Dead Reign

by T. A. Pratt

  And it was true. Marla had let time heal her guilt. Killing this man accidentally had taught her not to kill casually, to murder only when her own life or the fate of her city was at stake, but while she’d remembered the lesson, she’d forgotten the man who inspired it. “When I get back, I will again. I promise.”

  “Die with me,” it said again, and Marla could only shake her head, and turn away, allowing Pelham to guide her from the mess she’d made.

  Pelham and Marla took a construction elevator, partially open to the wind, up the Whitcroft-Ivory building. The air was so cold their breath puffed, but when they reached the top level, there was a walkway that led to a wooden door. This time Marla led, and this time the doorknob turned easily in her hand. Marla took a deep breath, pushed it open, and stepped into a perfect replica of her own office, with her high-backed desk chair turned to face away from her.

  “Hello, Joshua,” she said. The chair swiveled, and her dead lover tried to nod at her with his broken neck.

  Rondeau spat the regulator out of his mouth. “Fuck this.” He pulled himself up the ladder. “Two fucking days of this, and not a goddamn—” He stopped. Beadle sat hunched in the far stern of the boat, and the Bay Witch was in one of the swivel chairs, staring at Rondeau quizzically.

  “Fuck what?” she said.

  Rondeau got onto the boat, legs shaking. The Bay Witch was weird, but powerful, with titanic forces at her beck and call. Marla said the witch could’ve given her a run for chief sorcerer, if she’d had any political ambitions. Nobody knew what the Bay Witch’s ambitions were, if she had any, and Rondeau had no idea how to talk his way out of this. “Hello, ma’am. I’m just…frustrated. Nothing you need to worry about.”

  “You work for Marla,” she said. “I like Marla. When does she come back?”

  Rondeau glanced at Beadle, who shrugged miserably. “Ah, she’s been banished by the Walking Death. You know, that guy who killed all the zebra clams or whatever?”

  “Yes. Marla is still banished? Sad. I like Marla. I like your boat. I like boats.”

  This is like talking to a six-year-old. Only a six-year-old who could drown you with a gesture. “Thanks. It’s a good boat.”

  The Bay Witch rose abruptly. “What are you looking for? Tell me what you’re looking for.”

  “I was just going for a little swim—”

  “Don’t lie. Liars get turned into chum. Into cut bait. Don’t lie!” She was right up in his face now, shouting, and her breath smelled like raw fish and salt. Rondeau couldn’t back up without falling off the boat into the water, and going into the water wouldn’t make him any safer from her.

  “Okay! I’m looking for Marla’s cloak.”

  “Cloak? No cloak. Not in my bay.” She sounded puzzled, and strands of wet blond hair hung clumped in her face, giving her a slightly deranged look.

  “The cloak is in a box. A wardrobe. I know you took it.”

  “Oh. The box. Yes. The death man asked me to take it deep, where no one else could find it, as a favor. I owed him a favor. For killing the zebra mussels.”

  “Okay. I understand. But that’s what I’m looking for.”

  “You’ll never find it. No one but me ever will. That was the favor.”

  Rondeau spread his hands. “I have to try. For Marla. To help her.”

  “Oh. Why didn’t you ask me for help? To find it?”

  Rondeau stuck his pinky in his ear and wiggled it around. There was water in his ear canal, but he could hear okay. “What? You hid it. Why would you help me find it?”

  “You would owe me a favor. Better, no, wait, yes, better if Marla owed me a favor. You can owe me a favor from her?”

  “You…want me to promise Marla will do a favor for you? If you help me find the wardrobe?”

  The Bay Witch nodded vigorously.

  “But aren’t you loyal to Death?”

  The Bay Witch frowned at him. “He did me a favor. I owed him a favor. He asked me for a favor. I did him a favor. I owe him nothing now. Even-steven. He never said I couldn’t bring the wardrobe back.”

  He didn’t know he had to, Rondeau thought, and right then he could have kissed the Bay Witch right on her bizarrely literal lips.

  “Yes,” Beadle said, rising. “Will you do this favor for us? And keep it a secret, and tell no one?”

  The Bay Witch looked at him, then at Rondeau. “This man can make a favor for you for Marla?”

  Rondeau thought he followed that. “Listen, yes, I can promise Marla will owe you a favor when she comes back, if you get the cloak for us. But we’d like you to keep it a secret. And, um, don’t take it away from us or anything later on, even if somebody asks you to. Is that okay?”

  “Okayfine,” she said, all one word, and then, “Wait here.” She dove cleanly into the bay and vanished from sight.

  “Guess we should have asked her in the first place,” Rondeau said.

  Beadle sighed. “Some people defy rational analysis.”

  “So if she pops up with this cloak…we hit the party tomorrow night. Agreed?”

  “Let me lay some charms of deflection and misdirection on you, and, tentatively, yes. Partridge and Langford are on hand to provide distractions. We have to be careful, to spoil the party without harming the guests. The cloak might make you…unpredictable, yes? Likely to attack bystanders?”

  Rondeau shrugged. “Marla says it’s tricky, that you sort of lose control, but she said it’s like steering a really big boat, you have to be steady and guidance is slow, but it can be guided.”

  “We’ll try to chase the party guests out anyway, to be safe. Langford is working on a potent stink bomb that works psychically as well as olfactorily. It shouldn’t affect Death—or, alas, the ghosts of the founding fathers—but it should clear out the rest of the guests, and give you a free hand to face our opponent. He really might kill you, you know, oust your psyche, force you to find a new body. And now that Ayres has dropped out of sight, you won’t be able to seize his body.”

  Rondeau shrugged. “There’s risk, I know. But it’s for Marla. For the city. It’s gotta be done.” He sat down. “That’s crazy about Ayres disappearing. You think he’s dead?”

  “Probably all the excitement got to his heart. No one has seen the mummy Ayres raised, either, the one that claimed to be John Wilkes Booth. Being in Death’s employ seems a hazardous enterprise.”

  The water rippled, and the Bay Witch surfaced, along with a box wrapped in chains. She climbed the ladder one-handed, carrying the heavy wardrobe by a chain wrapped around the fingers of her free hand, and she swung the box onto the deck, where it landed hard enough to make the whole boat rock. “Okay,” she said. “Marla owes me a favor. Good-bye.” She vanished into the water, then emerged again. “Wait.” She seemed to be thinking something over very hard. “Will you be at the Founders’ Ball?”

  “We will,” Rondeau said.

  She nodded. “I will see you then.” Looking pleased with herself—for managing a simple social nicety, perhaps?—she dove back beneath the waves.

  Rondeau and Beadle stood on opposite sides of the wardrobe. “All right, then,” Beadle said. “Let’s get these chains off.”

  “You’ve looked better, Joshua,” Marla said. “Death doesn’t agree with you.” She was trying to be strong and cold, but seeing him again whipped her emotions into a whirlpool with a sucking funnel of darkness at the center. There was hate in there, sure, and she tried to focus on that, but there were other feelings, too. Joshua had made her happy, for a little while, before he turned to poison, but the happiness had been real, even if his motives had not.

  Joshua had been a lovetalker, a Ganconer, a man with supernatural charisma, capable of seducing anyone. He’d bewitched Marla, but all along he was working for one of Marla’s enemies. At the end of their affair, he’d murdered one of her friends, right in this very office, and then tried to kill her. She’d killed him first, breaking his neck, but she had still been so thoroughly under his spell that
killing him had been like ripping out her own heart and grinding it under her boot heel.

  “Marla,” Joshua said. His broken neck made his head cock at an angle, giving him a quizzical appearance, like a little boy lost. “I know I don’t look my best. Forgive me. You look beautiful.”

  “I have nothing to say to you.” Marla crossed her arms, trying to separate out the hate from the churn of her feelings, trying to isolate and distill that fury until she felt nothing else. It was like trying to separate the whiskey in a glass from the water. “You’re a betrayer, Joshua. Ever read Dante’s Inferno? In his vision of Hell, betrayers get chewed up for eternity in Satan’s mouth. You should be there with Judas and Brutus, gnawed forever.”

  “I was never much of a reader.” Joshua swiveled back and forth in the office chair—her office chair, right down to the squeak. “Is this your new assistant? The replacement for Ted? I never liked Ted. He liked me, though. Everyone did.”

  Marla instinctively maneuvered herself between Pelham and Joshua. “He’s my friend. And he’s none of your business.”

  Joshua shook his head. The broken bones in his neck ground together audibly. “You don’t have friends, Marla. Not really. There’s no room inside you for anything but yourself and your duty. Your city. Nothing but ashes in the hearth of your heart.”

  She gritted her teeth. “Fuck this. Pelham, look for a door out of here.”

  “You don’t leave until we’re done,” Joshua said, gently, gently. He rose from the desk, and he had a kitchen knife in his hand, the same knife, still wet with Ted’s blood. “Which means you don’t leave at all, because we never had closure, you and I. I was your lover. You took me into your arms, your bed, your confidence. Into your heart—I thought. I was closer to you than anyone. And what did you do?” He looked down at the knife in his hands, then back up at her. “You killed me. I know you loved me until the end. I saw it in your face, in the tears just starting to well up in your eyes when you snapped my neck and sent me here. What kind of woman are you, Marla? What kind of person kills what they love?”

  Marla licked her lips. “I don’t…you didn’t…you were going to kill me. You killed Ted. I had no choice.”

  He shrugged. “I never loved you. I was a liar. I acted true to my nature. But you…you did love me, and you snapped my neck anyway. What’s your nature? Ashes. A heart full of ashes.” Joshua put the knife down and came around the side of the desk, head lolling, eyes fixed on her.

  “I had no choice,” she whispered.

  “Please. You could have incapacitated me. Twisted the knife out of my hand, dropped me to the ground, knocked me out. I was no match for you. I was a lover, not a fighter. But you don’t hold back, do you, Marla? Erased me like a mistake on a blackboard. Because I was inconvenient, and complicated. Because I embarrassed you, tricked you. Isn’t that right?” He stepped toward her, put his hand on her cheek, and gazed into her eyes. She could smell him, the scent of honey, vanilla, just a hint of male sweat. Even without his supernatural glamour, he was still beautiful, her beautiful boy, and he was a monster, yes, of course; but wasn’t she a monster, too?

  “We’re both monsters,” he whispered, and she wondered with a jolt if he could read her mind, or if their thoughts simply ran on parallel tracks. “Two monsters. We may as well be monsters for each other, and leave everyone else out of it. You and I, together forever, here in this room. Just one thing to do first. To make us match. I’ll give you what you gave me. One little twist.” He put his hand on her chin, and Marla just waited for what she knew must come next: the hard twist, the break of her neck. She deserved it. She’d killed Joshua, and she’d never allowed herself to feel a moment’s regret or remorse for that act. But he was right. It had been easier to kill him than to cope with him alive, knowing he’d played her for a fool. She hadn’t faced that fact. Righteousness had been her armor. Until now. Now it was all rising up, and a broken neck was only the beginning of the penance she owed.

  But Joshua staggered away, reaching behind him, flailing, and suddenly Pelham was there, taking Marla’s arm, tugging her away, saving her. Marla’s eyes slowly came back into focus, and her fuzzy head cleared. “What—Pelly? What?”

  “I stabbed him with his own knife,” Pelham said grimly. “Just like he stabbed your friend Ted. It seemed only fitting. I apologize if I overstepped my bounds, Ms. Mason, but he was going to hurt you.”

  Joshua sat down on the edge of the desk, still trying to reach the knife Pelham had jammed into him. He began weeping, blinking tears from his beautiful eyes. “I was alive,” he said, voice harsh, no longer a lover’s whisper. “Damn it, I was alive, you loved me, you should have let me kill you, I’m supposed to be the one who’s alive.”

  “The door is this way, Ms. Mason.” Pelham led her by the arm to the far end of the room, to a door that didn’t exist in her real office.

  Marla let herself be led. “I had to do it,” she said, not sure if she was talking to Pelham or Joshua. “It was him or me. He tried to kill me, I had no choice. Isn’t that right? I had to do it.”

  “Of course,” Pelham said, and opened the door.

  A heart full of ashes, Marla thought.

  They entered a gray stairway, and after Pelham closed the door, Marla sank down to sit on a step and put her head in her hands. “This place is getting to me, Pelham. If you weren’t here, I’d have been lost two or three times by now.”

  “It is not a pleasant journey for me, but it is…less personally tailored to my experience. I think I am better able to cope. These women and men and monsters are all strangers to me. I have never, myself, killed anyone.”

  “I don’t recommend it. It’s bad for your soul. Even if you had the best reasons in the world, it eats at you. Maybe not right away, but eventually. The best you can hope for is to die yourself before all the shit you’ve pushed down comes welling up again.”

  “But…we’re almost done, aren’t we? Not much farther now?” Pelham’s voice was hope layered on top of desperation. He’d done some fighting down here, hadn’t he? That was new for him. Like B said, you couldn’t go to Hell without the experience changing you.

  Marla stood up. “Yeah. The only way out is through. Let’s go upstairs.” She had to focus on the task at hand. To repress everything else. It was the only way to continue.

  They emerged onto another rooftop—it was the roof of the club, Marla realized, on a warm summer evening—and faced a twisting tornado of gray feathers, white shit, and harsh cries. The buildings in the distance were all liberally spattered with bird shit. “Pigeons. Somerset’s turn, I guess.” She opened her shoulder bag and took out a good hunting slingshot with a molded grip, and a couple sacks of ball bearings. “Get Bethany’s crossbow ready. If Somerset appears—he’ll be the thing that isn’t a pigeon—hit him. I’m going to get his attention.”

  “You seem eager to confront him.”

  Her relationship with Somerset had been unambiguous: he was her first great enemy. There were none of the treacherous depths she’d run into with Joshua. This would be simple and direct. Just what she needed. “Fighting Somerset, putting him down, made my name in this city. It’s how I became chief sorcerer. It was also the hardest, best fight I’ve ever had.” She loaded the slingshot with a steel ball, drew back, and let it fly. A tiny portion of the tornado of pigeons fell, and Marla started whistling as she loaded up another shot, and another, plinking away at the birds. “Better than fish in a barrel.” After she’d fired two dozen times, the tornado finally began to shift, twist, and open up, birds parting like curtains, revealing a figure hanging in the air in the center of the vortex.

  “There he is,” Marla said. “Hit him!”

  Pelham raised the crossbow, took aim, and fired. Marla half expected the birds to fly in and intercept the bolts, but both struck Somerset true, in the chest. He didn’t plummet from the sky like a stone, though. He flew forward, and Marla saw now that some of those dirty gray feathers were attached to his back. Like Be
thany, Somerset had grown wings in the afterlife, though his were enormous bird’s wings. He seemed to dangle from the wings like a spider from a thread, and as he slowly flapped his way closer, he looked just as gangly as always. He wore only a ragged loincloth, and his skin was the same gray shade it had been in his undeath, when Marla killed him.

  Somerset glided down and landed on the rooftop, unconcerned with the bolts sticking out of his chest, and folded his dirty wings behind him. “Marla Mason.” His voice like something that scuttles in the night. “Why have you dragged me here?” His eyes seemed to spin like dirty pinwheels, almost hypnotic.

  Marla blinked. “What?”

  “I was having a perfectly pleasant afterlife when I heard you calling. Ruining the solitude I’ve made.” He gestured at the guano-stained cityscape before them. “I can’t create any people, but to be honest, people only got in the way. I’m happier here than I was alive. I always liked the inside of my own head better than the outside world anyway. The outside was so resistant to being shaped.”

  “Aren’t you supposed to be psychotically attacking me?”

  Somerset shrugged. “The dead often go mad in the presence of the living, I’m told, but after you’ve been brought back to life and sent back here again, something changes. You realize that life, real life, is no longer an option—just a false life, as an undead thing, skin numb, like your whole body is wrapped in leather. No taste, no smell, no real pleasures. It takes the edge off the blinding jealousy a bit. It helps you accept your fate. Normally, the dead can’t change, but being brought back to life provides another little window for learning experiences to slip through.”

  “But I killed you,” Marla said.

  Somerset frowned. “Hardly. You couldn’t have killed me. You were an upstart. Sauvage killed me, and took over the city. And I killed him for that when I came back to life, which is how you took control, I suppose. Don’t look surprised. I still hear things down here, sometimes. I have many connections. But no, you didn’t kill me, Marla. You just…put me down. Helped me rest again. I know I resisted you, but being raised from the dead made me crazy, ambitious, violent, desperate for things I could no longer have. I’m happier here, in my own little empire of the dead and the gray. And if this meeting has fulfilled whatever strange subconscious longing you had to see me again, I’d just as soon you moved along. You’re spoiling the whole milieu.”