The Secret Fiend by Shane Peacock

way to draw me into the open where the Irregulars can strike, murder me in front of the shop, on the very doorstep of my old family home?
    Sherlock can’t care about his safety anymore. It is timeto be brave. He must not let them win. “You have much to do in life,” his mother had said to him as she died in his arms.
There is much to be done at this moment – two girls to be saved, a fiend and his vicious crime lord to be denied. I cannot back down!
Sherlock grips his horsewhip and runs toward the shop.
    The villain hammers on the door. Then he leaps up, impossibly high, seizing the ridge at the top of the latticed bow window next to the door. He will be above Beatrice and to her side when she comes to the entrance.
    Sherlock is running full out now, trying to observe peripherally as he goes, ready to be jumped by someone else from the side or behind. The Jack, clinging to the wall like a giant bat, is making a strange sound, growling deep in its throat. It is looking down at the door.
    The boy is still ten feet away when Beatrice appears. The Jack leaps down, its wings billowing out, its roar cutting the night. She looks up and screams. Behind her, Louise faints and falls to the floor, hitting her head on the stone threshold. But Beatrice reaches out to fight her assailant. Still, he doesn’t attack her. He lands a few feet from her and actually turns, as if to flee.
    When he does, Sherlock Holmes is on him!
    “Sherlock!” shouts the Jack in a voice the boy recognizes. It isn’t Crew’s.
    Holmes is balanced on his feet, just as Bell taught him, the whip coiled, like a cobra ready to strike. He snaps it downward, wrapping the leather around his opponent’s lower legs. Then he jerks the weapon back, toward his ownhip. The fiend’s feet fly out from under him, and he lands on his back on the pavement with a slap. Pulling the whip toward him again, Sherlock frees it from the groaning brute’s legs and cocks it for another strike. Now for the coup de grâce. This next blow will finish his opponent, incapacitate him momentarily, and put him in so much pain that Sherlock will be able to bind his hands and feet with the whip. The boy is about to slash him across his face and eliminate his will to go on.
    But this Spring Heeled Jack is as strong as legend tells, for before Sherlock can follow through, he is lying on the ground, halfway across the street. His enemy has sprung up and kicked him with both feet, right in the midsection, in a thrust that felt like it was powered by a locomotive. Sherlock tries to rise and as he does, hears Beatrice scream again. Shutters pop open in the adjoining homes.
    The Jack is coming at him. The boy sees its face – red and angry, the horns sticking up through its hair.
It isn’t Crew.
    Just as the fiend nears him, Sherlock gets to his feet. But his opponent seizes him … by the throat.

    “The key” Sigerson Bell once said during a particularly stirring encounter in the shop, stripped to his tight-fighting leggings and naked to the waist, the white hair on his back so thick it would make a polar bear proud, “is to make the opponent’s body move in directions it is not used to going.Directions, shall we say, that it would never choose. For example … like this!”
    With that, he had grabbed Sherlock by the tip of his smallest finger with his own thumb and forefinger and began to apply pressure. Immediately, the boy was flat on the ground, crying out for mercy.
    “One can inflict an enormous amount of discomfort by applying extreme pressure to even the tiniest part of the human body. You see, my boy, your baby finger does NOT want to move in the direction I am forcing it.”
    “Sir, for the love of God, release me!”
    Sherlock had never felt such pain.
    “Oh! I am sorry, Master Holmes, I get carried away.” He released the boy, who stayed on the floor, writhing in agony.
    “I could also have gripped you here!”
    And with that, he had reached down and grabbed the