by T. A. Pratt
“Boredom threshold exceeded.” Marla lashed out with her blade, and the dagger parted the cloud of shadow forming around the Outsider like it was gauze, leaving a ragged tear. The thing hissed – and then surged forward, lightning quick, reaching out with both hands. Marla dodged out of the way, actually laughing, and cut up more of the shadows, sending tatters to the sand, where they turned to acrid vapor. She’d always been graceful in battle, but she was in rare form now, moving more fluidly than Bradley had ever seen her move without her purple battle cloak.
The Outsider kept trying to close on her, and she simply drove it back with slashes, landing a cut on its chest that made its howl and dodge away. She moved in close herself, then, and simply flurried stabs at the Outsider, thrusting the knife into its guts and chest faster than Bradley’s eye could follow. She’d told Bradley about knife fighting before, how it was all well and good to be fancy, but the best way to kill someone with a blade was “The Folsom City Rush”: just hitting them fast and hard and filling them full of holes before they knew what was going on.
The Outsider howled and backhanded her across the face. Bradley heard her neck snap, and she flopped onto the sand, unmoving. The Outsider knelt to pick up the dagger, but it twisted in the monster’s hand, severing most of its fingers. The Outsider hissed, its form losing cohesion, part of its face sloughing away to reveal the shadows underneath, the eyes empty holes full of darkness. “I will eat her, and then you – “
The door of the low stone building on the beach opened, and a long-haired handsome man in a dark suit of elegant cut emerged. “No, you won’t.” He reached out one hand, rings glittering on every finger, and eight-foot high pillars of flames burst from the sand all around the Outsider.
Holy shit. Bradley wrapped Marla’s coat around himself, its protective magics keeping him safe from the furious heat as he stumbled away. He couldn’t see what was happening, but there were roaring sounds, and howls of pain, and then silence.
Bradley turned to find the newcomer kneeling on the sand, vomiting. He straightened, and looked at Bradley, and Bradley’s focus shifted. That wasn’t a man at all. It was the god of death, Marla’s husband. Death shouldn’t be that pale and trembling, but he was.
“I drove it away.” Death rose unsteadily to his feet. “Things like that... they’re abhorrent to me. Utterly outside the natural order. My natural order. I thought Marla’s cloak was bad, but this, it makes the cloak look like... a butterfly. A fluffy bunny. If it hadn’t already been hurt, I don’t know if it would have fled even under my assault.”
“Where did it go?” Bradley asked.
“Turned to shadow and flew off to the east.” Death shrugged. “I assume you and Marla were hunting it?”
“Yeah. It’s an end-of-the-world deal.”
“Isn’t it always?” He extended a hand. “I’m Death.”
“Uh, yeah. Bradley. Bowman.” He shook. The hand felt perfectly normal.
“Of course. I’m going to resurrect Marla now.”
“Oh. Yeah? Okay. Good. That’s good.” Bradley wondered if he’d ever reach a point where nothing struck him as weird anymore. He clearly hadn’t gotten there yet.
“Normally she just heals, even if her body is entirely destroyed, my presence isn’t necessary – I try to give her space during her months on Earth. But that thing... it was going to do something drastic to her, something we don’t even have words for – ‘devouring’ doesn’t begin to cover it. I wasn’t sure what would happen, if it consumed her, so I thought it best to intervene, though it annoys her when I do.”
“Well, that’s married life.” Bradley knew he was being inane but he couldn’t help it. Seeing Marla get her neck snapped had messed with him a little bit.
Death knelt, touched Marla’s cheek, and she shouted and leapt to her feet, brandishing her dagger. Then she noticed her husband. “Oh. Hell. Dapper Cthulhu got in a lucky shot, huh?”
“Apparently. The creature has run off.”
“Then we’ve got to do some running of our own.”
“Marla,” Bradley said. “If the Outsider knows about the gazebo, if it can figure out where it is, trace our scents or ‘review our footage’ or whatever the hell it does –
“Yeah,” Marla said. “I know. We’ve got to go back to Felport.”
“Is all this necessary, darling?” Death said. “I hate to see you in pain.”
“The best cure for my pain is causing pain to someone else. Thanks for the intervention, but we’ve got it from here.” She sighed. “I even have an idea about how to solve this problem. And maybe how to solve my other problem, too.”
“I’ll see you in a few weeks, then,” Death said. “Try not to let that thing consume your essence.”
“Turn your back, Bradley,” she said.
He frowned. “Why?”
“Because I disapprove of public displays of affection, but I need to kiss my husband now. I also need to ask him for a favor, which is even more embarrassing. So turn your ass around and make this public beach private for a minute.”
“Hetero make-outs? Ew. You don’t have to tell me twice to avert my eyes.” Bradley turned, looking at the Ghirardelli chocolate factory for a few moments, until Marla said, “Okay, all clear.”
He turned, then frowned at the little stone building on the beach, the one Death had emerged from. “Wait. That’s not real. Or, I mean, it’s not supposed to be there? That building, I mean. It looks real, but it wasn’t there before.”
“That’s my husband’s thing. He opens a door from the throne room in the underworld and steps out of it into wherever he needs to go. He comes through existing doors if they’re handy, and if not...” She shrugged. “He makes a new door, and a wall for it to open from, if it comes to that.”
“But he’s gone. Don’t his doors usually disappear when he goes back through them?”
She sighed. “Yeah. That’s the favor I asked. I’m gonna have to owe him one, now, but there’s nothing to be done, this Outsider thing has gotten out of hand.” She held up her hand, revealing a black iron key as long as her middle finger. “This key will help us get where we’re going, fast. Which is good, because I have a couple of stops to make before we hit Felport. But now... ugh. I have to make a call.”
“Who are you calling?”
“The Outsider is on its way to Felport, almost certainly, to try to get through the gazebo and kill the real you, no offense. I figure stopping that is our priority.”
“I would agree that protecting the multiverse from complete destruction is a priority, yes.”
“Yeah. Except so far a demi-god, a whole scorpion god, a psychic reweaver coffee shop owner, and a fragment of the overseer of the multiverse, have all failed to keep a bad monster down. Which means I have no choice. I have to ask for help. You know I hate asking for anything, but this is fate-of-the-world shit.”
“Who are we calling? Genevieve?”
“She’s the nuclear option, and by that I mean, using her is so catastrophically destructive that it’s pretty much a war crime. She could probably weave the Outsider out of existence, but she might turn the entire east coast into an eighty-trillion-pound pumpkin in the process. No, I have to....” She shuddered. “Just give me the phone, would you, before I lose my nerve?”
Crapsey in Felport
Crapsey and Squat were shooting pool while the grown-ups talked about whatever they were talking about. Crapsey lined up a shot and sank the two ball, but scratched in the process.
“You’re terrible at this,” Squat said.
“We don’t play this game in the universe where I come from. We have a different game, one you play with rat heads and rocks and buckets.”
“Sounds delightful.”
Crapsey shrugged. “The winner gets to eat all the rat heads, so it had its fans.”
Squat wasn’t wearing his usual hobo-blanket of overlapping coats, but just a white t-shirt (stained yellow by the fluid oozing from the sores on his back, each sore fu
ll of tiny lamprey fangs) and oversized cargo pants. He was short and wide, like a deep-chested bulldog, his hands monstrous talons that nevertheless handled a pool cue with dexterity. His eyes had creepy hourglass-shaped pupils, he was entirely noseless, and his mouth was vertical instead of horizontal, which didn’t stop him from talking. He’d been cursed by the great chaos witch Elsie Jarrow – a former employer of Crapsey’s – to never be loved or liked or even tolerated by anyone, and as a result, he physically mutated to become repulsive to anyone who spent time with him. Some of his mutations had granted him power – poisonous sweat, nasty fangs, the aforementioned talons – and he had the kind of physical strength that led him to occasionally tear car doors off by accident. He’d also been granted immortality and invulnerability by the curse, presumably so he could suffer indefinitely. In all, he was a terrifying variety of muscle – and the closest thing Crapsey had found in Felport to a friend.
Becoming friends should have made the curse kick in and turned Squat repulsive enough to overcome even Crapsey’s liberal standards for the company he kept, but it didn’t, because Nicolette had found a way to arrest the progress of his malady – and even reverse the parts that made him smell bad. She’d just cast some kind of olfactory neutralizing spell, really: Squat still stunk, it was just that nobody could smell it. Apparently Elsie Jarrow’s death (or at least discorporation) had weakened her curse enough to let Nicolette pick at some of the threads, so, as horrible as Squat was, he at least wouldn’t get any worse. Such things would have been beyond Nicolette’s abilities not so long ago, but since taking over Felport, Nicolette had grown exponentially in power... and even seemed like a marginally less terrible person than before.
While Squat merrily sank one odd-numbered ball after another, Crapsey looked toward Nicolette and Perren, talking at a table in the corner. They were in the office in the back of a dive bar, Perren’s base of operations, and the boss and the proprietor were discussing some boring-ass urban renewal shit. Nicolette was still wearing her tattooed-hottie body, and she was even more attractive than she had been in her original body, which was annoying. She used to tease him relentlessly, and nastily, about the fact that he wanted (against what passed for his better judgment) to fuck her... but she’d cut back on that kind of behavior since taking over the city, too.
The old-fashioned touchtone phone on the desk rang, and Perren startled, then stared at it. “That’s weird.”
“Yeah, who the hell has a landline anymore?” Nicolette said.
Perren shook her head. “I just keep the phone around because it makes a handy blunt object if I need to give someone head trauma. It’s not even plugged in.” She demonstrated by lifting the trailing, unconnected cord and holding it up. The phone rang again.
“Somebody’s being a show-off.” Nicolette inclined her head. “You going to pick that up?”
Perren shrugged, lifted the phone, and said, “Sorry, wrong number.” Then her face went stony. “It’s Marla Mason. She wants to talk to you.”
Crapsey glanced at Squat, who rolled his eyes – probably, it was hard to tell, his eyes were so fucked up – and started racking the balls for another game. Oh. He’d won while Crapsey was ogling Nicolette’s new ass.
“The stones on her, calling after she ran out on me,” Nicolette said. “She must’ve cast a divination spell and made her phone call the phone nearest me – pretty cute.”
“Do you want to talk to her?”
“No. Never. Hearing her voice is like shoving live wasps into my brain. But I will.” Nicolette took the phone. “What the fuck do you – Wait. What do you mean coming here?” She went silent, scowling, then held out a hand, snapped her fingers, and made a scribbling motion. Crapsey reached into his jacket and took out a little spiral-bound notebook and a pen and put them on the desk in front of his boss. Nicolette said, “Marla, shut up. Where did the thing escape from? No, not the coffee shop, stupid, I mean originally. Could you for just once not ask why and answer the question? Okay. Don’t suppose you have exact coordinates? Of course not.” She wrote something down. “Hold on a second.” She turned her head toward him. “Crapsey, call Mr. Beadle, and Langford, too, tell them I need a meet ASAP.” Back to the phone. “You still there, Marla? You have a more precise ETA on this thing? Uh huh. Uh huh. I’m on it. I can reach you at this number? All right. Just out of curiosity, how many times are you going to be directly responsible for unleashing gods or extradimensional monsters that threaten to destroy this city? Because by my count this is four – yeah, four, you mean you can’t count to four, Marla? There was Death, and the Mason, and this Outsider thing, and those weirdos that called themselves elves. Yes, those were too your fault – What do you mean I caused two? I’ll grant you the nightmare king, you can trace that back to me, but you can’t seriously say that stupid mushroom magician actually threatened the city, he just threatened you. Ha, yeah, sure, you saved the city too, saved it from shit you caused, but this time I’m going to save it, also from something you caused. All right, Marla, not that I don’t enjoy hearing you yell, but I’ve got a city to run, you remember what that’s like, don’t you?” She switched off the phone and glared at Crapsey. “Did you forget how to follow orders?”
Crapsey pulled out his phone and dialed Beadle’s number. While it rang, he said, “What’s going on?”
“Marla fucked something up,” Nicolette said, “and she called to ask me to save the city.” She grinned. Crapsey couldn’t remember ever seeing her look so happy.
Bradley on the Beach and Beyond
Marla did something to the phone, punching in a long multi-digit code and murmuring an incantation. Bradley didn’t recognize the exact spell, but part of it was familiar from some of Sanford Cole’s more hardcore divination spells.
After a moment Marla spoke. “Perren, let me talk to Nicolette. I know she’s with you.”
Bradley widened his eyes. “Why are we calling –”
She flapped her hand at him, and he went quiet. “Nicolette, be quiet, there’s a multiverse-destroying monster called the Outsider on its way to Felport right now.” She paused, then sighed. “If you shut up, I’ll tell you. This is the big problem I had to deal with, the planet-destroying space rock. My stupid death cultists accidentally released this creature from another universe, and it’s been merrily murdering people and eating gods and getting stronger. I had it locked up in a magical pocket universe in the back of a coffee shop in Santa Cruz – never mind, it’s a long story. Anyway, it got loose, and I took another run at it, but I couldn’t kill it, and now it’s on its way to Felport, looking for a locus of magic in Fludd Park. I think you’re the worst person for the job, but you are the chief sorcerer there, and you’ve got some resources, if you don’t fuck them up. The Outsider is maybe not killable, but it can be trapped, obviously, some ancient-ass humans did it centuries ago – what?” She shook her head, as if flies were buzzing around her. “I told you, I trapped it in a pocket universe in a coffee shop – oh. Why do you care? It was in California, in a cave under Death Valley. No, of course I don’t, you think I walk around looking at a GPS all day? I – what do you mean hold on a second?”
She looked at Bradley. “I tell her a monster is coming to destroy her and she asks me dumb questions and puts me on hold?” She scowled and returned her attention to the phone. “Yeah, I’m here. I don’t know, it just left San Francisco. It’s been appearing in human form, mostly, but it can turn into a flying shadow, too. Maybe a day or two? Best assume it’ll be there soon. Yeah, this number’s good. Anyway, I’m coming, and I’m bringing Bradley and maybe another hired gun or two – Sure you’re on it, you’d better be.”
“Which hired guns?” Bradley said, but Marla hissed in an angry breath.
“Where do you get off? How the hell do you come up with four? Those stupid elf things were not my fault, that was Tom O’Bedbug, how was that my responsibility? Anyway, what about you, miss two-time-destroyer, you’re the one who caused Genevieve to get out of Blackwi
ng, and that brought Reave, and then you sicced that crazy mushroom magician on us.” She kicked sand toward the ocean, hard. “Anyway I saved the city, those times and more, what have you ever – oh, I almost hope you fuck this up, Nicolette, you are the ultimate Dunning-Kruger case, you have no godsdamn idea how much you don’t know – Did you just hang up on me?” She hurled the phone to the sand.
Bradley sighed, bent down, and picked it up. “Seems like that went well.”
“Nicolette is so far out of her depth she’s never even heard about the bottom, but she’s the boss now, so I had to let her know what was coming. If she scrambles Hamil and Perren and the other heavy hitters, such as they are, maybe they can at least hold the Outsider at bay long enough for me to get there and take care of business.”
Bradley nodded. He wondered, though. Nicolette had seemed... well... damn near queenly in Felport. Her usual jittering twitchy energy was gone, replaced by serenity and confidence. Oh, she was still deeply unpleasant, and her enmity for Marla was way into obsessive territory, but she was more capable than Marla gave her credit for, and she had the resources of a whole city at her disposal, too. Not that he was going to sit back and say, “Let Nicolette handle it.” The whole reason he was on Earth was to stop the Outsider, after all. “So what do we do? You said something about hired guns?”
