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.
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.”