Go and Beni stood at the center of the room, their hands linked by a long red sash. Around them burned candles, crimson and gold, sending tongues of tiger-colored flame up into the smoky air. Beni had thrown a handful of incense on the brazier and it smoldered, filling the room with a pungent, gingery scent.
"We're only going to get one shot at this," Go warned his colleague. "We've got to get it right."
Beni looked uneasy. "I still think she should actually be here."
"Yeah, right. That's entirely realistic. Lara, darling, just come and participate in this ritual for us, would you? It'll send you back to Hell and your unloving family and seal you there forever."
"I understand the reasons for it," Beni remarked. "I just think it would stand a much better chance of working. Couldn't you have slipped her something?"
"Like what? I tried that once, when she was being particularly difficult—put enough valium in her tea to knock out an elephant and what happened? She stayed wide awake and chattering on. She's not human."
"Couldn't you have asked a remedy man or something? An expert?"
"And tell him what? 'My friend and I, we conjured up this tiger spirit from Hell in India, and now she's a famous movie star, but she's gone bonkers and we want to get rid of her.' "
"You don't have to tell them the truth," Beni said, exasperated. "Make something up. It's what you do for a living, after all."
"I don't want any openings for blackmail. You know what these people are like. Look, we don't have infinite amounts of time. Are you going to help me or not?"
Beni gave a sullen nod. "Yeah. I suppose."
At the other end of the room, lit by a hundred candles, stood a shrine to Lara. Go had raided the archives for stills and these now adorned a wooden frame: Lara in black and white, posing like Ava Gardner; Lara in Bollywood Technicolor, a fuchsia sari whipping around her; several shots from a Vogue shoot and images from her latest movie. The only pictures that Go had failed to come up with had been images of her tiger-self. Lara was cagy about that, too aware of possible consequences, and although Go had surreptitiously tried, he'd never succeeded in capturing a picture of Lara in her true, or at least, non-human form.
"Okay," Go said. "Here we go."
Letting go of the sash for a moment, he cast a handful of banishing incense onto the brazier. It hissed ominously, smoke billowing out in an acrid cloud across the room and making Go's eyes water and sting.
"God, that stuff's strong," Beni said, coughing. "What did you put in it?"
Go did not reply. He was trying to read the scroll that stood before him on a music stand. It was familiar: the same spell that they'd used to bring Lara here, but—a classic touch—in reverse. Nervously, he intoned it.
"Nothing's happening," Beni said.
Go did not reply to this, either. He was not sure that Beni was right: perhaps more sensitive than the agent, or more paranoid, it seemed to him that they had suddenly attracted all sorts of attention to what was going on in the room. He had the sensation of a thousand eyes fixated upon him, a thousand ears listening, and he had no idea who they might have belonged to. He continued with the litany, which had to be recited three times, as the atmosphere in the chamber curdled and congealed like old milk.
"Oh my God," Beni said suddenly.
Go had come to the end of the third recitation and he looked up. There was a mass of movement around the base of the shrine, spreading outward. At first, he thought they were dustballs, but then little red eyes opened and through the incense smoke he glimpsed the skittering ghosts of rats and mice, a thin, transparent snake winding its way through the floorboards. A shape—much larger—stepped out of the air, seemingly made of smoke. It was a child, hair streaming down her back, mouth open in horror, a blood-red necklace around her throat that gaped and spilled.
Go and Beni cried out, but she was gone, taking the vermin-spirits with her.
"What the hell—?" Go whispered.
Beni glanced feverishly about him. "It's the house, man. This is such an old place—must have been full of psychic crap. You just sent it onward."
"No bloody Lara, though." The realization of failure ran cold down his spine, despite the choking warmth of the room.
"Oh yes, bloody Lara," a voice said. Go nearly dropped the sash. The child had not been the only thing emerging from the candlelit mouth of the shrine. At first, there was only an outline in the air: tall, slender, tail twitching.
"Shit," he heard Beni's panicked murmur.
At the top of the outline appeared two furious yellow eyes. And then the teeth. A moment later, Lara herself was almost fully visible: naked, with the black slashes of her tiger-striped marking all the way down her body. Her face, however, had changed and instead of the beautiful human mask it was elongated, snarling, the jaw dropping impossibly far to show the razor teeth.
"What are you doing?" Lara said, in a voice that was more of a growl.
"Lara—look, babe. Things change."
Beni, Go thought, don't make the mistake of trying to reason with her. She's way beyond that point. She's never been at that point. Even at her sweetest, logic had never been Lara's strongest feature.
"You know what I'm saying?"
"Beni—" Go said, in warning. You're not firing a bloody grip or something. But the warning went unheeded. The agent was too accustomed to talking his way out of a problem. "Things haven't been great for any of us lately—I know you're not happy, babe, and there was the whole pay dispute thing, which I fully concede was unfortunate, could have handled it a lot better, and—"
"So you're sending me back to Hell?" Lara said, in that voice that still was not human, at all, and filled with fire. "You brought me here, and now you can't handle it, you can't deal with me because I won't be your simpering demon bimbo, and you're trying to send me back, you pathetic little shit."
"Lara—" Go and Beni said together, but it was at Beni that she sprang. Go had a single, appalled image of Lara: her long legs bending backward at the knee, claws ripping on the polished wooden floor, her striped body arcing through the smoking air as she fell upon her agent and tore out his throat.
That was almost all he saw, because Go was off and running, knocking over the guttering candles in his flight for the door. He kicked the door open and fell out into the hallway. The clear, warm air came as a shock, as if he'd been punched. For a despairing moment, he thought Lara had struck him in the back.
Almost, but not quite all. Staggering against the opposite wall, he took one look back and saw, behind the curtain of sudden fire, Lara's head raised and fresh red blood running down her chin into the flames. The gold of the fire was trapped in her eyes and then she leaped upward. He heard the crash and shatter of broken glass as she sprang through the window and then Go himself was stumbling backward, bare feet slipping on the boards of the hallway, and he threw himself out of the front door and into the still and midnight garden as the house caught light and flared up like a firecracker.