Chapter One: Capture

It was on the night of one of our more recent missions that I was eventually caught. He had told me beforehand that if I were to be captured at some point during our adventures, that I had nothing to fear. "Besides," he had said slyly(I had come to believe that he could speak in no other tone)"In this town- perhaps even all of England- there is nothing to fear except myself."

On this night, just like every other, we were on a mission to kill. In the short time I had spent with him, I had discovered that his love of blood and killing had most definitely not rubbed off on me, yet I could not bring myself to stop in his place. If he was the killer, I would watch. If I was handed the weapon, I killed. It wasn't that I was afraid of him. even though it was perfectly rational to be afraid; rather, I felt compelled to pull the trigger or throw the knife because I had merely stopped caring about the consequences. Gone were the days where I gazed at him with horror at what he did, the days where I was too afraid to take the blade he offered me. Now, while I did balk at the blood and wrinkle my nose in disgust, there was no longer any overriding guilt. Only the shallow brother of guilt, the one who knew that what he was doing was wrong, but didn't care enough to feel remorseful. I was basically a coward. A disgusting, yellow coward.

Although I didn't much care about that either.

This night, we had killed a young woman, who's body now lay at my feet, twisted  in a mess of flowing silk and blood. The pistol that killed her had been placed in my limp hands, where it stayed, even as we heard hurried footsteps outside the door, as he disappeared and left me to deal with the consequences of his crime.

The door burst open within seconds of his disappearance, a disgruntled yet excited officer framed in the doorway. He took one look at the mess of blood across plush cushions, silk, and the weapon in my hands,and grinned.

"Well, hello," he said, straightening his back and striding into the room, panting heavily from all the stairs he had to climb, no doubt, "You've terrorized this town for a while now, haven't you?"

I merely stared blankly at the man, taking in the ginger beard and the unwashed mop of hair partially visible under a hat that had been knocked askew as he had run across the hall. I think I was in a state of shock. I had done nothing to hide the evidence, perhaps long enough so I could run and save my cowardly self, and now I realized that I could be hung for this. I had stepped back and watched a killer at work, and then done some killing myself. I could say that I had been framed now, but is it truly framing if I had committed the same crime willingly before?

The pistol was taken from my hands, and I offered them forward to be cuffed. The officer narrowed his eyes at this, watching my face for a grin or a sneer to appear. When none came, I was shoved roughly down a hallway, past the wide eyes of younger policemen. One spat on me as we walked past, but I was too far off in my own thoughts to truly be insulted. I was too busy thinking about the cold jail cell I could be thrown into. The days leading up to my hanging. And then my death. Death would be a good punishment. Of course then, I had to deal with hell, but I tried to avoid going any further than hanging.

At some point in my shameful dragging to the coach that would take me to my ultimate death, I realized that my hands were not really cuffed at all. While the disturbingly slimy metal pressed against my wrists, my hands could easily slide out of the chains without much effort.

He always said my small hands would come in handy.

In the split second the officer took his hand off of my back to open the door of the coach, the handcuffs were off and I was running down the street, narrowly avoiding the drunkard stumbling towards me and ignoring the surprised shouts of the officer and his men, the hands that rushed wildly forwards to try and catch me.

Above me, he cackled.

"Lovely night, officer!" he laughed from the rooftops, nodding at me to climb up and join him, "It's such a shame you couldn't catch me this time!"

I heard a tortured scream, and perhaps the ripping sound of hair being torn from it's roots, but I was too far away to be sure.

When I was close enough, he gave me a hand to pull me up to the roof. "You're getting better," he smiled. I stared breathlessly at him, the bright light of the full moon casting sinister shadows across his unchanging face. He grinned.

"Now," he said, turning abruptly away from the furious running steps of the policemen behind us, "We run."

To be honest, I'm not exactly sure how I got roped into this.