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I've never got on well with authority figures.
The angel gestured with a brightly glowing hand, and one of the salt statues toppled over and shattered. Suzie slapped me hard on the arm to get my attention.
"The Gun, Taylor. Give me the Gun, dammit. Give me the Speaking Gun!"
Her voice was back under control, but her eyes were fey and wild. "No," I said. "I get to try it first."
I yanked the case out of my i
It took all my self-control, all my rigid self-discipline, and all the outrage raised in me by the Bedlam Boys, to force my fingers open one at a time, until the Speaking .Gun fell stickily from my hand and hit the floor, still howling defiantly in my mind. I shut it out, behind my strongest shields, and leaned back against the wall behind me, shaking and shuddering.
The angel was gone. It had seen the Speaking Gun, and that was enough.
The restaurant was quiet now. The staff and customers were gone, the angel had escaped, and the Bedlam Boys were salt. There was just me and Suzie. My whole body was shaking, my hands beating a noisy tattoo against the wall. My mind felt like it had been violated. I could feel tears ru
Soon enough the shuddering stopped, and I was myself again. I felt tired, bone tired and soul tired, as though I hadn't slept for a week. I wiped the drying tears off my face with my hands, sniffed a few times, and gave Suzie my best reassuring smile. It felt fairly convincing. Suzie took it in the spirit with which it was intended and nodded briskly, all business again. Suzie's always been uncomfortable around naked emotions.
"I'll carry the case," she said. "I'm more used to guns than you are."
"It isn't just a gun, Suzie."
She shrugged. "That angel. Do you think it was from Above or Below?"
It was my turn to shrug. "Does it matter, Suzie? When the Bedlam Boys had us, trapped in our fears, for a moment I saw what you saw..."
"We won't talk about that," Suzie said flatly. "Not now. Not ever. If you are my friend."
Sometimes being a friend means knowing when to let things go and shut the hell up. So I pushed myself away from the wall and headed for the nearest of the three remaining salt statues. Suzie followed after me. The scattered remains of the shattered statue crunched loudly under our feet. I looked at the three white faces, trapped in a moment of horror, forever. Sometimes I think the whole universe runs on irony.
"Well, there goes our chances of finding the Collector's location," said Suzie, her voice and face utterly calm and easy.
"Not necessarily," I said. "Remember the first rule of the private detective, when in doubt, check their pockets for clues."
"I thought the first rule was wait until the client's check has cleared?"
"Picky picky."
It took a while, but eventually we turned up a single embossed business card, proclaiming a performance by Nasty Jack Starlight at the old Styx Theatre, dated that very day. Or, more properly, night.
"So Starlight's back in town," I said. "Wouldn't have thought he was the Boys' cup of tea."
"Has to be a co
"Let's go talk to the man," I said. "See what he knows."
"Let's," said Suzie. "I'm in the mood to talk forcibly to someone. Possibly even violently."
"Never knew a time when you weren't," I said generously.
We walked through the streets of the Nightside, through a city under siege. There were angels everywhere now, soaring across the night sky, plunging down to snatch victims right out of the street, spreading terror and destruction. There were screams and cries, fires and explosions. Dark plumes of smoke rose from burning buildings on all sides. People had been driven out into the streets, as homes and businesses and hiding places collapsed into rubble behind them. Everywhere I looked there were salt statues, and bodies impaled on lamp-posts. Burned and blackened corpses lay piled up in the gutters, and once I saw someone turned inside out, still horribly alive and suffering. Suzie put him out of his misery. Judgement Day had come to the Nightside, and it wasn't pretty. There was gun-fire all over the place, and fiery explosions, and now and again I felt the fabric of the world shake as some poor desperate fool leveled heavy-duty magics against the invading angels. Nothing stopped them, or even slowed them down. Grey men in grey suits stood u
Suzie and I hadn't been out in the street five minutes before an angel came swooping down out of the night sky, brilliant as a falling star, fierce and irrevocable, blazing wings spread wide, heading straight for me. I gave it my best significant glare, but it kept coming. Suzie pulled the Speaking Gun's case out of her jacket, and the angel changed course immediately, sweeping over our heads and flashing down the street behind us like a snow-white comet. Suzie and I stopped and looked at each other. Suzie weighed the case in her hand.
"Guess word about the Speaking Gun has got around."
"So much for the element of surprise," I said.
She sniffed. "I'd rather have the element of naked threat any day."
We started off down the street again, walking unhurriedly while everyone else ran, and blood an chaos flowed around us. Suzie put the Gun's case away again, then unconsciously rubbed that hand against her jacket, over and over, as though trying to clean it.
The Styx was an old, abandoned theatre, set well back from the main drag, in one of the quieter backwaters of the Nightside. There are enough dramas in the Nightside's everyday life that most people don't feel any need for the theatre, but we have to have somewhere for vain and bitchy people to show off in public. Suzie and I stopped outside the large, slumping building and studied it cautiously from a safe distance. It didn't look like much. The whole of the boarded-up front was plastered with peeling, overlapping posters for local rock groups, political meetings, and religious revivals. The once proud sign above the double doors was choked with grime and dirt.