Chapter Six: Questions and Answers

"She's in the other room." The first words Demetria had spoken all morning since she had stumbled from her room looking half-dead and declared she needed coffee were expressed to someone standing at the door; a stranger. I looked up from my file to see a tall, thin man leaning on an umbrella who peered at me with a morbid interest, like someone gawking at a mutant in a zoo.

The man had red-brown hair and a superior look. He was sharply dressed in a suit and tie like that which a government official would wear. I believed that he was at least eight years older than me and intelligent. He clearly held a high position somewhere in which he took pride. He had family, but wasn't romantically attached, most likely because he believed that most of the human population was vastly inferior to him. He was also OCD, as he had straightened the slightly askew door knocker and his entire outfit was pristine down to the last thread. The man was also not one for emotions of any sort. He walked like Sherlock did, making it possible that the two were related.

"Raven Holmes, I assume. Interesting." He half-smiled, ignoring Demetria's puzzled look. He stood there for a few more seconds without putting forth introduction and turned away, pausing briefly to stick his head into Sherlock Holmes's door just across the landing and walking off down the stairs, umbrella hooked over his arm. He yelled something, and a grumbled response came from within the messy flat. I was still watching as the mysterious man disappeared down the stairs.

"Who was that?" Demetria asked me, looking concerned.

"I honestly have no idea of his name, though he is not terribly difficult to deduce," I responded as I shut the door quietly and turned to my friend. She shook her head at me and went back to her magazine, lying forgotten on the table.

I spent the afternoon tracing the ammunition Tessa Lee had been murdered with. Nothing came up, but I sensed a pattern that I had yet to unravel itself in my hands. I knew it would, though. They always did, ever since I was seventeen and being consulted by the police.

I left my flat, shutting the door quietly behind me, and headed out just as my watch read five. I was going to walk the streets of London, get to know them again. The stairs were odd, so different than the ones I had been using for six years in my house. It was strange, the seventeen steps seeming unnatural to my body as I descended them and retreated into my mind palace. My body was functioning on autopilot, however, and managed to miss a step and go plunging to the bottom.

I winced as I pushed myself up, my pain no worse than the time I went over a railing on a case just after I had joined the FBI. As I eased myself into a seat on the stairs, my phone rang. Like the second man to ring me at the FBI, a blocked number flashed on my screen. I swiped my finger across the button and put the phone to my ear, apprehensive.

"Raven Holmes."

There was a void of sound before the man on the other end started to speak. "Ah. Miss Holmes. It will be good to meet you finally." He sighed. "I have heard great things about your investigations, and that was why I had you come from America to aid me. However, there are factors that may derail you from your task. I have called to warn you that lives are at stake in this; more lives than have ever rested upon your shoulders. You have entered dangerous territory now.

"I pray that you can finish what I will give you, for I believe that only you will be able to take it on. Before I meet you and tell you what you are doing, there is one piece of information that you must know; I confess that it is vital, though it may not seem so at first. Sherlock Holmes has a sister." With that, he hung up. There was no further explanation as to what I was doing, no clues as to the task. It was intentionally confusing me, probably so that this man would be the only source of my task in this country. He was clearly smart and hell-bent on making me confused.

Sitting on the bottom of the staircase, I stared at the blank screen. Sherlock Holmes' family seemed irrelevant to me at the moment, but it was entirely possible that it would become vital information at a later time. Odder things had happened to me in my years at the FBI and odder things were guaranteed to happen later in my life.

I was up the stairs after the call before anything else unusual could happen; after the last few minutes, nothing seemed like a long shot My journey out onto the streets of a city I had all but forgotten, so changed by time, was abandoned in favor of analyzation of evidence and the plotting of my next move. Technically I was acting against direct orders from my superiors, but I was also solving a murder I had become fixated on, so all was well.

I was searching through articles about old shootings in the area when my phone buzzed, a text from a blocked number. I was more eager than I would have liked to see what was written in it, the haste in my manner not missed by Demetria. She gave me an odd look, placing her latest entertainment on the table and walking over.

"What is it?" she questioned.

"Something new," I muttered in reply, avoiding her question altogether.

The message was simple at the start, a set of coordinates and a time. Midnight that night. It was the sentence following those numbers that shocked me enough to toss the phone onto the table and jerk to my feet. Answers from your past.

It was a graveyard where I was supposed to travel in a few hours, a graveyard that supposedly held answers to what I had locked away. Answers that I apparently needed to help the head of the British government fight a genius (why else would I be needed?), and it was now becoming evident that this matter was connected to Lee's murder.