Nightside 02 - Agents of Light and Darkness

feeding the fury that blazed within me. I could feel the power of the Voice, but it couldn’t get a hold on me. I stood my ground and smiled at Walker, and for the first time his certainty seemed to slip a little.
    “Go to hell, Walker,” I said. “Or better yet, stay right where you are while I come and beat the truth out of you. I’m in a really bad mood, and I could just use someone like you to take it out on. Can you still use the Voice when you’re screaming, Walker?”
    I stepped out of the pentacle, crossing the salt lines, and nothing could touch me. I could feel myself smiling, but it didn’t feel like my smile at all. I was ready to do awful things, terrible things. I was going to enjoy doing them. Walker backed away from me.
    “Don’t do this, John. To attack me is to attack the Authorities. They won’t stand for that. You don’t want them on your trail, as well as your enemies.”
    “Hell with you,” I said. “Hell with them.”
    “That isn’t you talking, John. It’s the Unholy Grail. That’s why you’re shielded from me. Listen to me, John. You don’t know how much I’ve done to protect you, down the years, using my position in the Authorities.”
    I stopped advancing on him, though part of me didn’t want to. “You protected me, Walker?”
    “Of course,” he said. “How else do you think you’ve survived, all these years?”
    “Oh, you’d like me to think that, wouldn’t you? But I know better. You belong to the Authorities, Walker. Body and soul. And now you’re scared, because the Voice they gave you doesn’t work on me. Perhaps it’s the Grail, perhaps it’s something I inherited from my mother or my father. You tell me. Are you ready to talk about my parents now?”
    “No,” said Walker. “Not now. Not ever.”
    I sighed, shrugged the airline bag off my shoulder, and let it fall onto the floor. Something cried out, in shock and rage, or maybe that was only in my mind. I stirred the bag with the toe of my shoe, and sneered a it. I’m my own man, now and always. I looked at Walker. “Why is it that everyone seems to know all about my parents except me?”
    “The truth is, no-one really knows it all,” said Walker. “We’re all just guessing, and whistling in the dark.”
    “You’re not getting the Unholy Grail,” I said. “I don’t trust you.”
    “Me, or the Authorities?”
    “Is there a difference?”
    “Now that was cruel, Taylor. Quite unnecessarily cruel.”
    “You hurt Suzie.”
    “I know.”
    “Get out of here,” I said. “You’ve done enough damage for one day.”
    He looked at me, then at Suzie and the others, still standing rigidly inside the pentacle. He nodded to them, and they all relaxed as the paralysis disappeared. Walker nodded once to me, then turned and walked briskly out of the bar and back up the metal steps. Suzie dived for her shotgun, but by the time she had it leveled he’d already disappeared. She scowled at me, her lower lip pouting in disappointment.
    “You let him go? After everything he did? After what he did to me?”
    “I couldn’t let you kill him, Suzie,” I said. “We’re supposed to be better than that.”
    “Well done,” said the man called Jude. “I’m really very impressed, Mr. Taylor.”
    We all looked round sharply, and there was my client, the undercover priest from the Vatican, standing patiently by the bar, waiting for us to notice him. Short and stocky, dark-completed, long, expensive coat. Dark hair, dark beard, kind eyes. Alex glared at him.
    “Its getting so just anyone can walk in … All right, how did you get in here, past two sets of homicidal angels and my supposedly state-of-the-art defenses that I’m beginning to think I wasted a whole bunch of my money on?”
    “No-one can prevent me from going where I must,” Jude said calmly. “That was decided where all the things that matter are decided. In the Courts of the Holy.”
    “You aren’t just an emissary for the Vatican, are you?” I said.
    “No. Though the Vatican doesn’t know that. I want to thank you for bringing me the Unholy Grail, Mr. Taylor. You’ve done me a great service.”
    “Hey, I helped,” said Suzie.
    Jude smiled at her. “Then thank you too, Suzie Shooter.”
    “Look,” I said, a bit sharply, “this is all very civilized and pleasant, but whoever the hell you really are, how do you intend to get the Unholy Grail past the supernatural brigades surrounding this place? They’ve already destroyed