Rain fell like an ocean upended. A frigid ice-rimed polar ocean, full of ghostly white whales and blue-veined icebergs; I pulled my raincoat tight at my neck and put my chin down on my chest and offered up a pair of unkind words to the cold gushing sky.

Beyond my narrow trash-strewn alley, out on Regent Street, nothing moved. Or, more precisely, if it moved I couldn’t see it through the whipping sheets of rain. The lone pair of streetlamps had been extinguished by the storm an hour ago, and I’d been reduced to watching the three candlelit street-side windows of Innigot’s Alehouse to see if anyone walked in front of them.

No one had. The halfdead, the Curfew and the Watch combined can’t clear Rannit’s streets after dark, most nights. But let a spring storm blow in from the south and sprout a few tornados and suddenly everyone stays tucked in bed and indoors ’til sunrise.

“Nobody out here but ogres and Markhats,” I muttered.

Thunder grumbled distant reply. I pulled my hat down lower against the spray and the splash, jammed my hands deep in my pockets and pondered just going home. The man I was looking for could stroll past wearing a clown-suit and banging a drum, and I might see him, and I might not.

All you’re doing is getting wet, said a snide little voice in my head. Getting wet for nothing. Darla Tomas, she of the soft brown eyes and jet black hair and the quick easy smile, is laid out on a slab at the crematorium, dead or worse than dead. Martha Hoobin is still missing. And the best you can do, said the voice, is hide in this alley and drip with rain.

In my right-hand raincoat pocket, the huldra stirred, brushed my fingertips. I yanked my hand away, pulled it out of my pocket entirely when the huldra jerked as if to follow.

At that moment, a shape darted past the first of Innigot’s three windows. A single shadow, one hand holding down its hat, tall but hunkered down against the gale.

I froze. Sheets of rain twisted.

The shadow crossed in front of the second window. I started counting. Innigot’s door was between the second and third windows. If the silhouette passed before the third window, I’d merely seen a vampire or a lunatic or any other of a dozen unsavory types, heading for trouble out in the rain. But, if someone went into Innigot’s…

There, in the dark, a door-sized slice of weak yellow light appeared, widened, vanished.

“Got you,” I said. I watched the street for a moment longer. No one moved. No shadow crossed Innigot’s third window. No other shadows followed in his wake. My mystery man had taken the bait, braved the storm and made his entrance.

I stepped out of my hiding place against the alley wall. Rain beat down on me so hard the spray went in my mouth, and I tasted Rannit’s sky-sooty, bitter and foul. I spit it out, shut my mouth and started walking.

At the end of the alley, I stopped, reached into my right-hand raincoat pocket, and found the wax-sealed terrapin shell Mama called a huldra. It was warm in my hand, and it quivered, as if it were packed tight with angry hornets. Crumpled below it was Mama’s hex. I pulled the hex out, took it in both hands and ripped the paper in half.

The paper screamed a tiny scream as it tore.

Now Mama knew I’d found our tall thin man. I had promised Mama Hog I’d wait. I’d promised her I would tear the hex and watch Innigot’s and wait for the lads from the Narrows.

There’d be fifty or more of them, all armed, all ready to back me up when I faced down the man who’d killed Darla, taken Martha, taken who knew how many others. Fifty strong, silent Hoobins and Olafs and Benks and Rowheins. A vengeful, furious army, well fit for the night’s dark work.

I’d promised Mama I would wait. I’d promised Darla I would keep her safe.

Promises. Such fragile things.

I dropped Mama’s spent hex, let the whimpering scraps wash away spinning into a flooded rushing gutter.

I reached again into my pocket and closed my bare hand tight about the huldra and marched out into the empty street. The huldra shook, went hot in my hand. Mama had warned me never, ever to touch the thing with bare skin.

I gripped the huldra tighter, heard mad laughter in the sky.

“Martha Hoobin,” I said. “It’s time to come home.”

I hadn’t known Martha Hoobin’s name, the day I returned to Rannit after a long kidney-bruising stage ride from the south. No, that day had been sunny and bright, even if the last feeble ghost of winter still managed to breathe a hint of chill in the air.

But I wasn’t bothered. I’d found a mother’s son, found him alive and well and running a hotel in Weeson, halfway to the sea. He-and about six thousand others-had been left there when the War ended, with nothing but their boots and a cheerful admonition that Rannit was a two-hundred-and-fifty day walk north, and good luck.

The son had, wisely, looked for work instead. And he’d been lucky and found it, and he’d been smart and kept it. Now he was running the place.

He’d been sending letters home, too, he said, confused that a finder all the way from Rannit had sought him out. Hadn’t Mother received his letters?

Hadn’t Mother gotten the money he’d been sending, on the first day of each month?

I assured him that while Mother had not, someone certainly had.

You’d think that surviving the War would teach a man certain things-don’t volunteer, don’t go first, don’t put wads of cash in paper envelopes and ask a mob of strangers to take it cross-country-but you’d be wrong.

I shook my head, and counted out the coins on my desk. The kid had paid me, and then some, so I’d been able to let his mother keep her meager stack. And while I hadn’t enjoyed the long stage ride to Weeson and back, it was, surprisingly, good to be home.

Three-leg Cat rubbed against my calf and purred from under the desk. He was fat and midnight glossy. Mama Hog had spoiled him in my absence.

I opened a drawer, hid the money and leaned back in my chair and at that very moment someone came a-knocking at my door.

It wasn’t Mama Hog’s knock, which is always accompanied by a gruff yell of “Boy, you in there?” and a turn of the latch. No, this was a man’s slow knock-one-two-three-four-that came from three-quarters of the way up the door.

I swung my feet off my desk and rose. No rest for the wicked.

“Come on in,” I said, shooing Three-leg Cat into the room behind my office. “We’re open.”

My door opened and in came the Brothers Hoobin.

I nearly bolted.

The Hoobins, to a man, are large men. The least of the brothers, young Borod, stood a full head, and then some, over me, and I’m not a dwarf. Add to that their well-fed foundry-toned musculature, their silent, direct gazes, and by the time the fourth and largest Hoobin piled wordlessly into my tiny ten-by-ten office, I had decided someone had purchased, just for me, a first-class beating.

Then I smelled the bread. Saw it, too, wrapped in a clean white cloth and gripped tight in the calloused sooty fingers of the largest of the giants.

I relaxed. I know scores of people who might send me a thrashing, but none who’d bake bread just to celebrate the event.

I nodded at the largest, who sidled between his siblings-I’d decided they were brothers from the shape of their wide-set blue eyes and the identical widow’s peaks in their short-cropped ink-black hair-coughed nervously, and spoke.

“I hight Ethel,” he said, his voice a bass profundo that sounded more Troll than human. He pronounced his name et-hell. “These be my brothers. Lowrel. Disel. Borod.”

As he spoke the names, each brother nodded, once and quickly.