by Eva Chase
“When he gets in that state, he’ll take your head off for interrupting him,” he’d said. “He’ll get to whatever inspiration he’s chasing down faster if we leave him to it.”
Now, Bash and I found Garrett and John sitting in the exact same booth, already near the bottom of their mugs of coffee and John halfway through a slice of the lemon cheesecake I’d been eyeing on the menu along with the tarts.
I plopped down across from them and promptly stole a bite of the cheesecake. John gave me an amused look as my eyes rolled upward in ecstatic appreciation. I flagged down the waitress to order a slice all for myself and then set my elbows on the table to get down to business.
“Our man’s parents went on a trip to the Highlands not too long ago,” I announced. “Interesting choice, don’t you think?”
John perked up. “Do you figure they’d have been near the commune up there?”
I shared the same reasoning with them I’d offered Bash. My cheesecake arrived, and after I’d taken my first bite, I waved my fork in the direction of the detectives. “Did you two turn anything up?”
Garrett shook his head. “No patterns of crime or connections to Scotland that we could find—which really, we should have expected. Tillhouse wouldn’t have wanted to let the criminal side of his dealings connect too closely to his home ground.”
“It was worth checking, though,” John said. “And obviously it’s a good thing we came up here, given what Jemma found. So, what’s next? We pay this vacation spot a visit and see what the word is around there?” His eyes shone with the excitement of having a mission ahead.
“If we’re going to make our own trip to Scotland, I think our first stop should be the police,” Garrett said. “It’ll be harder for them to turn me away in person.”
Bash let out a scoffing sound. “They wouldn’t help you at all before—why would they change their tune now? They’ll probably give you a load of bull that points us in the wrong direction just to get you off their backs.”
Garrett glowered at him. The intimacy the three of us had shared a few days ago might have broken down a few hostilities, but it was hard to say the two of them had exactly become friends. Their personalities clashed too much.
“I didn’t get to the position I’m in by giving up too easily,” the detective inspector said. “And whatever your opinions on the police force are, we do tend to be loyal to each other with the right motivation.”
“I think we should start with Jemma’s lead,” John jumped in. “It’s the most concrete one we have. Then we might have more details to direct the questions we want to ask the police.”
Garrett frowned. “If we start nosing around a place where Tillhouse has connections, that could tip him off that we’re getting close, especially since he’s probably even more on guard after the blow-up yesterday.”
“How many people can he even have alerted at this point?” Bash protested. “He just got released from custody this morning, and they’re off in some remote spot away from civilization. It’s not like it’d take a simple phone call.”
“We don’t know that for sure.”
“Whoa, whoa,” I said, holding up my hands. The debate was setting my nerves on edge. It sounded like too much petty squabbling and not like a team working together. Possibly because we didn’t have the whole team together.
But it wasn’t just that, was it? Even now, even after the shrouded folk had cast a shadow over these men in various ways, the threat wasn’t real to them the way it was to me. They might have seen photographs and witnessed injuries and heard my reports, but I’d seen one of those screaming violent deaths with my own eyes. I’d lived amid that violence for fourteen years.
My gut knotted. Taking down this commune, wiping out the others until the shrouded folk could no longer maintain their presence here in our realm—it wasn’t just another, albeit particularly immense, case. It was a matter of human survival. There was too much at stake here to be sniping at each other over strategy.
This really was a war, and even now, none of the men around me could fully comprehend that.
“We’re not doing anything today,” I went on. “Garrett, Scotland Yard expects you back there tomorrow, don’t they? And maybe we can still salvage our campaign against Tillhouse somehow once more information comes out. We need to find out what Sherlock’s been up to all this time. We’ll regroup, all five of us, pool our resources, and make a proper plan of attack for heading north.”
Garrett winced. “Sorry,” he said. “It’s just so maddening that he’s walking free—I got carried away.”
“And we really should loop Sherlock back in,” John said with a sheepish expression. “He may have wrapped this whole thing up while we’ve been running around.”
I perked up as I popped another bite of lemon cheesecake into my mouth. “Have you heard from him?”
He shook his head. “I’ll give him a nudge in warning when I’m almost back at the flat. Maybe we can have that meeting there over dinner.” He glanced at the clock on the diner’s back wall. “And I guess we should head out if we want to be back in London in time for dinner.”
I jabbed at my cake. “Let me finish this, and we’ll get going.”
Evening was starting to settle in when Bash and I reached central London. We’d switched places in the car, him driving and me poring over Tillhouse’s emails with his parents, but I hadn’t turned up any clues. All I’d gotten was an ache behind my eyes. I rubbed them and closed the laptop, and my phone vibrated with an incoming call.
It was John. “Are we on for dinner?” I asked him.
“I don’t know,” he said with worry laced through his voice. “We’re about ten minutes from Baker Street now. I texted Sherlock five minutes ago, and just called, and he’s not answering.”
A thread of cold wound through me from throat to stomach. “Is that unusual when he’s absorbed in work?” I asked.
“I don’t think he’d ignore his phone completely, especially when he knows we’ve been out doing our own work. For all he knows, he’s missing news about Tillhouse or some other aspect of the case.”
“Maybe his battery died.”
“It could be. He’s normally pretty fastidious about that.”
My fingers tightened around my phone. “So, what are you thinking?”
“I don’t know.” John sighed. “It’s probably nothing. He left the phone in the other room and got so caught up in thought he didn’t hear it, something like that. I just don’t like it.”
“We’ll come,” I said firmly. “If he doesn’t want a dinner meeting, he should have picked up the phone to tell you so.” I’d rather meet an irritated Sherlock than sit with this anxiety twisted all through me.
He hadn’t seemed completely like himself for a while now. The shrouded folk had been acting on him in ways he hadn’t wanted to admit. They wouldn’t have outright attacked him, would they? The possibility seemed incredibly unlikely given what I knew about them, but it also made me queasy.
“Drive faster,” I told Bash. “Let’s get to Baker Street.”
He took the next few turns at just shy of dangerous speed, only slowing at a glimpse of a police car. We made it to Sherlock and John’s building just as John and Garrett were pulling up outside.
John hustled up the stairs to the apartment with his mouth set in a tense line. “Sherlock?” he said as he unlocked the door and pushed it open. “We gave you as long as we could manage without any disruptions. I’m afraid you’re going to have to put up with one now.”
We got no answer. The living room was empty, the dining table bare, no sign of recent activity out here. Sherlock’s bedroom door was closed.
John’s posture had stiffened. He set his walking stick aside so abruptly it fell over with a clatter, but he didn’t stop to pick it up. He strode to Sherlock’s door with his slightly uneven gait and knocked. “Sherlock? Sherlock!”
The knob didn’t budge when he rattled it. “Could he have gone out?” I said. �
�He might not even be here.”
John’s hand dropped from the door knob. “You’re right. He could—” He froze, his eyes widening, and took a long inhale.
“I smell vomit,” he said in a thin voice, and dashed across the apartment to his own room heedless of the wobble that speed brought into his leg. I’d already reached Sherlock’s bedroom when John emerged a second later, unwrapping a set of lock picks. A faint whiff of that sour scent reached my nose, and my stomach turned.
“For the first time, I’m glad he insisted on badgering me into learning how to use these,” John muttered, but his voice was taut with distress. His hands shook as he wielded the picks.
“Let me,” I said.
He handed them over without protest. I inserted them into the keyhole and flipped the lock in a couple of seconds with a frantic jerk of my hands. The instant I’d pulled the picks out, John was shoving the door open.
A choked sound escaped his throat. Sherlock was sprawled on his side on the floor, his face blotchy, vomit streaking the hardwood by his mouth. John dropped at his side, grabbing his hand to check for a pulse. As I dashed after him, my pulse rattling through my veins, my gaze fell on the box lying open on the bedspread. On the baggy of white powder, nearly empty, and a syringe with a bead of liquid still poised at the tip of its needle.
This was war, all right. And the shrouded folk had found the perfect weapon to land a killing blow.
A nearly killing blow. “He’s alive!” John said. “Barely. Someone call an ambulance!”
“Already have,” Garrett said from the door, looking shocked.
I knelt down beside John, steeling myself against the hopeless sensation that rose up at seeing Sherlock so frail. “Tell me what we have to do to make sure he stays with us.”
Chapter Nineteen
Jemma
The hospital had exactly the sort of aesthetic I should have enjoyed: straight lines and clean whites and beiges. Something in the atmosphere cast too much of a shadow over it, though—the undertone of heavy disinfectant, the beeping of machines measuring the strength of lives in peril. Or perhaps just the knowledge that one of those lives belonged to the only man I'd ever felt could match me on every front.
At first, we’d all ended up in the waiting room while the doctors did what they could for Sherlock. Bash had stayed mainly to support me, and when it’d become obvious he felt awkward lingering there, I’d sent him back to his apartment. Garrett had left a little while after that, saying the best thing he could do for the man was get to the bottom of Tillhouse’s release.
That left John and me. The former surgeon had alternately sprawled on the stiff waiting room chairs and paced across the linoleum floor with sharp jerks of his walking stick, his gaze nearly always fixed on the hallway that led to the treatment rooms.
They hadn’t let us see Sherlock yet, hadn’t told us anything other than they were giving him the best possible care, however reassuring that was supposed to be.
I’d come across overdoses before—among junkies and other unstable characters. Even after John had mentioned Sherlock was using again after a stretch of sobriety, I’d never thought I’d find myself here waiting to find out if the world’s foremost detective had survived his own over-indulgence.
How much had his own innate moods gotten the better of him in this frustrating and unnerving situation, and how much had the shrouded folk given him a direct push? Even he might not be able to tell us accurately. I knew how slyly the fiends could exert their will.
I popped a sugar cube into my mouth, my fourth of the evening, although the sweetness only cut a tiny bit of the worry souring my stomach. John marched over to the nurse’s desk again.
“Is there any news at all?” he said. “Is he in recovery? When will we be able to see him?”
“I haven’t gotten any updates,” the nurse said in a mild but weary voice. “I’ll be sure to let you know as soon as I do. From what I’ve seen, with cases like that, it might be a while yet. If you’re going to stay, you should settle in for a long wait.”
John let out his breath in a rough exhalation and meandered back toward me. The normally cheerful light in his hazel eyes had dulled to a faint, frantic glimmer. Where his appearance normally gave the impression of warmth and softness, the muscles in his broad shoulders and along his jaw had turned hard with tension. It made my own gut knot tighter seeing him like that.
I got up just before he reached me and grasped his wrist. “Why don’t we find the cafeteria and get something to eat while it’s still open? You’re only going to feel worse if you starve yourself.”
John’s posture stiffened even more. “If something comes up about Sherlock—”
“We won’t be gone that long. Anyway, I heard what she told you. It could be hours more before we get any real news.”
He grimaced, but his stance relaxed a little, enough that I could tug him along with me.
“I’m not sure I can stomach much right now,” he remarked.
Neither was I. “Well, we’ll try our best,” I said, attempting to insert his usual cheer into the vacuum left by his distress.
We headed down the hall toward the staircase that led to the lower level. John kept twitching his walking stick restlessly. If anything, now that we’d left the waiting room he looked even more pained than he had before.
“You know it isn’t your fault, don’t you?” I said.
“How can you know that? I live with him. I’m his best friend—practically his only real friend. I knew he was using again. I should have realized something was wrong when he put me off this morning—I should have insisted on staying…”
He trailed off as if realizing even in his furor how ridiculous that idea was. I gave him a gentle teasing nudge. “And, what, you would have sat in the living room while he worked away in his bedroom, and still not have known what he was getting up to? Do you really think he’d have agreed to hourly check-ins or anything else like that? He’d probably have come up with some quest of his own to send you on if he’d wanted privacy that badly.”
“Yes.” John sighed and rubbed his hand over his face. “But still. My whole job is to support him, to fill in the gaps when he can’t handle everything on his own. If I can’t even make sure he stays alive, what the hell good am I?”
Those words sent a jab through my chest. I grasped John’s wrist again and turned him toward me so I could look him right in the eyes.
“He’s a grown man. It was his job to look after himself. He could have told any of us if he was struggling more than he let on. And you are not Sherlock’s keeper. You’re more than just his goddamned sidekick. How many people did you save before you even met him? I don’t care how brilliant or lauded a detective he is—it doesn’t mean you stop mattering.”
John blinked at me, clearly startled. Then he closed his eyes. “I know that,” he said quietly. “I know all of that, but it still kills me that I couldn’t stop this somehow, that I can’t do anything now.”
I drew him into an embrace, tucking my head against his shoulder. An orderly trotted by us without a second glance—no doubt people hugging out their fears or grief was a pretty common sight in the hospital halls.
John let out a shaky breath and wrapped his arms around me, pulling me closer. For a few minutes, we just stood there, locked together in the little comfort we could manage to generate between us.
When John eased back, he kept his head bowed over me, his forehead nearly grazing mine. He held my gaze for a long moment.
“It bothers you almost as much as it bothers me, doesn’t it?” he said. If he sounded a little startled by that too, I suppose I deserved that.
I started to speak and found a lump had risen in my throat. “He’s a spectacular man. I hadn’t known there was anyone like him in the world. Now it seems like a pretty horrible thing that the world might lose him.”
The corner of John’s mouth quirked up just slightly. “So it’s the world’s loss you’re concerned about, not your
own?”
“It’s all the same thing, really.” An ache spread from my throat down through my chest. “But just so you know, the thought of losing you or Garrett upsets me just as much. If you start to feel you’ve been pushed to close to some edge—”
“I know.” He touched my cheek. “I swear I’ll tell you if anything’s wrong. You don’t need to worry about that.”
The tingle of his breath across my face woke up other feelings far less fraught than my fears. A quiver traveled down through my core. There were other sorts of comfort, other avenues for release when there was no fully escaping the horrible situation you’d found yourself in. I suspected John could use the distraction as much as I did, if not more.
“Show me,” I murmured, resting my hand on his chest. “Prove to me how much you’re here with me.”
The thump of his heart beneath my palm sped up. John hesitated, his gaze flicking to one side and then the other to confirm we were alone in the hall, and then he ducked his head to capture my mouth.
There was an urgency to his kiss I’d never felt from him before—he was usually so gentle even at his most passionate. The hunger that had stirred in me before woke up completely, as if I were famished for this. I kissed him back just as hard, my fingers gripping the front of his shirt, my head tilting to allow him better access to my mouth.
John made a rough sound and shoved me half a foot back so my shoulders jarred against the wall. The impact only heightened the thrill. Our tongues dueled, and his heat soaked right through me. It might not have been able to wash away all the anxieties of the day, but it could overwhelm them while we were in the middle of this collision.
I tore my lips from his just long enough to gulp air and spot the door to a closet some ten feet down the hall. My hand still fisted in John’s shirt, I yanked him with me, threw open the door, and pulled him inside.
In the brief flood of light, I saw shelves stacked with cleaning products and boxes of plastic gloves, a mop in a bucket in the corner. Then the door thudded shut behind us, choking the light, and there was nothing to see. Nothing to hear except the hitch of John’s breath right before he kissed me again; nothing to feel except the solid bulk of his broad body against mine.
