Nightside 06 - Sharper Than a Serpents Tooth

where the dancers swayed back and forth to the over-amplified music.
    There were girls, up on the stages and in and among the audience, showing off what they'd got and what they could do, all of them naked, all of them dead. The spirits of departed women, condemned to wander the Earth for this reason or that, lap-dancing for the living. Some seemed completely real and solid, while others were only wisps of smoke or mist, tinted all of the colours of the rainbow by the coloured gels rotating in front of the stage lights. Most of the girls drifted from one state to the other and back again, as they stamped and spun and shook their breasts, pumping their hips and curling around the steel poles on the stages, all the time favouring the nearest customers with wide smiles that meant nothing, nothing at all. Ghostly girls, the dancing dead—the ultimate look but don't touch.
    There was a tacky-looking bar set to one side, and leaning up against it, the legendary Dead Boy himself. Technically speaking, he wasn't old enough to be in a club like this. Dead Boy was seventeen, and had been for some thirty years, ever since he was murdered—clubbed down in the street for his credit cards and mobile phone. He came back from the dead, after making a deal with someone he still preferred not to name, and took a terrible vengeance on his killers, only to find that his deal made it impossible for him to go to his rest afterwards. And so he walks the Nightside, forever young, forever damned, his spirit possessing his own dead body, doing good deeds in the hope that eventually he'll accumulate enough goodwill in Heaven to break the terms of the deal he made.
    He was tall and adolescent thin, wrapped in a dark purple greatcoat, over black leather trousers and tall calfskin boots. He wore a black rose on one lapel and a large floppy black hat perched on the back of his head. His coat hung open, revealing a corpse-pale torso held together with stitches and staples and duct tape. He doesn't feel pain any more, but he can still take damage. If I looked closely I could see the bullet hole in his forehead that he'd filled in with builder's putty.
    His long white face had a weary, debauched look, with burning fever-bright eyes and a pouting sulky mouth with no colour in it. He had experimented with makeup, but mostly he just couldn't be bothered. Long dark hair fell to his shoulders in oiled ringlets. He looked calm, casual, even bored. He was drinking whiskey straight from the bottle and eating Neapolitan ice cream straight from the tub. He nodded easily as I came over to join him.
    "Hello, Taylor," he said indistinctly, around a mouthful of ice cream. "Pardon my indulgence, but when you're dead you have to take your pleasures where you can find them. I'd offer you a drink, but I've only got the one bottle. And don't order anything from the bar—their prices are appalling, and the drinks are worse."
    I nodded. I already knew that. I'd been here once before, working a case, and had allowed myself to be persuaded to order what passed for champagne. It tasted like cherry cola. Nothing was what it seemed here. Even the waitress had an Adam's apple.
    "So you're the bouncer?" I said, leaning easily back against the bar beside him.
    "I run security here," he corrected me. "I keep an eye on things. Most of the punters take one look at me, and know better than to start anything."
    "I thought you had a steady gig, body-guarding that singer, Rossignol?"
    He shrugged. "She's off touring Europe. And I… prefer not to leave the Nightside. This job's just temporary, until I can scare something else up. Even the dead have to earn a living. Hence the girls here."
    I nodded. The Nightside accumulates more than its fair share of ghosts and revenants, one way and another, and they all have to go somewhere.
    "Where do the girls go, when they're not working?" I asked.
    Dead Boy gave me a pitying look. "They're always working. That's the point. It's not like they ever get tired…"
    "What do the girls get out of this? The money can't be that good."
    "It isn't. But a clever girl can make a lot from tips, and the management guarantees to keep the girls safe from necromancers, plus all the other unsavoury types who use the energies of the departed to fuel their magics. And of course all the girls hope to hook an appreciative customer, turn him into a regular, and milk him for all he's worth."
    I looked out over the widely spread audience. "Anyone interesting in