The Man With The Golden Torc

(The first book in the Secret Histories series)

Simon Green

CHAPTER ONE

Everything but a Bunch of Grapes

It started out as just another everyday mission. A certain Very Important Politician, whose face and name you’d recognise, had come, very secretly, to Harley Street in London. Home to some of the most expert, and certainly some of the most expensive, specialised medical care in the whole of the civilised world. This politician, let’s call him Mr. President, and no not the one you’re thinking of, had himself booked into the Hospice of Saint Baphomet under an assumed name after contracting a supernatural venereal disease during a goodwill tour of Thailand. He was stupid enough to slip his handlers’ leash and go looking for a little fun in the backstreet bars of Bangkok, and unlucky enough to end up getting it on with an agent of darkness masquerading as a ladything. As a result of which, Mr. President was now very heavily pregnant with something the very opposite of a love child. I had been ordered to terminate this unnatural pregnancy with extreme prejudice. The offspring was not to be born, or if born, not allowed to run loose in the material world.

I’d been supplied with a gun, and I was expected to use it.

(How did we find out about this? My family knows everything. That’s its job. And when you’ve been fighting the good fight for as many centuries as we have, you can’t help but accumulate an extensive network of sources and informers.)

I strolled casually down Harley Street, hiding in plain sight. No one looked twice at me; no one ever does. I’ve been trained to blend in, to be just another face in the crowd. I was wearing a nicely anonymous three-piece suit, expensive enough to fit in but not stylish enough to draw attention. I strode down Harley Street like I had every right to be there, so everyone else just assumed I did. It’s all about attitude, really. You can fit in anywhere with the right attitude. It helps that I have the kind of face that always reminds you of someone else: average, pleasant, nothing to jog your memory afterwards. An agent’s face.

It’s all in the training. You too could learn to look like nobody in particular, if you wanted to.

It was the lazy end of a summer afternoon in London. Pleasantly warm under a pale blue sky, with just a hint of breeze. Traffic roared by in the background, but the street itself was relatively calm and quiet. There were taxis, squat black London cabs, dropping people off and picking them up, men and women of all nationalities carefully minding their own business. And a large percentage who weren’t men or women or anything like it. You’d be surprised how many monsters walk plainly in open sight every day, hidden from mere mortal gaze by only the flimsiest of illusions. But I’m a Drood, and I wear the golden torc around my throat, so I can use the Sight to see everything, for as long as I can stand it.

An elf lord was getting out of a taxi just a few feet away, looking tall and regal in his glowing robes. He had pointed ears, all-black eyes, and a look on his face of utter contempt for all humankind. He paid off the taxi driver with a large denomination note, waving away the change with aristocratic disdain. The driver had better bank that note quickly, before it touched cold iron and turned back into a leaf or something. Elves live to screw over humanity; it’s all they’ve got left.

Up and down the street, ghosts walked in and out of walls that weren’t there when they were alive, trapped in their repetition like insects in amber. Just echoes in time. Demons rode unsuspected on people’s backs, their spurred heels dug deep into shoulder and back muscles, whispering into their mount’s ears. You could always tell which mounts were listening; their demons were fat and bloated. One man had the beginnings of a halo. He was escorting a friend with stigmata. It’s moments like that which give you hope. An alien with gray skin and big black eyes appeared out of nowhere, clutching a London A-Z in a three-fingered hand. Harley Street’s reputation stretches farther than you’d think.

None of them paid me any attention. I told you; I’ve been trained.

There are times when I wonder if it might not be nice to live a normal life, with only normal worries and responsibilities, and not have to know all the things I know. Not to have to see all the darkness in the world. To be one of the sheep, and not the shepherd. But, on the other hand, I get to know what’s really going on and who the real bad guys are, and I get to kick their nasty arses on a regular basis. Which makes up for a lot.

Harley Street is still mostly a long row of Georgian terraces with expensively bland anonymous facades. There are hardly any names on display; either you know where you’re going, or you don’t belong there. The heavy, secretly reinforced doors only open to buzzers when you know the right words to say, you can’t see in through any of the windows, and many of these venerable establishments are guarded and protected in ways you don’t even want to think about.

Those were the ones that interested me.

I studied the Hospice of Saint Baphomet from a safe distance while apparently listening to my mobile phone. Wonderful things; the perfect excuse for just standing around with a blank look on your face. There wasn’t any point in even approaching the hospice’s front door. I could See layer upon layer of seriously hard-core defences set in place. The kind that don’t even leave a body to identify. Imagine oversized magical man-traps with really big teeth and a built-in mean streak. The sort of defences you’d expect around a hospital that specialised in weird and awful diseases; the kind you really don’t want the rest of the world to know about.

So I decided to break into the building next door to Saint Baphomet’s, a smaller and even more specialised practice, Dr. Dee & Sons & Sons. They dealt strictly with exorcisms; very strictly, by all accounts. (Their motto: We Get the Hell Out.) Their defences were just as strong but more concerned with keeping things in, than keeping people out, on the perfectly logical grounds that only a madman would want to get in. Most people had to be dragged in, kicking and screaming all the way. But then, I’m not most people. I put away my mobile phone and glanced up and down the street, but as always everyone else was far too caught up in their own important business to spare any interest for a nobody like me. So I just slipped into the deserted narrow alleyway beside Dr. Dee’s and activated my living armour.

Most of the time it lies dormant as a golden circlet around my throat. A torc, in the old language. Invisible to anyone who’s not a member of the Drood family or at the very least a seventh son of a seventh son. (There don’t seem to be many of those around anymore. I blame family planning.) I subvocalised my activating Words, and the living metal in the torc spread out to cover my whole body, embracing me in a moment from head to toe. It’s a warm, refreshing feeling, like pulling on an old familiar coat. As the golden mask covered my head and face, I could see even more clearly, including all the things that are normally hidden from even gifted humans like me. I felt stronger, sharper, more alive, like waking from a pleasant doze into full alertness. I felt like I could take on the whole damned world and make it cry like a baby.

The armour is the secret weapon of the Drood family. It makes our work possible. The armour is given to each of us right after we’re born, bonded forever to our nervous systems and our souls, and while we wear the armour we’re untouchable, protected from every form of attack, scientific or magical. It also makes us incredibly strong, amazingly fast, and utterly undetectable. Most of the time.