Nightside 02 - Agents of Light and Darkness

get to try it first.”
    I yanked the case out of my inner coat pocket. I felt unpleasantly warm to the touch. I snapped open the lid and took out the Speaking Gun. The case fell unnoticed to the floor as I stood paralyzed, unable to move even the smallest part of me. My skin crawled, repulsed at contact with the Gun made of meat. It was like holding the hand of someone long dead, but still horribly, eagerly active. It felt hot and sweaty and feverish. It felt sick and powerful. The Speaking Gun had woken up. It breathed wetly in my hand, and its slow heavy thoughts crawled sluggishly across the front of my mind. The Gun was awake, and it wanted to be used. On everything. It ached to say the backward Words that would uncreate all the material world. It had been made to destroy angels, but its appetite had grown down the many, many years. And yet the Gun was dependent on others to use it, to pull its trigger formed from a tooth, and it hated that. Hated me. Hated everything that lived. The Speaking Gun forced its filthy thoughts upon me, determined to control and compel me, to make me its weapon. Its thoughts and feelings were in no way human. It was as though death and decay and destruction had found a voice, and hideous ambition. It knew my Name, and ached to say it.
    It took all my self-control, all my rigid self-discipline, and all the outrage raised in me by the Bedlam Boys, to force my fingers open one at a time, until the Speaking Gun fell stickily from my hand and hit the floor, still howling defiantly in my mind. I shut it out, behind my strongest shields, and leaned back against the wall behind me, shaking and shuddering.
    The angel was gone. It had seen the Speaking Gun, and that was enough.
    The restaurant was quiet now. The staff and customers were gone, the angel had escaped, and the Bedlam Boys were salt. There was just me and Suzie. My whole body was shaking, my hands beating a noisy tattoo against the wall. My mind felt like it had been violated. I could feel tears running down my cheeks. Walker had been right. Some cures are far worse man the diseases. I looked down at the Gun on the floor, lying beside its case, but I couldn’t bring myself to reach down and touched the damned thing. So Suzie knelt and did it for me, closing the case around the Gun without actually touching it herself. She slipped the case into her jacket pocket, then stood patiently beside me while I got myself under control again. It was the closest she could come to comforting me.
    Soon enough the shuddering stopped, and I was myself again. I felt tired, bone tired and soul tired, as though I hadn’t slept for a week. I wiped the drying tears off my face with my hands, sniffed a few times, and gave Suzie my best reassuring smile. It felt fairly convincing. Suzie took it in the spirit with which it was intended and nodded briskly, all business again. Suzie’s always been uncomfortable around naked emotions.
    “I’ll carry the case,” she said. “I’m more used to guns than you are.”
    “It isn’t just a gun, Suzie.”
    She shrugged. “That angel. Do you think it was from Above or Below?”
    It was my turn to shrug. “Does it matter, Suzie? When the Bedlam Boys had us, trapped in our fears, for a moment I saw what you saw…”
    “We won’t talk about that,” Suzie said flatly. “Not now. Not ever. If you are my friend.”
    Sometimes being a friend means knowing when to let things go and shut the hell up. So I pushed myself away from the wall and headed for the nearest of the three remaining salt statues. Suzie followed after me. The scattered remains of the shattered statue crunched loudly under our feet. I looked at the three white faces, trapped in a moment of horror, forever. Sometimes I think the whole universe runs on irony.
    “Well, there goes our chances of finding the Collector’s location,” said Suzie, her voice and face utterly calm and easy.
    “Not necessarily,” I said. “Remember the first rule of the private detective, when in doubt, check their pockets for clues.”
    “I thought the first rule was wait until the client’s check has cleared?”
    “Picky picky.”

    It took a while, but eventually we turned up a single embossed business card, proclaiming a performance by Nasty Jack Starlight at the old Styx Theatre, dated that very day. Or, more properly, night.
    “So Starlight’s back in town,” I said. “Wouldn’t have thought he was the Boys’ cup of tea.”
    “Has to be a