time, and the bar swayed around me. Suzie lowered me onto a chair, and I collapsed gratefully. I checked myself out as best I could. I didn’t seem to be bleeding from anywhere any more, and feeling was flooding back into all parts of my body. It hurt like hell. Suzie snapped her fingers imperiously for some clean water and a cloth, and set about cleaning the last of the mess off my face. The cool water felt good on my skin, and my head settled down again.
Razor Eddie stood before me, an intense grey presence in his filthy overcoat, regarding me thoughtfully with his fever-bright eyes. He was holding a bottle of Perrier water. Flies buzzed around him, and up close the smell was really bad.
“You reopened a door I made,” he said finally, in his quiet, ghostly voice. “I didn’t know you could do that. I didn’t think anyone could do that.”
“Yeah, well,” I said, as casually as I could, “nothing like having your mother around to inspire you to new heights.”
Walker brought me a glass of wormwood brandy. I’d actually have preferred a nice ice-cold Coke, but I appreciated the thought. I nodded my thanks to him, and he nodded back. Which was about as demonstrative as we were ever likely to get. It did seem we were becoming closer, whether we liked it or not. Suzie stopped dabbing at my face with her damp cloth, inspected her work critically, then nodded and tossed the bloody cloth aside. She sat down on the edge of a table facing me, and concentrated on cleaning her double-barrelled shotgun.
At another table, not too far away, Tommy Oblivion thrashed about while Alex did necessary, painful things to him. Betty and Lucy Coltrane held Tommy down, using all their considerable strength, while Tommy used the kind of language you didn’t expect to hear from effete existentialists. Alex’s remedies tended to be swift, brutal, but effective. He chanted something alliterative in Old Saxon, while pouring a thick blue gunk into Tommy’s exposed guts, while Dead Boy peered over his shoulder, watching interestedly.
“I could lend you some duct tape, if you like,” he said. “I’ve always found duct tape very useful.”
“Get the hell away from my patient, you heathen,” said Alex, not looking up from what he was doing. “Or I’ll use this superglue to seal your mouth up.”
“Superglue?” gasped Tommy. “You’re putting me back together with superglue? I demand a second opinion!”
“All right, you’re a noisy bugger, too,” said Alex. “Now shut the hell up and let me concentrate. Superglue was good enough for the grunts in Vietnam. It’s not like you needed all that lower intestine anyway… There. That’s it. Give the glue a few minutes to bond with the spells, then you can sit up. I’ve got the bullets here. Do you want to keep them for souvenirs?”
Tommy told Alex exactly where he could stick the bullets, and everyone managed some kind of smile. I looked around me, studying the small crowd gathered in the bar. My only remaining allies in the struggle to stop Lilith. It really was a very small crowd. I looked at Walker, who shrugged. He’d got his equilibrium back, but he still looked very tired.
“All my other agents are either out in the field, doing what they can, or they’re missing, presumed dead. What you see… is all that’s left.”
There was Alex Morrisey, cleaning his bloody hands on a grubby bar cloth, all in black as usual, in perpetual mourning for the way his life might have gone, if only he hadn’t been Alex Morrisey. He glowered at me, and said something about the mess I’d made of his place, but I could tell his heart wasn’t really in it. Tommy Oblivion was already sitting up on his table-top, ruefully inspecting the tattered and bloodied remains of his ruffled shirt. He nodded almost cheerfully to me and gave me a thumbs-up. Betty and Lucy Coltrane had chosen chairs from where they could keep a watchful overview of the bar, ready to deal with any and all intruders. They looked muscular as ever, but there were deep black smudges of fatigue under their eyes.
Dead Boy struck a casual pose in his flapping purple greatcoat, while Ms. Fate struck an heroic pose in his leather superhero outfit, mask, and cape. Standing proudly at his side was my teenage secretary, Cathy Barrett, in an oversized black leather jacket covered in badges. I stopped and looked at her closely.
“Cathy… why are you wearing a black domino mask?”
“Ms. Fate made me his sidekick!” Cathy said cheerfully. “I thought I’d call myself Deathfang the Avenger, or maybe…”
I shut my eyes, just for a moment. Teenagers…
Razor Eddie was standing a little off to one side, as he always did. Eddie wasn’t a people person. Julien Advent was nursing a glass of champagne and smoking a long black cheroot. As always, he was every inch the elegant Victorian, but his opera cloak was torn and tattered and even burned through in places. Of us all he looked the most like a real hero, tall and brave and unbending. Because he was. Larry Oblivion, in a soiled and battered Gucci suit, stood supportively beside his brother, and nodded briefly when my gaze landed on him.
“You saved my brother’s life,” he said. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” I said.
I hadn’t let Tommy die. The thought warmed me. I’d finally broken one clear link between my present and the devastated future, and it felt good, so good. And then I felt guilty, for caring more about that than for saving the man who’d risked his life to save mine. I do try to be a good man, but my life gets so damned complicated, sometimes…
“We’re all glad you’re back, Taylor,” said Walker, a little tartly. “But you’d better have some really good ideas, because we’re all out. We’re losing, John.”
Outside the bar, I could hear the roar of unchecked fires and the rumble of explosions, running feet, human screams, and the cries of monsters loose in the streets. Merlin’s shields were apparently still holding, but the War was edging closer. It occurred to me that this might be the last safe haven left in the Nightside. I remembered my Enemies, huddled together in their last refuge, and shuddered despite myself.
“What is there left for us to do?” said Walker. “We’ve tried open confrontation, manning the barricades, hit-and-run tactics, and guerrilla warfare, and none of it has ever done more than slow down Lilith’s advance. Now there’s just us… We’re all good, in our own ways, but she’s Lilith. Even her children were worshipped as gods for centuries. Lilith represents a kind of Power that’s almost beyond our comprehension. And her army of followers is growing all the time. I like to think most of them have been terrorised into joining, and would cut and run if given a chance, but…”
Everyone looked at me, and the silence stretched, because I had nothing to say. I had no plans, no schemes, no last trick up my sleeve.
“Can’t you use your gift, to find out what Lilith will do next?” said Cathy. It was hard for me to look at her. She still had faith in me. “Couldn’t your gift find us a way to defeat her?”
I shook my head slowly. “I know you’re trying to help, Cathy, but my gift doesn’t work like that. And every time I raise my gift now, it’s like running up a flag to tell Lilith exactly where I am.”
“But you’re always finding new things you can do with your gift,” said Cathy.
“Specific questions lead me to specific answers,” I said tiredly. “The vaguer the question, the harder it is to get any kind of answer that makes sense.”
“Where did you get this gift, anyway?” said Ms. Fate, in his rough, smoky voice. “I would have loved to have a gift to help me. I had to create myself through hard work and long training.”
“I won my gift in a poker game,” said Tommy Oblivion, unexpectedly.
“It’s true, he did,” said his brother Larry. “And he was bluffing, with a pair of threes. I couldn’t believe it.”
“My gift was a legacy, inherited from my inhuman mother,” I said. “My only legacy.”
“Now that’s interesting,” said Julien Advent. “Why that gift, in particular, and no other? I mean, when your mother is an ancient Power and a Biblical myth, I think you could reasonably expect to inherit at least half of that power, simply through the operations of chance. If all you got was one specific gift, it’s because that’s what your mother intended. She wasn’t prepared to risk your becoming powerful enough to challenge her, but she wanted you to have this gift for finding things. Why?”
An earthquake shook the bar. Tables rattled and chairs shimmied across the heaving floor. The walls creaked, and the long wooden bar groaned out loud. Everyone clung to each other, to keep from falling. Bottles toppled and crashed behind the bar, and the lights swung crazily. My first thought was that Lilith had found us at last, and was smashing her way through Merlin’s defences, but as quickly as it started the disturbance faded away,
