Read Book 1 - The Man With the Golden Torc for Free Online Page B

or less private corner to take the call.
    "I thought I told you never to call me here," I said coldly.
    "Come home," said an unfamiliar voice. "Come home now. You are
needed for a personal briefing on an urgent mission."
    And that was it. The phone went dead, and I slowly put it away,
my mind racing. Another mission, already? That was unheard of. I was guaranteed
at least a week between missions. Too much work in the field, and you burn out
fast. The family knows that. And why did I have to go home to be briefed?
Ordinarily they send me my mission brief, and whatever hardware I might need,
via a blind postal drop that I rotate on a regular basis; and then I just go off
and do whatever needs to be done and do my best not to get killed in the
process. Make my report to Penny afterwards, and then go to ground till I’m
needed again. The family and I maintain a civilised distance, and that’s the way
I like it.
    I scowled into what remained of my drink. The phone call had
shocked me sober again. I really didn’t want to go home. Back to the Hall,
ancestral home of the extended Drood family. I hadn’t set eyes on the place in
ten years. I left right after my eighteenth birthday, to our mutual relief, and
the family sent me a regular and (fairly) generous stipend guaranteed to
continue as long as I continued to work in the field. If I ever chose to give up
my career as an agent, I could either go home or be hunted down and killed as a
dangerous rogue. That was understood. They allowed me a short leash, but that
was all. I was a Drood.
    I left home because I found the weight of family duty and
history more than a little suffocating, and they let me go because they found my
attitude a pain in the arse. I’d kept myself busy, down the years, accepting
assignment after assignment just to avoid having to go home again and submit to
family authority and discipline. I liked the illusion of being my own man.
    But when the family calls, you answer, if you know what’s good
for you. I was going home again, damn it to hell.
    In the morning. Tonight, there was Silicon Lily…

Chapter 4
Home Is Where the Heart Is
    The sun had only been up an hour or so when I finally left my
comfortable little flat tucked away in an enclosed square in one of the better
parts of Knightsbridge. The place cost more in rent every week than the family
sent me in a year, but I once did the owner a favour, and now he picks up the
tab. And in return I keep very quiet about exactly what the succubus had been
doing in that flat before I exorcised her. (Let’s just say I had to burn the bed
and scrub down the walls with a mixture of holy water and Lysol.) The
brightening sky still had streaks of crimson in it, the birds were singing their
little hearts out, the noisy bastards, and the day felt fresh and sharp with the
anticipation of things to come.
    I’m not normally a morning person, but it had been a really good
night, thanks to Silicon Lily. She’d vanished from my bed in a crackle of
discharging tachyons about an hour ago, leaving me with the memory of a wink and
a smile and the scent of her perfumed sweat on my sheets. Damn, they know how to
live in the twenty-third century. I took a few deep breaths of crisp morning
air, yawned abruptly, and brushed vaguely at my blue jeans, white shirt, and
battered black leather jacket. Good enough for the family. I don’t normally
believe in getting up at the same time as everyone else, people who actually
have to earn a living, but I had a long day ahead of me. I unlocked the garage
under my flat with a Word and a gesture, and then backed my car out into the
cobbled courtyard. I revved the engine and it roared cheerfully, and I had to
grin as I thought of heads jerking up off pillows in flats all around the
square. I have to get up early, everyone gets up early.
    I swept through the almost empty streets of London, ignoring red
lights and speed limits and marvelling at all