Pure Dead Frozen by Debi Gliori Page B

become its temporary owner, the stone had been locked away in the custody of the Etheric Library; before that, it had hung unnoticed for hundreds of years in the chandelier in the great hall of StregaSchloss. Now the chandelier was history—smashed to atoms—and the Etheric Librarian was missing, presumed dead. In a desperate attempt to put the stone out of harm’s way, she, Flora McLachlan, had tried to hide it on the mythical island that lay on the outermost rim of Death’s realm. Tried…and failed. True, the stone was hidden, safe from any casual search, but a determined or desperate seeker would eventually find some way of sifting through the millions of pebbles on the island’s fringe and thus uncover the stone. Backbreaking as this would undoubtedly be, the stone was well worth the effort; some would go so far as to say that finding the stone was worth far more than mere human lives.
    The stone was like nothing else on Earth. It was immeasurably ancient; had, in fact, always been in existence. It predated the planets but contained no carbon itself, which meant it was un-carbon-datable. It appeared to be made of nothing that could be analyzed or attributed to one of the elements in the periodic table. Furthermore, the stone’s mere proximity made human clocks and compasses run awry, as it appeared to transmit an untraceable signal that jammed radio waves and caused mobile phones to hiss like enraged serpents. Interesting as these properties were, they were not the source of the stone’s fascination for mortals, angels, and demons alike. The stone’s allure lay in its being more than a lapidary anomaly, for what it represented was raw power in its most elemental form. Raw power of an order utterly beyond the grasp of human intelligence. Raw power that made the combined outputs from every single one of Earth’s power stations look, by comparison, like a last gasp from a dying glowworm.
    The stone was like a vast battery of the type that a planet could use to run its central heating—exactly the kind of battery that could be used, by those who knew how, to power a spell, multiply the effect of an incantation a thousandfold, or tip the wobbly balance between the powers of light and darkness and forever throw a shadow of evil around the world—
    â€œSo…let me get this straight—it’s like a magnet for deep poo?” Ffup interrupted Mrs. McLachlan’s meditations on the true nature of the stone. The dragon’s mind was conjuring up several scenarios, all of which involved bucketloads of deep poo happening in the general vicinity of her about-to-be exfiancé, the faithless, lying, two-timing—
    â€œFfup, dear. The
carpet
.”
    Ffup snapped back to the present, where she found she’d accidentally set fire to a corner of Mrs. McLachlan’s rug. Horrified, she apologized profusely, smothering the flames with her tail and vowing to herself that this simply
had
to stop. She had to get a grip. At this rate, if she continued to wallow in such vengeful fantasies, she ran the risk of burning StregaSchloss to the ground. If Mrs. McLachlan wouldn’t help her find the ring, Ffup had a pretty good idea who else might.

Play to Death
    T he weak winter daylight that had shone over Argyll was fading rapidly as a curtain of gray clouds drew over the west coast of Scotland. Weather forecasters upgraded vague prophecies of wintry showers to far more serious predictions of severe blizzards, with major disruption to traffic across the entire western seaboard of Britain. Within half an hour, supermarkets the length of the U.K. had run out of bread, potatoes, pasta, and rice—the panicked citizens presumably intent on burying themselves up to their collective necks in white carbohydrates to mirror the whiteness piling up outside their windows. Airports shut down, flights were diverted to Holland, and a dimly remembered form of Second World War siege