Bride of Death (Marla Mason)

by T. A. Pratt

  “In theory. But maybe, for today, I’ve suffered enough. This time I’ll make exceptions for survival and sex. Come on in. The water’s fine.

  “And you’re even better.”

  “Damn right,” I said.

  •

  That cheered me up a little.

  •

  Now that Nicolette was no longer half catatonic, she became irritatingly chatty again. After my long and quite refreshing shower, I was sitting in the armchair of the motel room, reading more about Zen and motorcycle maintenance, when she said, “Are we really going to team up with this Squat guy?”

  I closed the book and squinted at her, where she sat on the table in her cage. “I don’t know. Maybe? I feel like I killed a bunch of gangsters and then an ugly puppy came wobbling out of the bullet-ridden house, looking around all confused, wondering what those loud noises were and where his master went. Like I have some obligation toward him now, maybe. The poor bastard’s cursed.”

  “Speaking as an undying head stuck in a bird cage and forced to serve the will of a woman I repeatedly tried to kill, let me tell you about all the vast bucketloads of sympathy I have for him.”

  I thought about that. Making Nicolette be my bloodhound and oracle had seemed to serve two purposes: punishing her for her numerous crimes, and punishing me for mine. But now I began to wonder: was it also another kind of test, from my more enlightened goddess-self? Maybe I was supposed to learn something about forgiveness or the folly of revenge for revenge’s sake or simply about using people like they were tools and nothing more. Was I supposed to stop hating Nicolette?

  “I think of you hating me the way I think of the sun rising in the east,” I said slowly. “It’s just... part of the natural order. But, you know, it’s been so long, I can’t even remember why you started hating me –”

  “It hasn’t been that long,” she interrupted. “I always thought you were awful, snobby, arrogant, and way too full of yourself, but I don’t think I graduated to full hate until you had my mentor killed. I was supposed to succeed him as one of the leading sorcerers of the city, and instead –”

  I frowned. “Nicolette. Your mentor was plotting to murder me. Assassinate me, depose me, stage a coup, take over as chief sorcerer. And he collaborated with truly monstrous forces to try and get his way. Damn right he was executed for his treachery – he put the whole city, my city, in danger. And anyway, you got your seat on the council after he died, you fooled me into thinking you could be trusted –”

  She rolled her eyes. “Oh goodie. I had the chance to serve under the bitch who killed my friend. The incompetent bitch. My boss thought you were a terrible chief sorcerer, and you know what? Less than a year after you murdered him, you got your ass deposed and exiled for you own crimes against the city, abuse of power, whatever. Proving he was right about you all along. But before you pissed off to the islands, you got me locked up in an insane asylum –”

  “You were a danger to yourself and others, Nicolette. You were irrational, you couldn’t even be trusted to act in your own self-interest –”

  “Oh, puh-leeze. You just described every chaos witch ever. If I behave too predictably, I lose my mojo. Besides, you weren’t locking me up for therapeutic purposes. You used the Blackwing Institute as a place to put your political prisoners. Don’t deny it.”

  I squirmed a little. There was a tiny bit of truth to that. But it’s not like Blackwing was a gulag, some nightmare horror-movie asylum. If you had to be locked up somewhere, it was even sort of a nice place, maybe... I thought of further arguments. Like the fact that Nicolette still worshipped Elsie Jarrow, even though Jarrow had literally cut off her head, on the sort of whim beloved of chaos practitioners. But you couldn’t argue someone into not hating your guts.

  I sighed. “Okay. You’ve got legitimate grievances.” Along with the illegitimate ones. “I did some bad stuff. I know that. I’m trying to... never mind. Look. Do you want me to let you go?”

  “What?” Never had a single syllable been so filled with suspicion.

  I ran a hand through my damp hair and grimaced. “Death was withdrawn from you. I can probably arrange to... withdraw the withdrawal. Let you die in peace.”

  She belched. “Fuck you, Marla. I was just starting to feel a little bit good. I will always choose life over death, even this kind of half-life. What I want is to get my body back, or if that body’s not available, some other body will do. I’d take yours, for instance, if only because of the opportunities for self-mutilation.”

  I shook my head. “Nicolette, even if I could get you a new body, you’d just try to kill me again, right?”

  “Most likely. You haven’t given me a lot of reasons to be nicer to you, that little snack this afternoon notwithstanding. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate the gesture, and I’m sure I’ll have some erotic dreams about you in the car crusher next time I fall asleep, but that whole act of contrition just brought me back from depression and restored our old status quo – I hate you, and you get hated by me.”

  “How about if we made a truce? I get you a body, you go on your way, and you leave me alone?”

  “Sure,” she said. “I double-dog swear.”

  “Would you swear that in a circle of binding?”

  “Fuck, no,” she said. “I don’t like being subject to a geas. Besides, have you ever been in a circle of binding? The whole point is you can’t tell a bald-faced lie in one of those, so there’s no way I could promise not to kill you.”

  I couldn’t say her reaction entirely surprised me. She hated being with me, sure, but that hate was counterbalanced by another force. Nicolette has always wanted desperately to be my nemesis, but she’s seldom risen above the level of an annoyance. Oh, she’d allied herself with people who could reasonably qualify as nemeses – Jarrow, my dark doppelganger The Mason, maybe even her dead mentor Gregor – but she’d never been more than the sidekick or lieutenant or chief thug of the various big bads I’d faced. My refusal to dedicate myself to destroying her as I had some of those other figures had wounded her in her most sensitive spot, a part of her that remained intact even after her body was lost: her pride.

  I almost told her I felt sorry for her, but that would have only made things between us worse.

  Instead I spread my hands. “So what can I do? You don’t want to die. I can’t risk letting you have bodily autonomy.” Not that she could succeed in killing me, but she sure could make my life unpleasant. “You don’t want to travel with me –”

  “I never said that.” She smiled slyly, a familiar expression, like a clever child thinking she was smarter than all the adults around her, not recognizing the limits of her own cleverness. “This is pretty great in some ways. I mean, I hate your company, but you drag chaos and horror around with you wherever you go, and since I can’t have orgasms or eat lobster or punch people anymore, feeding on chaos is one of the only two pleasures I’ve got left.”

  “What’s the other pleasure?”

  “Complaining incessantly and annoying the shit out of you, and always devoting at least part of my attention to how I might engineer your eventual ultimate downfall.”

  Ah. She got joy out of depriving me of joy. I could see that. “Okay. It’s a deal.”

  “What are you talking about? What’s a deal?”

  “Nothing,” I said. And from Nicolette’s point of view, nothing would change. She’d bitch at me, and I’d bitch back – we’d snap and snipe at each other. But I’d be doing it because I knew the viciousness made her a little bit happier. It was bad enough to make Nicolette serve me in her undeath; making her suffer more by trying to treat her with sympathy and kindness was just cruel. I’d give her more fuel for the hate that sustained her.

  I embarked on my new policy immediately: “Why don’t you shut up? I’m starting to think I should have reanimated your body as an oracle and left your head in that fish pond. I could’ve stuck a motorcycle helmet on your neck-stump and let your body communicate with me by sign
language.”

  “I’m going to sing you a song I made up about how much I hate your guts,” Nicolette said, and proceeded to do just that, caterwauling and wildly out of tune.

  I put in my earplugs and went to sleep feeling like I’d done some good.

  COLD TRAIL

  “That hole full of ashes and rubble used to be Sarlat’s office.” Squat was dressed like it was the depths of winter instead of Southwest summer, bundled in hat, scarf, ugly brown parka, gloves, shapeless pants, big boots, and additional layers of clothing, like he’d put on his whole closet at once on a dar. He looked like an ambulatory pile of dirty laundry, which was better than looking like an ambulatory demon thumb wrapped in pus-covered bandages, which was the look he’d been sporting last time I saw him.

  I kicked a blackened fragment of the devastated building in the general direction of the rubble. The structures on either side were intact and unharmed by fire, which suggested either the actions of an incredibly talented arsonist or the use of magic. “Was anyone hurt?”

  “Nah, the place was empty. Used to be a little import/export office, small warehouse on site, loading dock in the back. Nobody there last night when it got torched. All the computers and papers and stuff are totally gone, though.”

  “You think it’s the Eater trying to cover his tracks?” I said. “Knowing someone might come looking and find a clue about his identity or whereabouts?”

  Squat stuck a finger in his ear – at least I think it was a finger, and it was probably an ear – wiggled it for a moment meditatively, and then shrugged. “You’re asking the wrong guy. I just beat people up for a living. I don’t, like, deduce.”

  I’d never been good at deduction, either. I’d tried to be an occult detective, for a while, but I’d sucked at the detecting parts. “So what do I do now? Place some ads online? ‘Dear Eater, I’d like to discuss your future prospects?’ I don’t even know what kind of bad guy this is – the revenge-taking sort, or the going-to-ground type?” I sighed. “Crap. I need an oracle.”

  “What, I’m not good enough for you?” Nicolette said.

  “Just because you’re a severed head doesn’t make you Mimir,” I said.

  “Who the fuck is Mimir?” Squat said.

  “Sorry,” I said. “Sorcerers tend to be mythology nerds. Mimir is from Norse mythology, a legendary wise man who got his head chopped off. After that Odin, the father of the gods, carried Mimir’s head around, and it whispered secrets to him. Whereas Nicolette mostly shouts obscenities.”

  “Living severed heads are full of wisdom,” Nicolette said. “There’s the Brazen Head, the Baphomet head, the singing head of Orpheus, Bran the Blessed – read a book, uggo. We’re chock full of wisdom, I think because when you’re missing your stomach and sexual organs and all that you don’t have so many distractions, so it frees up the brain for thinking.”

  “Nicolette’s good for leading me into generalized trouble,” I said. “She can smell chaos, especially the bad unnatural kind that we might as well call evil. But for tracking down one particular monster, if that’s what the Eater is...” I shrugged. “Time to call in the big guns.”

  “That rat fuck Rondeau?” Nicolette said. “He’s even uglier than you, Squat.”

  “I’d like to see that,” Squat said. “It might help my self-esteem.”

  “Too bad,” I said. “I’m not dragging him out here. He can find an oracle for me just fine in Vegas.” I pulled out my phone and rang him up.

  When he answered, his voice was blurry with sleep or possibly booze. “Wha?”

  “Good morning, sunshine,” I said.

  He groaned. “Marla. It’s... not even noon yet. I am not awake before noon. And I had all kinds of fucked-up dreams.”

  I perked up at that. “Did you have... one of those dreams?” Rondeau was a powerful psychic, known to have occasional prophetic dreams about potential futures. They tended to be of the annoyingly cryptic variety – surreal images that only made sense as prophecy in retrospect – but sometimes they contained useful clues.

  “Nah. I just hit an all-night buffet right before bed. Eating so much before I go to sleep always gives me vivid dreams. You know I usually only have those dreams about stuff that impacts me directly, so your decision to leave me here instead of dragging me around the desert – thanks again for that, by the way – means I’m not expecting any useful visions.”

  “Too bad,” I said. “I need you to summon an oracle and find something out for me.”

  “Gahhhh,” Rondeau said, or syllables to that effect. “You know doing that stuff wrecks me, I get the shakes for days. You sure this isn’t something you could just look up on the google?”

  “We tried that already. I hit a dead end trying to track down this guy or thing or whatever, the Eater. It’s trying to hide from me, I think. Or else I’m just no good at knowing where to look for it. Go summon up something horrible and ask it to tell me the Eater’s whereabouts, all right? And I’m sorry in advance for your headaches.”

  “If you really need it, I guess I’ll do it.”

  Having gotten what I wanted, I remembered to try and be pleasant. “How are things there?”

  “They were pretty good, until I got this phone call. Just gambling and sleeping and keeping myself entertained, pretty much pure perfection. Pelly’s doing all right, I guess – he’s back in Vegas now, though he wants to go back to Death Valley to check on the cultists this weekend. Apparently none of them have died on their spelunking expeditions yet.”

  “I really need to figure out what to do with those lunatics,” I said.

  “Taking all their money and having sex with the attractive ones is pretty traditional,” Rondeau said. “But whatever makes you happy. When do you need this oracle summoned?”

  “I don’t have any other plans, and my time is limited.” Both Squat and Nicolette looked way too interested when I said that – neither one of them knew I was going to turn back into a pumpkin at midnight, so to speak, when my month on Earth ran out. “So, you know. Make it a priority.”

  “Yes’m,” he said. “I’ll be in touch.”

  I switched off the phone. “My associates are going to chase down a lead,” I said. “Buy you lunch, Squat?”

  “I usually just crouch in an alley and eat rats and garbage.”.

  “I was thinking cheeseburgers.”

  “Sometimes when I go into places where there are lots of people the curse gets extra-active, and there are, uh... unpleasant consequences.”

  “Drive-through it is, then.”

  •

  I expected Rondeau to call me up and tell me what the oracle said, but instead Pelham sent an e-mail. It’s weird to get an e-mail composed of complete sentences, but that’s Pelly for you. I’ll just stick his message in here so you can read it if you want, future me, instead of trying to paraphrase. I’ve been writing in this diary a long-ass time, and I’m going to see if I can find the House of the Eater soon, so I want to kind of wrap this up.

  BEING AN ACCOUNT OF CERTAIN ORACULAR VISITATIONS

  Dear Mrs. Mason,

  As you have repeatedly chastised me for my alleged tendency to “bury the lede” or “beat around the bush,” and in keeping with your frequent suggestion that I “get to the [expletive] point already,” I will begin with the details I believe will interest you most: you should go to West Texas to continue your search for the Eater. Alas, the Eater is not necessarily in that location, but we are informed (reliably informed, Rondeau assures me) that you should be able to pick up his trail there.

  You will of course be disappointed that we were unable to obtain more precise information regarding the Eater’s location, or, indeed, his nature, abilities, and “threat level,” as the saying goes. In order to explain this failure to acquire more useful intelligence, I beg your indulgence: allow me to describe the events of this morning in some detail.

  Rondeau knocked on the door to my bedroom shortly before noon, and I was immediately alarmed, for he sel
dom rises before “the sun is over the yardarm,” as he says – a vague term, and a peculiar semantic choice given that Rondeau is not and never has been a sailor – but one which seems to corresponded in Rondeau’s mind, at least, to approximately midday. I inquired as to whether anything was wrong, and he said, “No, everything’s fine, but Marla needs me to summon up an oracle and I want you to come along in case I pass out or start choking on my tongue or something.”

  Though I found that explanation not at all reassuring, I dressed and accompanied Rondeau downstairs to the garage. He suggested that I drive, so that he might “concentrate on catching the right vibe,” and so I selected my preferred conveyance – a Bentley, not unlike the one you once used as chief sorcerer of Felport, though Rondeau insisted on putting “spinning rims” on it, for reasons which escape my understanding – and followed his directions.

  Soon we turned away from the unspeakably gawdy area near the so-called “Strip” – truly, living in this crass place is an affront to my sensibilities; I think I genuinely prefer being in Death Valley with the cultists – and wound our way through residential areas until finally moving south into the desert. I never fail to be astonished at how swiftly the glittering eyesore of an oasis that is Las Vegas gives way to genuine wilderness.

  Rondeau complained bitterly about the journey, however. “Why couldn’t I just go summon up the spirit of Lady Luck in a slot machine or something? You’re telling me in all of Vegas there’s not a single useful oracle?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t know,” I replied. You will recall, Mrs. Mason, that though I am familiar with Rondeau’s ability to “call spirits from the vasty deep,” as the bard so memorably put it, I have rarely had occasion to witness such summonings, and as such felt both curiosity and a certain amount of apprehension at the prospect. “Did you feel no, ah, ‘vibes,’ in the city itself?”

  “Not a twinge, not a tickle,” Rondeau answered. “But there’s a definite sort of tugging sensation from the desert in the south, and maybe, I want to say, underground, too. Hell. I hope there’s a shovel in the trunk.”