Live and Let Drood: A Secret Histories Novel
Live and Let Drood
ALSO BY SIMON R. GREEN
THE SECRET
HISTORIES NOVELS
The Man with the Golden Torc
Daemons Are Forever
The Spy Who Haunted Me
From Hell with Love
For Heaven’s Eyes Only
THE DEATHSTALKER
SERIES
Twilight of the Empire
Deathstalker
Deathstalker Rebellion
Deathstalker War
Deathstalker Honor
Deathstalker Destiny
Deathstalker Legacy
Deathstalker Return
Deathstalker Coda
THE ADVENTURES
OF HAWK & FISHER
Swords of Haven
Guards of Haven
OTHER NOVELS
Blue Moon Rising
Beyond the Blue Moon
Blood and Honor
Down Among the Dead Men
Shadows Fall
Drinking Midnight Wine
ACE BOOKS
THE NIGHTSIDE SERIES
Something from the Nightside
Agents of Light and Darkness
Nightingale’s Lament
Hex and the City
Paths Not Taken
Sharper Than a Serpent’s Tooth
Hell to Pay
The Unnatural Inquirer
Just Another Judgement Day
The Good, the Bad, and the Uncanny
A Hard Day’s Night
The Bride Wore Black Leather
GHOST FINDERS NOVELS
Ghost of a Chance
Ghost of a Smile
Live and Let Drood
A Secret Histories Novel
Simon R. Green
ROC
Published by New American Library, a division of
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street,
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First published by Roc, an imprint of New American Library,
a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
First Printing, June 2012
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Copyright © Simon R. Green, 2012
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.
REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA:
Green, Simon R., 1955–
Live and let Drood: a secret histories novel/Simon R. Green.
p. cm.
ISBN: 978-1-101-58541-2
1. Drood, Eddie (Fictitious character)—Fiction. I. Title.
PR6107.R44L58 2012
823’.92—dc23 2011045364
Set in ITC New Baskerville
Designed by Elke Sigal
Printed in the United States of America
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.
ALWAYS LEARNING
PEARSON
Table of Contents
Previously in the Secret Histories…
Chapter One: Home Is Where the Heart Breaks
Chapter Two: When the Droods Are Away
Chapter Three: There Are Worse Things Than Mummies in the Undiscovered Tombs of Old Egypt
Chapter Four: When the Seas Give up Their Dead
Chapter Five: Do You Have an Appointment?
Chapter Six: Department of the Unexpected
Chapter Seven: Some Unpleasantness at the Establishment Club
Chapter Eight: Traffic Can Be Murder Sometimes
Chapter Nine: Facing Evil
Chapter Ten: Where the Monsters Are, and a Not Entirely Unexpected Surprise
Chapter Eleven: Home Again, Home Again
Casino Infernale
Previously in the Secret Histories…
I came home and found someone had murdered my whole family.
Someone is going to pay.
In blood.
CHAPTER ONE
Home Is Where the Heart Breaks
You think you know where your life is going. You think you’ve got everything sorted out. You’ve defeated your enemies, saved the world, made peace with your family and gone on holiday with the woman you love. And then you discover what you should have known all along: that it takes only one bad day to turn your life upside down. That there’s nothing you can have, nothing you’ve earned, nothing you’ve paid for with blood and loss and suffering…that the world can’t take away from you.
I stood before all that remained of my home, Drood Hall, and all I could think of was how it used to look. How it had looked all my life. A huge, sprawling old manor house dating back to the time of the Tudor kings, though much added onto and improved through the centuries. Traditional black-and-white-boarded frontage with heavy leaded-glass windows, proud entrance doors strong enough to hold off an army, and a jutting peaked and gabled roof. Four large wings had been added to accommodate the growing size of the family; it was massive and solid in the old Regency style. So large and solid and…significant, it looked like it could take on the whole world and win.
High above the extensive grounds, the wide roof rose and fell like a great grey-tiled sea, complete with sharp-peaked gables, scowling gargoyles that doubled as water spouts and ornamental guttering that had probably seemed like a good idea at the time. Add to that a perky little observatory, extensive landing pads for all the family’s more outré flying machines (and, of course, the winged unicorns), and more aliens and antennae than you could shake a gremlin at…and it all added up to one very crowded and very useful roof.
I used to spend a lot of my time up on the roof when I was just a kid, enjoying the various comings and goings and getting in everyone’s way.
All gone now.
The Hall was a burnt-out ruin. Someone had taken it apart with gunfire and explosives and set fire to what remained. Walls were broken and shattered, blackened and charred from smoke and flames. The upper floors had collapsed in on themselves into one great compressed mass of broken stone and rubble and what fragments remained of the roof. The ground floor looked to be more or less intact, but the windows were a
ll blown out, and the great front doors had been blasted right off their heavy hinges. God alone knew what was left inside.
For all its many bad memories, the Hall had always been home to me. I’d always thought it would always be there to go back to when I needed it. To see it like this, brought down by rage and violence and reduced to wreck and ruin, stopped the breath in my throat and the heart in my chest, and put a chill in my soul that I knew would never leave.
I made myself walk slowly forward. Molly was right there at my side, trying to say something comforting, but I couldn’t hear her. There was no room left in me for anything except what had been done to my home. The massive front doors that should have been enough to hold off an army had been thrown back onto the floor in the gloom of the hallway. And a single golden-armoured figure lay curled in the doorway, quite still and quite dead, the gleaming metal half-melted and distorted, the arms fused to the torso and the legs fused together, by some unimaginable heat. I hadn’t thought there was anything in the world that could do that to Drood armour.
There was no smoke in the air, no heat radiating from the fire-blasted hallway. Whatever had happened here, it had clearly happened sometime before. Days before. So I hadn’t missed it by much. The attackers had come here, slaughtered my family, blown up and set fire to my home and then left. All while I was off enjoying myself in the south of France. I stood before the open doorway and I didn’t know what to do. What to say. My stomach ached, and even breathing hurt my tightened chest. Molly Metcalf moved in close beside me and slipped an arm tentatively through mine, pressing herself against me. Standing as close to me as she could, to give me what comfort she could.
“Why didn’t I know?” I said numbly. “How could something like this happen and I didn’t know? Why didn’t anyone reach out to me?”
“Maybe…it all happened too quickly,” said Molly. “It must have been a surprise attack, to catch your whole family so off guard.”
The strength just went out of my legs and I crashed to my knees on the gravel before the doorway. It should have hurt like hell, but I didn’t feel a thing. Too taken up with the greater hurt that filled my head and my heart and overwhelmed everything else. I would have liked to cry; I’m sure it would have helped if only I could have cried…but all I could feel was cold and lost and alone. You never know how much your family means to you until you’ve lost them all. Molly crouched at my side, one arm draped across my shoulders. I’m sure her words would have helped if I’d listened, but there was no room in me for anything but the growing need for rage and revenge. If tears would come, it would have to be later and far from here. After I’d done all the terrible things that I would do to my enemy.
I knelt before what was left of my home and my family and shook uncontrollably in the grip of emotions I never thought I’d have to feel. Molly put her arms around me and rocked me gently back and forth like a mother with a child.
After a while I became aware that Molly was speaking urgently to me, almost shouting into my ear.
“Come on, Eddie. We can’t stay here! We have to go! There’s always the chance whoever did this might come back, and we can’t afford to be here if they do. If your whole family couldn’t stand against them, we certainly can’t.”
I nodded slowly and got to my feet again, with her help. My head was clearing, all the pain and horror and loss pushed aside by a cold and savage need for revenge. I couldn’t leave here, not yet. I needed information and weapons. And more than anything I needed some clue to tell me my enemy’s name. And then nothing was going to stand in my way. All the awful things I would do to him and anyone who stood alongside him would make my name an abomination on the lips of the world.…And I wouldn’t give a damn.
I wasn’t used to thinking like that, but it seemed to come very easily. I was, after all, a Drood. The Last Drood.
Molly realised she wasn’t going to get any sense out of me. She looked at the ruined hall before her and the sheer scale of so much destruction seemed to overwhelm even her for a moment.
“What the hell happened here, Eddie? What could have done this?”
“I don’t know,” I said. My voice sounded distant and far away. “The Chinese tried to nuke us once, back in the sixties, and that got nowhere. No one’s struck directly at the Hall for ages. I would have said there was nothing and no one in the world that could get past all our defences and protections. This is all my fault, you know.”
“What?” said Molly, turning immediately to look at me with her large dark eyes.
“I should have been here,” I said steadily. “I wasn’t with my family when the enemy came. If I had been here, maybe I could have done…something. Saving the day against impossible odds is what I do. Isn’t it?”
“Stop that,” Molly said firmly. “Stop that right now, Eddie. What could you have done that your whole family couldn’t? If you had been here, odds are you’d be lying here dead, too.”
“I can do something now,” I said. “I can avenge my family. I can be the Last Drood. I can bring down my enemies in horror and suffering, and make my family name a byword in this world for revenge and retribution.”
“Okay,” said Molly. “Someone needs a whole load of stiff drinks, and possibly a nice lie-down in a cool dark room. You’re in shock, Eddie. Let’s get out of here.”
“Not yet,” I said. “I’m not finished here yet.”
“And what if the enemy isn’t finished? What if they come back?”
“Let them,” I said. “Let them all come.” And there was something in my voice that actually made Molly shudder briefly and look away. Anywhen else, that might have bothered me. I looked steadily at what was left of my home. My thoughts kept going round in circles, and returning to the same impossible situation.
“How could anyone have got past all of Drood Hall’s centuries of layered shields and protections? It’s just not possible!”
“Well, we did,” said Molly.
I looked at her. “What?”
“We got in. That time you came back to overthrow the Matriarch and take control of your family.”
“Well, yes,” I said. “But we only managed that through my insider knowledge and because we had the Confusulum. Whatever or whoever that annoying alien thing was. And since the Blue Fairy isn’t around anymore, I don’t see how anyone could acquire another one. But I see what you mean. This was no sneak attack. This was a carefully planned open assault. Which raises even more questions. Look around you, Molly. Look at the grounds. None of the robot gun positions have been activated; they’re still sitting in their hidden bunkers under the lawns. And I can’t See any trace of the force shields and magical screens that should have slammed into place automatically the moment the Hall came under threat. It’s as though the enemy caught my family with all their defences down. Which should have been impossible…”
“Could someone have…lowered the shields, from inside?” Molly said carefully. “Sabotage, in advance of the attack? We never did identify the traitor inside your family, the one who’s been working against your interests for so long.”
She stopped talking as I shook my head firmly. I wasn’t ready to think about that, not just yet. “Concentrate on our enemies,” I said. “Who is there left, who could have done this to us? We stamped out Manifest Destiny, stopped the invasion of the Loathly Ones and the Hungry Gods, wiped out the Immortals and crushed the Great Satanic Conspiracy. I mean, who’s left?”
“Clearly, someone you missed,” said Molly. “There’s always someone.…”
I thought about it. “The Droods are supposed to have made pacts with Heaven and Hell, back in the day, for power and influence and protection,” I said. “Could this have been the day when all our debts came due?”
“No,” Molly said immediately. “I’d know.”
I managed something like a smile. “You worry me sometimes when you say things like that.”
She managed a small smile of her own. “Can I help it if I’m a girl who likes to get ar
ound?”
I took her hand in mine and squeezed it firmly. “Sometimes I forget that I’m not alone anymore. That I don’t have to do everything myself.”
“You always were too ready to carry the weight of the world on your shoulders, Eddie. Whatever you decide to do, I’ve got your back.”
“Good to know,” I said. “Because I’m pretty sure this is going to get a lot worse before it gets any better.”
I gave her hand a final squeeze, let it go and turned away to look into the open doorway, where the huge and specially reinforced front doors should have been. The empty gap was like an open wound. I moved slowly, steadily, forward, Molly right there at my side. Gravel crunched loudly under our feet in the quiet. The remains of a lone gargoyle lay shattered on the ground before us. As though it had been shot down while flying against our enemies and plummeted to the ground. And maybe it had. I’d always been suspicious about the gargoyles. When I was just a kid, sleeping in one of the great communal dormitories along with the other young Droods, I was half-convinced gargoyles would creep down from the roof at night and listen outside our windows, so they could report all our sins and bad intentions to the adults. And maybe they did. Drood Hall is full of secrets. I stopped then and made myself rephrase that. Drood Hall was full of secrets. It was important to remember everything I’d lost.
I stepped past the broken remains of the gargoyle, with its shattered face and broken wings, to stand before the open doorway. Something really powerful had blasted both doors right off their hinges and sent them flying a fair distance down the hallway. I could see them lying on the floor, the heavy wood cracked and splintered from some unimaginable impact. And there in the doorway was the half-melted golden figure, the last defender of the entrance hall. The armoured man lay curled into a ball, as though wrapped around his pain. I knelt down beside him, let my fingertips drift gently across the cracked and distorted face mask. The metal was cold to the touch. Cold as death. There was no way to remove the featureless mask, no way of telling who it was inside the armour. Whether…it was anyone I knew.
I rose and strode past the dead man into the gloom of the hallway. There were no lights working anywhere, just dark shadows and fire- and smoke-blackened interiors. Loud and dangerous cracking and creaking sounds came from the bulging ceiling overhead, which supported all the weight of the fallen-in upper floors. It could all come down anytime. I knew that. I didn’t care. I needed to know what had happened here; needed that more than life itself. It is possible…I wasn’t entirely sane at that time.