From a Drood to a Kill - Simon R. Green Page 0,155

nearest possessed before the cat woman hit the ground, and then turned to smile happily at me.

“Now that’s more like it. Good to know there are some things you can still depend on. Oh, don’t look so disapproving, Eddie. None of these people are real! Half of them probably wouldn’t be even if this was the real Nightside!”

“They’re real enough to kill us,” I said. “But I take your point.”

“Definitely stuffy,” said Molly. “What do I see in you?”

I armoured up, and once again altered its configuration to suit the situation. My golden gloves morphed into two oversized machine guns, and I opened up on the ranks of possessed before me, mowing them down. Without hesitation or mercy. The golden guns fired strange matter bullets, and even the possessed had no defence against them. Their bodies blew apart in messy explosions, thrown this way and that by the impacts, and bodies hit the pavement faster than the crowd could advance on me. I turned around in a slow circle, raking my guns back and forth, shooting everything I could see. Molly moved quickly to keep behind me, picking off the odd target herself, just to keep busy. I could hear her laughing.

“Hardcore, Eddie! This is more like it!”

They’re not real, I told myself. I’m just destroying scenery.

But when I’d finally finished, and ran out of possessed people to shoot, the dead bodies piled up around me still looked real enough. With their gaping wounds and shredded flesh and so much blood, pooling thickly. Some of the bodies were still twitching, as though the demons within were still trying to manipulate them, but they were all clearly dead, and one by one they stopped moving. I let my guns turn back into gloves and then called out to the strange matter bullets to return. They ripped themselves free of the bodies, and shot back through the air to sink into my armour. I wasn’t leaving any strange matter behind for someone else to get their hands on.

With their hosts fallen, destroyed past the point of usefulness, the demons abandoned the bodies. They rose up, like so many blood-coloured ghosts or spectres, and streaked through the air to re-enter the hanging body of the Sin Eater. His face twisted and grimaced as his hellish children came home, but whether from pain or pleasure I couldn’t tell. I was genuinely shocked that there were so many of them, contained within one man, who still claimed to serve the Good.

I walked over to him. Molly hung back. I looked up at the cruciform figure, hanging on the air above me. He stared down coldly.

“You haven’t won,” he said. “I haven’t even started yet.”

“You have to stop this,” I said steadily. “Now. While you still can. Before it’s too late.”

“It was too late long ago,” said the Sin Eater. “Don’t you think I know that? So many demons; it’s like I’m full of razor wire, scraping against my soul . . . What I’ve done to myself, for what seemed like good reasons at the time . . . Fight fire with hellfire . . . I’m damned. I know that. Unless I can win this Game, and have all my sins forgiven. Or at least, adjusted. It won’t bother me to kill you, to sacrifice two more innocents for my holy cause. Especially since you aren’t really innocents, are you? A Drood and a witch? I’ve no doubt you deserve everything that’s coming to you. So there’s some comfort in that. I’ll just be sending you where you were bound to end up anyway.”

The ground in front of me cracked open, and I stepped quickly back. A jagged split shot across the street, from side to side. And it was only then that I realised all the traffic on the road had disappeared. Not needed any more to set the scene. A deep crevice opened up, full of blood and fire and heaving molten lava. With darks shadows moving in it. The Sin Eater laughed briefly.

“There you are, Drood! An express route to Hell, just for you and your little witch!”

Terrible things came crawling up out of the flames and the lava, hauling themselves out of the crevice. Awful distorted shapes, sickening to look at. Sins given shape and form, sculpted in flesh and blood and bone. Foul things from out of the Pit, all of them smiling with anticipation as they headed for me, and for Molly. She moved quickly forward to stand