Grim Tides (Marla Mason)

by Pratt, T. A.

  “Families kill each other all the time,” Marla said, thinking of her brother.

  “This is true,” Arachne said. “Is there anything else I can help you with?” Her tone said she hoped not.

  Marla brushed a many-legged, winged thing away from her face. “You ever heard of a guy named Reva? Claims to be a god of the lost and the exiled?”

  Arachne frowned. “I sensed the arrival of a minor power, and heard rumors, but I have not encountered this being myself. You have?”

  “He introduced himself, yeah. He thinks I’m primed to become one of his worshippers, I guess.”

  Arachne grunted. “Serving a god is a tricky business.”

  “I don’t serve anyone,” Marla said. Or anyplace. Not anymore. “Anyway, thanks. Sorry to bother you.” She stood up.

  “Wait,” Arachne said. “I doubt it is important, but... the wave-mages, they occasionally recruit, and they have been grooming a new member, a boy named... John? Luke? Something like that. He shows some natural aptitude for magic, and has the appropriate reverence for the sea, but he is not... hmmm... ‘assimilated’ yet? He may be able to give you a more informed perspective on the group than I can, since he knows them, but is not yet fully of them.”

  “Hey, a lead’s a lead,” Marla said. “I’ll talk to him. Do you know where I can find him?”

  “He works at a dive shop called Handsome Bob’s, in Napili,” she said. “Beyond that, I do not know – he is often out on the water.”

  “Thanks – uh, mahalo, Arachne. I owe you one.”

  Arachne bowed her head in acknowledgment. “I shall keep you in mind if I need future assistance. I wish you luck in your investigations. Ronin was... a good man, or at least, a man trying to be good.”

  “That’s all any of us can do,” Marla said. “Though some people don’t even bother. Aloha.”

  Marla found Pelham looking down at one of the seven sacred pools. “What, you don’t want to go for a dip?”

  “It looks enticing,” he admitted, “but I thought it would be ill-advised to be submerged in water, in case you had need of my assistance.”

  “My visit went off without a hitch, though I don’t know if I accomplished much. Arachne did suggest someone I could talk to, though. You up for the drive back around the island?”

  “Of course. But, may I suggest you stop for a meal along the way? I fear you don’t take proper care of yourself.”

  Marla sighed. “I’ve always been better at taking care of other people, and by ‘taking care of,’ I guess I mean ‘beating up.’ Sure, let’s eat. I bet you have a place in mind, right?”

  Pelham drove her to Mama’s Fish House, a restaurant on the North shore, about halfway back to Lahaina. At first, she objected because it was too fancy, but Pelham started going on about how she was married to a god, her worth exceeded those of diamonds and gold, and she agreed to eat there just to get him to shut up. The restaurant was nestled in a gorgeous cove and surrounded by palm trees, the walls of the building mostly windows, and thus largely open to the air. The place was decorated with tiki sculptures and outrigger canoes and oversized bird cages – it might have been kitschy anywhere else, but this was Hawai’i, and they were probably actual local antiques. The hostess led them to a table near a window, and a delicious sea breeze wafted through, cooling them as Marla read the menu. “Wait,” she said, “this thing tells you the name of the guy who caught the fish.”

  “Let’s hope it tastes good, then,” Pelham said. “Or you’ll know the man to whom you should complain.”

  “Ha.” Marla was a long way from being a foodie – she tended to think of food as fuel, and got by on jerky, peanut butter, power bars, and boiled eggs most of the time. Really enjoying food seemed like an indulgence, and indulgences were for the weak... but what was the pressing reason to be strong? Sure, Nicolette and Jason were apparently coming to try and kill her, but Nicolette had never been half as good as she thought she was, and Jason... well, she still had hope she could talk to him, and talk him out of whatever he was doing, and anyway, he wasn’t going to get the drop on her. Whatever chance they’d had to kill her had been blown as soon as Death told her about it, as far as she was concerned. Forewarned was forearmed and all that. Eating something opulent wasn’t going to put her in mortal danger.

  They ordered lobster guacamole to share – so that’s what heaven tasted like, good to know – and she got the stuffed mahi mahi. Pelham ordered prawns, and welcome to them. Marla thought the things were too rubbery by half, though Pelly said she’d just never had a good one. They chatted, and it was pleasant. He was a lot less deferential than he used to be. Traveling the world for a few months had been good for him. He actually told her some jokes, though his delivery could’ve used a little work, and –

  Marla dropped her fork, and it hit her plate with a clatter. She half rose from her chair, craning her head to look out the nearest window. Pelham looked at her with alarm until she shook her head and sat back down. “Can’t be,” she muttered.

  “What’s wrong?” Pelham twisted in his chair to look out the window. “Did you see something?”

  “Someone. Someone who’s supposed to be dead – damn it, who is dead, she must be. Probably just someone with a resemblance... . Listen, I’ll be right back, okay?” Marla tossed her napkin onto the table and rose from her chair again, winding her way through the tables toward the walkway that led out of the restaurant. She caught a glimpse of a woman with short blonde hair, in a white silk blouse and flowy white pants, disappearing around a stand of trees.

  Marla followed her, soon reaching a small but gorgeous stretch of beach, a miniature cove adjacent to the restaurant. A family was posing on an outrigger canoe (or a prop recreation of one) on the sand while the mother took photos, and a few other tourists were wandering around, but the woman was down by the water, alone. It was hard to tell from the back, and from this distance, but the way she carried herself...

  The woman turned, looked at Marla, and raised her hand to wave.

  Marla hissed in a sharp breath, the same sound she might make if she’d inadvertently burned herself. Even thirty feet away, there was no mistaking the angular beauty of Susan Wellstone, Marla’s onetime rival for the rulership of Felport. Susan had dropped her plans to assassinate Marla and seized the opportunity to become chief sorcerer of San Francisco instead, but that hadn’t made the two of them any friendlier, so seeing her was never a pleasure.

  But this time was worse, because Susan was dead, murdered many weeks ago on the West Coast. So what was this? A ghost? Ghosts tended to haunt specific people or places related to their deaths, so what would Susan’s shade be doing outside Mama’s Fish House? More likely it was someone wearing an illusion to fuck with Marla’s head.

  As Marla approached, she let her goddess-vision rise, dispelling all illusions... but the woman by the water’s edge didn’t change at all. “You’re not a ghost,” Marla said, stepping beside Susan. “You’re not wearing a glamour of bent light and twisted perception, either. So what the fuck are you? Evil twin? Or, ha, good twin? A clone? Did Susan make herself a backup body and download her consciousness?”

  The couldn’t-be-Susan looked at Marla, her gaze disconcerting as always because of her heterochromia: one eye was green, the other blue. “You’re going to die,” she said. “Your past is catching up with you – and your future is catching up with you, too, and isn’t that so much scarier? I don’t know why I’m not dead anymore – I was, they tell me I was – but I’m glad to be back, so I can see your suffering, followed by your end.”

  “Threatening me never worked out that well for you when you were alive,” Marla said.

  “Ah, but you had friends then, Marla. You had power, and influence, and artifacts.” Susan – no, not Susan, don’t buy the bullshit – knelt and reached into the sea, cupping her hands and lifting up a measure of glistening water. “But you let all that go, didn’t you?” Susan opened her hands, and the water poured out onto the sand. Mar
la gasped, doubling over and vomiting up all the water she’d drunk at lunch, and pretty much everything else in her stomach, too. A simple but nasty bit of sympathetic magic, entangling the handful of sea water with the water in Marla’s belly – pouring one out had caused the other to come pouring out as well. Marla straightened, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand, the surge of nausea thankfully passed. She looked around, but Susan’s double was nowhere to be seen, and the family by the outrigger canoe was staring at her with horror.

  “Stay away from the prawns,” Marla called, and they turned away, talking amongst themselves. No one showed any gratitude anymore. Kneeling – not too close to her puke – Marla scanned the ground and tried to find a trace of Susan’s footprints, but this was a popular restaurant, and a lot of customers had come down this way, so the sand was pretty well crisscrossed. With her goddess-vision still active, Marla scanned the beach, in case Susan had draped herself in a glamour, but there was no one here but ordinaries. She trudged back up the beach toward the restaurant.

  Pelham was still at the table, fretfully twisting a napkin. Marla sat across from him and took a long sip of ice water to clear out her mouth. “Are you all right?” he asked.

  “I think those old enemies Death mentioned have made their first move,” Marla said. “They’ve got better tricks than I expected, I’ll give them that. Way beyond what Nicolette or my brother could come up with alone. Makes me wonder who else is in on this little vendetta.”

  “What should we do?” Pelham asked.

  Marla shrugged. “Lay traps. Get prepared. But first, we’ve got a murder to solve.”

  “Surely the case can wait, if your enemies are attacking – ”

  “That wasn’t an attack. It was a taunt. And I wouldn’t give them the satisfaction of changing my plans just because they did a little something like raising the dead.”

  “Are you Handsome Bob?”

  The grizzled, white-bearded, sun-roughened man behind the counter grinned, showing incongruously white and shiny teeth. “Look at this face. You’re telling me that ain’t self-evident? Yeah, I’m Bob. What can I do you for?”

  “You’ve got a kid working for you,” Marla said. “His name’s John, or Luke, or – ”

  “Jon-Luc,” Bob said. “His parents are French, or from French Polynesia, hell, I forget which. He mess up a transaction or something?”

  “Not at all,” Marla said. “He recommended a great snorkeling spot on the road to Hana, and I just wanted to thank him, and see if he had any other tips.”

  Bob grunted. “Normally I’d be offended you aren’t asking me, but I have to admit, even though I’ve lived here twenty years, that boy knows more good hidden spots than I do. He’s out back hosing off some equipment.”

  Marla and Pelham went where he directed, down an aisle full of dangling snorkels and facemasks in assorted styles, and out the back door to a little concrete slab where a boy of perhaps nineteen with a shaggy blond mop of hair stood, washing sand off a row of brightly colored body boards.

  “Jon-Luc?” Marla said, and the boy turned off the water and looked over, his face open and guileless.

  “Can I help you ma’am?”

  “I think we have a mutual friend,” Marla said. “Glyph? My name’s Marla. I’m... helping Glyph out with something. You know what I’m talking about?”

  The boy swallowed, and nodded.

  “Great,” Marla said. “Want to take a break? I’ll buy you a soda.”

  Jon-Luc cleared it with his boss, then walked with Marla across the parking lot to a little restaurant that specialized in mixed plates, that uniquely Hawai’ian collision of Pacific and Asian cuisine, and secretly one of Marla’s favorite things about life on the island. The three of them took seats around a metal table under an umbrella in one corner of the wooden deck, just a few steps from the beach and a few yards from the ocean. Marla was hungry, having lost most of the lunch she’d eaten at Mama’s Fish House, so she ordered the kalua pig and cabbage plate, which came with the traditional one scoop of macaroni salad and two scoops of rice. Jon-Luc and Pelham made do with iced tea, and once they were all settled, Marla gave Jon-Luc her best friendly smile and said, “So, which one of your friends murdered Ronin, anyway?”

  The kid went all wide-eyed, mouth falling open, but Marla kept smiling. He looked at Pelham, who nodded encouragingly. “Uh,” Jon-Luc said. “I don’t know. I mean, I don’t think it was any of my friends.”

  Marla leaned across the table toward him. “Here’s the thing. Somebody cut Ronin’s throat, which means he had an enemy. Except he didn’t, because as far as I can tell he spent literally all his time out paddling around in the waves with his buddies. So if I’m looking for suspects, I have to look first at his friends. You get it?”

  Jon-Luc pushed some hair out of his face, sighed, and shook his head. “I get it. But I don’t think you do. Glyph and them... they’re like one person. They have to remind themselves to talk out loud when I’m around. None of them would try to kill Ronin – that would be like trying to kill your, I don’t know, your lungs or heart or something.”

  “Come on,” Marla said. “There’s no conflict in the group? No disagreements on philosophy – some who want to save the whales, and some who want to kill the whalers? Anything?”

  Jon-Luc shook his head. “No way, they’re in perfect harmony, with nature and with one another, they – ”

  “They tell all the newcomers that,” a kindly voice said. “But it’s not true, oh no, not true at all, how could they be all one mind when even one mind is all full of contradictions and conflicts and inner voices shouting, shouting over everyone and each other and everything?”

  Marla twisted around in her chair, grinning at the woman in a dripping wetsuit standing on the steps down to the beach. “Well, this is really turning into a reunion show. Nice to see you.”

  “True true, I am very nice to see,” the Bay Witch agreed.

  BROTHERLY LOVE

  Jason Mason had been laying low in Mississippi, only occasionally emerging to count cards at some of the riverboat casinos to keep himself in whiskey and cigarettes, afraid to touch any of his various bank accounts in case his sister was keeping tabs on him. Who knew what people like her were capable of? She’d killed his partner Danny Two Saints, and done her level best to kill him, and she had more than connections – she had fucking powers.

  Then his mother called to say Marla wanted to talk to him. Mom tried to lay a guilt trip on him for not mentioning he’d seen his sister recently, so he gave her a line of bullshit about how he didn’t want to upset her, he knew Marla was a sore point, and all that. He wasn’t fond of his mother, exactly, but he’d never quite managed to disentangle himself from her, and anyway, she was always good for an alibi, so he kept in touch.

  So now he sat in the living room of his rented Airstream trailer, parked on a scraggly lot in the middle of some bare fields, nothing for miles but crows and farmhouses and leafless trees. He watched dust swirl in the yellow light coming in through the dirty half-closed mini-blinds, smoking a cigarette, and tried to work out the angles. What was the percentage in calling Marla back? What did she want? Their recent history was even uglier than their ancient history, and now she was trying to reach out. Why, why, why? A trick, a trap, a lure?

  The only way to find out was to call and ask. He gazed at the disposable cell phone in his hand, the number his mother had recited repeating itself in his head – he’d always been good with numbers, almost as good as he was with people – and thought, Screw it, why not?

  Before he could dial, someone pounded on his door hard enough to make the trailer rock on its wheels. Jason slipped out of the chair, drawing his pistol, and waited.

  “Avon calling!” a woman’s voice shouted, and Jason frowned. Avon? Who still sold Avon door-to-door?

  “I don’t want any!” he called, rising, but keeping his hand on his gun.

  The door creaked open, despite the fact that he was sure he’d cha
ined it shut, and he squinted against the rectangle of daylight. A woman climbed the steps into the trailer and looked at him, hands on her hips, just a silhouette against the brightness.

  “Lady, you aren’t welcome. Beat it.”

  The door slammed shut, apparently of its own accord, but he could make himself believe it was just the wind. When his eyes adjusted to the new dimness, he raised his pistol – because for a second, he thought it was Marla, come to finish him off. She was the right height, and the shape of her face was almost the same, but her hair was wild and long and red, and anyway, she was too young, closer to twenty than thirty. Marla didn’t dress like that, either, in a scarlet silk blouse and tight skirt. The woman gave him a big goofy grin like nothing he’d ever seen on Marla’s lips, and any residual resemblance dissolved then. “Cute gun!” she said, and the voice was a bit like Marla’s, too, but brassier, and too loud for the small space. “Point it somewhere else, would you?”

  “I don’t know who you are, but – ”

  “I know who you are, though,” she said. “A boy who can’t follow directions.”

  The gun twisted in his hand, and he shouted, dropping it – the weapon had transformed into twenty or thirty big cockroaches, the monsters the locals called tree roaches, and he wiped his hand on his shirt as he backed away, and the bugs scurried for the corners.

  “My name’s Elsie Jarrow, Jason. I’m here to talk about your sister.”

  Shit. Marla must have sent this woman to finish him off. Figures she wouldn’t bother to do it herself. Why had she tried to call him, though? Just to gloat?