by T. A. Pratt
He shrugged. “So go look for a fight. Break a taboo and see if you can piss off a local god. The fight would do you good.”
She snorted. “I think I’d rather do something useful. I know you embrace your uselessness —”
“Hey, I support the local economy. The massage industry alone is having a great year because of me.”
“—but I like doing things,” she finished, ignoring him.
“I’m telling you: occult private eye. That’s your new gig. I’ll rent you some office space. It’ll be great. I’ll be your silent partner, spoken of in hushed tones, but never seen. When you have to refer to me, you can call me, ‘The Mysterious Mr. Cash Machine.’ You can, I dunno, disperse ghosts and lift curses and scare away the monsters lurking under little kids’ beds. Maybe they’ll make a reality show about you.”
“Let’s call that ‘Plan B,”’ she said. “I’m going to cast a divination.”
“And look for what?”
She shrugged. “Trouble, I guess.”
He popped another macadamia nut into his mouth. “Good luck with that. I’m going to hit the pool.”
After Rondeau left the suite—which had two bedrooms, and was, essentially, a very nice apartment that happened to be on the top floor of a very nice hotel—Marla went to her leather bag and took out her divination tools. She hadn’t needed them for a long time, because in her own city (scratch that, her former city), she’d had a small army of informants and people who did divinations for her. But that didn’t mean she didn’t have the knack herself.
Marla unrolled a dark blue velvet cloth on the flowered bedspread and opened a small leather drawstring bag, shaking the contents into her palm. A tarnished three-cent silver piece from 1865; a very small diamond with a flaw in the center; an inch-long tooth from a great white shark; a sliver of petrified wood; a scattering of morning glory seeds; and a stone from the head of a toad. She shook the assemblage in her hand for a moment, letting her senses open up wide, and then tossed the items onto the cloth.
Usually the arrangement of such objects formed patterns that, to a sufficiently receptive mind, could provide the answer to a question, or hints of likely futures.
This time, the shark’s tooth levitated about nine inches above the rest of the objects, which began to twist around and chase one another counter-clockwise like a whirlpool on the cloth, as the tooth whirled in the opposite direction a few times before stopping and pointing firmly in the general direction of the sea.
“Well that’s interesting,” Marla said.
Marla found what she was looking for on a typically lovely stretch of beach after a couple of hours of walking. She had the shark’s tooth on a string, the string wrapped around her wrist, and the tooth exerted a constant gentle tug, pulling her toward... something.
It was her own fault, probably, for not having a really specific question in mind. Divination worked better when the diviner didn’t generalize, but her clearest thought had been, “Find me something interesting,” and it would be just her luck if “interesting” in this case turned out to be “unspeakably horrible” or even just boring old “deadly.”
The shark’s tooth pulled hard enough to tighten the string painfully around her wrist, then sagged, its purpose accomplished.
“Hey,” Marla said to the person sitting on the sand.
He was a large Hawai’ian man, aged somewhere between thirty and sixty, naked except for a sort of skirt made of seaweed piled messily around him. He sat in the sand with his feet stretched in front of him, soles just out of reach of the lapping waves. He stared at the water with an expression of infinite loss and, maybe, just a hint of impotent rage.
Since he ignored her, Marla sat down beside him. “Aloha,” she said. She didn’t think she’d ever said the word “aloha” before in her life, but when in Maui...
Now he glanced at her. “Aloha, haole.”
“How-lee?” she said. “Huh. Spell that for me?”
He looked at her more directly, and a bit quizzically, but he complied.
“Ha,” she said. “I thought so. Spelled pretty much like ‘a-hole,’ isn’t it? Let me guess. That’s the local equivalent of gaijin, gringo, gweilo, muzungu, right? Outsider, foreigner, maybe a little dash of white devil?”
“That’s right, wahine.”
“I’ll assume that’s a nicer word. But you can call me Marla.”
A moment’s hesitation, and a slight nod. “I am... call me Ka’ohu.”
She looked out at the water. “Pleased to meet you. As for the other thing you called me... Well, you’ve got me there. I am an outsider. This isn’t my place. I don’t even especially want to be here, but my friend has the money, so he picked the destination. I’m a... I don’t know what you call them around here. A sorcerer. A witch.”
He took this assertion with equanimity, as she’d suspected he would. “We say kahuna,” he said. “Keeper of the secrets.”
“Good, that’s nice. Keeper and maker and taker and trader and occasional abuser of secrets.” She looked up at the sky. “I had a whole city of secrets in my keeping. I looked after it, did my best to take care of it, to protect the people there, to make life better for everyone. I risked my life, and more than my life, more times than I can count, in service to that place. And when I made one little mistake... Okay, a few large mistakes... the people there forgot everything I’d done for them, and they cast me out. Exile. So that’s what I’m doing here. I’m happy to be an outsider. I’m not even exactly a tourist. I don’t want to go native. I’m just here because the place where I’m not an outsider has been lost to me.”
He nodded, but didn’t take his eyes from the sea.
“So what have you lost?”
“Only myself,” he said. “An outsider, with magic. Someone like you. He has taken power from me.”
“If you lost something important, then you and I have more in common than I have with the person who took it from you, even if he is an a-hole like me.”
Now the man smiled, and Marla saw he was missing most of his teeth. Not all of them, but several, and the remaining teeth were smeared with the blood oozing from his gums.
“You’ve got to tell me the name of your dentist, so I can make sure I never, ever go to him.”
“Do you have sharks where you come from, Marla?” He might have been addressing the waves.
“Sure, my city’s on a bay on the east coast of the mainland. Sometimes we get sharks, though not often.”
He nodded. “We have many sharks here.” He paused. “I am a shark.”
Marla mulled this over. She’d known many people who could appear to turn into animals, and at least two people who could actually turn into animals, but never a... “Were-shark?” she said.
“Shark god,” he said, with some dignity.
Marla squinted at him, concentrating hard. She had the ability to see well beyond the normal limits of human sight, but using that vision gave her headaches. Still, now that she really looked, she could see: the shape of the world bent around this man, like he was a bowling ball resting on top of a bed, the surface sagging and deforming under his weight. Metaphysically speaking. “I was a goddess myself, once, for a while. I guess I still am, a little. But only by marriage.”
He just nodded.
Tough room, Marla thought, but it was just as well. The goddess thing was a long story, and one she didn’t feel like telling.
Ka’ohu said, “I am not one of the great gods. There are many shark gods, and many aumakua—ancestral spirits—who manifest as sharks. We are a multitude. But I have some power, including the power to transform myself into a man, and then into a shark again... power which has been stolen from me, trapping me in this form.”
“Something to do with those missing teeth, I’d guess?”
“The teeth will grow back, but I fear the magic is stolen forever. Some days ago a man—an a-hole, as you would say—appeared in a small boat. He threw a net over me, and dragged me into the air. I trans
formed into a man, expecting to terrify him, but he stunned me, somehow, and I lost consciousness, and when I woke, he was ripping out my teeth with a pair of pliers. I tried to transform, and could not, but I manage to leap over the edge of the boat and swim to safety. Since then, however, I have been unable to change.”
Marla sighed. “Sounds like you could use an occult detective.”
“What?”
“Never mind. Just me succumbing to the inevitable. Can you describe the guy?”
He shook his head. “You all look alike to me.”
“Look closer, then,” Marla prodded. “Really look at the memory. Me, if a guy ripped my teeth out, I bet I could draw a picture of him freehand.” Someone had ripped her jaw off, once, and she did indeed remember his acne-scarred face very well.
Ka’ohu frowned. “His hair was long and greasy, dark. He was thin, and didn’t seem strong enough to haul a shark my size into a boat, but he did it. He wore smoked glasses with round lenses.” He shook his head. “That’s all.”
“Okay,” Marla said. “Tell you what. I’ll find the guy who stole your teeth, and see what he’s doing with them, and, if possible, get them back for you. Deal?”
“Why would you do this for me?”
Boredom, she thought. But she said, “Because I like it when gods owe me a favor.”
“If you can do this, then I will owe you a debt.” His voice was solemn.
“Then it’s a deal.” She stood up, then paused. “Wait. Are you one of those shark gods who, I don’t know, pretends to be a guy, and lures a pretty girl into the ocean, and then turns into a shark and eats her?”
“No. At least, not since I was a very young god. And we all make mistakes when we are young.”
“Some of us just keep on making them. But you’ve gotta go on living. I’ll be in touch, Ka’ohu.”
Rondeau followed her out of the elevator, saying, “I’ll drive.” He trailed her through the lobby, past the tropical plants, and Asian-influenced sculptures, and the koi pond, and—no shit—the little penguin habitat.
“You don’t even have to go. I know you’ve got a lot of drinks with coconut juice or whatever in them ahead of you.” They stepped out into warm late-afternoon air. Marla was well-fortified by a late lunch of Kona coffee and macadamia nut pancakes and slices of fresh pineapple, though she’d never admit how much she’d grown to like the food here.
“It’s called milk when it comes from coconuts, Marla. And you know I like a little diversion now and then. Besides, I’m all psychic and stuff. I could be useful”
Rondeau did have an array of psychic abilities, which he mostly used to better understand the minds of men he wanted to sleep with. But he could also summon oracles, agitate ghosts, and do other occasionally useful things, and she did hate driving, so she said, “Okay.”
They got into their rental car, a black Ford sedan that Rondeau called “Huff-Juh” because the first three letters on the license plate were HFJ, and drove away from the high-rise resorts and condos and time-shares of Kaanapali on the western shore of the island. They drove south to Lahaina, the nearest town of any size, and found parking downtown easily, since it was still the off-season. (Rondeau, who in his usual way had become friendly with the hotel staff, assured her that in a few weeks, around mid-December, the retired snowbirds would start arriving in droves, something that Marla was willing to get annoyed about in advance.)
They strolled down Front Street, not far from the water, past the profusion of shops and restaurants meant to lure tourists. The weather was mild, as it always seemed to be here, and it made Marla miss home, which would be getting its first good snow right about now. The bastards who’d kicked her out of her job had even taken winter away from her.
“So where are we going?” Rondeau said.
“I did another divination last night, and got pointed in this general direction, though the tooth fairy wannabe we’re looking for is trying to keep himself hidden, so I couldn’t narrow it down much. Here’s where your psychic-ness could come in handy, if you can rouse yourself to look for anything unusual —”
“There.” Rondeau pointed at a t-shirt shop next to an art gallery, neither of which was doing bang-up business. “Right there.”
She squinted. “What? You see a shirt you want? Those all look too tasteful for you, even the ones with pictures of hula girls riding surfboards.”
“No, I’ll pick one of those up on the way out. In between, can’t you see it? The shimmer?”
Marla was usually good at spotting folded space, the little dimensional tricks sorcerers used to hide their lairs from enemies, or, more pragmatically, to avoid having to pay rent for prime real estate. But she didn’t see anything now, which meant the guy hiding it was good. When she tried to use her awesome illusion-piercing vision to look deeper, a bolt of pain lanced through her head—she’d peered beyond the veil too recently, and doing so again would give her a migraine. Not long ago she’d been granted the ability to see through illusions at will by the lord of the underworld, which was a pretty nice gift, but he hadn’t explained that it would take a toll on her body every time she used it. Probably because he didn’t have a mortal body of his own, and didn’t think about stuff like that.
“I’ll take your word for it,” Marla said. “Show me the way.”
“I just love barging into sorcerer’s lairs uninvited. That always works out so well for us.” But he took her hand and led her toward what appeared to be just a bit of wall separating art from t-shirts, and then led her farther.
They stepped into the folded space, and a door stood closed before them, the words “Rare Books” and “By Appointment Only” in flaking gold and black paint on the glass. Inside, dimly, they could see bookshelves, a counter, and stairs leading up to a second floor. This had been an antiquarian bookseller’s shop at some point, apparently, until a sorcerer comandeered it, hid it from ordinary people—and from other sorcerers—and turned it into a sanctum sanctorum.
Marla tried the knob, and it was locked. What kind of paranoid nut locked the door of his magically-hidden lair? Well, Marla probably would, in his place, but still.
“I got this.” Rondeau placed his hands on the glass and closed his eyes. “Hmm. Or maybe I don’t. This’ll take more than lockpicks. He’s got the door alarmed, magically. I don’t think it’s anything, you know, offensive, but he’ll be alerted if we break in.”
“Then we’ll have to break in fast.” Marla reared back for a kick with one of her steel-toed boots.
“Hold up, maybe... yeah, I think the alarm looks for the owner’s mind, sort of examines the shape of it, checks the contours of his mind against some stored template, and I can sense the guy in there, upstairs, let me see if I can...” He grunted. “Got it. Sort of a snapshot of his mind, taken with my mind. Now let me hold it up to the door, like using a severed hand to open a palmprint scanner, only less bloody...” He put his hand on the doorknob, turned it, and the door swung open. Rondeau grinned. “Hot damn, I love this brain of mine.” He made an “after you” gesture, and Marla slipped inside.
A quick check of the downstairs revealed three rooms and a few corridors constructed of towering shelves—despite the “rare books” on the door, the shelves mostly held used paperback bestsellers from a few decades ago—with no nasty surprises lurking anywhere. Rondeau was working on opening up the rather ancient cash register, because even though he was rich now from the sale of his nightclub, old habits died hard.
Marla tapped him on the shoulder and pointed upstairs. He nodded, and followed her. The stairs were wooden and probably squeaky, but there was nothing to be done about it except to place her feet as far to the sides of the steps as possible to minimize the creaking. The result was fairly quiet, and soon she reached the top of the flight and peered into the room above.
A man who matched Ka’ohu’s description, especially the greasy hair part, was leaning over a wooden desk that was entirely covered by an enormous dead shark. He wore an elaborate
cloak covered in red and yellow feathers, which Ka’ohu hadn’t mentioned, but you probably wouldn’t wear something like that out fishing for gods.
“Hey there,” Marla said, stepping into the man’s sight. Rondeau lurked farther down the stairs, retaining the element of surprise. He could be smart sometimes. “What’s with the big fish?”
The man removed his smoked glasses, revealing rather watery blue eyes, which he blinked at her. “Hmm. You made it inside without my noticing. I didn’t know there was any new... talent... on the island.”
“I’m a recent arrival.” She strolled into the room, looking around. There were lots more shelves—these held books that looked rather more interesting than the ones downstairs—and a couple of closed cabinets and a few windows that looked out over Front Street and toward the ocean. “I’m Marla.” She waited a moment, then said, “This is the part where you introduce yourself to me.”
“I am Kahuna Mo’i,” he said, drawing himself up to his full height, not that it helped much. Marla took note of the club hanging at his belt. She’d seen other weapons like it in one of the little museums nearby. It was a leiomano—a short club studded with shark’s teeth—one of the traditional weapons of the islands. She had a feeling she knew where the teeth had come from, too. “Why are you in my shop?”
She ran her finger over a few of the books on his shelf. “I’m new in town. Looking for work. I noticed your little magic shop here, thought it was impressively well-hidden, and knew there had to be a man of power here. Since I don’t like waiting tables or selling tchotchke, I’m looking for a job in the magic trade. That’s clearly your trade, so. I’d like to find out what you’re all about, and coming in to talk was easier than subscribing to your newsletter.” He preened a bit at the “man of power” comment. Loser. Marla mused. “Kahuna. I know that means sorcerer. What’s the other bit mean?”
“Kahuna is more like ‘priest’ than sorcerer. And Mo’i is... well, to simplify, it means King.”
