should escape. Or anyone. Julien made a series of important phone calls to the editorial desk of the
“You want me to wait, chief?”
“No thank you, Gloria,” said Julien. “Hospital car-parks charge a fortune. You take some time off. I’ll call you if I need you.”
“Suits me, chief. Try not to pick up anything nasty in there. I’d hate to have to fumigate the car again.”
“Again?” I said, but Julien already had the back door open and was climbing out. I got out after him, and the moment I was clear, the back door slammed shut, and the limousine pulled quickly away. I hunched my shoulders inside my trench coat against the chill of the night air, and stood beside Julien while we looked the Hospice over from a safe distance. Despite having lived most of my very dangerous life in the Nightside, I’d never actually seen the Hospice before. Julien saw me frowning.
“Something wrong?”
“Don’t like hospitals,” I said bluntly. “They get on my nerves. And don’t even get me started on dentists. On bad days, I need a local anæsthetic, even to make an appointment.”
“Back in my old days, the hospital was where you went to die,” said Julien, reflectively. “In Victorian times, surgeons were butchers, survival rates were frankly terrifying, and we had none of today’s wonder drugs. You had to be tough to survive a Victorian hospital. And don’t even get me started on the Elephant Man.”
The Hospice itself was a huge, bright, white-walled building, sweeping up into the night sky. Searchlights blazed from the roof, to guide in air ambulances, flying carpets and the occasional winged unicorn. They’d had a dragon drop in on the roof once, many years ago, and they’re still talking about it. Still trying to get the last bits of dragon dung out of the guttering, by all accounts. That was one sick dragon. All the windows were mirrored one- way glass, to ensure privacy and keep passers-by from seeing things that might upset them. The Hospice was named after the original Saint Margaret, who founded the place when she passed through the Nightside, many centuries ago.
“She didn’t stay long,” said Julien, when I tried to impress him with my limited knowledge. “We don’t get many saints in the Nightside, as a rule.”
“Gosh,” I said. “Imagine my surprise.”
“But she did hang around long enough to found a much-needed leper Hospice. She ran it herself, tending the lepers with her own hands, until she could find someone brave enough to take over; and then she couldn’t get out of the Nightside fast enough. The lepers didn’t bother her, but she felt contaminated by the general
“You still wouldn’t catch me dead in there,” I said solemnly.
“That joke was old when I was young,” Julien said crushingly.
We walked through the car-park and headed for the main front doors. We’d barely got half-way there before a whole bunch of heavily armed security people emerged suddenly from all sides to cover us. Some wore old military outfits, some wore specially adapted battle armour, and every single one of them kept their weapons trained very seriously on Julien and me. I looked casually around, careful to appear conspicuously unimpressed. All the security people had the same cold, focused, dangerous look. I knew who they were immediately. Who they had to be. A lot of them recognised me, and there was a lot of glancing around to find someone ready to make the first move. I could all but see the buck shifting in mid air. After a certain amount of glancing and muttering, they all carefully chose to point their weapons between me and Julien rather than directly at us.
Just so I wouldn’t feel too threatened.
They were all of them graduates of the Fortress, that heavily fortified refuge for people who had been abducted by aliens and were determined never to let that happen again. The Fortress contained more big guns, high explosives, and really nasty booby-traps than anywhere else in the Nightside. They have security cameras in every room and corridor, heavy-duty gun emplacements on the roof, and you’re never more than ten feet from a panic button. They have a stuffed and mounted Grey on display in their lobby, and you don’t even want to think about what they’ve done to the reptiloid on display.
(No relation to the Royal Family. None at all. Trust me on this.)
Of course, it turned out that Julien knew many of them by name, and they all relaxed a bit as he stopped to chat with them. I had heard the Fortress supplied security for the Hospice, but I hadn’t expected there to be quite so many of them. Or that they’d be so well-armed. A lot of them had attended the Hospice as patients—for psychiatric help, removal of implants, and the occasional bit of exploration to make sure no alien had left anything where the sun doesn’t shine. They’d been so impressed by the help and sympathy they’d received, they set up a rota for people to volunteer to help. They made very loyal, very dangerous guards. Exactly what the Hospice needed.
Julien asked a few vague questions about how the shift was going, and if they’d seen anything or anyone . . . unusual. He didn’t mention the Sun King by name, on the grounds of not wanting to start a panic if he didn’t have to. None of them had seen anything out-of-the-ordinary unusual. It was a quiet night, for once. The officer in charge turned up, an ex–sergeant major in the paratroops, with silver-grey hair and a thousand-light-year stare. He wore a battered flak jacket topped off with a bandolier of incendiary grenades. Any alien who tried to take him again was in for a really nasty surprise. He also wore a pair of specially tinted sunglasses, which he assured us allowed him to detect aliens trying to pass as human. I didn’t argue the point. This was the Nightside, after all, and he was holding the biggest gun I’d ever seen. In one hand.
“Why are there so many of you here?” I asked, to make it clear I was part of the conversation.
The ex-SM shrugged briefly. “Always some scumbag trying to break in, sir. Looking for drugs, equipment, magical shit. We show them no mercy. The good doctors keep telling us we’re allowed to bring them in alive; but we don’t believe in taking chances. Besides, the staff here have enough work on their hands without us adding to it with wounded scumbags. So we shoot their legs out from under them, double-tap them in the head, and everybody’s happy.”
“Keep up the good work,” I said, for want of anything else to say.
“Thank you, sir. Would you like an escort to the front doors?”
“We don’t want to draw attention,” Julien said smoothly.
“Then you shouldn’t have brought John bloody Taylor,” said a voice from the back. There was a certain amount of laughter in the ranks, until the ex-SM glared them all into silence. Julien and I made our way carefully through the security people and headed for the front doors. Some of them bowed to Julien, and some of them nodded to me, and they all kept a careful eye on us right up to the point where we reached the doors, in case we might get lost, on the way. I also heard the name Suzie Shooter mentioned, in quiet mutterings, followed by a lot of nervous looking about. The Fortress had bad memories of Shotgun Suzie’s occasional forced entrances into their building, on the trail of some runaway bounty. Nowhere was off limits to Suzie.
I slowed down as we approached the doors, and Julien looked at me questioningly. “I used to know someone who used to work here,” I explained. “Sister Morphine . . .”
“Ah yes,” said Julien. “I remember her. I wrote a few pieces about her, back in the day. She worked here for several years as a nurse before she had her crisis of faith, and decided it was more important to heal wounded souls than wounded bodies. You knew Sister Morphine, John? I didn’t know that.”
I nodded slowly. “She was there, in Rats’ Alley, when I was there. When I was down and out, just another of the homeless she tried to protect.”
“You don’t talk much about that part of your life,” said Julien.
“Would you?” I said. “Sister Morphine . . . was the kindest woman I ever knew. She looked after us all when we couldn’t look after ourselves, when no-one else gave a damn. She never preached, never held the Bible over us; but she was a great one for stories and parables. She lived with us, amongst us, as one of us. Sometimes we had to
