The Classified Dossier: Sherlock Holmes and Count Dracula(30)

“He will not survive,” Mina said gently.

“Not without the transformation,” Dracula said suddenly. He had come back into the house with that uncanny and disconcerting stealth of his. “You must infect him. It is the only way. Now.”

I had thought Holmes unconscious from the pain, but his thin fingers closed weakly over mine.

“No,” he said, his voice hoarse and low. It took all of my keen hearing to make out his words. “I will not be a blight to the world, not… undo all that I have done. I would not pass through the transformation intact the way you did. Even if I did, there would be an infinite amount of time for me to fall and become a menace to all that I hold dear. Promise me that you will not allow it.”

“It will not come to that, Holmes,” I said, fear rising up in me. I felt a desperate liar as I said it. “I can feel the bullet. I can get it. You shall survive this.”

He did not answer me. Holmes passed out again, expending all his last strength on his plea to me.

Dracula and Mina said nothing, and I bent back to my task.





Chapter 06





DECISIONS





Sunlight streamed through the open window back at Baker Street. It would be many years, I now knew, before those rays would be a sure-fire death to me, but even now their light lanced to the back of my head any time I looked directly at them and I instinctively avoided their touch. At least the torpor of daylight had not taken me. Dracula had suggested that additional ‘feedings’ should bolster me against the need for sleep and I had found that this was true. Even more astonishing was that Holmes had clearly told Mrs Hudson a great deal of the truth, for she brought me a teapot filled with warm blood in the morning without demur or even my needing to request it. She patted my hand before she left the room in a gesture of sympathy and I found myself staring at the door she closed behind her for a long time after she’d departed.

I drank, and then picked up the morning newspaper, but it was a feeble distraction. I stared across the room at the sideboard, where Holmes had left the air rifle that Lestrade had brought yesterday for Holmes’s inspection. It was the air rifle used by the assassin who had shot Holmes. Holmes had examined it with eagerness, then abandoned it with disappointment.

“You had thought it Colonel Moran’s air gun?” I had asked.

“Well,” Holmes had admitted. “Getting shot at with an air gun is not so commonplace an experience. However, this is not the same rifle and this…” here he pointed at the police sketch that Lestrade had brought us, “is clearly not our colonel. The man carried no means of identifying him and Scotland Yard currently has no leads.”

The man in the sketch was clearly younger than Moran, with a strong jaw and a high forehead. He was also completely unfamiliar to me. Holmes had, of course, wanted to go down and examine the body, but I had forbidden it until he recovered a bit more. We knew this much already from Lestrade’s report: the police had found him, his neck broken, against a large tree at least sixty feet from the dropped rifle. Dracula had apparently hurled the man a great distance.

“Of course,” he said, favouring me with another glare, “tracking down the man’s identity will likely be a trivial matter, easily accomplished once I am released.”

I said nothing, confident that my course was the correct one and determined to be proof against Holmes’s nettling.

“There is also this,” Holmes said, pushing a piece of foolscap across the table to me. On it were scratched a dozen or so names, including a few that had been crossed out, followed by a list of professions and attributes, all of it listed in Holmes’s own hand.

“What is this?”

“When we recovered Mina, you remember the crates we found? The vampire nursery, if you will?”

“Of course,” I said, shuddering. “I should be hard-pressed to forget it.”

“Just so,” he said. “I think it would be foolish to assume that the Mariner Priest had just the one vampire nursery. In fact, since we know he has several vampires in his employ, we can reasonably surmise that there are also several nurseries, but he allowed us to locate this one easily.”

“Easily?” I said.

“Undoubtedly,” Holmes said. “On further consideration, I believe this was an operation that had several layers to it. The Mariner Priest had to anticipate that we might be able to track the place down. As such, I suspect that it served additional purposes, such as probing the strength of our relationship with Dracula, as well as keeping us occupied while he reaped the seeds of other, more deeply hidden such nurseries. There was also the opportunity for his assassin to take one of us out of the game.”

“An objective he nearly accomplished!” I said.

“Yes,” Holmes admitted. “But there is also a curious opportunity for us here. I was not able to find any common thread between the victims before, but now comparing them with a list of missing persons from Scotland Yard has suggested one.”

“What is that?”

“We have on our new list,” Holmes said, “a forger, a known gambler and rake, as well as one woman suspected of taking place in a confidence scam inflicted on several banks in our area. There are many more possible names that would continue this thread.”

“The Mariner Priest is recruiting criminals?” I said.