Eddie Drood's Abilities (The Spy Who Haunted Me)

Remember how Eddie's torc makes him invisible to whoever and whatever he doesn't want to be seen by? Well, he can also extend that invisibility to whoever he wants:

“I’m pretty sure I can get my hands on a certain very useful item that will hide us all from the ghosts’ view. For a while, anyway. Long enough for us to sneak in, do the dreadful deed, and then get the hell out of there.”

Of course, I didn’t actually need such a device. My torc made me invisible to anyone or anything I wanted to be invisible to, and I was pretty sure I could extend that protection over the others for a while. Or until I found it necessary to drop it . . . -The Spy Who Haunted Me

Eddie's Sight allows him to pull a John Taylor:

I looked the Towers over carefully with my Sight, and the whole place blazed with dazzling arcane energies. Layer upon layer of old magics and deadly protections, such as proximity mines floating unseen in midair, just waiting to hit you with all kinds of nasty medicine if you were dumb enough to approach the Towers with bad thoughts in mind. The shaped curses under the flagstones were harder to spot, lying in wait like trap-door spiders. The huge old walls containing the Towers were solid in more than three dimensions, and the Towers themselves were half-buried under spells like so much crawling ivy. There were bright lights and terrible sounds, and the whole place stank of blood and horror and despair.

That was the ghosts, of course. I couldn’t See them without dropping more of my defences than I was comfortable with, but I could feel them the same way a fish knows when there’s a shark in the water. -The Spy Who Haunted Me

Eddie crushes the life-force of a snake spirit with his bare hands:

And then he spat out the last few words, and a snake big as all the world appeared out of nowhere and wrapped itself around me.

It was huge beyond bearing, its coils big as tube trains, superimposed on the Jewel House but no less real for that, twisting slowly as the coils tightened around me. It wasn’t a real snake, of course. This was the spirit of a Snake, an ancient ur-spirit in snake form, called back out of the Dreaming by Words that should never have been spoken. I couldn’t believe any Aboriginal shaman would have willingly surrendered these Words to Big Aus, no matter what he was promised. Spirits like this should never be summoned back into our limited physical world; they always have their own agenda.I

Big Aus was chanting more Words now at the iron bars surrounding the Crown Jewels. Protective spells sparked and sputtered and went out, and the metal bars dropped and ran away like melting candle wax. I could See it all through the coils of the snake, and I had had enough. It might be an ancient spirit made flesh, perhaps even an elder god let back into the world from which it had been driven long ago, but it was still just a snake, and I was a Drood. Through the golden mask I could See its life force flowing through the massive coils like a river of burning light. I thrust my armoured hand deep into the unnatural snake flesh, closed my golden fist around the life force, and squeezed. The snake screamed once, and then vanished, disappearing back into the safety of the Dreamtime. -The Spy Who Haunted Me

Eddie's armor protects him from the death magic of an aboriginal pointing bone:

“The Jewels are defended,” I said. I couldn’t stand the smugness in his voice anymore. “And while you might have got in, you’ll never get out.”

“Of course I will,” said Big Aus. “You can’t stop me. I am prepared. Even for a Drood.”

And suddenly there in his hand was an Aboriginal pointing bone. A small discoloured human bone, baptised in blood and murder magic. An Aboriginal shaman who knew what he was doing could point it at things that shouldn’t be in this world and make them disappear. Big Aus stabbed the pointing bone at me, and something slammed against my armoured chest like a cannonball. The sound echoed through the Jewel House, as though someone had just struck a great golden bell, but I didn’t move. I felt no impact inside my marvellous armour. I advanced slowly on Big Aus as he stabbed the bone at me again and again, and every time the impact and the sound was less. -The Spy Who Haunted Me

Eddie gets a new car. This is what it can do.

My new car, a Rover 25, had been carefully chosen to be anonymous and everyday. It was bright red; in fact, it was so red it was Red! Every time I got into it I was reminded of the old adage about a car being just a penis extension. I was tempted to paint the bonnet purple and sculpt some veins down the sides. Do I really need to tell you I didn’t choose this car?

Still, it came complete with all the usual extras, courtesy of my uncle Jack. Armed, armoured, and faster than a rat up a drainpipe, this particular Rover 25 could do 300 mph in reverse, fly at Mach 2, and even, in an emergency, go sideways. The Armourer was very keen for me to try that out, but I didn’t like the look in his eye when he said it. He’s still mad at me for messing up his beloved racing Bentley. The Rover 25 had all the usual hidden weaponry, protections, and nasty surprises for the ungodly, plus an ejector seat that could blast an unwanted passenger straight into the next dimension but three. -The Spy Who Haunted Me

Drood armour allows the wearer to breathe basically anywhere, to the point that they're implied to be able to walk on the moon while wearing it.

I never felt the water or the cold as I swam strongly down into the depths of the loch. The armour protected me and fed me all the air I needed. I could walk on the moon in this armour, and legend has it some of our family have. -The Spy Who Haunted Me

A monster slams Eddie into a submarine hard enough to kill an ordinary man, as well as crack part of the hull:

I couldn’t see the monster anywhere, but in these peat-filled waters the bloody thing could have been right on top of me, and I wouldn’t have known. Not a comfortable thought. And then something shot past me, moving impossibly quickly, and the shock of its passing wave slammed me against the side of the submersible with enough force to kill an ordinary man. I felt as much as heard the hull creak and crack beneath me, and I knew I didn’t have long to save Honey. -The Spy Who Haunted Me

With his armour, Eddie supports the weight of a submarine while at least a hundred feet underwater:

Something hit the submersible again, driving it sideways. The alarms in the cabin sounded shrill and raucous now.

“You’re almost here, Honey,” said Walker. “Only a few hundred yards. Can’t you coax a little more out of your engines? Any last emergency power reserves . . . ?” -The Spy Who Haunted Me

I gestured reassuringly at her while I thought fast. The only way to get her out would be to rip the submersible open, and then carry her to the surface. Except I didn’t know if she had any breathing equipment on board, the cold of the waters would probably kill her anyway, and I couldn’t be sure of protecting her if the monster attacked on the way up. No; for the moment, she was safer where she was.

So I gave Honey another reassuring wave, swam down beneath the slowly sinking submersible, found its centre, and put my golden shoulder against it. And then with slow, careful movements, I took the weight of the submersible upon my armour and swam back up to the surface, pushing the damned thing ahead of me all the way.

Sometimes my armour surprises even me. -The Spy Who Haunted Me

This is how big said submarine was:

A few moments passed, and then a great rent appeared in the sky above us, an actual tear in reality itself. Out of which dropped a large and very yellow and extremely futuristic-looking submersible. It was the size of an articulated lorry, and it fell almost lazily through the air, heading for the water right next to where we were standing. -The Spy Who Haunted Me

Eddie rips the escape hatch off this submarine:

Honey had already cracked the escape hatch, and smoke was pouring out. I ripped the hatch off, threw it aside, and peered in. Honey had freed herself from her chair and was climbing towards me through the smoke and flashing lights. The alarms were very loud. -The Spy Who Haunted Me

Eddie's Sight is nowhere near as good as John's, but it's still pretty solid:

I looked around me, focusing my Sight through my featureless golden mask.

At once, the street was full of ghosts. Men and women and children, running and screaming and dying from no obvious cause, all of them trapped in repeating loops of time. Images, echoes, from the past. People, terrified, howling like animals, dying . . . Images imprinted onto the surroundings, repeating over and over again. Even with the Sight, I couldn’t see what it was that scared them, what was killing them. Just . . . glimpses of something at the corner of my mental eye. Quick impressions of something unbearably awful hanging over the city like a storm, running wild in its streets, close and threatening and utterly unstoppable. Inside my armour, my skin was crawling.

As though the Devil himself had come to X37 and was standing right behind me.

I sent my Sight soaring up into the harsh gray sky and looked out over the woods, miles and miles away, to where the terrible old thing lay buried, deep and deep under the permafrost. I could feel his presence, like a wound in the world, but he was still sleeping soundly, hopefully till Judgement Day itself. I looked down at the city spread out below me, and my Sight immediately picked up strange emanations blasting up into the sky from one untouched research building only a dozen or so streets away from where we’d stopped. A shuddering, staccato glare of unnatural energies stabbing up into the sky like a stuttering searchlight. Pure psychic energy spiking up from a single location as though to say, Here I am! for anyone with the Sight to see it. So there was at least one survivor left in X37, after all.

I dropped back into my head, shut down my Sight, and sent my armour back into my torc. The cold oppressive gloom of the city weighed down on me again. It was actually harder to think clearly . . . I told the others what I’d seen and pointed out the direction, and we all set off immediately, glad to leave the street of blood behind us. -The Spy Who Haunted Me

Eddie's armour protects his mind from the influence of an entire city that's gone genius loci:

I sighed and armoured up. The golden armour slipped over me in a moment; immediately I felt sharper, stronger, better able to cope. I hadn’t realised how much the city was affecting me until my armour protected me from its malign influence. -The Spy Who Haunted Me

“I’m picking up all kinds of information from this room,” Honey said abruptly. “I know things I have no way of knowing. It’s like . . . suddenly remembering a book I read long ago that I know for a fact I never read. My head hurts.”

“It’s the psychic imprinting,” I said. “What happened here was so powerful, so traumatic, it literally soaked into its surroundings. Genius loci, and all that. A stone tape. And now, just by being here, we’ve started the tape playing again. -The Spy Who Haunted Me

“How much of it did you pick up?” I said after a while. It didn’t sound like my voice. It sounded . . . shocked, uncertain. Lost.

“Enough,” said Walker. “Monsters from the id. The city’s id.”

“He killed a whole city with their own nightmares,” said Honey. “A whole city . . .”

“The one thing no one can face,” said Peter. He turned around but looked past us to stare into the other room.

“Good thing the crazy bastard’s dead and gone, then,” said Honey, trying for a brisk, professional tone and not quite managing. “No telling how much damage he might have done otherwise. No wonder the Soviets couldn’t cope . . .”

“They wanted a weapon,” said Walker. “They got one.”

“I think he’s dead,” I said. “No one could See what he did, and survive. But I don’t think he’s gone. What he did was so powerful, the psychic energies stamped themselves into the physical surroundings. Ready to emerge again at any time. Why isn’t Grigor’s body still in the chair? Why aren’t the scientists’ bodies still on the floor, or at least, what was left of them? Why didn’t we discover a single corpse in the whole damned city? Because the nightmares are still here. Still active. Still hungry.” -The Spy Who Haunted Me

Just to prove that the above wasn't a fluke:

I armoured up, and the golden strange matter flowed out and around me in a moment, insulating me from the city’s psychic assault. I hadn’t realised just how close to the edge I’d come until the armour brought me back. Everything in the city was now dedicated solely to the destruction of the human mind and soul. -The Spy Who Haunted Me

Eddie's armour broadcasts a signal which prevents him from being seen by anything or anyone he doesn't want to be seen by:

“Is that really wise?” she hissed. “We’re supposed to be undercover agents, remember? Aren’t you in the least concerned that the tourists will see you in your armour and run screaming for their lives? Or an exorcist? All it needs is one quick-thinking onlooker to catch you on his phone camera, and we will be the local news, on every channel!”

“Try not to panic,” I said, still looking out over the river through my golden mask. “It’s very unbecoming in an agent. My torc broadcasts a signal that prevents anyone from seeing the armour. Unless I decide otherwise.”

“We can see it,” said Peter.

“Only because I let you,” I said.

“Hold everything,” said Walker. “Are you saying your torc has influence, even control, over our thoughts?”

“Pretty much,” I said. “Don’t worry about it. I am a Drood and therefore by definition far too nice and good and noble to even think of abusing such a privilege.”

“Typical Drood arrogance!” said Honey. “You never thought to mention this before, because . . . ?”

“I thought you knew,” I said. “You’re CIA. You know everything.”

“Don’t hit him,” Walker said to Honey. “You’d only hurt your hand. Wait till he’s armoured down; then hit him.” -The Spy Who Haunted Me

When Eddie absorbed the Blue Fairy's torc, his own armour gained some of the changes made to it:

“Just how are you intending to force your way into the Sundered Lands?” said Walker. “I wasn’t sure such a thing was possible, even for the legendary Droods. Even if there is a soft spot . . .”

“Blue had a torc stolen from the Droods,” I said. “Though he never did learn how to operate it, or he’d still be alive. Anyway, after he died, I used a spell built into his elven breastplate to send him home. My armour remembers the spell, and I can use it to force open the soft spot.”

“I didn’t know your armour could do that,” said Walker.
“There’s lots of things it can do that people don’t know about,” I said airily.

But that wasn’t one of them. My armour is strange matter, not magic. Whole different thing. I had a different plan to get us through. When Blue stole his torc from us, he took it to the Fae Courts, and they put their mark upon it. When I absorbed Blue’s torc into my armour, those changes became a part of my strange matter too. Changes I could follow right back to their origin. I could break into the Elven Lands any time I chose.

So why did I lie to my companions? To mislead them and keep them off balance. To keep something to myself. In the spy game, you take your advantages where you can find them. -The Spy Who Haunted Me

Eddie smashes an elf's head with a single punch:

“I am the Herald,” he said, fixing me with his one golden eye. “Mab’s Herald. I speak for her to lesser things. And yes, I am being punished, for sins beyond your comprehension. Or appreciation. Still, it is good to have you here, Drood. It’s been so long since we had anything human to torment.”

I armoured up and took him out with one punch to the head. His skull broke audibly under the impact of my golden fist, and he sat suddenly down, as though someone had pulled the floor out from under him. Start as you mean to go on, I always say. The massed ranks of elves stirred again, and the four favourites hissed with rage, but Queen Mab raised one perfect hand and immediately all was still and silent again. The Herald rose slowly to his feet, the bones of his head creaking and cracking as they moved slowly back into place. Golden blood ran steadily down the side of his face and dripped off the lobe of his pointed ear. The blow would have killed anyone else, but elves are hard to kill. You couldn’t slow an elf down with a wrecking ball. Not in their own world. -The Spy Who Haunted Me

Eventually, we learn that Eddie learned how to shift his armour into a new battle from during his training under Giles Deathstalker:

I concentrated, and my armour glowed and glared like an angry golden flame. Razor-sharp blades rose up out of my armoured arms and legs, thick spikes protruding from my knuckles. My featureless face mask became a savage demonic visage topped with curling horns. Strange exotic weapons burst out of my back on long golden streamers, covering the elves in their ranks, and rose up over my shoulders to threaten Queen Mab on her Ivory Throne. This was the battle form the Deathstalker had taught me to make from the malleable strange armour of my new torc. I didn’t have time to perfect it before the war with the Hungry Gods was over, but I’d spent a lot of time working on it since.

The elves stood very still. This was a new thing, and the elves have always been cautious of change. They don’t know how to react to new things. -The Spy Who Haunted Me

Eddie can use these bare minimum of his torc's  strange matter to form "parts" of armour. In this instance, Eddie forms a pair of sunglasses through which he can project his Sight:

I concentrated hard on my torc, coaxing and bludgeoning it into doing something new and different . . . until at last a long thin tendril slid up my neck from the torc to form a pair of stylish golden sunglasses over my eyes. An absolute minimum use of my armour, hopefully not enough to set off any alien detection systems. I focused my Sight through the golden strange matter over my eyes and Saw the town of Roswell very clearly indeed. Parts . . . I’d never tried parts of armour before . . . I made a mental note to discuss this with my family when I got back. Assuming I ever got back, of course . . .

My augmented Sight showed me a whole new Roswell. Dark shapes drifted through the streets like animated wisps of shadow, lighting here and there on people disturbed by a vague sense of menace or unease. Elemental spirits are always drawn to potential arenas of spiritual destruction. They feed like vultures on the fiercer, more distressed emotions. On the other hand, Light People were standing and watching all through the town. They were scintillating light and energy bound into human form, almost abstract living things. Their appearance at a scene was both a good and a bad thing. It meant something severely dangerous was about to happen, with many lives on the line, but also that they expected some agent of good to put up a fight. I always think of the Light People as basically good-hearted supernatural sports fans. There were ghosts too, and semitransparent memories of places past, along with other-dimensional entities and travellers just passing through. None of them mattered. I looked slowly about me, sifting through the various information streams permeating the local aether, and soon enough, there it was . . . A strange alien energy broadcasting from a location right near the centre of town.

I’d found them. -The Spy Who Haunted Me

They allow him to see right through an "avoidance field" that's mentally distracting an entire town's population from something:

Apart from the jamming signal, the mound was also broadcasting a powerful avoidance field. More than just the usual Don’t look at me, nothing to see here, move along suggestions; this was mind manipulation, a field strong enough that people couldn’t even think about the alien mound or anything connected with it. No wonder everyone in Roswell had seemed so unnaturally calm and languid; the alien signal was all but lobotomising them to be sure they’d stay in place for the great experiment. Presumably the signal would be dropped once the bloodletting began so the aliens could observe the full spectrum of human reactions to what was being done to them.

My Sight punched right through the avoidance field, but I knew I couldn’t risk that for long for fear of being detected. There had to be all kinds of surveillance going on within the mound. So I grabbed as much useful information as I could in quick looks and glances, ready to shut down my Sight at a moment’s notice that I’d been spotted. I couldn’t See any alarms or proximity fields or booby traps . . . Just the mound, sitting there, sick and smug and serene, like an abscess on the world. So sure of its own strength and superiority over mere humanity that it didn’t even feel the need for protection. Fools. -The Spy Who Haunted Me

Eddie's armour protects him from Strange Chloe's existence-erasing stare, eventually forcing her power to rebound on her:

She stepped forward and glared at me. I could feel power building around her. I hastily subvocalised my activating Words and armoured up. Coffin Jobe and the Dancing Fool gaped at me; they’d never seen a Drood take on his armour before. Not many have and lived to tell of it. Strange Chloe didn’t care. Her rage seethed and crackled on the air between us as she took another step forward. The impact of her gaze hit me like a fist. That was her gift and her power and her curse: to make anything disappear that dared not to love her. Strange Chloe’s stare slammed against my armour, terrible energies filling the space between us as she concentrated, the unyielding power of her fury straining to find some hold, some purchase, against the impenetrable, more than normal certainty of my strange matter armour. I took a step forward, towards her, and her face became almost inhuman in its concentrated rage.

Things close to us began to disappear, driven out of reality by the overspilling energies of Strange Chloe’s stare. Objects and trophies and pieces of furniture just vanished, one after the other, air rushing in to fill the gaps left behind. Rich deep carpet faded away and was gone, leaving a slowly widening swath of bare boards between us. Strange Chloe glared at me, scowling so hard it must have hurt her face, but all I had to show her in return was my featureless gold mask. I was almost close enough to reach out and touch her when her power broke against my armour and blasted back at her. The full force of her gaze was reflected by my unyielding armour, and Strange Chloe screamed silently as she faded away and was gone.

I armoured down.

“Sorry, Chloe,” I said to the empty air where she’d been. “I hope you’re happy now, wherever you are.” -The Spy Who Haunted Me