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The maid’s terrified eyes fixed on me over a long-fingered and long-nailed hand gripping her throat, digging in and leaving trickles of blood. A hostage, damn it.
The Baroness grinned at me, one beautifully-manicured hand taloned in the girl’s throat. She had teeth like Mycroft’s, a mouthful of wolf-teeth under mad yellow eyes. She wore an impeccable dark-blue suit and bustle befitting the current fashion for her station, but I had no trouble imagining her pre-Revolutionary finery, those wolf-teeth and the front of a splendid silk dress drenched in blood from her predations on her terrified staff. “A hunter!” she cried in perfect Parisienne-accented English, like a pleased hostess greeting the unexpected arrival of a celebrity to her ball. “You thought to stop me! What, no crosses to wave in my face?” She laughed as if at a joke during one of her soirees.
My own teeth were bared against her – my flat, useless mortal teeth against that mouthful of wolf-tushes. “Madame Maupertuis,” I said in the level deadly tone I used when I was angriest. “Do you think killing that poor child and tearing out my throat will save you? Your empire is toppled. Your bid for the Netherland-Sumatra company was annulled an hour ago – I can show you the telegram. Your banks are freezing your assets at the news of your work, even now. Your financial security is gone, as will be you yourself very soon.”
The murderous noble blinked her yellow wolf-eyes in disbelief. It was almost comical, her reaction to my recital of strictly financial matters, as if I were an accountant doggedly attempting normality in the face of horror. But light glowed in those eyes like hellfire. Even the monstrous undead, cut off from a source of bribery and estate maintenance, could be brought low by financial ruin.
Poor little Marie was rigid with terror. But I swore she would not join the Baroness’ other victims, for who knows how many maids Madeleine Maupertuis had drained and casually tossed aside since before the Revolution.
Maupertuis shook before me, teeth grinding. She could smell the garlic I’d chewed and smeared on my skin, could no doubt smell the silver in my revolver chamber. She dared not rush me, but I could not get a clean shot either while she held Marie. She saw my anger well-mixed with fear and knew she would not be able to paralyse me with horror at her doings – that I knew what she was as well as who – and that if she killed Marie I had her dead to rights.
What tipped the balance was a thread of music. Sweet and strong as a Hungarian wine, the tune swirled into the room, high and flawless in delivery, then down so low it seemed to skim the floor.
The Baroness shuddered.
I blinked away the tears rolling out of my eyes – the music was so pure and beautiful I could not help myself – and kept my gaze fixed on her even as the sound filled the room.
She had known from the beginning that I was in her home – she could hear my heart beating from across the room, hear my breath and smell the garlic carried on it from even further away, smelt the deadly tang of silver bullets. I had been a menace too blatant to hide. So she was unprepared to find a mortal man in collusion with another of her kind, armed with his best weapon.
Sherlock Holmes played into the room, his bow preceding his gaunt white figure as he swept the strings of his Stradivarius. I did not recognise the tune; very likely it was his own creation, a mad dance like silk spinning from a spider to entrap its listener. Again the Baroness Maupertuis shook as the music swung around her, soaring into the high trill that struck to the core of blood-drinkers.
Maddened and wild with desperation, the Baroness shrieked and lunged at Holmes, raising both clawed hands to tear the violin from the musician’s grasp.
Marie broke free and fled.
I fired – once, twice, then Maupertuis was too close to Holmes for me to shoot again. It did not matter in the slightest because she fell, wounded twice with silver, and it was Holmes who drew a pistol of his own and administered the coup de grace.
“Ensouled!” Madeleine Maupertuis hissed like a curse as the third and fatal silver strike took her, and was still, and even as I watched crumpled and sank and settled into dust, bones and all, under her splendid clothes.
I held the sobbing Marie in my arms, telling her over and over that la baronne maléfique was quite dead and would not hurt anyone ever again – and thought of the hundreds of drained-dead maids before her starting in feudal days, who could now rest in peace with their murderess brought to justice at long last.
Holmes pulled the wax from his ears that had kept him from falling under the musical spell also – making his playing all the more impressive given his inability to hear his own tune. He gave one dismissive glare at the mortal remains of the Baroness, then looked over at the maid crying in my arms. “The Netherland-Sumatra shareholders will sleep soundly tonight, Watson, for which I give not a thought,” said he.
I made the mistake of looking up from the girl into my friend’s eyes. It was as if I stared directly into the sun. Need burned in that gaze, and a living fire. Fire swept through my flesh like lust. I knew he could hear my suddenly-pounding heart from there; he also knew exactly how much blood raced through my veins, eager to find a new home. His lips parted; I saw the gleam of sharp front incisors and all my blood quickened at the sight. Whimsically, I knew that at that moment the one sane thought we both shared was: Marie is in the way.
I averted my eyes and coaxed the shaking mademoiselle to come with me to the entrance. It was one of the greatest demonstrations of my strength that I ever made; only one man in all of London will ever know of it besides myself, and that one man is the only one that matters.
I waited outside the house with the young woman until her father showed up. Fortunately we would not have to worry about the local gendarmes getting involved, as the police would not enter the estate and risk the wrath of a rich and powerful family over the abuse of a mere servant girl. Marie’s father, clearly a farmer, felt the same way; he angrily berated his daughter, more upset about her lost wages than the horror Marie had undergone from her perilous employer. My own angry and stilted French in the girl’s defence – both the danger of that house and the Maupertuis’ reputation among hired help had been known by the whole vicinity for centuries – made little difference. Like too many rural fathers of big broods this man seemed to view his daughters as one step above his plough-horses, and as they left I pondered which was the bigger monster in this affair. But the girl’s backward look to me as her father’s wagon departed – angry, defiant – gave me the hope that she would find another position, not only safer for her but much too far from her callous family for regular visits. I silently wished her Godspeed, and with that one nod to the sacred I re-entered the house of the profane. I stopped at a ewer and basin near the doorway to strip down, rinse out my mouth and wash the garlic taint from my skin. I left my clothes in the anteroom and walked back to the parlour with as little heed to my state as would a soldier in a barracks.
Sherlock Holmes still held his Stradivarius, his white skeletal fingers upon the neck and bow. He gave no attention to the dust encased in already-mouldering clothes on the floor; his eyes were only for me, and they glittered like the coldest stars in the heavens. His teeth were out, gleaming like his eyes. To better mask his scent from the old wicked creature and ensure she only focused on the blood-filled mortal decoy, he had refrained from feeding for a fortnight; his pallid gaunt frame bore witness to his deprivation, and was aimed at me in raw animal hunger – all the more now that he could smell me instead of garlic.
I smiled at him, and sank into a thick comfortable upholstered chair in that spider’s parlour, also completely dismissive of the desiccated remains of our prey that lay between us. “Play for me,” I said softly.
He raised the instrument to his shoulder; his famished eyes glittered as he fixed them upon me and set bow to strings.
I met his inhuman glare with my own hotter gaze. I held him on the knifepoint of need, awaiting my command. I drew breath once, twice…ten times. On the eleventh I said “Now.”
And I was inundated by music that made those sweet pure notes of his first tune harsh and grating in comparison. The notes flew from his strings, his fingers travelled up and down the neck like a frantic spider, and his wicked eyes never left mine as he swathed me in notes pure as silver, rough and sweet as wild honey, screeching and terrifying as a walk through the Diogenes Club at night, tender as first love. I felt the music in every bone and muscle; my blood raced and danced to its rhythms as he ensnared me, pounding in my veins, pulsing in my wrists. I wanted to weep like a woman, laugh like a madman, roar like a lion, swive like a roue, all at the same time. He wove us together.
I nodded, once.
The music stopped and he all but flung the priceless instrument to the opposing soft chair in the room as he flew to me. His teeth were sharper than my scalpel as I brought up my wrist and stroked it downward, hard, against those two tiny incisors, slitting open the vein and pushing the gash into his open mouth in the same movement. He pinned me to my chair with his whole body, gripping my shoulders, his mouth sealed tight around the wound; he was cold and heavy on me, his face close to mine, as he finally took sustenance. The giddy bloodloss swirled in my brain with the music and the narcotic trance his feedings invoked, and I moaned under him, my flesh hardening in mortal lust. He grew warmer, heavier; his icy tongue stropped my slit wrist, warming as it lapped the welling blood he had avoided for two famished weeks. I kissed his neck and shoulder open-mouthed, transported, as we became one blood swirling through two bodies.
And when he pulled away from my wounded vein and lifted his head, his eyes no longer bore a fiendish, feral glitter but were as soft and dazed with glory as any lover’s; his parted mouth was lined with red like clumsily-applied stage paint, but his inhuman incisors were hidden once again. I reached a hand behind his head and pulled him closer, leaned forward and kissed his warm mouth; my tongue stroked to share the taste of my blood with him. His warm hand slid down my belly and curled around my hotter, rigid flesh, stroking; in seconds I spent, gasping into his mouth. He settled atop me, and we both were still for a long time.
Ever since the night I had given him my blood for the first time, anticipating a brutal death and finding only an ecstasy in his grip for which he too was unprepared (having drained untold thousands in fear and hatred for centuries but never before partaking in love), Sherlock Holmes and I had dwelt together in contentment, keeping our secret from all eyes. This more recent discovery – that my physiological reaction to his music charged my blood so that it was almost like taking a dose of cocaine for him – had only intensified our connection to one another, in a fashion that would have made the most shameless and decadent green-carnation youths of London faint with horror at our perversion.
Still drenched in bliss – caused by chemical and musical transport, romantic enervation and mild blood-loss – I turned my head to inspect my wounds to confirm that the two parallel red lines were closed, albeit precariously; my wrist would need bandaging before we left the crime scene. The same narcotic effect induced by my friend’s feeding induced rapid healing of what would have been a serious laceration requiring stitches from another source.
Holmes lifted his hand and stared at the remains of the other fluid-letting he had induced in me. He touched his tongue to my semen and made a face so comical I couldn’t help laughing. “No substitute, is it?” I asked half-jesting.
“Not even yours is palatable,” he said, wiping his hand clean with a kerchief. “Some of my prey reacted involuntarily this way when I struck them. Others of my kind enjoy it as an aperitif, but I never acquired a taste for it. Pale thin stuff, in more ways than one.”
“Yet current medical thinking says that losing seed is four times more detrimental to a man than bloodloss,” I reminded my partner. "That theory informs most of the injunctions against and cures for masturbation.”
“Current medical thinking, Watson, is one step above the days when they blamed witchcraft for illness and plagues,” Holmes sneered, rising from me so that he could set his clothing to rights and I could regain my clothing. Since Holmes remembered those times I did not argue with him.
I looked over at the other chair as I stood up and sighed in relief. “Your violin is safe, thank – goodness,” I replied, and Holmes smirked. Contrary to folklore my companion would not react violently to a mention of the Deity, the presence of a cross, or being within the confines of a church, but he prided himself on not being a hypocrite. And there was a dram of truth in that folklore; holy water and blessed bread were as poisonous to him and his kind as was garlic.
"It is a beauty, is it not?” Holmes replied, lifting it to replace it in its case. “Signore Stradivari created this to my specification, and I consider the small treasury I paid for it a worthy expense. I would have regretted its damage or loss.” His eyes, now a warm mortal grey and not the glittering ice of a famished fiend, fixed upon me once again.
I nodded. I knew he was not only referring to his violin. “Yes, this was a rather dangerous undertaking for both of us. But it would have been a fatal undertaking for either of us alone. I was not about to let you face the Baroness by yourself.”
When I reentered the room after regaining my clothing and drinking a draught of the water in the ewer, Holmes was waiting with his violin, impeccably dressed in his outerwear, and looking like any other English gentleman. He walked toward me. “Watson, we should just make the station in time for the …” And he staggered.
I lunged forward and caught him in my arms to break his fall; we sank to our knees together, nearly in the very dust we had made of Baroness Maupertuis. No breath nor heartbeat met my grip, but Holmes trembled very slightly all over. He could tire like a mortal man, and his weeks of deprivation on top of his months of pursuit of our quarry had exhausted him. One feeding, even augmented with music and love, could not restore him.
“Poor old chap,” I murmured, brushing his lanky black hair back from the weary grey eyes. “You have had quite enough exertion for a while. Let us go home to London, and I will wire an old friend in Surrey who has an estate in Reigate. What both of us need is a long rest cure in the country.” At his frown I smiled. “Colonel Hayter’s is a bachelor establishment; his servants set the board and will leave us to our own devices. You may lie abed for days undisturbed by a maid making up the room or calling you to supper.” I tenderly stroked my thumb over his upper lip, just over the site where his feeding teeth were concealed. “I plan to consume a good deal of rich port and red meat whilst his guest, so that you may dine well under his roof also.”
Holmes nodded, and with my help regained his feet. “I look forward to such a rest cure,” he admitted.
I smiled at him, as wickedly as any sodomite. “Bring your violin.”
His own grin matched mine.
