Luther and I backed away some more. I was still thinking furiously. There had to be something, some way . . . The huge head swung round and fixed on me, studying me with its glowing eyes. It was really mad now. It wanted to take its time with us, make us suffer. And that . . . was when I got my idea. It was a really bad idea, based on a really old story, but . . . it felt right. I gestured to Luther.
“Get ready to back me up. I’m going back in.”
“What?”
“I’m going back down its throat. I’ve got an idea.”
“I don’t think hoping it will choke on you is enough.”
“I’ve got something rather more . . . extreme in mind. Once it’s swallowed me again, you grab its head. Hold the jaws closed, so it can’t spit me out. Got it?”
“No. But I’ve reached the point where I’m willing to try anything, including prayers and bribery. Go for it.”
The dragon’s head snapped forward, moving horribly fast on the end of its extended neck. I stepped forward to meet it, the huge jaws opened wide, and I threw myself into its mouth. The jaws slammed shut, and it swallowed automatically. And this time I didn’t fight it. I curled into a ball, to make the swallowing go easier, and the muscular contractions carried me swiftly down the long neck and into the belly. I uncurled, and once again grew viciously sharp blades all over my body. And step by step, I fought my way deeper into the beast. I couldn’t see where I was, or where I was going, but my Sight gave me a direction to follow. I fought my
˚
way into its stomach and on into its guts, its bowels, and all the way to the base of the tail. And once I was there, I grabbed it and with one good heave, pulled the tail inside out, so that it was in there with me.
You wouldn’t believe how strong my armour can be, when I really put my mind to it. Luther was right; it’s an extension of our will. It does what we tell it.
The dragon really didn’t like what was happening inside it. I’ve never heard screaming like it. I took a firm hold on the inverted tail with both golden hands, turned around, and step by step I struggled back through the body of the beast, from the rear to the front. And with one last effort, I hauled the tail up and into the mouth, punched a hole through the teeth from the inside, and marched out of the gaping jaws, dragging the inverted tail with me.
And that was how I turned the Lampton Wyrm inside out. It probably helped that the dragon was, after all, a magical creature.
Luther and I stood together, breathless and exhausted, and looked at the steaming, twisting mass before us. It smelled really disgusting.
“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.
W
hen 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 side, 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?