Live and Let Drood

certainly has enough of them by the balls…No, Crow Lee made compacts with Above and Below, long ago. With the Houses of Pain and the Shimmering Plains, trading them…something they wanted in return for power and protection. And, no, we don’t know what the deal involved.” I looked at the Regent hopefully, but he just shook his head briefly.
    “I have heard rumours,” the Regent said slowly. “And I feel I should make it clear that I have no actual evidence…rumours that Crow Lee had some kind of hold over the Droods. Enough of a hold to keep them at bay all these years…”
    “A hold?” I said. “What kind of a hold are we talking about here?”
    “Like I said, all I have are rumours, most of them contradictory. But to keep Crow Lee off the Drood agenda for so long, it would have to concern some of the highest people in the family.”
    “Blackmail,” Molly said succinctly.
    “Could be,” said the Regent. “But if it was, I’ve never been able to find out who or what was involved. And believe me, I’ve tried. You were head of the family for a while there, Eddie. Did anyone ever say anything to you?”
    “No,” I said. “I’m only just beginning to discover how much they managed to keep from me. And given all the terrible and sometimes downright appalling things my family has cheerfully admitted to down the years…what could Crow Lee know about that’s bad enough to give him a hold over us?”
    “What if he lost this hold?” said Molly. “After all the changes your family’s been through of late, maybe what he knew just didn’t matter anymore. What if the ones being blackmailed were finally in a position to tell him to go to hell? That might have been enough to provoke his attack. If the Droods were finally getting ready to go after him, maybe he decided to get his preemptive strike in first.”
    “Or maybe he just saw the family in a weakened state and decided to take them off the board while he had the chance,” said the Regent. “After all your recent wars, the Hungry Gods and the Loathly Ones, the Immortals and the Great Satanic Conspiracy…the family’s lost a lot of good people, Eddie. You’ve never looked so vulnerable.”
    And then we all looked round sharply as the door banged open and Miss Mitchell strode in. She wasn’t carrying a tea tray this time.
    “I didn’t call you, Miss Mitchell,” said the Regent. “And this really isn’t a good time.…”
    “Crow Lee sends his regards,” said Miss Mitchell, the pleasant and plain middle-aged woman in the cheap dress. She raised the Luger at her side and shot the Regent three times in the chest. I cried out as the impact of the bullets threw him right out of his chair. I was up on my feet in a moment and then froze as Miss Mitchell brought up her other hand to show me the clicker she was holding.
    “Crow Lee gave me this. He got it from someone in your family. Something to hold your armour in your collar, so I can kill you. And I will kill you, Edwin Drood, because that’s what Crow Lee wants. He wants your whole stupid family dead and gone. And I will do anything for Crow Lee because he loves me.”
    She smiled brightly at me and hit the clicker. I called my armour and it came, sweeping over me from head to foot in a moment. Miss Mitchell looked blankly into my featureless golden face mask and hitthe clicker again and again. It had clearly been programmed to affect my old strange-matter armour; not the new rogue armour. Miss Mitchell fired her gun at me, shooting me at point-blank range again and again, and the bullets just ricocheted away harmlessly.
    “It’s not fair,” said Miss Mitchell. “It’s not fair! Cheater!”
    I took a step towards her. She fell back a step and then raised the Luger and pressed it against her head. She looked at me defiantly.
    “Crow Lee loves me!”
    She shot herself, and the Luger blew half her head away. She crumbled bonelessly to the floor. I armoured down, and looked at Molly.
    “You could have stopped her,” said Molly. “You could have slapped that gun right out of her hand, with your speed, before she could have pulled the trigger.”
    “You could have stopped her,” I said. “You could have made her gun disappear or turned it into a flower. But you didn’t.”
    “She was a traitor,” said Molly. “And neither of us have ever had any time for traitors.”
    “She killed my grandfather,” I said. “And she would have killed me.”
    Molly moved forward and put her