Chapter Twenty-Seven

Flickering 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.