The Angel of the Crows

by Katherine Addison

“You sound like this happens frequently, Inspector,” I said to distract myself from the dreadfully alluring (alluringly dreadful) scent of the arm.

“Finally, the keyhole is surrounded by scratches where the key has slipped repeatedly. I infer that your brother was a drunkard. He wound the watch at night, thus scratching the plate. These marks are hardly the tracks left by a sober man.” I cleared my throat. “The disease which killed my brother palsied his hands.” I watched Crow’s face fall. “Oh dear,” he said. “That is embarrassing.”

A dog with a bone was nothing compared to Crow with an unanswered question, and I had a lively appreciation for the feelings of the bone.

“If…” He broke off. I was halfway down the casualty lists when he blurted, “If you have sexual congress with me, will you stop being mad?”

“Introductions!” the vampire said briskly. “My name is Moriarty.”

“Forgive me, Arachne,” I said reflexively, even though the spider who spun this web was surely long dead; it had been drilled into me as a child to be courteous to spiders.

But that Nameless, too, reported failure. He had found the cabdriver, sure enough, but the cabbie, like Crow and myself, remembered only the bushy black beard, and while the man had given a name, it was so common as to be patently false. “He could only have been more insulting if he’d called himself John Smith,” said Crow. “‘John Watson,’ indeed.”

“Who should we take it to, to find out if it’s a human kidney?” said Mr. Harris ungrammatically but practically.

For those of you who do not know, there is a thing called fanfiction, wherein fans of a particular book or TV show or movie write stories about the characters. Fanfiction, as an umbrella term, covers a vast variety of genres and subgenres. One of those subgenres is something called wingfic, wherein a character or characters have wings. The Angel of the Crows began as a Sherlock wingfic.