Upon seeing the guarding spirits, Jawsey dropped back into a nearby building while he thought. Trying to get in might get him see, possibly raising an alert. On the other hand they needed more data on exactly where this guy was and what he had with him.

On the third hand, Shedim were all sorts of bad news. If one managed to trail him back to his body … that was literally the sort of thing that he had nightmares about. But on the fourth hand — and here his mind took a short detour to picture Mato with future upgrades to add extra cyber-arms — what little he knew about Shedim suggested they couldn’t just be summoned, that once you got rid of them they were gone.

If it hadn’t been for the background count, he’d have just attacked the thing, but as it was he felt that the odds didn’t favour him as much as he’d like. So step one: try sneaking past it.

He came out of the side of the building, poked his head around the corner …. And found the Shedim staring at him hungrily.

One of the few things about the astral that Jawsey didn’t like was that you couldn’t swear out loud. Thinking it just wasn’t as satisfactory

(tobecontinued)