Queen of Nothing (Marla Mason Book 9)

by T. A. Pratt

  Marla leaned across to Daniel, and kissed him on the lips rather more chastely than she wanted to. “When you, ah, turn my divinity back up to full power, I might... change.”

  Daniel nodded. “I understand. Getting to see you at all, to fight with you again... that’s more than I ever expected anyway.”

  Marla turned to Jenny. “Did you have fun?”

  “I thought of lots of interesting new things I can set on fire when I get back home,” she said.

  “I’m, uh, sorry. That you died,” Marla said.

  “I was pretty bad at being alive,” Jenny said. “This is better, for me.”

  Marla took a breath, exhaled, and nodded. “Okay then. Let’s do a god transfusion.”

  Daniel took Elsie’s hand, and then Marla’s, and closed his eyes. Marla felt something inside her shift and then bleed away, passing through Daniel. Elsie’s eyes widened, and she gasped, then trembled in entirely too erotic a fashion.

  Daniel squeezed Marla’s hand, and suddenly torrents of power flooded into her, the fire at the center of her going from spark to fire to bonfire to inferno to sun –

  Marla closed her eyes.

  The Bride opened them. She looked around, and what she saw displeased her, but an agreement had been made, and when gods made promises, those promises were kept, even if a stupid mortal part of the god had done the promising.

  She released the hand of the dead boy beside her, wiping her palm on her pants. The red-haired woman—no, the red-haired god, now—stood and stretched, great prismatic wings unfurling from her back. She leapt into the air.

  The Bride grabbed her foot and pulled her back down. “No you don’t. We agreed to terms in principle, but we’re going to hammer out some details now.”

  Elsie laughed. “We’re both gods, you can’t hold me here. I have a whole world to play in! A whole universe!”

  “You fool,” the Bride said. “We are both gods, but you are in my realm, and while there are many ways to enter the land of the dead, no one leaves this place without my permission. If you want to go play in that world of yours, we need to have a talk first.”

  Elsie sighed. “You’re no fun.” She fluttered back down to the ground.

  “Marla?” the dead boy said, and the Bride waved a hand, banishing him and the burning girl back to their respective afterlives, and also from her mind.

  “Your sharp teeth are so pretty,” Elsie said cheerfully.

  •

  “So she’s a trickster god now.” Death sipped a brandy with cocaine dissolved in it—he’d read about the drink in some book, apparently. “Do you think that was a good idea?”

  The Bride sighed. “I told Elsie if she got up to anything too destructive, we’d come down on her hard. There are two of us: we’re twice the god she is. She says she’s going to wander around being a fairy godmother, and occasionally a reverse fairy godmother. Giving people epiphanies, and ripping away the veil, and other nonsense. She might spawn some new religions, but I can’t imagine any of them will last long. I don’t think she’s interested in conquering the world or anything. She just wants to make the world more interesting, and now she won’t give people cancer just by walking past them, so what do I care? I escorted her to a passage back to the world above, and barred her from entering here again.”

  Death nodded. “Still. I’m surprised you didn’t fight her to the bitter end instead, even if it would have required asking me for help. Defeating your enemy by giving her what she wants—that’s an unusual approach for you.”

  The Bride bared her sharpened teeth. “I don’t like it. Don’t blame me. It was my mortal self’s idea. True, I wanted Marla to change, to become a better person, to be less selfish, less rash, less short-sighted and pig-headed, but I didn’t expect her to develop all this pointless mercy. The one thing she always did that I approved of was implacably fighting her enemies.”

  “Mmm. Are you going to let your mortal self keep the memories of this experience?”

  The Bride shuddered. “Of course not. If I let her know it’s possible to keep her own mind, with a measure of my powers, in this place? You know she’d try to find a way to keep her continuity of personality during the monthly transition, and remain entirely herself during her time in the underworld. That would be a disaster. She’d lose all objectivity, and would meddle in all sorts of trivial personal matters, here and on Earth. Just look at what she did this time, recruiting her dead friends to help her face Elsie, instead of turning to you for help! Stubborn, but at the same time sentimental. No, she doesn’t have the right mindset to be a god. She takes things too personally. The... distance, the objectivity... I have in this form is what makes it possible for me to do my work. She can’t have those memories. It’s too dangerous.”

  “Not even her memories of Daniel?”

  “Especially not of Daniel. Gods, who knows what she’d do if she remembered him? She might try to bring him back to life, and with her current abilities, she could probably do it—which would be ironic, since she killed him partly because he wanted to bring Artie Mann back to life. She’s better off forgetting the boy.” She sniffed. “You’re enough one true love for anyone, anyway.”

  “I like to think so. Hmm. Seems a shame Marla went through all that, though, and won’t retain any of the experience. It’s the sort of thing that could change a person.”

  “Oh, well. I might leave a little thought in her mind.” The Bride smiled. “A strong antipathy toward being overly merciful to her enemies, perhaps. Defeating someone by letting them win? It sets a terrible precedent, and I’d rather not have her repeat it.”

  “I’m sure you know best,” Death said, with husbandly tact. “You have to go back to Earth soon. Your month here is almost over, and you need to deal with that thing that escaped from the caverns below Death Valley.”

  “Oh, right. The vermin from Elsewhere. How tedious. I can’t believe the trivial things Marla chooses to spend her time on.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Creatures like that disturb me greatly. It’s not from this universe, and so it’s beyond our powers of life and death.” He shuddered.

  The Bride laughed. “You’ve never been mortal. When you’re alive, most things are beyond your powers of life and death. Mortals gets used to it.” She leaned over and kissed his cheek. “I will miss you while I’m gone. Perhaps we can spend some time together when I return? The workings of the world won’t suffer much if we spend an afternoon crafting our own little paradise, will it?”

  “I can’t wait,” he said, and kissed her back.

  The Dead Boyfriends Club

  Elsie clapped her hands. “Bravo. What a romantic and, in retrospect, sad ending, though really you should have lingered more on my moment of triumph and elevation. Oh well. I’ll write up some editorial notes, you can tell it better next time.”

  “Huh.” Rondeau gazed thoughtfully at the ceiling. They were surrounded by the remnants of pancakes, sausage, eggs, toast, and the other detritus of a pricy breakfast. “All this time you had a dead boyfriend. Tragic love. Kind of puts your whole... you-ness... in a new light.”

  Marla sipped a glass of orange juice, her throat dry from all that talking. “I didn’t remember he was dead, so I doubt it had much of an impact on my life choices, Rondeau.”

  He held up his hands in a warding-off gesture. “I know, I know, but that stuff has to get at you on some level, subconsciously or whatever... or maybe not, what do I know.”

  “You can join me in the tragic dead boyfriends club,” Bradley said. “You be treasurer, I’ll be president.”

  “Why can’t I be president?” Marla demanded. “I literally killed my boyfriend.”

  “Well, me too. I got Henry into using. He wouldn’t have overdosed if I hadn’t handed him the needle.”

  Marla shook her head. “Thpt. He could’ve said no. I hurled my boyfriend off a roof.”

  “Yeah, but it was a self-defense thing. It was you or him. Nope. You’re treasurer. Maybe secretary, but
only if I see some tears on the anniversary of his death.”

  “I could have a dead boyfriend,” Rondeau said. “I probably do. I mean, depending on how you define boyfriend. I have definitely slept with some guys in Vegas who don’t make the kind of choices that lead to a healthy lifespan.”

  “I have loads of dead boyfriends,” Elsie said. “I definitely probably almost certainly killed at least a couple of them. I call vice-president!” She paused. “But wait, there was some other point to that story Marla told.” She snapped her fingers. “Yes! You recruited your friends from their afterlives to help fight me. It was a terrible plan, of course, because you were up against me, so you had no chance, but it’s not necessarily a terrible plan in general. I imagine the souls of the dead are probably eager to leave their little bubbles and cause trouble now that they’re being boiled in molten feces, or whatever it is the New Death has come up with in terms of eternal torment. I was thinking: how about we stage a huge jailbreak? Flood Hell with the dead—I think given the circumstances we can technically call them the ‘damned’—and give Skully something to think about.”

  “He would probably take vengeance on any souls who escape,” Marla said. She held up her hand. “But they’re already suffering unspeakable torments, etc., right, I get it. But... no. You just want massive disruption, Elsie. Any souls we come across, we’ll try to restore to their former afterlives, and free from suffering, but it’s not fair to ask them to fight.”

  “Fun is over here, and you are way over there,” Elsie said.

  “Tell you what. I might recruit some souls to help us, on a case-by-case basis. But nothing too indiscriminate.” She looked around. “Last chance to quit, guys. No hard feelings if you choose to bow out now. Going into Hell in your physical body means you can die in Hell in your physical body, and your soul won’t have to transmigrate very far. If we fail, you’re in for an eternity of suffering, probably with some distressingly personal touches.”

  “I’m good,” Bradley said. “Yes, eternal suffering, not fun, but we’re in for that anyway, if Skully stays in charge.”

  “Except probably not for a while,” Rondeau said. “Accelerating the timetable of eternal torment seems like a pretty bad idea.” He shrugged. “But what do I care? I’m a psychic parasite inhabiting the body of a murder victim. I don’t even know if I can die, and if I do, there’s no reason to think I’d end up in your dumb human afterlife anyway. What’ve I got to lose?”

  “There has never been any doubt that I would accompany you to the gates of Hell, Mrs. Mason, and on beyond them,” Pelham said.

  “Do we put all our hands together and shout ‘Go team Marla’ now?” Elsie said brightly. “Or can I start stabbing all of you and sending you to Hell?”

  “Hold up!” Rondeau said.

  “Yes.” Pelham carefully looked at a point about a foot to Elsie’s right. “You should put on some clothing first.”

  “The Greeks went naked into battle,” Elsie said.

  “That is true,” Pelham said. “Though perhaps not relevant.”

  Rondeau raised his hand. “That’s not what I meant. Since when do I object to naked anybody? What’s I’m saying is, can you give us a couple of hours to settle our affairs, at least? By which I mean, go out and get laid one last time? You’ve been leaning on this ‘certain death’ thing pretty hard, so....”

  Marla nodded. “Okay. We’ll reconvene here at, say, six tonight? And then... into the pit.”

  “I’d better call Cole, and make sure Marzi still has a teacher after I get eaten by Cerberus or whatever.”

  “I should return my library books,” Pelham said. “Lest they be out of circulation forever.”

  “I’m going to Paris so I can shop for an invasion-of-Hell outfit.” Elsie vanished, presumably appearing naked in a French dress shop a moment later.

  Rondeau looked at Marla. “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m just going to take a walk.” She closed her eyes, and folded the Earth, and when she opened her eyes again, she was in a dark office in the city of Felport, standing before a huge block of ice.

  “Hi, Nicolette.” She sat in a dusty chair and looked at the iceberg, which was also dusty. The room, indeed the whole building, had been magically sealed off; she could feel the wards pulsing from here, but she’d cocooned herself in obfuscating magics. “So it turns out freezing you into a block of ice was sort of hasty. A part of me I couldn’t consciously access decided it was done, that I wasn’t going to let my enemies win ever again, even if they weren’t exactly enemies anymore, and even if them winning actually made the world a better place. It was a cold, nasty, vengeful personality quirk... and the truth is, I still have it. I still feel it. I’m not quite the Bride of Death right now, but I’m not quite plain old Marla Mason, either. I’m something in between, and it’s less an amalgam and more oil and water, mixing and churning without ever quite blending. One goes up, the other goes down. You were a pretty terrible person, Nicolette, but if I’m honest, I’ve done some terrible things myself. You found your place, and you were doing good... and I threw a petulant fit, took the hard line, and stole all that away from you, deciding what you’d done was unforgiveable... and that I was the person in charge of making sure no one ever forgave it.”

  She rubbed the place on her wrist where, in recent incarnations, the words “Do Better” had been tattooed. A message from her higher self, urging her to rise above petty and selfish actions, to take a wider and more inclusive view. She hadn’t done a very good job of that.

  Marla considered melting the ice and setting Nicolette free, but there wasn’t time now to explain herself, or help undo the damage she’d done. Setting Nicolette loose now without guidance or assistance would just lead to a magical war between her and Perren River and the other sorcerers of Felport, fighting for supremacy, and sowing that kind of chaos and just walking away was more Elsie’s style than Marla’s. If Marla managed to survive the next day in Hell, she could see about redressing this particular wrong... and taking care of a few other things, too, before she succumbed to the inevitable consequences of her plan.

  She turned the Earth, and found a nice mountaintop to sit on, and thought about all the things she’d done... and the remaining things she had to do.

  Last Meal

  Bradley tried to come back to the suite early, but the sound of Rondeau and some friend and/or paid companion making the most of his remaining time on Earth in one of the bedrooms led him to flee to the kitschy old-fashioned diner in the casino.

  B had settled things as best he could, made sure Marzi would continue her education if he never made it back, and said goodbye to her without making it sound like he was actually saying goodbye, because it would be just like her to insist on tagging along to the underworld.

  Now his mottled reflection in the chromed napkin holder on the table turned its face toward him. “Hey. Psst. Little B.”

  “Hey, Big B.” He took a sip of his vanilla milkshake and tried to decide how crazy he looked talking to himself. Probably not that crazy; it was Vegas, after all. “Are you here to convince me to get reabsorbed into the collective instead of throwing my life away?”

  “Nah, I tried that in a couple of adjacent branches of the multiverse, and you’re the same all over. It’s cool you want to help Marla.”

  “Any glimpses of likelihoods for me? Are we totally fucked or just regular fucked?”

  “Some of your counterparts didn’t bother with this whole one-last-afternoon-off thing, and bounced straight down to Hell.... because Elsie just started thwacking you all with the sword without asking first, mostly. I peeked in on a branch or two of the multiverse, but none of you have come back yet, which either means you failed or you’re still in the process of winning.”

  “That’s not comforting, but it’s not not comforting. So what did you want, anyway?”

  “To be totally honest? You seemed kind of lonely.”

  Little B laughed, and then went quiet, and sai
d, “I’ve been thinking about Henry.”

  Big B nodded. “Sure.”

  “He’s dead in this reality. Which means he’s in that underworld. Which means he’s suffering.”

  “I hear you.”

  “So we have to win. I know I’m punching out of my weight class, here. That I’m sidekick material at best in the company of gods. But I’ll do anything I have to in order to put Marla back on the throne.”

  Big B nodded. “Yeah. Believe me, I’m rooting for you, even if... well. It’s too bad about Marla, but that’s how it has to go.”

  Bradley frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “Well, if she wins, I mean.... Oh, you hadn’t put it together. Or maybe you don’t have the pieces you need to put it together. If you ever worked on a puzzle with Marla, she’d probably hide the edges and corners, just to make it more challenging.”

  “Are you going to clarify what you’re talking about?”

  “I... don’t think so? Because it might be too much like trying to influence the outcome of events in your branch of reality? I say that because the wall beside me here at my house in the center of the multiverse just bloomed a big patch of black mold, which means I’m starting to overstep my bounds again. So, uh, never mind? Fight the good fight and do your best and believe in yourself and... don’t do drugs? I guess you’ve got that last one covered.”

  “The only thing worse than worrying about something is knowing there’s something you should be worried about but not knowing what it is.”

  “Nah,” Big B said. “There are at least a million things worse than that. Good luck avoiding an eternity of suffering, Little B.”

  The reflection was just a reflection after that. Bradley considered fretting, and then he considered extrapolating and deducing, and then he ordered another milkshake instead.

  •

  At six, everyone arrived. Rondeau had a spread waiting for them, including all their favorite foods: crème brulee for himself, crab cakes for Pelham, black-and-blue steak for Bradley, chicken-fried steak and mashed potatoes for Marla, and a big messy sausage-and-vegetable egg scramble for Elsie; he’d guessed about the latter and gone for something mixed-up and chaotic. He even got lemon pudding for Genevieve, on the off chance, though she didn’t appear. He presented the dishes with a flourish and a bow. “Elsie said some crap about us dining in Hell tonight, and I thought, fuck that, let’s dine in Vegas. Who goes to Hell hungry?”