Bride of Death (Marla Mason) (19 page)

I groaned. I wanted to tell him to fuck off before I
really
tested his immortality. I’m pretty good at killing things that are conventionally considered unkillable. But I thought of my tattoo: Do Better. I deserved a chance to redeem myself, right? Would I deny this guy that same chance?

“Fine,” I said. “Consider yourself an unpaid intern. Come with me to deal with Sarlat. And don’t think about doing any treacherous shit – I know you think you’re hard to kill, but you’re an amateur next to me.” I started to walk out of the tent, then paused. “I am
not
getting a sidecar on my motorcycle for you to ride around in.”

“You’re the boss,” he said. “So... are we going to kill my old boss now?”

“No need for murder in this case,” I said. “Sarlat works for me now.”

A PLAN IS A THING THAT FAILS

The street was filled with the dead, mostly Sarlat’s people, cut down by Orias’s crew. Nothing was moving, not even scavenger birds, though I imagined the buzzards would be along in time to eat whatever corpses proved edible – many of the dead were so inhuman their flesh probably wouldn’t be compatible with a vulture’s stomach. We picked our way among the fallen, Squat pausing occasionally to mercifully dispatch the not-quite-dead-yet from both gangs.

Tolerance was a ghost town again, pretty much. I kept expecting Sarlat to emerge from the jail, transforming into a wolf as he came – and I gave it even odds that Squat would turn on me to help his old boss, in that case. He wasn’t bound to me, and I didn’t have time to put him in a circle just then.

But the loup-garou didn’t come out, which was odd. He didn’t strike me as the lying-in-wait type. More the fools-rush-in type.

“So Sarlat can’t kill you?” Squat said, standing beside me just a dozen yards from the yawning-open door of the jail. “Maybe that’s why he’s holding back, hoping you’ll just go away?”

“I’ve heard crazier ideas.” I crept up to the door, trying to think of loopholes in the geas that prevented him from acting against me. Could he set a booby trap? Not if he had any expectation that I’d be the one to trigger it, not without dying himself in agony for breaking the deal. But maybe he’d tried to do it
anyway
, pain of painful death be damned? He seemed too conceited to give up his own life just to kill me, but it wasn’t like I knew him all that well.

“Marla,” Nicolette shouted. “If that’s you, get me the fuck out of here. I didn’t think it was possible for me to hate you any more, but I hate you
so fucking much
right now –”

I stepped into the jail. The only light in the room came from a lantern inside the cell, but I could see well enough. Nicolette, still disguised as Orias, was on the floor, resting on one cheek. Sarlat was also on the floor, in a pool of blood, very much dead.

“Gods
damn
it.” I’d had such a clever plan. Trap Sarlat in the geas, force him to tell me about the Eater, and then force him to help me take
out
the Eater, assuming the Eater was someone that needed to be taken out. Gloat a little and rub it in his face that I’d outsmarted him – petty, sure, but I didn’t think it was a failure of character to act like a jerk to someone who sold virgins to cults for ritual sacrifice. But Sarlat was dead. So much for being clever. “What happened here, Nicolette? Did one of Orias’s people get in and kill him?”

“
I
killed him!” she said – or screamed, and for the first time, I realized she was
really upset
, not just being ill-tempered or pretending outrage to amuse herself. “Do you know what that sick fucker tried to do to me? I don’t know who this chick you made me look like was, but her and Sarlat had some kind of messed-up relationship. He kept
talking
to me, telling me I should have loved him the way he needed to be loved, that I brought this on myself. Creepy as fuck, but I went along with things, I played dead, because I’m your goddamn slave oracle bloodhound and that’s the task you gave me. But then. Then he
kissed
me, Marla, he thought I was dead, and he still stuck his tongue in so deep I almost gagged on it. I could have stood that, but I could tell he was getting excited, and I was pretty sure he was about to move on from kissing to something a
lot
worse, so...”

I looked at Sarlat again. Most of the blood seemed to emanate from the vicinity of his mouth. “You tore out his tongue?”

“Aren’t you fucking perceptive. Get me a drink of water, right now, and
fuck you
.”

I just stood there, looking at Sarlat’s corpse, but Squat took the initiative and found Sarlat’s bag and took out a bottle of water. I shook off the horrified skin-crawlies and set Nicolette’s head up on the table. Squat gave her sips of water, which she spat out, twenty or thirty mouthfuls as the water went from bright red to pink to finally clear.

“Hey,” Squat said. “I’m Squat.”

“Did Marla enslave you, too?” Nicolette said.

“Uh....”

“Squat was cursed by Elsie Jarrow,” I said.

Jarrow was the woman who’d beheaded Nicolette, so I was thinking there could be some shared trauma bond thing there. Or that, being a chaos witch herself, Nicolette might find the nature of the curse interesting or instructive. But Nicolette was still a Jarrow fan, the way some twisted assholes revere serial killers, so instead she said, “Holy shit, did you
know
her? Like, were you a friend of hers, did you do her wrong, or...”

I walked outside. All the monsters were dead, except Squat, and killing him might require breaking his curse first, and it seemed like a shitty thing to do, breaking a guy’s curse and then murdering him. Like if, in
Beauty and the Beast
, Belle had shoved a knife in the Beast’s eyeball as soon as he turned into the handsome prince again. Maybe Squat was in the market for redemption, and we could work something out. I wasn’t exactly experienced in the rehabilitative arts, but it’s an article of faith for me that I can do anything.

I’d once overhead a guy in a comic shop trying to explain the difference between a superhero and an anti-hero to his young son. He said, “An anti-hero wants the bad guys to be dead. But a superhero wants the bad guys to turn into good guys.”

I didn’t have much hope of being a superhero, but maybe it was worth a try. Redemption over execution. All part of Doing Better.

Speaking of doing better, I knew I should figure out some way to make things up to Nicolette. She was supposed to just be a head on a mantelpiece, a prop in my plan, but instead she’d gotten monster-tongue in her mouth, and the legitimate fear of getting something worse. What she’d endured had gone way beyond the call of duty. The hard part was figuring out something I could do to make it up to her that wouldn’t constitute a crime against humanity.

•

But first I let Nicolette take it easy while Squat and I disposed of the bodies. There were about a hundred dead – hardly a massive battlefield, but way more than we could easily deal with. A fire would have been visible for miles, so we decided to go the mass-grave route instead. Squat didn’t know a damn thing about doing magic – he just
was
magic – so his job was picking up the strays and outliers and piling them up in the middle of the street. Me, I just concentrated on a bit of sympathetic magic. There were plenty of deep holes in the area, because of the old mines; I just needed to convince the dusty main street of Tolerance that
it
was actually a deep hole, too.

After Squat had heaped the bodies into a mass, I let the two thoughts held in opposition in my mind snap together, replacing over
here
with over
there
, and a sinkhole formed, the dead from Orias’s and Sarlat’s gangs tumbling down like sand disappearing into the lower chamber of an hourglass. Once all the dead were below the level of the ground, I gestured casually and a great wave of earth swept over the hole, burying the bodies and leaving no sign beyond a mass of churned-up dirt with shredded bits of scrub brush poking out haphazardly.

I looked at the covered hole for a moment, satisfied with myself, then I started blinking and twitching and shivering and had to sit down right there in the sand, my head between my knees, sucking in great gasps of breath.

I was freaking out because I
shouldn’t have been able to do that
, especially the last part. Covering a huge mass grave with a thought and a gesture was pretty big magic. Such mastery over earth was not one of my skills. I’ve never specialized as a sorcerer, as necromancers and pyromancers and technomancers and biomancers and so on do, preferring to be a utility player, or a “rag and bone shop sorcerer” as my old mentor called people like me. I was a jill of all trades, master of none; pretty good at a lot of things, not amazing at any of them. Insofar as I had a particular strength it was probably enchanting, because I had the strong will and stubbornness necessary to spend hours imbuing objects with magic to be released in a sudden torrent or flash as needed.

What I
didn’t
have was the power to be a human bulldozer. I could maybe fool myself into thinking I’d mastered sympathetic magic enough to make a hole spontaneously appear where there was no hole, but waving my hand and covering over the grave had been pure telekinesis or geomancy or, I don’t know, earth-bending.

“Uh, are you okay?” Squat said.

“This is part of my magical process,” I mumbled. “Go check on Nicolette, would you?”

Squat shrugged and wandered off. As far as he knew, I could move heaven and earth with a twitch of my fingers, so he wasn’t surprised by my grave-digging abilities.

I remembered something I’d read once, about people who suffered brain damage and lost the ability to form new memories. Some researchers had gotten such patients to play that old video game Tetris for hours, spinning colored blocks around on screen and forming them into lines. Every day, the patients were offered the chance to play Tetris again, and even though they didn’t remember playing it before, and acted as though they were encountering it for the first time every time, their game play
improved
. Their brains were forming new pathways and connections on levels far below consciousness. Some of the patients even reported dreams of colored shapes falling, just like they did on screen, though they had no idea why.

For a month, I’d been a chthonic goddess, co-regent of a metaphorical underworld, and even though my conscious mind had been stripped of the memories, and I assumed I’d lost all those goddess powers... maybe something was lurking underneath the thinking part of my brain. Not power I could access intentionally, but only in a casual, thoughtless act, with a distracted mind and a wave of my hand. World-class outfielders don’t
think
about catching pop fly balls – they don’t work out the angle of descent and lift their glove accordingly. They just
do
it, the same way I’d just unthinkingly moved a ton of dirt, by will alone.

Of course I wasted about ten minutes trying to make the earth move again, but thinking about it made it impossible. Like the old joke about a grasshopper asking a centipede how it managed to walk with all those legs, making the centipede so aware of its milling limbs that it promptly got tangled up in its own locomotion and fell over.

I stood up, glared at the hole, and wondered whether I should call Death, to demand an explanation. I felt like yelling at him, though there was no reason to, really. My response to being annoyed and confused is often to spread that annoyance and confusion around, which was probably one of those things I need to Do Better about. So instead of pitching a fit, I took a deep breath and decided to get on with my life on Earth.

•

I retrieved my bike and all my stuff from the undisclosed location, and got Nicolette settled in her cage on the rear seat again. Her illusion was fading, Orias’s face sloughing away like mascara running in the rain. She’d gone all quiet, which worried me. A constantly bitching Nicolette was something I knew how to cope with, but a silent and unsleeping Nicolette was weird and creepy.

“I don’t think there’s room on this bike for you to ride bitch, Squat,” I said. “You’re going to have to make your own way home.”

He snorted. “I’ll take one of the twenty trucks left parked outside of town.”

I swore. “Damn it. I buried the bodies but left the vehicles. I didn’t even think about that.”

“Eh, most of the cars were stolen anyway,” Squat said. “I wouldn’t worry too much.”

“Where are you headed after this?” I asked.

Squat shook his head. “Fuck if I know. Sarlat’s operation is all but wiped out, and the few guys left aren’t too fond of me. When they hear I’m the only survivor, that’s not going to make them like me any better. I seem to be unemployed and basically fucked.” He looked at me expectantly.

“What do you want me to do about it? I spared your life. That’s a pretty good favor you owe me already.”

“You couldn’t kill me anyway.” He sighed. “Look, do you need some muscle? I know you managed to wipe out about a hundred people pretty much solo, but I work cheap, and when I don’t have work to do, I tend to get myself in trouble.”

“Hmm. I don’t much need a thug. I’m pretty good at thuggery myself. But maybe... What do you know about the Eater?”

He blinked his eyes, which were the most human part of him, and actually kind of pretty in isolation, a sort of greenish-blue –

As I looked at him, his eyes changed, pupils elongating into goat-like slits, irises clouding and becoming a sort of bruise-purple color I found especially repellent. I flinched away from him, entirely involuntarily.

He grunted. “You had to like my eyes, didn’t you? One part of me that hadn’t changed much since I was human. Fucking curse.” He sighed. “The Eater? I’ve heard the name, sure. Sarlat had dealings with him, though I never met him. If it is a him. Could be a her, or an it, or something else.”

“Any idea what
kind
of dealings Sarlat had with him-her-it?”