Looking up, I find the Viking bloke from the bar, fighting like a seven-foot machine, his whirling movements fast and brutal. He’s fighting for me.

I try to rise, but heaviness weighs me to the ground. A sharp pain pulses through my skull. When I touch the back of my head, my fingers come away wet.

Alyona steps backward, calculation on her face. She glances down at me. “Another time, pretty Channeler.”

She turns away and speaks rapidly in a language I don’t recognize. A line of bright light appears in front of her, cutting downward through the air. As it widens into a doorway, she steps into it and disappears. I’m left blinking at an empty space. Where the hell did she go?

Movement catches my eye. From the opposite end of the alley, two new opponents join the fray. Both wear the same leathers as the Viking. What was his name? Something Irish. Flanagan. One guy, stocky with a shaved head, cuts through the men in black with a sword spinning in his hand. Beside him fights an Asian woman, her short black bob sliding across her jaw as she moves like the wind.

The clash and ring of steel on steel echo through the alley. Light flashes, night becoming day as lightning bolts streak from the hands and swords of the men in black, fizzing and crackling through the air. What the hell?

Flanagan fights weaponless and close combat. He’s got two men attacking him, and they’re losing. His opponents’ swords seem to bounce off his skin, and he absorbs their electric streaks without effect.

The woman uses long knives. She knows how to work them too. Her opponent looms large, but she’s so fast he’s struggling to keep up. She returns the lightning with flashes of her own, and silvery flames lick her knives as she wields them with swift precision.

I’ve never seen anything like it. This is officially the freakiest night of my life.

I try to rise again and make it to an elbow, but my vision dims, the alley spinning. Collapsing back, I suck in lungfuls of air to keep from blacking out.

The alley goes quiet apart from the echoing steps of the last attacker running for his life. The dark of night returns. The fight’s over.

Flanagan steps across to me and kneels. “Michael. Are you okay?”

I manage a slurred, “Whath the fuck,” but my sight dims.

“You’re safe now. Just rest.”

Darkness sucks me down. Before it swallows me, I wonder, safe from what?

3

I wake with a shock, heart pounding. Did something bump the bed?

No, wait. Not a bed. A van.

I’m lying on the floor of a fast-moving box van, my body juddering against cold metal. Dark walls loom around me, street lights flashing orange streaks across their shiny surface. I can see people beside me in the vehicle but can’t make them out. My vision blurs when I try to focus.