exclusively from the fiend in the mirror.
'You imagine that you do good. See what your good has wrought.'
Two hooded figures moved out from behind the tapestry, moving so swiftly that Doyle had no time to react. One clouted Lady Nicholson's brother across the head with a dimly glimpsed weapon; the wound spouted crimson as he fell away. The other grabbed Lady Nicholson and drew a long, thin blade smoothly across her throat, severing the vessels, arterial blood pumping furiously. The cry in Lady Nicholson's throat died in a drowning rattle as she slumped out of sight behind the table.
'God! No!' Doyle screamed.
A demented cackle from the monster filled the air before the ectoplasmic mirror exploded in a loud report of light.
One of the murderers now drew his sights on Doyle and nimbly jumped up onto the table, poised to leap down and strike at him with the mallet that had splintered the forehead of Lady Nicholson's brother, when Doyle heard something whoosh by his ear: a shape, a black handle bloomed at the throat of the assassin. He stopped on top of the table, dropped his weapon, and groped blindly at his chin; a dagger had pierced the span of his neck, pinning the material of the hood, drawing it down over the eyes. The man staggered, then toppled over.
With a grunt, the accomplice holding Doyle fell backward and away; he was free.
An unfamiliar man's voice spoke urgently in his ear. 'Your pistol, Doyle.'
Doyle looked up to see the Dark Man turning toward him with the truncheon raised. Doyle pulled the pistol from his pocket and fired. His left knee shattered, the Dark Man bellowed and fell to the floor.
The shape was moving behind Doyle now, kicking the candelabra, extinguishing half the room's light. Doyle just had time to note that the medium had vanished when his attention snapped back to a blur of gray; the advancing rash of the second assassin. Still unseen, Doyle's benefactor overturned the heavy table, throwing the murderer back. Hands pulled Doyle to his feet.
'Follow me,' the voice instructed.
'Lady Nicholson—'
'Too late.'
Doyle followed the voice into the darkness. They passed through a door, down a corridor. Doyle felt disoriented—this was not the way he had entered. The door at corridor's end fell as Doyle's confederate kicked it open, oozing a crepuscular light into the space. They were still interior. Doyle could make out a tall, rangy profile, see the man's breath vaporize in the cooling air, nothing more.
'This way,' the man instructed.
He was about to lead them through another door when a shape leapt from the dark with a feral growl and ripped into the man's forward leg. He staggered, crying out in shock. Doyle fired a shot at the dim shape of the attacking animal. It yelped and fell back, howling in pain. Doyle fired again, stilling its cries.
The man shouldered through the door. In the shaft of light that fell back through the doorway, Doyle saw the still body of the street urchin, crimson flowing from its wounds, jaws pulled back in a death grimace, exposing blood and meat in its sharp, canine teeth.
'Almost there,' the man said, and they left the terrible house.
HIS DELIVERER TOOK THE LEAD IN A HEADLONG DASH DOWN
the dark alley outside. Unable for the moment to see the wisdom of any alternate course, as he followed, Doyle strained to keep the man's flowing cloak in sight. They turned once, twice, and turned again. Seems to know where he's going, Doyle thought wanly, his bearings yielding to the rattrap rookery of shacks and shanties through which the man's path threaded them.
Breaking out of an alley onto a paved street, the man stopped short; Doyle's momentum carried him halfway into the street before the man yanked him back into the sheltering darkness. His grip was tremendously strong. Doyle meant to speak, but the man silenced him with a sharp gesture and pointed at the corner of an intersecting alley across the way.
Stepping around that corner into view was the surviving gray-hooded killer: crouched over, moving steadily, deliberately, eyes to the ground, a coiled predator tracking its quarry. What possible signs could it be searching for in the hard pavement? Doyle asked himself—and then, more alarmingly: How did it get here so quickly?
Doyle heard a whisper of steel on steel as his companion, face still obscured by shadows, sharp profile etched against the wall, drew from the walking stick he carried the base of a hidden blade. Doyle instinctively reached for his revolver. His friend's hand lay frozen on the butt of his rapier, as still as stone.
A carriage approached from the left. Four immense black stallions roared into view, clattering noisily to a stop on the cobblestones. The six-seat coach stood huge and black as pitch. No driver was visible. The man in the gray hood
moved to the side of the coach. A window slid open, but no light issued from within. The man nodded, but it was difficult to know if words were exchanged; nothing cut through the night but the labored sputtering of the horses.
The gray hood turned from the cab and looked directly into the alley where Doyle and friend were sheltered; both shrank back against the brick. The hood stepped toward them, stopped, and cocked its head like a hound tracing frequencies beyond human range. It stood like that for some time, the chilling blankness of the man finding perfect expression in the lifeless countenance of the mask. Doyle's breath died in his chest—Something's not right, he thought—and then he realized there were no holes for the eyes.
The door to the black carriage swung open. A short, strident, high-pitched trilling filled the air, halfway between a whistle and some less human vocalization. The gray hood instantly turned and leapt inside, the door slammed shut, and the steeds hammered the heavy carriage away, fog swirling greasily around the hole it carved in the mist.
As the clip of the hooves faded, Doyle's companion eased his weapon back into place.
'What the devil—' Doyle began, his breath bursting out in a rush.
'We're not safe yet,' the man stilled him, voice low.
'All very well and good, but I think it's time we had a brief chat—'
'Couldn't agree more.'
With that, the man was off again. Doyle had no choice but to follow. Keeping to the shadows, they stopped twice when the shrill whistling sounded again, each time at a greater remove, leaving Doyle to consider the disagreeable possibility that more than one of these hoods were on their trail. Doyle was about to break the silence when they turned a corner and came upon a waiting hansom cab, a compact cabbie atop the driver's perch. The man signaled, and the hack driver turned, offering a view of the ragged scar running obliquely down the right side of his face. He gave a brusque nod, turned to his horses, and cracked the whip, as the man opened the door of the moving vehicle and jumped aboard.
'Come on, then, Doyle,' the man said.
Doyle followed up onto the stair, turning when he heard a
dull thump to his right; a long, wicked blade had just penetrated the cab door, its quivering razor tip mere inches from Doyle's chest. A shrill, insistent variation of the vile whistling filled the nearby air. Doyle looked back: The gray hood was twenty yards back, drawing another, identically vicious dagger from its belt as it sprinted toward him at improbable speed. With a prodigious leap, the hood jumped onto the running board of the accelerating coach, clutching for purchase in the open doorway. Hands pulled Doyle back into the cab; he scuttled to the far corner, digging for his pistol, trying to remember which pocket he'd left it in, when he heard the opposite door open. He looked up to see a flash of flapping coattail; his friend had fled, leaving him trapped in the cab with their relentless pursuer—where was his pistol?
As the hooded figure captured its balance in the doorframe and raised the weapon, Doyle heard the scuff of weight shifting on the roof, then through the open window saw his friend swing down into view and drive both feet into the open door, slamming it shut and rocketing the point of the embedded dagger completely through their attacker's chest. With a hideously muted mewling cry, the hood kicked and clawed ferociously at the invading blade, mauling its hands indiscriminately, then went suddenly and entirely limp, pinned to the door like a bug.
Doyle struggled to his knees in the jostling sway of the carriage and moved to the hooded man. Rough clothes. Hobnailed boots, almost new. Feeling for a pulse and finding none, Doyle was about to remark on the curious absence of blood when his defender reached in through the window, pulled off the gray hood, and tossed it
