Disclaimer: All rights and characters belong to the BBC and Steven Moffat. Nothing is mine but the creativity and storyline.
One Week Beforehand
"Lestrade?" Sherlock hissed into the small hidden microphone he had attached to his trench coat collar. "Can you hear me?"
"Loud and clear, Sherlock," Lestrade replied, his voice loud and clear in the small headphone placed into Sherlock's ear. "Whereabouts are you now?"
"I'm just about there." Sherlock whispered, gingerly stepping out and down a hidden step in the sewer he was being forced to investigate into. "I can hear them moving. They're out of the sewage so there must be a platform of some kind coming up. Now please could you stop talking to me, it's very distracting."
Lestrade was silent.
Sherlock paused. "Thankyou."
He continued on his venture down the sewer. He was trying to fish out (pun not intended) a man wanted for murder in the United States. He illegally immigrated over to the UK a few years ago, and has only been discovered after assaulting a woman at a supermarket.
Honestly, you'd think that a murderer would try to keep himself low if he'd managed to keep hidden for a year, but no he has to be stupid and assault a cashier at Asda. Amateurs.
Sherlock stepped carefully. He didn't want to disturb the filthy water any more than necessary. "Oh, and Lestrade?" He said quietly into the microphone, "Remind me to thank Molly for the nose-plugs later."
"No need Sherlock, she's right here."
"You're welcome, Sherlock!" Molly called from somewhere in the background.
Sherlock winced, and said nothing. He would never understand women.
There was a turn up ahead and he could see a single ray of light from the other side. And as a shadow walked past he heard some low, muffled whispering. There were two men down there. Ah.
"Lestrade?" Sherlock whispered, his voice even lower than before. "We may have a problem. There is a second man down here and possibly a third. I can't take them all at once. Damn why didn't I accept that gun from Donovan?"
"Because you're a freak?" He heard Sally Donovan call from the background, more as a statement than a question, with her voice raised at the end as if the answer was evident.
"Hush, Sally, this is no time for jokes," Lestrade snapped, and the sniggering in the background silenced, "Okay, just get out of their, Sherlock. We'll get people at all the sewer openings right now."
Sherlock sighed. He hated giving up on a case. "Fine. How dull." He droned, bored already, and turned quickly to leave the awfully dark tunnel.
But he stopped dead in his tracks when he saw someone hanging upside-down from the roof of the rounded sewer. He stifled his gasp into his coat collar but in doing so caused the microphone to fall and land somewhere in the sewer.
"Sherlock?" He heard Lestrade ask into his ear, worriedly. "Sherlock? Sherlock, can you hear me?"
The very thing blocking Sherlock's path was... a man. Indeed a man, wearing torn, mud-stained blue jeans and nothing else. No shirt and no shoes.
But... he was hanging effortlessly from the roof of the sewer. The curved roof of the sewer. He was clinging onto the metal with nothing more than the souls of his feet and the tips of his fingers. His hair was blonde and his face seemed matted with some sort of dry mud, or sewer filth.
His eyes were closed, as though he were sleeping.
He... looked like a bat.
Sherlock was stuck. There was enough room to duck underneath the man but it meant crawling on his hands and knees in already knee-height sewage filth. But he knew the man knew he was there already. The man could have only been there at least a minute or so. He hadn't been there when Sherlock walked in, and it certainly would have taken more than a minute to hang upside-down like that. So what was this?
Where were the wires? There had to be wires.
But just as Sherlock contemplated in his mind whether or not to feel around the empty air around the man for a wire holding him up, Lestrade's panicked voice yelled into his eardrum.
"Sherlock?"
And at the exact same moment the first syllable left the Detective Inspector's lips, the man's eyes flew open and revealed blood-red irises surrounding his widely dilated pupils.
He had no time to think, move or even breathe – because in a split second the man had opened his mouth wide to reveal two gleaming fangs and leapt for Sherlock's jugular...
And the sewer blew up from the inside-out.
One Week Later
If Sherlock Holmes is anything, he is not stupid.
He may be arrogant and pompous, and big-headed and egotistic and sometimes maybe even a little conceited and haughty but if anything Sherlock Holmes is not stupid.
Sherlock Holmes is very, very clever.
So that morning when their landlady, Mrs Hudson, told him that DI Lestrade had rang with another mysterious murder case he wasn't at all surprised when it bored him to tears at how easily simple it was.
"You called me at four-thirty in the morning for this?" Sherlock demanded of the DI as he stood up from the mangled corpse lying on the bed before him.
Lestrade just shrugged casually; already used to Sherlock's usual rantings. "What do you think?" He asked placidly, placing his hands in his pockets, completely ignoring the Consulting Detective's question.
Sherlock sighed, a furrow in his brow, turning back to the dead woman lying in only a white nightgown that was now crimson with blood.
"It's fairly obvious," Sherlock began, peeling off his leather gloves and placing them into his trench-coat pockets, "The two puncture marks on the neck indicate some kind of psychopathic occult killer murdered her, possibly with a roasting fork but the wounds are too round while the ends of a roasting fork are flat; it had to be something else with two sharp points – it couldn't have been one sharp point stabbing twice because the wounds are exactly the same width apart and on a one-hundred and eighty degree line, not even the most intelligent mathematician could have got the wounds that straight so we're looking for something with two round pointed ends and perhaps made of metal. The woman was single, obviously waiting for a lover to come visit her from the floaty negligee she is wearing and her wedding finger is perfectly clean so no wedding ring has ever been worn. She is in her mid-twenties with a steady job from the dark circles under her eyes, that means she has been staying up frequently every night working on some form of paperwork looking at the multiple paper cuts on her thumb, meaning she has to flick through papers every day, perhaps she is a secretary but her nails aren't manicured enough so she more than likely works from home. There seems to be no signs of a struggle because her nightclothes are not torn if not maybe a little wrinkled, but the murderer had no intention of engaging in intimate contact with her otherwise she would be naked – definitely a bloodlust killer wanting to get the job done fast. Any questions, Detective Inspector?"
Lestrade nodded only once, before bending down closer to the victim's head and looking up to Sherlock, "Yeah, just one. How do you explain this?" And that, he lifted one of the woman's eyelids up to reveal a crimson-red iris.
Sherlock didn't look surprised or shocked; he looked more-so confused than anything else. "What is that?" He asked quietly, probably more to himself than anyone else.
"I was hoping you could tell me."
"Hmm..." Sherlock hummed, standing beside the DI to get a closer look. "Could be a blood clot behind the eye. Or a significant amount of trauma to the head caused internal bleeding."
Lestrade stood up straight, but Sherlock remained crouched over the body, studying the victim's eye. "Maybe," The Detective said, "But it's on both eyes." Almost immediately after he'd said it, Sherlock's hand darted out and lifted the other eyelid up to reveal exactly the same on the other eye.
A rush of air left Sherlock's lips as it rushed over him that he didn't have a reasonable explanation for this one. The whites of the eyes weren't bloodshot – it was just the irises, and no blood was leaving the tear-ducts either. So if it wasn't a blood clot or internal bleeding then what was it?
"Get her back to the lab and run some tests." He practically ordered, getting grouchy from his lack of knowledge, "I want to know if there is any sort of virus in her system. Maybe some kind of blood disease from the metal weapon the killer used."
"Umm..." Lestrade began, confused, as Sherlock stepped back and put his gloves back on, "...How do you know the weapon was made of metal?"
The corner of Sherlock's lip tilted up a little into that crooked smile that always said he knew more than anyone else did. "The wound is far too clean to be made with anything else."
Once Sherlock got back to 221b Baker Street, he collapsed onto his black leather sofa and peeled off his gloves, coat and scarf. Watson was sitting not too far away on the sofa reading the paper, his eyes never lifting from the article he was reading as he asked Sherlock, "So how was it?"
"Weird." Sherlock replied, his hands over his face so the word came out muffled.
Still his eyes never looked up. "How was it weird?"
Sherlock paused before speaking. It felt strange having to admit it aloud that he had no results on it yet, and he just wanted Anderson to get on with it so he could find this murderer. "The victim had... red eyes."
John's eyes flickered immediately from the paper and directly onto Sherlock's face. Sherlock couldn't see Watson's expression through his fingers but he knew it would be an echo of how he was feeling.
"R-Red eyes?" John spluttered out, throwing the paper to one side amongst all the other junk of Sherlock's in their flat and sat up straight in the chair to get a better listen in. "What like..." He paused and stifled back the laugh that was threatening to bubble up. This was a serious matter. A woman was dead. "...Like a vampire?"
"Don't be so stupid, John!" Sherlock shouted, tearing his hands away from his face to yell properly. "How on earth could a mythical creature murder a woman in the twenty-first century?"
Watson held out his hands in a surrender suggestion. "I wasn't implying that, I was just saying where the irises red or was it–,"
"Yes, the irises exactly."
"Oh."
They sat in silence for a moment while Sherlock's thought-waves radiated round the room. John half-expected him to tell him to 'shut up' and stop thinking because it was 'annoying' but when he said nothing at all for a good five minutes, Watson began to worry.
"...Sherlock?"
"A... vampire?" Sherlock repeated, talking aloud and not to John personally. John just sat hesitantly, watching the only Consulting Detective in the world do his thing. "Well, yes... An occult murderer, possibly. But that doesn't explain the lack of blood at the scene."
"Lack of blood?"
"Yes, the victim had significant blood loss. There was at least half a pint left in her system – if even that. But there were only a few large spots of blood on her nightgown and forensics confirm that there were no other traces of blood in the house."
"Um... Okay. But you said an 'occult murderer' – what makes you think that?"
"She had two puncture marks on her neck."
Although Sherlock's eyes had not moved from the spot of wall he'd been staring at, deep in thought, John felt his eyes on him as he shuddered uncontrollably.
"Don't be so stupid, John." Sherlock repeated, just as before, only calmer this time, in a voice so low it was barely a whisper. It reflected exactly what John was thinking. "This is the work of an occult gang of some sort. No doubt it'll happen again sooner or later."
John sighed, the sound immediately irritating Sherlock. "Wow. You emerge from an exploded sewer with nothing but a bump on the head and just after you are released from hospital a weird and 'wonderful' case shows up. Lucky you."
"Yes." Sherlock purred, staring blankly into space. "Lucky me... Ouch!"
Watson looked over to the Detective as a hiss emerged his teeth and he began rubbing at his front teeth madly.
"Toothache?" John asked, calmly.
"Yes." Sherlock replied, just as placid. But he winced when he took his fingers away and looked down at them to see little spots of blood there. "And bleeding gums, apparently."
"Well... Maybe unlucky you, then." John shrugged, turning back to his paper, his brow furrowed in thought about what could have happened to the woman.
Sherlock hissed in pain again and ran his tongue along his front row of teeth. He was surprised when the metallic taste was...
No. Blood didn't taste nice, did it?
A/N: Yeah, so... I'm not going to say anything; I'm just going to let your minds tick over what the hell was running through my mind when I wrote this. ;)
Reviews are love, and ideas are welcome! :D I hope you enjoyed this chapter.
Kelly xxx