Do Better: Marla Mason Stories

by T. A. Pratt

  The inner door opened, and Langford smiled and beckoned them in. He wore a lab coat, too, but his was spattered with strange stains, yellow and green and red. His round rimless glasses seemed on the point of sliding off his nose, and his brown hair was cut short. He might have been a cute young medical student, but Marla knew he was fifty years old at least, his youthful looks just one of the consequences of his dabbling in biological esoterica. Langford was commonly known as a biomancer, and his early studies had, indeed, been almost exclusively concerned with the effect of magic on living organisms (his menagerie of “transformed” creatures was supposed to be astonishing, though Marla had never spoken to anyone who claimed to have seen it firsthand). In recent years he’d expanded his field of inquiry, however, dabbling in quantum mechanics, superconducting technology, and other endeavors, applying the torque wrench of magic whenever traditional scientific approaches proved too slow or ineffective.

  “Are you ready for the divination?” he asked.

  Marla nodded, holding out the satchel.

  “Oh, good,” Langford said, grinning. His glee for the work he did never seemed to fade; he was the most consistently happy person Marla had ever met. She wondered if he’d done something to step up endorphin production in his brain.

  Langford took the satchel and preceded them into his workshop. In contrast to the gleaming, humming sterility of the labs upstairs, Langford’s personal workshop was a riotous mess, part junk-shop, part science lab, part brujo’s hut. One wall was covered with a particularly virulent green mold, and the last time Marla had visited, Langford had introduced her to the mold, and told her he was experimenting with “aggregate sentience.” Innumerable shelves held pickled oddities, as well as terrariums filled with all manner of live creatures, from hissing roaches to fire newts to water dragons.

  Rondeau was clearly spooked by the towering proximity of so many nasty, chitinous, slithering things, but Marla chose to ignore his discomfort, and Langford was wholly oblivious. The scientist led them to a lab table (its surface remarkably clear of clutter) and put the jars down beside a large metal mixing bowl filled with a viscous black substance.

  “I’ve been thinking about scrying bowls,” Langford said. “And quantum computers. The difference, really, is only one of perspective and application—”

  “I don’t need to know the details,” Marla interrupted. “You know this stuff is beyond me.”

  “Oh, only the math,” Langford said. “You could understand the outlines, if you wanted.”

  “I’m not interested in how you get the answers, just in the answers themselves.”

  “Of course,” he said, and started taking the jars out of the bag. “The goiter isn’t bad. I’d have preferred a goiter from a white buffalo, but this will do.”

  Marla laughed. “If I had a white buffalo, I could work up a magic big enough to get rid Sweeney of forever, and I wouldn’t need this divination.”

  “I can make a white buffalo, of course,” Langford said, gnawing his lip. “But the naturally occurring ones are so much more effective.”

  “Sweeney?” Rondeau said. “You’re here to ask a question about Todd Sweeney? But he’s dead.”

  Marla shrugged. “He’s supposed to be dead. Everyone said he was dead. But one of Hamil’s spies saw him in the lobby of the Whitcroft-Ivory building, alive and well. I’m here to figure out how that happened.”

  “Shit,” Rondeau said, with no little awe. “Todd Sweeney’s alive. That’s impressive. If as many people wanted me dead as want him dead... Well. I’d be dead.”

  Todd Sweeney (and the name was a pretentious affectation, one of many the man entertained) had come to town the year before. It was obvious to everyone that he was a player, and he claimed connections to heavy operators in Thailand and French Guyana. He wanted what everyone wanted—money and power—and he was charming enough to get both.

  But Sweeney had no qualms, no scruples, and no manners. He’d connived, cheated, and screwed-over everyone in the city to get what he wanted. Everyone, even hardcases like Gregor and Hamil. Marla was the only one who hadn’t done any business with him. When the council of sorcerers decided something had to be done about Sweeney, that a message had to be sent, Marla was the obvious choice to carry out the sentence. She was the only one who didn’t have a personal stake in Sweeney’s downfall.

  But now, somehow, Sweeney had survived Marla’s efforts.

  That was a mistake on Sweeney’s part. His survival made things between him and Marla a personal matter. “Yeah,” Marla said. “I take his continued life as a personal affront. He tricked us somehow, or else tricked death itself. Langford’s going to tell me what’s what.”

  “Wow.” Rondeau said, shaking his head. He walked over to one of the shelves, scowling at insects in a terrarium, then wandered toward a shelf of books.

  “You have the question all worked out?” Langford said, opening the jars. “My, this is exceptional lymph!”

  “Yes,” Marla said. “Nailed-down and unambiguous. I went over the wording about a hundred times. It’s airtight.”

  “Good. Because you only get one chance to ask, and—”

  “I know, Langford,” she said, not without affection. She liked the biomancer. His ambitions were incomprehensible to her, but they were also completely tangential to her own. That meant he was no threat. That meant they could be friends.

  Langford added the contents of the jars, one by one, to the bowl of blackness on the table, stirring with a wooden spoon. The toenail clippings swirled away, as did the kidney stones, and the goiter appeared to actually dissolve. “It’s like programming a computer,” Langford said. “Inputting the parameters. If you assume that everything physical has a spiritual analogue—” He glanced at Marla, who had her arms crossed with impatience. “Ah. Sorry.” He held the blue jar of lymph in his hand, light shining from the jar’s open mouth. “After I add this, ask the question. Don’t take any unnaturally long pauses, or the scrying bowl will think—well, not think, I don’t mean think exactly—that you’ve finished. It’s fascinating, really—as near as I can tell, the vibrations your voice cause in the air are transmitted to the scrying fluid, which then performs some operation which is at bottom mysterious to me, and the answer emerges... I don’t think the bowl is at all concerned with the content, it’s like the thought experiment about the Chinese-language-translating machine...” He glanced at Marla. “Well. Anyway. Onward.”

  He tipped the jar of shining lymph into the bowl, where it disappeared, not even changing the substance’s color.

  Marla drew breath to ask her question.

  “What the hell is this dog doing here?” Rondeau shouted.

  Marla’s mouth fell open in shock and dismay. She looked at Langford, who was staring fixedly at the bowl. “That’s it,” Langford said. “That’s the question it’s going to answer. I’m sorry, Marla.” He slumped his shoulders for a moment, then stiffened. “What dog?”

  Rondeau hurried back to the table... followed by the white dog they’d seen in the alleyway. “Marla, it’s that dog again, I don’t know what—”

  “Rondeau,” she said, her voice full of ice and spines. “You ruined the divination. Why can’t you keep your mouth shut?”

  “It’s impossible,” Langford said. “How did this dog—nice doggie—get in here? There’s no possible entrance, no conceivable way, unless it came in with you two, but it couldn’t have—oh, good dog!—it couldn’t have, because I let you out of the anteroom myself...” He frowned. “Why do I want to name this animal ‘Snowflake’ and take it home with me?”

  The scrying bowl spoke, then, in Rondeau’s voice:

  “The dog is here to guide the undying spirit to its final rest,” it said.

  Marla, Rondeau, and Langford all looked at the bowl.

  Then they looked at the dog. Which was wagging its tail.

  “So,” Marla said, feeding the dog a huge hunk of rare steak. “Do you think it’s come to get Sweeney? That he mana
ged to fool death somehow, and now the dog is on his trail?” The dog sat on a chair beside her, eating happily off his own china plate.

  “It’s possible,” Hamil said, looking at the animal thoughtfully. Hamil was Marla’s consigliere. An older sorcerer, and a man of considerable gravitas (as well as considerable physical bulk), he had the experience to temper Marla’s sheer-power approach to problem-solving.

  “Then why’s it keep following us?” Rondeau asked from the other side of Hamil’s table. He’d been sitting beside the dog at first, but it kept sniffing at his armpits, which made Rondeau nervous, mostly because he found the dog’s behavior adorable, which was a wholly unnatural response for him.

  “Perhaps it recognizes you as allies. It is surely a creature of great wisdom and perception...” Hamil trailed off as the dog began licking its own testicles, with evident pleasure.

  “That’s so cute,” Marla said, and then scowled.

  “That dog is too creepy,” Rondeau said. “Mostly because I don’t find it creepy at all, when I know I should. What do we do now?”

  “We go see Todd Sweeney, and let the dog get a whiff of him, and drag his ass to hell.” Marla patted the dog. “I always thought hellhounds were black and breathed fire and such.”

  “Death rides a pale horse,” Rondeau said. “Maybe this is Death’s pale best friend.”

  Hamil chuckled. “Psychopomps—beings that guide the dead from earth to the afterlife—come in a number of guises. They appear as birds, quite often. Why not a dog?” Hamil took a bite of a chicken leg, then offered the drumstick to the dog.

  Rondeau reached across the table and slapped Hamil’s hand away, though under normal circumstances he never would have struck a sorcerer of such power. Rondeau’s only strength lay in his ownership of Juliana’s Bar and his friendship with Marla, and those could only offer so much protection.

  Hamil looked at Rondeau with the implacable patience of a glacier.

  “I’m sorry,” Rondeau said, looking down at the table. “Really. But you can’t give chicken bones to the dog. It might choke.”

  “We’ve got to find Sweeney,” Marla said.

  Marla and Rondeau went to Sweeney’s old place, a Victorian townhouse in a nice neighborhood. The house had been ritually defiled, the walls covered with lethally mis-drawn spray-painted runes, the corners filled with sea salt, the mirrors all shattered. Bird-shit covered the floor from the flock of pigeons that had been released inside, that now lived raucously in the living room chandelier. The house had been turned into one huge bad-luck death-omen. That had been Sweeney’s first warning, which he had disregarded. As if he had nothing to fear from threats of death.

  “I don’t think he’s been back,” Rondeau said, noting the undisturbed dust. The dog sat down by his feet and scratched behind its ear. The pigeons twittered, and the dog barked. It was an adorable bark, a bark that would never annoy neighbors or frighten children.

  “Let’s check the bedroom,” Marla said, and went upstairs. She opened the closet, which was empty but for a few wire hangers. “He came back for his suits. He was always vain about his suits.” She glanced at Rondeau. “You’re vain, too, but he had good taste. Has, I guess.”

  Rondeau tugged at his purple cuffs. “My taste is unimpeachable. How do you know it was Sweeney, and not some looter, who took the suits?”

  She pointed to the carved designs over the closet door. “If anybody else passed so much as a finger through this doorway, zap! They’d be burned.”

  “That’s pretty extreme wardrobe protection.”

  “I told you he was vain.”

  The dog trotted toward the closet door.

  “No!” Marla and Rondeau shouted simultaneously. But the dog passed through the doorway without visible harm; the runes over the door didn’t even glow. It was as if the dog wasn’t even there. It trotted back out, whining, seeming unhappy for the first time since they’d met it.

  “So where do we go next?”

  “Sweeney doesn’t seem to be covering his tracks particularly well,” Marla said. “He doesn’t seem worried that we’ll find him. Where would you stay, if you wanted to thumb your nose at the whole council?”

  “Heaven forbid I should do such a thing...” Rondeau considered, then snapped his fingers. “Sauvage’s place.”

  Marla blinked. “Oh, he wouldn’t.” Sauvage had been the chief sorcerer in the city, before Marla. He had been murdered, and he was a heroic, almost totemic figure in the city’s history, its most accomplished and well-loved secret ruler. His former residence, a lavish apartment above the nightclub he’d owned, was practically a museum piece, preserved and untouched, the nightclub closed, the property owned by the council of sorcerers.

  “Sure he would,” Rondeau said. “Sweeney’s an asshole.”

  The dog barked again, as if in agreement, though it might have been barking at a stray pigeon that had made its way upstairs.

  “I haven’t been in here since the day Sauvage died,” Marla said, pausing with her hand on the door handle. “It’s been a long time.”

  “He was a hell of a guy,” Rondeau said, tugging at his shirt collar. “My goddamn ghost is waking up.”

  “So long as it wakes up quietly.”

  “Like that’s up to me. I’d rather it never woke up at all.”

  The dog scratched curiously at the door. Marla pressed her hand against the metal, closed her eyes for a moment, and nodded. “No traps. Not magical ones, anyway. I guess Sweeney could have a shotgun in there, with a string tied from the trigger to the doorknob.”

  “Cheerful thought.”

  Marla took a big, old-fashioned keyring from her pocket and unlocked the door. She eased it open and stepped into the dimness, her eyes quickly adjusting to the lack of light. Rondeau and the dog followed, the one muttering and tugging at his lapels, the other wagging its tail. They went past the shrouded jukebox, dusty chairs, and covered pool tables. “The stairway to the apartment is through the curtain, in the back.” Marla led them through the curtain and up the stairs, ghosting silently. Rondeau followed, still fidgeting as if his suit itched, but doing so quietly. Only the dog made a sound, a low growl that Marla took as an encouraging sign. Sweeney must be upstairs. With luck, Marla wouldn’t have to do anything to him herself—the dog would do its otherworldly messenger thing and drag Sweeney’s spirit away.

  Marla paused outside the apartment door. Inside, someone walked around, singing to himself. Marla touched the knob, found it unlocked, and shoved it open.

  Sweeney stood in the middle of Sauvage’s living room, wearing one of the dead sorcerer’s oversized flannel robes. He held a glass of something amber and probably alcoholic in his hand. Sweeney raised a bushy eyebrow at Marla and lifted his glass in salute. “Ah, you tracked me down.” His voice rolled majestically; that was half his charm.

  Rondeau stood beside Marla, taking no notice of Sweeney. “Fucking ghost,” he muttered. “It’s all... fluttery.”

  Marla ignored him, stepping toward Sweeney. “This is the end.”

  “You’ve come to kill me, then? Really kill me? Not like your bully-boys did? You think you’ll have more luck than they did?” Sweeney didn’t seem to be blustering. The whole situation appeared to amuse him mightily, which only incensed Marla further.

  Marla touched the dagger at her belt, its hilt wound with bands of white and purple electrical tape. It was her dagger of office, symbol of her position as chief sorcerer, custodian of the city.

  The dagger was very sharp.

  “What I kill, stays dead,” she said.

  Sweeney sipped his drink, then belched softly.

  The dog trotted around Marla’s legs, cocked its head, and looked at Sweeney.

  Marla grinned. “Have you met this nice pooch, Sweeney?”

  The dog sprang.

  But it didn’t jump at Sweeney—it jumped at Rondeau, a shocking lateral move that caught Marla by surprise. The dog hit Rondeau in the chest, and despite its relatively small size
, managed to drive him to the ground. The dog snapped its teeth near Rondeau’s throat—and, abruptly, Marla’s could see the ghost that haunted the zoot suit. Rondeau wasn’t paranoid or full of shit—there was a paranormal infestation. The ghost flickered and shimmered in her vision, like a black-and-white film projected on a billowing curtain, but it was undeniably there, black hair slicked back, dimpled chin, desperate eyes.

  The dog dug its claws into Rondeau’s stomach and pulled, holding the ghost by the throat. Rondeau was quiet, perhaps knocked unconscious by the fall, perhaps simply shocked into silence.

  “That’s unusual,” Sweeney said. “And it looks like such a nice dog.”

  Marla glanced at Sweeney, then back at the dog. They’d been wrong, she realized—the dog wasn’t here for Sweeney. It was here for the ghost in Rondeau’s suit. The ghost must have been sleeping before, or dormant, or something, somehow beneath the dog’s awareness, but now it had woken up, and the dog was on it. No wonder the dog had sniffed at Rondeau so intently; it must have faintly sensed the ghost.

  Well, this was unexpected, but it wasn’t really her problem. Let the dog have the ghost. She’d take care of Sweeney. Since the dog wasn’t after him, perhaps Sweeney hadn’t worked some dark magic to cheat death. Maybe Marla’s bully-boys had simply made an error, and believed Sweeney dead when he wasn’t. Maybe they’d even killed the wrong man by mistake. She would make no such error now. She unsheathed her dagger.

  Then Rondeau screamed. Marla whipped her head around and gasped in horror.

  The ghost wasn’t the only thing being pulled away by the dog’s relentless tugging. A flickering image of Rondeau himself was coming out, too, tangled up with the ghost. At first Marla thought the ghost was holding on to—to what? Rondeau’s spirit? The ghost seemed to have its arms wrapped around Rondeau’s spirit, like a shipwreck victim clinging to a piece of flotsam. But then Marla saw that the ghost’s arms disappeared into Rondeau’s spirit, that she couldn’t tell where one left off and the other began. They were joined like Siamese twins, the ghost and Rondeau’s spirit somehow grown together.