“Look, if anyone does touch it, some pretty unpleasant gas will start billowing all over the place, not to mention the ultrasonics, so make sure no one even gets close, right?”

The troll took the money and gave Geraint a greedy, confident grin. He opened his Italian-designer jacket and displayed a fine range of heavy throwing knives inside. “Don’t worry, boss. Anyone gets too nosy, you got their nose waiting for you when you get back. I’ll rip it right orf of their face. Pay me by the nose?”

Geraint smiled and walked away. “You’ll be paid well, term. See you soon.” I hope, he added to himself.

“We had to park farther away than I would have liked,” he told Francesca and Serrin. “Let’s hope we don’t have to make a run for it. Any closer to Houndsditch, though, and we couldn’t have relied on the car being in one piece when we got back. Tires would have been stolen and we’d probably find the doors beaten in just for the hell of it.”

“Is all that stuff you told Mr. Ugly true?” Francesca asked.

“Does it really matter? I certainly do have some defenses and alarms but unfortunately nerve gas isn’t licensed as one of them. Don’t know what this country’s coming to.”

They edged down the increasingly dark side streets. Some of the street lights had been shot out, but most had been dismantled and their cables and wires stripped for the copper. To their right, one of the very few remaining church clocks began to chime midnight.

“Hell, Geraint, I don’t like this at all.” Serrin’s stomach was protesting his fear. On top of all the food he had eaten, it didn’t feel comfortable at all.

“Okay, stop. Here. It’s the third house along on the left-see? Yeah, the one with the figure on top.”

Against the glimmering sky with its suffused glow of distant neon, they could dimly see the small statue perched atop the roof. Eros, the child archer.

“Serrin, time to do some checking. Top floor, back of the building.”

They’d discussed this move before setting off. Serrin hadn’t liked the idea of investigating with his astral body; being in a trance in the unlit mean streets of London’s East End was not a particularly comfortable thought. Instead he would simply assense the area first. He was startled by what he found.

“There’s a spell effect in the area. Detection spell. Someone’s running a detection spell.” Reacting swiftly, the elf dropped his astral perception and muttered a few words to activate a spell of his own. Probing for enemies what he sensed within the building confused him.

“Someone in there doesn’t like me much. But I can’t tell if it’s specific. It feels more like a spellcaster is expecting enemies to arrive, but I can’t figure out just how specific it is.” He stopped speaking and concentrated once more; the effect was like watching someone listening to instructions being delivered via a hidden ear-piece. “There’s some masking here, I think. There’s also some kind of-oh, frag it, I can’t tell.”

Switching his spell. Serrin began to search for the presence of a mage close by. He knew there must be one, surely; it couldn’t be just a spell lock, that wouldn’t make much sense. Screwing up his eyes in concentration and probing again, he shook his hands in annoyance.

“Check the woman!” Geraint hissed by his shoulder.

Of course; so absorbed in hunting for the source of the spell he’d detected, the mage had forgotten that part of the original plan. His mind probed for Catherine Eddowes.

“Gol her!… No, she’s gone!” He was furious with himself, wishing he’d learned these mundane spells with more force. He concentrated all his magical energies into the detection, adding resources he’d been withholding for defense in case the target of the detection reacted against him with hostility.

“Bingo!” She was at the back of the building. Then the elf reeled backward as if kicked by a mule. The scream reverberated right through him. He wasn’t going to try that again.

“Geraint, I think-”

His voice trailed away. They looked at each other and readied their weapons, but Stain begged time to prepare some magical defense. There was a mage about, somewhere, and he sure as hell didn’t want to be caught with his pants down.

Geraint stuffed a handful of notes into the hands of the ork pimps lurking by the doorway. Bored and uninterested, they put down their stunprods and ushered the motley trio up the stairs. They’d seen it all before. The runners’ feet hammered up the wooden stairs, and as they reached the top floor, Geraint virtually fell into the tacky wooden door. It bulged in its frame, but it didn’t give way. From within, they heard a loud bang. The door began to splinter as they beat against it, but it so resisted their attempts to force it open that they guessed some heavy furniture must be piled up against it.

The orks came running up the stairs behind them just as Geraint and company managed to force open a wedge between door and frame, pushing laboriously at the wardrobe lodged there. The pimps were yelling. menacing, clearly intending to attack them. Geraint screamed to them that someone was being killed, but Serrin decided it was no time for conversation. Throwing a powerball spell into the orks, the elf almost fell to his knees as the orks reeled back down the stairs. One collapsed unconscious and the other could do little more than hold his head, groaning in system shock. Geraint glanced at the elf furiously as he labored to force the door.

By the time he could drag himself through the wedged door and climb over the wardrobe, the wave of cold night air from the open window told Geraint that Catherine Eddowes’ attacker was gone. He half-stumbled over the barrier and slid to his knees in the slick pool of fresh blood. Gore covered his hands and the sleeves of his jacket, and soaked the legs of his trousers. To get to the window and look out for any fleeing figure he would have had to climb over the bed. It was a prospect he couldn’t stomach.

“Just don’t come in here. You don’t want to see this. Oh, God almighty.” With that, he turned, almost sagged, away from the carnage. Only the neurochemicals kept him from bringing the thousand-nuyen meal up the way it had gone down.

Serrin was still groggy from the drain of the spell; he had really let fly at the orks with all he had. As Geraint reemerged from the room, his face was ashen, but he waved away Francesca’s frantic hands offering him slap patches for the girl inside.

“Forget it. There isn’t an internal organ left where it used to be, We’re too late. We’re too damn late. Let’s get out of here and call the police. That’s all we can do now.”

They descended the stairs, Geraint throwing some more money at the huddled forms of the dazed orks. Ace it, he thought; it wasn’t their fault Serrin had to cream them. They might even have thought they were protecting someone.

When the three stepped out into the street again, they saw something totally unanticipated: a cloaked figure carrying a bag was veering crazily down the road toward a limo parked in the distance.

In the dark they could see no clear details. What puzzled Geraint most was how the man could be in this street if he’d gone out the back. Before he could fire his pistol, however, the first of Francesca’s shots rang out. The cloaked figure disappeared into the opened rear door of the limo as two other figures moved out from the shadows, one with a snarling automatic weapon and the other gesticulating dramatically.

The mage. Serrin realized, almost too late. An invisible tidal wave of concussion slammed into their bodies. The impact sent Geraint flying, Francesca managing to stay upright only by hanging on to the remains of a lamp post, her gun hanging uselessly from a hand that had lost all power of grip. Only Serrin managed to stay in some semblance of shape. His magical defense kept the worst of the manaballs effects away from them. Clutching at the best spell focus he had for combat, he dropped the defense that had saved them and let the combat mage and the street samurai have it with the works.