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The Redcap raised his hands with a sycophantic smile, and it was so grotesque I almost shot him then and there.

“Wipe that silly grin off your face,” I told him, and he did. He tried for passport-photo neutral in its place, but just looked kind of constipated. I didn’t care, as long as I didn’t have to see him smiling.

“I don’t have time for any crap,” I said, “I’m going to ask questions, and if I don’t like the answers I’m going to shoot pieces of you off until you aren’t spurking there anymore. Got it?”

“Aye,” he said.

“You wouldn’t spurk with the Guard unless your arms were being twisted. So someone sent you. Who?”

He sighed. “Nobody,” he said quietly.

Bradley drew himself upright, “Maybe you weren’t listening –” he started.

“Bradley,” I said, “Ease up. That was a real answer.”

“Oh. Well, it’s your party. Just let me know when you want me to shove this pole up his…”

“Thanks,” I told him, then turned my attention back to the Redcap, “Nobody? So he’s real?”

The Fae nodded.

“He happen to say why he wants us dead?”

“He did nae confide in us. He held our caps, and we dared not question him too close. We had no choice,” he said, “No choice but to obey.”

The caps dyed in blood aren’t just grisly souvenirs, they’re the source of a Redcap’s strength and power. Without them, or fresh blood to dye them red anew every night, a Redcap will die with the morning. It was, I reflected, a pretty big bargaining chip.

But Nobody. How the spurk did he fit into this? What I’d thought was a run-of-the-mill little con gone wrong was turning into something several orders of magnitude more complicated. Or hell, maybe this was about Joey Pennylegion.

If being wise means knowing that you don’t know, I was spurking Socrates. One thing I was sure of: I had to talk to the thing that had been pretending to be Glenn Jackson. And fast.

I pointed my gun to the ground. “You remember,” I told the little man who stank of someone else’s blood, “Who took your cap, and who didn’t. Remember who beat you in fair fight and gave you your life.”

He nodded, blood-soaked wool cap bobbing up and down.

“If I see you on this side of the Border again,” I said, “Nobody will be the least of your worries. Now go. Run.”

He blinked at me, incredulous. Then without another word he turned and ran, across the grass, towards the lake. I watched him go. It was a shuffling, awkward run, his body full of tension, hunched over. He was expecting, I realized, to be shot in the back.

As the Redcap rounded a bend and disappeared from sight, I glanced at Bradley. He dropped the iron pike and he sat down hard.

I crouched beside him and looked at his head. Even a glancing blow from iron-shod shoes can do serious damage, but – I checked to make sure his eyes were reacting to light and motion – yeah, Bradley had dodged a concussion for the second time today.

“Somebody up there likes you,” I said.

“Yeah? Then why did he jump on my head?”

I almost fell over. Bradley, joking? It was turning out to be a day of miracles and wonders.

I had a look at Bradley’s ear, and it confirmed my hunch that his little friend had clipped the side of Bradley’s head, ear and shoulder on the way down with those damned shoes. Better, of course, then taking an iron pole to the skull.

I had no first aid gear. Bradley probably did, back in his car, but…

“Look,” I said, “We can take the time to get this looked after properly, but we’re going to risk losing the Autumn Man.”

He nodded. “That’s why you let Toque-boy go,” he said, “Nowhere to put him. No one to hand him off to. No time to waste.”

I relaxed, as the fight I’d been bracing myself for evaporated before it began.

“If deciding which of the two perps who tried to kill you to go after makes for a time-management crisis,” Bradley added, “You guys are more understaffed than I thought.”

“We have high turnover,” I said, “So, want me to MacGyver something for your head? It’ll be…”

“Improvised,” he said, with a slight smile.

I smiled back, and pulled my knife.

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

I never enjoy any of the time my job requires me to spend in flophouses, and I was particularly glad to leave this one.

Bradley and I went out through the front door, and I took a deep, grateful breath of comparatively fresher air.

There was a downside; I wasn’t thrilled to be leaving a crime scene unattended – any evidence there was now well out of the chain of custody, and totally unusable at trial – but I didn’t see that there was much choice. With the alert that I’d just called in, the Captain was going to need all hands just to keep the border covered, let alone if there was, Goddess forbid, another emergency. They’d be pulling in the off duty Iron Badges too, all three shifts.

I had better, I realized, actually collar this spurk. I’d be facing a decidedly frosty atmosphere in the break room if this all turned out to be for nothing.

Bradley unlocked the car doors and I slid in to the passenger side. He sat in the driver’s seat, and moved the key to the ignition. Then he stopped and looked at me.

“I was pretty sure we were dead, there,” he said.

I nodded, “Whatever the hell he is, he’s tough.”

Bradley seemed surprised. “You don’t know?”

“Nope. He fits some of the key Fae criteria: Big, misshapen, some kind of connection to nature. But he’s not a standard model. George,” I added, “might have some ideas. He knows the Bestiary better than I do.”

“So,” Bradley said, looking a little horrified, “The tactics you used. Which worked. You were…?”

“Improvising,” I agreed, “Yeah. We do that.”

His lip twitched. “And you guys wonder why normal cops don’t like you?”

“I didn’t see you coming up with any brainstorms,” I snapped, and I could feel myself flushing, “Or was getting tossed through the door your way of lulling him into a false sense of security?”

I turned away and looked out the window. I thought I’d seen an olive branch for a moment there, and I wasn’t sure which one of us had thrown it away.

“Hey, maybe if you’d seen fit to pass along some of your fancy pixie-piercing ammo, I could have done some good. You didn’t tell me the guy was a ringer.”

“I…” I almost said didn’t know, but stopped myself. “I wasn’t sure.”

“You gave me nothing to go on,” he said, “I walked in there blind. It’s a damn miracle we’re both alive. Fine, credit where it’s due, you got us out of it. Well, you got us into it too.”

I bit back the first response that came to mind, and the second.

Also the third.

I counted to ten, then – and only then – turned back to look at Bradley.

“You going to start the car, Ace?” I asked.

“You going to fill me in this time, Maverick?” he replied.

I thought for a moment, “We need to find the nearest major stormwater overflow outlet… Yeah. Queen’s Quay, east of Bathurst. Right at the waterfront. Give me a minute and I’ll confirm the street address.” I pulled out my phone.

“And when we get there?” he asked.

“Not sure yet,” I said.

“Right,” he said, “Improvising. Jesus.”

And he turned the key in the ignition.

To Be Continued