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Chapters (19)
  1. Title Page
  2. Copyright Page
  3. CHAPTER ONE - A Day in the Life
  4. CHAPTER TWO - Families: Can’t Live with Them, Can’t Take Them Down to the River ...
  5. CHAPTER THREE - Good and Evil; It’s All Relatives
  6. CHAPTER FOUR - Sons and Lovers
  7. CHAPTER FIVE - These Two Baby Seals Walk into a Club . . .
  8. CHAPTER SIX - Four Tutors and a Cemetery
  9. CHAPTER SEVEN - A Thousand and One Damnations
  10. CHAPTER EIGHT - Family Matters
  11. CHAPTER NINE - Out of Time
  12. CHAPTER TEN - Various Voices, Prophesying War
  13. CHAPTER ELEVEN - About Time
  14. CHAPTER TWELVE - A Circle Full of Secrets
  15. CHAPTER THIRTEEN - Truth, and Other Things, Will Out
  16. CHAPTER FOURTEEN - Peace and War
  17. CHAPTER FIFTEEN - Journeys End in Enemies Meeting
  18. CHAPTER SIXTEEN - High Tension
  19. EPILOGUE

“God, you can be a real pain in the arse sometimes,” said Molly.

“Comes with the job,” I said. “Let’s go home.”

CHAPTER EIGHT - Family Matters

CHAPTER EIGHT

Family Matters

We came home in the Blackhawkes. Those wonderful, sleek, and silent planes. Nothing wrong with them. Completely untouched. But they seemed so terribly empty, carrying just the few of us home. With only eleven torced Droods left, we had to spread ourselves out across the planes, so we could fly undetected through foreign airspaces, above a world that didn’t even know what we’d saved it from. None of the other Droods would even look at me as we climbed aboard our separate planes. Molly sat beside me all the way back, holding my hand, talking softly to me, but I couldn’t tell you a single thing she said. All I could think of . . . was what we were carrying in the cargo holds of the planes. All the dead Droods.

The news went ahead of us. Bad news always does. When the Blackhawkes finally touched down on the landing field behind the Hall, it seemed like the whole family had come out to watch. And when I and the terribly few survivors of my first disastrous mission descended from the planes, we did so to utter silence. To ranks of shocked faces and condemning eyes. I could have fobbed them off, told them there’d be an official statement later. Could have walked right through them and gone inside. But I didn’t. I stood and waited with everyone else, as the bodies were unloaded from the cargo holds.

We hadn’t been able to recover them all. Most of the bodies on the plain were either crushed into pulp by the falling tower, or so messed up from the fighting we couldn’t tell who was who, or what was what. Some had been reduced to just bits and pieces. So we just brought back the heads. We spent hours under the hot sun, digging through the wreckage and sorting through the carnage, the blood and the offal, and the stench, but in the end we brought less than half of the family home. The watching crowd made soft, shocked noises as the first bodies appeared. They’d never seen so many dead Droods before. No one had. Such a tragedy, such a loss of life in one operation, was unprecedented. Some people cried out at the sight of familiar faces, broken and disfigured and smeared with dried blood. Some people made to rush forward, but the Sarjeant-at-Arms was there with his people, to keep order. Family dignity must be maintained at all times.