Live and Let Drood

Word, and a roaring wind came hammering down the Pier and swept the whole damned fog away. The wind blasted the fog right off the Pier and sent it back out across the sea…and without its support the dead couldn’t stay. They just faded away as the last of the fog dispersed and the raging wind swept the whole Pier clean.
    The dead man who’d spoken to me first was the last to go. He hung on somehow, intact, looking right at me with his eyeless face.
    “He’ll never let us go,” he said. “He’ll hold on to us, down in the depths, until he needs us again.”
    “I’ll get him for you,” I said. I slowly let go of the railings and moved forward to face him. I remembered the vicious joy I’d felt in fighting and destroying him and his kind, and I felt suddenly ashamed. If they really were just victims of Crow Lee’s will, I’d done them a terrible wrong. They were just innocent bystanders, caught up in the middle of a war. “I’ll set you free,” I said. “Whatever it takes.”
    “Why would you do that for us?” said the dead man. “After everything we’ve done, and would have done and will do again?”
    “Because that’s what I do,” I said firmly. “Because I’m a Drood.”
    “Sorry,” said the dead man, already fading away, with something that might have been a smile on his rotting mouth. “Never heard of you…”
    The fog was gone, and the last of the day’s sunlight washed from end to end of Brighton Pier. I looked out to sea, but there was no sign of fog anywhere. I armoured down and hurried back to join my Molly. I took her in my arms and held her tight, and she held me back just as strongly. And for a long moment we just stood there together. It was all very calm and very quiet. Eventually we let go of each other and looked around. Brighton Pier was back to normal. No trace left to show thatanything had happened, except for a few wet footprints on the floorboards, already evaporating.
    “I am never letting us get separated again,” I said. “For a moment there, I really thought I’d lost you.”
    “For a moment there, you forgot that I can look after myself,” Molly said sternly.
    “My head was all messed up,” I said. “All I could think of was…fighting, and striking down my hated enemy. I was enjoying myself. I forgot all about you. Until I looked back and saw you in danger.”
    Molly looked at me steadily. “Is it the rogue armour, Eddie? Is it affecting you?”
    “I don’t know,” I said. “I want to blame the new armour, but…maybe this is what I’m really like without my family.”
    “Bullshit,” Molly said briskly. “That is not what you are, and I should know. Proof in point: You said yourself the spell broke the moment you looked back at me.”
    “What if I hadn’t?”
    “But you did.”
    I had to smile. “You always were a good influence on me.”
    “Not if I can help it,” said Molly, and kissed me firmly on the mouth.
    “Time to be going,” I said after a while. “Unless we want to hang around and be asked a whole bunch of questions we don’t have any good answers for.”
    “I’ve got just enough magic left in me for one short-range teleport,” said Molly. “Enough to drop us off right next to the Phantom V. But, Eddie, that’s all I’ve got left. I need time out to recharge my batteries.…”
    “And I doubt we’re going to be left in peace that long,” I said. “I won’t leave you alone again, Molly, I promise.”
    “Will you stop beating yourself up? I saw you; you were busy kicking the crap out of dead things. Doing your job.”
    “I’m not so sure about that, either,” I said. “If there were spirits trapped inside those bodies, if they were just innocents…”
    “Very unlikely,” said Molly. “That was just Crow Lee speaking through them, playing games with your head.”
    “And if it wasn’t?”
    “Why do you keep asking questions when you know I don’t have the answers? Let’s get to Crow Lee and then we can beat the answers out of him.”
    “Sounds like a plan to me,” I said.

CHAPTER FIVE

    Do You Have an Appointment?
    M olly snapped her fingers and the air before us split obediently in two, forming into a shimmering portal that crackled with something very like static for a moment, like a television caught between stations, before finally condensing into a familiar silver tunnel. Molly had tried to explain to me that what I see when I look at her magic is largely symbolic; just my mind trying to make