I thought about it for a moment, then shook my head. “Nah,” I said. “Not really. You were just doing your job, serving your country, like I am now. Sometimes, we have to do things we don’t enjoy in the service of something higher.”

Selena nodded emphatically. “That’s what I had to keep telling myself,” she said. “I never enjoyed it, you know. I never enjoyed lying to you. But we had to be sure that you were who we thought you were. Someone had to do it, and I just drew the short straw.”

“Hey,” I said, “it’s all good. You did a great job—I had no idea! A year undercover, that can’t have been easy, but it’s done now, and I’m happy to move on from it if you are.”

She smiled at me. “Thanks. I… I lied as little as possible. I’m still me. We’re still friends.”

“Great,” I said. “I’m glad to hear that.”

“If you two are quite finished making up,” said Astrid from the back seat, “let’s get our minds back on the job. How far are we from the spot, Selena?”

Selena squinted out into the darkness. We had left the suburb behind and were travelling along an open road now, with the woods on our right and fields on our left. “Not far, I don’t think,” said Selena. “Belinda, can you use your psychic powers to pick up any suggestion of the Putrefied Cobra’s presence?”

“It’s difficult,” said Belinda. “This wood is a magical hotspot, which means there’s a lot of background noise. The Cobra would not give all that strong a psychic signal anyway, since it’s not that intelligent, barely sentient really.”

After a pause, she spoke again. “There’s something else, though. Something… it's fear. Fear and hatred. I can feel both emotions very strongly, probably strongly enough to geolocate. Whatever it's coming from, it's close. Can you slow down?”

Selena slowed the car down to a crawl. I glanced into the back, to see Belinda with her fingers at her temples and her eyes screwed closed. The strength of her psychic effort was almost audible in the car. The whole small space thrummed with it like a plucked string.

“Stop!” she said suddenly. “It’s here.”

“Yep, this is the spot,” said Selena, pulling the Chrysler over onto the verge. “Look, you can see the marks on the ground where the thing was. This is it all right.”

I got out of the car first, leaving one of my guns slung across my back on its strap and keeping the other in my hands, at the ready. As the women got out of the car behind me I walked over to where a dark stain marked the surface of the road. Moonlight glimmered on it as I squatted down to look more closely.