did you just call me a cow, you whale?

She smiled at me, that one particular smile I hardly ever saw, the one that could open padlocks, Yale locks, bank vaults, the one that was a trapdoor down into everything.

Why did you help me?”Hadrian looked down at Alistair. “He deserves to rot in a cell. He doesn’t get to pick his ending. He doesn’t get to burn down the house I’m hiding in, either, even if it is his own.

Holmes, my patron saint of trapdoors and fail-safes, of always remembering to pour the foundation so that, later, if you needed to, you could build a brilliant house on top.

I have a rainy-day fund, you know," she said, not quite looking at me. "Until recently, it was raining...rather a lot. But I...I've been trying to use an umbrella.

Did you know that only older forests grow the sort of fungi that feeds the variety of orchid called Goodyera pubescens—”“You’re making that up.”“I promise you, I’m not making up mushroom facts for your amusement.”“Pubescens? Pubescent orchid?” He snorted. “Has it grown a little stupid mustache? Does it skateboard?

John H. Watson might have been many things - a doctor, a storyteller, and by most accounts a kind and decent man-but he clearly wasn't a zoologist. There's no such thing as a swamp adder. And the idea that Sherlock Holmes deduced its existence from a saucer of milk is ridiculous- snakes have zero interest in milk. They also can't hear anything but vibrations, so they wouldn't hear a whistle. But they do breathe, so a snake couldn't survive in a locked safe.

We weren't Sherlock Holmes and John Watson. I was ok with that, I thought. We had things they didn't, too. Like electricity, and refrigerators. And Mario Kart.

I began wondering if there was some kind of Watsonian guide for the care and keeping of Holmeses.

The two of us, we're the best kind of disaster. Apples and oranges. Well, more like apples and machetes.