She ground her breasts against my chest as we kissed. She knows I like that. Butterflies fluttered joyously all about us as we ripped the clothes off each other.
Some time later, we lay side by side on a grassy bank, the sweat slowly drying on our cooling bodies, snuggled happily together. I’d brought Molly up to date on my latest mission, and now she was sulking just a bit because she couldn’t go with me.
“You know we work best as a team, Eddie. Who’s going to watch your back if I’m not there?”
“I did survive as a Drood field agent for years, before we became an item,” I said, amused.
“It’s a constant wonder to me you lasted even one year. You’re far too trusting.”
“The invitation from the Independent Agent is for me alone,” I said patiently. “It’s his game, so he gets to set the rules.”
“Why choose you anyway? I mean, I’m sorry, sweetie, no offence and all that, but why you, out of all the Droods? Why not someone with more experience and closer to his generation, like your uncle Jack, perhaps?”
“Because I saved the world from the Hungry Gods, apparently. You do remember that, don’t you? I mean, you were there. Helping.”
“Don’t pout, Eddie; it doesn’t become you. Of course you deserve this honour; I just can’t help wondering if this is all some kind of trick or trap. Not necessarily just aimed at you. What if . . . What if this is all just an opportunity to get the six best spies in the world together in one place, and then kill them all off? One final coup for the Independent Agent: to prove he’s still the best, after all these years.”
“What a wonderfully suspicious mind you have,” I said fondly. “You’re quite right, of course. Wouldn’t surprise me at all if this turned out to be some kind of devious plot or scheme. But I still have to go. The price he’s offering is worth the risk.”
“Is it?” Molly rose up on one elbow to consider me, frowning worriedly. “I mean, what information could this man have that the amazing Drood family doesn’t already have? Secrets don’t stay secrets long.”
“Some do,” I said. “And Alexander King has been around . . . He might not have made history, but he certainly helped shape it from behind the scenes. There’s no telling what a man like that might know. In the hidden world of spies, there are often secrets within secrets. If anyone might know what we don’t, it would be Alexander King.”
“So, you have to go.” Molly sat upright, hugging her knees to her bare chest, deliberately looking straight ahead so she wouldn’t have to look at me. “All right; I get it. Duty calls, even after all you’ve done for your family, and all it’s done to you. You always were far too loyal for your own good.” She turned abruptly to fix me with her huge dark eyes, and then reached out and tweaked my left nipple hard, to make sure she had my full attention. “You stay sharp, Eddie, and do whatever you have to to win this bloody game. Meanwhile, I’ll talk to some of my friends and allies. People who wouldn’t talk to the infamous Droods. See what they have to say about Alexander bloody King.”
“Of course, Molly. You can let go of my nipple now. Please.”
She let go and looked away again. “I may be out of touch for a while. I have some family business to take care of.”
“It’s not your uncle Harvey again, is it?” I said. “The one who thinks he’s a giant rabbit?”
“No, it’s my sister, Isabella. She says she has news. She says she might, just might, have a lead on why my parents were killed by your family. The real reason, not the rubbish they fobbed you off with.”
“I have been trying to get at the truth,” I said.
“I know you have, sweetie.”
“In a family business the size of the Droods’, there’s often a lot of stuff going on where the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing. Things are done because they need to be done and are only officially authorised afterwards. If at all. A lot of the records from that period are a mess, thanks to interference by the Zero Tolerance faction.”
“There’s more,” said Molly. Her voice was very serious. She still didn’t look at me. “Isabella says the death of my parents is linked to the death of your parents. That they were killed for the same reason: because of something they both knew.”
I didn’t know what to say. My parents were Drood field agents, killed in action in the Basque area, largely due to insufficient advance planning and unreliable intelligence. Or that was what my family told me. But like so many other things where my family was concerned, that might or might not be true.
“You be careful,” I said to Molly finally. “If my family finds out that you’re digging into Drood history, into secrets so awful they’re still hiding them from me . . . You be really careful, Molly. You have no idea what my family is capable of when it comes to protecting itself. What makes your sister so sure about this? Who’s she been talking to?”
“I’m not going to tell you,” said Molly. “You wouldn’t approve.”
“Molly . . .”
“Eddie, trust me; you don’t want to know. Now leave this to me. You concentrate on the Independent Agent and winning his stupid game. When it’s all over, come back here to me, and I’ll tell you what I’ve found out. And then we’ll decide together what to do. To avenge the murder of our parents.”
“Yes,” I said. “We will do that. The guilty will be punished. Whoever they turn out to be.”
We lay back down on the green grass, side by side. The birds were singing, and a pleasant cool breeze gusted across our naked bodies. The air was rich with the scents of grass and earth and living things. I stared up at the sky and thought of many things.
“If, by some foul treachery, you don’t win,” said Molly Metcalf. “If you don’t come back . . . I will kill Alexander King for you.”
“Yes,” I said. “You do that.”
CHAPTER THREE
In the Court of the Cryptic King
Fog, fog, everywhere, and not a bit of it real. When I stepped through the Merlin Glass, the world disappeared, replaced by thick gray walls of slowly swirling mists. Endless shades of gray, cold and damp, diffusing the light and deadening all the sounds. I glanced behind me, but the Glass had already shut itself down back in the Hall. I was on my own.
I could feel a hard surface beneath my feet and the bitter cold searing my bare skin. The air was thin but bracing, so it seemed I was probably in the right place at least, somewhere deep in the Swiss Alps. I couldn’t see a damned thing. The fog churned around me, thick and deep, like water at the bottom of a great gray ocean, and I had a strong feeling there was something else there in the fog with me. It wasn’t real fog; I could tell by the way it glowed. This was flux fog: the pearly shades that mark where the barriers of the world have grown thin and possibilities are everything.
I definitely wasn’t alone. There were dim, dark shapes moving in the mists around me, circling unhurriedly like sharks hoping for the taste of blood in the water. There were faraway voices, like the echoes of old friends and enemies talking in forgotten rooms, and a constant sense of something important about to happen. I stood still, refusing to be tempted or intimidated into unwise action, while slow heavy footsteps sounded all around me and dark shapes drifted in and out of focus as though struggling to become firm and fixed. In a flux fog, the harsh and solid places of the world become soft and malleable, and all kinds of things become possible. I stood my ground, holding my calm before me like a shield. Make a sudden move in a flux fog, and you could end up someone else before you knew it.
Besides, I still wasn’t entirely sure where I’d arrived. I’d given the Merlin Glass the exact coordinates for Alexander King’s retreat at Place Gloria, but all I knew for certain was that it was somewhere in the Swiss mountains. For all I knew, there could be one hell of a long drop in any direction.