Twisting my head to look back I could see the facing of the Royal National shrinking behind me. One or two people were staring in my direction but it was the early hours of the morning and the streets were nearly deserted. I couldn’t see Rachel but my precognition was still screaming danger danger danger, and as I looked ahead I felt the surge of another gate spell.

Gate magic isn’t meant to be used in combat. It’s too slow; the minute or so it takes to form a gate is just too long to be practical. You can speed it up, but almost no one does; the chance of something going wrong is so much higher that you’d have to be insane to take the risk.

Trouble was, Rachel was insane. And she didn’t care about risks.

I saw the green flash as Rachel appeared in a second-floor window ahead and to my left. With a flick of her fingers she vapourised the glass and then looked down, her eyes locking on to me as the van carried me towards her. Her hand came up, sea-green light intensifying, and I could feel the spell charging.

The van was going at maybe thirty miles an hour, but I didn’t even stop to think. I jumped off and for one terrifying moment I was free-falling at what felt like fatal speed. The ray hit while I was in midair, and I had a fleeting glimpse of the whole side of the van evaporating into dust, looking like some crazy sort of engineering diagram as the cross-section of the vehicle opened to the night. It slewed sideways and began to crash, and then I hit the road.

It hurt. Rolling, bumping, tumbling, feeling pain in every part of my body before fetching up against a parked car with a final thud. I was half dazed but I knew that I was still in Rachel’s line of sight and I managed to stagger to my feet and start running again just as the front half of the car disintegrated in a dust cloud behind me. A second later I was under an awning and out of Rachel’s vision; there was an alley to the right and before she could get in sight of me again I sprinted down it.