Sharper Than a Serpent's Tooth (9 page)

People around me kept glancing up at the night sky, as though half-expecting the stars to have changed position, or the oversized full moon to have turned bloodred. Something new and dangerous had come into the Nightside, and they could all sense it, like cattle approaching a slaughterhouse. Everyone seemed sharper and almost spookily alert, and the intensity of the night moved up another notch.

Striding back and forth outside the ever-welcoming doors of disreputable clubs, the barkers hawked their wares with a new urgency, while on every street corner the come-ons from the scarlet lips of the twilight daughters was a little bit more aggressive. Tides of people surged this way and that, the casual stroll giving way to the determined march, as though the punters were afraid that what they were looking for might not be there when they got there. A new Special Edition of the Nightside's only daily paper, the Night Times, was just hitting the streets, and people crowded round the news vendors, almost snatching the papers out of their hands, then chattering animatedly over the heavy black headlines. I had no doubt that Lilith had made the front page, and probably most of the other pages, too. I needed to get my plan up and running before everything started falling apart. And for that, I needed Dead Boy.

It wasn't hard to find the lap-dancing club where he was working as a bouncer. Bit of a come-down, for the Nightside's most eminent vigilante, dark avenger, and first line of defence against the legions of the dead, but presumably there were fringe benefits. I stopped before the club and studied it carefully from what I hoped was a safe distance. The flashing neon sign over the gaping door spelled out the club's name, not fade away, in colours so bright and garish they practically stabbed into my eyes. To either side were neon figures of dancing girls, jiggling eternally from one uncomfortable-looking position to another, back and forth, back and forth. A grubby window held photographs of the glamorous girls one could hope to find inside the club, though experience led me to believe the girls actually on display would look nothing like the photos.

The barker lounging by the door inhabited a brightly coloured check coat, with a revolving bow tie and a grin so fixed it bordered on the unnatural. He'd started out life as a ventriloquist's dummy, and never really got over it. Seeing my interest he fixed me with his brightly shining eyes and launched into his spiel.

"They're dead, they're naked, and they dance!"

I fixed him with my best cold stare. "Do I look like a tourist?"

He sneered and moved away from the door, waving me in. I passed him by with as much dignity as was possible under the circumstances. Inside the lap-dancing club, someone tried to take my coat, and I punched him out. Start as you mean to go on… The transition from chilly night to sweltering lounge was abrupt, and I stopped inside the main area to get my bearings. The management kept the lights down to a comforting gloom, partly to give the punters a sense of privacy, but mostly so you wouldn't get too good a look at the rest of the clientele. The air was thick with all kinds of smoke, and rank with the stink of sweat and desire and desperation. There were ratty-looking tables and chairs for the scattered audience, and cheap plywood booths at the back for more private encounters. The customers were mostly men, mostly human, their eyes fixed hungrily on the four separate spotlighted stages where the dancers swayed back and forth to the over-amplified music.

There were girls, up on the stages and in and among the audience, showing off what they'd got and what they could do, all of them naked, all of them dead. The spirits of departed women, condemned to wander the Earth for this reason or that, lap-dancing for the living. Some seemed completely real and solid, while others were only wisps of smoke or mist, tinted all of the colours of the rainbow by the coloured gels rotating in front of the stage lights. Most of the girls drifted from one state to the other and back again, as they stamped and spun and shook their breasts, pumping their hips and curling around the steel poles on the stages, all the time favouring the nearest customers with wide smiles that meant nothing, nothing at all. Ghostly girls, the dancing dead—the ultimate look but don't touch.

There was a tacky-looking bar set to one side, and leaning up against it, the legendary Dead Boy himself. Technically speaking, he wasn't old enough to be in a club like this. Dead Boy was seventeen, and had been for some thirty years, ever since he was murdered—clubbed down in the street for his credit cards and mobile phone. He came back from the dead, after making a deal with someone he still preferred not to name, and took a terrible vengeance on his killers, only to find that his deal made it impossible for him to go to his rest afterwards. And so he walks the Nightside, forever young, forever damned, his spirit possessing his own dead body, doing good deeds in the hope that eventually he'll accumulate enough goodwill in Heaven to break the terms of the deal he made.

He was tall and adolescent thin, wrapped in a dark purple greatcoat, over black leather trousers and tall calfskin boots. He wore a black rose on one lapel and a large floppy black hat perched on the back of his head. His coat hung open, revealing a corpse-pale torso held together with stitches and staples and duct tape. He doesn't feel pain any more, but he can still take damage. If I looked closely I could see the bullet hole in his forehead that he'd filled in with builder's putty.

His long white face had a weary, debauched look, with burning fever-bright eyes and a pouting sulky mouth with no colour in it. He had experimented with makeup, but mostly he just couldn't be bothered. Long dark hair fell to his shoulders in oiled ringlets. He looked calm, casual, even bored. He was drinking whiskey straight from the bottle and eating Neapolitan ice cream straight from the tub. He nodded easily as I came over to join him.

"Hello, Taylor," he said indistinctly, around a mouthful of ice cream. "Pardon my indulgence, but when you're dead you have to take your pleasures where you can find them. I'd offer you a drink, but I've only got the one bottle. And don't order anything from the bar—their prices are appalling, and the drinks are worse."

I nodded. I already knew that. I'd been here once before, working a case, and had allowed myself to be persuaded to order what passed for champagne. It tasted like cherry cola. Nothing was what it seemed here. Even the waitress had an Adam's apple.

"So you're the bouncer?" I said, leaning easily back against the bar beside him.

"I run security here," he corrected me. "I keep an eye on things. Most of the punters take one look at me, and know better than to start anything."

"I thought you had a steady gig, body-guarding that singer, Rossignol?"

He shrugged. "She's off touring Europe. And I… prefer not to leave the Nightside. This job's just temporary, until I can scare something else up. Even the dead have to earn a living. Hence the girls here."

I nodded. The Nightside accumulates more than its fair share of ghosts and revenants, one way and another, and they all have to go somewhere.

"Where do the girls go, when they're not working?" I asked.

Dead Boy gave me a pitying look. "They're always working. That's the point. It's not like they ever get tired…"

"What do the girls get out of this? The money can't be that good."

"It isn't. But a clever girl can make a lot from tips, and the management guarantees to keep the girls safe from necromancers, plus all the other unsavoury types who use the energies of the departed to fuel their magics. And of course all the girls hope to hook an appreciative customer, turn him into a regular, and milk him for all he's worth."

I looked out over the widely spread audience. "Anyone interesting in tonight?"

"A few names, a few faces, no-one you'd know and no-one worth noting. Though we do have several diminutive professors, who claim they're here researching modern slang. They loved it when I told them this club was licensed to dispense spirits . . ."

I smiled dutifully. Dead Boy shrugged and took a good slug from his bottle. It was nearly empty.

I watched the ghost girls dance. Putting off the moment when I'd have to tell Dead Boy why I was there. They were currently spinning and gyrating to an old Duran Duran number, "Girls on Film," and being ghosts they were all supernaturally beautiful, impossible lithe, and utterly glamorous. They danced with implacable grace, stamping their bare feet and jiggling their oversized breasts, rising from the stages to slide and sweep through the smoky air. Those in and among the audience drifted around and sometimes even through the customers, giving them a thrill they wouldn't find anywhere else. And why not? The steel poles were the only truly solid things on those stages.

"Don't get tempted," said Dead Boy, putting down his empty bottle and scraped-clean ice cream tub. "It's all just a glamour. You wouldn't want to see what they really look like when they drop their illusions between sets. Unfortunately, being dead I always see them as they really are, which takes a lot of the fun out of this job."

One girl swayed deliciously down from her stage, seemingly completely solid, until she extended one finger to a chosen customer, and he breathed it in, inhaling it like cigar smoke. The girl's hand unravelled, disappearing into his mouth and nostrils, until he couldn't take any more, and let it all back out again in coughs and snorts. The girl giggled as her hand reassembled. Up on one of the stages, a girl suddenly caught fire but kept dancing, unconsumed.

"An old flame of mine," Dead Boy said solemnly.

There are quite a few clubs in Uptown that cater to the various forms of death fetish, from mummification to premature burial, and some places that would freak out even hard-core Goths; clubs like Peaceful Repose, where you can try out being dead for a while to see what it feels like. Or the brothel where you can pay to have sex with female vampires, ghouls, and zombies. There are always those who like their meat cold, with the taste of formaldehyde on their lips…

I said as much to Dead Boy, who only showed any interest when I got to the brothel. He actually got out a notebook and pencil for the address.

"Trust me," I said firmly. "You really don't want to go there. You'll end up with worms."

And then one of the ghost dancers caught my attention, as she beckoned coyly to a customer and led him, half-walking and half-swaying, across the gloomy club to one of the private booths at the rear. The customer was tall and skinny, with a furtive air about him. The two of them disappeared into a booth and shut the door firmly behind them. I turned to Dead Boy.

"All right, what's the point of that? I mean, if she's not solid enough to touch…"

"Love always finds a way," said Dead Boy. "Instead of an exchange of fluids, an exchange of energies. All purely consensual, of course. The ghost girl absorbs a little of the customer's life energy, which I'm told feels very nice, and she becomes a little more solid, so she can… take care of him. A benefit to both sides. The more life energies a girl collects, the more solid and real she can become. Theoretically, she could even become alive again… Sometimes the girls go too far and drain the customer dry. Then we end up with a really pissed off customer ghost haunting the place and acting up dead cranky. Management keeps an exorcism service on speed dial for just such occurrences…"

The door to the private booth opened, and the customer came out again. He hadn't been in there long. And when he'd gone in he'd been skinny as a whip, but now he was noticeably overweight, with an extensive bulging belly. Dead Boy cursed briefly and pushed himself away from the bar.

"What is it?" I said.

"The bastard's a soul thief," Dead Boy said curtly. "He's inhaled the ghost girl, every last smoky bit of her, and now he's containing her inside himself, hoping to smuggle her out. Let's go."

We headed purposefully across the floor, and the punters hurried to get out of our way. The fat man saw Dead Boy coming, pulled an intricate glass charm out of his pocket, and threw it on the floor. The glass shattered, releasing the pre-prepared spell, and Dead Boy stopped as though he'd run into an invisible wall, his colourless face twisted in a pained grimace.

"It's an antipossession spell," he grunted. "Trying to force me out of my body. Stop the bastard, John. Don't let him get away with the girl."

I hurried forward to block the fat man's way. He stopped, studied me cautiously, and reached into his pocket again. I fired up my gift just long enough to locate the spell he was using to contain the ghost within him and ripped it away. I shut down my gift as the fat man convulsed, staggering back and forth as his imposing stomach bulged and rippled like a sheet in the wind. I got behind him, grabbed him in a bear hug, and squeezed with all my strength. Thick streams of smoke came pouring out of his mouth and nostrils, quickly forming into the ghost girl. The bulging stomach flattened under my grip, and the ghost girl stood fuming before us. She solidified one leg just long enough to kick the soul thief really hard in the nuts, then she stalked away. I let go of the soul thief, and he collapsed to the floor, looking very much as though he wished he was dead.

I left him there and went back to Dead Boy, who was looking much better.

"Cheap piece of rubbish spell," he said cheerfully. "Almost an insult, expecting something like that to take me out. My soul was put back by an expert. Leave the soul thief to me, John. I'll arrange for something suitably humiliating and nasty to happen to him."

We strolled back to the bar, where the barmaid had a fresh bottle of whiskey waiting for Dead Boy. He reached for it, then hesitated, and gave me a long, considering look.

"You didn't come here just to inquire after my nonexistent health, Taylor. What do you want with me?"

"I need your help. My mother is finally back, and the shit is hitting the fan in no uncertain manner."

"Why is it people only ever come to me when they want something?" Dead Boy said wistfully. "And usually only after everything's already gone to Hell and worse?"

"I think you just answered your own question," I said. "That's what you get, for being such a great back-stop."