Property of a Lady Faire (A Secret Histories Novel) Read Online Free PDF Page B

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    Men and women, friends and enemies, moved quickly to stand back to back so they could watch every direction at once and defend themselves against whatever was coming. Some threw accusations at one another, but most had already realised this had to be a threat from Outside. The shouting and screaming died quickly away, as people prepared to fight their corner. Weapons were appearing in everyone’s hands. I turned and gestured urgently to the nearest barman.
    “Why aren’t the security measures kicking in?” I said loudly. “I thought they were supposed to defend us automatically, if the club ever came under attack from Outside?”
    The barman looked back at me, confused. “I don’t understand it! If there’s a problem, any problem, the club should protect itself! If Security can’t react, for fear of injuring the patrons, then all the doors should open automatically! And if that fails, then the Roaring Boys should appear, to sort things out. But nothing’s activating! The computers back here are telling me they haven’t been interfered with, or sabotaged, or even bypassed . . . They’re just not activating. As though as far as they’re concerned, nothing is wrong!”
    I turned away from the barman as Monkton Farley grabbed me by the arm. His face was full of a sudden insight.
    “Shaman! Have you noticed only people on the edges of the crowd have been disappearing! The people in the middle haven’t been touched!”
    “So whatever’s grabbing people is only able to get at those people nearest the walls!” I said.
    Farley fought his way into the crowd, yelling for everyone to stand together in the middle of the club and stay well away from the walls. Nobody argued. They were happy to go along with anything that might make them feel a little safer. They huddled together, back to back and shoulder to shoulder, glaring about them, defying any outsider to come too near. They all had some kind of weapon at the ready now. Everything from machine pistols to energy guns, enchanted knuckle-dusters to aboriginal pointing bones. We’re an eclectic bunch at the Wulfshead.
    There were even a few pieces of alien tech being brandished, dangerous enough to make me feel distinctly nervous. On the grounds that they looked powerful enough to destroy the whole club and everyone in it. I just hoped no one started shooting at shadows, because the moment one started, everyone else would be bound to join in.
    I wanted very much to call on my armour so I could protect the crowd, as much as myself. But if I did that, everyone would know Shaman Bond was really a Drood. My cover identity would be lost forever. And I liked being Shaman Bond. I wasn’t ready to give him up just yet. I put my right hand to my forehead, subvocalised the activating Words, and allowed just a trickle of strange matter to run down my neck from my torc, and then streak along my arm to my raised hand, until it could jump onto my face and form a pair of golden sunglasses. With so much going on around me, I was pretty sure no one would notice anything. And with the golden sunglasses in place, I could suddenly See the whole situation a great deal more clearly. I could See everything that was there, including the things I wasn’t supposed to see.
    The problem was the club’s plasma screens. The huge screens covering the walls. Someone had tapped into them from Outside, and was watching everything that was going on inside the club from the other side of the screens. I could See them, dark figures sitting and listening on the far side of every screen—though they were almost certainly some distance away in reality.
    This was how the secrets had been getting out. And no one had noticed because the screens were part of the club. Just taken for granted. They probably hadn’t been physically altered, nothing to give away their new nature; they just had their signals piggybacked, so that the sound and vision went both ways.
    I jumped up onto the bar and shouted at