He waited until Molly had fallen asleep in her bed, sheets pulled so tightly around her that he was surprised she didn't suffocate. It wasn't cold that night, but he imagined she thought she was protecting herself from whatever stalkers she'd managed to attract now. Of course, there was no way she'd be able to fend off a "wraith" (as she'd described it) that killed by poison and tortured as systematically as Sherlock would have thought to torture someone. From what she'd described to him, the poison used to kill her date, the way he'd been tormented and the sudden appearance of the intruder in her lab, Sherlock already had a couple ideas.

Once Molly's breathing settled into a deeper pattern than he normally heard from her, he donned a long black coat and let himself out, locking the door behind him. He took the spare key from under the mat with him. It was more to keep Molly's new friends out than to let himself back in. He could find a variety of creative ways to get inside her flat.

The streets were almost empty as he strode to St. Bart's. He could have taken a cab, but the brisk cool of the 2:00 A.M air electrified his blood, stimulated his mind. Not that he needed it.

He reached the hospital and found that the main entrance, or at least the one that Molly typically used, was still open. He walked around the perimeter of the building, touching every door, every handle, fiddling with every lock and knob he could find. When he returned to where he started he laughed softly and glanced straight up, admonishing himself. He backed up a few steps, just enough to see that a window not far above the door was still open a miniscule hairsbreadth.

"Moron," he muttered to himself, strolling through the open door and taking his first left up a flight of stairs into the room with the open window. It was an office, a small room that employed an unhappy desk worker, by the look of it. He either took no pride in his work or whoever had come in through the window had taken the time to scatter his papers on his desk. A curve of mud accidently left on the intruder's shoe had flaked off when he had vaulted through the window. Sherlock shut the window, irritated by the draft, and bent down to examine the mud. It was, without doubt, from a shoe, and he doubted it was from the shoe of whoever worked there. They were depressed, burdened by their work, and overweight. Sherlock wasn't going to imagine they spent much time reveling in the outdoors or getting their work shoes dirty.

He ambled to the lab next, hands in his pockets, whistling a merry tune. The main entrance from the hall was unlocked, as Molly had left it. He flicked on the lights and was greeted by a corpse in a half open body bag. Behind a shelving unit a metal stool and a cart piled with glass chemistry equipment had been overturned. The glass had broken into a thousand shards, covering the ground like clear, sharp snow.

But a man who could climb up a building and slip like a spider through a window, a man like a "wraith", wouldn't have accidently made such a racket. He couldn't have been trying to scare her out, either, because following her home, which he assumed was the point, would have been easier if he had simply waited, and melted into her shadow.

It took him only a moment to locate the cause of the intruder's distraction. Molly's purse lay on a table just beside the fallen equipment. Her phone lay beside it, still glowing with a newly received text message—incidentally, from Sherlock. He smirked, tossing her phone up into the air and catching it deftly. The gang—for he was certain by now that it was an organization, and not an individual—that was following her wasn't as centralized as he had thought before. If the man they had sent to stalk her startled at the mere buzzing of a phone behind him, they couldn't be as dangerous as Molly's tears had convinced him.

One of the side entrances to the lab was still open. He exited the room through there and found himself walking down an auxiliary hallway that appeared seldom used. It led outside. Sherlock paused, glancing up and down the street. To his left it ran into a bigger road, where cars flashed by every few seconds. To his right, however, it led into a deserted alley.

A man leaned against the wall in the alley, dressed in black and punching in a message on his phone. He seemed content to ignore Sherlock until he had stopped before him.

"Good morning, sir," Sherlock murmured, his breath steaming in the air. In the dim light cast by a far off streetlamp he could just discern the brown of mud on the man's shoes, the same color as the mud on the floor of the office in the hospital. The man wore gloves and a knife was concealed in the leg of his dark jeans. Very badly concealed.

The man glanced up, tucking away his phone. He seemed as though he didn't know whether to turn and leave or stay and talk or try and kill him, a stranger approaching him so early in the morning. He scowled. Sherlock could hear the fragile, slow clockwork of his mind ticking, and rolled his eyes.

"Nightshade, isn't it?" he asked, nodding to a sprig of the poisonous plant hanging from a string around the man's wrist. It was the oddest choice of accessory Sherlock had ever seen. He thought back to another case he'd seen long ago, when he'd put the head of a crime syndicate in jail without a second thought. What had his people been called? The Daisies? Tulips of Doom? No. Whatever they were called, they were stupid, letting him find one of their men. Especially one who had just threatened the life of one of his dearest friends. This man was here on purpose, waiting for him. He must have had some sort of useless message to deliver.

The man looked down asininely as if it was the first time he'd seen the Atropa belladonna clinging to his wrist. He held up his hand. "It's our tag," he said calmly. Sherlock sighed at the man's blissful ignorance of the hole he was digging himself into with every word. "Our names. Nightshade's mine."

"A deadly plant," mused Sherlock. Then he remembered. "Hemlock, wasn't it? That was the man's name. I put him in jail long ago. That wasn't his real name, of course, but your gang has an affinity for the use of herbal toxins as your weapons. The Garden of Death, you call yourselves. But why now? Why seek me out now?"

"A little bird told us you were defenseless. No where to run, no one to hide with except that little rat of a woman that works in the lab. I'm not sure how much good she'll do you."

Knowing that the little bird in question was a leftover bit of vermin from Moriarty's web, Sherlock grimaced. His upper lip curled in disgust while his dagger blue eyes narrowed in anger. "That 'rat', as you call her, is a better human being than any of you could ever hope to be." With a soft grunt he grabbed a fistful of the man's shirt and twisted it, jerking him forward. The man pushed against Sherlock's shoulders, struggling against him. Sherlock plucked a dark, round berry from the man's "tag" and slammed his head back against the wall. He pried his mouth open. He held the berry less than an inch away from his lips, ready to force it in at any moment.

"If any of you dare to breathe within a ten mile radius of her, I will come for you," whispered Sherlock in a low growl. "Your last meal will be a fistful of nightshade or hemlock or yew or what have you. And I'll be there, standing over you, watching you die. I'll be the last smiling face you ever see."