The Demi-Monde: Summer by Rod Rees Read Free Book Online Page A

ForthRight’s grasp, but there is still much to be done. You have two principal tasks, Crowley: the Column of Loci must be brought under our control and taken to Terror Incognita, and the secrets of Dr Ptah’s work on the plague weapon secured and her laboratory destroyed.’
    With that Bole stood up to indicate that the meeting was at an end.
    ‘I can brook no more failure, Crowley,’ were his final words as he disappeared back into the darkness.

5
The Doge’s Palace, Venice
The Demi-Monde: 2nd Day of Summer, 1005 … 03:00
    That woeMen were created from the most repulsive and despicable creature, the serpent, does much to explain their inferiority. The great Aristotle himself regarded woeMen as simply
‘mutilated Men’
, a mere receptacle for the Soul of HumanKind which is carried in semen. Father Lotario de Conti in his study of the wiles of Lilith notes that the HIM Book tells us that
‘the wickedness of woeMen is greater than all the other wickedness of the Demi-Monde’
. And His HimPerial Reverence Mohammed Ahmed al-Mahdi warns that Man must be ever on his guard against the scheming and pernicious wiles of woeMen as they are an affront to Nature, it being their Lilithian purpose in life to make Men lose their Cool.
    An Idiot’s Guide to ManHood
: Selim the Grim, HimPerial Instructional Leaflets
    Billy didn’t like the Demi-Monde: it was too quiet. Where he lived in New York no matter what time it was of the day or night he always knew there were other people about. He could hear the traffic moving in the street three floors below his apartment, he could hear the music coming at him through the tenements’ thin walls, he could hear people laughing and shouting and yelling … he could hear life.
    But not in the Demi-Monde. Here everything was hushed. Standing on the balcony of the suite of rooms Ella had given him, all he could hear was the sound of the water lapping in the canals. It was spooky, especially as it was so dark. There were no street lights in Venice and if it hadn’t been for the moon he wouldn’t have been able to see anything. And to make things worse it hadn’t stopped raining since he’d arrived. Billy shivered and pulled his cloak more snugly around his shoulders.
    He fucking hated the Demi-Monde. Hated that it was so quiet, hated that it was so dark and especially hated that he couldn’t get high. No one seemed to deal in the Demi-Monde.
    Worst of all was that he was having trouble getting his head around the fact that the fucking place wasn’t
real
… it was just a computer game on steroids.
    Oh, some of the computer games the nerdniks had played at school were kinda out there with those losers pretending to be orcs and wizards and elves and shit, but this was something else again. This was computer gaming turned up to eleven. Virtual world or not, it was difficult to believe that the Demi-Monde was just digital jerking off and that made it fucking freaky.
    But then Bole had warned him that the DM was Weird Central and with a million bucks waiting for him when he got back to the Real World it wasn’t too much of a stretch just to stay cool.
    Just keep thinking about the dough
.
    Yeah, the money was the important thing and to earn it all he had to do was keep Sis locked down and stop her making waves … or miracles. It was his job to persuade her to stop fucking around playing nigga-in-charge and to haul ass back home.
    Not that Ella seemed ready to listen to him; she was really digging this whole goddess trip. That bitch had really put thetrembles on him. Bole hadn’t said anything about the changes she’d gone through since she’d arrived in the place, but she sure as hell wasn’t the same Ella he’d known six months ago. This new Ella was one scary bitch who walked around like she owned the joint, which, from what he could make out, she very nearly did. Nobody messed with Ella. Even de Sade treated her real carefully and from what he’d seen of de Sade he was one cat who