Young Sherlock Holmes_ Red Leech - Andrew Lane [106]
‘Your problem,’ Balthassar pointed out, porcelain face impassive and glowing in the moonlight, but voice bitter, ‘is that you let your emotions get in the way of logic. If I had any advice to offer you, it would be for you to suppress your emotions. Keep them in check. They can only lead you astray. They can only hurt you.’
Sherlock’s mind flashed with memories of his mother, and his sister, and the memories were coloured with emotions, and those emotions hurt. But then there were memories of Virginia too, and those memories didn’t hurt. They made him happy.
‘I appreciate the advice,’ he said, ‘but I think I’ll hang on to my emotions, if you don’t mind. I like them, for better or for worse.’
‘I would say you’ll live to regret it,’ Balthassar said, ‘but you won’t.’ He snapped his fingers. The cougar at his side advanced towards Sherlock, teeth exposed and eyes narrowed.
Sherlock brought his hand around in front of him. The blade of the knife caught the moonlight in a liquid gleam.
The cougar didn’t even hesitate. It just kept on coming.
Feet padded on rock behind him. Sherlock turned his head, slowly.
The second cougar was behind him.
His thoughts raced through possibilities, none of which helped. How could he fight two wild animals with just a knife?
But they weren’t wild, were they? They were partially tamed – or, at least, they obeyed Balthassar. They feared him, and that gave Sherlock a chance.
A sudden acceleration in the padding of feet behind him made him drop to the ground and roll sideways. Something dark flashed over his head. He jumped to his feet, but the cougars were quicker. They were side by side now, snarling at him.
Cats could climb trees, but they couldn’t climb rock.
As fast as he could, Sherlock scrambled up the sheer side of the gully; fingers scrabbling for gaps in the rock, feet trying to find small ridges and shelves that would take his weight without crumbling.
Below him, the cougars leaped.
His fingers closed over a flat area of rock and he hauled himself up desperately, just as a clawed paw caught at his boot and pulled him backwards. He put all of his strength into one tremendous heave, and pulled himself to safety on a ridge that ran along the side of the gully, heading upward in one direction and downward in the other.
He looked down, checking that his feet had survived unscathed. The heel of his boot had been pulled off by the big cat, but other than that he was intact.
From below, the gleam of the cougars’s eyes vanished as they headed off in different directions, looking for a way up to him. And this was their territory, not his. They would find a way.
‘Entertaining as this is,’ Balthassar’s voice called, ‘you are just postponing the inevitable. That isn’t a logical course of action. Just give in; it’ll be easier and less painful.’
‘You promised me that before,’ Sherlock panted, ‘and you lied.’
The ledge was barely wider than his body, and he sprinted along it, trying to get to somewhere relatively safe. He could hear the click of claws on stone from somewhere off to one side, and the deep rasping of breath echoing throughout the gully.
If he didn’t do something soon, he was dead.
Pressed against the side of the gully, he glanced downward. He could just make out Balthassar’s white hat below.
With a momentary prayer that his deduction about the cougars and their relationship with Balthassar was correct, he jumped.
He crashed down on to Balthassar, knocking the man to the ground and sending his revolver skittering away into the darkness. Sherlock’s left shoulder hit the rock of the gully floor as he tried to roll away, sending a spike of red-hot agony through his body. By the time he climbed to his feet, Balthassar was already standing. He was cradling his left arm with his right. It looked malformed, as if his thin bones had snapped in the fall.
His porcelain mask had been knocked off. It lay on the ground a few feet away, broken into three pieces. His face, bereft of the mask, was twisted into an expression of pure hatred.
‘Southern