Games of Genus Read online

  I offer her a weak chuckle, amused by her attempt at humor given the situation.

  But, as I run for the hills with my tail between my legs, a small part of me is left wondering if she really was joking.

  12 Watson's "Sting"

  Jay Mews at Kensington Gore, Borough of Kensington & Chelsea

  November 7, 9:54pm

  And speaking of releasing the beast…

  I do my best to side-step an over-excited pair of older teenagers, rushing in the direction of the Royal Albert Hall wearing masks reminiscent of lucha libre wrestling. One’s is styled after a lion, ironically patriotic, while the other looks more like a wolf or a bear.

  Both must have spent hours making them, and I imagine in some semblence of secrecy, too. Not only is the deliberate covering of once’s face illegal, the luchador masks themselves could be deemed borderline contraband due to their stylistically foreign design.

  Olé, el Rebelde.

  The official flyer for the weekly K.O.T.A. show that I was able to turn up via a FaceFolio search was embarrassingly immature to say the least, and embarrassingly enthusiastic to say the most. But all things considered, with the sheer gravitas revolving around the two of us, perhaps a night out being immaturely enthusiastic is exactly what Sherlock and I need.

  Especially with how close we’ve been growing over the past several months.

  I’m prematurely tucking both gloves into the pockets of my wool duffel, when I hear the unmistakable crack of a gunshot.

  Holmes—!

  I have zero idea why I automatically assume she has to be involved. Perhaps due to habit. I scurry as fast as I’m able to about the circumference of the grand, ovular building toward the parking lot, where the shot seems to have echoed out from.

  My sleek, black umbrella is poised to strike at the first sign of trouble as I round the corner, my Properdry trainers scuffing to a stop against the pavement.

  … good grief.

  A well-built, blond man crouches over an even blonder woman. From what I can gather at a distance, the latter of the two is bleeding.

  My mind instantly overreacts, swirling around memories of young girls collapsing with their throats and insides ripped apart. If this is the alleged vampiric activity Holmes was concerned about last night—

  Soon after I start to sprint toward them, the man gets up and flees. As much as I wish I could chase after him and kick his arse seven ways to Sunday, the medic in me is first drawn to his female victim.

  “Hey, love, are you—” The words get stuck in my throat. I can’t believe what I’m seeing, as I roll the wrestler’s body over in my arms. “Sherlock!?”

  “Ugh.” My dear friend grunts and hisses in anguish, blood seeping from between her small, pale fingers. “Bugger me. Release the beast, indeed—”

  While my mind longs to stay and play awhile on the amusement that we made similar cracks about the wrestling promotion’s Monday night aesthetic, an incoming tsunami of dread is rapidly making itself known.

  “Sherlock,” I mutter urgently, increasingly becoming aware of the expanding crowd of onlookers. “Sherlock, we need to get out of sight. Now.”

  “Out of sight? Take me to the privacy and warmth of my own bloody home, Jonathan,” grumbles Sherlock. She’s curt when she’s been shot. I happen to know this from experience.

  It’s about forty minutes by Tube from South Kensington to Baker Street via the Circle Line, one of the last operational train services of the old London Underground. Or twelve-to-fifteen by cab, which is preferable given my friend’s leaky state of being.

  “This is the fifth time you’ve been shot, Sherlock,” I’m muttering, helping her through the front door after paying the cabbie by scanning my BitID. “That I know of.”

  “Fourth,” Sherlock gripes. I steer her around Mrs. Hudson, who jumps up from her post on the rug and leads the way up the staircase with a worried chirp.

  “I remember five,” I insist, though at this point it may just be to distract her from her injury until I can get a better look at it. I unlock Sherlock’s apartment door and nudge it inward. The cat scoots beneath our feet, and I ease my smaller friend across the room and down into her armchair.

  “Brandy, Jonathan?”

  “Anaesthetic?” I inquire, moving to retrieve the requested libations from the sideboard. She snorts in derision behind me.

  “No, I just bloody well felt like getting rat-arsed. Is that really too much to ask after a woman’s been shot for the third time since you’ve known her?”

  I bite my tongue as I pour a healthy snifter of her preferred spiritual vice. But as I hand it over, I can’t help commenting.

  “This obsession of yours with adrenaline, with the rush of the game,” I say—cautiously, careful not to upset her ego in the process. “Call me unadventurous, but I can’t help worrying it’s going to get you killed one of these days.”

  Sherlock chuckles over the rim of the stemware. At one time, I think she told me it was heirloom crystal.

  “So be it,” she says thoughtfully, her breath fogging up the inside of the glass. “For I would much rather act on a whim and die a hero than live a life enslaved.”

  I’m making short work of her sleeve with a pair of medical shears, so that I can get a better look at what I’m dealing with.

  I love working off-the-clock.

  “I’m a doctor,” I say, my voice softening as I peel back the layer of cheap ‘patent leather’. “I witness first-hand the result of action and heroism all the time.”

  Sherlock nurses her brandy, eyes bluer than the sky over the Thames. I allow myself a second or two to enjoy them before returning to the wound she’s no doubt eager to ignore.

  “The bullet’s still inside,” I tell her reluctantly. She sighs, a heavy noise of defeat.

  “Jolly dee,” she says, staring dead ahead. “Do the thing you went to Cambridge to do, my darling.”

  “I went to UCL.” I quickly fetch one of many first aid kits we keep about the flat, rummaging through it in a sense of frenzied, organized chaos. “My Chief Resident went to Cambridge.”

  “I suppose that will have to do then,” she grumbles. She downs the last of her brandy in one quick swig.

  “Another?”

  “In a tick.” She visibly braces herself. “Just pull the ruddy thing out of me and stop making such a bloody fuss.”

  I smirk faintly, inserting the pair of disposable medical forceps into the gash to locate and remove the offending slug.

  “I wonder,” I muse as I work, “if it were me who’d been shot this evening, if my esteemed friend and flatemate would so much as bat an eyelash in my general direction while I writhed and squirmed all over the floor.”

  “I’d have the bullet out by now, that’s for sure.” Sherlock hisses and fights the reflex to flinch as I withdraw the forceps, the hunk of metal pinched neatly between the tips. “Bugger me.”

  “Easy…”

  I drop both the bullet and forceps into the plastic wrapping the latter came in. Knowing Sherlock, she’ll want to keep the former for her studies. Whatever that entails.

  “You think I wouldn’t bat an eyelid if you were shot?” she asks, gripping the edge of her seat to avoid grabbing at the wound. She’s not the only one who can be deductive.

  “I… silently fret.”

  She coughs up a noise of scorn, possibly even spite.

  “As a matter of fact,” she states matter-of-factly, “I’ll have you know that despite my propensity toward the far less exhaustedly romanticized side of life, one does have feelings for one’s dearest of friends. Even if one chooses not to wear them in plain sight.”

  I stare at her for several long moments before shaking my head.

  Less exhaustedly romanticized may be an understatement, I think to myself. But I decide not to continue to air my concerns aloud.

  “Okay,” I say, clapping my hands together in a manner I hope defies my inner angst and anxiety over having to once again perform s
ome level of surgery on the woman I love.

  “Sutures or supernatural hoodoo?”

  “Dealer’s choice,” is her off-handed response, before she adds, “But you’re way fitter when you aren’t puncturing my skin repeatedly with a needle.”

  My skin reddens as she implies any level of attraction to me and I decide—despite my own personal discomfort—that if she would prefer my to lay my hands on her in a paranormally curative fashion, then that’s just what she’s going to receive.

  And while I may tell myself it’s for her benefit, and not another excuse to simply lay my hands on her skin, opportunity to touch and soothe her come so infrequently that it’s impossible not to leap upon every single one.

  13 Lestrade's Oversight

  A&E Department, University College Hospital

  November 8, 03:03am

  I jerk my head up as the automatic doors slide apart, dragging in a gust of fresh, wintry air. The way I have done every time the doors have opened since I arrived an hour ago.

  The security guard is still at his post. He doesn’t react to the tall, East Indian man who enters the hospital’s emergency room, other than to lift his eyes and drop them a brief second later.

  I react, though. I react because, since arriving shortly after I received a tip through one of the regular faces on my beat route, I’ve finally seen something that’s enough to cause me to jump up out of my seat in the waiting room.

  “Bert—?”

  My voice is hushed to a whisper, to avoid the MDs and interns on shift overhearing what I say.

  “Did you hear about the hit on this place too, mate?”

  “Hit?” PC Maguire is plainclothes, the collar of his duffel coat pulled up around his face to hide his identity. He’s clearly on some kind of stake-out, and he nods stiffly.

  “Right,” my fellow officer says. “The hit. What did you hear?”

  I glance sideways, tilting my body to block one of the older doctors from earwigging our chat. I recognize his face from somewhere. “The blood bank raids across London county. They reckon there’ll be another theft here, tonight.”

  “They?”

  “Informants, narcs. I’m good at my job.”

  Maguire shifts his weight deliberately from one foot to the other. “At least there’s two of us present now, eh?” he says, looking around the emergency ward. “You armed, Gav, mate?”

  “Sidearm. No rifle, not in public.”

  “Good bloke.”

  A tiny intern appears next to us, all spunk and smiles. “Evening, lads,” she says brightly, before turning to Maguire. “Can I get you all checked into triage, love?”

  Neither one of us—and I mean myself and the intern—is expecting what happens next.

  In a flash of motion, PC Maguire’s shot the security guard and yanked the young doctor against him, effectively using her as a barricade between the two of us. The snub nose of an illegal compact Beretta is wedged into the underside of her jaw.

  “Not a MOVE!” he’s yelling, addressing the startled and panicking crowd while keeping his weapon trained on his hostage. “Not a bloody sound, ANY od you! Don’t piss me off and make me use this on someone you lot actually care about!”

  “Sinead—!”

  My own high-power Browning is out and in its business position before the older doctor can intercept, and Maguire and I are suddenly locked in a full-on stand-off in the middle of A&E.

  “Mate,” is my weak whimper of protest, my voice cracking in two when I try to speak. “You gotta be having a flippin’ laugh, ain’cha?”

  “If there was one thing the boys down the precinct could always rely on you for, Gav,” he says, almost lifting the small intern clean off her feet, “it’s how intelligent they always look by proxy.”

  Mother… wanker.

  I glance sideways at the doctor. Far as I know, he’s probably her tutor or direct supervisor, the way he’s staring at her with the care of both a teacher and a father.

  I know that look damn well, from a patriarch of my own.

  “Gav,” Maguire says, slow and stern. “Put the gun down, mate. I’m only here for the blood.”

  “Why?” I demand, and I’m sputtering it regardless of how illogical it might seem to ask. I don’t bloody care. One of my main diamond geezers is betraying my arse in real-time, and if I could paint a fancy flippin’ metaphor to describe my inner anguish, it’d hang in the Tate Modern and be worth ten million sterling, easy.

  Maguire shakes his head, several curls of dark hair falling in his eyes.

  “You want to join the CID and be a working detective, PC Lestrade?” he asks bluntly. The way he says my name almost cuts, dry with disrespect. I don’t reckon I’ve ever heard him say it that way. “Figure it out.”

  “You—you’re involved with all this Abyssal SIN malarkey?” I stab, aware of how quiet the entire emergency ward has fallen around us.

  I wonder how long we’ll have to wait ’til the tell-tale red-and-blue lights herald the arrival of my compatriots. I wonder if I can keep everyone in the room alive and unharmed until that moment comes.

  “Yes and no.” Maguire is dragging his hostage across the floor between rows of seating. I trace their path in parallel, each step even more and more tentative than the one it follows. “I’ve found a way to make money off them, anyway. You should get in on it with me, mate. Earn yourself a tidy little profit.”

  “The bent cop stereotype never really interested me,” I say flatly, squinting to keep my sidearm level with the bridge of his nose.

  “Then maybe I could interest you in the role of a fellow Sinner instead?”

  The hostage, Sinead, cries out sharply as she trips against the weapon. A number of us half-expect it to go off. Beside me, the older doctor is frantic, fretting behind his hands at the scene that’s unfolding.

  “Sinner?” I try not to flinch, the familiar sterile scent of the hospital nowhere near as foreboding as the way he just said that single word. Pieces of a bigger picture are coming together in my brain, and I’m not enjoying any of it. “Bert, are—are you some kind of flippin’—” My tongue trips over a couple different words, and the one I settle on is not the best. “—Bogle!?”

  PC Maguire’s laugh is icy and humorless.

  “Fuck me, son. I know you’ve been obsessed with vampires over the last few days, but there’s more than one or two genera of human in this country.”

  Maguire halts in what I recognize to be the most strategic vantage point in the room. “Even a pig-ignorant pikey like you’s got to have that one figured out by now.”

  “I do?” I ask, trying to sound earnest. In all honestly, I’m just trying to keep him talking as long as I can.

  “Humans, Anomalies, Traugr…” Maguire says, shaking his head against Sinead’s. “What’s stopping us adding a fourth, or even a fifth?”

  “Er.” I dare to cast a quick, sideways glance at the doctor mirroring my every move. “Science?”

  “The Sinners will be that fourth human genus,” Maguire growls.

  When he next speaks, he raises his voice to yell at the other doctors hovering frozen about the place.

  “BLOOD!” he barks, and everybody jumps at once as he nods to a trio of trembling interns. “You, you, and you—red cell components! Load as many packs as you can into the standard temperature-controlled transport containers I know you have on site, and bring them to me—STAT.”

  I interrupt before any one of them can move.

  “They can’t do that, Bert.” I advance a half-step, and my former colleague reflexively jams the Beretta deeper into his hostage’s throat, choking her. “Bert—come on. You flippin’ twat, don’t do this.”

  “Again with playing the romantic,” Maguire sneers. His eyes flicker from me to the doctor and back again, and I swear to god his tongue darts out across his lips. “Don’t make me proper fuck you up, Gavin, my son.”

  Heaving out a sigh, my comrade-turned-capturer whirls on the trio of medical students one
more time.

  “I’m not gonna tell the three of you again,” he warns, in a tone that’s dark and dangerous enough that I don’t think a single one of us doesn’t believe it.

  “Get yourselves downstairs a bit sharpish-like, and bring me what I want. Before I start making your odds of securing a residency at the end of the year easier—one bullet, one schoolmate at a time. You savvy?”

  14 Holmes' Firecracker

  221b Baker Street, Old London Town

  November 8, 03:13am

  It’s not too long after the onset of the witching hour when I once again become aware of that characteristically unpleasant sensation of being watched.

  Jonathan left for the first of back-to-back shifts less than an hour ago. Ergo, per my deduction, the eyes that are currently weaving their web around me cannot possibly belong to him.

  Tacky like honey, just as sweet and as viscious. Entrapping me in a way I’m all to familiar with.

  Ah, my little firecracker, I amuse myself with a mild chuckle. What on earth took you so long?

  With only minor difficulty, I unlatch the enormous bow window facing Baker Street from my lounge, abandoning my almost consummate (and ingeniously one-of-a-kind) patriotic bullet-hole mural to Elizabeth II Regina.

  In a splendid but perhaps misguided display of laxity, my dearest Jonathan did his darnedest to provide me with everything I could ever possibly require within reaching distance, with the humble request that I sit, and rest, and recuperate.

  I must say, whilst I relish in the prospect of relaxing into my armchair with the thought of Jonathan’s warm Magickal hands soothing their way across my barenaked skin, as mine follow a mundane but similar path…

  It gets dull after a while.

  “I see,” I call, as I lean out through the open window, “so I would be Juliet to your Romeo in this twisted little fantasy of yours?”

  To absolutely no consternation of mine, an intimately-known face is upturned and gazing at me from the street below. Framed by the rough, rakish curtain of his mousy Bandholz beard, his demeanor of a soft and innocuous woodsman is betrayed by the open ball of flame he’s quite literally holding in one hand.