Jackaby (Jackaby #1)(58)
“ ‘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.
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.”