Nightside 02 - Agents of Light and Darkness

news, and always have been! I can feel one of my heads coming on… How are we supposed to defend ourselves now? Buy the angels a round and spike their drinks? Lucy, Betty, emergency measures! Right now!”
    The Coltranes fell to with a will, moving all the furniture away from in front of the bar, and opening up a large clear space. (The shapeshifted barstool yelped quietly at the rough handling, but refused to turn back.) Once the Coltranes had created a big enough space, they laid out a large pentacle, using salt cellars from behind the bar to mark the lines. They made a really professional job of it, considering they were drawing it freehand. Bouncers have to know many special skills, especially in the Nightside. We all took our places inside the pentacle, then Lucy and Betty sealed and activated the design by scrawling disturbing signs in the vales between the five points. Betty drew the last sign with a flourish, and the salt lines blazed with blue-white energies. Properly constructed pentacles drew their power from ley lines, the living nervous system of the material world. Unfortunately, angels drew their power from somewhere even more impressive.
    Betty and Lucy Coltrane sat down together and held each other tightly. They’d done all they could. Suzie and I stood back-to-back, watching and waiting. Alex muttered darkly to himself while trying to look in all directions at once. At least when he wasn’t shooting dark glances at me that clearly said This is all your fault. Do Something. And you’d better have a really good plan . As it happened, I did. But I wasn’t going to tell him about it just yet. Because he really wasn’t going to like it.
    Upstairs, the front door to the club blew in. There was the sound of great wings beating, followed by the tread of heavy feet. A blindingly bright light spilled out of the foyer but stopped abruptly at the top of the stairs leading down into the bar proper. A heavy tension built on the air, oppressive and threatening like a storm about to break, as the angels pressed against Strangefellow’s ancient defenses. All of the windows shattered at once, vicious shards of glass flying through the air, only to fall just short of the pentacle’s glowing lines. A blackness far darker than the night oozed through the windows, swallowed them up, then crept slowly across the walls.
    “They’re here,” said Suzie. “Heaven and Hell.”
    “And poor Humanity caught in the middle, just like always,” I said. I turned to Alex. “And now, it’s up to you. We need your ancestor, Alex. We need Merlin.”
    “No,” he said. “No way. I won’t do it.”
    “He’s the only one powerful enough to make a stand against angels, Alex.”
    “You don’t know what you’re asking, John. I can’t do it.”
    “That’s your big plan?” said Suzie. “Call up Merlin? What’s he but another dead sorcerer who won’t lie down?”
    “According to some Arthurian legends, his full name was Merlin Satanspawn,” I said. “Because his father was supposed to be the devil.”
    “Just when you think things can’t get any worse…” Suzie scowled unhappily. “I can see a rock and a hard place moving into position around us. If you like, I could just shoot us all now. It might be less painful.”
    “Relax, Suzie,” I said. “I’m on the case. Alex…”
    “Don’t make me do this, John,” he said quietly. “Please. You don’t know what it’s like, what it does to me. When I call him up, he manifests through me. He takes my place in the world. I have to cease to exist, so he can be real. It feels like dying.”
    “I’m sorry, Alex,” I said. “Really. But we don’t have the time for me to be kind.”
    I pushed my gift into his head, found the connection that still existed between Alex and his most ancient ancestor, and pushed it hard.
    “ Merlin Satanspawn; come forth !”
    Alex cried out, in pain and shock and horror, and ran out of the pentacle before any of us could stop him. He got as far as the bar before the change hit him. The whole world seemed to shudder, as reality shifted and changed… and where Alex had been, suddenly someone new, or rather very old, came into the world. He sat in state upon a great iron throne, the heavy black metal carved and scored with crawling, unquiet runes. He was naked, his corpse-pale body decorated from throat to toes with curving Celtic and Druidic tattoos. Many were unpleasant and actually disturbing to look upon.
    Between the