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Bradley turned his head, just a touch, pure reflex, then turned back.

“There was this conversation we had,” he said, “About you explaining what you’re doing?”

I didn’t fault him for being wary. Our standard-issue knife is not something that inspires a whole lot of confidence. It’s four inches of blade, plus handle – all of it an ugly, dull grey. Dull being the operative word, since it’s pure iron and therefore can’t hold an edge for toejam. There’s a reason people ditched iron weapons as soon as steel was an option. Alas, for us, it’s the Iron Age every day, from now until happily ever after.

“Relax,” I told Bradley, “I’m not planning neurosurgery.”

I pulled the bottom of my t-shirt away from my stomach and carefully cut into the fabric. One short cut down, at the side, one long cut across the middle, and one more short cut that turned into a sort of sawing, because the damn knife was, yeah losing its edge.

Now I had a strip of cloth. And Bradley could see my belly button.

I grabbed the hand sanitizer from my jacket pocket, squeezed some out, and rubbed it into Bradley’s head and ear. He winced, but didn’t make a sound, just looked at me with those eyes that made you want to confess things.

I tied the strip of cloth around his head, covering as much of the damage as I could. Then I sat back and examined my handiwork. It would do. It would have to.

“Thanks,” he said.

“No worries,” I said, “But it’s not very stylish. You look like…”

“The Karate Kid?” he asked, “Ryu, from Street Fighter? Rambo?”

“Well, I was going to say a dork, but…”

I stood up and offered him my hand. He took it, and pulled himself up.

We both turned to look at the mouth of the outflow pipe.

“Chinatown,” he said.

I blinked and turned to look at him. He was still staring at the doorway into darkness.

“Forget it, Bradley, it’s Fairyland,” he added, “It was a Chinatown reference. The end of the movie.”

“If you got it…” I said.

He shrugged. “I didn’t think it related. It’s a tragic ending where the innocent suffer, the bad guy triumphs and the good guy’s powerless.” He finally turned to look at me, and his lip did that twitching almost-smile again. “Nothing like our situation, right?”

“Nothing at all,” I said.

We walked into the tunnel.

I threw myself back, slamming into the concrete wall set into the embankment. Another Redcap landed in front of me, the heavy metal pole he carried smashing into the earth, right where I’d been standing.

It’s raining men, I thought. I wanted to look at Bradley but didn’t dare. The Redcaps were between us.

And the one that faced me was swinging his iron staff again. I ducked, and the pole just barely missed me. He tried to stop it and pull back, but I fired before he could recover. The iron bullet slammed into his side and knocked him off his feet. He landed hard and didn’t move again.

Redcaps look like tiny little old men… little old men with muscles like stevedores. The eponymous hats are dyed in the blood of their victims, and they wear iron-shod shoes and carry iron staves. But they aren’t immune to iron. They wear it, carry it, as a sort of Fae machismo thing, to prove how tough are. They have no spurking fear of iron – no point waving the Badge at them – but it sure as hell can hurt them.

I looked around. Bradley was standing, thank Goddess, but the little bastard had clipped him on the way down. Bradley was bleeding from the side of his head and his left arm hung limp, as though he’d taken bad hit to the shoulder.

Bradley was backing away slowly, gun levelled at the Redcap in front of him. It was advancing, iron staff raised high to strike. I aimed my gun, but the three of us formed an almost straight line, and there was no way to take a shot without the risk of hitting Bradley.

And I didn’t want to shoot Bradley. The paperwork would be a bitch, for one, and… I cut the thought off when I saw it.

There was a third Redcap, and it was closing on him from his left with a vicious feral smirk and a pike made of iron.

“Bradley, eight o’clock,” I called.

I couldn’t tell if he’d heard me, or understood, and I still couldn’t risk a shot. Hand-to-hand it is, I thought, and ran towards them, but I was too spurking late.

“My kill,” cried the one in front of Bradley, and swung its pike.

“Nay, mine,” shrieked the other, and swung too.

Bradley twisted and dropped, and my heart and stomach lurched, but he was just in time. Like a dancer, like a spurking dancer, he slipped under the pikes as they met just over his head with a clattering clang. The Fae behind Bradley was knocked back and fell on his wizened ass.

Then Bradley was up again, he’d dropped his gun, and with his good hand he grabbed the pike of the Redcap in front of him, twisted and pulled.

And then it was Bradley who held a pike. He swung, and then there wasn’t a Redcap standing in front of him with empty hands. It was lying on the ground, and what was left of its head was the same color as its cap.

Bradley tried to hoist the iron staff again, but couldn’t. He used it to prop himself up instead. The last Redcap scrambled to his knees and reached for his pike, but reconsidered when it found itself looking down the barrel of my gun.

Bradley took long, slow, deep breaths and leaned on the pole.

I glanced at the mouth of the pipe. We’d been standing right in front of it, and talking a lot, for longer than was a good idea. I moved out of the channel, onto the at least dry-ish land at the bottom of the embankment – and out of line-of-sight of someone, say, inside the pipe.

Because Bradley was right again, or half right; it wasn’t technically a sewer. I waved him over to join me.

“Okay,” I said, “But I’m warning you now. This is perfectly logical.”

“So it won’t make sense, right?”

I hid my smile by scratching my chin. He thought he was joking. No such luck.

“With the Border sealed,” I told him, “He’s going to need to go to ground. Do you remember what he said about being glad to have a roof over his head?”

“He said it beat sleeping under a bridge.”

“I’m guessing that part of his patter was true,” I said. “But almost every bridge is the city is either staked out heavily by the Guard, or already claimed by other Fae. No joy there.”

He did that almost-smile lip-twitch again. “Let me guess. There’s another but.”

“But,” I said, “And most people don’t know this, there used to be dozens of rivers and streams crossing what became Toronto. Some got diverted, some dried up as their sources got paved over. And some,” I went on, “Got buried. They’re still there, but flowing through underground pipes. They still wind up in the lake,” I pointed to the mouth of the pipe, “Same as the stormwater drains.”

I could almost see the penny drop behind his eyes. “So this isn’t just a drain,” he said, “It’s a river. And a road that crosses a river is a bridge. Which means that every part of the city that’s above the drain…”

“Counts as a bridge,” I finished.

“But that doesn’t make any…” he stopped himself. He reflected, redirected and resumed, “I get what you’re saying, but the whole theory lives or dies by a freaking technicality.”

“Forget it, Bradley,” I said, “It’s Fairyland.”

He looked at me, and cocked his head.

“It’s Fairyland?” I repeated, “Don’t you…? I mean they have their own rules, and they stick to them. Yeah, we’re talking about a loophole, but it’s one they’re smart enough to exploit. And you,” I added, “Have no appreciation of the classics.”

He held up his hand. Oh, spurk, I thought, and listened.

Yeah, I heard it too. But it wasn’t coming from the tunnel, as I feared. It was coming from the top of the embankment, from the concrete blocks around and above the pipe. Something, or someone… no, more than one… was moving around up there, making an odd, sort of scraping sound, like…

I lost the thought when Bradley held up a hand again. He pointed at me, then traced an upwards arc that pointed behind me then to the top of the embankment.

I go back, up and come at them from the side, I thought. Made sense. I nodded.

He pointed to himself, then straight up.

Since he probably wasn’t trying to explain that he was Superman, I surmised that he meant he was going to take the direct approach.

That struck me as a Very Bad Idea, but before I could say so, I heard the scraping sound again. It was the sort of sound that makes your teeth tingle. It sounded like metal, scraping on the concrete. As if someone was creeping around up there wearing metal shoes.

Metal shoes oh spurking hell.

I pulled my gun and my Badge just as the little man in the red hat jumped on Bradley’s head.

To Be Continued

“Bradley? Bradley!” I called as I looked back and forth.

Nothing. I turned around, and peered into the depths of the outflow pipe. I couldn’t see anything, of course, and I couldn’t hear anything but the water flowing, the city and the lake. I hadn’t seen him go in there. But I hadn’t seen him do anything at all, and now he was nowhere.

Spurk, I thought. Surely not even Bradley would be so arrogant, so chip-on-his-shoulder thick, as to go in there alone, not knowing what he was going to find.

I thought about it again. Oh, spurk.

I slipped my badge into my left hand. Pulled my gun with my right.

And nearly jumped out of my skin as Bradley landed beside the mouth of the pipe.

He saw me standing there, weapon aimed at the darkness, and pulled his own gun. I shook my head.

“It’s okay,” I said, lowering my pistol, “There’s nothing. I just… Where the spurking hell did you go?”

He slid his Glock back into the holster. He looked at me for a moment, then at the pipe.

“You thought…?” he started to ask, and his lip twitched, just a bit, “No,” he said. He held up his left hand; he was holding a Maglite, “I had this idea that you were hinting that we were going in there. So I thought I should go back to the car and get this. Since you were busy on the phone anyway.”

I flushed. I would have loved to have been in a position to lecture the smug bastard about not being forthcoming with his plans.

“Sorry if you got bored while my partner gave me vital information about the perp,” I said, and filled him in on the details.

At the end of it, he looked puzzled, “So why would a tree elf be stuck in the fall?” he asked.

“We don’t know enough to be sure,” I said, “Maybe he’s a Year King who skipped out three-quarters of the way through his term.”

Bradley just looked blank.

“Or maybe,” I went on, “He’s connected to a tree, and it’s the fall where the tree is. Maybe he’s from somewhere in Fairyland where it’s always autumn. Maybe it’s a time-share and he only has the tree between summer and winter,”

Bradley snorted, and I shook my head, “No, for real,” I said, “It’s one possible reason. Of a huge mess of possible reason.”

“And none of them,” he said, “Make any freaking sense.”

“It’s Fairyland,” I told him, “The parts that make sense aren’t logical, and the parts that aren’t logical…”

He looked at me. “Is it always like this, for you guys?”

“Like what?”

“Guessing,” he said, “Improvising.” He gestured towards mouth of the pipe with his flashlight, “Walking blind into the dark,”

It was my turn to snort. “Pretty much,” I said.

We were both silent for a moment.

“I didn’t know,” I told him, “That Jackson was Fae. Until we were already in the room.”

His gaze was as cool as the breeze coming off the lake.

“I thought,” I went on, “That the real Jackson was the one in the apartment. I figured the one in the bank was the Fae, and he’d stolen Jackson’s identity.”

I suddenly understood how it must feel to be sitting across a table from Bradley, answering awkward questions.

“Then, I thought he was just a Puck. A little trickster. That’s who pulls the money-that-changes-back-to-something-else scam, not a spurking giant psychopathic tree spirit. I didn’t want to tip him off, so I kept him talking until I could make him touch cold iron. It broke the glamour – the disguise – and if I’d been right, it would have knocked him on his ass, too. But I was really, really wrong.”

Damn, I’d been wrong about something else, too: Bradley was good.

He looked at me for another long, silent moment. And he smiled.

“Hell, MacAvoy,” he said, “We all screw the pooch in this job once in a while. I like that a lot better than being your pet mushroom.”

I stared at him. He stepped forward, gave me a companionable clap on the shoulder, and turned to look into the mouth of the outflow pipe. “And on the subject of being kept in the dark, now maybe you can explain why we’re going into a sewer.”

To Be Continued