Queen of Nothing (Marla Mason Book 9) (30 page)

Marla led the way, the rod of lapis lazuli in her hand. The entrance was big enough to accommodate a zeppelin, and the foyer was a vast ballroom of marble, with candles floating unsupported in the heights. At the edges of her vision, the marble flickered, transforming into rough stone walls and back, but wherever she focused her attention, her version of local reality held sway.

Elsie really
had
hurt Skully, at least enough to loosen his control. Or maybe Marla was just better able to use her powers now that her mortal mind and her godly perception were fully integrated. The whole bargain she’d made, separating her mortal life form her divine one, had been a profound miscalculation. She’d been so desperate to hold on to her humanity, to keep her mortal self separate, that she’d essentially given herself dissociative identity disorder. She’d made the Bride of Death into a separate personality, practically a separate person, and an antagonistic one, at that. Now, for the first time since her ascension to godhood, she was fully herself, just one thing, truly whole, and in the place where she belonged.

Scores of human-sized doorways opened in all directions, some at floor level, some placed at random heights on the walls, but Marla recognized a trivial delaying tactic when she saw one. She gestured, and all the doors vanished, except the one that actually
led
somewhere: straight ahead. “He’s through there.” She sensed a ripple in the chaos, a gathering of power, a reallocation of energy and matter. “Um. Expect resistance.”

A horde poured out of the doorway, bellowing in rage. Marla had expected cartoon devils, three-dimensional renderings of demons from old illustrations, or predictable, recycled pop-cultural nightmares. Instead, Skully had conjured monsters drawn from the pasts and minds of his enemies.

Among the dozens of monsters were versions of Bradley with shards of mirror for teeth, a writhing golem made of flesh-stripping beetles, a shambling corpse with its flesh sprouting deathcap mushrooms, disheveled men crackling with electricity, pale dogs, and a passable imitation of the Beast of Felport. They were all just conjurations, though, little wads of chaos given shape and limited autonomy, and she waved her lapis lazuli rod and turned them into puffs of cloud and nothing before they got within twenty feet.

“Aww,” Rondeau said. “You could’ve left a few for me to shoot.”

“Trepanner hungers for brainmeats, Marla,” Elsie agreed.

“Skully is trying to delay us, and that means he wants time to
do
something, even if it’s just finding a new head. I’m not inclined to give him an extra second.” She started forward, but more figures emerged from the door... and these had a heft of independent reality the others hadn’t.

“Oh, hell,” Genevieve said. “Pun intended. And I thought
I
assembled a pretty good Marla Mason Revenge Squad.”

The first time Marla had come to Hell, she’d been forced to confront the spirits of everyone she’d killed. Skully’s recruitment was a bit more broad, though: this seemed to be just about every dead person who’d ever borne her a grudge.

“Hello, Marla.” Regina Queen, dressed in floor-length white fur coat, offered an icicle smile. “You asked for my help, and repaid me with assassination.” Her son, the pale subterranean sorcerer Viscarro, skittered forward in his mother’s wake, dressed in ragged monk’s robes. He looked worse actually dead than he had when he was undead.

Marla shrugged. “Well, Regina, you’re a murderous psychopath. That’s just how it had to go. Hey, Vicky. Wasn’t your whole goal in life cheating death? How’d that work out?”

The two of them were joined by Marla’s old rival Susan Wellstone, who still bore the bloodstain over her heart from when Marla’s dark doppelganger the Mason had killed her.

“It’s bad enough your arrogance led to my death,” Susan said. “To be forced to spend eternity under your rule is intolerable. You weren’t even fit to rule a city, let alone the entire afterlife.”

“Good to see you again too, Sue. Did you bring along Gregor? Ah, there he is.” The conniving dark-haired sorcerer smirked at her, hiding behind more formidable shades. Susan and Gregor had been a real pain in her ass, once upon a time, and apparently they were getting the band back together.

The mad priest Mutex was there, too, face impassive, an obsidian knife in each hand. The cannibal witch Bethany as well, sprouting wings of scrap metal, her teeth filed to points. The anti-mancer Christian Decomain—well, he was probably here for Elsie; she was the one who’d turned him into frogs and then stomped on a bunch of them. The shapeshifter Finch, transforming into a grizzly bear as he approached.

Marla scowled. “Finch? What do you have against me? I killed the guy who killed
you
! He’s standing right there! Or are you still pissed I interrupted your stupid swingers party?”

The bear just growled. Others filed in. Somerset, the old chief sorcerer of Felport, trailing a cloud of pigeons. The shimmering, indistinct blur that was doubtless Gustavus Lupo. That haole sorcerer who’d styled himself king of the Hawaiian wizards, the one she’d called Greaseface, still wearing his absurd feathered cloak. Jason’s thuggish friend Danny Two-Saints, holding a straight razor. The half-burned, ambulatory form of John Wilkes Booth, carrying a pistol. And more, and more, and more, all dead by her hand or at least in her vicinity –

“Marla, don’t let yourself get sidetracked.” Rondeau put his hand on her shoulder and gave her a little shake. “Like you said, Skully is just trying to buy time, you can’t settle old business with all these... oh, shit, is that Campbell Campion? Cam-Cam? Aw, man I’m so sorry, I didn’t know Jason was planning to kill you –”

Pelham slammed his walkingstick down hard on the floor, three times,
crack crack crack
. “We must not be delayed! These poor souls have all died. Their lives are finished, and that old business is done. We must move forward.”

“We aren’t here to delay you.” Regina seemed to be taking charge, which wasn’t too shocking. She’d always gravitated naturally to authority, fueled by her endless fount of arrogance. “We’re here to kill you. Being dead is terrible, Marla. You’re going to hate it.”

“I’m the
good
queen here, you idiots,” Marla said. “Most of you are straight-up villains, and the New Death believes you’ve earned an eternity of nightmarish torment. Believe me, you’d
much
rather have me in charge, with my laissez-faire policies. You should be helping me defeat him.”

“He’s promised us paradise if we slay your friends and bring you to him,” Regina said. “Paradises
beyond
our own capabilities to imagine.”

“We’re happy with our decision,” Susan said. She never could stand to let anyone else be in charge. “Kill them!” she shouted.

Marla tried to banish the dead back to their afterlives, but they were
locked
, impossible for her to budge: Skully was pouring a considerable percentage of his attention into keeping them solid and present.

Mutex came at her first, knives weaving, and though she cracked him across the face with her lapis lazuli staff, he didn’t even flinch away. “Fight them!” Marla shouted. “Take them apart, they don’t feel pain!”

The next few minutes were confusion. Elsie cackled gleefully, laying about with Trepanner, making a special point of driving the axe into the head of Christian, which was good; his magic-suppressing skills still worked here, but anti-mancy was no protection against a heavy metal object bashing in your skull. He fell—and then vanished. Marla gasped. She could sense that Christian’s soul was
gone
. He’d been cast out, into oblivion, and had ceased entirely to exist. A magical pickaxe that could wound gods could erase the souls of the dead, too, it seemed.

Marla’s other friends fought less definitively, but their attacks were effective, too. The bodies of their enemies were constructs made of primordial chaos, and being dead already meant they couldn’t be killed, but they
could
be disabled. Rondeau kept falling back, blasting away with his tommy gun, managing to cut Lupo nearly in half with gunfire. There was no blood, of course, and the skinchanger flickered through assorted identities while sprawled on the ground. Pelham seemed to be dancing with Viscarro, his walking stick cracking hard against the subterranean sorcerer’s long, nearly skeletal limbs. Jenny Click poured fire into Regina, who poured ice right back: at least their elemental antagonism seemed evenly matched. Bradley was fighting with Gregor, who dodged and spun with grim intensity. For her part, Marla had to fight off Susan Wellstone, who was now riding around on Finch in his bear form, one hurling magics, the other swiping with claws. Bethany was trying to flank her, and Booth was taking potshots with his pistol, though she was one tyrant he wouldn’t be able to assassinate; her armor was more than sufficient to turn bullets, at least.

Where the hell was
Genevieve
? She was the trump card, and she should have been able to end all this easily: dropping this rogues gallery into a pit, weaving cages around them, manipulating the environment in ways even Marla couldn’t. Marla kicked Bethany in the chest, dodged around the bear, and scanned the corners of the palace.

Gen was separated from the others, on the ground, scuttling away from an advancing attacker, someone Marla didn’t recognize, a bald white guy in a dirty peacoat. Genevieve could alter
reality
. Why was she afraid of some random –

“Oh, shit. When did he die?” The man coming for Genevieve was objectively the least formidable person in this group by several orders of magnitude. He was stupid and brutish, with no magic and no impulse control, just a common street thug. But back when he was alive, he’d brutally attacked Genevieve, sending her already-fragile psyche over the edge. Genevieve had later faced him, and realized he wasn’t a monster of mythic proportions, but just some asshole, and it had seemed to help her psychologically... but apparently seeing him here, now, coming at her again, was too much of a shock, and she’d forgotten her own progress, and her own powers. He was her PTSD personified. Marla had to –

Something drove Marla to her knees, a terrific weight and force slamming into her back, and she smelled fur and sweat and the stink of bear-breath.

“Elsie! Jenny!” She flung out one arm, pointing with her lapis lazuli rod at Genevieve’s personal boogeyman. “Get rid of him!”

Jenny broke off attacking Regina and flew across the room, and Elsie pirouetted and giggled her way in that direction, too. The thug—what was his name, Terry?—looked around, eyes wide in totally justified terror.

Jenny made him burst into flame, and Elsie started beating him with her axe like he was a vein of gold she was trying to mine.

Marla heaved upward with godlike strength, flinging the grizzly from her back, and ran toward her frightened friend. “Gen! Genevieve, you’re okay, he’s down, but we need help!”

Genevieve looked at her, eyes wet and blank, then shook her head and got unsteadily to her feet. “I—I’m sorry, seeing him was just such a shock, I didn’t even know he was dead....” Her eyes widened as she took in the scene, a decent cross-section of Marla’s personal murderers’ row doing their best to kill her friends.

“No!” Genevieve shouted. She brought her hands together, and there was a sound like a thunderclap, flinging all the antagonistic souls flying in every direction, slamming them hard against the marble walls. The wind she’d conjured didn’t touch Marla’s friends, only her adversaries, even the fallen ones. Tentacles and arms of white marble emerged from the walls, grabbing onto the dazed souls, and pulling them all—some screaming in fear, some shouting curses, some rendered incapable of sound by the battle previously—into the walls, where they disappeared as cleanly as pebbles dropped into a pond.

The sudden silence was resounding. Marla looked around. “Is everyone okay?”

“No.” Bradley’s voice wavered. “No, not everyone.”

She turned, and her heart became a falling stone. Bradley knelt beside a spreading pool of blood, and at the center, there was Pelham, an obsidian knife still protruding from his chest, his eyes open and empty.

“Pelly!” Rondeau dropped his gun and raced to his friend’s side, sliding on his knees in the blood. He tore the knife out of Pelham’s heart and threw it aside. “Marla, Genevieve, somebody, you have to heal him, come on, it’s just a little hole!”

Marla lowered her eyes. “I can’t... Rondeau, he’s gone.” Pelham’s body was an empty shell, his soul already departed. She closed her eyes, trying to sense his immortal self, and there he was, a falling star among many others in the heavens over Hell, streaking toward the great sea of primal chaos where he would make his afterlife.

Marla had known the chances of everyone getting through this unscathed were pretty much zero, but
Pelly
... he’d barely even had a life. He’d been raised on an estate, trained to serve aristocratic magicians, and had only been given a brief time to make his own way in the world. She’d never had a more loyal friend, and she couldn’t think of anyone she’d known who was a better man.

Rondeau sat in the blood, put his head in his hands, and sobbed. Bradley embraced him, pressing his face into Rondeau’s shoulder, but from the way his shoulders shook, he was crying too.

“He was a sweet little guy,” Elsie said. “But we don’t have time to mourn so much just now. We’ve got to save the underworld.”

“Shit.” Rondeau’s voice was muffled by emotion and, probably, snot. “Pelly was my best friend, Marla. You used to be, and probably if somebody had asked me yesterday I still would’ve said it was you, but you haven’t been around so much lately, and he... he was
there
. He was better than me, Marla. Made me try to be better, too, on my best days. Ah, fuck.”

“The afterlife isn’t so bad.” Tiny flames still flickered around Jenny’s head, but she looked more human and less elemental now, her face shadowed by grief. She hadn’t known Pelham before today... but seeing his loss had probably reminded her of her own fallen friends. “At least, when the New Death isn’t
making
it bad.”