From Hell with love sh-4 Page 5

  "And I thought it looked ugly from the outside," said Luther. "Heal that, you bastard."

  "Let's contact the family, and get some experts sent in," I said. "I think we've done all that can reasonably be expected of us."

  And that was when the dimensional gateway opened above us again, and a whole army of heavily armed troops dropped out of it. They hit the floor easily, wrapped in glowing body armour and carrying a whole bunch of really nasty-looking weapons. They saw the inside out dragon, and paused for a moment.

  "Oh bloody hell," I said.

  The gateway snapped shut and disappeared. The armoured troop surged forward. And I… lost my temper. I'm usually a calm and reasonable sort of guy, but there are limits. I used my Sight to find a suitably weak fracture point in the floor, and hit it hard with my golden fist, with all my? strength. The whole floor broke in half, and with a great grinding roar it collapsed, and we all fell through and down into the next floor, accompanied by several tons of assorted rubble.

  Luther and I rose to our feet. No one else did. Mostly they just lay there, around and under the rubble, making low moaning noises and hoping that the ambulance wouldn't take too long to get there. It was their own fault. Never annoy a Drood.

  "You might have warned me you were going to do that," said Luther.

  "Oh hush, you big baby," I said. "I was almost completely sure we'd live through it."

  I made my way through the mess, searching for a soldier who was still conscious. I wanted answers. I finally found one, pinned under a block of stone. He didn't look in particularly good shape. He raised a gun as I leaned over him, and I slapped it out of his hand.

  "You know who and what I am, so answer my questions. Who are you, and who are you working for?"

  He smiled briefly, revealing blood-smeared teeth. His face was white from pain and shock, and beaded with perspiration. He glared into my featureless golden mask.

  "We're everything that ever scared you. We're the wolf in the fold, and the serpent at your bosom. We're the Anti-Droods. And we'll be at your throat till the end of time."

  He bit down hard, and I heard a poison tooth crunch. He convulsed, his eyes starting from his head; and then he was dead.

  "Fanatics," Luther said disgustedly. "I hate fanatics. What was all that Anti-Drood stuff?"

  "Beats the crap out of me," I said.

  And that was when one of the other fanatics activated a suicide bomb. I didn't see him do it, but there was a hell of an explosion, the floor opened up beneath me, and suddenly everything was falling again. It must have been a really nasty? bomb, because it cracked the hotel open from top to bottom. I fell all the way down, crashing through floor after floor, thrashing helplessly, until finally I slammed to a halt back in the lobby, right back where I started. It took me some time to dig my way out of the tons of rubble, but eventually I emerged from the mess of what had once been a very large and expensive hotel. After a while, Luther emerged to join me.

  "You know," he said. "We really don't appreciate our armour enough."

  "Can you hear sirens?" I said. "I'm pretty sure I can hear sirens. And there are crowds gathering. I think we need to get the hell out of Dodge."

  "Yeah," said Luther. "Let someone else sort this mess out."

  "I think we've done all we can," I said.

  "The Matriarch really isn't going to pleased with us, is she?" said Luther.

  "Is she ever?" I said.

  CHAPTER TWO

  You Can Go Home Again, But Trust Me, You'll Regret It. When it all goes wrong, when the mission's a failure, the bad guy gets away with the prize and you've just demolished a perfectly good brand-new hotel… it's time to call it a day and go home. Secret agents can't really hang around to say sorry, and help fill in the insurance paperwork. So I headed for the airport and left Luther to talk with his people, make what excuses he could, cover up the rest, and generally stonewall any inquiry as to what actually happened. Let him make use of those important connections he was so proud of.

  Cleaning up the mess afterwards is always the hardest part of any mission; so mostly I don't bother. Get in, get out, and then disappear while everyone else is still standing around waiting for the smoke to clear. I did offer a few possible excuses to Luther… Gas explosion, that's always a good one. Or maybe a terrorist bomb, by the Aesthetic Liberation Army. On the unanswerable grounds that the Magnificat was just too offensively ugly to be allowed. Visual pollution, and a crime against the senses. I was just getting warmed up, when the taxi Luther had called for me arrived, and he picked me up and threw me bodily into the back of it.

  I can take a hint.

  When I got to the airport, I discovered my family was so eager to have me home again that they'd sent one of the family planes to pick me up. We use Blackhawke jets, lovely sleek black beasts, based around systems reverse engineered from an alien starship that crash-landed in a Wiltshire field in 1947. They can fly faster than any commercial jet, they're shielded from all forms of detection even when they're right on top of you and they can go sideways or even backwards, as required. And no, we haven't shared the technology with anyone else. Droods aren't big on sharing.

  All our planes carry a big stylised Letter D. If anyone at an airport gets curious, we just tell them it stands for Dracula, and they go and find something else to get interested in.

  I was the only passenger on the plane. Rows of empty seats stretched away before me, so I just chose one at random and settled down with a nice glass of pink champagne and the in-flight magazine. Even in a certain amount of disgrace, a Drood is still a Drood, and entitled to all the perks and courtesies. No stewardess, though. Droods don't believe in personal servants; they make you weak. The only human contact I had was the pilot's voice over the intercom. Iain Drood was almost unbearably cheerful as he grilled me for all the nasty details on my latest embarrassment. I could have lived without the word latest.

  "An entire hotel!" Iain said gleefully. "Got to be a personal best, even for you, Eddie. You're not the most subtle of secret agents, are you? Or even the most secret… We can always tell where you've been, because suddenly most of it isn't there anymore… So, how was Hollywood? Did you meet any stars? Did you get any autographs?"

  "I was in Anaheim," I said, at least partly in self-defence to stop him talking for a while. "That's right on the other side of Los Ange les. I didn't even get a sniff of anything glamorous. Now, if you don't mind, I have some serious brooding to be getting on with."

  "Oh sure, don't mind me! Keep your seat belt on, help yourself to the complimentary peanuts, and if we hit any turbulence try and get some of it in the bag provided."

  He finally shut up so he could concentrate on his takeoff, and I leafed listlessly through the in-flight magazine, the Drood Times. We have our own monthly magazine, never distributed outside the family. In fact, all copies self-destruct if anyone without Drood DNA even touches the cover. The current issue's headline was THE MATRIARCH'S BACK! AND THIS TIME IT'S PERSONAL! READ OUR BIG NEW INTERVIEW FOR ALL HER PLANS FOR A NEW AND IMPROVED FAMILY, EXTENSIONS TO DROOD HALL, AND HOW TO KEEP EXPLOSIONS IN THE ARMOURY TO AN ABSOLUTE MINIMUM. The Drood Times is rather like one of those long chatty letters people include with their Christmas cards, filling you in on all the latest news and gossip concerning people you really don't know or care about.

  The magazine is bright and cheerful and almost unbearably glossy, contains no adverts, and yet still seems to go on forever. The Droods are a really big family, and the sheer amount of news, gossip, cheerful chatter and character assassination results in a monthly issue big enough to stun an attacking bear. I do flick through it, on occasion. We all do. If only to see if we're in it. There's nothing like living together in one big Hall to get on everyone's nerves; and if nothing else, the extremely lengthy letter columns do allow us to let off steam safely. I tend not to appear in the magazine much; except as a Bad Example.

  Even when I was running the family.

  I put the magazine to one si
de, and stared glumly out the window. We were already out and over the sea. I tried out a few excuses for size, but none of them seemed especially convincing, so in the end I just gave up and settled for my usual explanation: Look, shit happens, okay?

  The pilot had been instructed to fly me straight home to Drood Hall, so I could make my report… but I overruled him. I wasn't ready to talk to anyone, just yet. So I broke into the cockpit, and told him he could either land at Heathrow in London or I could punch him twenty or thirty times in the head. Given my reputation, he believed me, which was just as well, because I meant it. And I think he was just a little thrilled to have an excuse to disregard the Matriarch's orders for once, even if only by proxy.

  We have our own private landing area at Heathrow, as at all major airports across the world. We have agreements in place with all major governments, organisations and significant individuals the world over. They let us do what we want, and we promise to leave them alone. No one ever says anything, but if questions do get asked, they're usually slammed down with the magic words National Security. On the unanswerable grounds that it's Droods who keep nations secure. It helps that our Blackhawke jets can't be filmed or photographed. One really fanatical plane-spotter did get uncomfortably close a few years back, so we just put him in charge of airport security. Turning poachers into gamekeepers is an old trick.

  I told Iain that he could give my excuses to the Matriarch, or not, as he wished, but that I'd report in at the Hall when I was good and ready, and not before. He said he thought he'd take the long way home, round both poles, so he wouldn't have to touch down at the Hall until after I'd decided to show up. Potentially bright lad, I thought.

  I took a taxi back to my new flat in Kensington. The traditional black London taxicab made a nice change from its LA equivalent. A little ganja-smoking voodoo fetishist goes a long way. The driver here did try to be chatty, but I wore him down with a series of low growls. In revenge he turned his music on high, and it was The Carpenters Greatest Hits all across London, the bastard. I slumped in the back of the cab, tired in body and spirit. I really needed some downtime, before I had to face my family again. The mission had gone quite spectacularly wrong. I should have reported in right away. But… it was only Doctor Delirium. How important could it be?

  I looked out the taxi window, and the familiar London streets rolled past. Places I knew, locations I remembered, all of them looking safe and secure. And all the ordinary people, going about their ordinary business, with no idea of who and what they shared their world with. I could have raised my Sight, and looked on the world as it really was, but I didn't. Sometimes I just liked to pretend that this was it, that this was all there was. At least I have the privilege of choice. These people, with their everyday jobs and ordinary lives, keeping the machinery of the world turning, were my responsibility. My job, to stand between them and the dangers they didn't even know existed. As Droods, we're encouraged to see the world's populations as our children, who must be protected. And if we do our job right, they'll never have to know their nightmares are real.

  Until the day they finally grow up enough that we can trust them with our knowledge. And then we'll all get together and kick the Bad Things right off our world. On that far future day, we'll all be Droods.

  When I gave up the leadership of the family, and went back to being just a field agent again, I left the Hall and returned to London. But I didn't feel like going back to my old place in Knightsbridge. Too many bad memories, from the time when I'd been falsely declared rogue, and the whole family turned on me. They'd trashed my flat, looking for secrets or stolen goods or any evidence they could use against me, but really just as an excuse to take their anger out on me. Someone spray painted the word Traitor! all across one wall. So I didn't go back.

  My nice new flat in Kensington was big, open and very comfortable. The family coughed up for all the best fittings and furnishings, as a way of saying sorry. My new place is not easy to get to, at the end of a cul-de-sac, and I have seen to it that it is very well defended. Against everyone and everything; very definitely including members of my family.? Though I hadn't actually got around to telling them that. I thought I'd just let it come as a nice surprise. Besides, they definitely wouldn't approve of some of the nasty, vile and downright unpleasant things I'd put in place to make my new home safe and secure. Right down to the smallest detail. It's not everyone who's got a banshee for an alarm bell.

  I also have a preprogrammed poltergeist in residence; it clears things up while I'm out, does the dirty dishes, deals with the laundry and even disposes of the garbage for me. My girlfriend Molly Metcalf gave it to me as a moving-in present. She's very thoughtful about things like that. Though I did have to have words with her later, after I discovered she'd set the poltergeist to remove from my collection all the CDs that she didn't approve of.

  How can anyone not like Abba?

  Once home, I took a while to just walk around the flat, checking all the defences were in place, and none of the booby traps had been triggered. I sorted through the post and checked my e-mails, opened some windows to let the fresh air in, and retrieved the Merlin Glass from its hiding place. These days, I keep my very special hand mirror in a subspace pocket dimension, tied to my torc. Only I can reach in and retrieve the Glass; even if you could detect the subspace pocket, which you can't. I called to the Glass, and immediately it appeared in my right hand, looking innocently normal and ordinary. Just a standard old-fashioned hand mirror with a silver backing. But Merlin Satanspawn never made an ordinary or an innocent thing in his life. I said the proper activating Words, and the Glass shook itself back and forth, growing quickly in size, until finally it jumped out of my hand and made itself into a Door, right in front of me. Through this new opening I could see Molly's wildwoods, the hidden place she lived in when she couldn't be with me.

  Through the Merlin Glass I could see rank upon rank of huge trees, falling away before me, heavy with foliage of so bright a green it practically glowed, interspersed with shady glens and tumbling waterfalls. Dust motes danced in long golden shafts of light. Fresh air gusted through the doorway, carrying with it rich scents of grass and greenery and living things. I stepped through the Glass into the forest, and the doorway closed behind me.

  The wildwoods stretched off into the distance in every direction I looked. Massive trees with huge trunks, so tall you could crane your neck right back and still not see the tops of them. Bustling untamed vegetation, that had never known the touch of axe or saw, sprang up everywhere. These were old woods, ancient woods, from primordial times when we all lived in the forest, because the forest was all there was. The air was full of sound; of birds and beasts and insects. These were the woods of Olde Englande, when forests stretched unbroken from coast to coast, and bears and boars and wolves roamed freely, along with other rarer creatures that have long since dropped out of history and into legend. I have seen kelpies and bogles and fenendrees in this place; and they have seen me. Other shapes moved warily among the trees, maintaining a safe distance; large dark shapes that studied me with bright unblinking eyes from the deepest of the shadows. I can come to this place only because Molly loves me; the wild things of the woods are still a long way from trusting me. They were only ever comfortable around me when Molly was there too.

  There was no sign of her now, which was odd. The Merlin Glass always sends a warning ahead of itself, just for her, so she knows I'm coming. Most of the time she's already there, waiting for me. But not now. I called out her name, and it was as though the whole forest was suddenly struck dumb. Every living sound shut off, even the breeze among the branches, as though the whole wood was still, and listening. I called again, my voice echoing on and on through the trees, but there was no reply. A cold chill ran down my neck. The woods didn't feel in any way welcoming, or inviting. And then a squirrel dropped down onto a branch right next to me, and I gave an entirely undignified jump of surprise. The squirrel sniggered loudly, its long russet tail snapping
back and forth. It sat up on its haunches and studied me disdainfully.

  "Hey rube," it said. "Keep the noise down; some of us have important nuts to be gathering. Molly's not here. Why are you here? You're disturbing the wildlife with your presence, and that after-shave of yours is doing absolutely nothing for the local ambience. I mean, yes, we're all happy she's finally found a boyfriend she can bring back to meet the extended family, and all that, but did it have to be a human? She could have done so much better for herself. Still, she's not getting any younger. Her biological clock is getting pretty damned deafening. Have you got her pregnant yet? Well, why not? You humans are too damned complicated for your own good. I could have been born human if I wanted, but I passed the intelligence test. Little squirrel humour there. Have you met her sisters yet?"

  "Not as such," I said, jamming a word in edgeways in self-defence. You might think a talking squirrel is cute, but trust me, they really get on your nerves after a while. "I've heard about Isabella, of course. Who hasn't? Supernatural terrorist, twilight avenger, and so hardcore in her convictions she could scare the wings off an angel. Practically every secret organisation in the world has her on its kill list, and vice versa."

  "What about Louisa?" said the squirrel, knowingly. "She's the one you have to watch out for. She's really scary."

  "Well," I said. "Something to look forward to."

  The squirrel cocked its head on one side, and considered me thoughtfully with a dark beady eye. "You do know this isn't going to work?" it said, almost kindly. "You and Molly? Love doesn't conquer all, and happy endings are just something you humans made up, to help you get through the nights. Molly is at war with the Droods, and always will be."

  "You see?" I said. "We have so much in common."

  The squirrel shrugged. "None so blind as those who've shoved two fingers in their eyes. Look, Molly's gone off gallivanting with Isabella, and no I don't know where, or when she might be back. She didn't leave any messages, and she didn't talk to anyone before she left. Our Molly's been playing her cards very close to her chest, ever since she met you. You're a bad influence on her, which is strange, because it's usually the other way round. You can hang around here and wait, if you want, but frankly I wouldn't. You make the wildlife uneasy, and there'll probably be an incident."