The God of the Hive - Laurie R. King [3]
The madman’s bullet had circled along Damian’s ribs, cracking at least one, before burying itself in the musculature around the shoulder blade—too deep for amateur excavation. Had it been the left arm, Holmes might have risked it, but Damian was an artist, a right-handed artist, an artist whose technique required precise motions with the most delicate control. Digging through muscle and nerve for a piece of lead could turn the lad into a former artist.
Were Watson here, Holmes would permit his old friend to take out his scalpel, even considering the faint hand tremor he’d seen the last time they had met. But Watson was on his way home from Australia—Holmes suspected a new lady friend—and was at the moment somewhere in the Indian Ocean.
He could only hope that Wick’s medical man had steady hands and didn’t drink. If they were not so fortunate, he should have to face the distressing option of coming to the surface to summon a real surgeon.
Which would Damian hate more: the loss of his skill, or the loss of his freedom?
It was not really a question. Even now, Holmes knew that if he were to remove the wedge holding the cabin’s hatch open, in minutes Damian would be sweating with horror and struggling to rise, to breathe, to flee.
No: A painter robbed of his technique could form another life for himself; a man driven insane by confinement could not. If they found no help in Wick, he might have to turn surgeon.
The thought made his gut run cold. Not the surgery itself—he’d done worse—but the idea of Damian’s expression when he tried to control a brush, and could not.
Imagine: Sherlock Holmes dodging responsibility.
Standing over his son’s form, he became aware of the most peculiar sensation, disturbingly primitive and almost entirely foreign.
Reverend Thomas Brothers (or James Harmony Hayden or Henry Smythe or whatever names he had claimed) lay dead among the standing stone circle. But had the corpse been to hand, Sherlock Holmes would have ripped out the mad bastard’s heart and savagely kicked his remains across the deck and into the sea.
Chapter 3
The man with several names edged into awareness. It was dark. The air smelt of sea and smoke. Fresh smoke. Memory was … elusive. Transformation? Yes, that was it—long plotted, sacrifices made, years of effort, but …
He’d expected physical reaction, but not this pain, not that smoke-filled darkness. Could what he felt be the birth pangs of the Transformed? Blood and pain are companions of birth; he himself had written it. If the right blood had been loosed—but no. The wrong blood had been spilt on the altar stone.
His own.
Certainly the pain was his. He groaned, and became aware of a woman’s hands, then a man speaking, and the sudden bright of an opening door followed by more voices. After a time came the suffocation of a rag soaked in ether, and with a sharp vision of the sun black as sackcloth and the moon stained with blood, everything went away.
It was broad daylight outside the hovel when he woke. The woman lifted his head to trickle in a jolt of some powerful drink. The nausea of the ether receded. His chest was aflame, and his head was flooded with the memory of fire and gunshot, but the whisky helped settle his thoughts as well as his stomach.
“What time is it?” he croaked.
“What’s that?” the woman said.
“Time. What time is it?”
“Oh, dearie, let me see. It’s near noon. Saturday, that is.”
Mid-day Saturday. To the north, over the pure, cold sea, the sun would be edging back from its darkness, the eclipse fading—and with it, opportunity. All his work, long months of meditation and planning, gathering the reins of Authority, feeling the power rise up within him (oh, exquisite power, exquisite sensations—peeling away a goose quill with the Tool, the sweet dip of nib into spilt crimson, concentrating to get the words on the page before the ink clotted: perfection), power that welled up like a giant wave