Book 1 - The Man With the Golden Torc Read Free

mess of their host in the process. He really should have gone to
Dr. Dee’s. You get what you pay for.
    The next few rooms held a severed hand that was trying to grow
itself a new body; a Time Agent whose latest regeneration had gone terribly
wrong, turning him inside out; and a sorry-looking werewolf with mange. Takes
all sorts, I suppose.
    I peered cautiously around the end of the corridor, and there
was Mr. President’s room. An armed guard was sitting right outside his door, for
the moment concentrating totally on his muscle man magazine. I checked
carefully, but that was it. One armed guard. They weren’t even trying, really. I
walked straight up to the man, and he didn’t even know I was there until I
squeezed a particular nerve cluster in his neck, and he went straight to sleep.
I sat him back in his chair, after moving it away from the door. I peered in
through the window, and there was Mr. President, sleeping fitfully on his back,
his swollen belly pushing up the bedclothes. Pregnancy can be very tiring, or so
I’m told. Mr. President’s wife was snoozing in a chair beside his bed. How very
understanding and supportive of her.
    I reached under my armour for the gun holstered on my hip. The
Armourer has supplied me with many different guns down the years, but this one
really was rather special. A needle gun with a pressurised gas cylinder that
fired slivers of frozen holy water. Very quiet, very efficient.
    I didn’t bother with the Hand of Glory for the locked door, just
kicked it in with one golden foot. It crashed open, and Mr. President sat up in
bed and looked right at me. The baby he was hosting must have boosted his
senses. He took one look at me in my golden armour and started screaming that I
was there to assassinate him. I aimed my gun carefully and shot his wife while
she was still half up out of her chair. The ice needle hit her square in the
jugular vein, entered her bloodstream, and melted down into holy water; and Mr.
President’s wife convulsed as the demon possessing her was forced out.
    She’d been my target all along. The demon had hidden itself
inside her while her husband was out playing patty-cake with the ladything, and
then waited undetected for Mr. President’s baby to be born through a caesarean.
The demon could then possess the unnatural baby and assume a permanent physical
form, safe from all attempts at exorcism. Who knows what its plans were after
that? My family hadn’t felt like waiting around to find out.
    We’d all seen The Omen.
    The wife went down on all fours, shuddering and convulsing,
while her husband looked on, shocked into horrified silence. Black slime burst
out of her mouth and nose and ears and even ran down her face as viscous black
tears. More and more of the stuff spilled out of her, faster and faster, forming
a widening pool of black tarry stuff on the floor before her. And from this dark
ectoplasm the demon made itself a new body, its last desperate attempt to assume
a physical form in the material world.
    A squat, powerful shape thrust up out of the black pool; first
long, muscular arms, then a broad chest and shoulders, and finally a horned head
with coal red eyes. I shot it with another holy-water needle, and it howled
horribly but kept on growing. Determined little fellow. It pulled itself up out
of the black pool, towering above me now. It grew long claws on its hands, and a
wide smile split the dark face to show me row upon row of needle teeth. It
looked like what it was: vile and evil and terribly strong. I put away my gun
and grew thick golden spikes on my armoured fists. Some days you just have to do
things the hard way.
    The demon surged forward, lashing out at me with a clawed hand.
Sparks flew as the claws skittered harmlessly across my armoured chest. I
punched the demon in the head, and thick chunks of black ectoplasm flew away as
my spiked knuckles ripped through its pseudoflesh. I hit it again and