Authors: William Ritter
I
stumbled backward, the forest spinning around me. I turned to flee, but the commissioner was already beside me. I threw myself into a staggering run in the opposite direction, but he was there at once, moving with inhuman speed. Only the clank and squeak of his metal braces revealed that he was moving at all, and not simply appearing in each new location by magic.
I nearly tumbled straight into him, but caught myself and froze, mere inches away. As I looked into the commissioner’s face, the glamour melted away. He looked as he had always looked, but my mind finally allowed me to see the features I had been forcefully ignoring until now. Above a grotesquely wide mouth full of too many sharp teeth, the bridge of his nose curved upward into a severe brow. His ears, which bent slightly under the brim of the hat, were pointed, and his skin was blotched and leathery. Hard, crooked cheekbones skewed the whole of his face in a disturbing angle. Most frightening of all was that horrible mouth and the jagged, bloodstained teeth—teeth that called to mind broken bottles and razor blades. He laughed, and his breath reeked with the coppery stench of the blood. He was a cat, toying with his prey before the kill.
There could be no escape, but my feet pulled me backward anyway. I tripped, landing at the base of an old tree. Jackaby’s books fell from my hands to the muddy roots. Swift’s lip twisted up in a final, wicked smirk, and vicious, bloodstained claws extended from his fingertips. Done playing with me, the cat pounced.
And so did the dog.
Swift was in the air, his horrible fangs and claws arcing toward me, when the massive hound hammered into him from the side. The two slammed into the ground and rolled. Swift’s cane bounced away, his dark coat whipping and tangling around the shaggy brown fur of the beast. They ground to a stop, the enormous dog pinning the commissioner’s shoulders under two heavy paws. It growled and snapped at the commissioner, who snarled back and ducked away from the hound’s jaws. Swift’s legs squeaked once beneath the hairy creature, and then the massive hound flew backward, the heavy iron boots cracking hard off its ribs. The beast collided with a broad tree and thudded to the ground, letting out a very human groan.
His handsome face had warped and vanished beneath the fur, but those warm brown eyes were still unmistakable. They were full of fear and pain and humanity as he shook off the impact and tried to reorient himself. Swift was up and behind him in seconds, claws out and teeth gnashing before the shaggy hound had even pushed itself to its feet. The dog was moving far too slowly. Someone screamed, “Charlie!” and I realized it was me.
The commissioner shot me a poisonous glance before lunging toward his target, but it was just enough of a pause for the hound to whip around, so that the attack glanced off his flank instead of striking his jugular. Three lines of red blossomed across Charlie’s shoulder. A few inches closer and Swift surely would have opened the hound’s throat.
The two circled each other. Charlie moved stiffly, as though the first kick had bruised or even broken his ribs. He waited for Swift to launch the next attack.
It came in a blur. The commissioner feigned a wide swipe with his wicked claws, but as Charlie ducked to avoid it, Swift kicked hard, catching his opponent solidly across the jaw. Charlie yelped in pain, and Swift cackled. He easily quickstepped around Charlie’s retaliatory bite, and came at the hound from the other side with another feigned slice and a brutal kick. This time, Charlie predicted the move, and he caught the commissioner’s ankle in his massive jaws and shook.
The commissioner hit the ground on his back, flailing with one hand and holding his bloody hat on with the other. Charlie did not release him, growling through clamped jaws as he continued dragging his opponent back and forth across the ground like a human paintbrush. He had scrubbed the moss from a six-foot swath of earth when a loud
ping
rang the hound’s teeth like a dinner bell, and his head shot back. Swift hopped to his feet, bits of metal and leather straps hanging loosely at odd angles around his knee. He ripped the mangled remnants of the brace from his leg and glared at the great hound.
His iron shoes dug into the freshly churned dirt and he waited, like a sprinter listening for the starting pistol. Charlie lowered himself, and his lips peeled back in a vicious growl. In a blur, Swift was behind him, and the dog’s teeth snapped at the empty air. Swift had carved a chunk out of the hound’s ear, and it bled dark ribbons through his shaggy coat. Again and again Swift darted around Charlie, piercing gashes and pounding kicks into his shaggy hide from every direction. Charlie spun and snarled and bit. He was keeping himself low, and protected from any serious wounds, but for all his ferocity, he was no match for Swift. It would only be a matter of time.
At last, the barrage of fast attacks paused. Swift taunted his opponent arrogantly, tipping his hat in mock cordiality and smiling wickedly, and then he turned his back to the hound and stepped away. “You’re good,” he said, amused.
Though panting heavily and covered in patches of deep red, Charlie held his stance, watching the commissioner’s movements.
“Monsters like us shouldn’t be brawling with one another, though, should we?” the commissioner continued, still facing away and sauntering to the center of the clearing. “We have so much more in common, after all. And a pup like you, so far from your pack—you could use a strong master. I tell you what, when I’m through with this one”—he waved a nonchalant hand in my general direction—“you’re welcome to finish off the scraps.”
Swift’s casual steps had brought him to the spot where his cane had landed. He stooped to pick it up, not presenting even the slightest defense, his back still wide-open. I caught the treacherous glint in his eye as he leaned down slowly, wrapping his fingers around the metal rod. Charlie took the bait and threw himself toward the commissioner in one powerful bound.
In a flash, Swift had pulled the broad hand grip from the cane and thrown it aside, revealing a long, flat blade on the end of the shaft. The metal cane was braced and waiting for its target before Charlie could stop his own momentum. It lodged itself in the hound’s right side, piercing clean through and out his back, just below his shoulder blade. Charlie bellowed in pain and sank onto the iron pike.
Swift stood and sauntered around the beast’s head, tutting softly to his victim. Without warning, he grimaced and kicked the glistening metal with a sharp clank where it protruded from Charlie’s hide. “Bad dog!” he yelled.
Charlie whimpered and shuddered. His whole body was shivering, his paws twitching.
“A few inches to the left and you’d be finished, you mangy mutt. Now I have to put you down myself.”
And there they were, not twenty feet from my stunned stupor. The horrible, grotesque form of Commissioner Swift knelt over Charlie’s soft, bloody head. He was drawing his claws down Charlie’s cheek in a sickening caress, savoring the kill, and Charlie had abandoned resistance. I wanted to scream or run or . . . or anything, but I was just a foolish girl, lost in the woods, and this was not one of the adventures in my books.
Books. Jackaby’s books still lay where they had fallen on the muddy roots. My shaking fingers found the closest leather spine, and they let fly before my mind had even considered the decision. The hefty volume turned slowly through the air, the pages whipping slightly as it spun like a wounded bird toward the commissioner’s grisly face. I was twenty feet away from my target. The book landed at fifteen. The commissioner paused to raise an unimpressed eyebrow in my direction.
I scrambled until I had found another, and heaved harder. Swift did not bother to flinch as it sailed wide over his shoulder, but he raised his head to fix me with an arrogant, somewhat scornful look. “Do you mind?”
The last volume was dead-on, and I thought, for a fraction of a second, that it might connect. I’m not sure what I expected a bit of leather-bound paper to do to the horrifying commissioner when a two-hundred-pound hound could hardly leave a mark. As the projectile neared, though, Swift’s hand left his victim’s throat and caught the book with a snap. Carried by momentum, the little sinker from Hatun’s line sailed free of the pages in his grasp and caught the commissioner squarely in the forehead. We both glanced down as it rolled to a stop in the dirt a few feet away, then looked back to meet each other’s eyes.
Swift’s face flushed with anger, his eyes narrowed to menacing slits, but his voice remained icy cold. “I was right in the middle of this, but if you absolutely insist”—he dropped the hound’s head and stood—“I suppose I can make time for you. Ladies first, and all that.”
He stepped over Charlie’s limp, bleeding body and strode toward me, not bothering to rush. Like his asymmetric face, the rhythm of his gait was now distinctly uneven. His left leg, still strapped in the brace, swung stiffly, creaking and clinking with each bend. His right swung free, but those iron shoes still clanked their own beat, muffled by the soft earth. As he drew near, that smell, the sickly sweet coppery smell, came with him. He was dripping with blood, and none of it his own.
Hatun’s premonition had come true. Just as she had warned me not to, I had followed Jackaby into the forest and to my demise. My heart hammered against my ribs, I shook, and my whole body felt clammy. My breath was ragged and too fast. Above me, Swift seemed to be enjoying my frantic last moments, sneering his crooked, broken-glass smile as he drew to a stop before me. Jackaby would not give the bastard this satisfaction, I thought.
What would he do?
Keep his calm. Keep control. I willed my heartbeat to slow and took a long, deep breath.
“It’s a lucky thing for you, Commissioner,” I managed with great effort, “that politics are not a lady’s domain, because you have lost my vote.”
The sound that came out of the ghoulish figure may have been a throaty laugh or a wet growl, but I did not have time to decide before his wicked claws buried themselves in my chest. The wave of pain hit me with a . . .
BANG!
For the second time that night, Swift was knocked back, spinning to the earth and away from me. As the terrible talons pulled away, my chest felt as though it had caught fire. Through a haze of intense pain and adrenaline, I half imagined Charlie had once more risen to my aid—but, no. The commissioner was alone, struggling to his feet, and the great hound lay where he had been skewered, barely breathing.
BANG!
Swift hit the ground again, and my eyes traced their way to the figure marching across the clearing, a pistol fixed steadily on the commissioner. My vision swam, but there was the bulging coat, the draping scarf, and that ridiculous knit cap.
“You were right, Miss Rook,” called Jackaby. “There are a lot of ways that people use lead.”
My chest throbbed with hot pain, and my vision was darkening, but I smiled up at the detective.
“I would still prefer to have done the thing properly, with a solid coat of the stuff,” he continued, his voice so casual he might have been discussing afternoon tea, “but given the circumstances, a few bullets should slow him down long enough to see the job done.” He stood directly over the commissioner, who was writhing on the ground, and pulled a small leather volume from his coat. He fixed the weapon on Swift’s chest as he read aloud.
“ ‘The life of a creature is in the blood . . . It is the blood that maketh atonement for the soul.’ Leviticus, seventeen.”
Swift snarled. The pistol rang out a third time, and then the forest went quiet as a warm blanket of blackness swept over me.
F
lickering light and the aroma of smoke dragged me by slow inches back into wakefulness. I attempted to sit up, wincing against the pain in my chest. My long coat, which had been draped across me like a blanket, slid away, and the cold air snapped me back to reality. I was still in the forest. I looked down to find Jenny’s warm shirtwaist had been removed, and Jackaby’s scarf had been wrapped around my torso like a long, clumsy bandage. Startled, I instinctively reached up to cover myself, and my chest seized with the pain of the sudden motion. I caught my breath and very slowly brushed my fingers over the scarf, tenderly exploring the wound on my chest.
“It’s superficial,” Jackaby said. I glanced up to see him adding kindling to a little campfire. “You’ll be fine, I’m sure, but have it looked at in the morning, if you like. You’ve lost some blood, but I imagine it was exertion, not injury, which ultimately did you in. You should try to exercise more often.” He propped another branch across the flames. “You’ve been out for a couple of hours. It took longer than I anticipated to get the fire going, and, of course, I’ve had to attend to both of you myself. I’m afraid our friend’s condition is rather more bleak.”
I looked around. Beyond the campfire, Charlie, still in the figure of a hound, lay in an immobile heap. The blade had been removed, and in its place a crude compress made of torn strips of fabric had been applied. I recognized amid them the hem of Jenny’s formerly beautiful shirtwaist. His breath was so shallow that the movement was almost imperceptible in the flickering firelight.
On the opposite side of the fire lay a pile of darkness that could only be the commissioner, draped in his charcoal gray coat with hints of its crimson lining visible amid the shadows. Jackaby tossed a few final twigs onto the flames and walked over to the body.
I shivered and gingerly pulled the coat back over myself, pushing the aching sting to the back of my mind. “Is he . . . ?” I began.
“Dead? Not yet. He won’t be dashing about any time soon with those lead rounds in his chest, but until this thing is neatly burned, the creature will live.” He knelt beside the commissioner’s head.
I looked at Jackaby’s meager campfire. It was not a bad job, downright impressive given the wet, frozen landscape, but it was no funeral pyre. Tossing a body onto that would only smother the thing. Swift’s coat, alone, would probably choke it out. “We’re going to need a lot more wood if we’re going to—” I swallowed my last words. Swift was not a good man, not a man at all, but my mind still recoiled at the thought of burning someone alive.
“Not at all.” Jackaby stood. He held the commissioner’s crimson derby in front of him by a finger and thumb, as one might carry a gift left on the doorstep by an overzealous cat. “We may not reduce it entirely to ashes, but I think we’ve more than enough to render it charred to a crisp and bone dry.”
“His hat?” I asked.
“Well of course his hat! What else?” Jackaby shook his head in exasperation and gave a curt nod toward one of his leather volumes that lay in the wet moss. “Maybe if you would bother
reading
a book once in a while instead of hurling them about every chance you get, you would have put the pieces together yourself by now.” He sighed. “What we have been battling is a creature called a redcap,” he explained at last.
“The redcap is a horrible goblin who usually haunts the ruins of old castles, especially in Scotland and England. They’re antisocial beasts. It is unheard of to find one in a bustling metropolis, but as times change, so must we all, I guess. I was right about my first instinct as well. His magic is ancient. Redcaps are old creatures, nearly immortal if they tend to their namesakes properly.” He waggled the glistening hat as if in explanation, and a thick, sticky drip fell to the earth.
“I should have caught on much sooner—stupid of me. All of it fits with your descriptions, but I’d never met the man, myself, not until tonight. Those silly drawings of him in the newspaper don’t look a thing like him, of course. The polio braces were a nice bit of misdirection, I must admit. Covered the sound of his shoes and drew attention, while his fairy glamour helped him hide in plain sight. That’s classic, old magic, glamour. He kept the telltale signs, though—clearly not ready to give up his traditions. Redcaps stand apart from most of their fairy brethren in their immunity to iron, which, historically, they flaunt by wearing heavy iron shoes and wielding an iron spear or pike. He kept his hidden as a cane, but Swift had the lot, the arrogant bastard, and I missed it all.”
“Don’t feel bad,” I offered. “I met him face-to-face, and I missed it, too.”
“Yes, but no one expected you to be clever, Miss Rook.”
“Thanks for that,” I said.
“We got him in the end, at least. That’s something.”
“So, how do we finish this?” I asked. “You said it’s his hat that’s keeping him alive?”
“The blood,” answered Jackaby. “So long as the cap is kept wet with fresh human blood, he will not die. That’s why he had to keep finding new victims.”
“What are you waiting for, then? Burn the horrible thing!”
“Not so fast!” A new voice thundered out of the darkness of the forest. Jackaby froze with the bloody derby poised over the fire. A heavy drip sizzled on the burning embers. We both turned to watch as Chief Inspector Marlowe pushed past the underbrush and into the clearing, his pistol trained on Jackaby. His eyes passed over the scene as he moved, pausing on the fallen form of Officer O’Doyle, then Swift’s prone body, and widening as they took in Charlie. “I don’t know what happened here, Jackaby, but I’ll thank you not to destroy the evidence.”
“Oh, put it down, Marlowe,” Jackaby replied. “We’ve done your job for you. It’s over. All that’s left is to finish him off before he kills again”—he nodded toward the commissioner—“and then get some medical attention for that one as soon as possible.” He gestured over his shoulder at Charlie.
Marlowe lowered his weapon and eyed Charlie. “You’re right about that,” he grunted. “The city will sleep safely tonight with that thing dead and buried.”
“What, Charlie? Don’t be an ass. You said yourself that boy was one of your best detectives.”
At the sound of his name, Charlie stirred, one deep breath sending a ripple of shudders through his body. He remained prostrate, but his heavy, felted eyelids flickered open a crack.
Marlowe started at the sudden motion, and his gun flashed back out, fixed on Charlie. Jackaby was almost as fast, stepping between the inspector and his mark. “Come now, Marlowe, let’s not do anything rash.”
“Have you gone completely and totally insane?” Marlowe demanded. His weapon, now pointed squarely at Jackaby’s chest, did not waver.
I heard a quiet clink and my eyes shot to Swift. The commissioner still lay on the damp earth, but now the shadowy form was beginning to awaken. The silky gray coat rose and fell in slow breaths, and the moonlight glinted off his heel as the iron shoe twitched.
“Jackaby!” I cried in a hoarse whisper, but the detective was occupied with Marlowe.
“As usual, Inspector, you have entirely failed to see things for what they truly are.”
“What is wrong with you, Jackaby? For the first time ever, there really
is
an impossible monster behind everything, and now you’re the one who
doesn’t
believe it?”
“Marlowe!” I called out as the commissioner’s leg brace creaked again ever so slightly.
“You saw what that thing did to O’Doyle and Swift,” the chief inspector was busy barking. “Move aside!”
“I did not personally see how Officer O’Doyle was dispatched, as it happens, but I doubt Officer Cane was involved,” said Jackaby, “and he definitely did not put those bullet holes in the commissioner. I did.”
Marlowe actually stepped back a little. “You are alarmingly bad at making yourself sound sane, do you know that?”
A faint wheeze escaped the commissioner, and his dark coat shifted as signs of life crept back into the body.
“Men! Please!” I cried.
“You think I’m crazy?” Jackaby continued. “Then let me burn the hat.”
“Yes, because that doesn’t sound crazy at all.”
“If I’m crazy, it’s just a hat. It burns. Nothing changes. Then you kill the poor beast. If I’m right, then burning the hat will destroy Swift, the monster behind all of this, and you’ll see what magic has been at work here. Either way, you get your murderer.”
Marlowe thought about this for a long moment, and my heart thudded as I considered leaping up and throwing the bloody thing into the flame myself. Pushing off from the tree trunk, I immediately realized that leaping was not an option. The smallest exertion sent pain hammering through my chest and left me reeling. My vision swam and I sank back to the dirt.
“We’re too late,” intoned Jackaby with sudden sobriety. I struggled to focus my eyes in the direction of his voice. “See for yourself, Marlowe. Swift is on the move . . . God help us all.”
I choked, whipping my gaze back to the spot where the villain had lain, willing my blurry vision to crystallize. Marlowe spun around as well, that much I could see, and then he swiveled slowly back to Jackaby.
“No,” Marlowe said evenly, with the forcibly patient tone one uses with a small child. “He’s right there.” My eyes found the gray shape in the dark at last. Swift had not moved.
“My mistake!” chirped the detective. “Oh dear, in my excitement I seem to have dropped the fellow’s hat.”
The ruby red derby perched atop the tower of sticks, tongues of flames licking the brim. For a moment the hat seemed immune, the fire even dimming a little beneath it, and then it began to crackle. The feather fizzled to nothing in one rapid puff, and the ribbon was suddenly alight. The thing popped and cracked violently as syrupy drips fell into the heart of the fire, which sizzled and spat. The derby smoldered, and thick, black, greasy coils of smoke rolled off it in a plume that darkened the stars. At last it burst into flame. Swift screamed.
The commissioner’s body spasmed and twisted upright until Swift was on his knees. His grotesque face contorted in agony, and his eyes went mad with confusion and rage. Smoke seeped from his charcoal gray coat, and he lurched forward. Whether because of the brace still lashed to his left leg or whatever internal hell was boiling inside him, he stumbled, clanking and crumpling to the dirt before he could take a full step. Swift’s sharp, leathery fingers clawed at the mossy earth, pulling him forward a few more feet before his arms, too, gave out and he shrank into himself, writhing in misery. The air grew thick with acrid clouds of smoke, and the commissioner’s clothing crumbled into soot, the skin beneath crackling and flaking away like ash. All the while, the man screamed in wretched fury, his voice losing all humanity and deteriorating into the guttural howls of an animal in pain.
And then it was over. The screams ceased and the air was thick with inky, pungent smoke. The hat’s stiff brim, the only skeletal remains of the wretched item, shifted and slid into the heart of the little fire beside us.
No one spoke as the smoke gradually cleared. There, at the edge of the flickering firelight, lay a scorched patch of moss, a few hinged rods with burnt leather straps, and two thick, iron shoes.