Garrett Investigates

Garrett Investigates - By Elizabeth Bear

The Tricks of London

London, April 1879

One foot up and the other foot down

That’s the way to London town

—Nursery rhyme

“That’s the third damned dead whore in seventeen days,” Detective Inspector Rupert Bitner said, his educated tones incongruous to his choice of words. He slurped tea loudly from the chipped enamel lid of a vacuum flask. Before Detective Sergeant Sean Cuan could warn him of the narrow figure approaching through the shadowy line of uniformed constables behind, Bitner continued, “And why we’re out here in the rain because somebody’s doing us a favor, can you explain that to me?”

“Hello, Crown Investigator,” Cuan said, louder and sooner than necessary. He pushed past Bitner, the wings of his greatcoat brushing the senior investigator’s legs, and dropped his hastily capped fountain pen into his own coat pocket. Cold rain dripped from the rim of Cuan’s tipped umbrella and somehow worked past the brim of his bowler to trickle down his collar. He firmed his jaw to hide the flinch and extended his right hand.

“This is DI Rupert Bitner. I’m DS John Coen. We’re with CID.”

Introducing the DI first wouldn’t mollify Bitner enough—nothing would sweeten his mood after an encounter with one of the Crown’s Own, especially this one—but it might help blunt the edges. Unfortunately, reciting their ranks made it a little too plain that the newly established Criminal Investigations Division was modeled closely on the Crown Investigators—and that Garrett ranked them.

Cuan cleared his throat and finished, “We’re certainly relieved to see you.”

Someone leaning out one of the lamplit windows two or three stories above catcalled. Someone else hollered at him to shut up. Cuan didn’t look up to mark from which rooms the noises issued. The Detective Crown Investigator squinted at his hand as if unfamiliar with the appendage, but after a moment she transferred her blue velvet carpetbag to her left hand and laid her dainty glove across his palm before withdrawing it just as quickly.

She didn’t carry an umbrella, as if impervious to the rain, but Cuan noticed her dress was sturdy, warm wool rather than silk or organdy. Her back was straight in her corset and her expression never flickered, even when Bitner snorted and slurped more tea, deliberately discourteous.

“DCI Garrett, Detective Sergeant.”

Of course Cuan knew it. She was the sole woman in her service, possessed of a notoriety that outstripped both her beauty and her expertise—neither of which was inconsiderable. As evidenced by the way Cuan’s voice caught in his throat on a stammer when she arched the smooth eyebrow over one alert pale eye. He looked away quickly, but not quickly enough to miss noticing how the corner of her mouth curved now as it hadn’t before. Apparently, his discomfiture was more amusing than Bitner’s rudeness.

Perhaps that was something to build on.

She turned, her walking dress mud-stained and swaying soddenly at the hem. He watched with some approval as she neatly sidestepped whatever filth some vagrant hurled from an unrepaired window above. She might seem serene, but her awareness was honed to a fine enough edge that the missile barely splashed her hem.

“I do hope you haven’t dripped tea on my crime scene,” she said tiredly to Bitner, then crouched in polished boots as if heedless that her navy skirt puddled on filthy stones. She set the carpetbag down beside her. It made more noise on the cobbles than her boots did, and Cuan wondered how she managed that. Maybe the same way she managed to move like a sylph, despite corset bones.

“Begging your pardon, ma’am,” Bitner said. “But there’s no sign of thaumaturgical interference in these cases. You’re rather wasted here.”

“We do mundane crimes too, when they’re unusual,” she said. Her voice stayed mild and light. Cuan wondered how much practice went into that, and if it were more or less than had provided her perfect posture. “Did he leave any footprints before the rain got to them? This is a lot of blood for there to be no traces.”

Bitner blew across the top of the tea, still steaming despite the patter of raindrops on its surface, and slurped ostentatiously before leaning over to Cuan and mouthing by his ear, “You know, they say she slept her way into the service.”

When Cuan moved away, he didn’t follow. Nor did he move to prevent Cuan from stepping up to the Crown Investigator’s shoulder.

She turned her head enough to let him know she’d seen him there. “Coen?”

Cuan said, “There were footprints in the muck by the back wall, but no sign he scaled the building, and they stopped abruptly. Near sheer brick, not by the gutter. In the rain—” He shrugged, shoulders hunching against the cold.

She turned away. “Ah. Get a look at the size?”

“About average for a man,” he said. “Big for a woman.”

She flexed her fingers, rubbing her palms together as if the gloves had not kept the chill out of her bones, either. Then, as Cuan had expected she would, she drew a twisted blown-glass rod from her sleeve, touched it to the draggled fur of her raincape collar, and said, “Shield your eyes.”

He placed the flat of his hand between his eyes and the DCI, hearing a shuffle behind him as Bitner pointedly turned his back. There wasn’t much of Bitner to turn—he must have been scraping his feet pretty hard to make as much noise as that. Fortunately, his coat collar and the hand beside his face let Cuan hide his smile as well as his eyes.

As he had known it would, the first flare of stark blue light from the DCI’s glass rod outlined the bones of his hand. But then the brightness moderated, brighter than moonlight but the same cold color, casting the same relentless shadows. A rumble of voices rose from the uniformed officers and the bystanders leaning from their windows, dropping away as did the intensity of the glow.

When Cuan looked up, he saw the DCI silhouetted, runnels of water trickling from her hat sparkling like sapphires as they caught and refracted the rays. She wedged the tip of the rod between stones and rose on the balls of her feet, one hand outstretched for a moment as if she expected it to fall. But it stayed, shining through the falling droplets, illuminating the blood-and-rain-washed alley with uncomfortable clarity so that Cuan could see clearly what he had previously observed only by lanternlight.

Blood on the cobbles was the least of it. The body lay under a heavy oiled canvas tarp, though the weight of the rain was such that he could see the victim’s outflung arm and doubled-under leg as if nothing but a wet sheet draped her. The rain wouldn’t be doing the trace evidence any good, though Cuan had fitted sieves across the gutters on the faint chance that they might catch something important before it washed away. If it hadn’t all washed away before the patrol officer even found her.

Cuan’s fingers itched in their gloves when he watched the DCI brace her hands on her hips and slowly turn to take in the scene. He wondered what she was seeing, besides the puddles of blood clotted to seaweedy strings in the rain, besides the rain itself, bucketing down to make every inch of the job harder. He wanted to see it too.

The DCI interlaced her fingers before her mouth and nodded, exactly as if someone had asked her a question. She said, “Detective Sergeant? Lift the canvas, if you please.”

He could have protested that what lay under that cloth was no sight for a lady, but somehow he thought it probably wasn’t the first time she’d heard that caution. Without turning to see if Bitner was paying attention, Cuan closed his umbrella, hooked it at his elbow, and bent down to expose the body. The DCI’s steely conjured light gleamed sickly on the glossy exposed surface of the victim’s liver, the swelling pearls of subcutaneous fat. Someone in a window squeaked; someone else moaned. Cuan heard the unmistakable sounds of vomiting.

“Somebody’s canvassed them?” the DCI said, without looking away from the grotesque display of flensed meat and spilled organs.

“Constables have been around,” Bitner said, surprising Cuan with how close he’d slipped. “They have names, for what they’re worth. A pair are still taking statements, and we’ll bring the likeliest back to the station house for further interrogation. You can’t do anything unobserved in a place like this, but anyone who heard her scream and looked, and is willing to talk to us, only saw a slender figure in a cape and helmet, vanishing into the dark. At least one said he looked like a peeler, in that helmet, but I don’t know of any policeman who’d come into a rookery like this alone. It could be worth your life.”

Now that something was actually happening, Bitner was either warming up to the DCI’s presence or his curiosity was getting the better of him. Not only was he speechmaking, but he’d crossed behind Cuan and came up on the opposite side from the DCI. Cuan let the slick, weighty canvas slip from his fingers. It folded up at his feet like a collapsed fan.

Cuan said, “What are you going to do now, ma’am?”

“I’m going to make another examination for evidence. And before the body is released to the coroner, I’m going to try to reproduce the weapon,” the DCI said, shaking a lank pale strand out of her eyes.

She’d bobbed her hair like an actress, so it swayed across the nape of her neck and stuck to her cheeks in waterlogged locks. Cuan found himself resisting the urge to push it off her face.

“Curse this rain,” she said. “I could believe it follows me. Your brolly, please, Detective Sergeant?”

Cuan laughed, and opened the black oilcloth device in such a manner as to flick water away from both the crime scene and his fellow investigators. He used it to shelter the DCI while she rummaged in her carpetbag, so he could sneak glimpses of what she fetched forth. Paraffin, he thought, watch-glasses and forceps, a tiny camelhair brush that she grimaced at and returned to its loop on the inside of the bag.

“Right,” she said. “Detective Sergeant, please bring the umbrella over the victim.”

Some of her performance seemed no different from what Cuan and Bitner had done already. Some of it was alien to CID’s procedures, but comprehensible. And some of it was utter arcana. Cuan itched to ask her the purpose of her muttering and the passes in the air she made over the body with a black-handled dagger, but he also thought breaking her concentration might be a rather perilous proposition. So instead, he held the umbrella open over her hands and working area as best he could, and tried not to breathe down her neck.

For her part, the DCI seemed to ignore him. When she sat back on her heels, though, she caught his eye. “Thank you, Detective Sergeant.” She packed away her tools, dousing the glass rod with a pass of her hand. The brilliance of her light extinguished, Cuan noticed that the sky was graying around the rooflines.

DCI Garrett stood as easily as if she were drawn erect on a cord, and turned to Bitner. “Your scene, Detective Inspector. Gentlemen, I’ve served my purpose here. As far as I’m concerned, you may release the victim to the coroner whenever you’re finished with her. I should have a report for you within twelve hours. I assume I may rely on you for copies of the witness depositions?”

Bitner looked up from screwing the chipped lid back onto his vacuum flask. “Absolutely, ma’am,” he said. Arms folded over his chest, he held her gaze until she nodded thoughtfully, turned and walked away. Cuan came up beside him, his shoulder level with Bitner’s ear, and tried not to let the umbrella drip on the DI’s head.

Bitner turned slightly to sneer at Cuan from the corner of his mouth. “Goddamned toady.”

Cuan sucked his lower lip between his teeth, tasting the salt of nervous perspiration, the soot flecks washed out of the London smog. The DCI had already disappeared into the lightening morning. “You think she’s really His Highness’s mistress?”

“Bit old for it, isn’t she? Got to be thirty, thirty-five if she’s a day.”

Cuan glanced over his shoulder. “I don’t care if she’s fifty. You think those grow on trees? I was just asking what you thought of the gossip.”

Bitner spat out of the corner of his mouth. “Why? You fancy your chances?”

Cuan snorted. The rain had slowed to a mist; he snapped the umbrella shut and shook it off. “And what if I do?”

“Women and Irish,” Bitner said. “Taking over society, if you ask me. It can’t end well.”


It was closer to fourteen hours than twelve before Cuan managed to present himself at the gray stone Enchancery to deliver transcripts of some dozen depositions to DCI Garrett, but he hadn’t slept in the interim. He had managed a change of clothes, and shoes and socks that did not squelch, and that was a boon—as was the approximate gallon of hot tea with sugar and lemon with which he’d washed his insides since the night before.

The Enchancery’s doorman might have been chosen to look the part. A tall man who hunched like a question mark, he wore his lank dark hair combed across a freckled pate, a crisp black suit buttoned over a spare midriff. “Good afternoon,” he said, with a glance at the sky.

Cuan, not tall and at a disadvantage due to the doorstep, craned his head back. “I’m expected,” he said, fumbling inside his coat for a visiting card. “Detective Sergeant Coen, for DCI Garrett.”

The doorman extended a gilt tray for the card. Cuan laid it gently across the concerned-seeming face of an embossed Narcissus and stepped through the door as the doorman stood aside.

“Please wait in the receiving room,” the doorman said, indicating the appropriate doorway with a white-gloved flourish.

Cuan stepped through, and stood just inside the threshold with his elbows cupped in the palms of his hands. The receiving room was not large, but it was comfortably appointed, with militarily pleated drapes that reminded Cuan of coffin velvet. He could sit on one of the needlepoint chairs, but that seemed like an unnecessary risk.

He was still standing when Garrett appeared in the doorway.

Cuan had expected the doorman again, someone come to usher him deeper into the bowels of the former mansion. The sorcerer herself, clad now in a plain blue dress with sleeves that buttoned to the elbow, came as something of a shock.

“DCI—” he stammered, heat spilling across his face. “I—”

“You didn’t need to deliver those personally,” she said, extending a pale hand. “A messenger would have sufficed.”

He slipped the documents in their oilcloth case out from under his arm and handed them to her. “I chose to assume the responsibility. I wanted—”

Her eyebrows rose, her thumb slipped under the flap of the case but hesitated before she lifted it. Though she said nothing, he read her regard as skeptical.

“I wanted to speak to you away from the DI,” he finished, limping. Groping after anything else to say, he added, “Did you have any luck with the knife?”

She’d been freezing over, a chill spidering through her manner like frost elongating toward the center of a pool. Whether despite or because of its awkwardness, his question broke that ice. She smiled faintly, the appling of her cheeks making more evident the bruised shadows under her eyes. “As a matter of fact,” she said, “I’ve had some exceptional success. Come along.”

She turned, black boots that vanished under the hem of her skirts clicking on marble until she mounted the heavy figured runner in the hall. She moved like a whippet, so Cuan hurried to match her, almost breaking into a trot before he drew up alongside. His heart thumped hollowly, but it wasn’t the woman or the exertion. It was the place.

He was here, in the Enchancery itself, on official business. He kept his eyes front and his expression professional, but there was a twelve-year-old inside him who hung on every sound, every image, every scent.

The long hall smelled of tobacco smoke, nitre, and saffron. The walls on both sides were hung with portraits of men in plain frames, each dark beveled rectangle chased with a narrow thread of silver. The oldest were in oils or tempera; the newer ones silver-process on tin. Each one bore a plaque beneath with the name of one of the Crown’s Own, and the circumstances of his death in the line of duty.

By the time Garrett and Cuan came to the far end of the hall, there were no more portraits. But the smell of saffron lay musty and heavy on the air, leading Cuan to speculate that dinner was likely to be curry.

The stair Garrett led him to was wide and plain—not a grand stair, but not a servant’s runway either. He thought they would climb, but she turned downwards, still wordlessly, and so they descended together. Cuan’s palms sweated badly enough that he wished he could ball his fists in his pockets.

The emotion filling him up was a peculiar one, a ribbon snarl of melancholy and longing he was more accustomed to associate with unattainable women than with government offices. He was here, finally, inside these gray walls and walking these worn floors—but he was not here as a Crown Investigator, or even as a hopeful supplicant.

At the bottom of the stair, Garrett unlocked a second door and swung it wide. Cuan expected the dankness of a London basement, but they entered into a bright cool space floored in granite, the low beams overhead knobby with glass spheres aglow with incandescent light.

The perimeter of the basement was divided into bays, each one open toward the center and containing a table, metal shelves covered in equipment, and paraphernalia half of which Cuan could not identify. “We don’t research or experiment here,” she said. “That’s carried out at London Bridge, just in case anything blows up. But there are facilities for forensic work. Last bay on the left, please.”

He went on ahead while she was locking the door behind, and paused by the opening she had indicated. A light still burned over the long slab table, a length of white toweling spread beneath it. Something black and slender lay diagonally across the cloth, dull enough even under intense light that Cuan could not make out its detail.

Garrett cleared her throat at his shoulder, and he jumped. While he was still gathering himself, she said, “Coen is really Cuan, isn’t it, Detective Sergeant? Sean Cuan? Do I miss my guess?”

The slow banging of his heart accelerated with panic. “DCI?”

She shook her head. “You’re Irish. Aren’t you?”

He could lie, of course. But changing your name wasn’t a crime. Lying about the reasons to a Crown Investigator, however…

“I’m Irish,” he said. “But I’m good at my job.”

She smiled. “Never fear, Coen. I’d be the last to throw you to the wolves. I know your partner dismisses it, but do you think your killer is a bobby?”

He shrugged. “I haven’t ruled it out, but—that’s a lot of ground for a policeman to cover, unless he’s off duty nights. And why would you slip on a cape to cover your uniform, but leave your helmet on?”

“You could plan to come back and mingle with the crowd of police at the scene,” Garrett offered. “Here’s your knife—or the shape of it, anyway.” She reached out and lifted the object, turning to offer it across her hand.

Cuan accepted the model, finding it lighter and warmer than he expected. He’d thought it would feel like glass, heavy and chill, but it barely weighed his hand. When he held it close enough, angled to the light, he could pick out the features of the blade.

“Dip it in whitewash,” she said. “It’ll give it a little more texture. But for now, you should be able to see—”

“It’s a Frontiersman,” Cuan said. A hunting knife, jagged along the back, sharply pointed and sporting a heavily beveled edge. “We don’t see a lot of these in London.”

She nodded. “I thought it was significant. There’s more; look at the hilt.”

He brought his eye down to the same level as the hilt and looked along it, consciously adjusting his focus to sweep the length. “There are scratches on the hilt. That’s pretty damned weird, DCI.”

“They look like fingernail scratches,” she said. “But those would have to be peculiarly long fingernails.”

Whatever passed between them when their eyes met, it was Cuan who looked aside. It was easier to talk with his shoulder to her. Spit it out, Cuan. “How did you get to be a sorcerer?”

She lifted her chin, framing a savage response. And then something in his face must have softened her fury, because the corner of her eyes twitched and she said, “I attended university.”

Cuan bit his lip, knowing she noticed. “And the admission requirements?”

“A basic liberal education,” she said. “There’s an examination, of course. And a practical. The examinations are more stringent at Oxford than on the continent, with three or four exceptions.”

“The Sorbonne,” he said.

The flat line of her mouth curved upward. It must have been the note of pure longing in his voice. She said, “But if you want to join the Crown’s Own”—she touched her dress over her breastbone—“you need the red sigils.”

Sorcerers received the mark of their profession upon graduation. Mostly tattooed over the breastbone in black ink. The red sigils were from Oxford, Paris, Wittenberg, Rome, or Kyiv—the great universities of the profession. “No point in studying anywhere else, then.”

“You’ve a spark?”

He nodded.

She lifted the model knife from his grip and turned back toward the work table. With her free hand, she swept up the length of toweling. “Show me.”

He spread his fingers as if they ached. “I haven’t anything to work with.”

Garrett laid the objects in her hands on a steel shelf. When she turned back, she held a shallow brown-and-cream glazed bowl in her palm. She laid it on the table before Cuan and cupped her hands around it. She leaned over it, looked down, and breathed, “Where do you think you are?”

Between her hands, the fine white grit that filled the bottom of the bowl shifted slightly. “That’s sand and glass. Can you sift them?”

Cuan swallowed. “A little. I’m not strong.”

“Talent isn’t half of it. As long as you’ve enough to go on with, brains and determination mean more.” She hesitated. “You know neither Oxford nor the Crown’s Own would take you under an assumed name. There are oaths. And they have means by which to tell. Can you face that?”

He swallowed. “I don’t know.”

She stepped back and Cuan stepped forward. He cupped his hand around the bowl. “Do you have a glass rod? Or a piece of quartz?”

Smiling, she let a lens of rock crystal slide to the table from where she’d palmed it. Cuan touched it with his fingertips, slid it around until it centered between his body and the bowl.

He closed his eyes.

The blood in the lids filtered the bright light pink, but he could still see it. Against that glow, he pictured the bowl of white grit, the tabletop, the crystal, his hands. He imagined the grit sifting itself, sand and powdered glass, indistinguishable to the eye. He tried to feel the flush of energy moving through him, the tingle of his fingertips, but all he felt was an ache at his temples, the throbbing in his throat.

“Enough,” Garrett said.

Cuan opened his eyes in time to see her draw a finger across the dust-dulled surface of the lens, leaving a shiny swath behind.

“Not strong,” he said again, apologetically. Embarrassed, feeling the heat in his cheeks.

She touched one of them with that selfsame finger, so he imagined he felt the sand grit against his flesh. “Irish,” she said, and shook her head. “Huh.” And then she winked. “Well, if a girl can do it…”


Bitner thought the American knife meant the killer was a colonial. Cuan couldn’t argue the possibility, but he thought Bitner’s conviction betrayed a certain unsettling air of relief. Not one of ours. Something other, something else. It’s comforting to alienate the monsters.

So Bitner built his fairy tales and sent the Bobbies about asking after rough-hewn colonials, while Cuan imagined him picturing the killer in fringed buckskin and a wolverine cap, and had to cover his mouth with his hand. It was wasted time, but Cuan knew better than to argue. So he nodded and agreed, and conducted his own investigation in the interstices of Bitner’s. It meant he ate out of cookshops still draped in black bunting to mark the period of formal mourning for the Prince-Consort, and it meant he slept in snatches, propped against walls, but neither thing mattered. There was no one waiting at home.

He asked Bitner’s questions—insubordination wasn’t useful—but Cuan also made sure to asked his own, less-leading ones first. Not that it garnered him much; the murderer might as well have vanished into the yellow fog. Might as well have been the yellow fog, for all the traces he left.

They waited only three days for the next victim.

Cuan was catching a nap when the bell rang, doglegged on the burgundy divan which jammed one corner of his office. He started awake in darkness slatted with what dim light fell through the blinds from the hall and pushed himself to his feet before he really knew what was transpiring. Shoving a hand through well-greased hair to rake it into some semblance of order, he opened the office door and leaned through it, one hand on the knob, the other braced heavily against the frame. “What’s all this?”

Bitner was shrugging into his coat. He might be too attached to pet theories, but Cuan couldn’t fault his work ethic. And when he looked up and caught Cuan’s eyes, Cuan didn’t ask any more stupid questions. He fumbled his coat off the back of his chair and threw it around his shoulders. The boots were under his desk. He jammed his feet into them one at a time, hopping as he caught up to Bitner. “What have we got?”

“A double,” Bitner grunted, as Cuan stomped his heel into his second boot. He could button them in the carriage. “Come on. It’s Jacob’s Island; we’re going where the whores and Irish reside.”

“Bloody hell,” Cuan said tiredly. “Bloody hell.”


Jacob’s Island was an island no longer, the man-made Folly Ditch that delineated it having been filled in decades before. But it remained one of the worst rookeries in Bermondsey, the reek of tanneries doing nothing to cover a charnel stench. Shaggy tenements leaned shoulder to shoulder, hunched over ineradicably filthy alleyways littered with crusted oyster-shells and bloated animal corpses.

It was down one of these, off Jacob’s Street, that a uniformed officer led Cuan and Bitner. Bitner held a handkerchief pressed to his face. It was impossible to tell by the sickly light of dawn if his color was as queer as Cuan’s stomach, but Cuan wouldn’t doubt it. Gray morning caught a clotted sheen off the cobblestones and the muck between them.

Cuan stepped carefully.

They had to pass through a warped and rotten gate to reach the bodies, which lay in an enclosed courtyard within—or between—tenements. There, the squalid stones lay concealed under a fading red wash, and two women tumbled in each other’s arms.

Or rather, Cuan realized as he drew up at the edge of the puddled blood, one had pulled the other into her arms before she died. The younger lay spread-eagled, the cavity of her abdomen gaping through a rent bodice, gray and yellow organs losing luster before his eyes. Under her crouched an older woman, one leg bent, her slashed throat soaking her dress and her arms hacked about the forearms.

“Sweet Christ,” Bitner said, and turned from the drone of flies. He made a show of examining the gate, the rotting iron fence—some twelve feet high—that separated the yard from the alley, and the stones of the tenement to either side. “There’s no sign this was climbed,” he said. “You couldn’t climb something this rusty without making noise and leaving signs.”

“Was it locked?”

“The gate and the door from the tenement, too. And the hallways are full of Irishmen.” Bitner’s jaw worked. “The girl was no better than she had to be. I think we’ll find she got money from most of them. None of them saw anything, of course. Unless somebody got inside all over blood, stepping over sleeping men without waking one of them, he didn’t leave that way.”

“Maybe the blackguard sprouted wings and flew.” Cuan turned back to the dead. He swallowed bile and leaned over the blood, careful not to trespass its margins.

“She fought,” Cuan said, and realized only when he heard his own voice that he’d spoken aloud. “DI, come look at this.”

Bitner gagged, but didn’t retch. He squared himself beside Cuan and squinted through the gloaming, arms folded over his chest. “He attacked the young one first.”

“She’s just a girl,” Cuan said. Agony and death didn’t help the process of determining her age, but by her sloped nose and the plumpness of her cheeks and jaw he made her out to be no more than sixteen. The older might be thirty, though she looked half a crone. Women aged fast in poverty. “Her mother or sister or friend came to her defense—”

He glanced from side to side, brow itching as it furrowed. There was less blood behind the body—a slope had pulled it chiefly in one direction—and so he circled to approach from that direction. He crouched there and lifted one of the older woman’s arms. Her garments were worn, stained. There was too much blood and muck on them to tell if they had been clean before she fell.

“These are wounds from defense,” he said. “There’s blood under her nails.”

Bitner handed him a penknife and an envelope. “Maybe some of it is his. And he might have cuts—she must have fought like a tigress.”

Having scraped her fingernails into the envelope, Cuan laid her hand gently down from where he had lifted it. He patted the dead woman’s matted hair. “I hope you got your claws in him, love,” he said. “Good for you.”


When Cuan arrived at the Enchancery, it was half eight, hammered light making the old city glint like copper and pewter under a ragged sky. He didn’t expect DCI Garrett to see him at all. He certainly didn’t expect her to meet him in her dressing gown and slippers, eyes red-rimmed and strands of bobbed hair twisting out like twigs around a pallid face. The doorman sniffed with patent disdain as he left them alone together, but Cuan was honestly more concerned with the grayness of her cheeks and the smell of bourbon on her breath.

“Late night?”

She rolled her eyes at him exactly the way Bitner might have, so he choked back a bark of laughter. She caught it, too, to judge from her hollow-backed smile. “Do you have a sweetheart, Coen?”

He shook his head.

“You’re better off without one. What have you brought me? You’re holding that parcel like you had a dead rat by the tail, so I imagine chocolates are too much to hope for.”

Cuan chuckled under his breath and held out the brown paper package, which he had indeed been dangling from a fingertip thrust through the twine. “Nothing nice, I’m afraid.”

She lifted the box with both hands, cradling it six inches before her bosom. “It never is. There’s been another killing.”

“Two. In the small hours of the morning.” He was hovering, he realized, giving her a covert stare like a wishful hound. He should explain himself, excuse himself, and go. “Those are scrapings from under the fingernails of one of the victims.”

“Fingernails,” she said.

Cuan nodded. “She fought.”

That turned the DCI’s empty smile real. “Good for her. Good job, Coen. Maybe we’ll make a Crown Investigator of you yet.”

It shocked him to hear her state his secret hope so baldly, as if there were no embarrassment in it. He stood as if poleaxed. She moved away, as if to retreat deeper into the bowels of the Enchancery, and Cuan settled his bag more firmly on his shoulder, grateful to be tacitly dismissed.

Until she stopped in the doorway, turned back over her shoulder, and said, “What are you waiting for?”


The stairs down were the same stairs, and the laboratory below them was the same laboratory. Cuan followed as Garrett swept precipitously across the stone floor, the skirts of her dressing gown flaring about ankles that flashed distractingly white in the brilliant lighting. Another of the Crown’s Own was hard at work in one of the bays, bent grumbling over some process involving retorts and alembics. He glanced up as they came parallel to his table, but didn’t return Garrett’s civil nod. Cuan felt the sorcerer’s stare boring between his shoulder blades as they passed.

“You have time to dress, DCI,” he murmured, as she led him into the same end bay as before.

She set the parcel down on the table and flashed him a wink that made his heart skip a beat, in despite—or perhaps because—of her dishabille.

“They don’t bother.” The jerk of her chin indicated the anonymous Crown Investigator sharing the basement, and all the Enchancery beyond. “I had to fight like a cat to be allowed rooms here. It’s most unsuitable, you know.”

Her grin was infectious. Cuan found himself sharing it as she continued: “You can be certain I mean to use them exactly as the men do. Now tell me, Detective Sergeant, is there anything about this fourth murder scene that you noticed in particular, other than the presence of more than one body?”

“The gate,” he said promptly, and blushed. He looked down, but continued, “The yard was gated. With a fourteen-foot fence of wrought iron.”

“And the previous murder was in a tenement yard as well,” she said, and frowned. “Where did you say these murders took place?”

“I didn’t. Sorry, the instinct is to withhold information from potential interview subjects.”

From her sideways glance as she lifted a pair of bandage scissors with which to cut the twine, she understood that instinct very well.

Cuan finished, “But it was Jacob’s Island.”

She rubbed the corners of her red-rimmed eyes with the hand that didn’t hold the scissors. “I suspected you were going to say that. Remember the footprints at the first scene?”

“The ones that ended in a wall. The ones we thought the rain must have washed away.”

“It didn’t.” Having laid the scissors aside, she drew the snipped twine free and coiled it about her fingers. That done, she began folding open crackling paper.

“He didn’t scale that wall,” Cuan protested. “Not without sorcery.”

She folded the paper, too, and set it aside with parsimony that struck him as quite out of character for an aristocrat. “He didn’t scale the wall,” she agreed. “He jumped.”

Of course Cuan knew what she meant. It was London legendry, the stuff of penny dreadfuls and bedtime tales. Murders and assaults in Whitechapel, in Southwark, in Jacob’s Island.

Even an Irish boy heard about the boogeyman. But—“That was forty years ago!”

She opened his box and lifted his little morbid stack of lidded watch-glasses free, dealing them out upon the table in a line. As mildly as if inquiring if her preferred milk or lemon in his tea, she asked, “What’s forty years to Spring-Heeled Jack? More or less, I mean. We never knew why he stopped before, so it’s no mystery if he’s started up again.”

“He didn’t kill!”

Garrett licked her lips. “Forty years is long enough to learn to use a knife.”


Whatever other errands she ran after retiring up the stairs, Garrett was still the first Crown Investigator to appear again in the hall, though the Enchancery’s housekeeper assured Cuan that soon there would be more. Cuan’s experience had prepared him for many things, but the sight of DCI Garrett in navy trousers and a coat like a man was not one of them. She had swept her bobbed hair up under a bowler and buttoned all four buttons on the jacket rather than leaving the bottom three open to flash her waistcoat, and still he found he couldn’t look at her directly. His discomfort seemed to amuse her, however, especially when he blushed and turned his head when she bent to lift her carpet bag.

“Can’t fight devils in a dress,” she said, facing him.

Cuan extended a hand, ready to take her bag, but she shook her head and shouldered it. He stepped back, still tasting the bitter coffee the housekeeper had poured him. In the street before the Enchancery, he heard the rattle of many hooves and the whir of steel-shod carriage wheels on the stones.

He said, “So how do you catch a devil?”

“We didn’t catch him last time. We only ran him off. If we had anything to do with it.”

“And now he’s back.”

Stairs creaked, Garrett’s and Cuan’s heads pivoting as one. Two more sorcerers paused their descent at the first landing, one a tall man with grizzled hair and a moustache that draped his upper lip in luxuriance, the other shorter, stouter, and sprightly of step despite curls shot through with silver and a powder-blue coat gone shiny at the elbows.

“DCI Rice,” Garrett said, nodding to the taller before turning her attention to the man in the worn suit. “Commander.”

Cuan caught himself correcting his posture. So this was Sir Nigel Lain, Commander of the Crown’s Own. As he descended, Cuan could see that he was not a big man, neither tall nor broad across the shoulder. But he wore the unmistakable cloak of authority, which neither his genteel manner nor the careless manner of his dress could diminish. He extended his hand, and Cuan hurried to accept it, stammering as he tried to remember if the proper form of address was Commander Lain or Sir Nigel.

“Commander,” the Commander offered, with a disarming smile. “The Crown’s Own reserve titles for social occasions; it confuses the issue otherwise. Don’t you agree, Lady Abigail Irene?”

“Of course, Commander,” she said with an amused smile. “DCI Rice, Commander Lain, this is Detective Sergeant Coen. He’s been cooperating on the prostitute murders.”

Rice winced when Garrett said prostitute, and Cuan would have had to be a blind man to miss his disapproval of her mode of dress and the casual banter Commander Lain offered her. Cuan squelched—hard—any unworthy speculation on how exactly it was that DCI Garrett had come to be the only female among the Crown’s Own. Perhaps Sir Nigel had been a friend of her family; there was only so much peerage, after all.

“Excellent work, Detective Sergeant,” Lain said. He had a cool, dry handshake, papery but still strong. “I’ll be sure to put in a good word with your superiors.”

Ouch, Cuan thought. But out loud, he said, “Thank you. May I ask what our next course of action is?”

Three more sorcerers had appeared at the landing while he was shaking the Commander’s hand. The men filed down, arranging themselves against the hallway wall. By the tilt of his head, Commander Lain appeared to note their presence, but he didn’t turn. “To start? DCI Garrett has turned the tissues you recovered over to a team of technical sorcerers, who will be providing us with locator amulets. Once that’s done…”

“We put a lot of men on the street,” Garrett supplied. “Station the Crown’s Own near every neighborhood affected—then or now—and then we wait for him to emerge.”


A mustard-colored blend of coal smoke and London fog, thick as gravy, licked the windows of the carriage and trailed across the street in tendrils that seemed firm enough to touch. Cuan balanced awkwardly on the bench seat beside Garrett, trying not to stare as the drape of her trousers resealed the outline of her knee. He hunched over the amulet cupped in his palms, watching a needle of light flicker in the jewel at its center. A real cat’s-eye would have maintained its orientation, but this one spun lazily as the needle of a demagnetized compass. When Cuan sighed, his breath blew across it, and—impossible as that was—seemed to set it spinning the harder.

“He won’t appear until sunset,” Garrett said.

She had bent her head and was picking something from her coat sleeve; the wiry russet hairs of a dog, if he didn’t miss his guess. “Terrier?”

She smiled obliquely and flicked the fur out the window. “You have a good eye.”

“I like dogs. You keep it in your rooms?”

“You may as well take some rest.” She looked away and drew her legs up onto the cushion, wedging herself into the corner opposite. When Cuan looked up in surprise, she reached for the lap robe that hung beside the door.

She must have read his face accurately, or perhaps it was merely the wisdom of long experience with slightly raw recruits that led her to continue, “We have to be out amidst the city, it’s true. But nothing will happen until nightfall, and one of the most vital skills of a Crown Investigator is sleeping in carriages, Detective Sergeant. By all means, take the bench opposite.”

“Thank you,” he said. “I think.” He held onto the amulet while he swung across the cabin of the carriage. There was another robe; he reached for it and snuggled himself into the corner opposite. Garrett seemed to drop off as soon as she shut her eyes, her breath leveling out and her head rolling softly on the long neck. Cuan did not find sleep so easy, with broad daylight outside the windows and the close, unchaperoned proximity of a woman, but he let his head slide to the side anyway, cupping the amulet where he could watch it without turning. If it flickered with anything resembling purpose, he would see.

He didn’t expect to doze, but the late night and his gritty-eyed lack of sleep quickly won the day. When he awoke, it was to Garrett’s touch on the back of his wrist.

“Sunset,” she said. He could see the slanted orange light—still fog-muffled—for himself.

He sat up, rubbing his eyes as much to obscure the sleep-mussed visage across the dim carriage as to clear the sleep away. “You told me so.” He’d been dreaming, pentagrams and frankincense, and it almost seemed the cloying scent of resin still hung all around them. The amulet must have slipped from his hand in his sleep, because Garrett held it now, balanced lightly on her palm. “Any movement yet?”

She bent over it briefly and shook her head. “It’s still slow spins.”

As if her frown had conjured it, a whipsnake tendril of dream-memory skimmed his awareness. Conjured. Cuan shuddered. “Do devils just summon themselves?”

A slow blink, as Garrett raised her gaze from the amulet cupped in her palms. “A conjured spirit,” she said. “Possible, though why you’d go to all that trouble just to murder a soiled dove or three—” She shook her head.

“Well, fiddlesticks,” he said. “I was hoping against hope that I might have developed a facility for clairvoyant dreams.”

“Maybe we should bring in a Spiritualist,” she offered. When he winced, she patted his knee and continued, “Whether or not your dreams are prophetic, it doesn’t mean you’re incorrect. Or…”

She paused, and for a moment he imagined he saw her counting on her fingers. “What does now have in common with forty years ago?”

“Well, I wasn’t here then,” Cuan said, to see her smile. “Same Iron Queen,” he said, opening his hands helplessly. “Though only just barely a Queen on that end. Long may she reign.”

He must not have scrubbed his voice sufficiently, because Garrett gave him a soft, ironical smile. “I’m sure Alexandria Victoria will be comforted by your approval.”

Cuan touched the brim of his hat and wondered if he dared to kiss her. She was too old for him, and an adventuress, and rumor would have it that her lips were not innocent of men’s kisses—and that one of those men was the son of the woman he had just obliquely maligned.

He looked away. “It’s been forty years since Spring-Heeled Jack was last in London. Forty years exactly?”

“Near enough,” she answered. “When last he appeared, he terrorized women from ’37 to 1840 and was never captured. He was described as thin, tall, clad in white oilcloth and a flowing cape, with a pointed beard and pop-eyes. His claws were made of iron, and were freezing cold to the touch. He scampered over rooftops and leaped hedgerows and walls with mighty bounds. This time he seems more violent, however—then he only murdered a few of his victims. The rest were groped, clawed, or interfered with—but again, in the intervening years he’s learned to use a knife, and that seems to increase his lethality.”

When she spoke, she was as cold-blooded as any copper. Cuan felt as if he should withdraw, find it unseemly. Bitner no doubt would. Instead, it made him easier with her.

When she spoke so, she was just a colleague.

She continued, “He vanished after something very like this—the Crown’s Own blanketed the city, interrupting his every attack. Eventually, he must have given up, his purpose—whatever it might have been—thwarted.”

“So what gave him the idea for the knife, if he only used claws before?”

She shook her head. “It would be natural to blame this on a copy-cat.”

“But you don’t think it is?” He leaned forward on his seat to push aside the curtains and peer out the window. Nothing lay beyond except the city, the press of its streets, and the gloaming. A woman in a ragged dress caught his eye and swung her hips. Cuan bit his lip on a sigh. Even if she knew someone was hunting her, there wasn’t much she could do if she were going to earn a few pennies for her liquor and her bed.

Here at the edge of Whitechapel, theirs was the only carriage in sight. Not even hansom cabs found commerce here.

“I tested the scrapings,” Garrett said. “They weren’t from anything human.”

Cuan let the curtain fall. “Did you say ‘interfered with’?”

“Raped,” she amended dryly.

“No sign of that this time. He’s taking the direct route.”

It fell like a stone into still water between them, Cuan struck dumb while his mind ticked over the implications. Garrett stared back. “DS,” she said, finally, “I do believe you’re right. Do you wish me to inform your supervisor as well as my own?”

“DI Bitner? Yes, if you know what’s going on.”

She reached up to rap on the carriage roof. “I think we can manage that.” She handed Cuan the amulet before leaning out the window to confer briefly with the coachman. By the time she sat down again, Cuan had finished lighting the lantern that would allow them to see each other though the last light faded from the sky. “I think he’s using the—the life force, the generative force—of his female victims to stay manifested in London. I think he needs that anchor, or he falls back into whatever hell he came from. And the Queen’s reign is his gateway. Then, she was young, new to the throne. Now she’s recently widowed. A woman in transition. He connects himself to the Queen’s life-giving energy the same way you sorted the sand from the glass.”

“Because all women share a symbolic continuity,” Cuan said. “Just like all bits of quartz.”

Garrett nodded. “Just like all men.”

Cuan glanced down at the amulet, expecting only more lazy spinning, and had to look back twice to confirm what his eyes registered.

The needle of light pointed west, shivering like a bird dog on point.

He held it up. Garrett, after only a wide-eyed glance, lunged for the window to call out to the coachman again.


The coach lurched heavily through packed streets, jostling and slewing so Cuan was obliged to wedge himself in the same corner he’d slept in and cling for dear life to the vertical rail beside the door.

“St. Giles,” Garrett said, as the needle’s course plunged them along the roads that still described the path of London’s ancient walls. “We couldn’t have guessed much more wrong than Whitechapel.”

Cuan gritted his teeth, grateful for missed meals, and held on until the carriage shook to a halt a mere three miles but nearly half an hour later.

“We’re not the first,” Garrett said, pushing the curtain aside. She swung the door open as she stood and kicked the stairs down. One hand extended to whoever waited below, the other burdened with her carpet bag, she descended without regard for the railing. Cuan followed at slightly less breakneck speeds, though still in haste.

As he fell into step beside her, she spoke without looking at him. “I’ve made up my mind to write you a letter of recommendation to Oxford.”

He would have stammered thanks, but she silenced him with a wave. Full dark had fallen while they raced the breadth of the city proper, and the coal-oil stinking yellow fog rolled in. Despite streetlamps and carriage lanterns, everything had acquired an air of indistinctness, or unreality.

However the transfer of information had taken place, five carriages clustered at the base of the pillar marking the intersection called the Seven Dials. Fifteen or twenty men milled among them, the bright edge of human chatter dulled by the fog. Along the perimeter of the lamplight loomed the vague-edged silhouettes of helmeted and uniformed officers, some clutching their truncheons like children clutch poppets.

As Cuan found his footing, DI Bitner detached himself from the crowd and stumped over. That didn’t surprise Cuan, but he was a little taken aback to realize that the overcoated shape striding along in Bitner’s wake was Detective Superintendent Mattingly, second-in-command of CID. He hastened forward, intending to smooth over the introductions, but Garrett was already warmly greeting Mattingly.

The Detective Superintendent seemed less enthusiastic, but he wasn’t giving her the brush-off, a friendliness which Cuan perceived to be the source of Bitner’s frown.

“What have we got?” Garrett asked as Cuan drew up. Across the square, fog swirled around the pumping legs of Commander Lain, his silhouette unmistakable as he hurried to join them.

Mattingly cast a searing look over his shoulder at the rookery as Lain inserted himself into the circle. “The Met have the rookery surrounded,” he said, nodding to the truncheon-wielding crew. “They’re not letting anyone pass.”

“With all due respect, sir,” Cuan said, “he’s already in there. And if we’re talking about a jumping devil, well, a lot of peelers aren’t going to slow him down a bit.”

Mattingly harrumphed through his moustache. “St. Giles is a warren, DS. We don’t have enough men to maintain a perimeter if we go in after him.”

“We can go in,” Lain offered, gesturing to another carriage now drawing up, the arms of the Crown’s own emblazoned in gold on the black, glossy door.

Cuan winced, but he hadn’t the rank to say what needed saying. Bitner, too, was swelling full of unpronounced arguments. Fortunately, Mattingly interceded.

“Do you want to imagine the carnage we’d get if we sent a dozen stiff-limbed elderly sorcerers on a room by room search of that?”

Lain bridled, but Mattingly rolled right over him.

“Even a wizard can be bashed over the head, sir, and they would be. No, thank you, Commander Lain. It would be a far superior use of your resources if your men would consent to be stationed among the bobbies. A stasis-wanding is our best chance to capture this sprite.”

“I think I know what he’s after,” Garrett said. Every set of eyes swiveled, and she colored. “It’s…indelicate.”

Lain tilted his head. “We are all scientists here, DCI.”

“A feminine principle,” she said. “Before, he raped for it, and when we kept him from his prey for long enough, he was forced to return to whatever Hell he came from. Now, he simply eviscerates. DS Coen gave me the idea—”

“Did he now?” Bitner interrupted, raking Cuan with a peculiar look.

Mattingly said, “That gives us a potential strategy for starving him out. But it doesn’t answer the question of which terrier can drag this particular badger from his sett.”

Cuan felt Garrett drawing herself up. “Send us,” she said, pointing from Bitner to Cuan. “The three of us, and a couple of bobbies, if there’s one or two who will volunteer. These two gentlemen have revolvers, I imagine, and I’ll have my wand. They can protect me quite effectively—and it won’t be a house to house search. We have the amulets, thanks to DS Coen. And I am hardly elderly and stiff-limbed.”

“I’m not sending a woman into danger,” Mattingly said, with a glance for support at Lain.

Garrett took a step forward. Her pointing finger made an arc, taking in the bobbies and their lanterns, the hellish silhouettes their lights cast on the fog. “There’s a woman in there now, Detective Superintendent, who—if she has not already been molested and horribly killed—is already in grave peril. You’re not sending me into danger, sir. I’m going to get my sister out.”

The sweep of her neck, the lift of her chin, were magnificent. Cuan held his breath, thinking of Mattingly’s fond disdain, the dismissive comments of investigators. From across the circle, Bitner caught his gaze, one eyebrow rising.

Lain spread his hands. “I know better than to come between DCI Garrett and anything she might have set her will on.”

Mattingly shook is head. “Bitner? Coen?”

“We’ll do it,” Cuan said, as Bitner’s mouth was opening.

It might be insubordination, but—whatever he’d been about to say—once the words were out of Cuan’s mouth, Bitner rocked back on his heels and folded his arms. Superior officer or not, he’d back his partner up.

“We’ll do it,” Bitner agreed, more slowly. He turned to Garrett. “The plan is to flush him out onto the Crown’s Own? Do you think he’ll run when confronted?”

She looked as if she’d like to bite her lip, but was too much a lady. Instead, a shiver spread through her delicate cheek. “He did before.”


The alleys stank of feces and rotting trash. No light filtered in from outside—the gaps between buildings had long been bridged with shoddy construction that sifted filth on their hats—and Cuan tried not to think too hard on what the beams of their lanterns illuminated through the crawling smog. Any heap of rags might be a filthy vagrant, a rotting corpse, or just a stinking heap of garbage. Cuan would be as glad to get through the night without having to determine which was which.

Few folk were abroad. Cuan would wager that word had spread of the peelers surrounding St. Giles and everybody who had shelter was taking it. So they moved like ghosts through the fog, unopposed but not unremarked. Cuan felt as if he could sense the hostile gazes blistering his skin from every angle. If he could not see the people, he could hear them, the scrape of iron on stone within the ratty dwelling-places, the screams of more miserable babies than could be counted.

Garrett had the amulet. Her footsteps clicking at his heels, she called directions at each intersection. Behind her, Cuan heard the scrape of Bitner’s boot, his ragged breathing. Two bobbies—Burns and Jamison—brought up the rear, big doughty men clutching their truncheons.

Cuan’s palm sweated into the grip of his revolver. He was obliged to pause at each corner, flatten himself against whatever passed for a wall—some no more than flimsy barriers of planking and bits of crate, the interstices wedged with rags—and peer ahead into the gloom, alert to ambush.

Nevertheless, the knowledge that somewhere ahead a woman could be in peril of her life kept him moving faster than caution would dictate. “We must be getting close,” Garrett said. “The amulet is brightening.”

As if her words had been permission, the ambient sound of too many people living pent too closely in tiny rooms and corridors was rent by a woman’s cry. With a glance over his shoulder, Cuan broke into a run.

It could be a trap, of course, and it could be that he was charging headlong to the devil. But he told himself he wouldn’t be himself if he could listen to a shriek like that and take no action. The pounding footsteps of the others echoed around him, telling him he was not alone. Garrett kept up quite handily, the silver tip of her wand flashing in the lanternlight as she drew up alongside. And Bitner, long-legged and slight, swung wide to charge past them, drawing ahead.

Cuan watched the jiggling beam of his lantern and drove harder, hopping rubbish piles and sliding in drifts of refuse. One of the bobbies blew his whistle, sharp and shrill, a sound that set Cuan’s teeth to vibrating in his skull. They broke out into a courtyard ringed in squalid shanties, loomed over by soot-blackened brick. The darkness shattered and broke around blades of light, the erratic sweep of lanterns nauseating in trembling hands. Bitner had drawn up a little before them, squinting the length of his extended arm. The beam of the lantern in his left hand illuminated a lumpish black shape Cuan at first mistook for a shanty draped in ragged black oilcloth.

He could hear the woman whimpering, the sort of tiny mewing sounds made by someone too terrified or hurt to get a breath. He stepped forward, flanked by the bigger of the two bobbies, meaning to join Bitner in forming a wall between Garrett and the source of the sound.

Then the thing stretched, and rose, the draperies flaring with its movement, and Bitner saw it unveiled from within the flapping cloak—a bone-white figure as spindly as if lashed together out of broom handles, its eyes bugging out of a face like a Pulcinella mask. One skeletal hand was still knotted in the hair of a woman who sprawled before him; the other folded stiffly around the hilt of a hunting knife.

Spring-Heeled Jack.

The woman’s dress was ripped from collar to navel. Shiny darkness spotted the edges of the gash, but the bright steel of her corset busk glinted between ragged edges of cloth, and it sharpened hope in his breast. The wounds might be superficial.

“Throw it down!” Bitner demanded, his voice ringing with authority. “Throw down the knife!”

The thing snarled, and in a blur of black cloak and pale limbs yanked the woman’s head back by her hair. The knife-hand darted. Flames leaped from Bitner’s revolver, and a sound so loud that Cuan felt its concussion through his chest shook the air. Cuan felt his palm sting, saw the curl of blue smoke from the barrel of his revolver, and realized that he’d fired as well.

At least one bullet must have struck the thing. Cuan saw its body jerk, the shudder that rippled its cloak. The knife scythed away through darkness when its arm flung wide, and struck something solid enough to thump.

The woman screamed, her terror combining with the shrilling of police whistles to drown the ringing in Cuan’s deafened ears. Garrett appeared on Cuan’s right, a slim ebony wand wavering in her hand.

The devil snarled and leaped for Bitner, a jump so fearfully swift Cuan could not track it with his gun. Bitner shouted as he went down, his revolver discharging hopelessly into the air. His lantern shattered on the stones, splashing fire like water from a dashed cup. The beast fell on him, cobalt flames jetting from between its lips, its pinwheeling hands showing dark at the tips.

Cuan raised his gun before he realized he could not shoot, and instead threw himself on the creature’s back, his fingers burrowing deep in the folds of its cloak, seeking purchase on its scrawny throat.

The cloak felt warm, oily, like filthy human skin. He clawed; his fingernails caught, bent, and what they caught on tore. Spring-Heeled Jack shrilled, more alcohol-blue flames billowing from his mouth. The devil reared up, arching backward. Cuan yanked, slick heat flooding over his hands, burning his skin. If it was blood, it splashed his cheek and burned like fire.

He held his grip. He yanked again.

But the burning blood was as slick as a man’s, and his hands slipped and slid. Spring-Heeled Jack twisted in his grip, still wailing, and then—more eerily, cursing fluently like a man. It leaped, the living cloak flaring on every side, but Cuan’s weight flattened its leap and they smashed together into the brick tenement. They crashed into a shanty roof that splintered beneath them, and Spring-Heeled Jack staggered up, wobbling free of the debris, and leaped again.

Cuan slid from its back and skidded along the filthy stones. When he tried to stand, thorny heat spiked the length of his shin. He yelped and fell, realizing as he groped for it that he had lost his gun. One of the bobbies closed on him, truncheon dangling, and Cuan waved the man back.

Across the pavement, Bitner pushed himself into a sitting position and dragged himself away from the burning pool of lantern oil. “Where is it?”

Garrett spoke out of the darkness. She must be moving toward him; Cuan found himself blinded by the beam of her lantern. “Look over by the far wall. I think I got it with my wand.”

“I can’t. My leg is broken. Constable Burns?”

The policeman—Burns—wavered, his expression only a pale blur through the dark, but he turned away. His lantern now illuminated a crumpled shape sprawled across the dented tin roof of a lean-to. “Might be,” he said. He glanced over his shoulder. “DCI—”

She leveled her wand again and gave it a little flick, with no visible result. “I reinforced the paralysis,” she said. “Collar it. Where’s Constable Jamison?”

“Here, ma’am.” He came forward, supporting a staggering woman. The victim, Cuan realized, who was well enough to hold the ragged edges of her dress together at the front. “I’ll go for stretchers if you feel safe enough here with Constable Burns.”

Garrett smiled and slipped her wand up the tight sleeve of her jacket. “We’ll manage. Oh, DI Bitner, please do me the courtesy of sitting down until somebody can look at your injuries?”

“I’m fine,” he said, drawing wide his coat to display the blood-spotted tatters of his shirt, the scorched but not blistered area on his throat and cheek, the sizzled hair. “He scraped me up, is all. His claws aren’t all that sharp. Like dog claws. I guess that explains why he used the knife.” But he plunked down beside Cuan nonetheless, and drew up his knees. “Thank you, old man.”

Something rattled in Bitner’s pocket as he reached inside his coat.

Constable Jamison led the woman over and drew his coat off for her to sit upon. “Here, miss, just sit down by the Detective Sergeant, would you?”

She as much collapsed as sat. Cuan pulled off his own coat and draped it around her shoulders. She huddled into it, wide-eyed and unweeping, peering at him over clutching fingers. Her eyes almost vanished behind her tangled locks.

“It’s not moving,” Constable Burns reported. “How long will this last?”

“Until I take it off,” Garrett answered. She swayed, standing over them, but kept herself erect. Across the court, Cuan heard the sounds of people stirring, the rattle of nests of newspapers pushed back, the grind of propped-up doors slid aside as the denizens of the rookery emerged. “Drag it over here, would you, and then relax. We may have a bit of a wait.”

Someone called “Suzy?” It must have been the woman’s name, because she flinched a little, but she didn’t answer, just huddled tighter in her coat.

“She’s here,” Cuan said. A shape emerged from the night, framed by two others. Women, all of them, blowsy and dressed in tatters, reeking of cheap gin.

“Is she—?”

“Alive,” Cuan said, and turned his face aside as Suzy was helped up and led limping away. He should retain her as a material witness—but he found he didn’t care. They had the suspect in custody, though what they’d do with it, he had no idea. Thank God that wasn’t his department.

Bitner nudged his arm. When he looked down, he saw the open mouth of a metal flask. “This’ll take the edge off the leg.”

He let Bitner slip it into his fingers, and paused. “There’s something you should know before I drink this.”

Bitner waited. Cuan felt the stir of Garrett’s coat-tail against his shoulders as she turned, scanning the darkness.

He drew a breath and said, “The name I was born with was Sean Cuan.”

“Why are you telling me that?”

“Because I want your recommendation when I apply to read sorcery at Oxford.”

“You’re Irish.”

“That’s what I’m telling you,” Cuan said. “You’re a university man. With your letter and DCI Garrett’s, they might consider me anyway.” He extended the flask, untouched, back to Bitner.

Bitner turned and looked him in the eye. “Christ, man, I thought you were going to tell me you had the pox. Drink the damned gin. Of course you’ll get your letter, man. And then maybe you can write me a report on exactly where that thing came from.”

“Hell,” Cuan answered, the sharp fumes of gin filling up his sinuses, making his eyes sting. The pain in his leg dimmed a little, veiled behind alcohol burn. “I can tell you that without an education.”