Page 37 of Across Space and Time

Jack frowned. “We shall have to travel once this mystery is solved.”

“We?” Hugh asked, but Jack suddenly grabbed him, his black cape whipping around Hugh as he scooped him into his arms like a baby.

“Hold on!” he said, and Hugh barely had time to think before Jack had taken a running start and leaped across their tenement rooftop to the one across the road. The wind whistled past him, stinging his eyes, and his stomach clenched as he felt Jack rise into the air and then fall again before landing on the stone building with the grace and silence of a cat.

“Jack!” he gasped, burying his face in the man’s chest.

Jack glanced down at him. “Are you all right?”

“Y… Yes,” Hugh replied. “I was just not expecting that.”

Jack chuckled softly. “My apologies. I am not used to traveling with a partner. Put your face into my chest, and I shall make it as smooth of a ride as I can.”

Hugh felt his face turn absolutely scarlet. Put his face in Jack’s chest? He could hear the patter of Jack’s heartbeat, like the ticking of a clock. And, he had to admit, it was nice. Very nice. He had not been held like this since he was a child, and his body craved the warm touch of another human being. Or, rather, the touch of someone who cared about him. He swallowed hard. “All right,” he agreed softly. He turned his face in to press his forehead against Jack’s chest, so firm and muscular under him.

Jack took another running leap, and Hugh curled close to him so the cold air would not make his eyes teary or his skin prickle. He thought about everything he had learned so far as Jack ran. It was certainly a puzzling mystery, though one where people were ending up dead the longer he was unable to solve the case. His father had been a great fan of mysteries and had been the one to get Hugh interested in them. He had read many of them to Hugh when he was a child, including The Murders in the Rue Morgue with the brilliant inspector C. Auguste Dupin, Charles Dickens’ unfinished The Mystery of Edwin Drood, and the tale of The String of Pearls with the disturbing barber Sweeney Todd as its villain. Hugh did not doubt that his desire to become a police officer had stemmed from these tales of intrigue and investigation. He wondered what his parents would think of Jack if they had lived to meet him. He had not had a good opportunity to tell them that he was attracted to men before they passed away, but they had always been very supportive of him, and he thought that they would be understanding of his proclivities. And Jack was hard not to like, with his charming smile, dramatic way of talking, and his eagerness to help.

He pondered this as Jack ran and jumped from rooftop to rooftop, never moving his hands from holding Hugh securely against him. Sometimes there was a drop or a rise at uneven levels, and once Jack’s foot hit a loose tile and started to slide. But within moments he had his feet under him once more and was continuing on his way. Hugh had to admire the confidence Jack had to leap across roofs like that, the ground dozens of feet away. He knew he would never be able to make most of those jumps himself, even with being in relatively good shape. Once in a while he thought he heard a noise or a shout from the street below, but he couldn’t pull his face from Jack’s chest to look. And really, he didn’t want to.

He didn’t know how long it had been, but it hadn’t been all that long before Jack gave him a warning squeeze. “Going down.” And then he had jumped off the rooftop they were on. Hugh’s stomach rose in his throat, until Jack suddenly alighted on the pavement with only the softest click of his boot heels. Jack unwound his arms and his cape from Hugh and set him carefully on his feet. “All right?”

Hugh brushed himself off and laughed, running his hand through his windswept hair. “Yes. What a way to travel. Don’t you get tired?”

Jack smirked. “Eventually, but not from so little exertion as that.”

Hugh looked around. The acrid scent of smoke still hung in the air. They were at the back of the burned-out bakery, where the fire had been the strongest. In the darkness of the late night-early morning, the whole thing looked like the ancient ruins of some long-lost Grecian temple or Egyptian tomb.

If he had not been in the bakery recently, it would be nearly impossible to determine the exact layout of the structure; everything had collapsed upon itself, and the water from the fire hose had sent scraps and debris tumbling everywhere. Walls stood half-erect. He could see into the front of the shop where he had talked to Prudence, because the dividing wall between the front and the back had nearly completely toppled. This back area had to be the bakery, with its many instruments and surfaces.

What he saw looked more akin to a tornado going through than a fire. The heat had destroyed much of it. But while Hugh did not know much about metal and bakeries, he knew that the ovens were built to withstand tremendous amounts of heat for long periods and should have been relatively intact. What he found instead was a mangled mess of metal, twisted and bent into a grotesque monument to pastry. It looked as though a child had taken an aluminum toy and stomped repeatedly on it until the metal had broken and warped into an unusable pile of junk. Someone did not want this oven to be used again and was trying to send a message as such. This was definitely no accident.

Jack hopped amongst the remnants, lifting a few pieces of debris up as if they weighed no more than paper. Hugh watched him in surprise but decided not to interfere with whatever Jack was looking at. Jack did several circuits of the backroom area before moving into the area where the front had been. A few broken trinkets glittered amongst the ashes. “I thought this was a bakery,” Jack commented, nudging at a few things with the toe of his boot.

“It was,” Hugh replied. “A bakery and emporium. They had other things for sale too.”

“Like what?” Jack asked.

Hugh shrugged. “I’m not really sure. I saw a few tarot cards, some colored bottles. I don’t know what they were, but Miss Wilcox said her parents were fans of the mystic.”

“Hmm.” Jack picked up something and blew on it to dislodge the ashes from it. It was a piece of crystal quartz on a silver chain. He pawed through the ashes again and found a second one of dark green adventurine, and a third in tiger’s eye. He picked them up, studying them all curiously, rolling the crystals around in his palm. “I’ve seen these before.”

Hugh blinked. “You have?”

“Yes,” Jack replied. “Have you heard of The Magic Shop?”

“What magic shop?”

“The Magic Shop,” Jack said again.

Hugh frowned. “No. Should I have?”

“Mm, I suppose not,” Jack said thoughtfully. “But the strangeness of this case makes me think now that it might behoove us to go there.”

“We can go in the morning,” Hugh replied.

“Oh, no need to wait,” Jack said, waving his hand airily.

“But it’s the middle of the night,” Hugh protested.

---