by T. A. Pratt
“Obviously I can, but it didn’t appear to do much good. Boots it is.” I stood up in the booth, stepped up on top of the table, and kicked his head like I was playing kickball in elementary school. I’d worked some nice inertial magics into my cowboy boots during my enchanting spree the night before, and his head flew free. Nasty sprays of black stuff floated up from inside his neck, some kind of horrible pathogenic spores probably, but I didn’t worry about it. Being death-proof had its advantages.
After I got his head off I kicked his body out of the booth to the floor and methodically stomped him to mush. I had no idea if I’d really killed him or not – maybe his actual physical form was those floating black seedpods or spores that came drifting up, or maybe he was a remote-controlled filth golem. I didn’t much care. I’d made my point: I wasn’t for hire, and I wasn’t on anybody’s side but my own.
Once he was done, I finished my beer, put on my coat, stowed my weapons, and picked up Nicolette – still sleeping, as far as I could tell.
I didn’t go for the front door, but went around the bar, weaving among the statue-like people, and into the tiny kitchen (glad I hadn’t seen it before I ate – I’ve been in cleaner crackhouses). The cook, poised over the fry pit, began to move, pivoting in slow-motion, but it was an encouraging sign – the normal flow of time was returning for these people. I found the back door and eased my way out.
I didn’t see or sense any sign of life back there, just empty desert night, so I crept around the side of the building, toward the front, and saw a couple of hulking figures watching the door, talking in low grunting voices. I put Nicolette’s cage down, then crept up until I was standing just behind and between them.
“Hey.” As they turned, I slipped a couple of my mundane knives into their guts, where the kidneys would be. They fell, scrabbling for the hilts, and I got a look at their faces, which were human except for piglike tusks and flat noses and eyes that were all sclera. “So, I stomped the ambassador or lawyer or whatever in there to death. I mean, I think – none of his bits are moving anymore, anyway. You can take that news back to the rest of your mob. And in case they’re shaky on the interpretation, the meaning of my radical act of violence is: I don’t work for you, or anyone else. Oh, and anyone who fucks with me? I take them apart. Of course, there’s a good chance I’ll take them apart even if they don’t fuck with me, but why increase the odds?”
One of them tried to reach into his jacket so I stomped down on his arm until things cracked, then kept on until they stopped cracking and started grinding. “Sorry. Too much? I tend to overreact to negative stimuli. It’s a coping mechanism.”
“Kill... you...” the one I hadn’t stomped said. “I’ll...”
“You will? Do you plan on doing it soon, or is this one of those long-term things? Do I have time to set my affairs in order? I have to admit, the suspense is totally killing me.” I booted him in the side until he rolled over, then retrieved my knife. His wound was already healing up. Monster-types often heal fast. I retrieved my other blade – better not to give them any possession they could use to magically track me – and spat on the ground beside them, because I always like to get in the last word.
The music came back on inside the honky tonk. I wondered what the clientele would make of the heap of gray mush and flannel beside my booth, and my sudden disappearance. Or the pig-men in the –
But no. They’d crawled off into the dark somewhere. Back to report to their masters, because they were lackeys if I ever saw any. I didn’t figure their bosses would be scared away, but that was fine. I was here to make enemies, and if the monsters came to me, that just saved me the trouble of looking for them.
I got Nicolette settled and cranked up my bike, then headed back to the road, toward the highway. The noise of the engine must have woken her up, because she yawned and said, “I smell violence. What’d I miss?”
“I got dinner,” I said. “Had a beer. Chatted with a bartender. Some young biker tried to pick me up.”
“Oh, gross. You’re making me sick to the stomach I don’t have. Is that all?”
“Mostly. I also found out I triggered a monster gang war by killing that thing at Sunlight Shores. His allies want me dead – and so do his enemies, since I kicked their messenger to mush.”
“Huh,” she said. “So was the biker boy cute?”
Then I got a motel room and wrote all this, and tomorrow I’m going to see if I can find the front lines in this war I started.
Or, better yet, bring the front lines to wherever I am. Much more relaxing.
NOJIMBO
“Ghost towns are boring,” Nicolette said. “They’re the opposite of chaos, unless you count gentle entropic decay.”
“Welcome to Tolerance,” I said. “Jewel of the West.”
(This was a few days after I stomped the monster lawyer to death, or anyway to pieces. I’d had to do some research first, make some preparations, and sorry, future me, but it’s too boring to write all that stuff down. I want to get to the part with the traps and tricks and battles. I’ll fill you in on any backstory you might need along the way.)
I surveyed the dusty streets and the few sand-eaten structures still left standing. The place looked almost picturesque in the gray morning light. “This is a ghost town, and I mean ghost. It’s not on the maps or in the guidebooks. Pelly told me about it. It was a thriving little town until the copper mines or whatever played out, and after it was abandoned by humans, other things moved in. Then some kind of major supernatural battle went down here in the late 1800s, and it became doubly-abandoned.”
“It stinks of residual magic, all right,” Nicolette said. “Why do we care, exactly?”
I carried her cage into one of the nearly-intact buildings. Maybe it used to be a saloon, but it was just a mouse toilet now, full of rotting timbers and broken glass. The walls left standing were riddled with bullet holes, so that was cool. I righted a table that still had all its legs and put her cage down. “All the magic here will muddle things up. They’ll have trouble tracking me precisely, and they won’t be sure how much power I have, and how much is purely atmospheric. This place is a magical megaphone, too – any workings I do will be made stronger just by the boost of background magic.”
“It’ll make their magic stronger too,” Nicolette pointed out.
I shrugged. “I’m not too worried about that.” I leaned against the bar, which creaked but didn’t fall over.
“You don’t have that white cloak anymore, so I don’t know why you’re so confident,” she complained. “If you get killed, I can’t exactly sneak away and hitch a ride back to civilization.”
Once upon a time I’d had a magical cloak that healed all wounds I sustained – in fact, Nicolette herself had once set me on fire while I wore the cloak, and I’d ended up with little more than singed hair. The cloak had even let me recover from a bullet to the head, once, though it had taken a few hours. But the garment was cursed, basically, so I was better off without it.
Besides, these days I pretty much wore an invisible cloak of healing, and that was even better, because no one expected it.
“I thought you wanted me to die? I figured you’d be thrilled with me taking on a battle against unlikely odds.”
“I don’t want you to die while we’re in the middle of nowhere, or surrounded by people who think I’m your ally, who’ll probably play kickball with me out of spite. I need you to die someplace with a handy innocent bystander or two, someone I can convince or compel to carry me off with them into the sunset. Show some consideration, Marla.”
I shrugged. “Don’t fret about me. One woman against two rival gangs, in an isolated town – how can I possibly lose? You’ve never seen A Fistful of Dollars?”
“I prefer Yojimbo. You know, the classic Kurosawa movie they totally ripped off when they made Fistful of Dollars?”
“Thpt,” I said, or some similar sound. “Kurosawa? Black and white. Subtitles. What am I, an art house theater? Spare me. A
nyway, if you’re going to make a Western, let it be a Western.”
“You’re an idiot,” Nicolette said. “Eastwood’s got a face like a block of wood. He can’t emote his way out of a paper bag. Mifune’s so subtle, he can convey so much with the tiniest change of expression, one twitch of an eyebrow –”
“Different approaches to the character, that’s all. Apples and oranges.”
“Apples and vastly inferior apples, more like it,” she said. “I bet you prefer The Magnificent Seven to The Seven Samurai, too.”
“Well, duh. Steve McQueen was the first man I ever loved, though I loved him from afar.”
“This isn’t Yojimbo anyway,” Nicolette said. “Mifune played both gangs against each other, pretending to switch his loyalties back and forth, and got them to mostly destroy each other. You’re not going to double-cross anybody. Both gangs of monsters are just going to kill you.”
“Don’t be silly. It’s unlikely both gangs will kill me. One of them will manage it first, and the other will be left disappointed.”
“They might shed a little extracurricular blood as they fight to see who gets to rip your spleen out personally, but otherwise, I don’t see how you’re going to hurt them all. And! In Yojimbo, he was fighting to save the townspeople from the gamblers and gangsters who’d taken over. There aren’t any townspeople here. You’re just fighting for... what? Your own self-aggrandizement? General bloodlust? I still don’t know what the hell this little road trip is for. Not that I require meaning or purpose – I used to do things all the time just because it seemed like a good, or at least interestingly bad, idea at the time – but I expected more sense and sensibility out of you.”
“I’m fighting for hypothetical townspeople,” I said. “People somewhere in some town who won’t get eaten or brain-drained or seduced or ripped off by these things after I kill them. My motives are pure.” I strolled toward the front door, such as it was. “How long do you think before they get here?”
“It’s hard to tell anything for sure in this place, because of old magic kicking so much noise up in my signal, but... I’d say you have a while. There are forces gathering, but they’re a ways off. I don’t think anyone will try to murder you until late this afternoon, anyway.”
“Good enough. That gives me time to play the good hostess and get some party favors ready.”
•
Let me tell you a little bit about these assholes, these “gangs.” You’d think, two big groups of supernatural bad guys, there’d be some kind of fundamental split. Like the classic vampires versus werewolves. (The first don’t exist, at least not the classic blood-drinkers with the garlic allergies, not as far as I know, and as for the second, sure, there are people who turn into wolves, just like there are people who turn into jaguars and bears and vampire squid, using all kinds of magical methods, so I don’t know why the wolfie ones always get top billing.) Or Seelie versus Unseelie courts. (There are certainly things from a place painfully adjacent to this universe who present themselves as fairies or elves, but I wouldn’t trust them to accurately identify themselves, or to tell the truth about anything really, or to know what the truth even means.) Or Godzillas versus Kongs, or angels versus demons, or ifrits versus water sprites, or ghost pirates versus giant squids, or something.
But these gangs weren’t like that. They didn’t have some ideological or inherent conflict that could only be played out in the form of a secret war. They were just concatenations of supernatural assholes who arbitrarily aligned themselves into factions for mutual support, until their groups came into inevitable conflict, and then they started a low-level ongoing war. There wasn’t a “good” gang or a “bad” gang – they were equally awful. Let me give you an idea what I was going up against.
(Some of this I found out from research I had Pelly do – the man is a whiz with the internet, knows how to access every darknet and private forum for monsters there is, and he’s not afraid to make phone calls and do a little social engineering to worm information out of people, either – and some from shady sources Rondeau knows from the casino scene and all the other unsavory things he does.)
On the one side, we had team monster-lawyer – you know, the guy I stomped to bits at Danooli’s. His bunch was led by a witch named Orias, who specialized in the satiation of unnatural appetites. Her preferred rackets were prostitution, of the decidedly non-standard kind. You went to her brothels if you wanted to fuck a girl who had a barbed tail she could shove up your ass during the act of love, or to make out with a guy with needle fangs full of hallucinogenic venom, or to get blowjobs from a blob with a thousand mouths and two thousand tongues. Some of the ‘escorts’ were monsters she hired, some were artificial life forms constructed in her underground flesh lab, and some she acquired through more mysterious means.
Orias supplied ordinary everyday humans to monsters who liked to play with those, too, and she didn’t much care if the humans were willing or not. She had fingers in most of the sin industries – exotic drugs (blood, sweat, milk, jizz, and other substances from her employees, mainly), gambling (where the stakes were a little more interesting than cash or cars or houses), and so on. I’ve got nothing against people having a good time, as long as everything’s consensual and nobody gets dragged in against their will, or exploited because they’re too young and/or dumb to know better, but Orias had no such qualms. She was teamed up with various thugs and bone breakers and mind eaters who enforced her policies and kept the below-the-line workers focused and on task.
The other gang, the one the beast of Sunlight Shores had been aligned with, was run by a self-styled loup garou called Sarlat – name taken from some famous man-eating wolf that only attacked grown men, standing on its hind legs and clawing out their throats. Sarlat was into heavier shit than Orias, mostly. Where Orias served the twisted needs and desires of the people in the Southwestern states, Sarlat believed more in making opportunities, and then exploiting the fuck out of them. Extortion, murder for hire, protection, all the standard rackets, backed up with supernatural powers. He was also... let’s say a procurer. He was the guy you went to if you were a cultist and your god needed fifteen virgins sacrificed at the next new moon, or if you were a monster who needed to eat the livers of unbaptized babies to sustain your next century of life. For the right price, he’d make sure you got what you needed, and word was he’d wield the ceremonial knife himself for no extra charge.
As a rule his gang was nastier than the crew Orias ran, but they were also less well organized, more a loose affiliation of independent contractors who bonded together for mutual protection and backup as necessary.
As for why the two gangs hated each other... all the usual reasons. Clashes over turf. Sarlat robbing Orias’s people, Orias’s people poisoning Sarlat’s people in retaliation. There was also some more personal enmity between the two leaders, though Pelly and Rondeau hadn’t been able to track down any details, at least not in the few days I’d given them to scrounge up intel. There were rumors that Orias and Sarlat used to sleep together, which was all the explanation I needed, really. There’s no hatred like love gone rancid.
Both gangs were using all the psychics and divination specialists at their respective disposals to track me down, and make sure I paid for my crimes. Or, more honestly, to make sure I didn’t commit any more. They don’t give a shit about justice, but when it comes to self-preservation, Sarlat and Orias are both motivated self-starters.
(You’re thinking: what about the Eater, right? I was promised an Eater. But Pelly couldn’t find anything about a guy called that, and Rondeau couldn’t, either. I could have pestered Rondeau into summoning up an oracle and asking the question, but if he did that sort of thing too often he got migraines, and started barfing, and I was trying to go easy on him. I didn’t think it mattered – I figured maybe ‘the Eater’ was a nickname for Sarlat. I was so wrong.)
•
The bad guys rolled in around sundown, a line of pickup trucks and SUVs, and creatures m
oving rapidly on foot (or paw or claw or slime-cushion) in the shadows. I watched and listened from my undisclosed location, through the eyes of various Polaroid photographs of myself I’d secreted all over the ghost town. (Imbuing representations of self with sensory capabilities is pretty basic sympathetic magic. The downside is if someone sticks a knife in one of the photos, it hurts, so I’d hidden them pretty well.)
The monster gangs set up a couple of camps, each at one end of the long main street. Both gangs posted guards, who made occasional forays down the main street toward one another, jeering and shouting threats, each side claiming they would be the one to take my head – I assumed they meant decapitating me, as opposed to taking Nicolette, more’s the pity – and so on. Just posturing. It was good to see they hadn’t coordinated their plans, teaming up to take me out more efficiently. Given the deep enmity between them, that wasn’t surprising, but I’d worried they’d see me as a big enough threat to join forces against the common enemy. I’d have an easier time (and, being honest, a lot more fun) if they were still out to kill each other, too.
Sarlat took up residence in the remains of the sheriff’s office, which was pretty much just a tumble of timbers, except for the rusting iron bulk of the cells, the bars still holding firm in stone walls. He set up a chair and table in a cell, which surprised me – animals aren’t big fans of being in cages, as a rule – but then, that was the only bit of office that had a solid roof overhead, so it made sense. He barked orders at his lieutenants, telling them to scour the nearby buildings and the surrounding area for any trace of me. There was so much residual magic in Tolerance they couldn’t focus on me with the usual pinpoint divination techniques – the best they could tell was that I was somewhere inside a fuzzy circle a mile or so in diameter, centered on the town itself.
Once Sarlat was alone in the cell, jabbing angrily at the screen of his smartphone, I made my presence known.
