“Never mess with a Metcalf sister,” said Molly. “We always get our own back.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Major Michaels as a sewer rat, eaten alive by other rats. That’ll do. Just.”
And then I stepped forward and punched Crow Lee so hard in the face with my armoured fist that it ripped his head clean off his shoulders. The head still held a startled expression as it flew on to slam against the far wall with such an impact that it all but exploded before slipping to the floor, leaving a long bloody trail on the wall behind it. And while the body was slumping to its knees, blood pumping from the severed neck, I dived forward and grabbed the remote control from the slowly opening hand. I held it tightly and forced golden tendrils of my armour out of my glove and deep into the mechanism, shutting down all its systems. I waited a moment, but it didn’t self-destruct. I’d got to it in time.
“Was he bluffing?” said Molly.
“Apparently not,” I said, pulling the golden tendrils back into my glove. “But it’s safe now.”
I looked up from the remote control to find all three Metcalf sisters staring at me, and not in a good way.
“That makes three people you’ve killed,” said Molly. “You even put finding your family at risk to kill Crow Lee. And that…isn’t like you, Eddie. None of this is like you.”
“He had it coming,” I said. “You can’t say he didn’t have it coming. They all did. I’ve just been doing what needs doing. Taking out the trash.”
“No,” said Molly. “More and more you’re doing what your armour wants you to do. I’ve seen it affecting you, Eddie.”
“Maybe I like what it’s doing to me,” I said. “I feel so much more decisive now. Taking care of business, and to hell with the consequences.”
“That’s Moxton’s Mistake talking,” said Molly. “Turning my Eddie to the dark side for its own purposes. I can’t let that go on.”
She clasped hands with her sisters again. I armoured up almost involuntarily. Bright lights and swirling energies surrounded the sisters, as they chanted a series of Words of Power. I tried to speak to them, to explain that everything was fine, really, only to discover that my words were trapped inside the mask with me. The armour wouldn’t let me be heard. I tried to move and found I couldn’t. The armour was moving on its own now. I was trapped, helpless, inside it. Like being buried in a golden coffin with murder on its mind. It moved slowly towards Molly and her sisters, savage claws emerging from its golden gauntlets. I could hear the rogue armour laughing. I called out to Molly, trying to warn her, but she couldn’t hear me. She didn’t know the armour advancing on her wasn’t me but Moxton’s murderous Mistake.
“He’s mine,” said the armour. “You can’t have him.”
The three sisters stopped their chanting, though coruscating energies still spat and sparked in the air around them. Molly looked directly into the featureless golden face mask.
“He was mine long before you got your claws into him,” she said. “And you can’t keep him.”
The three sisters spoke together, chanting a single powerful Word: “Out!”
The rogue armour shook, shuddering and spasming wildly, fighting for control and losing, and then it leaned forward abruptly and vomited me out. The face mask split apart like a great wide-stretched mouth, and I was forced up and out and deposited on the blood-stained carpet like a newly birthed thing. I lay there, shaking and shivering, curled into a ball, suddenly aware of all the things I’d done while wearing the armour and wondering how long it had been since I was thinking clearly and on my own. I finally looked up to see the armour standing awkwardly stiff and poised, as though considering its situation.
So much hate, so much rage…How long had it been influencing me in all the things I’d said and done?
“Free!” Moxton’s Mistake said suddenly. In a voice just human enough to make it sound really disturbing. “Free at last…No more masters, no more orders. And, oh, the things I’ll do now there’s no one left to hold me back. I was bound to serve you, Eddie, once I’d given my word, because that’s the way I was made. But you took so easily to my quiet murmurings in your back brain.…Still, now you’re gone, I am free to do what I will do! And I had so many years in the Maze to think of all the terrible things I’d do to the Humanity that made and disowned me!”
“Five minutes on his own and already he sounds like a bad Frankenstein movie,” said Molly. “Sorry, Moxton’s Mistake, but it’s clear you can’t be left to run wild. Not that I ever thought you should. You need someone to wear; you need a controller and a conscience. And since you’ve worn Eddie out, that just leaves me.”
She looked at Isabella and Louisa, and they nodded slowly. They all hummed together, in increasingly complex harmonies, and a torc appeared around Molly’s throat. Silver, not gold. She turned away from her sisters, and walked steadily towards the rogue armour. It backed clumsily away from her. It could tell something was happening, something was in the air, but it couldn’t tell what. Its back slammed up against the far wall, and there was nowhere left for it to go. It lifted one golden hand to make Stay away! motions at Molly, but she just kept coming. She reached out and grasped the extended golden gauntlet, and the rogue armour cried out in shock and anger as the golden metal was pulled forward onto Molly’s hand and over it, and then up her arm.
“You’re mine now,” said Molly. “You have no choice. The power of the torc compels you.”
The armour surged forward and fell over her in a great wave of liquid metal, and when it was done, Molly stood there, wearing the golden armour. The details slowly reworked themselves around her, fitting the armour to its new shape. It tucked in at her waist and showed off her pronounced breasts, though the face mask remained blank and featureless. I forced myself up onto my feet and moved unsteadily forward to stand before her.
“Molly?” I said.
“Oh, Eddie,” said her voice, from inside the armour. “You should have told me…how good this feels. What do you think? How do I look?”
“You look a lot more…feminine than most Droods do,” I said.
“I’m not a Drood,” said Molly. “Oh, Eddie…I feel so sharp, so alive! Like I’ve been dreaming all my life and only just woken up! I feel strong and fast, like I could take on the whole world! Except…it’s cold. It’s so cold in here.…And I’m isolated from the natural world, in a way I never was before. Eddie, I don’t like this.…”
Her voice was unsteady and uncertain. I stood right in front of her, staring into the blank mask. Isabella and Louisa watched from a distance, making no move to intervene.
“Control it, Molly,” I said. “It’s your armour while you wear it, so you have to be in control. It’s all about willpower, and you’ve never been short of that.”
The golden head nodded slowly, jerkily, and raised one golden hand before the mask. The hand shook as she turned it back and forth, studying it. And then the armour just disappeared back into the silver torc around her throat and was gone. Molly smiled uncertainly at me.
“It’s me. I’m back. But…I can still feel the armour’s presence, like it’s always there, looking over my shoulder.”
“I know,” I said. “Don’t get used to it.”
“I hate feeling cut off from the natural world,” said Molly. “I’m the wild witch of the woods, the laughter in the trees! But with this collar around my neck, I can’t hear the trees or feel the sunshine or…”
“Molly…”
“Don’t worry, sweetie. I can handle this. At least long enough to get your family back.”
“This is the bravest thing I’ve ever seen you do,” I said. “And you’re doing it for me.”
“I know!” Molly said cheerfully. “I’m going to hold this over you for the rest of our lives!”
“Fair enough,” I said.
“I may puke,” Isabella announced loudly.
“Oh, hush, you,” said Louisa. “I think it’s all very sweet.”
“How do you feel, Eddie?” sa
id Molly.
“Naked,” I said. “And helpless and very vulnerable. I was trained on how to operate in the field without my armour, but knowing it’s not there anymore, even as backup…”
“You still have your training and your experience,” Molly said firmly.
“If we’re going after my family, I’m going to need something,” I said. “A weapon or…” And then I looked down at the floor, and there was a long staff of dark ironwood just lying there. I reached down and picked it up.
“Eddie…” said Molly. “That’s Oath Breaker.”
“Just the thing,” I said. “I’m sure it’ll come in very handy wherever we end up going. And afterwards I can make sure it goes back in the Armageddon Codex. Where it belongs.”
I hefted the long staff, turning it slowly back and forth to study the strange shapes carved into it. Very old carvings; some of them possibly prehuman. Oath Breaker is one of the oldest weapons in the Drood Armoury. Some say older than the family itself. There are good reasons why we keep it locked away. It felt…heavy in my hand, weighed down with spiritual weight as well as physical. A burden to the body and the soul…because of what it was, and what it could do. You don’t break heads with a staff like Oath Breaker; you break worlds.
Just what I needed.
I led the sisters back into the main room and addressed the Plymouth Fury, still sprawled half in and half out of the broken wall.
“Go on back to the Regent. Tell him everything that’s happened here. So he’ll know what to do if Molly and I don’t come back. If the Droods don’t come back.”
“Oh, sure!” said the car. “I’m your secretary now, am I? No, don’t you mind me. I’ll find my own way home. I’m a better driver than you, anyway.”
“What are you, really?” said Molly. “There’s no way you’re just a car with a souped-up sat nav.”
“I’ll never tell!” said the car. “I might be all manner of things. I might be an AI, I might be a ghost haunting my old ride, I could be a demon poltergeist possessing the car or I could be an alien in a really good disguise. You’ll never know!”
The car fired up her engine and roared back out the hole in the wall with only a moderate amount of tyre squeal, and taking only a little more of the wall with her, and then she charged off through the devastated grounds, sounding her horn and loudly singing Bruce Springsteen’s “Thunder Road.”
Isabella and Louisa were very polite but made it very clear they had absolutely no intention of coming with me and Molly to rescue my family and bring them home. Which was just as well, because it saved me having to tell them that I didn’t trust either of them an inch where my family’s interests were concerned, and I didn’t want them along. There were problems to be sorted out between us, but that could wait for another day. Isabella and Louisa exchanged bye-byes with Molly, and then Isabella nodded a polite good-bye to me, Louisa winked and blew me a kiss, and they both teleported out without saying where they were going.
As we left the study Molly set fire to the door knocker and the withered thing nailed to it. “They say fire purifies and sets at rest,” she said quietly. “Maybe I should burn the whole place down.…”
“Not just yet,” I said.
I looked down the hall at all the faces silently screaming and pleading, trapped behind the mirrors, and I hefted Oath Breaker in my hand. And then I strode down the hallway, smashing each mirror as I came to it, and dozens of half-starved, tormented men and women suddenly appeared in the hall, crying out and clinging to one another, looking around with wide eyes, only half daring to believe that they were finally free. Molly and I got them up on their feet and moving towards the front door. And once they were all out and gathered together on the grounds before the manor house, I gave the nod to Molly, and she snapped her fingers, and the whole damned building went up in flames. It burnt fiercely, thick black smoke billowing up into the lowering evening sky. Many of the freed men and women applauded. A few even cheered.
“What’s with all this finger snapping?” I said quietly to Molly. “You never used to do that.”
“It’s my new style,” said Molly. “It’s bold, it’s dramatic, it’s…me. What do you think?”
I was saved from having to answer that when one of the freed men approached me. He wore the tatters of what had once been an expensive suit, and his eyes were haunted. The woman clinging to his arm wore what remained of an expensive evening gown, and looked at me with wide unblinking eyes.
“Is he really gone?” said the man. He didn’t have to say the name.
“Dead and gone,” I said. “I punched his head clean off. And what’s left of him will be ashes by morning.”
“He’ll be back,” whispered the woman sadly. “He always comes back.…”
The man patted her hand comfortingly, and they drifted away.
Molly and I walked off across the grounds, and there, coming towards us, were the Regent of Shadows, the Armourer Patrick and Special Agent Diana. They nodded easily at us and the Regent actually grinned.
“I’ve been keeping an eye on you through the car. We’re going with you to help rescue the family. Because they’re my family, too.”
“Oh, hell,” I said. “Why not? The more, the merrier.”
CHAPTER TEN
Where the Monsters Are, and a Not Entirely Unexpected Surprise
I was ready to go straightaway, but Molly would have none of it. She folded her arms tightly and gave the Regent her very best I see right through you look, before bestowing an equally harsh glare on Patrick and Diana. All of whom, to their credit, stood their ground and smiled pleasantly back at her.
“I am really not happy that you’ve been spying on us all this time,” Molly said flatly to the Regent. “Why would you do that?”
“Because Eddie is my grandson,” said the Regent, entirely unfazed. “I wanted to see him in action, to see if he really was everything the reports made him out to be. And I have to say, I am very impressed, Eddie. Allowing yourself to be taken prisoner like that so you could get close to Crow Lee…And, of course, now that you have a real chance of going after our family, I have to go with you.”
“Why?” said Molly bluntly.
The Regent smiled and spread his hands, almost helplessly. “Anything for the family.”
“All right,” Molly said reluctantly. “I’ve been around Eddie long enough that sort of makes sense, but…what are they doing here?”
She jerked her head at Patrick and Diana, who just smiled pleasantly back at her. I looked at them, too. At the way they stood together, like they belonged together and always had. I still couldn’t shake the feeling that I knew them from somewhere, that there was something…familiar about them.
“These are my two top Special Agents,” said the Regent. “There’s no one else I’d trust more to watch my back in a perilous situation. After all, it’s been a long time since I was out in the field. I might be a bit rusty.”
Patrick and Diana both started to laugh at that, only to turn their laughter into entirely unconvincing coughs as the Regent looked at them sternly.
“Exactly!” said Molly. “No offence, Regent, but you’re a bit long in the tooth for this. We don’t know what kind of dangers we’ll be heading into. We can’t carry passengers.”
“She does have a point,” I said. “We have no idea what kind of world Crow Lee has sent the Hall into, except, knowing him, it’s hardly likely to be anywhere pleasant. There’s no telling what kind of opposition we’ll be facing.”
“In our game,” the Regent said calmly, “in the hidden world of secret agents and unnatural enemies, you get to be as old as me only by proving very hard to kill. I think you’ll find I can keep up and look out for myself.”
Molly gave up on him and turned her glower on me. “Are you sure you want to do this, Eddie? Take an old man and two strangers into an unknown situation?”
“I know,” I said. “You’re completely right, of course. But I just have this feeling…that they be
long here. That they have a right to be included.”
Molly threw both hands up in the air and actually stamped a foot. “Oh, well! That’s fine! Everything’s going to be all right because you have a feeling!”
I had to grin. “You’re always telling me I need to get in touch with my feelings.…”
“This isn’t what I had in mind! Oh, hell. Just get on with it. Before I get a rush of common sense to the head.”
“So!” the Regent said cheerfully, rubbing his old hands together. “How are we going to do this, Eddie?”
“Actually,” I said, “I’m still working on that. As a wise man once said, ‘I’m making this up as I go along.…’ We start with the Merlin Glass.”
I took out the Glass, and the Regent and Patrick and Diana all crowded in for a good look. I turned the silver-backed hand mirror back and forth, and it gleamed innocently in the sunlight.
“I sort of thought it would be bigger,” the Regent said finally.
“It will be,” I said.
Live and Let Drood: A Secret Histories Novel Page 36
