Lady of Misrule (Marla Mason Book 8)

by T. A. Pratt

  “Which is?”

  “You remember Reva?”

  Marla nodded. “He’s a meddling busybody, like most gods, but not a bad guy.”

  “This is the god of exiles, right?” Bradley said.

  “Exiles, the displaced, refugees, expatriates, anyone who can’t go home again, yeah,” Marla said. “You think the Outsider is going to try to eat him, Big B?”

  “It’s a working hypothesis. Reva’s in San Francisco right now, ministering to all the homesick newcomers who moved in during the latest tech boom, I guess. It just so happens you’ve got a friend in the city who can give you aid and comfort in your search for the Outsider, too.”

  “So open up a portal or whatever,” Marla said. “Don’t get me wrong, the coffee’s great, but I’m a little bit anxious to take care of this monster before my branch of the multiverse rots off.”

  “Can I give you a little advice about how to kill it first?” he said.

  “Because you know more about killing stuff than a goddess of death? Absolutely. Let’s hear it.”

  “As the Outsider takes on additional ontological weight, it adapts itself to the structure of our reality. It’s taking on more power by eating people and monsters and gods, but it’s also taking on some of the weaknesses of people and monsters and gods.”

  “Marzi made it bleed,” Little B – damn it, he was thinking of himself that way now, in this context at least – said.

  “Exactly. As it becomes less alien, it gets better at manipulating things in our reality – but it also becomes more vulnerable to damage in our reality.”

  “So kill it just like you’d kill any other god,” Marla said. “Got it.”

  “Yeah, there’s that. I’m honestly not sure it can die, exactly, not as we understand the term. Being trapped under Death Valley for centuries might have weakened it, but it sure didn’t kill it.”

  “So we have no idea what we’re going to do when we find it, but we’re going looking for it anyway,” Little B said.

  “Godspeed,” the over-Bradley said.

  “What other speed could I possibly go?” Marla said, and then reality changed around them.

  Little B in the Big City

  “How have you been, Marla?”

  “Oh, fine,” she said. “The toads that rained down are eating a lot of the locusts, and with this plague of darkness, you can’t really see all the blood.”

  “Ah. That well. How can I help you?”

  “We’re looking for a monster,” Marla said. “Except at this point we’re pretty sure it just looks like a person.”

  The small, white-whiskered old man sitting in the velvet armchair across from them nodded thoughtfully. “Ah,” he said. “A person. That narrows it down. There are only about eight hundred and twenty-five thousand of those in San Francisco. Closer to seven million if you consider the Bay Area as a whole. Can you be any more specific than ‘a person’?”

  Marla shrugged. “We heard it was in a body that appears male, so that cuts the options in half, except it’s probably a shapeshifter, so never mind. It’s not very nice. It seems to literally gain power from killing people and eating them, or consuming them in some way that might as well be eating them.”

  “It’s eaten at least one god,” Bradley offered. “So far.”

  “That’s... alarming,” Cole said. “Why not summon an oracle and ask it for the whereabouts of your target?”

  “Oh, we’ve been there,” Marla said. “Without success. Something about this thing resists divination. Which didn’t stop us trying again when we got to the city, just in case. We went to an alley in the Tenderloin and Bradley talked to something that looked like the ghost of a three-legged dog. You ever play with a Magic 8-ball? ‘Reply hazy, try again later.’”

  “This thing, we call it the Outsider, is too strong already, and trying to get stronger. Since my usual skillset failed, we’re falling back on other lines of inquiry. Have you heard anything that might point us in the right direction? Any mysterious deaths or disappearances last night or this morning?”

  Cole stroked his neat little beard. “I had a report earlier today about a shapeshifter. I’ve had trouble narrowing down its location through divination – and as you know, that’s one of my strengths. I assumed my failure was because its form is so malleable, but it could be your monster. The city is woefully short of battle magicians since Susan Wellstone’s tragic demise and the defection of many of her people to neighboring organizations, so I haven’t tasked anyone to track the creature down yet.”

  Marla nodded. “Good thing I’m here, then.”

  “I will give you what information I have.” Cole sighed. “I do wish you had more time to talk. Especially Bradley here. I never thought to see him again.”

  “Well, he’s not exactly the Bradley who was your apprentice,” Marla said.

  “I know,” Cole said. “But he’s close enough to stir the pain of his loss.”

  “I worked with your counterpart in my universe,” Bradley said. “I miss you too.”

  “You’re a couple of sappy sons of bitches,” Marla said. “We’ve got a monster to hunt. Give us some leads.”

  Cole examined a piece of paper. “There have been four deaths in the past twelve hours or so, all by drowning – two in bathtubs, one in a pool, and one in a toilet, of all things. All the victims were new to the city. Our population is booming now, with many new jobs in the technological sector opening up, and our population is swelling. “

  “Huh,” Marla said. “So young brogrammers move here, get good jobs, pay three grand a month for shitty studio apartments, drive up rents, price out longtime residents, the usual churn. Right?” Marla shook her head. “Running a city is rough even when things are going well, isn’t it?”

  “Indeed. I assumed the shapeshifter was a local sorcerer, angry about the changing face of the city, trying to make a point or warn people away... but perhaps it’s your monster instead?”

  “The Outsider is more about eating people than drowning them,” Bradley said.

  “Yeah, but our theory is that the Outsider is trying to track down the god of exiles and eat him,” Marla said. “If he’s killing people new to the city, he’s killing Reva’s people, right? That’s the sort of murder spree that might get a god’s attention.”

  “I knew this Reva was in the city,” Cole said. “Though he hasn’t visited me personally.”

  “Of course not,” Marla said. “San Francisco’s the home of your heart. You’re not one of his constituents.”

  “Why not try to find Reva directly?” Cole said.

  Bradley shook his head. “Same thing – the oracle was no help there, either. Gods are tricky to find. Usually they find you. Though if Marla prayed to him, maybe...”

  “I am a god,” Marla said. “I can’t go around praying to other ones. That sets a terrible precedent. Give us the details on your drownings, Cole, and we’ll look into this thing. It’s a start, anyway.”

  They said their farewells and went out into the hallway. Marla’s brow was furrowed, her brain working something over. Bradley flipped through the thin dossier Cole had given him, all those death, and – “There’s a survivor.”

  “Huh,” Marla said. “This I gotta see.”

  •

  The victim sat in his tiny one-room apartment in the Mission, jittering in a high-end office chair and intermittently gulping at an energy drink. He was bug-eyed and wild-haired and his shirt was turned inside out, but Bradley couldn’t tell if that was typical of his nature or an expression of his recent trauma. He did know he was sitting on a dirty futon and there were piles of dirty clothes and take-out boxes everywhere, and it was pretty gross. Marla looked right at home, of course. “Look, Mr. – Lin?”

  “Uh, yeah. Andrew. Call me Drew. Everybody calls me...” He looked around, seeming to notice the mess for he first time. “Sorry to make you come here, I know it’s, uh, but it’s just, I’m kind of jumpy about going outside...”

  “
You met a girl last night and she tried to drown you?” Marla interrupted.

  Drew blinked at her, then looked at Bradley, who shrugged affably. “That’s right, yeah.” Drew spoke slowly, frowning, and he was probably trying to remember why he’d let these people into his place, why he was talking to them at all, but before he could go too far down that road, Bradley gave him another little psychic nudge, and he snapped back into focus. “Right. So, look, I went to MIT, I’d never been on the West Coast at all, not even to visit, but I’d heard about San Francisco, how cool it was, how hip, how everything was happening here, you know? Also how it never snows, which after all those years in Boston, that’s pretty great by itself.”

  Marla nodded, not very patiently. Bradley could have probably just ripped the knowledge they needed out of the guy’s brain without forcing them to endure a conversation, but he preferred a more delicate approach. This poor guy had been through enough.

  “So I got here,” Drew went on, “and mostly I just worked a lot, you know, sixty-hour weeks, sometimes eighty-hour weeks during crunch time, the start-up standard. Occasionally I’d go out to clubs and bars and I’d see those San Francisco girls, with the piercings and the straight black bangs and the cool tattoos and the motorcycle boots and the heavy eyeliner, and I tried to make time with a few of them, but mostly they seemed to be laughing at me or bored by me, you know? They’d let me buy them drinks all night but then they’d leave with some hipster wearing tiny pants and giant glasses, or else with another girl. The only real date I had was with another programmer, who also went to MIT, and I mean, I could’ve stayed in Boston, right?” He took a breath. “But then last night, I was sitting in this little hole-in-the-wall burrito joint after another bad night at the bars, it was maybe two in the morning, and I met her. Llyn.” He spelled the name, and Marla grunted.

  Would the Outsider call himself by a name like that? Bradley wondered. What kind of name was it, anyway? Welsh, or just pretentious?

  Drew went on. “She was... she was just this hurricane of a girl, you know? Tiny, maybe five-foot-one, barefoot, wearing a short skirt and a shiny top and about eighteen hundred scarves in all different colors, bangles on her wrists, ankle bracelets, red and green streaks in her hair, ukulele hanging on a strap on her back, purse made out of a plush toy squid. She ordered a big bowl of jalapenos and then just sat down across from me, looking at me with these huge blue eyes, popping peppers into her mouth and grinning. We ended up walking around and talking all night. She told me she was an art-school drop-out who was into doing sculptures with found objects, and that she spent a lot of time busking on her ukulele for the tourists, and that she liked meeting people who were new to the city because they still had a sense of wonder, and did I want to go back to my place, so, ah...” He blushed, and Marla rolled her eyes. Bradley gave Drew’s sense of propriety a little nudge, and he said, all in a rush, “So we could do some molly and she could suck my cock and then make me pancakes.”

  “And you said yes,” Marla said. “Hell, who can blame you? A manic pixie dream girl straight out of a stupid indie film offers you a totally San Francisco experience, who wouldn’t say yes? So what happened?”

  Drew looked down. “This place is tiny, but one of its good qualities is the bathroom.” He rose and went to a door with a crystal knob and opened it up, beckoning them to look inside. The bathroom was almost as big as the rest of the apartment – clearly it had been the master bath, and his “apartment” had been the master bedroom, before this house was chopped up into tiny units. The floor was tiled in honeycombs of white and blue, and there was a pedestal sink and a toilet in a fetching shade of teal porcelain, but the space was dominated by was a huge claw-foot bathtub with a showerhead suspended above it.

  “She came in, and we made out for a while, and then she wanted the tour, which was kind a joke, but whatever. She looked at the bathtub and her eyes got real big and she said we had to take a bath together. At that point I still had no idea what she looked like naked, every time I managed to get a scarf off her there were ten more underneath it, so I jumped at the chance. She took my clothes off and put me in the tub and sat on the edge while it filled up, and I mean, she had her hand in the water, and it was pretty nice....” He trailed off. “The tub filled up, and I asked her when she was going to get in with me, and that’s when she pushed me under.”

  Bradley nodded. His first thought was: serial killer dresses up like cliché quirky girl to exploit the fantasies of young brogrammers, preying on the tech elite as a symbolic protest against the inevitable horrors of gentrification. But Cole said it was weirder than that, and it got that way fast.

  “She was strong. Crazy strong. Couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred pounds, but she pushed me under like it was nothing, one hand on my forehead, one on my chest. I looked up at her through the water, and I guess it was just the drugs, but... her face changed. Her body, too. Rippled like water, became translucent, it was like, she became water, but her hands were still solid. After a couple of minutes she stopped holding me down and left.” He shrugged.

  Bradley frowned. “Wait, so how did you survive? Did someone resuscitate you?”

  He shook his head. “I’m good at holding my breath. Have been since I was a kid, when I went swimming a lot with my dad, and I just kept at it. I used to win breath-holding contests, it was my party trick in college. I mean, I’m not like those free divers who can stop breathing for twenty minutes, but two or three minutes? Sure. Once I realized she was trying to drown me I thought I’d better just play dead, and it worked. I think I would have freaked out a lot harder if I hadn’t been on drugs, honestly. Molly saved my life.”

  “No sign of her when you got out of the tub?” Marla said.

  He shook his head. “No, she was just gone. There were lots of puddles, though, all over the hardwood in the main room, like she’d dripped tons of water around. I called the cops, they took her description and told me not to pick up strange women in burrito shops anymore, and that was it. I don’t get the feeling they’re assigning a task force or anything.”

  “What time did she leave?”

  “I mean, the whole thing from meeting her to her leaving, it only took maybe two hours.”

  Bradley could see Marla doing mental math. The Outsider flees Santa Cruz a bit after midnight, and appears as a cliché dreamgirl in San Francisco two hours later? It was an hour and a half drive at least, but the Outsider was capable of alternative modes of locomotion, so maybe it could work, if Drew was its first attempted victim. The other drownings had come later, throughout the remainder of the night and on through the day, the last one a death in a swimming pool just an hour before they’d sat down with Cole. But why death by water? The Outsider had been trapped in the caverns below Death Valley for centuries. Maybe it was feeling retroactively dehydrated? Something just didn’t make sense.

  Marla nodded. “Well, thanks for your – “

  “Wait,” Bradley said. “There’s something you’re not telling us.”

  Drew frowned, and Bradley pushed, and Drew moaned. “Okay, fine, she left one of her scarves, it’s under my pillow. I know it’s stupid, it’s sick, but it still smells a little like her, she was so hot, I can’t help it – “

  “Show us,” Marla said.

  Drew went to his futon, lifted up a pillow, and picked up a long piece of ragged seaweed. He rubbed it against his cheek, sighed, and handed it to Marla, who took the slimy thing in her hands. “A... scarf,” she said.

  He nodded. “Smells like, I don’t know, vanilla and baby powder and the cherry soda I liked when I was a kid...”

  She handed it wordlessly to Bradley, and it smelled like salt and rotting fish to him.

  “We’ll have to take this,” Marla said, “but on the plus side, we won’t tell the cops you withheld evidence, okay?”

  •

  Once they were outside, Marla took the seaweed again. “Well?” she said. “Does this look like a scarf to you?”

 
“Seaweed. But I looked into Drew’s mind and I could see the psychic tampering. I fixed it while I was in there. But I left his caution about picking up ukulele girls in bars.”

  “You’re such a humanitarian, B. Can you use this scrap of slime to track down our mystery woman?”

  “Pretty sure she’s not actually a woman,” Bradley said, “but I’ll do the psychic bloodhound thing, sure.”

  “It’s not the Outsider, is it?”

  Bradley shook his head. “I don’t think so. We don’t know what forms this nixie or kelpie or whatever has taken in other attacks, but in this one, it showed a pretty sophisticated understanding of human psychology and expectations – more than that, it seems to have a sense of humor. I mean, the ukulele? Infinite scarves? That’s comedy, right? Like, it’s a reference. I don’t think the Outsider saw too many indie films in the impossible desert.”

  “Manic nixie dream girl,” Marla said. “That is pretty funny, except for the death by drowning.”

  “So, I mean... do we go tell Cole we’re sorry, this isn’t our monster, good luck killing it?”

  “Eh. We’re here anyway, and this still might lead us to Reva – he’s got to be looking for the thing that’s killing his people, right? So let’s track down little miss death by water.”

  •

  They wound up on the western edge of the city, down by the ruins of the Sutro Baths, the once-vast swimming pool complex on the beach that had been reduced by demolition and fire to concrete foundations and a few vestigial fragments of the old buildings. The place was usually popular with tourists who came to hike, take in the shattered grandeur, and look out at the ocean and the nearby Seal Rocks, but today it reeked of rotting fish, and the wind from the sea was salty and stingy, and it was just generally vile and unpleasant. “This place is awful, let’s go somewhere else,” Marla said, but Bradley grabbed her arm.

  “Somebody cast a keep-away spell over here,” Bradley said. “A strong one. Of course, I’m immune, but your puny mortal mind is no match for the magic.”