Nightside 02 - Agents of Light and Darkness

floor around her.
    It only took a few steps before I was kneeling beside her and holding her in my arms, but it seemed t take forever. I held her shoulders tightly, trying to stop her shaking. Her face was bone white, and already wet with sweat. She rolled her eyes at me and tried to say something, but her mouth was loose and ugly and wouldn’t work properly. There was no fear in her eyes, only something that might have been a terrible resignation. One bloody hand groped around for her shotgun, but it was on the other side of the room. Her other hand was still trying to stuff severed bits of intestines back into her stomach. The stench of blood and guts was almost overwhelming. Suzie was breathing clumsily now, great heaving gasps, as though every breath was an effort.
    She was dying, and both of us knew it.
    And then the blur came to a sudden halt before me, solidifying into a familiar shape, one I hadn’t seen in years. I should have known; it had to be her. She struck an elegant pose before me and smiled a happy contented smile. She always did like to show off. In one white-gloved hand she held the Speaking Gun’s case, taken from Suzie even as she ripped out her guts. She waggled the case a few times before me, as a trophy, then slipped it casually under one arm.
    “A little extra, I think, on top of my exorbitant fee. You don’t object, do you, Walker darling?”
    Walker started to say something, then stopped himself.
    “Hello, Belle,” I said, in a voice I didn’t recognize. “It’s been a while, hasn’t it?”
    “Oh, years and years, darling. But you know me. Always happy to bump into old friends.”
    Belle. Short for La Belle Dame Sans Merci . Tall and elegant, beautiful and sophisticated, supernaturally slender. She had poise and style and vicious charm, and an aristocratic disdain for small-minded things like ethics or morality, good or evil. She was what she was, and delighted in it. Her face had a marvelous bone structure, a broad forehead, purple eyes and a heavy, sulky mouth. Belle was a freelancer—intrigue, murder, theft, and conspiracy, or anything else you might desire, as long as you could pay for it. She’d done it all in her time, and always on her own terms. She drifted from one European capital to another, leaving a trail of broken hearts and broken bodies behind her, and never once looked back. Mostly she stayed out of the Nightside. Said the place was beneath her. I think she just felt happier away from any real competition.
    To give her her due, she’d always been ready to take on anyone, anywhere, and she’d never been known to lose. Mainly because Belle had armored herself in trophies taken from her many victims. On her back she wore a werewolf’s pelt, thick and grey and shaggy. She skinned the hide off him herself, and now she wore the pale grey fur all the way down her back, with the emptied head pulled forward over her head like a hood. The skull’s long canines dented her forehead, above her purple eyes. It wasn’t just garment; her magics kept the pelt alive and plugged into her own system. It was her skin now, her fur, and as a result she had a werewolf’s ability to regenerate. Her burnished golden breastplate was made from a dragon’s hide, and it formed utterly impenetrable amour. Her shimmering white elbow-length gloves were in fact a vampire’s lily white skin, flayed from the undead victim by Belle’s own fair hand. On one of her hands, heavy claws pushed through the white glove; claws taken from a ghoul and fused onto her own fingers. The thigh-high leather boots were new. I didn’t know who she’d got them from. Belle’s magics made her various armours a part of her, made her, for all practical purposes, unkillable.
    Belle was very much a self-made woman.
    Most strikingly, the two halves of her face didn’t match. The left half was a distinctly darker shade than the rest of her body. One victim had got close enough to rip half of Belle’s face away. So after she was dead, Belle took half the victim’s face as a replacement. The new skin was younger, tighter, and a perfect fit.
    Belle would go anywhere, and do anyone, as long as the check cleared. Or as long as the enemy was a challenge, or had something Belle wanted.
    I clutched Suzie to me, cradling her shaking body in my arms. She was trembling violently now, as shock took hold. Blood ran in sudden spurts from her slack mouth, and dripped off her chin. I could almost feel the life going out of