“Bad news travels fast,” I observed. Annabella sat down opposite me and turned her recorder on. I told her the story, while downplaying my own involvement as much as possible. I suggested, as strongly as I could without being too obvious about it, that I was only there as part of my investigation of the Cavendishes, and not because of Rossignol at all. I never discuss my cases with journalists. Besides, putting the Cavendishes in the frame as the villains of the piece would make it easier for me when I had to ask Julien for that favour. The two of us had worked together in the past, on a few cases where our interests merged, but it never came easily. I finished my story of the riot by telling how I’d been swept outside along with the rest of the ejected audience and only saw the resulting mayhem from a safe distance. Julien nodded, as though he’d expected nothing else from me. Annabella turned off her mini recorder and smiled brightly.
“Thanks awfully, John. This will make a super piece, once I’ve chopped it down to a reasonable length. Pity you weren’t more personally involved with the violence, though.”
“Sorry,” I said. “I’ll try harder next time.”
“One last question…” She surreptitiously turned her recorder back on again, and I pretended I hadn’t noticed. “There are rumours circulating, suggesting the Nightside was originally created for a specific purpose, and that this is somehow connected with your missing mother’s true nature and identity. Could you add anything to these rumours?”
“Sorry,” I said. “I never listen to gossip. If you do find out the truth, let me know.”
Annabella sighed, turned off her recorder, and Julien held the door open for her as she left. She trotted off to write her piece, and Julien shut the door and came back to join me.
“You’re not usually this cooperative with the press, John. Would I be right in assuming you’re about to beg a favour from me?”
“Nothing that should trouble your conscience too much, Julien. It wouldn’t break your heart if I was to bring the Cavendishes down, would it?”
“No. They’re scum. Parasites. Their very presence corrupts the Nightside. Just like the Murder Masques in my day, only without the sense of style. But they’re very big and very rich, and extremely well connected. What makes you think you can hurt them?”
“I may be onto something,” I said carefully. “It concerns their new singer, Rossignol. What can you tell me about her?”
Julien considered for a moment, then used his intercom to summon the gossip columnist Argus. The shapeshifter breezed in, looking like Kylie Minogue. Dressed as a nun. She sat down beside me, adjusting her habit to show off a perfect bare leg. Julien glared at Argus, and she sat up straight and paid attention.
“Sorry, boss.”
“Rossignol,” said Julien, and that was all the prompting Argus needed.
“Well, I heard about the suicides, of course, everybody has, all of them supposedly linked to Rossignol’s singing, but nobody’s come forward with any real proof yet. For a long time we all thought it was just a publicity stunt. And, since no-one famous, or anyone who really matters, has died yet, the Authorities don’t give a damn. They never do, until they’re forced to. But… the word is that the Cavendishes have a lot riding on Rossignol’s success. They need her to make it big. Really big. Their actual financial state is a lot dodgier than most people realise. A lot of their money was invested in property in the Nightside, most of which was thoroughly trashed during the recent Angel War. And of course insurance doesn’t cover Acts of God. Or the Adversary. Or their angels. It was in the small print; the Cavendishes should have looked.
“Anyway, Rossignol is all set to be their new cash cow, and they can’t afford to have anything go wrong with her big launch onto the music scene. Especially with what happened to their last attempt at creating a new singing sensation, Sylvia Sin. You wouldn’t remember her, John. This was while you were still away. Sylvia Sin was going to be the new Big Thing. A marvelous voice, a face like an angel, and breasts to die for. She could whip up a crowd like no-one I ever saw. But she vanished, very mysteriously, just before her big opening night. Her current whereabouts are unknown. Lots of rumours, of course, but no-one’s seen anything of her in over a year.”
“She could have had it all,” said Julien. “Fame, money, success. But something made her run away and dig a hole so deep no-one can find it. Which isn’t easy, in the Nightside.”
And that was when all hell broke loose out in the bullpen. All the supernatural-threat alarms went off at once, but it was already too late. Julien and I were immediately on our feet, staring out through the office’s glass walls as a dark figure roared through the bullpen, throwing desks and tables aside, casually overturning and smashing computer equipment. Journalists and other staff dived for cover. Truth and Memory flew round the room, screeching loudly. Argus peered past my shoulder, her Kylie eyes wide. The dark figure paused for a moment, looking around for new targets, and it was only then that I realised it was Rossignol. She looked small and compact in her little black dress, and extremely dangerous. The expression on her face was utterly inhuman. She saw Julien and me watching, picked up a heavy wooden desk, and threw it the length of the bullpen. We scattered out of the way as the desk smashed through the cubicle’s glass wall and flew on to slam against the opposite wall, before finally dropping to the floor with a crash.
Julien and I were quickly back at the shattered glass wall. Argus hid under the editor’s desk.
“How the hell did she get in here, past all our defences?” Argus yelled.
“Language, please,” Julien murmured, not looking round. “Only one answer—someone must have followed you here from the club, John. You brought her in with you.”
“Oh come on, Julien. I think I would have noticed.”
“That isn’t Rossignol,” Julien said firmly. “No-one human is that strong. That is a sending, probably from the Cavendishes, guided by something they planted on your person.”
“No-one planted anything on me!” I said angrily. “No-one’s that good!”
I searched my pockets anyway, paying special attention to the jacket Pew had given me, but there was nothing anywhere on me that shouldn’t have been there. The fake Rossignol advanced menacingly on a group of journalists trying to build a barricade between themselves and her, and Julien decided he’d had enough. He strode out of his office and into the bullpen, heading straight for Rossignol. He might be an editor these days, but he was still every inch a hero. I hesitated, then went after him. I couldn’t see how I might have brought that creature here, but Julien had made me feel responsible. He’s good at that. Argus stayed in her hiding place.
Rossignol raged back and forth across the bullpen, smashing computer monitors with flashing blows of her tiny fists. The staff scattered back and forth, trying to keep out of her way. The ones that didn’t got hurt. Her strength was enormous, impossible, as though she moved through a world made of paper. Her smile never wavered, and her eyes didn’t blink. One journalist didn’t move fast enough, and she grabbed him by the shoulder with one hand and slammed him against a wall so hard I heard his bones break. Julien was almost upon her. She dropped the limp body and turned suddenly to lace him. She lashed out, and Julien only just dodged a blow that would have taken his head clean off his shoulders. Julien darted forward and hit her right on the point of the chin, and her head hardly moved with the blow.
Otto the poltergeist came bobbing over to join me, as I moved cautiously forward. “You’ve got to stop her, Mr. Taylor, before she destroys everything!”
“I’m open to suggestions,” I said, wincing as another vicious blow only just missed Julien’s head. “I’m a bit concerned that if we hurt or damage whatever the hell that thing is, we might hurt or damage the real thing.”
“Oh, you don’t have to worry about that,” said Otto. “She’s not real. Well, she is, in the sense that she’s very definitely kicking the crap out of our revered editor right now, but that thing isn’t in any way human. It’s a tul
pa, a thought form raised up in the shape of whatever person it’s derived from. You must have brought something with you that came from the real Rossignol, something so small you didn’t even notice.”
I thought hard. I was sure Rossignol hadn’t actually given me anything, which meant whatever it was must have been planted on me after all. I checked all my pockets again, and again came up with nothing. Julien was bobbing and weaving, snapping out punches that rocked the fake Rossignol back on her heels without actually hurting her. The goblin drag queen suddenly tackled Rossignol from behind and pinned her arms to her sides. Julien picked up a desk with an effort and broke it over her head. Rossignol didn’t even flinch. She freed herself from the goblin’s grasp with a vicious back elbow that left him gasping, and went after Julien again. She wasn’t even breathing hard from her exertions. I decided, very reluctantly, that I was going to have to get involved.
I circled behind Rossignol, picked up a heavy paperweight, and bounced it off the back of her head. She spun round to face her new enemy, and Julien kicked her neatly behind her left knee. She staggered, caught off-balance, and Julien and I hit her together, putting all our strength into our blows. She just shrugged us off. We both backed away and circled her. She turned smoothly to keep us both in view. I looked around for something else to use and spotted a large bulky object with satisfyingly sharp points. Perfect. I reached for it, then hesitated as Annabella hissed angrily at me from behind an overturned table.
“Don’t you dare, you bastard! That’s my journalist of the year award!”
“Perfect,” I said. I grabbed the ugly thing and threw it with all my strength. Rossignol snatched it out of mid air and threw it straight back, and it only just missed my head as I dived for cover. Julien yelled back at his office.
“Argus! Get your cowardly self out here! I’ve got an idea!”
“I don’t care if you’ve got a bazooka, I’m not budging! You don’t pay me enough to fight demons!”
“Get your miserable self out here, or I’ll cut off your expenses!”
“Bully,” said Argus, but not too loudly. He came slouching out of the editor’s office, trying to look as anonymous as possible. His face was so bland as to be practically generic. He edged towards the ongoing battle, while Julien glared at him.
“Look like Rossignol! Do it now!”
Argus shapeshifted and became an exact copy of Rossignol. The tulpa looked at the new fake Rossignol and paused, bewildered. Julien caught my attention and gestured at an overturned table. I quickly saw what he had in mind, and we picked it up between us. The tulpa Rossignol had just started to come out of her trance when we hit her from behind like a charging train. Caught off-balance, she fell forward, and we threw our combined weight onto the table, pinning the tulpa to the ground. She struggled underneath us, trying to find the leverage to free herself. And I used my gift and found just what it was that the tulpa was using as its link. On the shoulder of my jacket was a single black hair from Rossignol’s head, almost invisible against the black leather. It must have happened when I held her in my arms to comfort her. No good deed goes unpunished, especially in the Nightside. I held up the hair to show it to Julien, while the table bucked beneath us. He produced a monogrammed gold lighter and set fire to the hair. It burned up in a moment, then the table beneath us slammed flat against the floor. There was no longer anything underneath it.
Julien and I helped each other to our feet. We were both breathing hard. He looked about his devastated bullpen, as journalists and other staff slowly emerged from the wreckage. Somebody found a phone that still worked and called paramedics for the injured. Julien looked at me, and his dark eyes were very cold.
“This has to be the Cavendishes’ work. And that makes this personal. No-one attacks the Night Times and gets away with it. I think I’ll send the arrogant swine a bill for damages and repairs. Meanwhile, I’m starting a full-scale investigation into what they’re up to, using all my best people. And John, I suggest you go and see Dead Boy. If anyone knows where Sylvia Sin is hiding, it will be he.”
I nodded. That was the favour I’d been hoping for.
Julien Advent looked back at his wrecked bullpen. “No-one attacks my people and gets away with it.”
Death and Life, Sort of
I left the Night Times riding in Julien Advent’s very own Silver Ghost Rolls-Royce. He wanted to make sure I got where I was going and not die anywhere near him or the Night Times’s offices. I considered this a thoughtful gesture and left him and the rest of the staff to clean up the extensive mess and damage caused by Rossignol’s tulpa. My chauffeuse was a slender delicate little flower in a full white leather outfit, right down to the peaked chauffeur’s hat pulled firmly down over her mop of frizzy golden hair. She asked me where she was to take me, then refused to say another word. I have that effect on women sometimes. Either that, or Julien had warned her about me. I sprawled happily on the polished red leather seat and indulged myself with a very good brandy from the built-in bar. It does the heart and soul good to travel first-class once in a while. The Rolls purred along, sliding smoothly through the packed and snarling traffic of the Night-side, where the only rule of the road is survival. Most of the other vehicles had enough sense to give the Rolls plenty of room—they knew that a vehicle that expensive had to have state-of-the-art defences and weaponry.
But there’s always one, isn’t there? I was peering vaguely out the side window, not really thinking about anything much, except trying to remember whether Dead Boy and I had parted on good terms the last time we’d met, when I gradually became aware of a battered dark saloon car of unfamiliar make easing in beside us. It didn’t take me long to realise it wasn’t a proper car. I sat up straight and paid attention. All the details were wrong, and when I looked closely, I could see that the car’s wheels weren’t turning at all. I looked at the chauffeuse. She was staring straight ahead, apparently not at all concerned. I looked at the black car again. The outlines of the doors were just marks on the chassis, with no depth to them, and though the back windows were opaque, I could see the driver through the front side window. He wasn’t moving at all. I was pretty sure he was a corpse, just put there to add verisimilitude and fool the casual eye.
The Rolls was moving pretty fast, and so was the thing that wasn’t a car. It really was getting very close. A split appeared in the side facing me, stretching slowly to reach from one end to the other. It opened like a mouth, revealing rows of bloodred cilia within, thrashing hungrily. They sprouted vicious barbs and lashed out at the Rolls’s windows. I retreated to the opposite side of the seat, as the cilia scratched futilely at the bulletproof glass. The chauffeuse reached for the weapons console on the dashboard.
And then the fake car lurched suddenly, as huge feet slammed down from above, burying long claws in the fake roof. Blood spurted thickly from the wounds the claws made. The thing surged back and forth across the road, trying to break the claws’ hold, and couldn’t. Its wide mouth screamed shrilly as it was lifted, suddenly up and off the road. There was the sound of very large leathery wings flapping, and the thing that only looked like a car was gone, snatched up into the night skies. It had made a very foolish mistake—in becoming so fascinated by its prey it forgot the first rule of the Nightside. No matter how good a predator you are, there’s always something bigger and stronger and hungrier than you, and if you let yourself get distracted, it’ll creep right up behind you.
The Rolls-Royce purred on its way, the traffic continued as though nothing had happened, and I drank more brandy.
It took about half an hour to reach the Nightside Necropolis, site of Dead Boy’s current assignment. The Necropolis takes care of all funerals for those who die in the Nightside and is situated right out on the boundary, because no-one wanted to be too close to it. Partly because even the Nightside has some taboos, but mostly because on the few occasions when things go wrong at the Necropolis, they go really wrong.
It is the management’s proud cla
im that they can provide every kind of service, ritual, or interment you think of, including a few best not thought of at all if you like sleeping at night. Their motto: It’s Your Funeral. In the Nightside, you can’t always be sure that the dear departed will rest in peace, unless the proper precautions are taken, so it pays to have professionals who specialise in such matters. They charge an arm and a leg, but they can work wonders, even when there isn’t an actual body for them to work with.
So, when things do go wrong, as they will in even the best regulated firms, they tend to go spectacularly wrong, and that’s when the Necropolis management swallows its considerable pride and calls in the Nightside’s very own expert in all forms of death—the infamous Dead Boy.
The chauffeuse brought the Rolls to a halt a respectful distance away from the Necropolis. In fact, I could only just make out the building at the end of the street. I’d barely got out of the car and slammed the door shut behind me before the Rolls was backing away at speed, heading back to the more familiar dangers of Uptown. Which if nothing else solved the nagging problem of whether I was supposed to tip the chauffeuse. I’ve never been very good at working out things like that. I set off down the street, which was very quiet and utterly deserted. All the doors and windows were shut, and there were no lights on anywhere. My footsteps sounded loud and carrying, letting everyone know I was coming.
By the time I got to the Necropolis building itself, my nerves were absolutely ragged, and I was ready to jump right out of my skin at the first unexpected movement. The huge towering edifice before me was built of old brick and stone, with no windows anywhere, and a long sharp-edged gabled roof. It had been added to and extended in all directions, down the long years, and now it sprawled over a large area, the various contrasting styles not even trying to get along with each other. It was a dark, lowering, depressing structure with only one entrance. The massive front door was solid steel, rimmed with silver, covered with deeply etched runes, sigils, and other dead languages. I pitied the poor sod who had to polish that every morning. Two huge chimneys peered over the arching roof, serving the crematorium at the back, but for once there was no black smoke pumping up into the night sky. There was also supposed to be a hell of a graveyard in the rear, but I’d never seen it. Never wanted to. I don’t go to funerals. They only depress me. Even when my dad died, I only went to the service. I know too much about pain and loss to take any false comfort from planting people in the ground. Or maybe I’ve just seen too many people die, and you can’t keep saying goodbye.