heavy black headlines. I had no doubt that Lilith had made the front page, and probably most of the other pages, too. I needed to get my plan up and running before everything started falling apart. And for that, I needed Dead Boy.

It wasn't hard to find the lap-dancing club where he was working as a bouncer. Bit of a come-down, for the Nightside's most eminent vigilante, dark avenger, and first line of defence against the legions of the dead, but presumably there were fringe benefits. I stopped before the club and studied it carefully from what I hoped was a safe distance. The flashing neon sign over the gaping door spelled out the club's name, not fade away, in colours so bright and garish they practically stabbed into my eyes. To either side were neon figures of dancing girls, jiggling eternally from one uncomfortable-looking position to another, back and forth, back and forth. A grubby window held photographs of the glamorous girls one could hope to find inside the club, though experience led me to believe the girls actually on display would look nothing like the photos.

The barker lounging by the door inhabited a brightly coloured check coat, with a revolving bow tie and a grin so fixed it bordered on the unnatural. He'd started out life as a ventriloquist's dummy, and never really got over it. Seeing my interest he fixed me with his brightly shining eyes and launched into his spiel.

"They're dead, they're naked, and they dance!"

I fixed him with my best cold stare. "Do I look like a tourist?"

He sneered and moved away from the door, waving me in. I passed him by with as much dignity as was possible under the circumstances. Inside the lap-dancing club, someone tried to take my coat, and I punched him out. Start as you mean to go on… The transition from chilly night to sweltering lounge was abrupt, and I stopped inside the main area to get my bearings. The management kept the lights down to a comforting gloom, partly to give the punters a sense of privacy, but mostly so you wouldn't get too good a look at the rest of the clientele. The air was thick with all kinds of smoke, and rank with the stink of sweat and desire and desperation. There were ratty-looking tables and chairs for the scattered audience, and cheap plywood booths at the back for more private encounters. The customers were mostly men, mostly human, their eyes fixed hungrily on the four separate spotlighted stages 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