Bride of Death (Marla Mason) (15 page)

On the one side, we had team monster-lawyer – you know, the guy I stomped to bits at Danooli’s. His bunch was led by a witch named Orias, who specialized in the satiation of unnatural appetites. Her preferred rackets were prostitution, of the decidedly non-standard kind. You went to her brothels if you wanted to fuck a girl who had a barbed tail she could shove up your ass during the act of love, or to make out with a guy with needle fangs full of hallucinogenic venom, or to get blowjobs from a blob with a thousand mouths and two thousand tongues. Some of the ‘escorts’ were monsters she hired, some were artificial life forms constructed in her underground flesh lab, and some she acquired through more mysterious means.

Orias supplied ordinary everyday humans to monsters who liked to play with those, too, and she didn’t much care if the humans were willing or not. She had fingers in most of the sin industries – exotic drugs (blood, sweat, milk, jizz, and other substances from her employees, mainly), gambling (where the stakes were a little more interesting than cash or cars or houses), and so on. I’ve got nothing against people having a good time, as long as everything’s consensual and nobody gets dragged in against their will, or exploited because they’re too young and/or dumb to know better, but Orias had no such qualms. She was teamed up with various thugs and bone breakers and mind eaters who enforced her policies and kept the below-the-line workers focused and on task.

The other gang, the one the beast of Sunlight Shores had been aligned with, was run by a self-styled
loup garou
called Sarlat – name taken from some famous man-eating wolf that only attacked grown men, standing on its hind legs and clawing out their throats. Sarlat was into heavier shit than Orias, mostly. Where Orias served the twisted needs and desires of the people in the Southwestern states, Sarlat believed more in
making
opportunities, and then exploiting the fuck out of them. Extortion, murder for hire, protection, all the standard rackets, backed up with supernatural powers. He was also... let’s say a procurer. He was the guy you went to if you were a cultist and your god needed fifteen virgins sacrificed at the next new moon, or if you were a monster who needed to eat the livers of unbaptized babies to sustain your next century of life. For the right price, he’d make sure you got what you needed, and word was he’d wield the ceremonial knife himself for no extra charge.

As a rule his gang was nastier than the crew Orias ran, but they were also less well organized, more a loose affiliation of independent contractors who bonded together for mutual protection and backup as necessary.

As for why the two gangs hated each other... all the usual reasons. Clashes over turf. Sarlat robbing Orias’s people, Orias’s people poisoning Sarlat’s people in retaliation. There was also some more personal enmity between the two leaders, though Pelly and Rondeau hadn’t been able to track down any details, at least not in the few days I’d given them to scrounge up intel. There were rumors that Orias and Sarlat used to sleep together, which was all the explanation I needed, really. There’s no hatred like love gone rancid.

Both gangs were using all the psychics and divination specialists at their respective disposals to track me down, and make sure I paid for my crimes. Or, more honestly, to make sure I didn’t commit any more. They don’t give a shit about justice, but when it comes to self-preservation, Sarlat and Orias are both motivated self-starters.

(You’re thinking: what about the Eater, right? I was promised an Eater. But Pelly couldn’t find anything about a guy called that, and Rondeau couldn’t, either. I could have pestered Rondeau into summoning up an oracle and asking the question, but if he did that sort of thing too often he got migraines, and started barfing, and I was trying to go easy on him. I didn’t think it mattered – I figured maybe ‘the Eater’ was a nickname for Sarlat. I was so wrong.)

•

The bad guys rolled in around sundown, a line of pickup trucks and SUVs, and creatures moving rapidly on foot (or paw or claw or slime-cushion) in the shadows. I watched and listened from my undisclosed location, through the eyes of various Polaroid photographs of myself I’d secreted all over the ghost town. (Imbuing representations of self with sensory capabilities is pretty basic sympathetic magic. The downside is if someone sticks a knife in one of the photos, it hurts, so I’d hidden them pretty well.)

The monster gangs set up a couple of camps, each at one end of the long main street. Both gangs posted guards, who made occasional forays down the main street toward one another, jeering and shouting threats, each side claiming they would be the one to take my head – I assumed they meant decapitating me, as opposed to taking Nicolette, more’s the pity – and so on. Just posturing. It was good to see they hadn’t coordinated their plans, teaming up to take me out more efficiently. Given the deep enmity between them, that wasn’t surprising, but I’d worried they’d see me as a big enough threat to join forces against the common enemy. I’d have an easier time (and, being honest, a lot more fun) if they were still out to kill each other, too.

Sarlat took up residence in the remains of the sheriff’s office, which was pretty much just a tumble of timbers, except for the rusting iron bulk of the cells, the bars still holding firm in stone walls. He set up a chair and table in a cell, which surprised me – animals aren’t big fans of being in cages, as a rule – but then, that was the only bit of office that had a solid roof overhead, so it made sense. He barked orders at his lieutenants, telling them to scour the nearby buildings and the surrounding area for any trace of me. There was so much residual magic in Tolerance they couldn’t focus on me with the usual pinpoint divination techniques – the best they could tell was that I was somewhere inside a fuzzy circle a mile or so in diameter, centered on the town itself.

Once Sarlat was alone in the cell, jabbing angrily at the screen of his smartphone, I made my presence known.

When I materialized in the office and sauntered to the door of the cell, he tried to kill me straight away – leapt up, threw his phone aside, and just
flew
straight for me, hands extended and already twisting into claws. He passed right through me and rolled in a somersault on the dirty ground before springing to his feet. “Illusion,” he spat.

I shrugged in my undisclosed location, and my image standing before him did the same. “Projection, anyway.” One of my photos was in a corner of the room, covered with a layer of dirt, allowing me to spy and to project a remote presence into the room. My illusory body only had a range of ten yards or so, but that was more than sufficient for my purposes. “I like how you came straight at me, no posturing, no chit-chat – I’d heard you were a pro. Not like that poser Orias.”

Sarlat’s hands were just hands again, and he brushed dirt off his body. He looked like a weird cross between a dom and a hipster – motorcycle boots, leather pants, leather vest over a white shirt, and thick leather bracelets on each wrist, but he had absurd facial hair that included a mustache with waxed ends, and his glasses were old-school with big chunky frames. Sarlat might have been handsome, but it was hard to tell under all the clichés he was wearing. “You killed someone I was sworn to protect, bitch.”

“Bitch? I’m not one of your litter-mates, wolfman. All human here.” (That was true, for the moment. I had three weeks before I’d be a goddess again.) “Which reminds me – what kind of werewolf are you, Sarlat? Are you more like a Basque, or more like a leper, or more like a Tasmanian devil?”

Sarlat circled around my illusion, clenching and unclenching his hands. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

“I mean, are you a human who just happens to turn into a wolf, with your own werewolf cultural traditions and shit – werewolf as ethnicity? Or are you a human who got bitten by a filthy animal and caught a nasty disease that makes you sprout hair in even more places than usual – werewolf as disease, like a leper? Or are you a totally different species, and you just happen to
look
human sometimes, even though you’re really no more human than a Tasmanian devil?”

He drew himself up to his full height, which was probably only about five-foot-eight absent the motorcycle boots. “I am
le loup-garou
. My sins were so extravagant that I became heir to an ancient evil, which allows me to transform – and not just into a wolf. I can be an owl, stalking the skies, or a cat, slinking through the shadows –”

“Huh, right,” I said. “And a cow, too, right? Sometimes a pig?”

He bared his teeth, which were noticeably yellow, especially the oversized canines. “A bull, and a
boar
.”

“Sure, sure. My French-Canadian folklore is a little rusty, but I thought that curse of the loup-garou thing only lasted for 100 days or something, and the transformation was involuntary? Why do I get the sense you’re just a dude with some shapeshifting magic who decided to come up with a soaked-in-evil backstory to impress the chumps?”

“I will sniff you out,” he said. “I will open your belly, feast on your organs, and shit in your empty body cavities.”

“Straight-ahead attacking, and weirdly specific scatological threats! I gotta admit, Sarlat, you keep impressing me. I mean that sincerely. How about you and me work something out? Killing your tentacled friend at Sunlight Shores, that was strictly self-defense on my part. I respect the right of a monster to do his monster shit, but I draw the line at letting myself get eaten. You have to cut me a
little
slack there.”

“Absolutely,” Sarlat said. “All is forgiven. Come over in person and we’ll have a drink to celebrate our new friendship.”

“Now, now, no need for sarcasm. My point is, I didn’t go picking a fight with your people, I just did what was necessary to keep myself alive. I
did
kill Orias’s advisor with malice aforethought, though – when he came to congratulate me on killing the beast and to ask if I’d help wipe out your whole gang, since I’d made such a good start.”

Now I had his attention. He walked through me like I wasn’t even there – which, okay, technically I wasn’t – and sat back down on his chair in the cell. “I assumed Orias hired you... until I heard you killed the spore-lord. He’s not dead, by the way. His body was a temporary thing made of shit and fungus, mashed up into a man-shape. He’s just motes of thinking dust, really.”

“Drat. Next time I’ll bring a tank of herbicide and put him down for good. Listen – how much do you know about me?”

His shrug was elegant. “Enough. You used to be chief sorcerer of some rust-belt city out East. You fucked up somehow – details are sketchy – and the other sorcerers ran you out of town on a rail. You lived in Hawaii for a while, until some trouble there sent you packing again. You popped up in Vegas a couple of days ago and then proceeded to start fucking with my people for no reason.”

“Any such fucking was inadvertent, I assure you. Did you hear
why
I left Hawaii?”

He frowned. “What I
heard
was that you killed Elsie Jarrow.”

“You heard right.” Technically I hadn’t killed her – I wasn’t sure someone as powerful as Jarrow
could
be killed – but I’d sure as shit neutralized her. “You sure you still want to fuck with me, knowing that?”

“You killed
the
Elsie Jarrow. Most powerful chaos witch in history. I didn’t believe it, but then I heard it from three different sources, two of which I even trust. You really did her in?”

“With these little hands. If I could do that, don’t you think I could take out Orias?”

“You’ve got my attention. What exactly are you saying?”

“I’ve got some business to do in the Southwest, and I’d rather not have your bruisers bothering me. I can handle them, of course, but I don’t want to spend all my time scraping your thugs off the bottom of my boots. I killed one of yours – I’ll acknowledged that. Party foul. You’ve got a need for blood vengeance and all, you can’t let anybody fuck with your cohort, I get that. But how about I pay restitution for my crime instead? I’ll take out Orias, and you and your gang call it even and leave me be.”

He stroked his chin, thinking about it. A normal crook would have just agreed, waited to see if I managed to kill Orias, and then murdered me anyway. You can promise anything when you’re a lying piece of shit. But such casual double-crosses are a lot harder in the world of sorcerers – there are ways to make agreements that
stick
in my world, to make deals you can’t break any more easily than you could eat your own brain – so if he said yes, he had to
mean
yes, assuming I’d insist on supernatural compulsion to make the terms firm. “So that’s it, you kill Orias, and we’d be square?”

“Well, I wouldn’t mind having access to some materiel and personnel while I’m in your neighborhood. Give me a few favors to call in, and sure, I’ll kill Orias for you, and I’ll even help you mop up the remnants of her forces and make sure to take out any of her lieutenants you’re especially worried about.”

He spat. “None of them
worry
me, they’re just annoyances... but life would be more pleasant with a few of them dead, I’ll give you that. Okay, Mason. You’ve got a deal.”

“You’ll forgive me if I don’t just take your word on that?”

He snorted. “Of course not. Give me an hour to set up a circle of compulsion and we’ll finalize things formally.”

“I’ll send my astral proxy then,” I said. “You won’t blame me if I choose not to come in person.”

“I like doing business with cautious people,” Sarlat said, which was funny, coming from a wolfman who clearly enjoyed solving problems by tearing out their throats.

I let my illusion wink out of sight, though I still had eyes on him, of course, as he called for his contract sorcerers to set up a circle of binding.

An hour. That was probably enough time.

•

Orias wasn’t alone. She was with her spore-lord, who’d made a new body, just as ugly as the last one. They were using a patch of ground beside a dry well for their base of operations, and she’d had her underlings set up a big tent of dark silk, full of pillows and antique-looking furniture. There was even a full liquor cabinet. Ghost town decadence.