“Do you want me to kill him for you?” Grimalkin hissed into my ear.

I shook my head and strode toward the man. He was carrying a wooden club about the length of his forearm; it was thick and heavy at the business end, stout enough to split my skull. He swung it at my head with surprising speed, but I stepped to the side and danced away. He swung and missed again, and came after me, brandishing the weapon wildly.

A second later, I rapped him hard on the wrist with my staff; he groaned but wasn’t deterred. He attacked again, cursing, his face red with rage. I hit him twice more, once on the knee and once on the shoulder. It hardly checked his advance. He looked ready to tear me apart with his bare hands.

Suddenly my own anger flared. I thought of my job as a spook—how I tried to keep the County safe, always putting duty first despite the danger. I thought of my own master, who had given his life to save men like this from the dark. I remembered how people used to cross to the other side of the road as we approached. They needed spooks, but they were afraid of what we did. Most of them didn’t like us one bit.

So I attacked with renewed energy, in a fury now. My first blow caught the man hard across the mouth, and he staggered backward. Then I rammed the base of my staff deep into his belly, and he fell to his knees, fighting for breath. He looked up at me, his face twisted with pain, and spat two bloodied teeth out onto the grass.

I strode past him and approached the others. “Who’s next?” I demanded.

They backed away warily, so I turned and strode away. Grimalkin and Jenny followed hard on my heels. I was still seething with anger, and nobody spoke for a long time.

“What if they do talk to a quisitor?” Jenny finally asked, breaking the silence. “You told them you were the Chipenden Spook. They know where we live. He could come after us.”

I shrugged. “Once they see what we killed on the green, they’ll forget all about that,” I told her. “That was just anger and bluster talking.”

To my surprise, Grimalkin took her leave of us just before dark, with no explanation of where she was going.

“I will visit you early next week,” she said. “I have concluded my experiments and will then tell you something of what I have learned.”

Later, as we sat around a fire cooking a chicken I’d bought from a farmer on the way home, Jenny finally exploded.

“Hundreds of people could have died in that village!” she said. “Had the witch no sense of the terrible risk she was taking?”

“You mean her experiments?” I asked. “I suppose she thought she could contain the creatures. Grimalkin’s magic is extremely powerful. She would not have expected the varteks to escape.”