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Authors: Debi Gliori

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“Dad.” Pandora ignored Titus entirely, positioning herself between her beetroot-red, panting parent and her palely malevolent brother. “Dad, you're not hiding anything from us, are you?”

It was fortunate for Luciano that he was already bright red, or Pandora would have immediately spotted the guilty pink flush sweeping across his face.

“You're…you're not
ill,
are you?” Giving voice to this terrifying possibility, Pandora's voice was barely audible over the whine of the exercise bike's whirring pedals.

Don't,
Titus begged silently.
Don't, don't, don't.

“I mean, you would tell us if you had something awful, like…like ca—”

“STOP IT!” Titus roared. “Just shut
up,
would you? Dad, make her stop, for God's sake. She's always doing this. I can't stand it. Her mouth. It's just—it's—”

“Come on. Both of you. Enough. Calm down.” Luciano was trying to disentangle his feet from the toe clips on his exercise bike. Unfortunately, he could only manage to release himself from one, and trapped embarrassingly by the other, he was engaged in a doomed attempt to shake himself free. Trying to pretend he wasn't making a complete idiot of himself, he carried on as if nothing was happening. “The doctor, um…he said…Ah, damn this stupid thing.”

“I thought you had Dr. Holgram.”

“Yes, Pandora, I
do
go to Dr. Holgram,” Luciano snapped. Now he had partially dismounted from the bike's saddle, but with one foot still trapped, he was forced to hop on the spot as he tried and failed to release the offending toe clip.

“Well, Dr. Holgram's female, not male. You said
he
said—”

“DAMMIT, PANDORA!” roared Luciano, toppling sideways and crashing into the disused fireplace, the bike slowly tipping over and falling on top of him. “Who
cares
if he's a she or whatever? Whose
business
is it if I've decided to improve my fitness? Why do you and your mother always subject me to the Spanish Inquisition if I do anything out of the ordinary? Why won't you just go away and leave me in
peace
?”

All of which, of course, convinced Pandora that her father wasn't telling the truth.

         

“Titus?” Pandora was sitting on the exercise bike, which, several days later, was still missing one of its toe clips and looking rather the worse for wear after its brief encounter with the iron grate of the disused fireplace. She took a deep breath. “It's just, oh, um, Titus, I know I'm probably being an idiot, but it's so unlike Dad to pay any attention to what he looks…I mean, how he…it's, like, he's
Dad
. He's always been, like…like…”

Titus glared at her. Slowly he raised his eyebrows. “Like?” He shrugged. “Like
what
? He's like Dad always is. Nothing's changed, as far as I can see. So what if he's going through a keep-fit phase? Better that than turning into a couch potato.”

“Yeah, Titus. I guess you're right.” Although she agreed with Titus's assessment, Pandora's voice lacked conviction. “Dad's just getting older. Perhaps he's having a midlife crisis thing. Probably something to do with growing bald…. It's just, oh, he's my
dad
. It's…”

Mine too,
Titus thought, wondering if he'd be forgiven for gagging his sister and locking her in the dungeons. Just for a year or so. Nothing too permanent…

“It's just that I know him backwards. I know what he's saying, and I hear what he's not saying too. And, Titus, I'm positive there's something huge going on that he's not telling us about.”

“Pan, give up, would you? This may come as a surprise to you, but Dad's an adult. Don't you think that adults are allowed to keep some things hidden from their kids? If he wants to tell us, he'll do so. Myself, I think you're reading way too much into his health kick. You wait: Dad's inner slob will reassert itself and will mount a spirited defense against his inner athlete. Soon he'll be bench-pressing nothing heavier than a pan of pasta, running nothing more taxing than a bath, and exercising only the major muscle groups in his mouth. Give him another month and you'll see….”

Titus might as well have saved his breath. Closing in on StregaSchloss were several entities that were determined another month was a luxury none of the Strega-Borgias would live to enjoy.

Hello, Baby

T
he nearest hospital to StregaSchloss was housed in a tiny prewar building surrounded by beautifully maintained lawns and gardens. The actual hospital consisted of two microscopic wards—one for men and one for what the Ward Sister referred to as “my ladies”—an administration office squeezed into a broom cupboard, and a maintenance and cleaning department sharing space with an outside toilet. When Baci and Luciano's car drew up in the darkened parking lot, at first they were convinced that Latch had mistakenly driven them into someone's private garden.

“This
can't
be it.” Luciano peered blindly into the blackness beyond the car windows. “Are you sure?”

“I'm absolutely positive.” Latch turned round to face his employers. Baci's eyes were closed and her breathing was ragged, and Luciano had the eyes-out-on-stalks appearance of someone teetering on the edge of hysteria. Just as Latch climbed out of the driver's seat and came round to open the rear doors, reassuring them that this was indeed the West Argyll Cottage Hospital, a beam of light cut through the darkness and a woman's voice greeted them.

“You'll be the Siggy-Borshters, I assume. Your staff phoned to let me know you were on your way….”

On the point of correcting this woman's hideous mangling of his surname, Luciano managed to stop himself in time. He also suppressed the involuntary squeak that had risen from his throat at the sight of the flashlight-bearing gorgon glaring across the parking lot. As wide as she was tall, Sister Passterre stood on the doorstep of her hospital like a condensed Doric column, sweeping the beam of her flashlight along the path leading up from the parking lot, her face set in the kind of expression more commonly found on a pit bull. Sister Belinda Passterre (known to her ladies as the Blister Plaster) was a woman not to be trifled with. Her most stubborn patients became strangely compliant and putty-like under her care, preferring to subject themselves to a thousand humiliations rather than incur her wrath. Such was her reputation that the most arrogant of consultants quailed before her, regressing in an instant to the stammering, quivering medical students they had once been, many years before.

However, Baci didn't turn to putty and nor did she quail. Instead, with an apologetic smile for Luciano, she turned round, climbed back into the family car, and slammed the door shut. Seconds later, Luciano, Latch, and Sister Passterre heard the distinctive wail of a newborn.

         

Secretly watching this drama unfold from the vantage point of Ward One's bathroom was a middle-aged man with both legs encased in plaster. He watched intently, hidden in the darkness, through a window that stood slightly ajar, all the better to remove any trace of the small black cigar he was enjoying while the gorgon Passterre was otherwise occupied with matters obstetric. Some weeks previously, this man had been admitted to the hospital following an accident that had washed his broken body onto the shores of Lochnagargoyle. When he recovered consciousness, the nonappearance of any concerned relatives phoning on his behalf and his apparent ignorance of who he was, how he'd broken both his legs, or where he'd come from had led the medical staff to diagnose him as an amnesiac. This misdiagnosis was one that the man with the broken legs was keen to encourage. For one thing, he wasn't a man—he was a demon—and for another, as his broken legs had mended, so too had his memory.

Now, fully recovered, he knew that his name was Isagoth, and he also knew that he was in deep trouble. He'd been thinking about this, thinking dark and increasingly more desperate thoughts, when the Volvo had pulled up outside the hospital and events had taken a decidedly dramatic turn. To his astonishment, Isagoth discovered that he recognized the driver of the car: it was none other than dear Mr. Butler, the one he'd brainwiped several months ago and left for dead on the front steps of that ridiculous house—what was it called? Strega-something? How curious.
Ssso, Mr. Butler,
Isagoth thought, staring out of the window at Latch.
What brings
you
to this little hospital? Visiting?
Then the rear door of the Volvo had opened to disgorge a hugely pregnant woman and a thin, hysterical man.

Yesssss,
Isagoth hissed. He recognized them too. They were the employers. Not only of Mr. Butler, but also of that
creature,
that Flora McLachlan woman, that infernal, interfering…Smoke hissed from between his teeth and coiled upward to wreathe his head in thin gray wisps. If that
woman
hadn't got in his way, he'd not be in such trouble now. No…Isagoth sighed; now he'd be home in Hades, back in S'tan's good books, not hiding out here in this backwoods hellhole, too terrified to let S'tan know that he, Isagoth, onetime Defense Minister of Hades, had been outwitted by a mere Scottish nanny….

However, he reminded himself, all was not lost. A smile straight out of a horror film hovered around his mouth as he saw what fate had delivered straight into his hands. Cigar trembling in his grip, the demon Isagoth could hardly believe his luck. There, out in the parking lot, wailing its outrage at being born on the backseat of a middle-aged Volvo sports wagon, was Isagoth's ticket back home to Hades. What was more, he realized, hugging himself with glee, was that with a newborn baby as leverage, he'd be able to upgrade his ticket to first class. Out in the parking lot, lights were going on, white-jacketed hospital personnel were appearing, a porter was trundling a wheelchair across the tarmac, and no one was paying any attention to the patient with the broken legs who was hobbling down the corridor as fast as his crutches could carry him in search of a telephone.

         

“Baci,
cara mia
…” Luciano was barely able to speak, so blown away was he by the speed with which he'd become a dad for the fourth time. It was as much as he could do to stop himself bursting into tears at the sight of his wife being assisted into a wheelchair and gently rolled across the parking lot, their tiny newborn child wrapped in her arms.

“Mr. Borshter?” The Ward Sister stepped across his path, her deepening frown indicating exactly how affronted she felt by the Strega-Borgias' decision to have their baby in the parking lot. “I'm going to have to insist that you take a seat in the waiting room, Mr. Borshter. Just while we get your wife and baby checked out. If everything appears to be…
normal
”—here she gave the sort of sniff that implied that this was a possibility that she very much doubted,
normal
not being an adjective she would ever apply to unscheduled deliveries in parking lots—“then you'll be allowed to see your wife tonight for ten minutes before going home. That is,
you
going home, and
she
staying put.” She held up one scrubbed red hand to forestall any objections from Luciano and raised her eyebrows in a highly challenging manner, as if to say,
Go on, punk, make my day. I dare you to raise an objection.

Luciano wisely kept quiet, consoling himself with something that, in his innocence, he didn't realize was a complete fiction: his certainty that no harm would befall his wife or baby as long as they were in the care of Sister Passterre. Meekly, he followed her through the front door of the hospital, blissfully unaware that anything more malign than a stray bacterium could be lurking in the shadows within.

Lightly Toasted

T
he phone rang in the great hall at StregaSchloss, its urgent shrilling causing everyone within range to run to answer its summons. Thus Titus, Pandora, Minty, Mrs. McLachlan, Knot, Sab, and Tock were all in time to witness Ffup playing butler.

“Hellurrrr,” she murmured throatily, her normally harsh dragonish tones muted down to a husky purr. “Strrrega-Borrrgia rrresidence. Ffup here. How may I be of assistan—?”

At which point Minty briskly plucked the receiver out of Ffup's paws and hissed, “
You
may be of assistance by going downstairs to the dungeons and reading
your
baby a bedtime story.” Then she turned her back on the gaping dragon, changed her tone completely, and said, “So sorry. Bit of a mix-up there. You're through to the Strega-Borgias. Can I help?”

Pandora glanced up at the landing, where Mrs. McLachlan stood smiling down at Ffup's indignant splutters and snorts of flame as Minty shooed her dungeonward to her neglected baby, Nestor. Considering that the first time Minty had clapped eyes on Ffup, the young woman had fainted dead away, it was remarkable that she now felt brave enough to push the huge beast around, Pandora thought. As well as being brave, Minty was also tactful, always deferring to Mrs. McLachlan, consulting the older nanny over every decision regarding what had been, until recently, Mrs. McLachlan's sole responsibility. Now the two nannies effectively job-shared—a state of affairs that suited everyone perfectly, allowing Mrs. McLachlan to recoup her strength after what everyone referred to as her “accident” in Lochnagargoyle. This accident had been a weird near-drowning occasioned by Mrs. McLachlan's throwing herself into the loch on purpose and, even more weirdly, not washing
back
upon the loch shore until almost two months later. Far easier, Pandora thought, to refer to the whole thing as an “accident” and mentally file it under “Forget.”
One day,
she vowed,
one day when Mrs. McLachlan is one hundred percent better, I'm going to ask her what really happened, but not now.

Downstairs, Ffup had finally given in and was dragging herself at a snail's pace across the great hall, taking as long as possible to reach the dungeons in the hope of not having to read “The Little Mermaid” to Nestor for the tenth time, and also in case the telephone caller had any news about whether Baci's baby was a girl or a boy.

“No, I'm sorry. The Signor and Signora have gone to the hospital tonight….” Minty turned round and made a shooing gesture at Ffup.
Go on,
the young nanny mouthed silently; then, turning her back on the dragon: “Yes. We're just waiting to hear about the baby. Mmmm. Very exciting time, yes. Absolutely. May I tell them who called?” There was a pause while Minty raked in the drawer of the telephone table, trying to find a pen or pencil with which to take down the caller's details. “Hang on a second…,” she muttered, hauling out a selection of dried-up old felt-tips, a nibless fountain pen, and several pencils with such impossibly hard leads that they didn't so much write as
carve
.

Titus, seeing an opportunity, seized it. “Look, here, hey…um, use this,” he said, vaulting downstairs and holding out his mobile phone to Minty. Her puzzled frown told Titus that she, along with his entire family, was a stranger to twenty-first-century technology. Probably prefer a goose quill dipped in ink, Titus thought gloomily, calling up the voice-recorder menu on his phone and passing it over to Minty.

Understanding dawned. Her face brightened, and nodding to show Titus that she was now with the program, she repeated with exaggerated care what the caller was telling her.

“Loo-doh Grab-it. Most unusual name.”

This, Titus decided, was a bit steep, coming from someone who rejoiced in the name Minty.

“Signor Strega-Borgia has your number? Great. I'll let him know that you called…. Yes. Even if he doesn't come home till late?…No. Not a problem—I'll leave him a note. Tomorrow, late morning?…Yes. Consider it done…. You too. Goodnight.”

Ffup's wings slumped as she reached the door to the kitchen. There was to be no last-minute reprieve, then. No avoiding having to read “The Little Mermaid” to Nestor. Again. Silently praying that the new Baby Borgia would arrive in the next few minutes, Ffup continued her glacially slow progress toward the dungeons, where, had she but known it, Nestor was already fast asleep, taloned thumb in mouth, having given up waiting for his mummy nearly an hour before.

         

Inside the cramped broom cupboard that served as the hospital administration center, the demon Isagoth was encountering some technical difficulties in getting through to his boss, S'tan. Unlike humans, who were required to sacrifice goats and initiate weird rituals involving candles, pentagrams, and incense, when demons wanted to talk to His Horned Horribleness, S'tan, First Minister of the Hadean Executive, all they did was pick up a phone.

That, at least, was the theory. In practice, all calls to Hades were screened, and thus all demons had to work their way laboriously through a score of labyrinthine menus before even being allowed to speak with a fellow fiend. Even then, there was no guarantee that a phone call would ever reach its intended destination. Especially if, like Isagoth, one had the kind of pukka accent marking one out as a member of the Demonic Elite, namely, a minister in the Hadean Executive enjoying all the bungs, freebies, and privileges that such a position entailed.

By contrast, on the other end of the line was an underpaid demon who'd just been forced to walk to work through the foot-high snowdrifts, black ice, and severe blizzards that were currently paralyzing Hades' entire transport network. Frozen to the marrow, the demon was in no mood to be pushed around by some git like Isagoth, who, it seemed, was lucky enough to have been posted somewhere that wasn't Hades, even if it
was
Scotland in winter. Out of spite, the demon shivering in the Hadean call center decided to be as awkward as possible, thus sharing some of the misery of his life with the overprivileged Isagoth.

“Whaaaat?” he bawled. “Can't hear yer. You're breaking up, mate. Wossermarra? You on a train or sumfin'?”

Unable to raise his voice to anything above a whispered hiss for fear of being overheard by the dreaded Blister Plaster, Isagoth tried again: “I need you to put me through to the Internal Offices of His Imperial Inflammableness.”

Silence greeted this request—a silence that Isagoth didn't realize was entirely due to the demon in the call center's removing his headset, dropping it into a filing cabinet, and going off to make himself a cup of hot vitriol. All unknowing, Isagoth tried to appeal to the drone's better nature.

“Pleeeassssse,” he hissed from inside the filing cabinet. “This is really urgent. It is a matter concerning the stone. I must speak to His S'tainless S'teeliness at once. The very future of Hades depends on it….”

Silence rolled down the phone to where Isagoth hunched over Sister Passterre's desk, idly rifling through her handbag, wondering if there was anything edible, smokable, or even valuable in its depths. So far he'd found nothing of note save for a passport, two pounds fifty in change, an underripe banana, and half a low-calorie oat-and-prune energy bar. Isagoth devoured the banana and had just sunk his front teeth into the unappetizing prune confection when he distinctly heard the demon on the other end mutter something about an overpaid plonker who'd had the nerve to phone up and demand to speak to the Boss. At this, Isagoth's blood pressure soared and a red mist appeared before his eyes. To add injury to insult, in the background he could distinctly hear the demon loudly suggesting exactly where his caller could stick his telephone, and at this, Isagoth blew a fuse.

“Listen up, lard-for-brains,” he snarled. “When I said I wanted to speak to the Boss, I didn't mean I wanted to speak to a stunted goblin with out-of-date cottage cheese between its ears—”

“I BEG YOUR—” a voice broke in, but Isagoth was not for begging.

Eyeballs bulging, spitting oat flakes and flecks of prune across the desk, he hissed, “You, pal, can do as you're told for once. Get off your overstuffed rear end and put me through to the Boss—”

“YOU'RE THROUGH TO HIM,” a voice informed him. “IT IS I. HIMSELF. OR, AS YOU WOULD HAVE IT—HOW WAS IT YOU PUT IT? SO QUAINT, SUCH AN ELEGANT TURN OF PHRASE…. AH, YES, ‘THE STUNTED GOBLIN WITH OUT-OF-DATE STILTON BETWEEN ITS EARS—'”

“Cottage cheese,” Isagoth corrected him before he could stop himself.

“INDEED. COTTAGE CHEESE. YOU, SCUM, ARE GOING TO LOOK LIKE YOU'RE
MADE
OF THE STUFF BY THE TIME I'VE FINISHED WITH YOU. ISAGOTH, ISN'T IT?”

Isagoth's knees, under their plaster casing, turned to jelly. It was
S'tan
on the other end. At some point that ghastly little guppy at the call center must have put his call straight through…. Oh, Hell's teeth, Isagoth thought. This was
disastrous
.

“I ca-ca-can explain, Your Abysmal Aggressiveness.”

“THAT I VERY MUCH DOUBT. TELL ME, USING ONE SYLLABLE ONLY, DO YOU HAVE MY STONE?”

This was not going at all well, Isagoth thought. He'd hoped to be the bearer of good news along the lines of
Returning soonest with Your stone plus newborn baby soul,
rather than the kind of bad news that usually preceded the death of the bearer—viz.
Regret have failed utterly in mission to rescue Your precious stone and am returning for execution
.

“LET ME JUST REFRESH YOUR MEMORY,” S'tan continued. “I'M TALKING ABOUT MY STONE. MY CHRONOSTONE,
COMPRENDEZ
? WITHOUT WHICH I AM DECIDEDLY LESS EVIL THAN I WAS. THE LESSER OF TWO EVILS, YOU MIGHT SAY. WHEN I CHARGED YOU WITH THE TASK OF RECOVERING MY STONE, I DID NOT ANTICIPATE FAILURE ON YOUR PART. I NEED THE STONE TO RESTORE DOMINION OVER THE FORCES OF LIGHT THAT SEEK TO OVERTHROW HADES. NOW. ONCE MORE, WITH FEELING. DO YOU HAVE MY STONE, MINISTER?”

Isagoth's bowels turned to water. “Ye-e-e-s,” he managed, and then good sense got the better of him and he qualified this with, “Well, no. I mean, I know roughly where it is, Your stone, but I haven't got it. At least not personally.”

There was a long pause at the other end, during which Isagoth wondered if his translation into cottage cheese would be swift and painless. Somehow he very much doubted it. No. Of one thing he was absolutely one hundred percent certain: S'tan didn't do mercy. After all, Isagoth reminded himself, S'tan was the Devil, the Arch-Fiend, the Earl of Earwax and Prince of the Pit. Mercy? Sadly not. However, what S'tan
did
do was a nice line in terror, punishment, retribution, and revenge. Isagoth could plead till he was blue in the face, explain how his mission to find S'tan's missing stone had been thwarted by the actions of one woman acting on her own—one tiny middle-aged woman called Flora McLachlan—but somehow Isagoth knew that no matter what excuses he offered, S'tan would be deeply unimpressed. Nor, he realized, was there any point in telling S'tan that His stone could be found amongst a million other stones on the shore of an island that had never been charted on any map in existence; Isagoth sensed that S'tan would be somewhat underwhelmed by that snippet of information as well.

The only hope to which Isagoth could cling was that without His stone, S'tan's power would be so diminished that He'd barely be able to turn pale with rage, let alone turn His failed servant into a particularly pointless cheese. Chewing with a mouth turned dry by fear, Isagoth wished that he'd chosen something a little more easily swallowed than an oat-and-prune energy bar for his last meal on Earth.

“STILL THERE, HMM?” S'tan sounded…it was weird, but S'tan sounded cheery, almost playful.

With a considerable effort, Isagoth swallowed. There, ughhh. “Yes, Your Gruesomeness?”

“YOU'RE AN IDIOT, D'YOU KNOW THAT? A COMPLETE FAILURE. HADES IS FREEZING OVER BECAUSE YOU HAVEN'T BROUGHT MY STONE BACK. MY KINGDOM, THANKS TO YOU, IS CURRENTLY FATHOMS DEEP IN SNOW; IT'S BLOWING A BLIZZARD; THERE'S A WIND SO SHARP IT COULD SLICE BREAD…TALKING OF WHICH”—S'tan gave a little un-S'tan-ish giggle—“I'M IN A TELEVISION STUDIO RECORDING MY COOKERY SHOW,
TOTALLY TOAST,
SO FRANKLY, I'M NOT TOO FUSSED ABOUT WHAT'S GOING ON BACK HOME BECAUSE I'M NOT SUFFERING IN PERSON”—another merry S'tanic snicker—“WHICH IS WHY I'M NOT EVISCERATING YOU, YOU MORONIC LUMP. NO. THAT PLEASURE CAN WAIT. IN FACT, IT CAN BE POSTPONED INDEFINITELY IF—”

If? Isagoth seized upon that small word as if it were a life preserver. “Anything,” he babbled. “I am Yours to command. Just say the word—”

“AND THE WORD IS
SHADDUP,
” S'tan snapped. “ZIP YOUR LYING LIPS. PUT A CLOVEN SOCK IN IT. I HAVE A JOB FOR YOU. A MISSION. A CHANCE, IF YOU DON'T MESS UP, TO REDEEM YOURSELF IN MY SIGHT. A GUARANTEED PARDON IF YOU ARE SUCCESSFUL. I NEED YOU TO DESTROY SOMEONE FOR ME. AM I CLEAR?”

BOOK: Pure Dead Frozen
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