Simon Green - The Man with the Golden Torc

The police and the onlookers scattered as Matthew and I crashed into and through the barrier, the barbed wire snapping instantly, as insubstantial as fog to our armoured strength. We were outside the exclusion zone now, where everyone could see us, and the screams brought me back to myself. I tried to back off, but Matthew was too far gone now to stop. He picked up one of the police cars as though it weighed nothing and threw it at me. I ducked, and it sailed past me to crash into a storefront. I grabbed a nearby parked car and threw it at Matthew. He stood his ground, and the front half of the car concertinaed as it smashed against his immovable form. It exploded suddenly into an expanding orange fireball. The closer buildings caught alight, and the air shimmered from the intense heat. And Matthew came walking out of the heart of the fireball, brushing blazing wreckage away from him, entirely unhurt. People were running now, screaming hysterically, and the police were on their radios yelling in unmanned voices for armed backup.

I looked at Matthew, in his gold, and the hairs stood up on the back of my neck. Was this how people had seen me? This terrible, inhuman thing?

While I stood there, frozen by insight, Matthew picked up another car and smashed it down on top of me, catching me off balance and throwing me to the ground. He leaned on the car with all his strength, trying to pin me down, but I just pushed back, and the metal of the car tore like tissue paper under our armoured strength. I rose up through the wreckage of the car, and we threw the broken pieces aside to get at each other again. People were still screaming in the background. They sounded like animals, maddened by something they couldn’t comprehend. The fire was spreading. It occurred to me that the family were going to have a hell of a time hushing this one up.

Matthew charged straight at me. I waited till the last moment, and then sidestepped. He stumbled past me, off balance, one arm out to brace himself against the wall ahead of him. I took out my portable door and slapped it against the brickwork, and he fell through the new opening into the interior of the building. I ripped the door away, trapping him inside. And then I used my armour’s strength to pull the whole damned building down on top of him.

Ton after ton of brick and stone and concrete and steel came thundering down, piling up on top of Matthew. The ground shook with the impact, and the street filled with smoke. I waited a while, tensed and ready, but nothing happened except for the great pile of rubble slowly settling. I snapped my golden fingers at dear defeated Matthew. The armour would have protected him even from this, but he’d still be a long while digging himself out. By which time I fully intended to be long gone.

I took one of the abandoned police cars. The officers had retreated so quickly they’d actually left the keys in the ignition. I drove off, armouring down as I went, turning down a side street as I heard the approaching sirens of fire engines and police cars. I wasn’t in the mood for any more confrontations. Soon enough I was back in the main flow of London traffic, driving calmly and carefully, and no one looked at me twice. No one ever looks at a police car unless they have to. I stopped the car as soon as I could and walked away from it. Once again Shaman Bond was just another face in the crowd, no one special, nothing to look at. My cover identity was the only real protection I had left. No one in the family knew my use-name. They’d never asked. Never cared.

I headed for the Underground again. For better or worse, there was only one person I could go to now for help and answers. The one person the Matriarch would be sure I’d never approach. The wild witch Molly Metcalf. She shouldn’t be too angry at seeing me again. It had been months since we last tried to kill each other.

You know, sometimes I swear the whole universe runs on irony.

You hear a lot of stories about Molly Metcalf. How she once frightened a ghost out of the house it was haunting. How she abducts aliens in order to run strange experiments on them. How she once called up the Devil himself, just to tell him an endless stream of knock-knock jokes. The most disturbing thing about these stories is that far too many of them are true. But that’s the wild witch Molly Metcalf for you: free spirit of anarchy, Hawkwind fan, and queen of all the wild places. Enemy to the Drood family and everything they stand for.

Somehow I just knew this meeting wasn’t going to go smoothly.

But there I was, on the run in London and hiding in the smoke, sticking to the darker and nastier back streets because I couldn’t afford to be seen by old friends or enemies. Using the secret shortcuts and subterranean ways that normal people never get to know about. Heading reluctantly towards the one remaining person who might be able to find me a way out of the mess I was in. My oldest and fiercest enemy, my opposite in every way: Molly Metcalf. Sweet, petite, and overwhelmingly feminine, Molly specialised in forbidden old magics, applied with much passion and not a little lateral thinking.

She once changed the magnetic patterns of force over London, just so that all the migrating birds would have to pass over the Houses of Parliament and crap on them. She once worked a subtle magic on certain bed fleas and venereal crabs, making them her eyes and ears so that she could spy on the very important personages who patronised a brothel that specialised in the rich and famous. As a result she learned many interesting things, and blackmailed her victims ruthlessly. As much for the fun of it as the money. One of her victims had to stand up in Parliament and recite the whole of "I’m a little teapot, here’s my spout," during the prime minister’s question time, before she’d let him off the hook. Given who it was, I quite approved of that one…

And of course there was the time she bribed a group of disgruntled earth elementals into causing massive earthquakes in the bedrock beneath the British mainland. Apparently she wanted to split the United Kingdom into three separate island states: England and Wales and Scotland. I only just stopped that one in time. And she was an enthusiastic part of the Arcadia Project, a gathering of top-rank magicians dedicated to changing the rules of reality itself, to bring about a new world constructed a lot more to their liking. Fortunately for the world and reality, magicians have the biggest egos outside of show business and rarely play well with each other. Half of them ended up turning the other half into various kinds of livestock, and Molly lost her temper and called down a plague of frogs on the lot of them.

People were clearing frogs out of their gutters all over London for weeks after that.

Molly Metcalf resisted authority; any authority. She also hated my guts, with good reason. We’d been on opposite sides of a dozen missions, with me standing for order and her for chaos. We’d come close to killing each other several times, and neither of us had failed for want of trying. If I went to her in my armour, wearing the golden face she had every reason to hate, she’d attack me on sight. My only chance to get close to her was as Shaman Bond. Molly knew Shaman, in a friendly if distant way, as just another face on the scene. We’d even had the odd drink together, as part of my cover. I planned to use that, to get a foot in her door.

Molly lived in Ladbrook Grove, in what had once been quite a trendy area that had now fallen upon reduced circumstances. Her house was a simple two up, two down, in the middle of a long terraced row. From the outside it appeared no different from any of the others: a bit shabby, a bit neglected, and in urgent need of a new coat of paint. The street was full of squabbling kids riding their bikes back and forth, kicking a football around, or just hanging about in the hope something would happen. None of them paid me any attention as I went up to Molly’s front door and leaned on the bell. There were always strangers coming and going on a street like this. There was a long pause, long enough to make me consider ringing again, and then the front door opened just enough to allow Molly to peer out.