by T. A. Pratt
The suite was a balmy 72 degrees, and Rondeau sat on the couch in a robe, watching anything but the weather on the big screen TV. “It’s terrible for business. Half the casinos aren’t even open. The slot machines out at the airport are literally frozen up, I heard, you can’t even pull the levers.” He shook his head. “But what are you going to do? It’s the weather.”
“I can’t believe this is natural,” Pelham said, finally down to his customary suit and jacket. He perched on the edge of an armchair. “Don’t you get any sense of... magical interference?”
Rondeau winced. “I drink a lot of champagne specifically to dull my psychic senses, okay? And I’m not going to summon up an oracle just to complain about the cold. The weather guys say it’s just a thing, anyway, a hyperborean vortex or whatever. It’s warm in here. I say we wait it out.”
“Half a dozen tourists have died already,” Pelham said. “The locals aren’t likely to fare any better. No one is prepared for this kind of weather here. You can get frostbite in minutes. People will be losing fingers and toes, and that’s if they’re lucky. If it’s magical weather –”
Rondeau sighed. “Fine. Let’s go ask Nicolette. Chaos witches are good with weather, and she can sense when natural order’s being messed around with.”
“Have you been to see Nicolette, since Mrs. Mason returned to the underworld last week?”
Rondeau made a face. “No. Why would I? I just stuck her cage in the bedroom, turned the TV on, and left her to it.” He’d always hated Nicolette, and she hadn’t become any more pleasant since she’d been decapitated and had her head endowed with a magical quasi-life and stuck in a birdcage for use as a magic-detector.
They went to her bedroom door, knocked once, and went inside.
The cage on the bed was empty, the base separated from the top. A folded letter rested beside it. Rondeau read the pages with rising dismay before handing it over to Pelham.
“Oh, dear,” Pelham said. “That ogre Mrs. Mason hired for muscle has absconded with Nicolette.”
Rondeau groaned. “We let Nicolette escape. We didn’t even notice. Marla’s going to kill us when she gets back to the mortal world. Seriously. Kill us. She can do it. She’s the bride of Death, isn’t that what the cultists called her? We’ve got three weeks to live.”
“It is indeed problematic, but we are not jailers, and I’m sure Mrs. Mason will understand –”
“She’ll understand,” Rondeau said. “But understanding won’t stop her from smiting us. We’re gonna get smitten. No. That sounds too pleasant. We’re gonna get smote. How could things get any worse?”
They both tensed up, because saying something like that was an invitation to the universe reading “Please fuck with us further.” Lightning didn’t strike, no one burst into flame, and a chasm didn’t yawn open at their feet, so they went back out into the living room, mildly bickering about the best way to deal with Nicolette’s jailbreak.
A tall, regal looking older woman in a long black fur coat stood gazing out the windows at the ice-locked streets of Las Vegas below. She turned to them, smiled in a distant and superior way, and said, “Tell Marla Mason that Regina Queen is here to see her. Wait. No. That’s not quite right. Tell her that Regina Queen is here to kill her.”
“Ah,” Rondeau said. “Marla’s... out of town.” Despite the bottle of champagne he’d already had that morning, first mixed with orange juice and then with apple juice when the orange ran out, his psychic senses tingled and twinged in this woman’s presence. She was magic, and big magic, too. Something about her name rang a bell, but he couldn’t quite place it.
“Then summon her,” Regina said. “I’ll wait.” She sat on the couch and crossed her legs. The temperature plunged at least fifteen degrees wherever her roving gaze fell.
“Oh, right.” Rondeau snapped his fingers. “Marla told me about you. She met you on a mercenary job, years ago. You’re an ice witch.”
“An ice queen, really – as it says in my name. Twice.”
“I heard you were up north,” Rondeau said. “Arctic Circle territory.”
“I was, for a time. I find humans objectionable. I came south when I learned my son Leland – you knew him as Viscarro – was killed. By Marla Mason. Your employer.”
Rondeau winced. “Employer? Lately I’ve been the one giving money to her, but come to think of it, she does still give me orders.”
“I do not wish to speak to the valet,” she said. “Or the psychic parasite.”
“Hey, us parasites are people too,” Rondeau said. “Or, at least, we possess people, which is pretty much the same.”
Pelham cleared his throat. “Ma’am, if I may.” Pelham had lots of training on how to talk to nobility, and he used his best butler’s tone. “To be technical Viscarro was already dead, having transformed himself many years ago into a lich, a ghost haunting his own corpse – and, to be more precise, it was not Mrs. Mason who ended his corporeal existence, but a dark duplicate of Mrs. Mason who hailed from an alternate timeline parallel to our own –”
Regina held up a hand, and Pelham stopped cold. “I may be a snow queen, but that doesn’t mean I have patience for fairy tales. I looked upon the charred fragments of my son, and found traces of Marla Mason’s aura and flesh and psychic resonance there. She is to blame, and frankly, I don’t care if it was some alternate version of her who did the deed – I will take my vengeance on the Marla I can reach. It’s a shame. I was mildly fond of the woman – she did me a favor, once. But some crimes can have only one punishment.”
“I thought you hated Viscarro?” Rondeau said.
Regina turned her icy regard to Rondeau, making him shiver. “What does that matter? He was my son. No one, myself excepted, gets to kill my children. Call her.”
“Okay, that’s between you two, but Marla is... seriously unreachable,” Rondeau said. “For at least three more weeks.” Rondeau wasn’t about to explain that Marla was a part-time goddess of death, spending six months of every year in the underworld, doing – literally – gods alone knew what.
Regina hmmed. “I understand Marla prefers that innocent lives be spared. Tell her I will kill one person the first day she makes me wait. I will kill two the next day. I will double that number the next day. And so on, doubling each day. It won’t take long to empty the city at that rate, will it? Those deaths will be in addition to any who simply succumb to the weather, which will only get worse the longer I wait. Tell Marla to hurry, won’t you?”
“We can’t,” Rondeau began, and then stood in horror as the saliva in his mouth froze, jamming his jaws closed. He grunted in surprise and pain as Regina strolled toward him. She reached into the pocket of his robe, took out his phone, and diddled around with the screen before returning it to the pocket. “There’s my number. Call when Marla’s here. A little hot water will clear out your mouth. Don’t say ‘can’t’ to me ever again, all right?” She sauntered regally out the door, leaving it standing open behind her.
“Oh, my,” Pelham said after a moment. “I suppose that’s how things could get worse.”
They made a good-faith attempt to reach Marla. There was a magical bell she used, in her mortal months on Earth, to summon her husband the god of death, but ringing it didn’t accomplish anything. The old necromantic rites were no good – Marla and Death had stopped appearing or letting their underworld minions answer when necromancers made sacrifices, because, as Marla said, who wanted to encourage that kind of behavior? They even tried the supernatural equivalent of leaving a message, shouting into a fire full of small animal bones (remnants from the empty kitchens downstairs), and when that failed, they slumped down on the couch in the suite. They didn’t know what Marla did during her month in the underworld, but it was vast business, and she didn’t have much concern for the mortal realm while she was there.
“Ms. Queen can’t mean it literally,” Pelham said. “Killing two people the second day, fine, and four the third, all right, and eight the fourth, and even on
through 16 and 32 – but before long she’ll be into hundreds, even thousands, every day. How is it practical to kill that many? With any precision?”
“You’re right,” Rondeau said. “She’ll probably top out around 30 a day, sure. That’s comforting.” He put a pillow over his face. “So what do we do?”
Pelham shrugged. “What would Marla do?”
“Something clever, and if that didn’t work, something violent. She’d stop Regina.”
“Then as Marla’s agents on Earth during her absence, we must do the same,” Pelham said.
“You’re noble. Why do I live with someone noble? Your plan is mostly flaws. You mix a hell of a hangover cure, Pelly, and I’ve seen you thwack guys pretty good with a walking stick, but you’re not actually a sorcerer. And while I’ve got some psychic powers that came along with this body I stole a while back, they’re definitely more on the diagnostic side than the offensive one. I could find out where Regina Queen is hiding, but I can’t make her head explode.”
“Ah, but you and I possess one power that Mrs. Mason does not,” Pelham said. “We are capable of asking for help.”
Rondeau took the pillow off his face. “I like the sound of that. On account of how it doesn’t involve me fighting Regina Queen directly.”
“I know, it makes sense, start at the top, call up the big guns first.” Rondeau stared at the syringe in his hand, the rubber tubing wrapped around his upper arm, the bulging vein in his forearm. “And Bradley Bowman’s more than a god, he’s like a meta god, he’s the scary story gods tell their little godlets to make them eat their celestial vegetables. But this is the only way I know to get Bradley’s attention, to defile this body I stole from him in this one particular way, and I’m afraid he’s going to be pissed.”
Pelham sat on the edge of the tub, hands laced over one knee. He’d bought the heroin from a dealer who usually supplied Rondeau with different drugs, and cooked up the stuff with the same skill he used to flip crepes. “You don’t actually have to inject the vile stuff. Just make Bradley think you will –”
“But I have to mean it. I have to really intend to do it. Bradley oversees the multiverse, he can see possible futures, and if he sees that I’m really going to shoot up, that’s when he’ll come.” Rondeau closed his eyes. He had nothing against getting high, but he did have something against annoying beings of unfathomable power, especially Bradley, since he’d already stolen the guy’s body once. But here he was. He moved the needle.
“Rondeau, put that shit down,” Bradley Bowman – B to his friends, when he’d been mortal enough to have those – called from the living room.
Rondeau exhaled in relief, put down the syringe, untied the tube, and walked unsteadily into the living room.
Bradley wasn’t there in person—if he even had a person anymore. His face loomed on the TV screen, in extreme close-up, his tropical-water-blue eyes calm, his former-movie-star features as scruffily handsome as always. “Don’t pull anything like that again, all right? Heroin, hell, man, you know my one true love died of a heroin overdose. I know, that was the point, get my attention, but that’s cold, Rondeau. Next time you want me, go to Oakland, down by 38th and Telegraph, and yell my name into a sewer grate. I’ll lodge a fragment of my attention there. But make sure if you call it’s more important than this.”
“Sorry,” Rondeau squeaked. Bradley had been a nice enough guy once, but now he was something far beyond human, however normal his face looked.
Pelham cleared his throat. “Mr. Bowman, sir, we have a terrible problem – Regina Queen has threatened to kill – ”
“Hey, Pelham, yeah, I know. I see everything that is and might be, and it doesn’t look good for you, but there are a few paths where you come out the other side intact, basically. You’ll work it out. My job is watching out for existential threats to the fabric of reality, guys, incursions from hostile universes with inimical physics, stuff like that, not... fighting ice witches. I sympathize, but I’ve got an exiled outsider from an especially nasty bubble in the quantum foam increasing his ontological mass on Earth at an exponential rate, and I’m a lot more concerned about him than I am about Viscarro’s mom killing people.” He paused. “Can you believe Viscarro has a mom? Who’s still alive? I figured the dude was hatched from a spider egg or something.”
“If you can see the paths ahead,” Rondeau said, “maybe a little guidance – ”
“Rondeau, if you need guidance, you can summon oracles. I know – you use the brain that used to belong to me to do it. Take care of my body, would you? Wouldn’t hurt you to get on a treadmill every once in a while, lay off the all-you-can-eat buffets a little. As for this Regina thing, keep doing what you’re doing. You don’t even die in, like, sixty percent of the possible futures I can see.”
The television turned itself off.
“Hmm,” Rondeau said. “Keep doing what we’re doing. So. Next witch on the list?”
“You’re sure this will work?” Rondeau said.
“Mrs. Mason told me it would attract Genevieve’s attention.” Pelham was methodically slicing his way through a bag of lemons from Rondeau’s bar.
“But you make lemonade all the time. And lemon chicken. And lemon drops. Lemon meringue pie. You slice lemons a lot, is what I’m saying, and it’s never summoned a reweaver capable of altering the nature of reality out of the pocket dimension where she lives.”
“The element of intentionality is necessary,” Pelham said. He picked up a lemon and sniffed it, eyes closed. “I have to call her, with my mind.”
“Not fair. Why did you get to learn the summoning trick? Did you ever even meet Gen? I was actually there, when she was turning Felport into a hallucination amusement park, I even helped stop the nightmare king who tormented her. At least, I mean, I was around at the time...”
“Hello, Rondeau,” Gevenieve said. One wall of the kitchen had turned into a gauzy pavilion of white silk, and the woman with the violet eyes and the caramel-colored hair stood shyly, half-hidden by a curtain. “Did you need something? Only, I shouldn’t stay too long, just being in the world like this, it makes thing start to go... soft... around me...”
Rondeau suddenly regretted suggesting they call Genevieve. She’d developed some control over her powers, so her worst nightmares didn’t just pop into being anymore, but she was still dangerous, and she knew it – that’s why she lived in a little pinched-off bit of reality, where she could reshape the landscape without damaging a place where people actually lived. “Uh,” he said.
Then he blinked, or didn’t even blink, but it was like reality blinked, and he was on his back underneath the glass-topped coffee table in the living room, wearing only one shoe, with a terrible headache, and Pelham was sitting up groaning beside the frosty balcony door. “Wha?” Rondeau said. “Did Gen... do something?”
“I think she left,” Pelham said. “I think... she might have been annoyed? That we called her for this?”
Rondeau squinted. Had there been yelling? Something about how if she meddled, she might cause a drought that would consume the world, or bring on a new Little Ice Age? About how you didn’t bring a thermonuclear bomb to a knife fight? “Oh. Right.”
He turned his head. His beautiful big-screen TV was gone. In its place rested a single yellow lemon.
“Damn,” he said. “I liked that TV.”
“What?” Rondeau said, holding the conch shell to his ear. “You – okay, I get that, I know, Marla owes you a favor, you don’t owe anyone any favors, I’m saying, maybe I’ll owe you a favor if you come help. I don’t know, you’re an ocean witch, that’s basically the same as weather magic, and anyway won’t this hyperborean vortex mess up the Gulf Stream or something – Huh. That’s – right. Okay. Uh, no, yeah, I’m still gay, not planning to hit the coast soon anyway – right, sure, thanks.” He hung up, if that was the right terminology to use for putting an enchanted conch shell back down on the table.
“That didn’t sound good,” Pelham said.
“Did she say why she can’t help?” Pelham said.
Rondeau shrugged. “She’s an ocean witch. Nevada is landlocked.”
“There are planes,” Pelham said.
“You ever try arguing with Zufi via conch shell? It’s even more pointless than arguing with her in person.” He sighed. “Who’s next? And what will we have to sacrifice or chant or enchant in order to call them?”
“I suppose we could try Hamil,” Pelham said. “And he actually answers his phone.”
Hamil had been Marla’s consigliere when she was chief sorcerer of Felport, and though their relationship had soured when he voted with the rest of the council to send her into exile, Rondeau still considered the man a friend. He’d bought Rondeau’s nightclub, admittedly a site with interesting magical properties, for stupid amounts of money, laying the groundwork for Rondeau’s subsequent life of leisure.
Well, mostly leisure. “I don’t know,” Rondeau said. “You’re a master of sympathetic magic. Can’t you just, like, create a sympathetic magic link between someplace really warm and Las Vegas, and kind of balance things out?”
“Possibly, possibly.” Hamil’s deep, rich voice was uncharacteristically distracted. “But I’d need to go to Vegas, and things are frantic here right now. Don’t tell Marla I said so, but the city’s gone a bit to hell since she left – we’re dealing with a rash of inexplicable cases of spontaneous...” The rest of the sentence was indistinct, as if he’d turned his head away from the phone, and Rondeau heard him shouting orders at someone.
