Bride of Death (Marla Mason) (25 page)

“Hi,” I said. “My name’s Marla Mason. I hear you’re a bad person. Tell me about the Eater.” I looked him over carefully, but there wasn’t much to see – he looked like a middle-aged guy who’d spent a long time on the road and was now experiencing a totally reasonable moment of terror in the face of a stranger with a gun interrupting his bowel movement.

His face was slick with sweat, his adam’s apple bobbing, his eyes fixed and wide. “Listen,” he said, “I don’t have much, but you’re welcome to it, my wallet’s in the other room, just –”

“Let’s not do this. It’s so tedious, the part where you pretend you don’t know why I’m here. You’re a monster. I’m a monster-hunter. Today, you’re lucky, because I don’t so much want
you
as the guy you can
lead
me to – the Eater. Cooperate, and I might let you scuttle off into the night alive.”

“Lady, I swear, I don’t know what you’re talking about –”

“The fuck you don’t.” But I didn’t shoot, or kick, or draw my blade to make him a little more talkative... because this just looked like a
guy
. Sure, lots of monsters were indistinguishable from humans – lots of monsters
were
humans, though I was focusing on the inhuman sort these days – but confirmation was nice. He could be a mind-controlled slave, or even just a dupe unwittingly in the Eater’s employ – the oracle had promised me a
thread
, something I could follow to the Eater, but it didn’t necessarily mean that thread was going to be another bad guy. If I’d found him eating a baby or wearing a hat made of human eyeballs, I would have been more comfortable bringing some enhanced interrogation techniques – fuck it, I mean torture – to bear, but he just looked like an idiot taking a crap. It was always possible
Nicolette had misread the cues, too, or –

“Shit,” the man said. “Did you say Marla
Mason
? Did Nicolette send you?”

I didn’t quite lower my gun, but I confess my hand wavered. “What do you know about Nicolette?”

He ran a hand through what was left of his hair. “Ah, hell, we used to date in high school, before she got into all that witchy shit. Things between us never worked out, in fact we had a nasty breakup, but a few years back I was passing through Felport and she somehow knew – magic, I guess – and she invited me out for dinner. I thought, you know, she wanted to rekindle an old flame, but it was all a trick. She poisoned my food – just a little, enough to make me puke and shit myself all night long. The whole time I was sick she stayed in my hotel room, laughing at me, and she never stopped
talking
, and mostly she bitched about you, Marla Mason, how much she hated you and wanted to get rid of you. I passed out eventually and woke up in a cornfield wearing nothing but a pair of pink lace panties, and one of my kidneys was missing.
Crap
. And now she’s told you some bullshit about how I’m a monster?”

I gritted my teeth. That was all alarmingly plausible. Nicolette was nothing if not whimsically vindictive, and we
had
been ruinously bored tooling up and down the highway. I could easily believe she’d scented an old lover and decided to have some fun at
both
of our expenses. A guy she knew being in the same part of the country where we were was kind of a big coincidence, I’ll grant you, but I’ve noticed that bizarre coincidences seem
way
more likely when you’re in the company of a chaos witch.

I lowered the gun, but I didn’t put it away, because, well. Like I said. Better safe.

The guy was a little less terrified-looking, now, and he went on with renewed energy. “I don’t know what Nicolette told you, Marla, but I’m just a
guy
, I drive a truck for a living, you know? She’s just fucking with both of us. I think ever since she got her head cut off she’s gone even crazier –”

And the gun went back up. The man – if he was a man – winced. “Damn it,” he said. “I shouldn’t have known she got her head cut off, huh? Must have happened too recently. But it was such a strong image in your mind... I’m a decent telepath, but I can only skim the surface. Oh, well. I guess we’ll do this the other way, then. At least I can read enough of your mind to know you don’t have any idea what the fuck you’re dealing with here.”

He started to stand, and I shot him in the shoulder, just by way of discouraging him. I would have gone for the face, but I wanted answers before I took him apart.

A .22 doesn’t make a very big noise, but in the confined space it was loud enough to make my ears ring. It didn’t do much
except
make a big noise, though. The bullet passed through his shoulder like a rock dropping into a pond, his flesh rippling for a moment and then smoothing out again. He went “Ouch,” but I clearly hadn’t hurt him a bit.

I realized he was cloaked in an illusion, just wearing the semblance of humanity. That was confirmed when he finished standing, and I saw his crotch was entirely bare, smooth as a doll’s. He hadn’t bothered to make the illusion complete. I wondered why he’d been sitting on the toilet at all. Did he even shit? Or maybe he kept his real mouth down there and he’d been drinking the water out of the toilet bowl. Who the fuck knew?

The monster grinned at me, his jaws and lips contorting, at least half a dozen mandibles – they looked like crab legs – unfolding from within his mouth and wriggling at me, dripping what I could only assume were assorted toxins. He reached out with an arm that was rapidly mutating into something multi-clawed and hard-shelled.

I kicked him right between his hairless legs. The inertial charms in my boot gave my kick the impact of a battering ram, and I hit something solid that
crunched
with a sound like a stomped eggshell. His body flew upward hard enough to hit the ceiling, then crashed back down on the toilet. The illusion draping him wavered and vanished, revealing his true form. Man-sized crab-spider-octopus, more or less, with a thin veneer of slime eel. I’d seen worse, though it was certainly nothing you’d want to share a bathroom with.

“Doesn’t matter,” it slurred, human voice emerging from the grinding nightmare of its mouthparts. “My hive-mates are legion, and they gather at the house of the Eater. The work will go on.”

“The work always does,” I said. “So about this house of the Eater. Where can I find it?”

The thing chuckled, I think, or maybe it was just choking on fluids, but then it spoke: “You have attacked one of the Eater’s tribe. That will not go unpunished. You will see his house soon enough: when you are brought there, laid bare before him, all your possible futures flayed away. “

“Huh. Hurting you will make him track me down, huh? Would killing you accelerate the process? I only ask because I’ve got an immovable deadline coming up, there’s someplace I’ve got to be next month, so I don’t have a lot of time for cat-and-mouse back-and-forth.”

“To kill me would earn you nothing but a lifetime of servitude and suffering –”

“Good enough,” I said, and stomped down on its head. There was no reason to assume a thing like that kept its brains in its head, so I stomped the rest too, until all the bits stopped wriggling, and they were no longer recognizable as parts of a coherent whole. Dismemberment-by-stomping is pretty tedious work – this guy’s carapace was a lot tougher than the spore-lord’s spongy form had been – and my legs got tired, but it was easier than ruling an entire city or being an occult detective, at least.

I didn’t envy the maid who’d have to clean that bathroom. It didn’t look like a murder scene, exactly. More like a dozen people had used the contents of a sushi bar for a mosh pit.

I climbed back out the window and returned to my room, washing off my boots in the sink, making the little embroidered skulls and scythes shine.

“Well?” Nicolette said. “Are they okay?”

I frowned, poking my head out of the bathroom. “Are
who
okay?”

“The monster’s captives,” she said. “Or didn’t I mention there were captives? I’m totally getting a captives vibe.”

“You
bitch
,” I replied.

•

I went back to the monster’s room, doing my best to jump over the nastiness in the bathroom, and searched his belongings. I found a set of keys and took the risk of slipping out his front door – it was dark, and as far as I could tell we were the only two guests on that side of the motel anyway. I made my way through the parking lot, to the far end where the big rigs were. There were two: one gleaming black with a shiny refrigerated trailer, and one smeared with mud and muck, with a dirty white trailer. I took a wild guess and tried the keys on the dirty truck. The door opened right up.

The trailer in back was locked, of course, but flipping through the keys I soon found the right one to open it. I tugged the trailer door up and open, and found... Nothing. Empty trailer, just a big dark echoing space.

Remembering the illusion the monster had cloaked itself in, I grimaced. I’m capable of seeing through illusions, but it gives me a nasty headache if I overdo it. Oh well. Some things can’t be avoided. I closed my eyes for a moment, and when I opened them, the truth inside the trailer was revealed.

It looked like a child’s bedroom. Giant fluffy stuffed animals, mostly bears of various kinds; a child-sized pretend kitchen, complete with stove and oven and sink and cabinets and little dishes and fake food; a miniature table and chairs, with a plastic tea set; three sets of bunk beds with brightly-colored sheets all done up in superheroes and princesses; and the whole scene lit by whimsical lights in the shape of ladybugs and smiling suns and flowers stuck on the walls and the ceiling.

Half a dozen children sat in a circle on the colorful rug, eating candy bars, faces smeared with chocolate, a litter of discarded juice boxes all around them. I’m no good when it comes to guessing ages – kids all look like lumps of uncooked dough to me – but the oldest couldn’t have been more than six or eight. They had dirty hair and wrinkled clothes, ranging from footie pajamas to Sunday dresses. One little girl stood up and waved at me, tentatively. “Is this the farm?”

“Farm?” I said, wondering if I sounded as stupid and stunned as I felt.

“The farm where mommy and daddy are waiting for me,” a little boy said. “The man said it was a surprise.”

“We will ride ponies,” the girl said solemnly.

One of the younger kids wailed. “No farm! Want mama!”

I swallowed. Some things you couldn’t fix with guns or knives or magic boots. “This man – did he hurt you?”

The oldest boy and girl shook their heads; the others were too young or distracted to notice my question, but I took their two responses as a good sign.

“Did this man... take you?” I asked.

“He said it was okay to come with him,” the boy said.

“He’s my mommy’s friend,” the girl added. “He knew the secret code, so it was okay to go with him.”

I closed my eyes, this time because it hurt to look at them. Secret code. Right. I’d heard about that sort of thing – you teach your children a secret family pass phrase, and they know they shouldn’t go with anyone who doesn’t know the magic words. As far as security precautions went, it had a few flaws, especially when you were dealing with a telepathic monster who could pluck the words right out of your head. He’d probably skimmed
all
their minds and come up with whatever info he needed to lure them in. But why take all these children?

Then again, who cared why. There weren’t a ton of
non
-horrifying reasons to steal children, especially when the kidnapper was a monster in the employ of something called the Eater. “Come on, kids,” I said. “You’ll see your parents soon.”

•

Getting them across the parking lot was a little like herding a bunch of lizards on meth, but I got the kids settled into my room – after nipping in real quick first to cover up Nicolette, because the little ones didn’t need
more
trauma. Once they were happily ensconced in front of the TV (little kids maybe shouldn’t watch Godzilla movies, but it was the best I could do), I said, “Be right back.” I left, and took my saddlebags and the birdcage with me.

I unhooked the trailer from the truck, then climbed into the cab. I put Nicolette down on the passenger seat, and after I took her cover off she looked around and whistled. “Do you know how to drive this thing?”

“I know how to do everything worth doing,” I said.

She snorted. “Sure you do. What are you going to do about the kids?”

I took out the pad of stationery I’d liberated from the motel room, then turned on my cell and dialed the number on the letterhead. When the bored-sounding clerk answered, I said, “Hey, this is the lady in room 6. I came back from dinner and found six little kids in my room. What the hell?”

The clerk squawked in disbelief and surprise and annoyance but I cut him off. “Look, I don’t
care
, that shit was too weird. Consider this me checking out.” I hung up, and just to be safe, I dialed 911 – confident my cell couldn’t be tracked or called back, since it was magicked up one side and down the other – and told them I’d seen a guy in a mini-van dump a bunch of little kids in the motel parking lot and then drive away. I disconnected before the follow-up questions got too personal. Between the two calls I was confident
somebody
would look into things and get the kids back to their parents.

“You’re not going to deliver them personally?” Nicolette said as I started up the truck and eased out of the lot, trying to get the feel for the sticky clutch and loose gearshift. “You’d be a terrible mother.”

“No argument there.”

“So where are we going now?” Nicolette said.

“To park this truck someplace where it won’t be noticed for a little while. I can do some divination magic, figure out where it’s been, maybe track the Eater that way –”

“Of you could come screaming into the present century,” Nicolette said, “and just check the fucking GPS.”

I noticed the LCD screen on the dash. “Oh. So I could just look at his travel history and see where he’s been, and maybe where he’s going, if it’s a place he’s been before. This ‘farm,’ the kids mentioned, or the house of the Eater.” I shook my head. “Kids. He was stealing kids. Shit.”