All In A Night's Work
by Rebecca Lloyd
Disclaimer: I don't own 'em, I'm not making money off this, please don't sue me.
Edward Hyde took the overland route, as usual, moss-clotted London tile cracking under his heels as he bounded from roof to roof. No striding down the street for him anymore; over a year had passed since he had swollen to the size where no cloak could conceal his inhuman attributes. Not that he missed it, really, or got lonely; humans mostly got in the way, and few if any were worth stopping to converse with. And that was if they didn't run at the sight of him.
The effluvia of the East End clogged his nostrils: cooking, sex, sewage, disease, the greasy smell of unwashed bodies. Underneath it all was what he was following: a copper-scented tang tainted with sickly sweetness, like blood that had gone off. The unseasonable heat brought its stink up clearly from the cobbles below; it intensified in one direction, and he lumbered after it doggedly, exhaustion be damned.
Do you have the trail? The Baggage again, one step behind as usual.
"You've got the same fucking nose that I do, Henry, you know I have it." He made another leap and his shadow passed across a pair of cart-horses on the lane below; they whinnied and danced in place, eyes rolling in terror. "It's heading towards Whitechapel, like most of them." He landed with a thump and kept running.
This makes eight incidents in two weeks. That's twice the number as the month before, and most around East End. What in God's name is happening to London?
Hyde sneered as he vaulted over an alleyway. "From the looks of things, God's got little to do with it. Now shut up and let me catch up with this thing."
But Jekyll's worries weren't his alone. Hyde had earned a lot of new scars in the last several months, fighting an influx of supernatural creatures that for some reason seemed increasingly inclined to call London home. It was the League's new assignment, handed over by a new M–this one, Mycroft Holmes, the Great Detective's brother and (for a change) a legitimate government official. He had met them with the offer in hand on the London docks the moment that they had returned from Africa. Now Hyde and the Baggage had a genuine governmental pardon and were drawing twice the salary that Holmes's "predecessor" had offered—all to get them to hunt London's monsters. (Or perhaps it was London's other monsters, in Hyde's case, he thought with a grim smile). Ultimately, they were supposed to find out what was drawing the creatures here, and put a stop to it.
The latter task, however, increasingly seemed impossible. There just wasn't time and manpower for a broader investigation; they were running themselves ragged as it was. With Quatermain gone and Grey turned traitor the League was undermanned, and every night new reports came in of supernatural incidents: hauntings, possessions, attacks by beings of every description. They were getting used to working together, but the increasing load was taking its toll. Nemo's men were good for crowd control and could generally shoot straight, but they were ordinary people at the end of the day and most were out with injuries or just plain spooked. The rest of the team wasn't much better off: Nemo was dealing with the unrest of a crew that wasn't at all enthusiastic about hunting monsters for the English; Sawyer had taken a nasty blow to the head fighting a werewolf last night and was out himself until he stopped seeing double; and Skinner, still recovering from his burns, now had two cracked ribs to nurse as well. Holmes had pulled Mina into a meeting for the night, to discuss incoming cases and hopefully come up with a way of getting them more help.
All of that left Hyde having to go off on tonight's hunt alone. (So to speak; he was still dragging the Baggage around inside of him). Which he would have preferred, if it wasn't all getting so fucking tedious. The League let him out all the time now, pushing the Baggage into the background so that Hyde could kill for them. Which he did, quite competently of course—and now, with government sanction. It almost made him laugh.
The problem is that the League only let him out to risk his neck on their behalf. The Baggage was still being damnably careful (stingy) about regulating Hyde's "outings", and the knowledge that the government's eye was upon them merely added to the pressure to keep him under wraps until the fighting started. He hadn't had any "out" time to himself in months. And he hadn't had a woman in almost a year.
The urge to simply abandon the chase and run off in search of his own sort of entertainment nagged at Hyde even more than usual. One of these nights, he thought to himself as he chased down the monster's blood-scent, he was simply going to snap. He didn't particularly wish to harm his associates should they get in the way—they were about the only humans he'd miss a bit should they die—but he was getting sick of being treated like their attack dog. Chained up until they wanted to see blood spilled, and allowed no life whatsoever outside of that.
He habitually took his frustration out on their enemies, including that werewolf that had given them so much trouble. He had torn the thing limb from limb, made jokes about making himself a fur coat, and otherwise had a delightful time until Nemo had come up and put a silver bullet in the twitching creature's brain. But in the end, that frenzy, cathartic as it was, had only played to his companions' narrow expectations of him. Once the monster was dead and some small praise had been handed him the others had simply ignored Hyde until Jekyll had come back.
Hyde was bored, he was tired, he wanted about a gallon of good drink and a good fuck or five. And though the Baggage would never admit it, Hyde knew he felt the same. In a way, Jekyll was getting it even worse: Hyde was valued by the League as a warrior, but though the Baggage worked like mad in the Nautilus's infirmary, most of the time the best thing he could do for them was to gulp down the formula and get out of Hyde's way. It was humiliating—for both of them, really, if you thought about it.
Their shared misery had made Hyde a bit more sympathetic toward the Baggage, in a you-poor-pathetic-bastard, now-piss-off sort of way. It helped their relationship greatly that Jekyll had stopped tinkering around in his lab trying to KILL Hyde, of course. Though that was probably because they were both just too fucking busy for another round of the usual war. But the current...stresses...were adding to their animosity, even though they were out on business and trying to cooperate.
Women. That was a large part of it. Despite the wildness of his youth, Jekyll had always tried as hard as he could to buy into the notion of the "fairer sex"; his head was full up of airy-fairy ideas of love and all the other extraneous garbage that the average human uses to dress up and make "presentable" the desire for a good shag. But Jekyll had always been too shy and wrapped up in his work to actually hunt up a wife—and so he'd visited whores. They weren't "real" women, whose opinions could damage his reputation and whose rejections would sting. It wasn't romance; it was business, and though Jekyll wallowed in shame for his "depravity", he still kept at it on the sly.
Which had suited Hyde fine during his first year or so after the "great experiment"; it was sex, and Jekyll paid for it, and even covered up the messes when Hyde got too...enthusiastic. But Jekyll was, unbelievable as it seemed, always better with people than Hyde—who had been bestial, hairy and misbegotten-looking even back when he was man-sized. Often those whores, whom Jekyll contracted and Hyde took to bed, were too repulsed or frightened by him to do what he wanted. And that made him furious.
The angrier he got, the more violent; the more violent, the more hysterical the whores got and the more their squealing got on his nerves. One thing led to another; he had his way, but more and more the women did not survive the experience. And the more of them he killed, the more bestial- looking—and powerful—he became. Eventually he became so huge and monstrous that almost no woman would let him anywhere near her, and none could survive his attentions.
Jekyll believed that Hyde, being a walking embodiment of his own carnal nature, wore the sins engendered by that nature in the very shape of his body. As Hyde's sins mounted, he therefore grew and grew. It was ironic; Hyde's favorite vice was now out of his reach unless he chose to take actions that would contribute to his deformity. Or, in short, he'd kill any woman forced to accommodate him, whether he actually wanted to or not, and grow even more enormous from her blood on his hands.
Meanwhile Jekyll had grown even more sickly, nervous and shy over the years until he was a wreck incapable of even approaching a prostitute for his own use. Thus neither of them had gotten any "congenial company" (aheh) in far too long—and of course, they blamed each other for it, which helped nothing.
Nor...er...does all this brooding, Edward, Jekyll observed timidly, especially at the moment. Do you—do you hear anything yet?
Hyde paused in his rooftop run and sniffed the air again, turning towards the region where the scent was coming strongest. They were coming up on Whitechapel proper, which was where so many of these bloody trails had led of late. This time, though, the creature's run had come up short. The stench of rotten gore was at its strongest practically at Hyde's feet, and the trail ended abruptly in a burned-out tenement a few doors down. He crouched and listened: grunts and whore-moans from the alleyway below, the snort and stamp of carriage-horses across the street, quiet conversations and the rustle of post-dinner families in the building beneath his boots. Nothing out of the ordinary. "No."
Is it hiding from us? Does it know we're here?
"No. I would smell its fear if it did." No bitter note of adrenaline in this...thing's scent. It was calm, focused, oblivious to him. It too was on the hunt. "It may have stopped to feed—"
A scream of pure terror came from inside the tenement.
Good guess. Oh, God, Edward, move, it's going to kill someone!
Muttering at the Baggage's keen grasp of the obvious, Hyde launched himself into space again, gaining the roof of the tenement in three quick hops. The rotten boards cracked under his feet; Jekyll's startled yell of fear echoed through his skull, but Hyde just levered up a section of roofing with his outsized arms and dove through the hole.
Inside, dark and soot and cobwebs—and hysterical whimpering down below. Someone was running clumsily through the wreck of the first floor, making all sorts of noise as he—no, she, Hyde realized as he caught the scent of her—sought a hiding place from something that clicked and skritched like a gigantic insect as it slinked after her. The fire had torn a gaping hole through the heart of the building; as he peered down through the gloom he saw a slight figure run past two stories below him, trailed by something hunched and dark that glittered in places, like broken glass.
Hyde timed his jump to land on the damn thing and end the mess quickly, but it scuttled aside at the last moment with a squeal. A moment later he was glad he had missed: the creature whirled on him and went for his face like a rabid cat, and in the thin light from the street he caught glimpses of furrowed, rotten-looking skin pierced through with spiky bits of scrounged metal.
Jekyll cringed inside of him. What IS that thing?
"How in bloody Hell should I know?" Hyde knocked the screeching beast away and was rewarded with pain as dozens of sharp points pierced the skin on the back of his forearm. The monster crashed through a wall with an explosion of blackened plaster dust and scrambled back to its feet just beyond, where a puddle of dull moonlight revealed something more of its form.
It would have been perhaps seven feet tall had it stood up like a man, but instead spindled along the ground on all fours in a way that reminded Hyde of an enormous spider. Despite its elongated form it gave every indication of having once been human; now, though, it smelled like a corpse, and indeed had no heartbeat. Its skin, where it wasn't stripped away in tatters to reveal reddish meat below, was sere and grey as ashes. Its flesh was peppered with razors and nails, broken springs and rusty knife-blades. Its talons were arrays of old fish-hooks shoved through the tips of its fingers. Curdled, sickly-sweet-smelling blood drizzled slowly from the nastier impalements, giving up a stink that was almost unbearable close up. The eyes were dead—dull, sunken orbs glazed white and immobile, like those of a cooked fish.
It hissed at him, voice containing all the malevolence that its blank eyes and wabbling, expressionless head could not project. Behind him, Hyde heard the girl, who had thrown herself aside when Hyde had jumped in, gasp.
"What in fucking Hell are you waiting for, woman?" Hyde tossed back over his massive shoulder. "Get out. Run!"
That was gracious of you, Jekyll said, only half-sarcastically for once.
"Don't mention it," he muttered back, hunting around for a weapon. All those sharp edges made taking this monster hand to hand an uncomfortable proposition at best. He found a fire-hardened length of support beam and gripped it at one end, like a club. "I said RUN, you silly cunt!" he snapped, but all she did was whimper and burst into tears.
The poor girl's in shock.
"That's lovely. I suppose you'll expect me to cart her out of here, then? Perhaps take her to the bloody hospital?" The beast attacked again, shrieking wetly as it swung its blade-studded arms. He caught it in its midsection with the beam and knocked it back through another section of wall, only to see it twist in midair, land on its feet and come after him again almost immediately. It rushed forward with surprising speed, getting in under his swing and tearing at the skin of his abdomen with its barbed and rusty talons.
"Fuck!" Hyde dropped the beam and punched the monster in the face with all his strength, only to blink in amazement as its head came clean off in a gout of black blood—without slowing it down in the least. It slammed into him again, flaying open his chest and belly in a dozen places with frantic claws. "What in fucking—nggaAAAHHH!!!!" he pried it loose and flung it away, vision going red-rimmed with his growing rage, barely feeling the new breaks in his skin.
Calm down, Edward! Swinging away at it blindly won't destroy it. Jekyll's thin voice was lent a bit of confidence by urgency.
"What then?" Hyde panted, scooping the beam back up as he watched the headless monster right itself and, despite its lack of eyes or ears, come skittering towards him again. This time he smashed it across the chest, hearing ribs shatter as it went flying. "I'm tired of getting ripped up!"
Then listen. Whatever this thing is, it's clearly the walking dead. No pulse, corpselike, no sense of pain, doesn't even seem to notice when bits of it are missing...
"That follows." Charge. Swing. Smash. The girl whining and sobbing somewhere in the shadows behind him; the noise grated on his nerves. He was tempted to shut her up permanently, but the horrified bleating such an act would earn him from Jekyll would have been even more annoying.
You'll have to render it completely nonfunctional. Destroy enough of its tissues and it won't be able to move anyway.
"Pretty fucking hard to tear it apart when it's covered in spikes." The beast got in under a swing again; Hyde rolled onto his back as it hit him and kicked it away with both feet, watching it smash through what was left of the ceiling, bounce off the wall and come back down through a rotted section in a clatter of broken boards. When it got up, it was missing part of one forearm. It didn't seem to notice, and Hyde was starting to get sick of this. He rolled back to his feet. "How do I kill it without being able to get a grip on it?"
Fire would work. Do you still have one of Nemo's flare guns?
"I DID fucking listen when he insisted we all carry one, you know." He checked the top of his boot to make sure it hadn't slipped loose in the fight. The brass grip still gleamed there. "Yes! It just has the one shot, though."
It'll have to do. Best pin the creature first so there's no chance of missing.
"Hrmph." The Baggage was earning his keep for once. "Fine, we'll try it your way, then." Hyde snapped off the end of the beam with one hand, leaving a jagged point. "This had better work..."
The monster charged again, claws tearing up blackened chunks of flooring as it raced at Hyde, unable to scream now but wheezing and spewing ropes of black fluid from its neck-stump. Hyde waited, waited, muscles bunched, until finally it was in mid-leap with its chest and belly exposed. Then he brought up his makeshift weapon and drove it like a spear through the damned thing's guts, pushing with all his strength.
There was a noise like a rotten melon smashing and an explosion of blood and plague-house stink. Hyde gritted his teeth and charged, holding the length of wood before him, driving the now-impaled monster backwards against the sturdier outer wall. He slammed the point of the beam right through the thing's spine and into the seared wood behind it, leaving it hanging in midair, scrabbling and scratching at wood, air, itself, as it still tried to get to him.
Hyde let go of the beam and stepped back, panting and sickened from the thing's stench. He spat a gobbet of its blood out of his mouth and leered. "About bloody time you stopped jumping about," he muttered as he reached for the tiny flare gun.
The monster's answer was to grab the beam and start pulling at it, hitching its own body along the blackened, splintery wood as it moved closer to him inch by painful inch.
Jekyll started to panic. It's getting loose!
"Oh, no you don't," Hyde growled, hooking an outsized fingernail clumsily around the flare gun's trigger and aiming for where the monster's heart should be.
The flare gun coughed out a blazing ball of light that stung Hyde's eyes and crisped his nostril hairs with its heat before streaking to its target. It slammed into the thing's chest and stuck there, burning furiously. The monster convulsed, limbs flailing around randomly as the flare ate away at it from within. The smell of cooked, rotten meat was soon thick in the room.
It took a very long time to die.
"Well, that was a fucking treat." Hyde swiped rotten blood out of his eyes and used the flare's light to see as he started picking out all the bits of rusty metal that had come loose in his skin.
Still, we did it.
"I did it. You just came up with the idea. You didn't bleed to make it work."
I'll be bleeding enough tonight. Grimness in Jekyll's tone. They were both in for an uncomfortable couple of days.
"True enough," Hyde begrudged him.
Where'd the girl get to? Did she run?
Hyde sighed and turned his back on the still-burning corpse, heading over to the pile of debris that the silly woman was still hiding behind. Her heartbeat was slow and even now, panic over, but she hadn't run yet.
When he rounded the pile he saw why: she had fainted dead away. "Oh, bloody Hell." He should just leave her; she was none the worse for wear from her brush with the monster or he'd have smelled the blood on her. She'd have a nice nap and wake up sore and a little queasy from the stink in here, but alive.
But as he drew closer, he noticed something that made him freeze in place and made Jekyll tense up inside of him.
She was a Whitechapel shopgirl, perhaps seventeen, in a patched green frock unbuttoned partway to show the rather grubby pale swells of her teats. Her lips were painted a garish red, and she wore no hat—just a few wilted wildflowers tucked into her straggling bun. She smelled of male sweat and semen.
"We just rescued a fucking whore." The irony of it made his lips tremble with barely suppressed laughter. "All that fuss for a pinch-prick. God."
It needed doing, Jekyll ventured. Besides, that thing would have killed many others if we'd let it go.
"MMmmm."
Edward? Edward, are you listening to me?
Hyde was staring at the whore, just standing there staring, frozen to the spot as his eyes ran over her. The smell of her, the overripe musk of an unwashed woman, suddenly cut through the dead-monster stink like a knife.
His nostrils flared, and he felt a familiar stirring in his trousers.
Oh God. Edward—
"Shut up," Hyde snarled, with a vehemence that startled even him. He crouched over her, massive shadow falling across her serene face and closed eyes. Her skin looked soft and smooth; she was young enough that the streets hadn't wrecked her completely yet.
It would be so easy to just reach down, hook a finger in the top of her bodice—right between those ripe little breasts—and tear the whole mess off her with one quick downward tug. Cloth was nothing; it gave like cobwebs under his strength nowadays. He wanted to see all of her. He wanted to touch her.
He wanted to fuck her until blood ran out of her ears.
Edward, please—
"Just shut UP!" He closed his eyes and clenched his fists and tried as hard as he could to force away his sense of Jekyll's growing horror and their shared despair. If he did what he wanted to, the girl would die.
But what did it matter? She was just another streetwalker. Even the Baggage had never seen them as completely human. What was one more dead whore in Whitechapel? Who would care?
His massive hands flexed greedily as he reached for her.
No. Edward. No. You can't. We can't go back to that. Please...
He paused, head pounding with a mix of lust and irritation. "I TOLD you..."
"Sir?"
He blinked down at the girl, who was now gaping up at him with wide, shocky green eyes. He snatched his hands away and backed up, suddenly uncertain. The red haze at the corners of his vision receded a little as he stared at her dumbly.
She stared back at him for a few moments, then sat up, expression wary and more than a little terrified, but tone almost...respectful. "Sir? I-is th' monster dead?"
He looked at her, suddenly and disturbingly aware of the mind and personality inside that lush, fragile little body that he wanted so badly to enjoy. She was frightened of him, yes; she was in shock, practically hysterical, and frozen to the spot like a terrified deer. But there was awe in her eyes, too, and she had addressed him like a gentleman.
Like a person.
"Sir, you're bleeding—"
"It's nothing," he rasped, mouth suddenly dry. "It'll heal." He tore a last fish-hook free from the skin of his chest and heard her gasp again, this time with something like sympathy. That...stung, worse than the barb and far deeper in. He shuddered.
"You...you saved me." She scrambled up, smoothing her soot-streaked dress self-consciously. "You saved me loife."
He rumbled noncommittally, turning partway from her. The corpse was still burning. As he watched, it twitched again and its blackened arm fell off entirely. The sight cooled his ardor some, but it didn't improve his mood.
Edward, just...send her away. Please.
"Th-thank you, sir. I...I don't understand what's 'appened 'ere, but—"
His guts tightened. "No. No, you don't. And you don't want to know, either." He stared at her, thinking longingly of that smooth skin and the feel of cloth tearing under his hands. But then he scowled and shook his head. "This business doesn't concern you. Now...get out of here. Go."
"Bless you, sir—"
"GO!!!!" he roared, mortified by the agony in his voice. She blanched white and took to her heels, and he found himself fighting the urge to chase after her.
Instead, he held himself still, and when her running footsteps had faded down the lane he threw back his head and let out a howl of confusion and rage that shook bits of plaster off the walls.
Then he turned his attention to the still-burning corpse and let himself loose. By the time the red faded completely from his vision, he had stomped the thing into a reeking, blade-studded paste with his thick-soled boots, and the building interior was smashed to pieces. The tenement trembled around him, bleeding showers of plaster dust and soot as it threatened to collapse.
The effort had reopened the largest of his wounds, and blood again mixed with the grime on his skin. Sighing, he ducked out of one of the holes he'd kicked in the side of the building and started climbing the old brick wall on the other side of the alleyway. Suddenly, all he wanted was a bath, and about a year's worth of sleep. Thinking of anything else hurt too much, and he was too worn down to deal with it.
"This hero shite is getting on my nerves, Henry," he grumbled as he gained the roof and looked around to get his bearings.
It...wasn't a bad night, though, for all that. We did get rid of the monster, and save an innocent life.
"Now whores are innocents, eh? Hrrmp. That's liberal of you." He started across the rooftops again, heading back the way he came. "Cold bloody comfort, either way."
It's still the truth.
He vaulted an alley and grunted as the impact jarred his wounds. He said nothing.
You...did well, back there. Letting her go.
Hyde ground his teeth, fighting back another surge of uncomfortable and unfamiliar feelings. "Leave it be, Henry. Just...leave it be."
Bitter and aching, Hyde made his way home, Jekyll brooding silently inside of him.