Live and Let Drood: A Secret Histories Novel (29 page)

“I’m pretty sure it was Crow Lee,” I said, and then had to break off as the Regent slammed his fist on the desktop.

“Of course it’s him! Has to be him! Only he’d have the brass nerve…Cheeky bugger! I was talking to him just the other week, and he never so much as hinted at what he was planning. He must have known I’d have thrown this whole organisation against him if I’d known.…”

“Would you?” said Molly. “Would you really? You’d have risked everything you’ve built up to save the family that threw you out?”

“Once a Drood, always a Drood,” said the Regent. “Right, Eddie?”

“Unfortunately, yes,” I said. “You have to understand, Molly, despite everything, it’s always going to be
Anything for the family.
It’s bred in the bone.”

“Trust me, I had noticed,” said Molly.

“Crow Lee…” said the Regent, rubbing his hands together briskly. “I’ve been searching for some way to bring down that arrogant little shit for years. They don’t call him the Most Evil Man in the World for nothing. But as I’m sure I’m not the first to say…he’s always been too well connected for me to touch. I couldn’t even get near him because of his powerful friends in high and low places.”

Molly looked at me. “If the Droods knew what Crow Lee was, why didn’t they take him down? Connections in high places shouldn’t have been any obstacle to your family.”

“Crow Lee’s connections aren’t just with the Thrones of this World,” I said patiently. “We’re not just talking about the everyday movers and shakers of politics and big business. Though he certainly has enough of them by the balls…No, Crow Lee made compacts with Above and Below, long ago. With the Houses of Pain and the Shimmering Plains, trading them…something they wanted in return for power and protection. And, no, we don’t know what the deal involved.” I looked at the Regent hopefully, but he just shook his head briefly.

“I have heard rumours,” the Regent said slowly. “And I feel I should make it clear that I have no actual evidence…rumours that Crow Lee had some kind of hold over the Droods. Enough of a hold to keep them at bay all these years…”

“A hold?” I said. “What kind of a hold are we talking about here?”

“Like I said, all I have are rumours, most of them contradictory. But to keep Crow Lee off the Drood agenda for so long, it would have to concern some of the highest people in the family.”

“Blackmail,” Molly said succinctly.

“Could be,” said the Regent. “But if it was, I’ve never been able to find out who or what was involved. And believe me, I’ve tried. You were head of the family for a while there, Eddie. Did anyone ever say anything to you?”

“No,” I said. “I’m only just beginning to discover how much they managed to keep from me. And given all the terrible and sometimes downright appalling things my family has cheerfully admitted to down the years…what could Crow Lee know about that’s bad enough to give him a hold over us?”

“What if he lost this hold?” said Molly. “After all the changes your family’s been through of late, maybe what he knew just didn’t matter anymore. What if the ones being blackmailed were finally in a position to tell him to go to hell? That might have been enough to provoke his attack. If the Droods were finally getting ready to go after him, maybe he decided to get his preemptive strike in first.”

“Or maybe he just saw the family in a weakened state and decided to take them off the board while he had the chance,” said the Regent. “After all your recent wars, the Hungry Gods and the Loathly Ones, the Immortals and the Great Satanic Conspiracy…the family’s lost a lot of good people, Eddie. You’ve never looked so vulnerable.”

And then we all looked round sharply as the door banged open and Miss Mitchell strode in. She wasn’t carrying a tea tray this time.

“I didn’t call you, Miss Mitchell,” said the Regent. “And this really isn’t a good time.…”

“Crow Lee sends his regards,” said Miss Mitchell, the pleasant and plain middle-aged woman in the cheap dress. She raised the Luger at her side and shot the Regent three times in the chest. I cried out as the impact of the bullets threw him right out of his chair. I was up on my feet in a moment and then froze as Miss Mitchell brought up her other hand to show me the clicker she was holding.

“Crow Lee gave me this. He got it from someone in your family. Something to hold your armour in your collar, so I can kill you. And I will kill you, Edwin Drood, because that’s what Crow Lee wants. He wants your whole stupid family dead and gone. And I will do anything for Crow Lee because he loves me.”

She smiled brightly at me and hit the clicker. I called my armour and it came, sweeping over me from head to foot in a moment. Miss Mitchell looked blankly into my featureless golden face mask and hit
the clicker again and again. It had clearly been programmed to affect my old strange-matter armour; not the new rogue armour. Miss Mitchell fired her gun at me, shooting me at point-blank range again and again, and the bullets just ricocheted away harmlessly.

“It’s not fair,” said Miss Mitchell. “It’s not fair! Cheater!”

I took a step towards her. She fell back a step and then raised the Luger and pressed it against her head. She looked at me defiantly.

“Crow Lee loves me!”

She shot herself, and the Luger blew half her head away. She crumbled bonelessly to the floor. I armoured down, and looked at Molly.

“You could have stopped her,” said Molly. “You could have slapped that gun right out of her hand, with your speed, before she could have pulled the trigger.”

“You could have stopped her,” I said. “You could have made her gun disappear or turned it into a flower. But you didn’t.”

“She was a traitor,” said Molly. “And neither of us have ever had any time for traitors.”

“She killed my grandfather,” I said. “And she would have killed me.”

Molly moved forward and put her hands on my chest. “Oh, Eddie. I’m so sorry about your grandfather. You’d only just found him again.…”

“I will avenge him,” I said flatly. “I will kill Crow Lee and everyone who stands with him. I’ve always been able to do that much for my family.”

“No need for that, thank you,” said the Regent, getting stiffly back onto his feet again. He brushed vaguely at his clothes and then shook himself briskly. Molly and I looked at him blankly, and he grinned.

“But…you don’t have Drood armour anymore!” I said. “You said…”

“I don’t,” said the Regent. “So I had to improvise. I knew all kinds of people would be gunning for me once I’d left Drood Hall, so I made…other arrangements.” He undid the top few buttons of his shirt and pulled it open to reveal a large glowing amulet on his chest, apparently fused directly to his skin. There was a large golden eye in
the centre of the amulet, and it glared at me unblinkingly. I stirred uneasily. It could see me. I could tell. The Regent tapped the amulet proudly, and then buttoned up his shirt again. “Kayleigh’s Eye, a very old and very potent thing from Somewhere Else. Absolutely guaranteed to protect the wearer from any and all forms of attack. You wouldn’t believe what I had to give the previous owner in exchange.”

“Hold everything,” said Molly. “Last I heard, Kayleigh’s Eye was in the Nightside, very firmly owned by the Salvation Army Sisterhood.”

The Regent just smiled at her. “Kayleigh had more than one eye.” He moved over to look down at the dead woman lying on his carpet in a widening pool of blood. He shook his head sadly. “Poor Miss Mitchell. Crow Lee lied to you, dear. He didn’t love you. He doesn’t love anyone. But I do have to wonder: If he could get to you, who else in Uncanny might he have got his hooks into? Hello. What’s this?”

I was there before him, picking up the clicker Miss Mitchell had dropped, and tucking it carefully away in my pocket.

“Just a weapon that didn’t work,” I said.

The Regent looked at me thoughtfully. And then we all looked round sharply as the office door banged open and Ankani burst into the room, sari swirling around her, a large gun in each hand, ready for trouble. She checked that the Regent was safe, and only then looked at Molly and me before finally looking down at the body on the floor. I stood very still, ready to call on my armour, while Molly’s hands moved slowly and subtly in dangerous ways. Ankani knelt down to study what was left of Miss Mitchell’s head, and then shrugged and lowered her guns. She straightened up, stepped back a pace to avoid the spreading blood and looked to the Regent for orders.

“Nice reaction time, my dear,” the Regent said briskly, “but right now I’m more interested in how Miss Mitchell was able to smuggle a bloody big handgun past all our supposedly top-rank security measures. Find out, Ankani. You are authorised to use severe language and excessive force. I’m also authorising a complete lockdown; no one gets in or out until they’ve been thoroughly checked. I want a full investigation into how Crow Lee was able to use his mind games on one of my
most trusted people. Have the body removed. I want a full autopsy. See if she was under any outside influence. I doubt it, to be honest, but I do feel I should give the poor old thing the benefit of the doubt. Oh, and I’ll need a new carpet.”

“Of course, sir,” said Ankani. “I’ll have a full report on your desk by morning.”

“You’ll have it here by end of day,” growled the Regent. “No one goes home till we’ve got this sorted.”

“Yes, sir,” said Ankani.

She made her guns disappear somewhere about her person, and then bent down and picked up Miss Mitchell without any obvious effort. She slung the body over one shoulder, smiled winningly at all of us, and then left, pulling the door quietly shut behind her.

“Given that your tea lady turned out to be an assassin, are you sure you trust her any better?” Molly said sweetly.

“Ankani? Of course!” said the Regent. “Been with me for years. One of my best agents. Trust her implicitly.”

“You trusted Miss Mitchell,” I said, looking at the large bloody stain on the carpet. There were quite a few bits of bone and brains, too. Miss Mitchell had meant business. Crow Lee’s business.

“Yes, well,” said the Regent. “There’s trust, and then there’s trust.”

“That’s a real Drood answer for you,” said Molly.

“The apple never falls far from the tree,” the Regent said vaguely.

“If Crow Lee had a traitor inside your organisation,” I said thoughtfully, “who’s to say he didn’t have someone inside the Droods? I mean, how else could he have known about Alpha Red Alpha? Most of our family didn’t know it was down there, underneath the Hall, on the grounds that if they had, they’d probably have left the Hall en masse and set up tents on the grounds rather than live over such a dangerous thing. Hold it…hold everything. Go previous. Drop anchors.…Grandfather, has anyone ever talked to you about the Original Traitor?”

“No,” said the Regent. “And it does sound like something I ought to know about. Tell me about this Original Traitor, Eddie. Tell me everything.”

So we all sat down again, and I filled him in on the latest conspiracy theory within the Droods that there was a traitor inside the family who went back years, maybe decades, maybe even centuries. Subtly sabotaging us, working from within to undermine everything we did for his own hidden purposes.

“I’ve been away too long,” said the Regent. “Far too many things I don’t know…Why the Original Traitor?”

“Because we don’t know how far back he goes,” I said. “There is some evidence to suggest he goes way, way back.…”

“Given how many of your family’s more important secrets have been forced out into the light recently,” said Molly, “maybe the Original Traitor feels you’re closing in on him at last. He must be getting a bit desperate.”

“We’re pretty sure he murdered Sebastian,” I said.

“Good God!” said the Regent. “Really? He worked for us, you know.”

“Sebastian worked for everyone,” I said. “He was murdered during the Hungry Gods affair, while he was being held inside one of our supposedly secure holding cells. Which is supposed to be impossible.”

“And Freddie went missing around the same time,” said Molly. “He’s been declared missing, presumed dead.”

“Both of them rogues,” said the Regent. “Are we assuming a connection?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But I think we need to track down the remaining rogues and make contact with them. Apart from you and me, they’re the only Droods left in this world. A world that probably wouldn’t be too unhappy if we were to become extinct…I did make contact with some of them when I was declared rogue by Martha.…But most of them have disappeared. The Mole has gone deep underground, and no one’s seen Mad Frankie Phantasm or Harriet Hatchet in ages. Of course, it could just be that the rogues don’t want to talk to me because I killed one of them. Arnold Drood, the Bloody Man.”

“I did hear about that,” said the Regent, nodding slowly. “It was a righteous kill, Eddie. If ever a man needed killing, he did.”

“And Tiger Tim,” I said. “He needed killing, too.”

The Regent looked at me sharply. “Timothy? Jack’s boy? That was you? I’d heard he’d been killed, but I didn’t want to believe it. He was Jack’s only child.”

“I know,” I said.

“And my only other grandson. Did you really have to… ?”

“Yes,” I said.

“You were there,” said the Regent. “It was your decision to make.” But he still didn’t want to look at me. “Poor Jack. Life…has not been kind to him.”

“What about James’s children?” said Molly. “They’d be your grandchildren, too.”

“The Grey Bastards?” said the Regent, not quite turning up his nose. “I know all about them.…I think not. They’re not Droods, you see. Just half-breeds. I know it shouldn’t matter that they’re all illegitimate, but it does. I think I’m old enough to be allowed to be old-fashioned about some things.”

“There’s still Gerard Drood, Grendel Rex, the Unforgiven God,” said Molly, just a bit mischievously, and perhaps showing off a little. “Still securely bound and buried, sleeping deep beneath the Siberian permafrost.”

“We don’t talk about him!” the Regent said sternly. And we all managed some sort of smile.

“Do you know of any rogue Droods I might not have heard of?” I said. “Any who might be willing to help us against Crow Lee, or even any who might be working with him?”