Closing Doors: The Last Marla Mason Novel

by T. A. Pratt

  Defensive magic up, he said, and raised his hands.

  Or we could just get out of the damn lake, Marzi said.

  Or that. How about both? He began swimming toward the nearest shore, which was a good hundred yards away. The alarm in his head didn’t get any quieter, and he looked around, but it was a murky-ass lake. Screw this. Visual information wasn’t helping. He closed his eyes, and reached out with his senses, feeling around psychically. Lots of rudimentary minds: fish and other sea creatures. Certainly no monster—

  Wait. The fish were avoiding something, swimming away in a definite pattern. There was an absence, a defined spot the animals were avoiding, and that absence was moving through the water toward them. He tried to find its mind, but there was nothing to find: and since that was impossible, it meant something was hiding from him. The intruder was either a supernatural creature with natural stealth power, or a sorcerer deliberately cloaking himself from magical view.

  The hell with that. He was Bradley Bowman. He’d been trained by Marla Mason and Sanford Cole. He’d been to hell and back. He was a budded-off fragment of the consciousness that oversaw the entire integrity of the multiverse. No mere sneaky magical creature and/or individual was going to best him. He gritted his teeth, amped up his psychic vision, and pushed—

  It was like pushing through smoke. There was no sense of a mind being warded or guarded or blocked. It was more like he was trying to use telepathy on a rock.

  But then his magical senses were superfluous anyway, because he perceived the intruder with his regular senses.

  The thing arrowing through the water toward him was superficially human, but wrapped up in a lot of deep aquatic magic: he moved like a fish, his fingers webbed, his eyes black orbs, and he grinned with a mouth distorted by shark’s teeth and whipped around a stinging tail like a ray. He was moving fast, totally naked, and oh gods he was right there, ten feet away and getting closer.

  Bradley reached out to squeeze the guy’s mind, to put him into a sleep so deep it would be more like a coma, but there was still nothing to squeeze. The monster coming at him had a person’s body, yeah, but it was being run remotely, hollowed out and used as a drone, or something. There was no psyche for Bradley to work any of his reliable magic on.

  Then the guy was right in front of him, his mouth was open, it was opening wider than biology or physics should allow, and why didn’t Bradley at least carry a knife or something, why was he so determined to solve all his problems with his brain—

  The shark-man jerked, rolled halfway over, and then drifted a foot away from Bradley, eyes changing from pure black to muddy brown and white, like anyone’s. The shark’s teeth fell out of his mouth as he floated, drifting down to rest in the silt. Blood streamed from the man’s temple, and floated upward like a reverse crimson waterfall.

  Got him. Marzi’s voice in his mind was grim. He glanced right, and there she was, holstering her toy pistol, which wasn’t always a toy. Marzi had just a touch of reweaving ability: the power to brute-force reality into changing to fit her wishes. Not enough to transform the world in big or permanent ways, but enough to make a toy gun real and capable of firing spectral bullets for a little while. Those conditional bullets could pass through magical barriers and wards as easily as they could through bone and flesh... but Bradley didn’t think she’d ever used her gun on a person before. Even a person as gruesomely altered as this.

  Marzi shuddered, bowed her head, and vomited—which turned out to be just an incredibly gross thing to do underwater, because now there was an expanding cloud of puke next to them. Marzi stumbled away, retching, and Bradley looped around toward her, avoiding the blood and vomit as best he could. Shit, I killed him, she wailed. I killed a guy!

  You saved me, he said. He was going to eat me. Also you didn’t kill him. He was a robot. Something else killed him, or at least rendered him brain dead, and turned him into a flesh puppet. The spells laid on him, those transformations... they wouldn’t have been survivable anyway.

  Why did he try to kill you?

  I don’t know! I’m lovable! We’d better keep the body though, and see if we can trace it back to whoever was driving it. Maybe we’d better go see Cole. He’s good at that kind of thing. Anything with divination is his specialty.

  Marzi reached out and grabbed the shark-man’s ankle before he could float away. And here I thought the grossest thing I’d have to deal with today was duck poop.

  Rondeau was having an early lunch with the Pit Boss when the attempt on his life went down.

  They were in the private dining room at the Pit Boss’s secret subterranean casino beneath Las Vegas, eating ortolans, because the Pit Boss was experimenting with human vices. Rondeau thought the tiny little songbirds, traditionally captured alive, fattened on grain, drowned in Armagnac, and then cooked and eaten whole except for their spindly little feet, were super gross, but he was trying to develop a relationship here, so he went along. The Pit Boss had eschewed the French tradition of the diners covering their heads with napkins to hide their shame from God, because why minimize the wickedness? They were eating defenseless and innocent little songbirds like utter bastards and the Pit Boss didn’t care if anybody, deities included, knew about it. Plus the Pit Boss was a sort of demon made of rock and fire, and any non-magical cloth that touched his “flesh” would have burst into flame. Burning napkins would have spoiled the private dining room’s ambiance, which was very white-tablecloth-and-crystal-glasses. Even if the tablecloth probably had to be replaced nightly because casual contact with the Pit Boss left burn scars on it.

  Eating songbirds before it was even noon was pretty messed up, but this was Vegas, where the casinos had no clocks or windows, and knowing what time it was tended to be generally discouraged.

  Rondeau fished a bird bone out of his mouth and dropped it on his plate. Probably the whole cover-your-head-with-a-cloth thing was also meant to make that kind of unappetizing necessity more discreet, too. Hiding your villainy from God and your repulsiveness from your fellow diners: a marriage of form and function. Oh, well. Him and the Pit Boss were basically family, so fuck it.

  The Pit Boss swallowed, looked meditatively into the distance, then nodded. “I taste fig, and hazelnut, and... well, liver and organs. You?”

  “You know I don’t have a sophisticated palate,” Rondeau said. “It tasted like a crunchy little songbird to me. Armagnac and feathers.”

  “Ha. We’ve got tiramisu for desert.”

  “Is it made with the blood of an unbaptized baby or something?”

  “Nah. Standard amaretto.”

  Rondeau dabbed at his mouth with a napkin and took a small sip of wine. His body was pretty bad at dealing with all the fun substances, but alcohol didn’t mess him up like caffeine and cocaine and meth and other stimulants did. He wasn’t averse to getting drunk, but getting drunk in the presence of the Pit Boss seemed inadvisable. Their relationship wasn’t all that rocky anymore, but neither was it rock solid, despite the Pit Boss being more-or-less made of rock. There was a joke in there somewhere, but Rondeau opted not to make it. He could needle Marla that way, and it amused her at least as much as it exasperated her, but he was still getting the lay of the volcanic land here. “Thanks for inviting me over.”

  “Sure thing. Dad.”

  Rondeau winced. He always winced. That was probably why the Pit Boss kept saying it. When you weighed eight hundred pounds and you were made of magical lava, you could tease anybody you wanted. Technically, Rondeau had conjured the Pit Boss into existence, which was as much fatherhood as, say, Zeus could claim over Athena. Rondeau had gotten a headache in the process, too. Like his friend Bradley Bowman, Rondeau was an oracle generator, a summoner-up of forces, and when he’d been in a tight situation some time ago, he’d conjured up the Pit Boss and asked for help. That was inadvisable, but Rondeau hadn’t known any better. An instruction manual for his power set would have been useful, but even Rondeau had to admit that if he’d been given one, he might
have been too lazy to read it. He’d learned through bitter experience that asking the things you summoned questions was pretty much fine, as long as you could pay what they demanded. But asking an oracle you summoned to do a favor for you—that was different. That gave the summoned creatures a measure of agency and autonomy in the world, and risked unleashing powerful forces in unpredictable ways.

  The Pit Boss was powerful all right. After completing the task Rondeau set for him, the big lug had taken on a complete and independent life—and gone on to seize control of Las Vegas’s magical underworld, with the help of Rondeau’s wealth, which the Pit Boss had claimed as payment for its favor. (He’d kicked Rondeau out of town, too, but since then they’d made up, and Rondeau had a nice slice of territory again. Parent/child relationships could be bumpy that way.)

  Las Vegas was a good city to run, too, being awash in juicy probability magic, and of course lots of money, which was even better than magic in a lot of ways: certainly it was more predicable and reliable. Initially the Pit Boss had hated Rondeau, both because it was magical tradition for creatures to hate their creators—see Frankenstein, et al.—but also because, as the one who’d given the Pit Boss life, Rondeau also had the power to banish the Pit Boss back into non-existence.

  In theory, anyway. Rondeau had no idea how to actually do such a thing; he barely understood how he’d conjured the Pit Boss in the first place. Rondeau was possessed of immense psychic power, but very little in the way of discipline or ambition. Bradley said he was like a guy who had a rocket launcher and used it to kill flies. Given how badly Rondeau had fucked things up on those occasions when he had tried to use his magic for anything beyond the trivial, he figured his lack of ambition was a good thing.

  The Pit Boss’s hate and fear of Rondeau had gradually become curiosity and even a sort of fondness: it turned out they had a lot in common. For one, they were both weird magical entities in a world that didn’t quite know how to deal with them. Rondeau was a psychic parasite of unknown provenance inhabiting a stolen body. The Pit Boss was a creature of elemental fire who was oddly afflicted with appetites of the flesh. They had a lot to talk about, and even more to drink about, so in recent months—since Pelham, Rondeau’s best friend apart from Marla, had died—they’d been hanging out a lot.

  One of the Pit Boss’s personal attendants, who were drawn mostly from the ranks of succubi and incubi, showgirls and male strippers, and satyrs and lava nymphs (who even knew there were such things?), appeared bearing a silver tray with a lid on top. She appeared to be human, dressed in a sort of slutty-stage-magician outfit that was heavy on the fishnets and tuxedo shirt and top hat (wasn’t there a superhero who dressed like that? Rondeau’s psychopathic doppelganger Crapsey would have known—he was a fiend for comic books). She smiled at them professionally, put the tray on the table, and then lifted the lid.

  She did not reveal tiramisu for two. She revealed... a big bug. A greenish-black cricket-like thing about the size of a hamster, cocking its pointy head and wiggling its mandibles. Rondeau actually recognized the thing, weirdly enough, or at least, he thought he did: Pelham had spent time in Malaysia during his world travels and had encountered a creature there called a pelesit, a sort of vampiric witch’s familiar that looked like an oversized grasshopper. They could attack people, bore holes in them, climb inside their heads, and possess them: apparently some magical practitioners did a kind of protection scam with the creatures, sending their pelesits to infest people, then charging the victims a hefty fee to “exorcise” the demon. Rondeau leaned away from it. “Eating tiny songbirds is one thing, Boss, but I don’t want to eat a grasshopper demon.”

  “What?” The Pit Boss leaned forward, squinting, and then the pelesit leapt at Rondeau’s face.

  Rondeau clamped his jaws shut instinctively, but the pelesit clung to his chin, its tiny but freakishly strong legs trying to pry his lips apart. Rondeau jumped up from the chair and stumbled around, clawing at the creature, which was biting his face, and doubtless drinking his blood. That’s what pelesits fed on, Pelham said, and if you didn’t feed them regularly, they’d attack people even without being ordered to do so. He yanked at the parasite, but it had claws or hooks or something embedded in his cheeks and chin, and he couldn’t pull it away without de-facing himself.

  The pelesit pressed its blunt head against his mouth, forcing its way in between his lips, and Rondeau moaned.

  The Pit Boss reached out, smacked Rondeau’s hands away from the creature, then closed one black-and-red rocklike fist around the parasitic beast. There was a sudden burst of heat, enough to make Rondeau wonder if he’d be red-faced and eyebrowless when this was done, and then he was bending over, spitting out bits of hot demonic ash. The Pit Boss had transformed the creature into cinders with a touch. “Thanks,” Rondeau said. “You saved—”

  The waitress, who’d been standing off to one side during this affair, picked up a knife from the table and stuck the blade into Rondeau’s neck. The knife hurt, of course, but mostly it felt like an inconvenience, like a hard shard of tortilla chip stuck in his throat. He coughed, and that hurt, oh, wow, did it hurt.

  Rondeau stumbled away from the waitress, on the theory that putting distance between yourself and the person who’d stabbed you was probably advisable. Her expression was curiously blank for an attempted murderer. The Pit Boss smacked her hard enough to send her flying across the room, where she struck the wall and then sank to the floor, unmoving. Good kid. Looking out for dear old dad.

  Rondeau put his hand on the knife in his neck, and tried to decide whether he should pull it out or not. Wasn’t it bad, to pull a knife out? Because it let all the blood rush out of the hole, or something? He couldn’t remember, and it was getting harder to think. Too much wine probably. Or, no, wait: blood loss. That was just as effective as getting drunk. Why didn’t people bleed themselves recreationally, for the buzz?

  The room was getting blurry, down and up were starting to seem less like absolutes and more like options, and he decided to lie down on the plush carpet and wait for things to get better.

  Am I dying again? He’d experienced bodily death once before, or at least, once that he could remember. As a psychic parasite who inhabited stolen human host bodies, death was an existential hazard. His old body, the one he’d taken from a starving eight-year-old street kid, was his first, as far as he knew, and it had served him well for a couple of decades before some asshole put a bullet in it a few years back. Being in a dying host had panicked him so intensely that he’d instinctively launched his bodiless consciousness out of that failing body and into the nearest living human, which happened to be his friend Bradley Bowman. He hadn’t realized what the consequences would be: that he would steal Bradley’s body, consigning his friend’s own mind and soul to oblivion. That he’d become a murderer.

  Sure, they’d gotten Bradley back, sort of, thanks to Marla’s refusal to let her old apprentice stay dead... but the new Bradley actually hailed from an adjacent, very similar, branch of the multiverse, where he’d avoided being possessed that day. The real Bradley, his Bradley, was gone and lost forever, denied even an afterlife, and that was Rondeau’s fault. He didn’t feel guilty about much, as a rule, but he felt plenty guilty about that.

  Soon after taking over this new body, with all its impressive psychic gifts, Rondeau had commissioned an enchantment, one that would lock him inside this body forever, and make it impossible for his psychic self to flee, no matter how panicked it became. He never wanted to be a murderer again, even if it meant giving up his own body-hopping immortality. He was pretty much trapped inside a magical bell jar, bound to this flesh... or at least, that was the idea. He’d never actually tested it. Looked like he was about to get the opportunity.

  The Pit Boss was kneeling beside him. When had Rondeau ended up on the floor? Oh, right, lying down and hoping for the best. Suddenly the discomfort in his throat changed when the Pit Boss pulled the knife out, and there was instead a great surge of warmth f
ollowed by an even stronger, mind-annihilating wave of dizziness and lethargy.

  For a moment everything was just pink haze, but then he screamed as searing pain tore through his neck. The Pit Boss was using his fiery hand to try to cauterize the wound. Was that a good idea? A terrible idea? After the initial unspeakable pain it stopped hurting, which probably meant the nerves were burned so thoroughly they were dead. A big disfiguring scar didn’t matter much: Rondeau went around draped in an illusion all the time anyway, to make the body he’d stolen from Bradley look like his old body, because looking in the mirror and seeing his dead friend’s face staring back would be a bit much to endure every day.

  If I’m worrying about my looks, I must be okay, Rondeau thought. Then his heart stopped pumping due to the extent of his blood loss, and he died.

  The Head and the Heart

  Marla’s head bounced off the wall and rolled across the floor, ending up face-down, which was irritating. The kick hadn’t hurt much—she’d deactivated her pain receptors while she was in the air, so the impact hadn’t made things any worse—but this whole thing was still awkward and humiliating. Also a little bit funny, though. Marla had a better sense of humor about things than she had when she was a mortal.

  “The nice thing about wielding a god’s weapon is that it can kill gods.” Nicolette pumped her arms in the air like she’d just won a boxing match. “I am the godslayer! Fuck yeah! You’re next, Elsie Jarrow!”

  Marla mouthed a spell to conjure a magical voice for herself. The spell didn’t require audible vocalization or gestures to activate, since it was designed to let you speak even if you were bound and gagged, or trapped underwater, or both. She said, “Yes, some divine artifacts can kill gods... but usually only when they’re wielded by a god.” The whole reason Marla had become a demi-god in the first place was so that she could effectively wield Death’s terrible sword. That blade was a formidable weapon in mortal hands, but it was an inconceivably powerful one in the hands of a god. Nicolette’s hatchet had the same limitations.