"Simon R. Green - Nightside 1 - Drinking Midnight Wine" - читать интересную книгу автора (Green Simon R)

gold and gems, magical artefacts and personal power. They all had their reasons: vampires and
werewolves who wanted to be freed from the demands of their curses, or undead who craved to know
the sensual pleasures of the living, or just to know the simple joy of daylight. In Veritie, they
could be mortal men and women, free from fate or duty or geas. The price was always more than they
expected. Some of the newcomers were already shaking and shuddering on the platform, shocked at
how much smaller they seemed here, how much more diminished and vulnerable the human condition
really was.


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Some of them had never even been cold before.
Two figures appeared suddenly out of nowhere to welcome the newcomers, and Jimmy leaned forward
just a little for a better look. He was surprised, bordering on astonished, that they'd actually
been able to arrive at the station without his noticing. And then he saw who the two were, and
understood much. The man in charge of this small welcoming committee, speaking so calmly and
graciously and comfortingly to the uncertain refugees, was Nicholas Hob, the Serpent's Son. Very
old, very powerful, and irredeemably evil. Jimmy hadn't known Hob was back in town. To the best of
his knowledge, no one had. It had been a hundred years and more since Nicholas Hob had gifted the
town with his poisonous presence.
As always, he looked utterly perfect, in style and manners and everything that counted. He was
handsome, elegant, apparently in his late twenties, in great shape and dashing with it. Blond,
blue-eyed and almost overpoweringly masculine, Hitler would have loved him on sight. (And probably
had, if some of the rumours were true. There were a lot of rumours about Hob.) His suit was of the
very latest cut, and quite clearly the most expensive money could buy. Gold and silver gleamed all
over his person, and he was charm personified as he welcomed one and all to their new lives in
Veritie. He might have been a politician, a successful businessman or a film star, and had been
all of those and more, in his time. But they were only the faces he hid behind, the masks he wore
for other people. He was the Serpent's Son, cunning and vicious, potent and foul, who walked
through lives and destroyed them, just for the hell of it. No one had ever been known to stand
against him and live. He was his father's son, and he could shine like the sun when he chose.
(It was said that flowers and women withered when he smiled on them, and that he left a trail of
blood and suffering wherever he walked. Jimmy Thunder was quite prepared to believe it.)
Hob's companion looked like a woman, but was actually Angel. In her own disturbing way, she was
just as powerful and terrifying as Hob. Incredibly tall, impossibly pale and slender, she dressed
in black tatters held together with safety pins and lengths of barbed wire. The pins pierced her
flesh, and the wire broke it, but she didn't seem to care. She wore her jet-black hair cropped
brutally close to her skull, and her face was coarsely good-looking, sensual rather than
beautiful. Her skin was as pale as death, and her mouth and eyes were the same deep, vivid red.
She smiled meaninglessly at the new arrivals, and her hands curled impatiently at her sides, as
though impatient to be hurting or breaking things. At her belt hung a rosary made from human
flngerbones, and a clutch of supernaturally white feathers that came from no material wings. The
newcomers avoided her gaze, as though the very sight of her was painful to them. They all knew her
name was more than just a name.
She really had been an angel once, descended now from the immaterial to the material world, and
though she was much diminished from what she had once been, she was still a force almost beyond
reckoning. No one knew what kind of angel she'd been, from Above or from Below, and whether she
fell or was pushed, or what terrible, unforgivable thing she'd done, to be sentenced to the mortal
miseries of flesh and blood and bone. No one asked; no one dared. She was Angel, and that was all