He nodded amiably at me and I saw his eyes flick to my right – he was wondering where Guleed had gone.

And while he was distracted I gave him everything I had.

Now, I’m not up to Nightingale’s standards and 100mm of case-hardened steel is a bit beyond me, but I have progressed a bit from that first time we met on a rooftop in Soho when the Faceless fucker snatched my fireball out of the air. The flash git.

What he got was a flashgun bright fireball followed by an impello palma. The idea is that the target spends all his time worrying about the bright light coming at his face and doesn’t notice the invisible wall of force rushing along at waist height.

It might have worked, for all I know, but I didn’t stick around to find out. As soon as the spells were loosed I turned and legged it for the trees.

You don’t run straight away from someone with a ranged weapon unless you want to get shot in the back – you’re supposed to zig-zag at random intervals to present a constantly shifting target. It’s one of those things I’ve always known intellectually but, fuck me, it’s difficult to do in practise.

So I went left as if I was trying to get out of sight around the house and then right, picking a number at random and counting down the paces, eleven, ten, nine and then a horrid thought that maybe eleven was too high. So I turned at six and had gone one pace when something huge and orange shot past my head, close enough for the wind of it to stagger me. As I recovered, I looked up long enough to see the Asbo go tumbling into the trees, splintering branches and spinning round as the front clipped the trunk of a full grown oak.

I thought I’d been running flat out . . . but, you know, I think now I added a couple of kph and shaved some time off the world record. I feinted right again, went left and suddenly I was in amongst the trees and the under-growth and running downhill towards the main road.

The previous summer I’d done the exact same thing while being chased by an invisible unicorn – so at least I had form. I fumbled my screamer out of my jacket pocket, pressed my thumb hard against the activation slot and threw it as far as I could to the left.