The cat hissed and yowled, Ronald cursed again, and Nigel caught up.

“Where are they?” he asked, panting slightly. “Where’d they go?”

“There!”

Nigel followed his companion’s pointing finger down a foggy alley, to where their prey was already being preyed on—by someone else. He scowled. Wasn’t that just the way of it, these days? London was becoming positively disreputable, filled to the brim with the criminal element. You couldn’t trust nobody no more.

He started forward, only to get slammed against a wall again by the freakishly strong smaller man. “Wot d’you think yer doin’?” he asked Ronald, whose only answer was to put a gag spell on him.

Nigel struggled with it, wondering if his companion had gone mad. Only to realize that the three thugs in the alley weren’t threatening the couple, after all. But rather another woman who he hadn’t seen ‘cause of the fog.

She was dressed far more respectably than the clergyman’s daughter still clinging to the blond, in a dark blue, taffeta dress and matching bonnet that blended in with the night. She’d had a blue and black tartan wrap around her shoulders, as well, but it had been pulled off by one of her attackers, whilst another bore her to the ground. She cried out, her attacker laughed, and the third man edged closer, telling him to hurry up.

“Not ‘till I’ve had me fun.”

“Oh, this will be fun,” someone said, right before the man on top of the struggling woman went flying.

Nigel blinked, because no one had touched him. But he understood a little better when he noticed the bruiser pinned against a wooden fence with four daggers sticking out of his body—one in each limb. The bruiser screamed, the woman screamed, the dollymop in the red dress screamed—and then went running down the street, passing them in a panic. The blond man didn’t go with her, Nigel wasn’t sure why.

Then he realized why, when the blond began to mop up the street—all by himself.

One of the thugs decided to rush him with a cudgel, whilst the other—the nervous third—started running away. The first thug was met with a duck and a fist to the face, and the second had a lasso spell sent after him. It wrapped around an ankle and started dragging him back over broken cobbles, which wouldn’t have been too bad—if he hadn’t been face down.

He started muffled screaming, in between having his face scraped off, which along with the woman’s cries and the fence man’s wails, made quite a commotion. The man with the cudgel didn’t say anything, having been knocked unconscious after his nose caved in.