Bride of Death (Marla Mason) (6 page)

“It’s made of buffalo leather,” Rondeau said. “Because, who the fuck knows, we’re in the West.”

I tried on the coat, and it felt good – gave me the same armored-up feeling I used to get from wearing an enchanted cloak. “All right. This is an acceptable gift.”

“Check these out.” He lifted a pair of deep red cowboy boots from the bag, and I snorted.

“No way. Not my style. My old stomping boots are fine.”

He shook his head. “I had a cobbler I know make these. Yes, I’m the kind of guy who knows cobblers now. This is some bespoke artisanal footwear here. You just... try them on. Seriously.”

I’ve never been more dubious, but I slid my foot into one of the boots... and couldn’t help letting out an involuntary sigh. They were the most comfortable things I’d ever had on my feet – warm and soft and solid all at once. Rondeau handed me the other boot. “Check out the detail work.”

At first glance the leather was just stitched in swirling patterns... but when I looked closer I saw the shapes of scythes, skulls, wings, and swords embroidered in the leather. “Ha. They’re custom, I’ll give them that.”

“I figure you can enchant them so you can kick your way through cinderblock walls, like you did with your steel-toed boots back in the day.”

“All right. I’m officially touched. I look forward to scraping monster brains off the heels.”

Pelham slipped away while I was trying on the boots, and returned carrying leather motorcycle saddlebags that contained my truly potent tools: my old dagger of office, a blade capable of cutting through just about anything (including ghosts and astral tethers), and the silver-bladed hatchet that Nicolette carried around back when she had arms. I had no idea what the little axe’s powers were, particularly, but it had to be good for
something
. If nothing else, I could use it to chop firewood if I got stuck sleeping under the stars.

“This is great, Pelham. Both of you. I appreciate it.” I’m not always about thanking people for things. Mostly because I don’t like to admit that I ever need help from anybody with anything at all – but I was trying to do better. “Guess I’d better load up Nicolette and get on the road.”

“There’s a cell phone in the saddlebag too,” Pelham said. “With two numbers programmed in it: mine and Rondeau’s. If you need
anything
, call.”

“You know me,” I said. “I never hesitate to call for help.”

TALK TO THE HEAD

“I thought you’d fight me more on this whole cage thing.” I settled Nicolette into the old-fashioned bell-shaped birdcage Rondeau had acquired for me. The bars were bronzey-golden, and it looked more like a theater prop than something you’d actually use to house a tiny feathered dinosaur-descendant. Nicolette didn’t even try to bite me as I lowed the cage down over her head and secured it to the base.

“Who doesn’t want to live in a gilded cage?” She frowned as I flipped the latches that attached base to the bars. “Anyway, I gave it some thought last night, and I’ve decided this is better than the alternative.”

“Which is?”

“Being
dead
. You do know every other enemy you’ve ever had a beef with is worm food now, right?”

“Not true,” I said. “Some of them just decided it wasn’t worth the trouble of trying to fight me anymore.”

“Then they were never really your enemies. They were just people you had disagreements with. That’s just politics. All the real implacable hardcore foes you’ve faced, they’ve been shuffled right off this mortal coil, whether by your hand directly or as a roundabout consequence of something you did. I was pissed to wake up all disembodied in that fish pond, but I don’t really want to join the roll call of the damned, so for now I’m playing nice. This is a lousy kind of quasi-life, but at least I can still have some fun – eat some chaos, annoy the shit out of you, watch monsters try to unspool your intestines.”

I lifted the cage. An adult human head weighs ten or twelve pounds – don’t ask me why I know that – and the cage added a bit more. Hardly an impossible weight, but I’d get tired lugging her around all the time. Maybe I could rig up some kind of backpack. “So you’re going to be my loyal guide and just hope passively for entertaining misfortunes to befall me? Right. I don’t trust you.”

“That’s sensible.”

“I
can’t
trust you, Nicolette. My old teacher Artie Mann, back when I was an apprentice, he warned me about entropic witches – warned me not to
become
one. He said you can’t trust that kind of chaos witch to do anything, not even to act in her own best interests. When a chaos witch has a plan, and it works out exactly the way she wants, she gets
weaker
. When a chaos witch’s plans falls apart, she gets
stronger
. He told me that kind of mindset makes practitioners of entropic magic a little bit crazy. I can’t say I’ve seen anything to make me believe otherwise. That’s why I never studied the kind of magic you do – I value the integrity of my mind too much.”

“Also you’re a control freak,” Nicolette said. “And you’re predictable. And a fascist. So that works against you.”

I shook her head. Like, picked up the cage and shook it until she fell over and her face got smushed up against the bars. That shut her up. For about a second.

“How’d you get the juice to bring me back to life anyway?” she demanded, after I put the cage back down.

“I told you, I didn’t bring you back. Someone did it for me, so you could help me with my work. You might say I’m on a mission from god.”

“Okay, Elwood. Whatever you say.”

I was kind of annoyed that she’d caught the
Blues Brothers
reference. I don’t like to think of us having similar tastes in anything. I snorted anyway. “Please.
You’re
Elwood. I’m Joliet Jake.”

“Bullshit.”

“Elwood was practically a sidekick. Joliet Jake was the heart of the film.”

Nicolette rolled her eyes. It was one of the only ways she had to express disdain, and I suspected she was going to be using it a lot. “Doesn’t matter. I’m still Jake. You don’t think John Belushi was an avatar of
chaos
?”

I didn’t answer for a moment. Then I said, “Touché.”

ROAD FOOD

I shook off Pelham and Rondeau before they could turn everything into some kind of heinous long-goodbye type situation with hugs and parting advice and declarations of affection. I got into the freight elevator with Nicolette’s birdcage dangling from my hand – with a black cloth cover on top, of course, and strict instructions to only make noises that could be attributable to a bird – and a leather messenger bag slung across my back.

In the elevator, Nicolette said, “Squawk. Polly wants a shotgun.”

“Shush.”

The garage was empty that morning – I guess Vegas isn’t really a town for early risers, except for the slot-machine zombies, who would already be at their stations. My boots clicked pleasantly on the concrete as I walked toward my bike, which was all gassed-up and waiting courtesy of Rondeau’s minions.

I settled Nicolette’s birdcage onto the rear of the bike, lifting the cloth a bit and lashing the cage into place with bungee cords threaded through the bars and hooked to solid bits of motorcycle. “Don’t I get a helmet?” she said. “I need to protect my head. It’s all I’ve got. Squawk.”

“The cage is enchanted.” I tapped the bars with the wedding ring on my left hand, making them
clink
. “You’re safe as long as you stay in there. Besides, the motorcycle is so wrapped in magics I doubt I could crash it if I wanted to.” I didn’t know exactly what kind of charms Death had put on my pale horse, but even my rudimentary psychic senses tingled in its presence, so I knew it was serious stuff.

I packed most of the contents of my bag – a few minor charms, along with ordinary odds and ends and spare clothes – into the motorcycle’s saddlebags. After some thought, I put the silver hatchet in one of the bags, too. Since I wasn’t sure what the weapon did, exactly, I didn’t want to keep it in my coat, so close to my body. For all I know it had the power to give you bone cancer. I wasn’t worried about dying, particularly, but I’m no big fan of pain. I shoved my dagger down in a boot sheath, tied the flapping ends of my coat around my ankles, and put on my helmet, with the smoked visor flipped up, for the moment. I was ready to go.

“So. You’re my monster-detector, Nicolette. Where are we going?”

Nicolette, muffled by the dropcloth, said, “Out of the city would be good. I sniff out disorder and disaster and chaos, and in case you hadn’t noticed, we’re in
Vegas
. I’m like a bloodhound in an aromatherapy factory right now. There’s nothing
but
random chance and bad decisions and malice aforethought in the air, plus lots of gambling and shifting probabilities muddying up the signal, so I can’t find anything useful. Get us out on the open road and I’ll try to find something for you to murder for no good reason.”

I settled myself on the motorcycle, taking a moment to sit and hold the handlebars and get a sense of my balance. Riding a motorcycle’s not exactly like riding a bicycle, and I hadn’t been on one in ages. I turned the key and twisted the throttle, easing the bike forward, and the rumbling purr of the engine felt good. Powerful.

I rode slowly through the garage, spiraling up the ramp and out into the glaring sunlight of a desert morning, then proceeded down a side street, away from the casino, heading for the highway. I was thinking south, toward Arizona, for no particular reason at all, except I’d never been there, and Death had once told me the painted desert was beautiful.

Riding the motorcycle was.... actually pleasant. Maybe that old exposed-nerve feeling had more to do with my state of mind at the time than the actual experience. I’ve never much liked driving cars. I always feel isolated, like I’m gliding around in a box, insulated from the wider world. But riding a motorcycle is so much more like being
in
the world. You can feel the wind, the motion, the friction of tires on asphalt, and the bike eventually starts to feel like an extension of yourself, as opposed to an unwieldy machine.

My boots were comfy, my coat was warm, the wind whipping by was loud enough that I couldn’t have heard Nicolette talk even if she’d screamed, my belly was full, my bladder was empty, and all felt right with the world. I began to relax, feeling tensions I’d hadn’t even realized I was holding melt away.

Freedom. The open road. Had I ever really experienced that? Oh, I’d been homeless on the road before, as a teen runaway, but that was different. Now I had power. I had resources. I wasn’t
afraid
. I was going looking for trouble, not trying to avoid it. There were no meetings to take, no allies to reassure, no enemies to outmaneuver. No politics, no assassins – ha, I’d
been
assassinated, I didn’t have to worry about that anymore – no sacred place that I had to protect.

I had no responsibilities, except to myself. A month – well, thirty days, now – of walking the Earth, trying to do good. Or, at least, to do better.

Soon I left the city behind. It doesn’t take long to go from the outskirts of Vegas to big empty. I realized later that I could have taken a slightly alternate route and gone along the shoreline of Las Vegas Bay, and gotten a last glimpse of big – well, biggish – water before delving deep into the land of dust and sand, but I didn’t think about it at the time. I took highway 93 southeast for a while, and soon there was nothing on either side but dusty hills and rocks and power line pylons. Big open spaces, and nature in general, have a tendency to unnerve me. I consider myself a creature of urban spaces, and I find the press of people and buildings more comforting than claustrophobic. The American Southwest is a big place, and apart from flying over it a few times, it’s not a landscape where I’ve spent much time. I’d looked over some maps, though, and was thinking maybe I’d cut over toward Texas, pick up I-40 East, head toward the more tightly-packed population centers of the East Coast, see what kind of trouble I could find –

Somebody was screaming behind me, so I pulled the bike over to the shoulder and turned off the rumbling engine. “What are you yelling about, Nicolette?”

“How t else am I supposed to get your attention? You could at least stick a bluetooth headset on me so I could
call
you.”

I grunted. She had a point. It wasn’t like I was in a camper van with her head on the passenger seat, where we could chat. It’s hard to hear anything but the wind in your ears and the hum of the road on a motorcycle at highway speed. “I’m new to this traveling-avenger thing. I didn’t think about it. I’ll come up with something when we stop for the night, to let us communicate.”

“None of that telepathy shit,” came the muffled voice beneath the cage cover. “I don’t want you in my head, and I don’t want to be in
yours
.”

“Likewise. I’d rather stick my head in a septic tank than take a dip in your stream of consciousness. Now what were you screaming about?”

“I got a sense of something. A twinge of a twinge. There’s a lot of big empty up here, but there’s a thread of chaos twisting not far ahead. Look for human habitation, and I bet we’ll find something.”