Page 1 of The Hood and his Thief

Chapter one

Being one of the best pickpockets in London came with certain advantages. For one, Rhosyn was able to easily spot those less practiced at their craft. As her deft eyes swept the street on her normal patrol, they zeroed in on a skinny child bumping into a well-dressed gentleman with a little too much intention. She pulled her standard-issue police baton from her belt and swung it casually in her hand as she veered towards the side of the narrow, cobbled street. Her gaze trained on the urchin darting off toward a shadowed alley, with a prize clutched to his chest.

She intercepted him just before he turned off the main drag, thrusting her baton in his path before he could scamper off into the darkness. He froze in place, gaze trailing up Rhosyn’s torso and eyes widening in his dirt-smudged face as he took in the golden buttons and badge emblazoned on her Royal Police uniform.

Before he could turn to run, Rhosyn grabbed him by the kerchief around his neck, not hard enough to jar him, but firmly enough that he couldn’t escape. She held out her hand expectantly.

With a degree of wide-eyed innocence that could only be coaxed from a guilty child, he shook his head. “What have I done, ma’am?”

“I’ll warrant that watch in your pocket wasn’t there when you left home this morning,” Rhosyn prodded, propping her free hand on her hip.

With a thick swallow, the urchin reached into his jacket and produced an engraved pocket watch, swinging on a thick golden chain. Rhosyn had half a mind to let him keep the thing, to punish the owner for carrying such an ostentatious accessory through a part of town where every streetcorner was occupied by pickpockets and gangsters, all searching for their next mark.

Instead, she plucked it from his grip and let go. The boy hesitated, clearly wanting to run away, but unsure if it would get him into any more trouble. After all, Rhosyn towered above him, with legs even longer than most of the male police officers, making catching a running youngster all too easy.

“If you look around like you’re wondering if you’ve been spotted, you give yourself away,” Rhosyn told the child against her better judgment. “Don’t let me catch you again.”

He smiled tentatively, the hint of a sparkle in his eyes before turning and disappearing among the shuffle of people in the street. Rhosyn sighed, knowing he was likely to be trouble again, but she didn’t have it in her to arrest every person who committed petty theft in the lower city. After all, that would probably be half the populace of the streets she patrolled. She was interested in the more sinister criminals who prowled these blocks, knives up their sleeves and revolvers tucked into their jackets.

A judgmental voice in the back of her mind nagged that she was letting the thieves go because she was one of them. She shoved that voice aside with a practiced hand, and it retreated to the shadowy recesses of her mind with a grumble.

She returned her focus to the task at hand. Rhosyn cut across their street, people giving way for her when they caught sight of her uniform. She stopped before a man smoking a pipe outside of one of the nicer gambling dens in the area.

“I believe you dropped this.” She held up the watch, letting it swing on its chain in front of his surprised expression.

Patting his pockets, he found that she was right. “My goodness, I don’t know how I could have been so clumsy. Thank you, ma’am.”

“Just doing my job.” Rhosyn deposited the watch in his outstretched palm. “And keep a wary eye on your purse.”

With a brisk nod, she turned and strode up off the street. She swept the area with her gaze constantly as she walked, alert for the trouble that never seemed far away. Many eyes caught hers as she observed, greeting her with a brief nod of familiarity. After several years as a Royal Police officer, the residents of the lower city were familiar with her presence. Many new officers left the lower city beats as soon as they had paid their dues, but Rhosyn had asked Chief Thorne if she could stay on this patrol. As harried as he was in the years since the end of the Inquiries, he hadn’t been of a mind to object.

Rhosyn preferred to keep an eye on her old stomping grounds, and if anybody remembered her as the young rascal who ran jobs with the Lions, they had the sense not to say anything. Not to mention, she still felt more at home among the crooked flats and smoky air of the streets here than in the middle city where she now lived. Maybe she always would.

As the sun lowered behind crooked chimneys in the bruised sky, Rhosyn turned her steps uphill, toward the police station at the border of the middle and lower city. The night watch would be heading out and it was time to turn in her report for the day before heading back to her rented room. Her mouth watered at the thought of the scones waiting for her there, carefully wrapped in paper by Gregor and handed to her with a smile when she left the Woodrow’s house early that morning.

Before she could contemplate whether she might be able to borrow some jam from the couple she rented from, shouting grabbed her attention. Rhosyn immediately broke into a run, darting into an alley, trying to cut over to the next block where the racket came from.

No sooner had she turned the corner than a solid frame crashed into her, knocking her down with a bone-rattling thump. Glaring up, she found a shape dressed in all black, a hood pulled low and obscuring his eyes, another piece of cloth covering his lower face.

“Sorry, ma’am. I’m afraid I have to run,” the man said in a light tone, only sounding a little out of breath, despite having been running full tilt just seconds earlier. Before Rhosyn could think to order him to halt, he threw himself at the wall to the right, scaling the uneven bricks with all the ease of a bird taking flight.

Rhosyn sprang to her feet, just in time for two other officers of the Royal Police to materialize at the other end of the alley. Their batons swung in their hands as they huffed and puffed.

“Where’d he go?” one officer wheezed.

“The roof.” Rhosyn pointed.

The officers looked up just in time to see the man’s coat flaps disappear over the eaves, faces falling in dismay. They turned and retreated back down the alley, apparently planning on pursuing him from the street. Granted, with how fast the man climbed, the two men would likely lose him faster than a gambler could throw a hand of dice if they tried to follow him across the buildings.

Rhosyn, on the other hand, was far more comfortable among the chimneys and gables of the lower city.

She flung herself up the wall in hot pursuit, using an obliging drainpipe to help her shimmy up the building. She crested the edge, jumping to her feet and looking around. The dark silhouette was already on the next building over, about to leap to a third.

Rhosyn wasted no time in breaking into a sprint. The gap between the first two roofs was narrow enough that she leaped it without having to break her stride. Her long legs carried her swiftly enough that she should gain ground on her quarry.

However, the gap between the next two buildings was larger, almost twice as broad as Rhosyn was tall. The man ran at it full tilt, launching himself into the air and even performing a flip as he arced over the distance, hovering for what seemed to be a moment too long—or maybe that was just the way time stretched in a chase. He landed lightly on the balls of his feet, as if his joints were spring loaded.

Rhosyn didn’t have time to gawk as she grit her teeth for her own jump. If she were being judged on style, she certainly would have lost to the pursuant, but she managed to make it over safely, tucking her head in and rolling to absorb the impact as she landed.