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.