For Heaven's Eyes Only (6 page)

We all looked at the Sarjeant-at-Arms, but he had nothing to say.

“If we could stick to the matter at hand, people,” said Roger. “You don’t think what I’m doing is easy, do you? The body is already starting to fall apart. Anything else you want to ask, ask quickly. He won’t last much longer.”

We all looked at the dead Immortal. His skin was blotched and cracking, thick fluids seeping out of him as Roger’s dark blood burned him up from the inside out. His eyes had sunk right back into their sockets, nothing but a mess of black jelly now. The corpse moved his head blindly back and forth.

“Don’t leave me like this. Please. Don’t leave me here, trapped in a decaying body.”

“Why not?” said Roger. “You deserve it.”

“No,” said Molly. “Let him go.”

Roger looked her and raised a sardonic eyebrow. “Mercy, from the wild witch of the woods?”

“No,” said Molly. “Not mercy. Why keep him from Heaven’s judgement, and Hell’s punishments, one moment longer?”

“Hard-core,” said Roger, smiling.

“You tried to murder my Eddie,” Molly said to the dead man. “Burn in Hell.”

I looked at her, disturbed by the savage and uncomplicated hatred in her face and in her voice. I liked to forget that my Molly had her own dark side, like Roger; but sometimes she wouldn’t let me. I couldn’t say anything. It wasn’t my sister the Immortals had used.

Roger straightened up and stepped back, snapped his fingers lightly, and just like that the dead man was simply a corpse again. We all watched it carefully for a while, but it lay there, cracking slowly open, leaking all kinds of unpleasant fluids and stinking the place out. The Armourer sniffed loudly.

“You haven’t left me much to dissect, Roger.”

I looked at Molly. “The Immortal lost most of his family. I think it was grief that moved him, as much as revenge. God has mercy.”

“I don’t,” said Roger. He was still maintaining his demonic aspect, defying any of us to say anything. Perhaps because it felt so good not to have to pretend anymore. He smiled widely at Harry, showing rows of pointed teeth. “This . . . is who and what I really am, Harry, my dear. It’s as real and as relevant as the human face I usually wear to show the world.”

“We all have our dark sides,” Harry said steadily.

“Not like mine,” said Roger.

He took on his human aspect again, resuming the dark, sardonic and lightly mocking face he’d always shown before. And then he turned his back on all of us, including Harry, and walked away to be on his own. Where he’d been standing, his cloven hooves had scorched deep hoofprints into the wooden floor. Smoke curled slowly up from them, and on the air there was the smell of blood and sulphur and sour milk. The stench of Hell.

“Damn,” said the Armourer. “I’ll have to get the industrial sander out again.”

It’s hard to impress my uncle Jack.

“All right,” I said. “What now?”

“An attack on you is an attack on the family,” said the Sarjeant-at-Arms. “I’ll have the family psychics run some tests on you, see if they can pick up some traces of who or what might have been threatening you in Limbo.”

“Later,” I said. “I’m tired.”

The Sarjeant sighed heavily. “You’ve never had any faith in the family psychics, have you, Edwin?”

“Well, they didn’t predict my bloody death, did they? I wouldn’t trust that bunch of poseurs and wannabes to guess my weight!”

“Later, then,” said the Sarjeant, entirely unfazed. “In the meantime, I will organise the family’s resources to search for the missing Isabella Metcalf. We have people everywhere, Molly. We will find your sister for you.”

“Eventually,” I said.

The Sarjeant didn’t actually shrug, but he looked like he wanted to. “It’s a big world.”

I looked at Molly. “Do you have any better ideas?”

She frowned. “My younger sister, Louisa, could find Iz easily, but last I heard, she was off exploring the Martian Tombs.”

I had to blink. “Really?”

Molly did shrug. “With Louisa, who knows?”

“I’ve got it!” said the Armourer. “The Merlin Glass, Eddie! It can find anyplace you needed to get to, so technically there’s no reason why the Glass shouldn’t be able to locate any individual person you want to find and show you where they are! Try it!”

I reached into the dimensional pocket I store the Merlin Glass in, at least partly because the damned thing creeps the hell out of me, and held the hand mirror out before me. The image in the Glass quickly cleared to show Isabella Metcalf, her own bad self: a tall muscular woman in crimson biker leathers, with short-cropped black hair and an intense, sharp-featured face. She was lurking in a fairly ordinary-looking business office, leafing through papers on a desk in a way that suggested she didn’t have anyone’s permission to do so. She looked up, startled, to see Molly and me watching her through the Merlin Glass.

“Iz!” said Molly. “You’re all right!”

“Of course I’m all right! And keep your voice down,” Isabella said urgently. “No one’s supposed to know I’m here!”

“We’re coming through to join you,” said Molly.

“Don’t you dare!” said Isabella. “You’ll blow my cover!”

But I’d already shaken the Glass up to its full size, and Molly and I were stepping into the office with her.

“Eddie!” roared the Sarjeant-at-Arms behind me. “You can’t just rush off! You have responsibilities here!”

But Molly and I were already gone.

A
s offices went, this one hadn’t even made an effort. Just an ordinary, everyday business office with characterless furniture and all the personality of a brick wall. Not even a potted plant in the corner to cheer the place up. When Molly and I arrived, Isabella was busily thumbing through a thick sheaf of papers. She didn’t have the grace to look even a little bit guilty, and glared at Molly and me as though we were the ones who had no right to be there.

“What the hell are you two doing here?” she said, keeping her voice down.

“Oh, we happened to be passing,” I said easily. “Thought we’d drop in, say hello. . . .”

I busied myself shutting down the Merlin Glass and stowing it safely away while Molly advanced on her sister to give her a big hug. Isabella dropped the papers on the desk and stopped Molly in her tracks with an icy glare.

“What’s the matter with you? It’s not my birthday.”

Molly then launched into an impassioned account of what had been happening. She hit only the high points, but it still took a while. I used the time to take a good look round the office. It was all very neat, very tidy, and everything had that sheen of newness, as though everything had been moved only that day. The office felt . . . strange, incomplete, unfinished. As though someone had put everything in this room that they thought an office should have, but no one had actually moved in yet. The computer was the very latest model, the monitor was wide-screen and HD, and the keyboard didn’t have a speck of dust on it. I considered the computer thoughtfully, wondering whether it was safe to try cracking its systems open with my armour. Luther Drood, the Los Angeles field agent, had shown me a neat little trick using Drood armour that could make any computer roll over on its back, begging to have its belly rubbed. I reluctantly decided not to try anything just yet, on the grounds that Isabella would have already cracked the computer if it were that easy. The bad guys do love their booby traps. And if I set off an alarm while Molly was busy persuading her sister what a great guy I was, I’d never hear the end of it.

So I leafed quickly through the papers on the desk, looking for whatever had caught Isabella’s attention. Damned if I could see what she’d found so interesting. Pretty standard business correspondence: job openings and opportunities, accounts and invoices and memos covering the upcoming week’s meetings. But all very bland, very vague, almost too generic to be true. What was more interesting was what wasn’t on the desk: namely, not a single personal touch. No photographs, no coffee mug with an amusing saying on the side, not a mark out of place. Nothing on the walls, either: not a portrait or a print . . . or a window. Only a featureless box for someone to sit in and do . . . businesslike things. No, this wasn’t an office. It was something set up to look like an office, enough to fool an outsider.

Molly was rapidly approaching the end of her story, so I took the opportunity to quietly study her sister Isabella. The crimson biker leathers looked well lived in and hard used, like she’d done a lot of travelling in them, and she looked muscular enough to bench-press a Harley-Davidson without breaking a sweat. Even standing still she burned with vitality, as though she couldn’t wait to be out and about doing things. And, given that she was one of the infamous Metcalf sisters, probably wild and destructive things. She was handsome rather than pretty, had a hard-boned face stamped with character and determination, and wore surprisingly understated makeup. She had a certain dark glamour about her. A dangerous glamour, certainly, but there was something about Isabella that suggested she could be a whole lot of fun, if you could keep up with her.

She was the only woman I knew who had a worse reputation than my Molly. A supernatural terrorist, a twilight avenger, the Indiana Jones of the invisible world, been everywhere and done everyone. Isabella had given her life to the uncovering of mysteries and the pursuit of truth, and she didn’t give a damn whom she had to walk through or over to get where she was going. Always out in the darker places of the world, digging up secrets and things most people had enough sense to leave undisturbed. Just to ask questions of the things she dug up, and kick them in the head if they didn’t answer fast enough. She was looking for something, but I don’t think anyone knew what. Maybe not even her. I think she liked to know things. And if Molly was the wild free spirit of the Metcalf sisters, Isabella was by all accounts the tightly wrapped control freak who always had to be in charge.

I knew we weren’t going to get on. But she was Molly’s sister, so . . .

Having finally understood why Molly was so pleased to see her alive and well, Isabella grudgingly allowed Molly to hug her, but only briefly.

“So,” she said coldly, fixing me with an implacable gaze, “someone impersonated me? Someone actually dared? My reputation must be slipping. I did hear there was a rumour going around that I might have mellowed, and I can’t have people saying things like that about me. I can see I’m going to have to go out and do something appalling. Even more appalling than usual, I mean. Can’t have people thinking I’ve got soft; they’ll take liberties.”

“Trust me, Iz,” said Molly, “no one thinks you’ve got soft. There are still religions in some parts of the world where they curse your name as part of their regular rituals.”

“Well,” said Isabella, “that’s something. You have to keep the competition on their toes in this game. There’s never any cooperation when it comes to digging up graves, despoiling tombs and desecrating churches. It’s every girl for herself, and dog-eat-dog. Or perhaps that should be god-eat-god. . . . It’s all based on fear and loathing and a complete willingness to take risks no sane person would even contemplate. You still haven’t explained what you’re doing here, interrupting my work.”

“I thought you’d want to know that the Droods now know you know how to get past their defences,” said Molly. “I hate sentences like that; they’re always trying to get away from you. I had to tell them, Iz; they wanted to know how your duplicate was able to penetrate Drood security so easily. I had to tell them that to avoid telling them other things.”

“Other things?” I said suspiciously. “What kind of other things?”

“Later, sweetie,” said Molly.

Isabella looked at me, and then shrugged briskly. “Don’t take it personally, Drood. I don’t give a damn about you or your family; I wanted access to your Old Library. I did ask nicely, but when that snotty, stuck-up, dog-in-the-manger family of yours turned me down, I had no choice but to find my own way in. Partly because no one tells me to get lost and gets away with it, but mostly because I wanted to read some of the wonderful old books you’re supposed to have. You Droods sit on all kinds of information that would make my job a lot easier—because you can.”

“You’ve been strolling around the Old Library?” I said.

There must have been something in my voice or my face, because Isabella actually looked away for a moment.

“Well, I haven’t personally been in there, as such. Not yet. But I’m working on it!”

“You’re welcome to try,” I said. “But once you’re in there, watch your back. There’s something living in the Old Library: something very powerful and very scary. It almost killed an Immortal who was masquerading as our assistant Librarian.”

“You see!” said Isabella. “That’s the kind of secret I want to know about!”

“Let us change the subject,” I said, “on the grounds that I have been here for what seems like ages, and I still don’t know why. What are you doing here, Isabella? And where is here, anyway?”

“Can we please all try to keep our voices down?” said Isabella. “This really isn’t the kind of place where you want to attract attention to yourself. This is Lightbringer House, deep in the financial area of Bristol. As far as the rest of the world is concerned, Lightbringer House is only another ugly, anonymous office building, where businesspeople do business things. Except they don’t. This whole building is a front, a place for people to come and do things in private that would get them hanged from the nearest lamppost if they even mentioned them in public. This office, and all the others, are for show, something for people in authority to see if they have to be given the grand tour. Everyone here works on the same thing: a purpose so secret even I haven’t been able to scare up a whisper of what it might be.”

“Yes,” I said patiently. “But what are you doing here? Who are these people? What makes them so important?”