Book 2 - Daemons Are Forever Read Online Free PDF

running for home by the fastest routes possible. We know something drastic has happened inside the family, Eddie. You can’t hope to keep it secret for long. We’ll find out.”
    “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” I said.
    MacAlpine shrugged, started to turn away, and then looked back. “Is it true? About James?”
    “Yes,” I said. “He’s dead.”
    MacAlpine nodded slowly. “The old Gray Fox is gone. I thought he’d outlive us all. How did it happen?”
    “Sorry,” I said. “Family business. Now tell the prime minister to back off. Tell him what happened here. Tell him about the silver armour. And tell him the family isn’t weak. Just…reorganising.”
    “No doubt he can expect a call from the Matriarch?” said MacAlpine.
    “Eventually,” I said. “Molly and I are leaving now. You and your people can stay, and clean all this mess up before you go. We’re supposed to fight secret wars, not endanger innocent civilians! What were you thinking of?”
    “I told you,” said MacAlpine. “It’s a different world now. All the old rules have changed. Thanks to you.”
     
    Molly and I headed back to the Hall in the Bentley. Molly sang happily along to her Ramones compilation, while I did some thinking. No one in the wrecked street would talk about what they’d seen happen, right in front of them. The usual mixture of bribes, threats, and the magic words
terrorists
and
national security
would see to that. All camcorders and camera phones would be confiscated, and if anybody did get stubborn and try to talk to the media, the government would slap on as many D notices as necessary to muzzle them. Any real troublemakers…would be
made
to forget. It’s a secret war, in an invisible world, and people have to stay ignorant if we’re to protect them.
    I still had a lot of unanswered questions. How had MacAlpine known exactly when to stake out my flat? That much armour and manpower takes a lot of advance organising. Somebody must have talked, and the only people who knew…were family. I’d known there were still members of the Zero Tolerance faction who hoped to sabotage and undermine me, so they could seize back control of the family…but to talk to outsiders? To politicians? That was crossing the line.
    Enemies without, enemies within. As if I didn’t have enough problems.
     

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Chapter 2
Families: Can’t Live with Them, Can’t Take Them Down to the River and Drown Them All in Sacks
    « ^ »
    T he Hall has been home to the Drood family for generations. Even though, officially, it doesn’t exist. You won’t find it on any map, and you can’t get to it by any ordinary route. The Hall stands alone, apart from the world, and it likes it that way. Don’t come looking for us or something really nasty will happen to you; we’re protected by sciences and magic and nightmares worse than both. The family has always taken its privacy and its security very seriously.
    Especially after the Chinese tried to nuke us, back in the sixties. Just because we protect the world, it doesn’t mean the world is always grateful.
    The Hall has raised, nurtured, and indoctrinated Droods for centuries. Trained us relentlessly to fight the good fight, and taught us everything we needed to know about the world except how to live in it. Most Droods never leave the Hall all their lives. Only approved field agents get to go out into the world and walk up and down in it, fighting our endless, secret, invisible wars, and smiting the ungodly till they cry like babies. The Hall is mother and father to us all; the Hall is family. I ran away first chance I got, and never looked back. Now, for my many sins, I was home again. Ostensibly to run the family in its hour of need, and redeem its soul from the evil ways it had fallen into, down the long centuries. When we moved from protecting humanity to running it.
    The Hall stands alone in the middle of its extensive grounds, brooding jealously over its idyllic domain. I drove the