AN: This is my first Sherlock Holmes story. Please tell me if you like it or not and why.

Disclaimer: Again, I cannot own Sherlock Holmes since I was born in 1985.

Now Enjoy "Milady Vampire".

Moon 1: The Nature of our Guest

Lunar Age: 3. Saturday 20-12-1884

Nearly three days had passed and our guest was still asleep as if she was a corpse. She didn't even move a single finger. Both Holmes and I even began to revolve a routine around her motionless figure, me changing her bandages in the morning and the evening, and Holmes, ever the restless one, taking the "night watch". But slowly I began to worry since she had touched neither food nor drink the last two days. If she would not wake up soon, it would be her end indeed. I tried to bury the thought with the determination to save her, but it was not gone. In this mood, I removed the bandages on this morning for changing them.
"How odd…" Once removed, I noticed that all her wounds were gone completely. I stood up, turned around to my right and called Holmes, but then a pair of inhumanly strong hands grabbed my left forearm. Before I could react, I felt a strong pain in my arm and as I turned my head back to her, I screamed in shock, disbelieve, fear and pain. The woman I had been taken care of the last few days and who had been about as lively as a comatose had bolted upright and deeply embedded her jaws into my forearm, sucking my blood with glowing red eyes clearly visible in the dim room.

Holmes raced in, but before he could do a thing, the fuss was over. With a weird suffocated sound, she let me go and the glow in her eyes disappeared. Before falling unconscious again, she touched my wound, which simply… vanished.

We stood there in silence for a while, a bit overwhelmed by the occurrences. Finally, I found my voice again. "Can you imagine this? She bit me!"

"I've seen it," he remarked dryly. "Show me your arm please." I did as he demanded and he examined the place where a bite mark should have been. "This makes absolutely no sense. Anything else she did to you?" he asked, concerned.

I closed my eyes at the fresh and rather horrid memory. "Believe it or not, she drank some of my blood."

"Without leaving marks." He pointed at my forearm.

"That's not all. Her strength was inhuman. I was not able to move at all. And her eyes…" I shook my head, shuddering. "And then she made it all disappear. But I still feel… drained."

"Maybe some poison influence," Holmes suggested. "Have you felt a prick on your skin or maybe cut yourself with something in the last few days?"

Again I shook my head. "No. But as she bit me, my skin was clearly pierced by something. I felt it. My blood was sucked out of my veins!"

My friend stepped beside her, examining her more closely. "Where are her wounds? There is something wrong with her – and her teeth." He pointed towards our guest's half-open mouth and her healed shoulder. "I assume your calling earlier was about her lack of wounds then. Please take a look at these teeth; I doubt that they are real."

I merely nodded and took a look at her mouth. What I saw however provoked me to yell again. "Oh my god… She has Fangs! Like a tiger!" Carefully I tried to remove them, assuming they were some kind of trick. As my finger touched one of the long fangs, I accidentally cut my finger. "Ouch! They are real –" A single drop of my blood touched her lips as I was removing my hand from her mouth. Immediately, her tongue instinctively and greedily licked up the red liquor. I stared at her in disbelief, and so did Holmes. "Holmes… didn't she just…"

My companion didn't answer. Instead, he rushed outside, and moments later, he returned with a very thin book and a knife in hands. He was deep in thought and flipped through the book with an insane speed until he found what he sought. 'A greater amount to wake, huh? Let us test this…' he murmured.
Slamming the book closed, he fetched my bottle of surgeon alcohol from the bedside table and rinsed his knife with it. "I am sorry, my dear Watson…" With this, he grabbed the knife tightly with the right hand by the blade until it bled, right into the woman's mouth. Then he reopened the cut hand and removed the blade with the other and placed the bleeding hand into her mouth.

"What the hell are you doing?" I demanded, horrified.

Her reaction followed nearly immediately, she bit his hand and sucked his blood. He shortly gritted his teeth, but then he answered: "Proving the greatest nonsense theory I ever had in my mind in all my life. A theory about the true nature of our guest."

"Which is?" I was puzzled, to say the least.

Before my friend could answer, our guest made another suffocated sound and awoke with a start, bolting upright. At the very same moment, she let Holmes's hand go, and with a startled yelp, she pressed her hands on her mouth. "Did-I-bite-you? I-am-sorry! I didn't realize… Wait… where am I and who the good Lord are you?" All of this literally blurred out of her mouth in no time with a weakened voice. Noticing her rather indecent state of dress (nightshirt with the right shoulder exposed), she pulled up the blankets to cover up herself.

My friend simply smiled. "Indeed, where are my manners? You are in our flat, 221B Baker Street, and I am Sherlock Holmes. And this is my friend and companion…"

"John Hamish Watson, M. D.," I introduced myself, taking her right hand and kissing it. "It is a pleasure to meet you, Madam."

Our guest clearly was not one to be shocked easily. Her sharp gaze was meeting and matching Holmes's as she answered with straightened figure: "The Right Honourable Lady Ceridwen Astoria Llewellyn, 2nd Marquess of Cardiff. Thank you for saving me, gentlemen."

I stared at her in disbelieve. Her manner was somewhat unexpected; it suited her rank as a Peer but not her sex. She was a bit too direct and prideful for being a woman.

However, it didn't seem to trouble my friend at all as he answered, "At your service, My Lady." With his injured hand, he reached for her right and kissed it. A flash of light, and as my friend let her hand go, his hand was unharmed, even the blood smears were gone. He stared at it, displaying a shocked but intrigued face. "So I was right…" Then he met the gaze of Lady Llewellyn again. "You are a Vampire, My Lady."

As if the conclusion of my friend was a death sentence, the Viscount(ess) tried to get up, but with a weak yelp she fell back as her body protested against the overuse. Before I could act, Holmes placed his left hand on her clothed left shoulder. "Don't. You still lack the strength for moving, Milady." Then he removed his hand again.

"Holmes…" I could just barely believe my eyes. My friend, the one who mistrusted women in general and had an overall rather cold manner, did something as kind as comforting an injured woman and hindering her at doing something reckless. I turned to the young Peeress.

Immediately, her figure had sunken into an obvious posture of weakness and defeat. She sighed. "I guess you found me out, gentlemen. Care to explain your thoughts?"

Holmes closed his eyes. "I hoped at the bottom of my soul that I was mistaken, but… if all rational reasoning is to be excluded, the seemingly fantastic or unusual is reality. To proof my theory about your true nature, Milady, I even cut my hand, only to find myself first bitten and drained of my blood and then healed in an instant. Together with the facts that your physical strength is far greater than possible with your outward appearance, that you are weakened to this extreme by a rather average blood loss and eyes glowing red in the dark while you were attacking Watson in delirium, there was too much evidence that you are not a normal human being." His eyes snapped open again. "You are a Vampire, and a powerful one as well, for you do not fear the sunlight."

She smiled, smirked at him. "Congratulations, Mr Holmes for finding me out with a data base as meagre as 'General Vampire Myths of the West'." She pointed at the book on the bedside table and closed the nightshirt again.
Afterwards, her face fell to a polite and neutral expression as she asked: "And now, please, would you be so kind to tell me where my crest medallion, my seal ring and my Viola is?"

I shuddered at the tone she was speaking with, cold enough to freeze River Thames on a hot summer day. Had she been screaming and shouting in anger, it would have been only half as terrible as this more-than-perfect display of a noble's perfectly well-educated manners. By searching her personal belongings and thus violating her privacy, we had voluntarily called upon her anger.
Since Holmes didn't seem to have problems with this, I already wanted to apologize, but then he spoke, bowing his head. "Forgive me, my Lady, I wanted to know who you are and why you were attacked. Unfortunately, it seems like I was only able to detect your name and nature. So I used the coat of arms on your belongings to find your name in »Burke's Peerage«. The case, the two seals and your watch are now on my desk in the study."

The only visible sign of her anger were the fingers of her hands, etching, scraping into the blankets. But then, her grip on the cloth loosened. "Acceptable, Mr Holmes."

"Very well." He straightened himself again and focussed on her face. "But there was something else I found in your cloak, and that made me think."

"I am uncertain if I should like the sound of your voice right now Mr Holmes…" Again, it was this crisp, sharp voice in which she spoke, so similar to my friend which shocked me. I had no doubts in this very moment that she was dangerous and not to be underestimated.
"Curiosity is good for your work but bad for your health if it was a lower-ranked Vampire than me. But I am not one of these blood-thirst-driven lunatic monsters. I am a proud Shinso, a High Daylight Walker. Also known as Pure-blood or Living Soul Vampire."
In terms of intellect and self-control, she was clearly a worthy opponent to him, I thought.

Holmes however retrieved her cloak from a chair in the room. "Or in other words, a Vampire under Vampires, the epitome of a Vampire. But your cloak hid also another part of your identity. As I found your watch, I also found these." With this, he pulled out of another pocket of the cloak something black and shimmering.

As he showed it to us, I gasped in alarm and Llewellyn yelped, "No!"

Holmes smirked lightly and deviously. "Care to explain yourself, Milady?" In my friend's open palms laid three bundles of black raven wing feathers.

AN: This type of Vampire was partly inspired by the Character Evangeline A. K. McDowell from Magister Negi Magi, which bases upon the oldest Vampire myths in East and West. Since there is only a description and not a real word for the highest ranking kind of Vampires in Western tradition, I used (and will use later on) the Japanese word "Shinso", which means "true ancestor"(literally) or "Pure-blood/High Daylight Walker".
I will explain in a later chapter the system of Vampires in this Alternate Universe.
VALE! (Latin: See you again!)

To you, Addy-kun, THANK YOU for your advice on Victorian English.