Page 2 of The Hood and his Thief

Coming to her feet again, she dashed across the slanted rooftop, boots clacking against the chipped shingles. She gained a few meters on the man, but he was deceptively fast for all that he appeared to be a few inches shorter than Rhosyn and much more densely built. Still, he couldn’t run forever, and a drop between buildings loomed just ahead.

The hooded man leaped over the edge without hesitation, and without second thought, Rhosyn barreled after him. Her heart stuttered through a moment of free fall before relief restarted it at the top of the adjacent building just a story below.

She landed heavily in a crouch, ready to pounce forward and tackle her target. Instead, her head snapped back, as if somebody grabbed her by her collar.

The hooded man stood a few meters away on the edge of the roof, one arm raised to reveal a small crossbow mounted to his forearm and pointed directly at Rhosyn. He had fired so fast and so sure that she had barely registered the bolt whizzing past her face, piercing through the jacket of her uniform, before embedding in the wood paneling behind her. She yanked on it to no avail, the arrowhead clearly buried deep in the side of the building.

“It’s been a while since any of the Royal Police gave me such a good chase, but I’m afraid this is where we part ways.” The man lowered his arm.

Rhosyn strained to see under his hood, but he had fastened it well around his face and his features were fully obscured by the shadows of rapidly descending twilight. Instead, she let her eyes rove over his physique, trying to generate as thorough a description of him as she could without seeing his face.

He was clearly athletic, which she could tell from his speed and agility, but the notion was only driven home by his thick, shapely thighs and broad shoulders that tapered to narrower hips. Rhosyn blinked. She would not be writing shapely thighs on the report she filed with Chief Thorne under any circumstances.

The hooded man turned away from her as she continued to tug fruitlessly at the bolt pinning her in place. The thin sunlight peaked through the clouds long enough for her to tell that his clothing was actually a dark forest green, instead of the black she had originally thought.

“There’s nowhere for you to run,” Rhosyn insisted.

Indeed, they had reached the corner of the block, and all the nearest rooftops were far too distant to consider jumping. Crashing and shouting told Rhosyn that the other officers in pursuit had arrived in the street below, blocking him in if he were to climb down.

“Come quietly and I’ll put in a good word,” Rhosyn offered reasonably, even as she surreptitiously began unbuttoning her jacket under the guise of continuing to struggle. If she could slip out of the garment that kept her trapped, she could tackle the man before he tried to run again.

Instead, he looked over his shoulder, posture casual, as if there were nothing dire about his situation.

“Although this has been fun, I have no interest in being on good terms with the Royal Police.”

Pulling free of the jacket, Rhosyn lunged, but her arms closed around open air. The hooded man had leaped into the open space between buildings, arms spread wide as if diving off a cliff into the ocean.

Rhosyn teetered on the ledge, watching in disbelief as he made it a surprising distance into the street, but still nowhere near the building on the far side. As he started to fall, he twisted, grabbing onto a clothesline hung between buildings. With all the skill of an acrobat, he swung around it once, twice—building up momentum before launching himself at the height of his swing. With a light thunk, he landed neatly on the far roof.

Rhosyn stared slack-jawed as he had the audacity to look back and offer her a mock salute, before darting off into the rapidly thickening shadows of evening. Jerking herself from her shock, she turned and scrabbled down to the ground as quickly as possible. Dropping from a little too high, her heels hit the cobbles with enough force to rattle her teeth in her skull. Still, she knew the moment she turned to dart across the crowded street that the hooded man would be long gone by the time she managed to scale the next building.

The two officers she had encountered earlier were waiting for her, still staring up at the clothesline above them where moments earlier a man had flown.

“What were you trying to bring him in for?” Rhosyn asked, bringing their attention back to the present. As they lowered their faces to look at her, she cocked her head in curiosity. While their faces were vaguely familiar, she couldn’t recall names, and she thought she knew everybody that patrolled the lower city.

“Officer Rhosyn Walsh,” she offered.

“Officers Fletcher and Davies,” the taller of the two introduced himself and his partner. “Why don’t we get back to the station and we can fill you in while you help us file our reports.” He looked around pointedly at the crowded streets. Whatever had happened, it wasn’t something he wished to be overheard.

Chief Joseph Thorne shuffled through endless stacks of paper, trying to clear enough space on his desk for him to write on and failing. While Rhosyn could tell there was a system to the stacks of reports, the cramped desk in the corner was not nearly large enough to accommodate the amount of work Chief Thorne was burdening it with.

For that matter, Chief Thorne himself didn’t seem able to accommodate the amount of work he was trying to complete, if the pallor of his skin and the shadow of a beard that had not been shaved in several days were any indication. Still, he pushed on doggedly, gesturing Rhosyn and the two officers with her to take a seat in the wooden chairs across from him.

The whole setup was rather cramped, shoved into a cordoned-off corner of the Royal Police’s headquarters. While there was a perfectly good office down the hall, with more space and a bigger desk, Rhosyn didn’t have to wonder why he didn’t use it.

The weathered brass plaque on the door to that room still read Chief Cook, despite the man’s imprisonment years ago. Chief Thorne could easily have his former mentor’s name changed out for his own, but Rhosyn got the impression that it was left there as a sort of reminder for all who passed through. After all, the echoes of the corruption bred by Chief Cook’s leadership still cropped up every once in a while. The aftereffects of the Inquiries still ruled the city’s underworld, and too many of the rich and influential still disagreed with their sudden end, despite the passage of years.

“Officers,” Chief Joseph Thorne greeted. “I take it your sitting here means you were unable to apprehend the thief.”

“I’m assuming the man you were chasing was the thief?” Rhosyn asked as the other two officers nodded dismally.

“There have been a series of jewel thefts from some of the wealthiest households of the city. We’ve had shockingly little intel on them, even from our ears in the black market. We finally got an anonymous tip from somebody implicating the man in the hood,” Officer Fletcher explained.

“Seems to be causing a lot of trouble for a simple jewel thief. Who is he?” Rhosyn asked. It struck her as odd that such a case would be reported directly to Chief Thorne, but he did have a rather hands-on approach. Rhosyn got the impression he liked to have his fingers in every investigation, to prevent something like the sloppy case that allowed Chief Cook to get away with the murder of his wife.

Chief Thorne scrubbed a hand over his face. “He certainly has picked targets that have made my life difficult. Several of the houses that were broken into belong to those who have sponsored Talented. Given that they have spent a substantial amount of money helping us give the Talented of the lower city another chance, I would prefer not to seem incompetent at catching a petty thief.”

“Which is why it is unfortunate that we still don’t know who he is. Our informant only gave us a tip on his location,” Officer Davies commiserated.