This story is being translated into Russian! This site will not let me post the link, but if you are interested, either send me a PM or see if you can find this fic on ArchiveofOurOwn (the link will be there).

Again, thank you so much for all the support that this fic is getting. I did not expect nearly as good a response as you've given me and it means the world.

Chapter Twenty-Five

By the time John had finished his cup of tea, Sherlock had failed to say even a single word to him, and so the werewolf decided that it was best to leave the vampire to his own devices. John was no detective. He did not think himself unintelligent, but he knew he did not have intelligence to match Sherlock's, and, if Sherlock's stories of the cases he consulted on were anything to go by, the vampire had this all under control. He left with a reminder that Sherlock was more than welcome to text him if he could offer any assistance, but Sherlock's silence told him that that assistance was not likely to be necessary.

It wasn't until after John had gotten back to his bedsit and settled down at his desk that he realised that he had not been limping since they had left the forest.

OoO

When two days passed without a particular vampire turning up to join him on his walks to and from the Tube station, or otherwise making any effort to contact John, the werewolf decided it was a good idea to go and find out what he was up to. It was not the first time that Sherlock had gone several days without visiting, even when they were on good terms, and yet it felt stranger this time, more out of place. That, and John could not deny his own investment in what Sherlock was researching. After all, it was because of him that Sherlock had not ended up dead at the hands of the hunter.

(Not that he was going to feel in any way smug about that, of course.)

It was not Sherlock who answered the door when he knocked on it, but instead an elderly woman whose name he did not know. He had met her only briefly, the first time he had come there. She had been the one to answer the door then as well, and John had not even bothered to say hello before he had pushed past her and stormed up the stairs to yell at Sherlock. Seeing her face made his stomach twist with guilt.

"Hi," he said, somewhat awkwardly. "Um. I'm John. Sorry I didn't... introduce myself properly last time."

The woman smiled at him in a way that John did not think he deserved, after the way that he had treated her last time. "Oh, that's perfectly all right, dear," she said, stepping to the side and holding the door open for him. "I'm Mrs Hudson. You are here for Sherlock, yes? I thought I heard you upstairs a few days ago."

"Ah, yeah, that was me. Sorry I didn't come and say hi."

"Oh, it's no matter. I'm his landlady, dear, not his mother; I don't expect to be introduced to all of his guests. Still, I am glad to see that the two of you are getting along, after I heard you yelling a couple of months ago. He doesn't really have many friends, you see. I don't think he tries to get close to people. It's not very good for him, is it? The poor dear."

John stared at her for a moment, not sure how to respond, and she seemed to come back to reality, blinking. "Oh, where are my manners?" she said with a laugh. "You don't want to be down here talking with me. Sherlock's just upstairs."

"Right," said John, nodding. "Ah, thanks."

Mrs Hudson smiled, and then she turned to head back into what must have been her flat, and John made his way up the stairs.

When he reached the top, he thought, for a moment, that Sherlock had not moved since the last time John had seen him. At a second glance, however, it became clear that that was not the case. For one thing, the mug that John had put on the desk for Sherlock to drink out of had been moved, and as John's gaze wandered around the room, he realised that the walls had been covered with several pictures and post-it notes, creating some sort of mind-map – a crime map, perhaps? Whatever the map was supposed to show did not jump out at John very easily.

"You've been busy," John commented. Sherlock glanced up at him.

"I said could you pass me a pen."

John frowned. "What, when?"

"A couple of hours ago."

"You realise that I've only just gotten here, right? I've not been here for the last two days."

"Haven't you?" said Sherlock, in an absent tone of voice.

"No, I haven't," John said, looking around and then grabbing the first pen he could see and tossing it at the vampire. Sherlock caught it with one hand, and used it to circle something on one of the pages in front of him before he pulled out a photograph.

"Come have a look at this," he said. John walked over, leaning over Sherlock's shoulder to examine the photograph in front of him. It was the woman that Mycroft had determined was the hunter's partner; the image had been zoomed in to focus on her face, cutting off below her shoulders. The picture was not of particularly good quality, but John was fairly certain she did not look familiar to him in any way. He wasn't sure if she was supposed to.

"What's interesting about this picture?" Sherlock said, tilting his head to watch John as he studied the image. John tried, he really did; he looked for anything unusual that Sherlock might want to draw his attention to, but he could not see anything. If he had passed this woman in the street, he would have never given her a second glance, never thought that she might be a hunter or otherwise associated with one.

"I don't know," he said, and Sherlock let out an exasperated sigh.

"Her neck, John. What's interesting about her neck?"

John changed his line of focus, studying the woman's neck. He could not see anything unusual on it – it was not as though she had any tattoos or unusual markings that suggested she was part of some sort of organisation, except for a couple of small spots of colour on the side of her neck.

John frowned, leaning in closer to the image. "Are they..."

"Puncture wounds," Sherlock finished with a nod of his head. "She's been bitten."

"Does that mean she's a vampire?"

Sherlock shook his head. "If she were, her body would have healed the marks by now. She's human – or perhaps another creature that does not have increased healing abilities, but human is the most likely. And, she's been fed from. I don't think that's coincidence, do you?"

"That she's been bitten by a vampire and hunting vampires? Probably not. So, what, this is some sort of revenge thing?"

"No, that's not very likely. Remember what I told you about vampire venom?"

John frowned in thought to the text conversation they had had several months ago. "You said it was like a drug."

Sherlock nodded. "It keeps humans coming back for more. I also told you that it could cause feelings of attachment, yes?"

John nodded.

"In some people, that can manifest as a desire to... please their vampire, perhaps by doing whatever they ask."

"Wait. So, you're saying that whoever bit her is... hypnotizing her?"

"Not precisely. She still has free will, of course. She does not have to do as she is asked. However, she may feel a heightened desire to do so, and perhaps she is receiving something else by doing this vampire's bidding as well, just to further convince her."

John frowned. "But why would a vampire try to convince someone to kill other vampires?"

"Why do humans kill other humans?"

"Good point."

Sherlock turned his attention back to the pages in front of him, and John slid down into the chair opposite him. "Did the other hunter – had he been bitten, too?"

"We have no way of knowing. I would assume so, but, unfortunately, the security footage that Mycroft has given me only ever caught him wearing high-collared clothing or scarves. It may have been an intentional effort to hide the marks."

"Or it may have just been his choice in fashion."

"Precisely."

John leaned back in the chair, thinking. "So, we have at least one, maybe two – maybe even more – hunters working for a vampire, who is intent on... wiping out other vampires?"

Sherlock did not reply for several moments, and John cleared his throat, unsure if he had been heard.

"It's kind of weird, isn't it?" he said, raising his voice just a little to try to get Sherlock's attention.

Again, this was met with no reply from the vampire. John sighed.

"Are you always like this when you're on cases?"

This time, Sherlock did respond. His gaze flickered up to John and he seemed to raise his eyebrows a little before looking back down at the pages again. "Sometimes I don't talk for days on end," he said. "Why, does that bother you?"

A ghost of a smile flickered over John's face. "You know what, not really," he said. "Sometimes it's impossible to get you to shut up. This might be a nice change."

Sherlock's gaze remained fixed on the file, but John could have sworn he saw an eye roll.

After a moment – a = silent moment, of course – John decided to speak again. "Okay, maybe this time I do actually want you to speak. I can help. I want to help."

Sherlock looked up at him, the expression on his face sceptical. "You? John, you might not be a complete imbecile, but I certainly do not expect your intelligence to be anywhere near enough to match the apparent intelligence of this vampire. There is very little that you can do to assist me."

It took John a moment to answer, because he was trying to work out if that was a compliment wrapped up in an insult or an insult wrapped up in a compliment. He shook the thought off; he could consider Sherlock's thoughts on his intelligence later. "Are we forgetting the fact that I did save your life?"

"That shows nothing of your intelligence, John. That came down to your strength alone – and, might I add, the fact that the hunter was prepared for a vampire, not for a werewolf."

"Intelligent or not, I saved your life. And if there is a whole organisation of these hunters, I might need to do it again."

Sherlock gave him a look.

"Look, just hear me out," John sighed. "I don't know if I'll be able to help you actually work anything out, fair enough. I know that you will, given the way you solve cases. Just keep me in the loop, yeah? This whole investigation thing is not going to only involve you sitting in your flat staring at files; you're going to need to go out and hunt the hunters. And that's when things are going to get messy and that's when I can help."

Sherlock was silent for the longest moment, long enough for John to begin to think that the vampire was not going to accept his offer, but then, at last, Sherlock sighed. He dragged his chair around the table so that he was sitting adjacent to John rather than across from him, and he rotated the papers so that they could both read them. "All right," he said. "Here's what we know."

OoO

It took Sherlock the better part of an hour to explain his findings from the last couple of days, complete with elaborate hand gestures and dramatic pointing towards points on the map or the pictures on the walls. Sherlock frequently went off on tangents about precisely how he had discovered this fact or another, and a lot of these did not make sense to John, but the werewolf chose not to ask questions. As long as he understood the conclusion that Sherlock had eventually come to, the rest did not matter.

The most important fact to note was that the hunter and his partner were not the only two people involved in this mess. Sherlock, apparently, had spent the past couple of days trying to work out exactly who else was involved, using information from security footage, passenger information from flights, and so on. He looked for people who had arrived in the same areas that the hunter had at approximately the same time, for people who seemed to have travelled with the hunter. He had also been looking for other disappearances or deaths of supernatural creatures outside of England, making the assumption that everything was connected.

This organisation seemed to spread far beyond England. Sherlock had not even looked at every country in the world, and yet he had already found what seemed to be the beginnings of a very intricate web. It wasn't just vampires that were being hunted, but werewolves as well, and even some human deaths had caught Sherlock's attention. John didn't understand how he could be certain that all of this was related – maybe he wasn't certain, maybe it was all assumptions – but Sherlock was not ignoring any possibility that everything was linked in one way or another.

He had found several names that seemed to be associated with either the hunter or his partner, and he gave John an overview of the information on them. The way that the vampire spoke about it made it seem as though this was only the tip of the iceberg. This went down far deeper than either of them could imagine.

When Sherlock finally finished, John was silent for several moments, processing the information, before he asked, "So, what do we do?"

Sherlock steepled his fingers together underneath his chin and smiled, a far-off expression on his face. "We follow this web to the vampire at the centre."