voice came clearly to me, more than usually animated with furious emotions.
“Julien Advent was my friend!” said Razor Eddie. “And a better man than you or I will ever be. And you killed him. I know where you are, Taylor. I’m coming for you. And I will soak my razor in your blood.”
His voice cut off as Alex wrestled the phone away from him. I could hear them shouting at each other, then Alex’s voice returned.
“Get the hell out of my bar, Eddie, or I will have Betty and Lucy frog-march you out, then hose you down with something seriously disinfectant! God, you stink . . . You still there, John? He’s gone. Disappeared right in front of me, leaving only his stench behind. A smell so strong it feels like it wants to make friends with you and follow you home. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him so angry before . . . It seems like a lot more people admire Julien Advent dead than were ever prepared to say so while he was still alive. John, have you talked to Suzie yet?”
“I don’t want her involved,” I said immediately. “She’d kill anyone to protect me.”
“Yeah,” said Alex. “But would she kill everyone?”
“Probably,” I said.
“Suddenly, I have cold chills all over me.”
“I have to find the Sun King,” I said. “Stop him, kill him . . . But how the hell am I supposed to do that when it seems like all my old friends and enemies are out on the streets looking to stop and kill me?”
“I suppose you could hide out here, for a while,” said Alex. “In the cellars under the bar. Given that both Merlin Satanspawn and Arthur Pendragon were both buried down there for centuries, undetected, it seems likely there’s enough power left behind to hide you . . .”
“Thanks, Alex,” I said, and I meant it. “But the way the Sun King’s got everyone stirred up, I don’t think all of Strangefellows’ protections put together could keep them out if they did track me there. The whole world could turn up at your door, baying for my blood. I wouldn’t want to bring that down on you.”
“Does this mean I’m reinvested as best man?” said Alex.
“Don’t lose the ring,” I said.
I broke the connection and sat on my tombstone for a while, hefting the phone in one hand while my mind chased in all directions at once. The phone rang. It was Suzie. Her voice sounded cool and calm as always.
“I’ve heard,” she said. “Did you really kill Julien Advent in cold blood?”
“Of course not!” I said. “How could you even think that of me?”
“It didn’t sound like you,” said Suzie.
“I killed him at his own request, to save a whole bunch of innocents from being killed.”
“That sounds like Advent,” said Suzie. “Where are you, John?”
“You’d better stay out of this, Suzie. I can handle it.”
“Of course you can. Where are you, John?”
It was the second time she’d asked, and something in her voice made all the hackles rise up on the back of my neck. “Why do you want to know, Suzie?”
“Because the Authorities have hired me to track you down,” said Shotgun Suzie. “My biggest bounty ever.”
“And you said yes?”
“It’s a really big reward,” said Suzie. “Biggest I’ve ever been offered. And it is what I do best. It’s a matter of professional pride, John. I can’t let anyone else get to you first.”
“And you never bring your bounties back alive,” I said.
I cut her off and shut down the phone, just in case. It wasn’t like I wanted to talk to anyone anyway. I simply sat there, staring at nothing, trying not to think, trying not to feel. Because it felt like someone had punched my heart out. I’d never felt so alone.
I rocked back and forth, hugging myself tightly to keep from falling apart. Tears burned my eyes, but I was damned if I’d give in to them. Instead, I clung to the rage within me, warming my heart on its heat. I had to stop the Sun King. To save the Nightside and avenge Julien Advent. I would stop him, then put him down, in the worst and messiest way I could think of. And after that, the whole damned Nightside and everyone in it could go straight to Hell, for all I cared.
I looked up sharply. There was a new presence on the air, a new power forcing its way into the cemetery dimension. Something was coming my way, cutting its way through Space and Time to get to me, and I knew who it was, who it had to be. Light burst suddenly into the cemetery gloom, bright neon glare from the Nightside, falling through a narrow gap that split the air before me from top to bottom. The gap stretched wide, forced apart by one man’s unstoppable will; and through that hole came Razor Eddie, the Punk God of the Straight Razor. His feet crunched loudly on the gravel before me, and the gap slammed shut behind him, cutting off the light. Razor Eddie, a grey presence in a filthy coat, with dark eyes and a haunted face, holding his pearl-handled straight razor out before him. The steel blade shone supernaturally bright. Eddie moved slowly towards me, cold and implacable as an avenging angel, and it seemed to me I’d never seen him look so angry, so . . . emotional, before. I never knew he had it in him.
I got up from the headstone, unhurriedly, and waited for him to come to me. I can honestly say it never even occurred to me to run, to use my gift to get away, even though that would have been the sane thing to do. He stopped at the very edge of the gravel path and stared at me as though he’d never seen me before. He hefted the shining razor; and it occurred to me that the razor’s magics shouldn’t work here, in the face of so many defensive magics. Instead, it glared more fiercely than I’d ever seen before. Fuelled by the rage of the god who held it. Eddie held it up, so I could get a good look at the killing thing.
“I am a god,” he said, in his ghostly whispering voice. “People tend to forget that the Punk God of the Straight Razor isn’t just a title. I take my power with me, wherever I go. I exist to protect the innocent and punish the guilty. I have never allowed anything to get in my way.”
“You won’t even give an old friend the benefit of the doubt?” I said, standing very still.
“The friend I thought I had, the man I thought I knew, would never have murdered Julien Advent in cold blood.”
“I didn’t!”
“Liar.” Razor Eddie smiled at me slowly. “What a long, strange road it’s been, John. Sometimes friends, sometimes allies, sometimes enemies. Typical enough, I suppose, for the Nightside. And now here we are, ready to go head to head, like in the prophecy . . . You should have listened, John. Dagon is never wrong about these things.” His smile slowly widened into a cold and remorseless thing. “All these years we’ve danced the dance, circling around each other . . . You must have known it would come to this, eventually. You must have wondered, which one of us would win, in a fight to the death?”
“No,” I said. “I can honestly say, the thought never crossed my mind.”
“Liar,” said Eddie, almost fondly.
“Eddie,” I said. “You don’t have to do this.”
“Yes, I do,” he said. “For Julien Advent. Who never once approved of me, and quite right, too.”
He launched himself at me while he was still speaking, an old trick, but I was ready for that; and we went fighting up and down the gravel path, through the cold grey silence of the cemetery. And the fog swirled around us like the disturbed waters where sharks are circling with bad intent.
I knew I couldn’t face his razor, so I kept falling back before it, dodging and ducking where necessary. The brightly shining blade sliced clean through the top of a headstone, when I put it between myself and Eddie; and the blade hacked off the top corner in a moment, cutting through solid stone like it was paper. I kept moving, darting this way and that, trying to stay alive long enough to come up with some kind of strategy. He wasn’t even trying, yet. He was playing with me. So, when in doubt, raise the stakes. I stepped deliberately off the gravel path, into and among the graves, daring Eddie to follow. I could See the hidden dangers, but he couldn’t, for all his Punk Godness. He didn’t even hesitate. He stepped off the gravel path and straight onto a land mine.
The explosion was deafeningly loud on the quiet, and a great cloud of pulverised stone and earth filled the air. Bits of gravel rained down like shrapnel. And Razor Eddie came walking forward out of the dust cloud, like a wolf out of hiding. Untouched and unscathed, like the murderous force he was. I kept backing away, and he kept coming after me; and the ground between us erupted, as a rock golem, a clumsy, misshapen thing, twelve feet tall and more, with a featureless face and huge fists like mauls, rose out of the dark earth between us to confront him. It went for Razor Eddie, and he moved so quickly he was only a blur. His razor flashed like lightning, sparking on the air, everywhere at once. And when Razor Eddie stopped moving, the rock golem was gone, leaving only piles of
