Tim Waggoner - Dark War

Maybe there was a reason she'd chosen the form of a young girl beyond trying to pose as Papa Chatha's niece, I thought. The more I got to know Shamika, the more childlike she seemed. Maybe in a sense she was a child. The Watchers might be ancient as a race, but the personality that called itself Shamika had only recently emerged. And like a child, she was eager for an adult's approval.

"You did great," I said, and she beamed.

We headed upstairs and entered the bar proper. Skully doesn't believe in wasting money on decor. The nine-foot-high front door is solid iron, and there are no windows for customers to break – not because Skully cares about his patrons' safety, but because it's a pain in the ass to keep replacing glass all the time. The walls are brick and the floor concrete, which makes mopping up bloodstains less of a chore. The solid oak tables are bolted to the floor, and the wooden chairs are cheap and easy to replace. Darkfolk tend to get more than a little rowdy when they overindulge, and Skully has learned from experience that the best way to protect his place is to make it hard to destroy.

Beyond beating the shit out of your fellow bargoers, the only entertainment at Skully's comes from a jukebox sitting in the corner. As we entered, the three heads bolted to the top of the machine saw me and started singing a rendition of Oingo Boingo's "Dead Man's Party." The scars, fresh cuts, and bruises on the singing heads showed that Skully's customers enjoyed their potential as targets more than they appreciated their musical offerings.

Skully's clientele glanced our way as we entered, either out of curiosity or to size us up as possible threats. I recognized a few of them – Suicide King, Patchwork the Living Voodoo Doll, and Sally O'Sorrows – and nodded a curt greeting, but I didn't head over to anyone's table to chat. I was looking for someone who might be able to tell me what I needed to know, and I found him sitting at the bar, talking with a young woman I also knew.

Before we could start toward them, the front door opened and a teenage boy with mussed hair and a pouty expression walked in. He had the elongated canines of the Bloodborn, but his skin gave off a glimmering sheen.

A couple of bald, overly muscled, heavily tattooed vampires clad in scuffed leather snarled at the sight of the luminous teen. They rose from their chairs, stalked toward him, flanked him on either side, grabbed hold of his arms, lifted him off the floor, and started escorting him back toward the door.

"Hey, take it easy, guys!" the teen whined. "It's not my fault I sparkle!"

The biker vampires laughed as they left the bar, and the iron door slammed shut ominously behind them.

The three of us then headed over to the bar, and I took the empty seat next to Carl, leaving Varney and Shamika to stand. The seat on the other side of me was occupied by a gill man wearing a diving helmet with rubber hoses attached to a humming machine he wore like a backpack. The helmet was filled with murkish, vaguely luminescent water, and I knew the gill man's H2O was laced with tangleglow, a Darkfolk-created drug too strong for human consumption. The gill man looked a little wobbly on his chair, and I knew if he didn't dial back the amount of tangleglow his device was pumping out, he'd end up in a coma before the night was over.

I ignored the gill man and turned to the older man sitting on the other side of me. His thinning reddish hair was covered by a straw porkpie hat, and he wore an ancient wrinkled seersucker suit that he claimed was white but was really more on the yellowish side.

"Hey, Carl. How are things?"

Carl didn't look from his beer. Instead, he reached into his jacket pocket, removed a small folded newspaper, and tossed it down on the counter in front of me. I unfolded and smoothed it out. It was the latest edition of the Night Stalker News, the alternative paper of which Carl is the sole owner, reporter, photographer, printer, and distributor. Today's headline read: RICHTER AND KANTI STOP HYDE PLAGUE. Accompanying the story were photos of Devona, Darius, and me battling Hydes as we fought to reach the House of Dark Delights.

I turned to Carl, impressed despite myself. "How did you get these? We were in a another dimension, you know."

The young woman seated on the opposite side of Carl laughed. "You should know better than to expect Carl to reveal his sources!"

Fade is a petite woman in her early twenties with long brunette hair that hangs past her waist. She usually dresses in dance-club chic, and tonight she was wearing a ripped Sisters of Mercy T-shirt, thigh-high black boots, and a skirt so mini it was barely there. Her earrings were shaped like silver cobras, and they swayed back and forth from her earlobes, tiny tongues flicking the air, serpent eyes narrowed as they gazed upon the world with cold disinterest.

Varney looked over my shoulder at Carl's paper.

"Dude, when my producer sees those photos, he's going to be even madder at me for not getting to go along on that trip!"

Now that we were in public, it seemed Varney had assumed his cover persona again.

Carl looked at Varney with more than a little disdain. "You Mind's Eye reporters are too used to letting your technology do the work for you. You need to rely less on cybernetic implants and more on good old-fashioned journalistic know-how."

There was something about the way he said this, though, an almost mocking tone that made me wonder if Carl knew Varney's hippy cameraman act was a lie. I wouldn't have been surprised. Back on Earth, Carl had been an investigative reporter who'd uncovered the existence of the Darkfolk and worked to expose them. His stories were ridiculed by the mainstream media, though, and eventually he found his way to Nekropolis, and he's lived here ever since, producing his own newspaper and exposing truths that more than a few rich and powerful citizens wish he would keep his damn mouth shut about.

Carl turned to Fade. "And you, my dear, should quit wasting your time with that silly gossip column of yours and start reporting some real news for a change." He finished the last swallow of his beer and slammed the mug down on the counter as if to emphasize his point.

Fade didn't seem the least bothered by Carl's criticism. "Not all of us are cut out to be crusaders, you know. Gossip sells papers, love, and in my case, the more readers I have, the happier I am."

Fade isn't a shallow fame-seeker. For her, having a large readership – and being a well-known personality about town – is literally a matter of life and death. She's reality-challenged. For reasons she's never shared, her existence is so uncertain that if she doesn't constantly reinforce her own reality, she's in danger of vanishing. Hence her name. That's why she spends so much of her time club-hopping, and why she writes the gossip column for the Daily Atrocity, Nekropolis' sleaziest and therefore best-read tabloid. I myself rarely read it, and when I do, it's only in the interest of professional research – I swear.

I introduced Varney in case Fade didn't know him, and then I introduced Shamika as Papa Chatha's niece. I saw no reason to tell Carl and Fade the truth about who Shamika was, partly because we were in a hurry and the truth was too complicated to easily explain, but also because if they knew who Shamika was, they'd learn that Gregor was back. And it was safer for Carl and Fade not to know about Gregor. If they knew, Gregor might decide they were a threat to him, and if that happened, he might get it in his head to do something painful and permanent to get rid of them. Sometimes ignorance isn't just bliss, it's also necessary to one's long-term survival, especially in this town.

"So what are you two fine members of Nekropolis' journalistic establishment doing hanging out in a bar?" I asked. "Don't you know there's a war going on?"