The Bride Wore Black Leather

again. I’m going to have to ask all of you some questions. None of you should take it personally . . .”

“We don’t answer to you!” snapped a man wrapped in a purple Roman toga, to which he might or might not have been entitled. “Jumped-up functionary! We are leaving; all of us! Before the murderer strikes again!”

“No you’re not,” I said, fixing him with my best hard glare. “No-one leaves until I’ve found the killer.”

Jasmine de Loir stepped forward, cocking her oversized head back, the better to sneer down her aristocratic nose at me. She was dressed as Elizabeth I, complete with red hair and a very high forehead. “You can’t keep us here! You’re only a mortal. You have no authority over us!”

“He isn’t even really a Walker!” said another voice from somewhere safe in the back of the crowd. “He doesn’t have the Voice!”

“I’m John Taylor!” I said loudly, and the crowd fell quiet again. I smiled nastily around me, and a few actually shivered. “You’ve all heard of me. The man with a gift for finding things. Now be quiet, and behave yourselves, or . . .”

“Or what?” said Jasmine.

“Or I’ll find your missing husband,” I said.

Jasmine hesitated and was lost. She slipped back into the crowd. I looked unhurriedly around me, nodding to faces I recognised.

“You there, I could find where the missing funds from your company went. Or you. I could find where you buried the bodies. And as for you, sweetie, I could find your old nose and put it back where it used to be.”

They were all very quiet now, looking at each for support and not finding it. They all had secrets, and none of them wanted me looking at them too closely. Of course, I was mostly bluffing, throwing out a few educated guesses based on the latest gossip; but they didn’t know that. I turned my back on them all and knelt beside what was left of King of Skin.

He was lying face-down, half-curled into a ball. There was a single bloody wound in the small of his back and more blood soaking his tattered coat. He’d died quickly, bleeding out in seconds. With his glamour gone, without his usual spooky aspect, he looked much smaller and very ordinary. I turned the head carefully, so I could see the face. His real face, at last. Not particularly handsome, or ugly; nothing more than another face in the crowd. His clothes were old and comfortable, and not in the least stylish. Very worn, very lived-in. And then, as I looked at the face, it suddenly shrivelled up into a mass of wrinkles. As though all the years of his considerable age had caught up with him at once. The wrinkles kept appearing, criss-crossing each other, sinking deep into the flesh, until I was looking at the face of a man who’d lived at least a hundred years, and most of them hard ones. The few immortals who’d edged in for a closer look let out horrified gasps and hurriedly retreated. Time’s catching up was an immortal’s greatest fear.

I checked the rest of the body thoroughly. Just as old, but no more wounds. The stab wound in his back was wide and deep, and it had been made with something with a jagged edge. Not a knife, or any other bladed weapon. Whatever it was, it had irregular, serrated edges . . . I went through King of Skin’s pockets and found nothing. Not even a wallet or a handkerchief or a ring of keys. The killer couldn’t have had time to rob his victim; which suggested King of Skin had arrived with empty pockets. Perhaps because he relied on his glamour to get him what he needed. Didn’t rule out robbery as a motive, though . . . I stood up, straightened my aching back, took out my mobile phone and put in a call to the Nightside CSI. Alistair Hoob; nice guy, multiple personalities, a whole department in one head. Crowded, but efficient. He took a long time to answer his phone.

“Yes? What is it? (I’m busy!) Oh, hello, John. (You call him Walker now.) I know! (He knows, he knows.) Someday I swear I’m going to buy a spirit gun and shoot all you other voices in my head.”

“I’ve got a murder at the Ball of Forever,” I said loudly. “Nasty business, with nasty implications. How soon can you get here?”

“Ah well,” he said. “That’s the problem. I’m already working another murder, at the Old Haymarket Theatre. That’s right on the other side of the city. (Bad business. Actors. Very touchy people.) (Who knew the old fellow had so much poison in him?) I’ll get to you as soon as I can (blood), but it’ll take me a while. (I want a pony.)”

“Do your best,” I said. “Got a feeling I’m going to need all the help I can get on this one.”

“Do you want me to alert the Authorities? (Who’s been messing with my DNA kit again?)”

“Tell them,” I said. “And then tell them to stay out of it. It happened on my watch, right in front of me, so it’s my murder, my case. Tell them I’ll be in touch when I’ve found the killer; and not before.”

“Your funeral, Walker. (Ooh, can I come? I love funerals!) See you in a while.”

I put my phone away and looked down at the body again. A stab wound in the back meant he never saw it coming. The assassin had struck from behind . . . but who would King of Skin turn his back on, in a place like this? He would have known better. So, had the murderer sneaked up on him? Without being noticed, in a crowded room? I glared at the watching immortals.

“Who found the body? Come on; somebody screamed.”

A tall, gangly fellow dressed in Puritan blacks raised a hesitant hand. “I was startled, that’s all. You don’t expect something as vulgar as common murder in a select gathering like this. I saw him lying there, and the blood, and I let out . . . an involuntary noise, that’s all.”

“You saw the body lying on the floor?” I said. “You didn’t see the actual murder?”

“No! No! Just the body. Isn’t that enough?”

“Don’t go anywhere,” I said because you have to say things like that. And I went back to looking at King of Skin.

The three reporters finally fought their way through the tightly packed crowd and stared at the dead body with fascinated, eager eyes. Brilliant Chang seemed as calm and serene as ever. He’d seen his share of bodies before, in his time as an enforcer. Bettie Divine’s face was flushed, and she was breathing heavily at the prospect of covering a real story. She didn’t get many of those, working for the Unnatural Inquirer. And Charlotte ap Owen’s face was an open book, for all her many nips and tucks. This story was her passport to the big time, and she was damned if anything was going to get in her way. She snarled for Dave the camera-man to get good coverage of the crime scene, and I let her. I could always commandeer the coverage later if I needed it. I nodded for Brilliant Chang to step forward. I could use a cool head to talk with.

“Am I not a suspect, then?” he said amiably.

“You’re a combat sorcerer,” I said. “If you’d wanted him dead, you could have killed him in a dozen ways and never left a mark.”

“True.”

“Why are you standing around, Taylor?” snapped Charlotte. “Why don’t you use your gift and find the killer!”

“Because it doesn’t work that way,” I said. “I have to ask my gift a specific question to get a specific answer.”

“A question occurs to me,” said Chang. “King of Skin was not a well-liked man. He knew things, and wasn’t loath to let people know it. So, which of his many secrets was a step too far? Which one was important enough to be worth killing over, to keep it secret?”

“Good point,” I said. “But he’s been hoarding secrets for years. He always knew how far he could push things . . . Wait. Hold everything. Something’s happening to the body.”

Chang and I both knelt beside King of Skin, while Charlotte shrieked for Dave to get a close-up. King of Skin’s deeply wrinkled face was twitching, rising and falling, as though something was moving underneath it. And then, as we all watched, his entire face peeled off and dropped away, revealing another face beneath it. A second, completely different set of features. And then it aged, too, shrivelling into a mess of wrinkles, before dropping off to reveal yet another face beneath. The process went on and on, face giving way to face, skin to skin, aging and slipping away to reveal another, like those Russian dolls that nest inside one another. As each face fell to the floor, it rotted quickly, decaying and falling to dust in a matter of seconds. Skin under skin, face under face, until the process finally stopped, with a face I recognised. I’d seen it once before, on the future King of Skin, who’d been a member of my Enemies, in the terrible possible future I’d visited. And then that face aged, too, and fell in upon itself, a mask of far too many years.

“It’s stopped,” said Chang. “Do you suppose that last one was his real face? His original face?”

“I think so,” I said. “Remember what Hadleigh said to him? He said King of Skin’s power was skin deep. He knew about this.”

“You think you can get Hadleigh to talk?” said Chang.