"Then why did you agree to see me?" I said, feeling a slow hot
anger build within me. "I don’t have time to waste."
He sneered at me. "I always wondered if you’d be the one they
sent to kill me. If they ever did find a way to dismantle my little safeguards.
You killed poor Arnold, after all, and you did live just up the road from me."
"How did you kill the Bloody Man, Eddie?" said Molly. "I mean, I
thought the armour made all you Droods invulnerable."
"Only when we’re wearing it," I said. "I staked him out, learned
his routine, and then shot him through the head from a safe distance using a
rifle with a telescopic sight. He never knew I was there, never got the chance
to armour up. Very effective; if not especially honourable. But I was a lot
younger then, and he was the Bloody Man. You don’t take chances with a man like
that."
Sebastian smiled. "Funny you should say that, Edwin."
There was a sudden sting in my neck even as I heard the window
glass beside me shatter. I started to turn. I thought, I’ve been shot. And then
my legs were buckling, and I sank very slowly to my knees. I put my hand up to
my neck, and it seemed to take forever to get there. Sound slowed, and my vision
blurred, as though I was underwater. My numbing fingers found a feathered dart
in the side of my neck, just above the torc, and I pulled it out with the last
of my strength. Tranquilizer dart, I thought, and the words seemed to echo
around and around inside my head. I tried to call up my armour, but my thoughts
were already too dulled to concentrate on the activating Words. I slumped to the
floor, hitting it in a boneless heap, and I didn’t even feel the impact.
This all happened in a few seconds. Molly threw herself down
beside me, below the shattered window, out of the line of sight of any more
darts. She put her hands on either side of my face and muttered urgently under
her breath. I could feel her touch when I couldn’t feel anything else, and then
I felt subtle magics flowing into me, fighting off the effects of the
tranquilizer. My body was still numb, still helpless, but my thoughts slowly
began to clear. Molly glared up at Sebastian.
"You bastard! You sold us out!"
"Of course," he said smoothly, giving all his attention to the
adjusting of a cuff. "It’s what I do. Rest assured, I got a very good price. For
both of you. A certain Mr. Truman of Manifest Destiny was very pleased to learn
exactly where and when he could be sure of finding you. I was on the phone to
him the moment I stopped talking to you. And then all I had to do was keep you
entertained here until his people could get into position."
The door burst in, and a dozen armed men streamed into the
apartment, all of them in familiar black uniforms. They looked quickly around to
make sure the place was secure, their guns constantly trained on Molly and me.
She stayed very still. I twitched my fingers ever so slightly. Molly’s magics
were fighting off the drug, but only very slowly. I looked at the guns and
wondered why the soldiers weren’t already shooting. I would have. One of the men
knelt down beside me, checked the sluggish pulse in my neck, and then stood up
again, satisfied. He yelled out the open door, and his group commander sauntered
in. And if I hadn’t been so tranked, I would have yelled out in shock and anger.
I knew the group commander. She wore battered old army fatigues
still stiff with dried black blood from fighting in a hell dimension. She wore
her black hair cropped short, so enemies couldn’t grab at it during close
combat. Her scarred face was no longer pretty, and her bare muscular arms were
scarred too. I knew all these things about her because I knew her. She was
Janissary Jane, an old friend and colleague to Molly and to me. Except it wasn’t
her. Not really. Around her neck she wore a Kandarian amulet on a chain, and
that meant this was really my old adversary Archie Leech.
Archie Leech, serial possessor, occupying another stolen body.
Only this time he’d taken someone who mattered to me, no doubt in revenge for
what I’d done to him in that cellar under Harley Street. Archie/Jane swaggered
forward into Sebastian’s apartment and grinned down at me, proudly waggling the
gun she’d used to shoot me. And then she shot Sebastian in the neck with another
tranquilizer dart. Sebastian crashed to the floor, thrashed awkwardly for a
moment, and then was still, an almost comical look of shock on his face. I would
have laughed if I could. The betrayer betrayed. Archie strolled over to him, his
exaggerated masculine movements out of place in Jane’s body.
"You really should have seen that one coming, Sebastian. You got
soft, living on your own. Playing at being the gentlemen thief. Got cocky,
thinking no one could touch you. You should have realised two Droods were always
going to be worth more than one." She turned abruptly back to look down on me
and smiled happily. "How do you like my new body, Eddie? I thought I’d slip into
something a little more comfortable this time. You know…I hate it when you
destroy my bodies before I’m finished with them. Before I’ve squeezed every last
bit of fun out of them. So this time I went out of my way to take a friend of
yours just to prove that I’ll always be able to hurt you so much more than you
can hurt me."
She kicked me in the ribs a couple of times just to make his
point. The force of the blows was enough to lift me up off the floor, but I
hardly felt them. My hands and my feet were tingling, and my face wasn’t as numb
as it had been, but that was all. Molly’s magic was working. My head was
clearing fast. I probably could have armoured up, but I didn’t want to risk it,
not just yet. Not with so many guns trained on Molly as well as me. So I lay
still, watching and listening and biding my time. Molly stayed down beside me,
also keeping very still, giving Archie no reason to trank her too.
"What happens now?" she said, her voice carefully calm and
nonthreatening.
"I deliver the three of you to Mr. Truman," said Archie. "My
current and very generous employer. He can’t wait to get his hands on two Droods
and their torcs. I understand he has a whole team of surgeons standing by, ready
to take his two new prizes apart one piece at a time, until they find out just
what it is about a Drood and his torc that’s so special. A very slow, very
painful process, I should think…Maybe Mr. Truman will let me watch, if I ask
nicely. Apparently he was very impressed by what three armoured agents were able
to do to the very well-trained and expensive army he threw at them. He can’t
wait till he’s able to put a torc around the neck of every Manifest Destiny
soldier, and then turn them loose on the world. I do so admire a man with
ambition…"
"He won’t learn a thing from vivisection," Molly said flatly.
"Except to remember what happened to the goose that laid golden eggs."
Archie shrugged with Jane’s shoulders. "I don’t think he cares
that much. He just needs someone to take out his rage on. He really is very
upset at what those three Droods did to his fine army. You should have heard
him! I suggested he just kill Eddie and Sebastian, and then bring them back as
zombies. Then he’d have two Droods with torcs who’d do anything he told them to.
But apparently that wasn’t enough for him. The Droods have torcs, so he has to
have them too. It’s a parity thing. But you shouldn’t feel left out, Molly; I
gather he has quite detailed plans for you too. He keeps special torture cells
for those of his own people who turn on him."
Strength flooded suddenly through me as Molly’s magics stamped
out the last of the drug’s effects. Sensation flooded back through every part of
me, and my thoughts were clear and sharp. I looked up at Molly, caught her eye,
and mouthed the word Now. She grinned back at me and lashed out at the watching
armed men with a simple tangle spell. All twelve of them crashed to the floor at
once, their muscles spasming helplessly as witchy lightning crawled all over
them, spitting and crackling. The spell hit Archie Leech too, but she just
staggered backwards, fighting the spell with the strength the amulet gave him.
I was already up on my feet, heading for Archie. And thinking
desperately on how to stop him without killing or even damaging Janissary Jane.
I’d had to kill Archie’s last host body to stop him, but I couldn’t do that
here. No more dead innocents on my watch. Unfortunately that gave him the
advantage. He wouldn’t care what happened to Jane’s body; he could always jump
to another. I slammed into Archie’s stolen body just as she shrugged off the
last of the tangle spell, and the two of us hit the floor together. The gun flew
from Archie’s hand, and she struggled fiercely under me, fighting to draw the
knife at her belt.
I grabbed the Kandarian amulet in both my hands. It tried to
evade me, twisting this way and that, but at such close quarters there was
nowhere for it to go. I closed both my hands around the awful thing, squeezing
them tightly shut, and the amulet burned my palms with a cold fiercer than any
heat. I subvocalised my activating Words, and the golden armour surged around me
in a moment even as Archie finally got her knife free and thrust it at my ribs.
The heavy steel blade slammed and shattered against my armour as the living
metal flowed over both my hands and what they contained. The Kandarian amulet
was now inside my armour with me, sealed off and insulated from the rest of the
world. And that was all it took to sever Archie’s connection to the amulet.
I rolled away from Archie as he screamed like a damned soul,
Jane’s body thrashing and kicking as his possessing spirit lost its hold on her,
and she forced him out. Archie had nowhere to go; his original body had been
destroyed long ago. I used my Sight and saw Archie’s real shape superimposed
over Jane’s, just for a moment. And then his soul fell away from the world,
howling horribly, summoned at last to the Hell that had been waiting for him for
so long. I turned off my Sight. I didn’t want to See what was waiting for him.
Janissary Jane lay unconscious on the floor, twitching and
shuddering. Physically exhausted and in psychic shock, probably. But she’d
recover. She was a fighter and had known worse in her time.
The Kandarian amulet writhed inside my enclosing hands like a
living thing, burning colder than the fiercest winter. A coldness of the heart,
and of the soul. I could feel its presence inside the armour with me, fighting
to impose its will on mine. The armour couldn’t protect me while the amulet was
inside it. I seemed to a hear a dark inhuman chorus of voices drawing slowly
closer: Join us. Join us. Just the sound sickened me, as though something had
trailed slime across my mind. I armoured down, and the moment the living metal
disappeared from my hands, I threw the nasty thing away from me.
The amulet skidded across the floor and Sebastian snapped out of
his apparent stupor, rolled to one side, and snatched it up. He scrambled to his
feet, smiling terribly as he clutched his prize to his heart. "You’re not the
only one who can play possum, Eddie; I protected myself against all poisons
years ago. And now…I have power beyond dreams. Because if you haven’t got the
balls to use this, Eddie, I have. I shall enjoy hundreds of bodies, young
bodies, and live lifetimes…"
"Throw it away," I said, rising slowly to my feet. "It’ll
destroy you."
"Like that fool Archie Leech? I don’t think so. I can control
it."
"No one can control it," I said. "It corrupts. That’s what it
does. You’ll end up just like Archie, a spiritual rapist."
"I need a new body," said Sebastian. "This one’s getting old.
It’s slower, and it lets me down. People like me shouldn’t have to grow old. Not
when we enjoy life so much. Appreciate its pleasures and its qualities so much.
It isn’t right that someone like me should die just because an old body is
wearing out." He smiled at me, and it wasn’t his smile, not anymore. "Maybe I’ll
take your body, Eddie, just for a little test drive. See what it can do. And
maybe I’ll do awful, awful things with your body, just for the fun of it."
Molly hit him over the head from behind with the Manx Cat
statuette, and he crumpled to the floor, unconscious. He’d been so taken up in
taunting me that he never even noticed Molly sneaking up behind him. The Manx
Cat cracked into pieces, crumbled, and fell apart. Molly looked at me, shrugged
and smiled, and brushed the last few bits off her hands. The Kandarian amulet
had spilled out of Sebastian’s hand as he collapsed, and now it lay on the floor
between us. Such a small thing, to be so evil. I stepped forward and stamped on
it, and the ancient stone crumbled into dust under my heel.
But with the Manx Cat shattered, the power sustaining Molly’s
tangle spell was gone too, and the dozen black-uniformed men scrambled to their
feet again, raising their guns. Mad as hell at being taken out so easily, they
all opened fire on Molly. The bullets hit her again and again, sending her
staggering backwards under the repeated impacts. Blood spurted from dozens of
wounds, snapping her head back and forth, and she couldn’t get enough breath to
scream. Finally the men stopped firing, and Molly fell, as though that was all
that had been holding her up. I fell to my knees beside her and grabbed her
hand. She tried to say something to me, blood gushing and spraying painfully
from her mouth, and all I could do was hold her hand until at last the life went
out of her eyes. I looked up at the armed men, and they all fell back a step,
afraid of whatever it was they saw in my face.
But I wasn’t going to kill them. That wasn’t enough.
I finally thought to hit the button on my reverse watch and
rewind time. I’d almost left it too long. The watch didn’t want to take me far
enough back, but I just hit it again and again and again, until finally it took
me back to the point where the armed men were just starting to train their guns
on Molly. I threw myself in front of her, between her and the bullets, armouring
up as I went. The living metal swept over me even as the bullets flew through
the air; and fast as the bullets were, the armour was faster. Every single shot
that would have killed Molly ricocheted off me instead.