“Wha—” The words whipped from my mouth as I flailed to keep up with Heathcliff’s frantic pace. He dragged me past rows of identical townhouses until we rounded the edge of the wood. I glanced all around, searching for any sign of Quoth.Please let him be okay—
“Croak, croak, crooooooak!”
A tall, dark shape burst from the trees – a man yelling at the top of his lungs as two large, black wings battered at his face. My chest burned as we sprinted toward them.
Sherlock Holmes stumbled into the road, sinking his bony hands into Quoth’s neck.
“Crooooo—” Quoth’s cry turned terrified. His tiny bird feet scratched and scrabbled for purchase. Sherlock cried in triumph as he pried Quoth from his face and hauled him aloft, ready to dash his brains out on the road.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
With an inhuman roar, Heathcliff threw himself at the consulting detective. Sherlock crashed to the ground as literature’s greatest gothic anti-hero pummeled angry fists into his face.
“Croak!” Quoth dropped to the pavement and hopped around angrily, feathers flying.
Sherlock, who’d learned a thing or two in the underground boxing rings in Victorian London, managed to pull Heathcliff into a headlock. But Heathcliff simply rolled his torso forward, flipped Sherlock over his shoulder, and slammed him against the pavement. Sherlock bounced and went slack, his head lolling to the side.
“No one hurts my birdie.” Heathcliff’s growl sent a shiver through me as he wrapped his hands around Sherlock’s neck. He sounded like a beast of hell, so great and terrible was his vengeance. “Andno oneframes my annoying friend and gets away with it. He was an idiot for trusting you, but that won’t be a problem for long.”
“Heathcliff, don’t kill him.” I wrapped my arms around Heathcliff’s neck and yanked, but it was like trying to pull an elephant from a bowl of salted peanuts. Quoth hopped on Sherlock’s head and nipped the tip of Heathcliff’s nose.
“Yeeeeow.” Heathcliff dropped Sherlock to clamp both hands over his nose. “That bloody hurts. I was only trying to avenge you.”
I nudged Sherlock with the toe of my boot, rolling him over. He winced as he slowly raised a hand to his face, wiping blood from his eyes.
“Thank you for stopping him,” he mumbled, his haughty voice thick with pain.
“Don’t thank me yet. I’m not done with you. I thought you were supposed to be a trained boxer.” I frowned down at Sherlock.
“Yes, well.” He kept his hands over his face as he rocked his body into a sitting position. “It appears I’m no match for a brutish gypsy.”
“I’ll kill him.” Heathcliff lunged again. I managed to push myself under his arm, popping up between the two of them before Sherlock got the dismembering of a lifetime.
“First, we get answers.” I pressed my palms into Heathcliff’s chest. “Then you can kill him.”
“Where has this hostility come from?” Sherlock sneered, spitting blood onto the pavement. “I thought we were all working toward the same end, securing our good friend’s freedom.“
“Morrie’snotyour friend. Especially not after we show him this.” I whipped out the photograph and held it under his nose. “Care to explain what you were doing at a Ticketrrr retreat fromtwo yearsago?”
Sherlock’s face remained perfectly still. Not a hair moved out of place. He gave away nothing as he stared at the incriminating evidence in my hand. “If you intend to turn me over to the police, I suggest you do it now. If they’re as incompetent as Lestrade and his constabulary, you’ll need to perform charades, paint a picture, and learn semaphore signals in order to explain who I am and my connection to Moriarty’s case.”
I exchanged a glance with Heathcliff. Of course, we couldn’t turn Sherlock over to the police. We couldn’t trust that he wouldn’t reveal the truth about the bookshop.He’s seen Quoth shift. He’ll turn us in, and they’d take my boyfriend to a lab to be cut open and studied.Instinctively, my fingers flew up to hug the raven to my chest.
“This is between us.” Heathcliff’s hands balled into fists. “And Morrie.”
Sherlock sighed. “Very well. I swear to you I did not kill the woman, and I promise to explain everything. But I should be telling this story to Moriarty first. If we return to the cabin, I will unburden myself of this secret.”
“It’s going to take hours to get to Barset Reach on the bus,” Heathcliff growled. “Can’t you just put Morrie on a conference call so I can kill you here?”
“I have a driver.” Sherlock nodded to a beat-up old Skoda parked at the end of the street. Heathcliff grabbed the detective by the scruff of his shirt and dragged him to the vehicle. I followed behind with Quoth still perched on my shoulder. As I climbed in, I realized the driver was the man who owned the petrol station in Barset Reach.
We drove in absolute silence. Quoth sat in my lap, staring up at me with those wide, soulful eyes of his. I turned over every piece of information in my head, trying to make sense of the various strings. Dave Danvers. Tara Delphine. Grant Hosking’s blazer button at the scene. Sherlock lying through his teeth. But what did it all mean? Who framed Morrie, and why?
The driver took us up to the same clearing Sherlock had parked the police cruiser. As I stepped out, my mind flickered back to Morrie’s face the day I left him with Sherlock, when he’d lain me over the hood and shagged me senseless. My heart hammered against my chest. I was about to see Morrie again, hold him in my arms, hear his filthy words, and see those smirks that turned my brain to mush.
And I was also about to reveal to him that his ex-lover had been keeping a dangerous secret, and he might even be responsible for this mess.
If someone wanted Morrie out of the way, they could just kill him. Whoever did this hated Morrie enough that they wanted him to suffer. They wanted to take away the one thing that Morrie valued over everything else – more than money or fine wine or kinky sex.
