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was uncontrolled, and he could see he was going to hit the asphalt and skittle half a dozen people. Even though Warat was spinning and tumbling, she looked like a gymnast executing a routine. She spun once, twice and landed on the road, boots thudding down, knees flexing as she dropped into a shoulder roll and came up with her sword drawn.
    And Trinder expected me to kick her ass?
    Dave shook off the thought as his own landing fast approached, undignified and dangerous. Without any of the Russian’s skills or native grace he simply tucked himself around Lucille in a ball, and swore as he hit the road surface and felt his shoulder break. Again. The pain was huge but dull, as it always was now, and washed away almost immediately in the bathing warmth of endorphins and whatever magical fucking fairy-bots coursed through his bloodstream to make good broken bones and torn flesh. He felt the muted impact of those unfortunate enough to be caught in his path as he landed among them. He tried to close his mind to the muffled cries and startled shouts, and one sickly snapping sound, which had to be somebody’s leg breaking. There was nothing to be done for them. Not yet. He knew, from Lucille’s battle hymn filling all his secret places, that the Horde were upon them.
    But where was Warat?
    Dave climbed to his feet, muttering apologies and cringing at the sight of the seven – no, eight – people he’d just knocked down. One of them, an old woman in a bloodied head scarf, wailed and clutched at her leg that was bent all wrong at the knee. He struggled to reconcile the banal with the bizarre. A Gap Kids store, the Walgreens on the opposite corner, neon lights and giant posters for Stephen Colbert’s Late Show and Amazon’s Man in the High Castle, gunshots cracking out ahead of him, muted only slightly by the roar of the fleeing mob, a dead Fangr, cleanly decapitated, midnight dark daemon ichor pulsing from its neck stump.
    More shots, fired rapidly, but singly. Not the automatic weapons fire he’d grown used to, or thought he had, in Omaha and New Orleans. Probably cops and probably only two of them.
    He was about to punch the accelerator when somebody else did. Warat, of course.
    The crowd stopped. The screams and honking horns and general chaos died away to that familiar distant rumble and hiss. But his vision fell apart in broken pixels again. The pain, the iron fist squeezing his head from the inside was back, and his hunger . . .
    The bubble popped and all around him chaos and human madness surged back into motion. The uproar of thousands of voices hammered and clawed at his ears. Frantic, horrified, unbelieving. Dave was buffeted and knocked off balance, almost losing his footing in the surging tide of the terror-struck mob.
    He tried one last time to pause the world, and failed. The pain and blinding disorientation was too great. He pushed through the crowd, trying to exercise some care, but keen to break free. To find Warat. He moved about ten yards, when his stomach cramped and his head swam. He almost stumbled to his knees, but he was clear, or relatively clear, of the worst of the crush and he could see the Russian spy again.
    She stood in a clear space at the meeting of Broadway and 42nd, a rough circle surrounded by nine daemons. Three Hunn. Five leashed Fangr. And one of a type he had only seen once before, on a screen in New Orleans, but which he, or rather Urgon, recognised as thresh.
    No.
    Not as thresh, but Threshrend . A fully mature adult. Battle scarred and grown into its power.
    A daemon superiorae.
    A boss motherfucker.
    Two cops, both looking freaked out, stood a short distance behind Warat, pointing their guns at the monsters. The showdown had locked up the better part of the intersection. From the crushed and burning vehicles Dave could only assume the Hunn and their thralls had just jumped in and started laying about them with heavy war hammers and battle-axes.
    The daemons looked wary, even fearful,