”

Shit, Margaret thought, does that mean I just ate my second-in-command?

Diane shook her head. “No. As he lay dying, Phyllis started eating him.”

“What?” Margaret said. She’d managed to sit up against a wall.

Connor shook his head, too, looking down in dejection. “She was hiding her condition from us, Mrs. Revenel. Jesse shot Phyllis,” he said, “killed her—stone cold dead. Then Brock retaliated, shooting Jesse in the head—Phyllis was his girlfriend. That set off a fire-fight, and, before we knew it, everyone in the other room with Willem just went crazy. Clawing. Roaring. Screaming. Bashing against the doors until their bones broke.”

“And where were you when this happened?” Eyvan asked.

Connor pointed at the room behind them. “In the back rooms.”

Margaret heard more of the demons’ noises: their unearthly howls; their limbs slamming against the door.

“But then what about them?” Steyphan asked, pointing at the zombies behind the door.

Diane shook her head. “When the shooting started, Errol and a couple other of the guys who were really sick… they turned into those things.”

Steyphan nodded. “It’s almost like the fungus is defending itself,” he said.

Verune nodded slowly. “I see.” Turning around, he looked at Eyvan. “Please, Eyvan, wait outside. You are injured.”

Eyvan obeyed. He nodded and then left without a word.

He pointed at Connor. “You there, Connor, is it?”

Connor nodded.

“Show me where you put the changelings—Goldmouth and the others. I must speak with them.”

Connor did as he was told. He led Verune into the lounge. The Lassedite didn’t levitate Margaret along with him, but, by that point, Margaret’s stomach had sufficiently deflated that her arms could actually reach the ground again, so she followed after them, dragging herself forward.

“Do you, uh, need help, Mrs. Revenel?” Diane asked.

“Don’t touch me!” Margaret snapped.

Diane backed away, and kept her distance.

Dragging herself forward like this was exhausting as it was humiliating. But Margaret Lerchblock Revenel isn’t going to take handouts from anyone, she thought.

She crawled into the lounge just as Connor opened the door to one of the side rooms.

That must have been where they’d put Jon and the other changelings.

I really need to figure out how to do those magic tricks of—

—But a collective gasp interrupted Margaret’s thoughts. She groaned as she turned to look, spinning herself around on the floor like a walrus on the beach. She let out a gasp of her own as she saw what lay beyond the door Connor had opened.

There were three changelings in the room, one woman, and two men. One had no arms, and the other two had only one arm left each, though much of the skin was missing.

None of them had any legs.

For the first, brief time in her life, Margaret found herself feeling bad for someone who was not her. If it was out of character for her, it was only because she was so keenly aware of the struggles of dealing with a changing body.

It was obvious where their missing limbs had gone.

They’d eaten them, out of desperation.

Margaret would probably have done anything to make that hunger stop.

Unfortunately, eating their own bodies didn’t give them the nutrition a growing divine beast needed. Deformed, slug-like stumps grew out from their bottoms, in between the nibbled stubs of the parts of their thighs that they hadn’t been able to reach. They had no clothes; they’d probably eaten them first. The men’s genitals were gone—eaten, as were the woman’s breasts. They’d eaten each other’s ears and noses and hair.

The three Angelforsaken horrors were clustered around a hole in the wall. They gnawed away at its edges, licking and sucking like starved ticks on a mangy dog. Cracks shot through the sides of the hole where the drywall was softening and crumbling.

The three changelings turned their sunken, emaciated faces to their watchers.

Verune made the Bond-sign. “By the Moonlight, what horror is this!?” He gave Connor a furious stare, but then turned away and strode into the room, as if to rescue them “I am Mordwell Verune,” he said, lowering himself to the ground, staring them in the eyes. “I am here to guide you. I swear, I will make this right.”

The three changelings gave him blank stares—mystified, awed, and overwhelmed.

“Please,” Verune asked, “which of you is Jon Goldmouth?”

One of the two men flopped onto the ground. He dragged himself forward with his single arm, with only his thumb and index finger to help him. The rest were gone.

Lowering himself to his knees, Verune pressed his claw-hand on Jon’s back. “Your suffering has ended. Here,” he nodded, “let me give you a proper meal.”

Without turning around, Verune reached an arm back toward Connor, as if to ask him for a wrench. Halfway through the movement, the Lassedite pointed his fingers up, holding them like the petals of a lily while muttering under his breath.

Something about twine?

Then he twisted his hand, turning it at the wrist, and Connor’s head spun around, snapping off his body like a twizzled twig. He dropped dead, spilling dark, ooze-tainted blood on the floor.

“Eyvan,” Verune said, in a loud, clear voice, “lock the kitchen door.”

The other Innocents screamed. The door slammed shut a moment later.

“Quiet!” Verune snapped. Once again, he didn’t bother turning around. Instead, he lowered his head. “I will place your fates in the hands of these three,” he said. One after another, he looked the three changelings in the eyes. He levitated Connor’s corpse into the room with a wave of his hand.

Jon drooled as he stared at it, stupefied.

The other two changelings rushed toward the corpse, but Verune held out his other hand. “Forgive me,” he said, “but it will be quicker if you feed one at a time. I promise you, you will not need to wait long. Your lessons must come first.”

“Le-lessons?” the female changeling stuttered.

Verune glanced lovingly at the feeding changeling.

Margaret couldn’t help but lick her lips as she watched.

“Yes,” Verune nodded. “Look at what Jon is doing.”

“He’s… eating Connor,” the man said.

“No.” The Lassedite shook his head. “He is eating evil. That is why the Angel is giving us these slivers of the Hallowed Beast’s power. The plague brings out the evils within mankind. We devour that evil. We destroy it, utterly.”

As Verune spoke, Margaret noticed a beautiful, gleaming fluid drip down the sides of his head like multicolored wax. Mysteriously, it evaporated before ever hitting the ground.

The zombies in the next room screeched and raged.

“The demons will be your sustenance,” Verune said, turning toward the sound. “Each of you must eat at least one of them. It is essential that you recover your strength. You will need it.”

As he spoke, the wounds on Jon’s body began to heal, filling themselves in with scaly, dark blue hide. His lone arm thickened, sprouting a new finger which immediately exploded into sausage size, as did the other two digits. Margaret watched in fascination as Connor’s flesh fueled the growth of a new arm from Jon’s shoulder, to replace the one he’d lost.

“As for the others,” Verune said, turning to face the astonished changelings, “eat them if you see fit.”

Jon wept tears of joy as he fed. He stopped eating just to stare at his reforming hands. He clawed two hunks of flesh from Connor’s torso and tossed them to the other two changelings, who devoured the bloody hunks right where they’d landed on the floor.

“Your lesson begins now,” Verune said. “You do not need to worry. The demons in there cannot hurt you. They are there to feed you. They will make you stronger.”

Then, lifting his arm, Verune flicked his hand. Metal groaned and snapped as the door to the zombie-filled room flew out of its socket and the feral infected spilled out into the open.