Bride of Death (Marla Mason) (24 page)

“I understand,” I said.

“Good. Now, the price. The piece of me that is lodged in your world: break it up, smash it to sand, and send some of that sand to distant places: sift some into the seas, drop some at the poles, some in the mountains, some in the caves. Do you understand?”

“I do, but why –”

“My reasons are not for you to know,” it roared, and Rondeau’s jaw
did
stretch too far, then, the skin on both sides of his mouth tearing and beginning to bleed, and I flinched back. “Obey!”

“Of course, we will obey!” I shouted, and with that, we were back in the desert again. Rondeau fell backward, unconscious, and in kneeling to attend to him I happened to glance at the stone...

For just a moment, Mrs. Mason, it seemed to be a monstrous human
eye
, the size of my own head, the white of the eye crawling with veins that were actually living worms, the iris a deep and mottled purple, the pupil a blackness pinpointed by red and green stars... but then the eye closed, the lid just lustrous stone again.

Perhaps I have gone on too long. Rondeau was fine, after a few moments, waking up with no memory of the experience at all, though he did not doubt my interpretation of events. He did experience a profound compulsion to dig up and smash the stone, and so we fetched a tarp from the Bentley, set the stone upon it, and set to breaking it with pick and sledgehammer. I was terrified that we would crack the outer layer and discover an eye inside, soft and full of fluid and pulsing and warm and alive, but it was mere stone all the way through, and surprisingly brittle and easy to break up. Seeing the eye may have been a trick of my senses after all. I hope so.

When we were done we had a few pounds of black sand, which we carefully tied up in the tarp. Rondeau says he will begin mailing packages of sand to people he knows throughout the world tomorrow, to fulfill the bargain. He does not seem eager to speculate about the nature of the oracle we consulted, or its motives in making the demands it did; I feel no particular eagerness to do so myself.

You have said, Mrs. Mason, that there is nothing humankind was not
meant
to know, because that implies there is some reliable higher power doing the
meaning
, and you do not believe in such things, as you know from experience that even gods are limited creatures. But I think there are things humanity would find it unhealthy, or at least deeply unsettling, to know, and the true nature of the oracle we summoned strikes me as one of them.

I hope the information we provided proves to be valuable, and worth the price; whatever that price truly turns out to be.

I remain your humble and obedient servant,

Pelham

EAST OF NOWHERE

That Pelly. He writes like he’s a time traveler from the Victorian era, though he was born and raised in Felport. (Admittedly, he was raised in captivity and trained to be an ideal omnicompetent servant for a family of snotty nobles with supernatural lineage, but still.) That story was pretty fucked-up, and I might not have asked Rondeau for the oracle intel if I’d realized it was going to be such a traumatic experience.

It did make me think the Eater was bigger prey than I’d realized, if we’d needed to summon an oracle with
that
kind of mojo just to get a
clue
about how to find it. I’d been assuming he was some kind of anthropophagous magical crime boss... but maybe I was dealing with something more dangerous here.

If so, good. Killing magical thugs is a public service, but it’s not a particularly interesting challenge.

•

After I read the message from Pelly on my smartphone, I looked up to find Squat staring at me expectantly. We’d eaten our nasty fast food at the picnic table beside a rest stop that otherwise consisted of two bathrooms and a knocked-over garbage can. Squat had a motorcycle of his own, a beat-up old Harley, parked beside mine. We were well on our way to being a biker gang. (Maybe “The Brides of Death.” I could picture the logo on the back of a leather jacket already. Though I wasn’t sure Squat would go for that.)

“Ever been to West Texas?” I asked.

Squat shrugged. “Sure. Looks a lot like East New Mexico.”

I poked at my phone some more. “Hmm. If I really pushed it, I could get there in ten hours or so.”

Squat whistled. “Ah. Okay. Will you be coming back, or...”

“Not necessarily. It’s not like this is my home base – that’s Vegas, if it’s anywhere. I might just keep rolling on the roads.”

“Huh. I have a place here, some stuff, some affairs to set in order, but... would you mind if I caught up with you?”

“You’ve gotten a taste for the monster-killing life, huh?”

“Let’s say I’m hearing the song of the open road. And you’ve gotten me kind of curious about this Eater guy. He burns down Sarlat’s place to cover his tracks? Must have something interesting to hide. Plus I have a lot of rage, on account of being cursed, and following you seems like a great way to find people I can beat up.”

“Never people, Squat, just monsters. Unless they’re monstrous people. The lines get a little blurry sometimes, but I’ll be your guide. As for being my tagalong...” Like I mentioned before, having Squat around sort of appealed to me. A sidekick with opposable thumbs had obvious advantages. “I guess having a tough unkillable cursed guy could be a tactical advantage. Sure. Sort out your shit and then give me a call. But I have to get on the road – this lead I’ve got on the Eater has a time limit attached.”

He saluted with his gnarled fingers. “I’ll be in touch.” He leaned over and spoke to the covered cage resting on the table between us. “See you, Nicolette.”

She mumbled something not very nice, and Squat shrugged and went on his way.

I went to throw my burger wrapper on the ground, in the existing pile of garbage from the spilled can, then sighed, righted the container, scooped up most of the garbage (using a bit of newspaper as a makeshift glove/dustpan), and only then threw my own trash away, in its proper place. “Doing better,” I muttered. “Dirty business.”

•

I stood in the broken remnants of a town somewhere in West Texas at twilight, motorcycle saddlebags slung over my shoulder and a birdcage in my hand. The cage rocked and swayed in my grip. She’d gotten restless on the long drive – not just the ten hours racing from Arizona to Texas, but the subsequent going up-and-down the freeway all night and through the next day, sniffing for chaos. “Be still in there,” I said, bumping the birdcage with my hip. A muffled snarl emerged from under the heavy cloth, but I ignored it.

My motorcycle was parked some distance away, locked down with magic to keep it safe and make it less likely to be noticed. I didn’t want to ride it right up into town, because the bike stank of magics, and I didn’t want to tip off my prey. Bad enough I had a bag full of enchantments, and a living head in a cage, but both bag and cage were charmed to muffle the emanations, so maybe they’d go unnoticed.

The town wasn’t much to look at, and if it had a name I never noticed. There was a stoplight, but it didn’t look like it got much use, even though we were just off the highway. The few shops, huddled together as if for warmth, looked ignored if not abandoned. A gas station with ancient red-faded-to-pink pumps that had never even heard of credit cards. Everything on this side of the highway looked desiccated, like flies after days in a web.

The gleaming oasis of a modern truck stop shone a little ways off on the other side of the highway, and I figured it had sucked most of the life out of this place like a well-lit, colorfully-packaged vampire. There was a motel over here, though, with a couple of big rigs in the parking lot, for drivers who wanted more than a shower at the truck stop and a nap in their own cab.

And somewhere, in or under or above or running through this town, there was something that might as well be called evil. My thread, I hoped – the one that would lead me to the Eater. We’d driven all damn day, Nicolette sniffing for chaos, and finding nothing noticeable, and I’d almost started to despair. The oracle had said my lead on the Eater would be located somewhere in the fifty miles between Plainview and Lubbock “tomorrow,” but “tomorrow” was a long ass day, in practice, and fifty miles of highway was a lot of territory to check over and over again. Nicolette and I had both gotten pissy and impatient and I was starting to think I’d missed the lead entirely, or that the oracle was full of shit, when she said, “Wait, there, something, it’s
moving
, no, wait, it’s slowing down, it stopped, there!
Here
!”

So here we were. Nicolette said the evil was in this vicinity, but couldn’t (or wouldn’t) narrow it down except to say it was somewhere near the truck stop, motel, or wasteland environs. Alas, there were no sixty-foot-high goat-headed demons or enormous carnivorous blobs with visibly entropic auras in the area, so we’d have to wander around and play hot-and-cold until Nicolette’s chaos-sense could get a better fix on whatever we were looking for.

I checked into the motel, paying with some cash Pelly had messengered to me. My room was surprisingly clean, though old and worn. At least, I thought so until I saw a roach scurry from beneath the bed and into the bathroom. Yuck. If a place had roaches, it didn’t seem beyond the realm of possibility that it would have bedbugs, too. I set the birdcage on the table, then opened my bag and fished out a napkin wrapped around a chicken bone I’d saved from a hasty roadside lunch. I muttered an incantation, snapped the bone in half, and send a low-level pulse of death through the room, enough to kill any six-legged vampire bedbugs, shit-footed roaches, or other vermin.

The birdcage rocked on the table, and I sighed and pulled off the dirty brown cover. “So,” I said. “You got a better fix on our mystery monster yet? North, south, east, west? Up, down?”

Nicolette bared her teeth at me. “Hungry.”

I sat down in the chair and glared right back at her. “There’ll be plenty of time to eat
after
I deal with –”

“Not if you get killed. And I’m hungry
now
.”

“You don’t get to make ultimatums, Nicolette. You’re a head in a cage. You don’t even have the classical dignity of being a head in a
jar
. Do your job, and speak.”

“Oh, I’ll speak, but you won’t like what I have to say, unless you’ve got fetish for humiliating insults. You rode up and down a highway with me for ten fucking hours today, a linear path cut through the desert, so orderly it made my follicles ache. I need chaos if you want me to do any fine work, pinpointing locations – so
feed me
.”

“Seriously?”

“
Hungry
!” Nicolette shouted.

Shit. I hated being in thrall to her moods, but this lead on the Eater was obviously mobile somehow, so I couldn’t waste time arguing – it might move on, and I wasn’t about to ask Rondeau to summon up an oracle that big again. I went to my bags and pulled out a messily taped-up, bubble-wrapped package. Unwrapping the plastic, I removed several antique blue glass bottles, ranging in size from beer bottle to test tube, and then dug out a small ball-peen hammer. I’d purchased the glassware for the crusher trick, and decided to hold them back in case Nicolette got peckish later.

I lined up the bottles in front of Nicolette’s cage and smashed them, one by one, with the hammer. Nicolette’s eyes rolled back in her head, and she gasped and shuddered, less like someone eating a meal and more like someone having an orgasm. I really hoped she was exaggerating her response just to make me uncomfortable. Otherwise I hated to think of the ecstasy she’d experienced watching me get crushed to death.

“Mmm, delicious entropy,” she said, once I’d swept all the broken fragments into a trash can. “Nothing tastes as good as destroying something beautiful.”

“Chocolate’s not bad, either, sicko,” I said. “So speak. Where’s this evil?”

“Hmm? Oh, that. It’s in the room right next door.”

•

I have been criticized for being too direct in my approach to problem solving, but many of the subtle, tricky, deceitful people who made those criticisms are dead, and I’m still alive, so I see no reason to change my ways.

I turned on the TV, both so the noise would make the room seem occupied and to keep Nicolette more-or-less entertained. She was a lot less dangerous than she used to be, but she was still capable of making trouble, and I wouldn’t put it past her to try and fuck me up at any given moment.

I opened my bathroom window and climbed out, dropping down to the weedy ground in back of the motel. Then I crept over to the next room, listening at the bathroom window – frosted glass, so I couldn’t spy more directly. I couldn’t hear anything, except the low murmur of the TV, so I tested the window. Locked.

I took a tarnished old key out of my pocket and gently drew the outline of a rune on the window. The key dissolved into powder in my hand – four hours spent enchanting it, and only seconds to use up the magic. Isn’t that always the way? This time when I pressed my palms against the window and pushed upward, it moved.

I stared through the open window at the astonished face of a man sitting on the toilet, pants around his ankles. He had thinning wisps of brown hair, big brown eyes, and a generally fishlike aspect. “Wha –” he began

I reached into my coat and drew my most mundane weapon – just a little .22 target pistol, but a gun is a gun – and aimed it through the window. “Don’t speak, and don’t move.” I preferred to use my knife or axe, of course, but they weren’t much of a threat when I was standing
outside
the room. I never used to carry firearms at all, since blades were fine for close work and magic seemed sufficient for all other purposes, but I’d had a run-in with an anti-mancer capable of nullifying magic not long ago, and Pelly had convinced me to carry something with a little more range and intimidation factor for certain eventualities.

Have you ever tried to climb through a chest-high window without taking your eyes
or
your gun off a prisoner? It’s not easy, but I managed – it helped that he had his pants around his ankles and his hands in the air. Once I was upright in the bathroom I slid the window shut behind me with one hand. I was no more than three feet away from the man on the toilet, my gun pointed straight at the center of his chest.