Nightside 05 - Paths Not Taken

like much, just a squat stone structure of maybe three storeys, brooding ominously over a backwater square. The few people passing by gave it plenty of room, though. The Tower had serious layers of protection to ensure that only Old Father Time had control over Time travel. It was said by some, and believed by many, that you could blow up the whole world and the Time Tower would still be standing there, unaffected. Most people couldn't even find the place if they approached it thinking bad thoughts.
    Just an old stone building, with no windows and only the one, anonymous, door. But the last time I'd been here, during the angel war, I'd seen an angel crucified against the stone wall of the Tower, with dozens of cold iron nails hammered through its arms and legs, and its severed wings lying on the ground beneath it. They play for keeps in the Nightside, and especially in Time Tower Square.
    I'd never traveled purposefully in Time before. Just the thought of what I was planning to do unnerved me, but I had to do it. More and more I was convinced that all the answers to all my questions could be found at the very beginning of the Nightside, in that moment when it was created by my missing mother, for reasons of her own. My mother, who might or might not be that Biblical myth known as Lilith. I only had her word for it, after all. I needed to know, to be sure.
    The only thing I did know for sure, concerning my mother, was that she had been banished from the Nightside once before, long and long ago, thrown out of reality and into Limbo for centuries. Maybe I could learn how to do that again. I was sure I could learn all kinds of things by observing how and why my mother created the Nightside, all those millennia ago. If I could persuade Old Father Time to send me all the way back to that fateful moment, there had to be all kinds of useful information there, and maybe even weapons I could use against my mother. There had to be. I had to stop her bringing about that awful future I'd seen in the Timeslip, the future where I destroyed the Nightside and maybe all the world, too, because of who my mother was.
    "Bang, you're dead," said a familiar cold voice.
    Tommy and I both looked round sharply as Suzie Shooter stepped unhurriedly forward out of a concealing shadow. My old friend Suzie, also known as Shotgun Suzie and Oh Christ it's her, run. The most deadly and efficient bounty hunter in the Nightside, and certainly the most pitiless. She'd track a bounty all the way down to Hell itself if the money was right. She looked icily impressive, as always, a tall blonde Valkyrie in black motorcycle leathers, heavily adorned with steel chains and studs, complete with knee-length boots with steel-capped toes, and two bandoliers of bullets criss-crossing her impressive chest. Grenades dangled from her belt. Her face was striking rather than pretty, with a strong bone structure and a determined jaw, and the coldest blue eyes I ever saw. She kept her long hair back out of her face with a leather band, fashioned from the skin of the first man she ever killed.
    She was covering us both with her pump-action shotgun, and I didn't like her smile.
    "Hello, Suzie," I said. "You're looking very fit. Been busy?"
    "You know how it is," said Suzie. "So many people that need killing, and so little time." She lowered her shotgun. "You're getting soft, Taylor. Was a time I wouldn't have been able to sneak up on you like that."
    "I've been somewhat preoccupied," I said, trying for dignity. "Killed anyone interesting recently?"
    She shrugged easily and slipped her shotgun over her shoulder and into the holster hanging down her back. "No-one that matters. There's a lot of hysteria around. People saying the End Times are coming, like we haven't heard that before. But it's definitely good for business. Lot of people out there determined to pay off old scores while they've still got the chance. I've been looking for you, Taylor."
    "Oh yes?" I said. Suzie might be an old friend, but it wasn't always wise to drop your guard around her. She only separated her business and private lives when it suited her. Five years ago I ran away from the Nightside, away from all the troubles and unanswered questions of my life, and I left with a bullet in my back from Suzie's gun.
    "I've been hearing rumours about you," Suzie said lazily. "Disquieting rumours. About you and your mother, and what's going to happen now she's revealed herself at last... I went to