Bride of Death (Marla Mason)

by T. A. Pratt

  I winced, and a couple of the other bikers walked over to the guy, then went outside with him, presumably to look over the vehicle in question. I tried not to worry about it. As long as they didn’t try to touch it – or gods forbid sit on it – they’d be fine, and bikers by and large are extremely respectful of personal property. They came back in later, and now all three of them were excited. I’m not much of a gearhead myself, but I should have realized a bike that rare would excite comment among those who give more of a shit. Trust my boy Death to give me a gift as impractical as it was awesome. He was clearly a guy who’d never had to live in the world. There’s privilege and then there’s privilege.

  The guys shouted some more, and general inquiries about the possessor of said sweet-ass-ride were addressed to the room, and finally someone who must have seen me arrive pointed me out. The young guy ran over like I was his long-lost first love and slid into the booth across from me. “Hey, I’m sorry to bother you, but lady, I think I love you.”

  I had no idea how long it had been since I’d had sex, not definitely – Death and I had gone on a honeymoon (which is a story for another time) the week before I descended to the underworld for my first month of indentured godhood, but it was possible I’d had some kind of crazy rarefied god-sex while I was down there, too, and just couldn’t remember. Not that it mattered. I wasn’t so hard up I’d go for the slobbering puppy-dog enthusiastic type, so I didn’t give him even an iota of warmth in response. “Great. Get the fuck out of my booth. I’m eating.”

  “Okay, okay, I just wanted to say, that bike out there, I’ve never even seen one, I saw a Black Shadow once in a parade, but –”

  “It’s a nice bike,” I said. “But I’m not a nice woman. Beat it.”

  “Any woman who rides a machine like that is plenty nice enough for me,” he said, in a tone like he was doing me a favor. “I’d sure love to ride on that thing, I’d even ride bitch. Or if I can’t ride the bike –”

  I saw clear enough where that was going, so I tapped my wedding ring on the beer glass. “See this, kid? Means I’m taken.” It didn’t mean that at all, necessarily – Death and I are pragmatists – but I could suddenly see the usefulness of wearing a wedding band to fend off unwelcome admirers without resorting to physical violence or magical mind-fuckery.

  For a moment the kid looked crestfallen, but then he rallied and said, “What makes you think I wouldn’t love you better than he can? What’s your husband got that I don’t?”

  I could’ve given lots of honest answers. The powers of a god. Dominion over the land of the dead. Better reasons for similar levels of cockiness. Instead I said, “For one thing, he gave me that motorcycle.”

  The kid sat back in the booth. “Sheee-it,” he said, drawing it out low and slow.

  “Yup.”

  He slapped his hand on the table nodded. “Can’t see how I can argue with that. You have a good night, ma’am.”

  “You too, kid.” He went across the bar to the other bikers, shaking his head, and I watched out of the corner of my eye to see if any of them were going to try their luck, but apparently he’d conveyed my utter unattainability adequately, because they kept to their end of the room.

  The jukebox was blaring something by The Eagles – good, the cognitive dissonance from the ska music was starting to bug me – when suddenly the room went silent. I don’t just mean the music stopped: I mean the music stopped, the talking stopped, the clink of glasses stopped, the pounding of feet stopped, everything stopped.

  I took in the room at a glance. Everyone was standing still, but time itself hadn’t stopped, which was good – that kind of thing was major magic. This was more like actors in an improv class told to “freeze!” I could see they were still breathing, and the ones who’d gotten stuck in particularly awkward positions were trembling a little from the effort of holding their poses, but their eyes were blank and empty. As far as everyone else here was concerned, this was lost time blackout territory.

  I sighed, tore a piece off the napkin in my lap, and used it to mark my place before closing my book. Then I pulled my coat into my lap, so I could reach into the pockets if need be.

  “Well?” I called. “Come on if you’re coming.”

  The bathroom door swung open, and something mostly man-shaped stepped out. He was dressed in flannel and denim and work boots, but his skin was a curdled-cheese color not generally found in nature, his eyes were set too far apart and not quite level on the horizontal, and his hair appeared literally made of dirty steel wool. His footsteps made squishing sounds when he walked, even though the floor was dry, so that was pretty nasty.

  “Hello.” He slid into the booth across from me, then laced his hands together on the table. He only had four fingers on each hand, like a cartoon character. “You’ve made quite an impression with... certain people... since you came to town.”

  I sipped my beer. “Ha. I bet calling them ‘people’ is stretching it. What do you want?”

  “I represent some prominent local interests. We noticed an act of mayhem you committed. Now we’re curious about your intentions going forward.”

  “Intentions don’t matter for shit,” I said, echoing my conversation with Death earlier that day.

  “Nonsense.” He smiled, like we were old friends having a familiar argument. “Intentions matter a great deal. They’re the difference between first and second degree murder, among other things. Intentions are the reason some things are tragic accidents and some things are crimes against humanity. There’s a Latin expression, ‘actus non facit reum nisi mens sit rea’ –”

  “The act’s not a crime if the mind isn’t guilty,” I interrupted.

  “A biker, a monster-slayer, and a Latin scholar, too,” he said.

  I shrugged. “From time to time I’ve been called upon to be judge and jury and, as you’ve already noticed, executioner.”

  “Then you understand that the state of mind of the criminal does matter. You’re the criminal here, in case that wasn’t clear. Did you act with intent? With reckless disregard for foreseeable consequences? Did you mean to kill the creature you encountered today? Was it something you planned, or a murder of opportunity, or even self-defense? Do you intend to commit similar crimes in the immediate vicinity in the near future? These questions matter very much to those I represent.”

  I don’t actually hate lawyers, as a class. I’ve met a few I got along with fine, both of the crusading paladin and conniving pragmatist types. But if this thing was some kind of lawyer for monsters, I had two reactions. One: “That’s interesting.” And two: “Fuck him.”

  “You know who doesn’t give a shit about intentions?” I said. “The ones who suffer the consequences. The guy who gets smeared into nothingness by a truck doesn’t care if it was premeditated, or an act of negligence, or recklessness, or catastrophic unavoidable unpredictable brake failure. He’s just as dead.”

  “Mmm.” The thing fixed me with his glossy eyes. “You’re saying the creature you killed was a killer, and it doesn’t matter why it killed – the killings were crimes, which had to be avenged. And you have chosen to be the avenger.”

  That wasn’t what I was saying at all. I was thinking about some of my own acts, born of good intentions, and the deaths that had followed as naturally as rot follows slaughter. There wasn’t even anyone around to avenge those deaths, not in a way that mattered... but I could pay penance. “What I’m saying is, fuck intentions. Actions are what matter.”

  “Really?” His rudimentary face looked incredulous. “What about homicidal somnambulism? People who commit murder while sleepwalking, without any input from their conscious minds? Or take the classic monster-movie version of the werewolf, an ordinary man, transformed by the moon, who commits terrible acts, but not willingly? How is that different from, say, someone being mind-controlled by a psychic parasite and steered toward murder? Are they to be judged exactly the same as one who murders for profit or sexual release?”

  “You se
em to think I’m talking about blame,” I said. “But blame is irrelevant here. I wouldn’t blame a guy who committed a murder while sleepwalking – but I’d sure as hell make sure he slept in restraints, under supervision. I wouldn’t blame Lon Chaney for wolfing out and eating somebody, but I’d make sure he got locked in a cell during the full moon. And if the sleepwalker slipped his restraints, and the wolfman killed his jailer and escaped, and I knew containment wasn’t a feasible action? You bet I’d kill them, for the greater good. If there’s a guy who kills strangers, it doesn’t matter if he did it because he was possessed by a demon, or because he had a combination of bad genes and a shitty upbringing and a psychological stressor that made him snap, or because a brain tumor pressed on his amygdala and convinced him the strangers were ghosts from hell – reasons aside, you stop him from doing the killing. I’m a pragmatist.”

  “Yet you say this as someone who does kill strangers,” the lawyer mused. “You see no contradiction?”

  “I guess I should’ve said ‘innocent strangers.”’

  “No one is innocent. From the point of view of those I represent, you could be seen as a mad-dog killer.”

  “More like a killer of mad dogs. But, if you feel that way – you’re free to try to stop me.”

  “Mmm. We might have to. We’re pragmatists as well, you see, and our future actions depend largely on whether we judge you liable to be a... repeat offender.”

  I nodded. “Okay. I can help you with that. Yeah, I killed a monster. There’s every reason to think I’ll do it again. At least until I run out of monsters.”

  “I see. Well, then.” He drummed his fingers on the tabletop. Nasty brown water leaked out of one of his sleeves and puddled around his hands. “Do you know why World War I started?”

  “Germans behaving badly?”

  He smiled, and as far as I could tell his teeth were made of chipped bits of tile. “The archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austro-Hungary was assassinated by a Serbian nationalist group called the Black Hand.”

  I put a deep-fried jalapeno (probably) in my mouth, chewed, swallowed, and said, “I hate them already. They’ve got a name like a comic book super villain team.”

  “Mmm. As a result of that assassination, Austro-Hungary declared war on Serbia. Then Russia, which had an alliance with Serbia, stepped in to honor their mutual-defense agreement and declared war on Austro-Hungary. Germany had an alliance with Austro-Hungary, and since the Russians were making threats, the Germans stepped in to defend their allies. The French were allied with the Russians, so of course they had to help out too. The Germans struck at France through Belgium – which triggered the Belgian alliance with Great Britain, bringing the English into the war. Italy and Japan and the US felt left out, so they all joined in, too.”

  “Who doesn’t love a party?” I said.

  “The point is, striking at one individual isn’t a self-contained act. One small murder can trigger consequences, which trigger other consequences, and soon...” He spread his dripping hands before him. “You’ve got a war.”

  “Huh. So you’re saying the beast I killed had friends, and now those friends are going to try to start some shit? And are you one of those friends?”

  He shook his head. “Quite the opposite. I am a member of what might be described as an opposing faction to the beast’s cohort. Personally, I’m delighted you killed that refugee from deep time with the buzz saw face. But the beast had allies, who now suspect that my friends hired you to kill the beast, in order to weaken their base of power – the beast was a rather heavy hitter, you know, in the violence department. We’ve claimed innocence, of course, but they don’t seem to believe us. The fragile peace between our factions is now threatened.”

  I smiled. “You mean I triggered a monster gang war? Wow. That couldn’t have worked out better if I’d planned it.”

  “Only if you’re a fan of chaos.”

  “I’m not, particularly, but maybe some of my allies are.”

  He leaned forward, and the spongy texture of his flesh was even more apparent at closer range. I caught a whiff of something nasty, old sewage and fresh latrines. “My people are going to be blamed for your behavior no matter what. As we’ve already covered, rather thoroughly, I don’t know your motives –”

  “Simple. I kill monsters, because monsters need to be killed.”

  “That is simple, or at least, simple-minded. But, fine – if that’s what you want to do, we can help you. We can point you toward certain monsters, tell you their weaknesses, help you with weapons, whatever you need.”

  “Uh huh. And why would you do that? Bring me into your alliance, when I’ve caused you trouble?”

  He shrugged. “If a war is starting anyway, it’s in our best interests if you thin out the enemy. Best case, you make our struggle easier. Worst case, you die, which doesn’t bother us much. You’re pulling us into a war, so the least you can do is help us win it, and advance your own asinine agenda in the process.”

  “And if I decline your offer?”

  “We can’t have wild cards and loose cannons and other clichés meddling in our business. I have been authorized to take preventative steps if you aren’t willing to be reasonable.”

  “You have a boss? A general? Someone you answer to?”

  “We are more a loose alliance of like-minded individuals who work together to achieve consensus.”

  “Huh.” I ate a beer-battered mushroom. “That structure never worked for me. I always liked a strong central authority, or at least a first-among-equals kinda deal.” Though now that I thought of it, I was technically co-equal with Death during my time in the underworld. I wondered if one of us had ultimate authority, or if we had a system of vetoes or bargains or favors owed, or if we just flipped coins or played Rochambeau to break deadlocks. Probably we had some kind of god-level flow-chart or decision tree my puny human brain couldn’t comprehend.

  “Yes, you mentioned your time as a one-woman judicial system before. That’s the sort of approach beloved by dictators and tyrants.”

  “Despots get a bad rap. These enemies you mentioned – is one them called the Eater, by chance? I’m guessing he’d be more equal than the others.”’

  The man-thing didn’t flinch or twitch or anything, but his total lack of reaction was, in itself, something of a reaction. “The Eater?”

  “Just a name I heard. From the thing I killed. Offered up in the form of a threat.”

  “The Eater is... not one of our allies, not directly. But we have no quarrels with it, either. That’s all I’m comfortable saying on the subject at this time.” And he actually looked around, as if afraid the Eater might be sitting in a booth, watching him. Which, for all I knew, he or she or it was. “I’d rather talk about you, and what we’re going to do about you –”

  “What you’re going to do about me? You don’t know who I am, do you?” I was mostly used to fighting people who realized what they were getting into when they fucked with me. What? So I’ve got a little bit of ego. Then again, I’d once been chief sorcerer of a city, fighting monsters in an official capacity. As a freelancer far from my traditional stomping grounds, my anonymity was a new experience. I couldn’t decide if it was liberating or annoying. Probably both. Everything’s complicated.

  “I don’t even know your name, no. We haven’t had time to do much research – we just picked up your trail and I came to chat.”

  “Huh. I’m Marla. What’s your name?”

  “I don’t have a name as you understand the concept –”

  “I’m curious, how did that thing have allies anyway?” I interrupted. “You know, Mr. tentacles-and-tooth-whorl, the victim, maybe he doesn’t have a proper name either. I thought he was some kind of prehistoric dimension-hopper that was imprisoned for millennia, or at least centuries – I half thought ‘the Eater’ was just the name of his extradimensional monster god, some kind of alien divinity. But apparently it’s an actual guy, or thing, or whatever. So you’re telling me the beas
t of Sunlight Shores, what, escaped a cavern, hooked into the local power structure, made friends and influenced people, and then started eating squatters?”

  “Some of our alliances are very old, as are some of the creatures who made them. The beast found a familiar face or two when he woke up, as I understand it. Well, not that they literally have faces. But we’re always open to promising newcomers, too, Marla. We seldom involve humans in our business, but you’re not a typical human, so –”

  I held up a hand. “I’m considering your offer, SpongeBob. Let me ask you something. Do you and your allies prey on humans? Drink their blood, or eat their brains, or sap their life essence, or steal their creativity, or suck out their capacity for love, or devour their innocence, or bathe in their sexual energy, or feast on their entrails?”

  The monster shrugged. “Everyone preys on something. We act only according to our natures.”

  “So do liver flukes. And those little fish in the Amazon that swim up a dude’s pee-hole and then fill up the urethra with spikes. Not to mention that parasitic fish that eats another fish’s tongue and takes its place, then snaps up all the food the big fish tries to eat, until it starves. Every one of them, just doing what comes naturally. Doesn’t mean I have to like them.”

  I took my silver hatchet out of my coat and rested it on the table between us, two fingers touching the handle. “So I pissed off the other crew by killing one of theirs. How about I even things up by killing one of yours? I’m not picky about which one, but I mean... you’re convenient.”

  “Did you think I would come here without protections?” he said. “I have allies outside, and –”

  While he was staring at the axe I whipped my dagger out and jammed it deep into his eye socket. The knife tore through his face like I’d plunged it into moldy bread – part of the hilt got embedded, too, and his whole ocular orbit and cheekbone collapsed inward. I tore the knife out, and watched him wobble a little, then clutch one hand over the injury. “You can’t stab me,” he said.