As quickly as I could, I gave Buster a wave to get his attention and pointed towards the source of the noise, then did my best to hide in the shadows.  It wasn’t perfect cover, but hopefully if our new arrivals were hostile, they would focus on Buster as the obvious target giving me a chance to surprise them.  I slid a dagger from my belt, but kept it close to my body, so that it wouldn’t be an obvious threat, just in case I was spotted.

Due to the cart, we needed to meet outside.  Prue had chosen an out of the way location, which meant that we shouldn’t be disturbed.  An undesirable side effect was that we didn’t have good visibility and anyone could approach and be upon us – hopefully upon Buster if it came to it – with little time for us to react.

I took a breath to calm myself, then checked the skyline.  People never look up.  I didn’t want to get surprised while focusing on the new arrivals.  Luckily there were no new threats that I could see.
Three figures appeared in the drizzle, still indistinct, but the right size and shape for the companions we were expecting.  I couldn’t help thinking that if I had organised an attack on Nana, Prue and Effren that I would pick three attackers with the same rough size and shape as our party members, dress them in their cloaks and sent them to finish the job. I really regretted that I hadn’t been more insistent about us having a hand signal or two that we could use to visually announce our presence.