“Do you truly believe you can shoot one of the Hounds with impunity, mortal?”

I’ve got a bearing on Windbag now. Your typical B-Team idiot is either a religious fanatic who’s grown up listening to preacher-men ranting and foaming in seventeenth-century English, or they’re a wannabe who’s seen too many horror flicks. I’m betting on the second kind here. I take a step back-accidental contact with this particular species of doggie is about as safe as licking the third rail on the Underground-then quickly slip my left hand into my pocket and mutter the command word to ignite the Hand of Glory as I pull it out of my pocket.

Of course the HOG lights off promptly, but its little pinky is tangled in my pocket lining and comes free with a foul gust of scorched linen-something else to hold against the gloating ratfucker. I take a long step sideways, then another, holding the wrinkled hand at arm’s length out to one side. The Glock is a numbing drag on my opposite arm: nothing like as bad as a Browning, but I can’t keep this up forever.

A second voice chirps up from behind the thrashing Hound, about where I was standing five seconds ago: “Hey, where’d he go?”

(He sounds… dim. Let’s call him Minion #1.)

“Fuck!” That’s Windbag. He sounds pissed off. “We’re going to lose him! All-Highest will be displeased!”

“I’ve got the path.” A third voice, female and coldly controlled. Maybe she’s an A-Team player assigned to ride herd on the clown car. (She can be Minion #2 until proven competent.) “You walk the-”

No plan survives contact with the enemy-especially when the enemy is invisible, within earshot and taking notes-but even more importantly, no cultist survives physical contact with one of the Hounds. The doggie of doom flails one paw against the ground and its back arches as it goes into the seizure I’ve been expecting ever since I plugged it with a banishment round. Which is bad luck for Minion #1, who is in the path of one viciously barbed paw. He gives a brief gurgling scream, but is already dead by the time the sound reaches me: it’s just air venting from the corpse’s lungs and reverberating through its larynx on the way out. Every muscle in his body contracts simultaneously with a strange popping sound as his joints dislocate and ligaments tear, in a spasmodic breakdance that ends in a pile beside the Hound.

I don’t wait to see what they do next-I scramble up the dry soil embankment, moving diagonally between tree trunks.

“We’re going to lose him!” Minion #2 calls in a high, bell-ringing voice. “Fallback plan!” Okay, she’s promoted to Mistress. I think for a moment that she’s telling Windbag to withdraw, but then I hear the second truly spine-chilling noise of the evening, the unmistakable sound of someone racking the slide on a pump-action shotgun.

I throw myself flat against the side of the embankment and roll over on my back, still clutching the Hand of Glory and my pistol as the two robed figures on the path raise their weapons and pour fire past each other, sweeping up and down the bike path. They set up a reverberating roar that jars the teeth in my head: they’re not aiming, they’re simply spraying clouds of buckshot at waist level. I’m about two meters up the embankment above them, and twenty meters away. Holding my breath, I glance at the HOG in my left hand. The fingertips are burning steadily-I have perhaps three or four minutes of invisibility. Odds of two to one, shotguns against silenced pistol, at twenty meters? Not good. I could probably take them-probably, but I’d have to put the Hand of Glory down, and if I didn’t get them both with my first two shots I’d be giving the survivor a muzzle flash to aim for. With a shotgun, let’s not forget.

Fucking B-Team cultists. If this was the A-Team, they’d summon something exotic and deadly to set on my ass-something I’d have a chance of banishing. But the B-Team were at the back of the queue the day All-Highest was handing out death spells, so they just blaze away with shotguns.

Ten rounds later-it feels like having my head slammed in a doorway ten times in a row-they lower their guns. “He’s legged it,” says Windbag.

“Right. We’re leaving.” Mistress’s voice is so chilly you could rent it out as an air conditioner. “Philip is dead. This will not be received well by All-Highest. Let me do the talking, if you value your life.”

“But can’t we-” Windbag whines.

I don’t hear what he says next, though, because Mistress says something in a voice that distorts weirdly as she speaks: and then a hole in the air opens and closes, and they’re not there anymore. Neither is the Hound. It’s gone, taking the corpse of Minion #1 back to wherever it is that the Hounds come from. The glamour is gone, too: below me, the cycle path is restored-just another rustic suburban alleyway, lit by the streetlight glare from the nighttime clouds overhead.

I shudder uncontrollably for a minute. Then I carefully extinguish the fingers of the HOG, holster my pistol, stumble back down the embankment to the footpath, and dust myself off.

They weren’t after Mo: they were after me. They knew how to find me and they wanted to know about the Teapot. Once is happenstance, but twice is enemy action, which means it’s time to go to work.

9. NIGHT SHIFT

WALKING TO THE OFFICE ISN’T SOMETHING I’D NORMALLY DO, because it takes about three hours, but I am feeling inconveniently surveilled and I don’t like the idea of the MAGINOT BLUE STARS network being able to track me. So I follow the footpath for another half kilometer before reigniting the Hand of Glory and dashing back almost all the way I’ve come, then exiting onto a side street. I take two corners and jump a fence into somebody’s backyard before I extinguish the HOG again, then walk out casually with my shoulders back and my chin up.

A bus ride in an irrelevant direction takes me ten minutes farther away from the office-then it’s into a back alley and time to reignite the HOG for a brisk kilometer. Finally I snuff it out and catch a different bus that passes close enough to the New Annexe that I can walk from the stop.

I march up to the darkened C &A staff entrance and key my number, then swipe my pass card. The door clicks, and I step inside. It’s totally black, and in the gloom I can hear the restless shuffling of one of the night staff. I pull out my warrant card hastily, lest I be eaten by a grue: arguing with the night watchmen is singularly futile unless you do it with a chain saw or a baseball bat.

“Brrrrr-”

“Get me a torch,” I snap. The warrant card is all very well-it sheds a faint, nacreous glow-but the backlight invocation has unpleasant side effects if you crank up the lumens too high. (Why is it that all the movies make it look as if wizards find invoking light easy? Tenuous glows and balefire are all very well, but there’s a reason we use fluorescent tubes around here.)

“-rains?” he asks plaintively.

A torch flicks on and I see the wizened face of its holder. “Here, give me that.” I take the torch, being careful to hold the warrant card between me and the doorman. I think he might be Fred from Accounting, but if so, he’s definitely a bit the worse for wear these days; it’s several years since he died, and not everyone around here gets the deluxe Jeremy Bentham treatment. Mostly HR just arrange for one of us to stick them in a summoning grid and bind one of the eaters in the night to service (weak, minimally sentient efflorescences of alien will, that can animate a corpse and control it just about enough to push a broom, or scare the living daylights out of unwanted nighttime visitors). I gather it saves on funeral expenses. “Stay here and forget I came this way. That’s an order.”

I climb the stairs, leaving the residual human resource behind to eat any unwitting B-Team cultists who were stupid enough to tail me. It’s past midnight and they make regular inspection rounds, so I keep my card out and hope like hell the battery in this plastic piece of shit lasts until I make it to my office. I keep a proper torch there, a Maglite that’ll work properly when it’s time to go visit Angleton’s lair and turf those files from top to bottom. Luckily the plastic piece of shit holds out and I let myself in, flick on the light, shut the door, and flop down behind my desk with a sigh of relief.