Pure Dead Brilliant (17 page)

“Of course you hadn't, darling, but do you remember how, a year afterward, a little patch of forget-me-nots sprang up in the exact spot we'd buried her?”

“Rats don't change into
flowers
,” Titus said with seven-year-old certainty.

“Yes they
do
, Titus,” Luciano insisted. “Think—a tree starts with a seed from another tree, blown by the wind, dropped by a bird—”

“In its poo.”

“Thank you, Pandora. Yes, sometimes seeds are dropped by a bird ‘in its poo,' as you so quaintly put it. Then the seed grows into a sapling, then a tree, then it makes its own seeds for growing into other trees, and in time it grows old, withers, blows down in a storm—”

“Or we cut it down. For firewood,” Titus insisted, ever a stickler for detail.

“And yes—we burn it on our fires, but that isn't the end of the tree. It doesn't vanish—it turns first into flames and heat, then ash for the garden, and part of it turns into smoke and flies up out of the chimney. . . .”

“But it's
gone
,” Titus wailed. “It's not a tree anymore.”

“No,” Luciano conceded. “It has changed into smoke and ash, and in time, the clouds and the wind will carry it away and it will rain down on other trees in other places, and those other trees will drink it up through their roots—and in this way it will become a tree again.”

“Oh! That's just so
perfect
. Well
done
, Luciano.” Baci sprang to her feet and flung her arms round her husband's neck—and before they could blink, the boat overturned, plunging them all into
Lochnagargoyle. . . .

“Titus—hello? Hello?”

He blinked, recalled to the present by his father's voice. To Titus's relief he wasn't struggling in the chilly loch, but slouched across a chesterfield in the library. Luciano stood before him, backlit by the logs burning in the fireplace, scratching irritatedly at a gnat bite behind one ear.

“Sorry, Dad.
Phwoof,
I was miles away,” he mumbled, aware from his father's expression that something more was expected from him. “Um—what? Why're you staring at me like that?”

“You look different, somehow.” Luciano tilted his head to one side and narrowed his eyes, peering at his son doubtfully. “I hesitate to say this because you'll probably regard it as an insult, but you look . . . oh . . .
young
and happy. Happi
er
. Much, much happier than you were earlier this evening.”

Titus smiled, somewhat baffled by his father's comments. Of course he looked
young,
he reasoned—compared to the two wrinklies in his present company, he was almost a newborn. And happy? Oh
yes,
he confirmed, feeling something vast and full of light streak across his thoughts. Yes, I'm so happy I could
burst,
actually. In a week's time I'm going to be pure dead grown-up. Thirteen! A teenager at long last. And . . . at long last, I know exactly what I want for my birthday . . . and, more to the point, exactly what I
don't
.

“Dad,” Titus said, turning his back on the estate lawyer, “can I have a wee word—just you and me, for a moment?”

Spilt Blood

I
n a fit of rash generosity that she later regretted, Signora Strega-Borgia had given Fiamma a bedroom on the
second floor, the walls of which were covered in panels of raw Chinese silk dating back to the P'Ing Imperial Dynasty. Sitting on the bed, her charred high heels digging holes in the coordinated silk quilt, Fiamma lit a tiny black cigar and sank back against the pillows with her cell phone tucked under
her chin.

“I need you to look something up for me,” she said, tapping ash onto the floor. “It's not available on the Internet, otherwise I'd have done it myself—so don't give me grief about your not being my personal search engine. You have to get up off your scaly haunches and go find the relevant file.”

There was a stunned silence from the other end. Then Fiamma was put on hold while the lesser demon applied itself to the task. Minutes ticked by until the bedroom was filled with evil black smoke and Fiamma had ground her cigar out on the bedside kilim.

“So soon?” she hissed, her eyes briefly flashing vermilion. “Took long enough, didn't you? Right. The chapter on
Sang di Draco,
if you would, with particular reference to the subsection dealing with fluorescence . . .”

There was a shuffling of parchment as, on the other end, the minor demon did as it was bid.

“Right, minion. Tell me if the Pericola d'Illuminem does indeed make dragon's blood glow.” Fiamma's voice had dropped to a whisper as she peered at a tiny vial held between her thumb and forefinger. “Perfect,” she purred, transferring the vial to the palm of her hand and closing her fingers around it. “I thought it did, but I just wanted to be absolutely sure before I start hurling blood around the place. . . .” A smile played around her mouth, and a small trail of drool crept down her chin. “Catch you later, serf,” she added, switching her phone off.

Fiamma stood up, her breathing shaky, her inner agitation making it impossible for her to remain still. I'm almost
there,
she gloated silently. First the stone, then the souls . . . and then I'm out of here, back home to Hell. Even if I do say so myself, that was a stroke of utter
genius,
drawing blood out of that malformed baby dragon. . . .

Before she'd left the Hadean Executive on this particular mission, they had been installing tanning beds for the exclusive use of high-level members who needed regular exposure to ultraviolet light to counteract the effect of spending their entire lives in the sunless depths of Hell. A colleague of Fiamma's had made the useless discovery that UV light caused dragon's blood to fluoresce—under the ultraviolet rays of a tanning bed the blood glowed deep neon-pink. This information was duly filed and forgotten, and would have been entirely lost to demon-kind were it not for the fact that here, now, Fiamma was about to make demonic history. For the Chronostone emitted a particular wavelength of light that corresponded to ultraviolet on the electromagnetic spectrum.

“All
I
have to do . . . ,” Fiamma whispered to her reflection in the dark glass of her uncurtained window. “All I have to do to find the Chronostone is sprinkle little drops of dragon's blood around this Scottish mausoleum and wait to see if they
glow
.”

The small matter of dispatching the boy and the baby? A mere bagatelle. Fiamma unstoppered the vial and dipped a tiny glass rod into the red liquid within. With a flick of her wrist she sent a single drop of Nestor's blood spinning up in the air, and then straight down onto the floor. On contact with the floorboards, the drop exploded into tens of droplets, which arranged themselves in the classic spatter pattern beloved of detective fiction. In the gloomy light of the Chinese bedroom, the blood failed to do anything other than soak indelibly into the floorboards. Not in the least discouraged, Fiamma restoppered the vial and tiptoed out into the corridor, pausing at the head of the stairs to repeat the experiment.

It wasn't until she reached the great hall that she struck gold. But by then, it was far too late.

Titus Grown

“A
s your lawyer, I must advise you that what you are doing is . . . foolhardy beyond belief.”
Titus wrote steadily, ignoring the splutterings coming from behind him.

“Once done, this cannot be undone.” The estate lawyer was pale with the effort of making sure that his young client was aware of what he was doing.

“Look,” Titus said, waving his father's fountain pen for emphasis, “I don't
want
any more advice, thank you. Please, could you keep quiet—or I'm going to sign my name wrong. . . .” He bent his head and laboriously scrawled

for the fourth time in ten minutes. Silently, Titus passed the pen to Luciano, who signed his name under that of his son. In a silence broken only by scratching from the pen nib and loud hissing from a particularly resinous log on the fire, they all became aware of the sound of footsteps approaching from downstairs. An urgent knock was immediately followed by Latch's head appearing round the library door, his words tumbling one over the other in his haste to be understood.

“Sir, you've got a prob— There's a— You've got to come downstairs now, right now, or he's going to—”

“Latch?” Luciano slowly unfolded himself from the
woodworm-scarred embrace of his chair. “Latch—you're
shaking like a leaf—what's the matter?”

The butler's eyes were wild and his hands trembled as he pointed behind him to the open library door. “Please,” he begged, “now. He said if I don't bring you both downstairs immediately he'd—he'd—”

“Who? What? He'll what?” Signor Strega-Borgia was by Latch's side, infected by the butler's state of panic and half-aware of Titus getting up from the desk and moving toward the door in slow motion. A shot rang out from downstairs, and Titus heard the unmistakable sound of Pandora screaming.

The front door stood wide open, and consequently the great hall, like the library, was full of opportunistic insects whose attraction toward warmth and light made them unaware of
the present dangers inside StregaSchloss. Fiamma d'Infer lay sprawled across the floor at the foot of the grandfather clock, her hand outstretched toward the shadows beneath it, a large bloodstain evidence of the bullet that had torn through her buttock and embedded itself in the wall behind the banister. Regrettably, her chest's slow rise and fall indicated that she was not slain, merely unconscious. Spilling from under the demon's body was a mysterious puddle of neon-pink liquid, which was slowly leaching away into gaps between the flagstones.

Titus took in these details in little memory snapshots—
door/
insects/body/clock/luminous pink puddle
—automatically recording each image with scant emotion and even less interest. Since hearing the gunshot, he'd entered a nightmarish zone akin to the still center at the eye of a hurricane. He'd run downstairs behind his father, but he'd felt like an automaton, robotic in his utter lack of thought or feeling. All he could hear was his sister's scream. All he could think of was Pandora.

The door to the drawing room stood ajar and now, coming from behind it, they could hear a weird, high-pitched squeaking sound followed by another gunshot.

Left behind in the library with instructions to phone the police, the lawyer discovered that the telephone line into StregaSchloss had been cut. Replacing the dead receiver, he turned to rake through his briefcase, then remembered that he'd left his cell phone in his car.

Perhaps he'd seen too many movies or had failed to realize that, at fifty-eight, deciding to rappel down the south face of StregaSchloss on the end of a moth-eaten damask curtain was a bad idea. Or maybe the sight of the Borgia money going to such an undeserving home had simply robbed the estate lawyer of the will to live. But miraculously, his rappelling suicide attempt didn't kill him. He was just crawling, bleeding, out of the shrubbery—and checking how many bones he'd fractured in his fall from the library window on the second floor—when a bullet turned him into the subject of a fulsome obituary in the following week's
Daily Telegraph
. Unaware of his posthumous fame, the lawyer spun round once, sank to his knees, and collapsed facedown in a thistle patch.

On the threshold of the drawing room Titus stopped dead, a howl of protest dying in his throat. The smell of explosives assailed his nostrils as he caught sight of his mother in the grip of a man with a face straight out of a nightmare. Aghast, Titus realized that the object the man was pressing against Baci's throat was a snub-nosed gun. Around her, frozen in place, the faces of her family and guests mirrored the terror Baci felt at being held hostage by this hideously maimed assailant. Under hissed instructions from Latch, Titus and Luciano restrained themselves from running to Baci's aid. On a sofa in front of a vase full of blood-red roses, Pandora sat trembling next to Mrs. McLachlan, who held Damp in her arms. A muted growling came from all five beasts, miserably aware that they had failed utterly to guard their family from harm.

“L-L-Lucifer?” Signor Strega-Borgia stammered, barely able to recognize his half brother's ruined face. “Is that really you?”

“Eek,” came the terse reply, as Lucifer waved his free hand
in Latch's direction. With a whispered apology, the butler approached as instructed, producing a notebook and pen which he handed over.

“What happened to your face . . . your voice?” Luciano quavered.

Ignoring this, Lucifer transferred the gun to his left hand and wedged the notebook open between Baci's shoulder blades, holding it in place with his forearm. Not taking his eyes off the others, he scribbled something in the notebook and passed it back to Latch.

“He says,
Shut up,
” Latch read, an impatient movement from Lucifer making the butler return the notebook. Lucifer's yellow eyes didn't once drop to the page but maintained their watch on the room as he scrawled out several lines of instructions. Wearily, Latch received the notebook and, holding it at arm's length, read out Lucifer's demands.

“‘Nobody try anything or the Signora gets it. Luciano, get your brat to transfer the money over to me. I'm taking your wife with me as security until the money reaches my bank account. Any tricks and you'll never see her alive again.'”
The butler's face was strained with the effort of allowing such words to pass his lips. From the other side of the room, Titus spoke, his voice ringing out in the silence.

“You're too late, ‘Uncle' Lucifer. You've wasted your time coming here tonight. Earlier this evening we wired the money from Grandfather's estate account into yours. We were just completing the paperwork when you . . . interrupted.”

Pandora's head jerked upright. Titus had voluntarily
given
his inheritance to this creep? Uncomprehending, she watched as Lucifer relaxed his grip on Signora Strega-Borgia.

“Phone your bank if you don't believe me,” Titus said, adding, “That is, if you haven't already cut the telephone cable into the house.”

Still without taking his eyes off anyone, Lucifer produced a cell phone from his breast pocket and pressed a button on its keypad. His eyes darted from Luciano to Titus, back and forth, recognizing in Titus shades of the little half brother he'd spent his childhood torturing. He squeaked something incomprehensible into his phone, but evidently the voice on the other end was used to dealing with a client who not only acted like a rat but spoke like one, too—for Lucifer fell silent, his face reflecting the discovery that half an hour before his nephew had made him one of the wealthiest men on the planet. His lips curled upward in a hideous rictus as he confirmed that Titus had not lied.

However, if he wasn't mistaken, there was a corpse in the shrubbery outside—and a roomful of witnesses to the fact that he'd murdered an innocent stranger, shot a woman in the hall, and threatened the life of his half brother's wife. With a vicious shove, Lucifer pushed Baci to one side, grabbed the notebook from Latch, and began to write with such force that his pen gouged holes in the paper. He flung the notebook on the floor at the butler's feet, and backed away toward the French windows leading onto the lawn. Latch briefly closed his eyes and took a deep breath before reading Lucifer's message.

“He says the money changes nothing. Apparently we're all still dead meat.” Latch's voice was utterly flat and devoid of emotion as he read out this death sentence in the silent room, but everyone watching noticed the telltale quivering of the notebook he clutched in his hands. “Apparently,” he continued, “while we were dining downstairs, this murderer was crawling around in the attic, wiring up a massive incendiary device—”

Ariadne Ventete gave a small squeal and collapsed into a
log basket.

Unperturbed, Latch carried on calmly, “—a device that he intends to detonate by keying in three numbers on his cell phone—”

All adult eyes in the room swiveled to where, with gun in one hand and cell phone in the other, Lucifer had almost reached the open windows.

It was at precisely this moment that Damp, impatiently wriggling in Mrs. McLachlan's arms, reached out to grab one of the roses in the vase behind her nanny. Instinctively, Baci made a lunge for her baby daughter and fell on top of Mrs. McLachlan. Damp lost her balance, clutched a particularly thorn-studded rose stem and, shrieking like a banshee, cast the first major spell of her lifetime.