The Bride Wore Black Leather

chief. Buckle up; it’s going to be a bumpy ride.”
    A glass partition slid up, separating us from the driver. Presumably because Julien knew there were all sorts of questions I wanted to ask about how she and Julien knew each other. You can never have too much gossip. Julien had already opened up the interior bar, revealing a sparkling area full of crystal decanters. He helped himself to a glass of very good brandy, and I helped myself to a decanter. Julien gave me a reproving look. I grinned at him, and toasted him with the decanter.
    “Any snacks in there? Chief?”
    “No,” said Julien, very firmly, and he shut the bar quickly before I could go rooting around in it. “But the limousine does come equipped with an ejector seat for those passengers who’ve outstayed their welcome. Don’t say you weren’t warned.”
    I drank some really good brandy, straight from the decanter, and Julien winced. I think sometimes I’m a bit too much for his delicate sensibilities. Probably because I don’t possess any. He made a point of not looking in my direction as he picked up the interior phone again and contacted the news desk at the
Night Times
, to catch up with what had been happening in his absence. He listened for a while, then frowned and put the phone on speaker, so I could hear what he was hearing. It appeared that Brilliant Chang had already turned in his piece on what had gone down at the Ball of Forever, and I had come out of it surprisingly well. The voice at the other end of the phone read out some of the choicer bits, managing to sound both shocked and scandalised while enjoying himself immensely. Julien nodded.
    “I’m going to have to write a special editorial on the passing of King of Skin when I get back. Doing him justice will be a challenge.”
    “Will you be mentioning in passing that one of the co-founders of the new Authorities was actually a major serial killer, who wrapped himself in the living skins of his victims?” I said innocently.
    “The
Night Times
stands for the truth,” Julien said stiffly. “Just not all the truth, all the time. In cases like this, it can be better to let the truth come out a bit at a time, so as not to . . . overwhelm people. On the other hand, we can’t hold some things back for fear of being scooped. You did say Bettie Divine was there . . . Damn. I’m going to have to try and balance the good with the bad. King of Skin did do admirable things, in his time. He did help found the new Authorities, and you might remember that he fought alongside us during the Lilith War. A lot of innocent people are only alive today because he put his life on the line to protect them.”
    “Innocent?” I said, raising an eyebrow. “In the Nightside?”
    “You know what I mean.”
    “King of Skin only took on Lilith’s armies because they were destroying his own personal playground,” I said, letting the empty decanter drop onto the floor at my feet. Somebody should have refilled it; I’d only got a few drinks out of the damned thing. I sighed, feeling suddenly tired. Contemplating the endless ambiguities of the Nightside can take a lot out of you. “Just because the enemy of your enemy is your ally, it doesn’t necessarily follow that he’s your friend,” I said.
    The voice at the other end of the speaker-phone asked, rather nervously, if he should continue, and Julien told him to get on with it. Possibly I wasn’t the only one who was feeling tired. We listened silently as the voice did its best to hit the high spots of what was happening in the Nightside. Apparently someone had dumped a whole bunch of piranha into a private swimming pool because someone had blackballed their membership bid. No-one had ever seen so many people leave a pool so quickly. They then turned the heating all the way up, broiled the piranha, and ate the lot. There was a metaphor for the Nightside in there somewhere, but I was too tired to work it out. Someone else had opened the wrong kind of book in the H. P. Lovecraft Memorial Library, and now there was a whole new building standing in the same place, the Linda Lovecraft Library of Spiritual Erotica. Explorers in protective suits were currently investigating the new contents. And something really unpleasant had possessed the lady news-reader of the local television station, on air, right in the middle of a broadcast. It had her saying really nasty and untruthful things for some time before anyone noticed. She had to be wrestled