Buttons scatter, and Sherlock chokes on a groan, bent back over the wood suddenly and bare. He has slightly fewer scars, only by virtue of his age, but a few nasty ones. A close call with a serial killer, the fall off the roof, a gunshot graze, a thousand other close calls.

Irene's beautiful, symmetrical circles, each the size of a small pea, dotting up his back like wings, in vampire-teeth pairs of two from the puncture marks of the hooks.