Nightside 06 - Sharper Than a Serpents Tooth

tonight?"
    "A few names, a few faces, no-one you'd know and no-one worth noting. Though we do have several diminutive professors, who claim they're here researching modern slang. They loved it when I told them this club was licensed to dispense spirits . . ."
    I smiled dutifully. Dead Boy shrugged and took a good slug from his bottle. It was nearly empty.
    I watched the ghost girls dance. Putting off the moment when I'd have to tell Dead Boy why I was there. They were currently spinning and gyrating to an old Duran Duran number, "Girls on Film," and being ghosts they were all supernaturally beautiful, impossible lithe, and utterly glamorous. They danced with implacable grace, stamping their bare feet and jiggling their oversized breasts, rising from the stages to slide and sweep through the smoky air. Those in and among the audience drifted around and sometimes even through the customers, giving them a thrill they wouldn't find anywhere else. And why not? The steel poles were the only truly solid things on those stages.
    "Don't get tempted," said Dead Boy, putting down his empty bottle and scraped-clean ice cream tub. "It's all just a glamour. You wouldn't want to see what they really look like when they drop their illusions between sets. Unfortunately, being dead I always see them as they really are, which takes a lot of the fun out of this job."
    One girl swayed deliciously down from her stage, seemingly completely solid, until she extended one finger to a chosen customer, and he breathed it in, inhaling it like cigar smoke. The girl's hand unravelled, disappearing into his mouth and nostrils, until he couldn't take any more, and let it all back out again in coughs and snorts. The girl giggled as her hand reassembled. Up on one of the stages, a girl suddenly caught fire but kept dancing, unconsumed.
    "An old flame of mine," Dead Boy said solemnly.
    There are quite a few clubs in Uptown that cater to the various forms of death fetish, from mummification to premature burial, and some places that would freak out even hard-core Goths; clubs like Peaceful Repose, where you can try out being dead for a while to see what it feels like. Or the brothel where you can pay to have sex with female vampires, ghouls, and zombies. There are always those who like their meat cold, with the taste of formaldehyde on their lips…
    I said as much to Dead Boy, who only showed any interest when I got to the brothel. He actually got out a notebook and pencil for the address.
    "Trust me," I said firmly. "You really don't want to go there. You'll end up with worms."
    And then one of the ghost dancers caught my attention, as she beckoned coyly to a customer and led him, half-walking and half-swaying, across the gloomy club to one of the private booths at the rear. The customer was tall and skinny, with a furtive air about him. The two of them disappeared into a booth and shut the door firmly behind them. I turned to Dead Boy.
    "All right, what's the point of that? I mean, if she's not solid enough to touch…"
    "Love always finds a way," said Dead Boy. "Instead of an exchange of fluids, an exchange of energies. All purely consensual, of course. The ghost girl absorbs a little of the customer's life energy, which I'm told feels very nice, and she becomes a little more solid, so she can… take care of him. A benefit to both sides. The more life energies a girl collects, the more solid and real she can become. Theoretically, she could even become alive again… Sometimes the girls go too far and drain the customer dry. Then we end up with a really pissed off customer ghost haunting the place and acting up dead cranky. Management keeps an exorcism service on speed dial for just such occurrences…"
    The door to the private booth opened, and the customer came out again. He hadn't been in there long. And when he'd gone in he'd been skinny as a whip, but now he was noticeably overweight, with an extensive bulging belly. Dead Boy cursed briefly and pushed himself away from the bar.
    "What is it?" I said.
    "The bastard's a soul thief," Dead Boy said curtly. "He's inhaled the ghost girl, every last smoky bit of her, and now he's containing her inside himself, hoping to smuggle her out. Let's go."
    We headed purposefully across the floor, and the punters hurried to get out of our way. The fat man saw Dead Boy coming, pulled an intricate glass charm out of his pocket, and threw it on the floor. The glass shattered, releasing the pre-prepared spell, and