retty cold air in Chicago, and that’s no mistake. London could be cold, too, could be freezing, but London didn’t have buildings as tall as Chicago’s.

Jack stood on the tallest he could find, his toes curled, toenails digging into the concrete to keep the winds from just blowing him off like a leaf from a tree. He pictured himself falling lightly, tossed and turned by that wind that was rushing around him, caught in its currents, ebbs and flows. He might even look graceful, falling like that. Course, he wouldn’t be looking quite so graceful when he hit the ground. Not nearly so graceful as a leaf from a tree, coming to a gentle stop on the pavement – or sidewalk, as they called it here. Nope, if Jack were snatched from this rooftop and fell all that way, no matter how gracefully he was falling or not, as the case may be, he’d still end up a splatted smear of red across grey.

Wouldn’t that be something, though? To go from who he was, what he was, whatever he was, to just the essence of him. At his essence, what was he? Blood and bone and cartilage and flesh. That’s how he’d end up, down there, after the fall. Blood and bone and cartilage and flesh all mushed together. The bones pulverised. The flesh burst. The cartilage crushed. The blood... everywhere.

What would they say, when he was gone? Would they pick at his remains, run them through a sieve of some sort to try and figure out what manner of creature he had been? Would they mourn the extinction of a species? Was he even a species? Does one specimen make a species?

One thing he knew – no one would mourn for him, for plain old Springheeled Jack. He had no friends to tell stories about him once he was gone, no family to remember him fondly. What legacy was he leaving behind? Dead bodies? There weren’t even any of those – not after he was done with them. Bloke’s got to eat, after all. He’d lived hundreds of years and all he had to show for it was a list nobody would ever compile of people who went out one evening and never returned home. He was leaving voids in his wake, patches of empty space where the missing people should have been. That was it. The grand total of his many years.