The Secret Order of Doom: Part Sixteen

The girls ducked at the sound of the shot, pain shooting through them, the sort of pain the body generates when it believes that it has been injured. Then they straightened up, as each realised they had not been shot. They traded glances, then looked ahead.

The man with the gun stumbled, his gun falling from nerveless fingers. Ms. Madison and Andrea watched in relieved amazement, as the remaining monks fell back. Someone shouted, this being followed by the sound of somebody (probably the same person) getting thumped. Two of the men turned to deal with this intruder, only to duck, as the person, invisible to the girls, engaged them with tremendous ferocity). The four remaining monks watched for a moment, stunned at the turn of events.

Then, deciding that amazement time was over, the girls went on the offensive, Andrea dragging one of the men into the room, while Ms. Madison took on another. The others tried to intervene, but in the narrow passage, and finding themselves boxed in, it was not until Andrea felled her man with a jolting blow to the jaw that his fellows were able to intervene.

Ms. Madison, barefoot and in a nightie, was scarcely able to fight as well as she might have wished. Even so, she was able to render her man unconscious, before starting on the others. Combining with Adrea, she was able to put the remaining men to flight, where the Green Man (for it was he that had fired the shot) knocked them out.

"Teamwork," the Green Man stepped into the room. "Now, if you girls could break every piece of advice your mothers ever gave you and get into bad habits, we can be out of here."

The girls removed the habits from two of the brothers, and found nothing remarkable beneath. They were just normal, ordinary, everyday people. Probably pillars of the local community or something.

"I'm not ungrateful," Andrea donner a robe that trailed on the ground," but how did you find us?"

"When the landlord of the pub said you had moved on, "the Green Man explained, "I started shooting out the bottles behind the bar. He was quick enough to tell me then."

"I should have guessed," Ms. Madison laughed. "But where do we go from here?"

"We descend to the ground," the Green Man explained, "then you girls will repair to a safe house of mine in the village. There we will plan our next move, which has to be to locate their headquarters and confront them with their evil. We must know why they are killing people. And we must make them pay for their evil. In blood."