Dead Reign (16 page)

“Have safe travels,” Dr. Husch said. “Come back alive and well. I doubt Death will be a very generous supporter of the mentally ill.”

“I’ll miss you, too.” Marla went to put her boots on.

P
elham did surprisingly well on the airplane, after Marla finally got him to settle down and stop asking for things—apparently all the Chamberlain’s lessons in air travel had started from the assumption that Pelham and his boss would be traveling in first class, possibly sometime in the 1950s, when people still wore formal wear to fly. He had a little trouble coping with the tiny seats in cattle class, though the flight wasn’t crowded, and Marla was pleased they’d gotten a whole three-seat row to themselves. Pelham finally subsided into pensive silence once he realized the “stewardesses” wouldn’t be bringing champagne and lobster thermidor, and that, yes, those thin little blankets and sad little pillows were the best they could offer, and no, there really wasn’t any way to move the seats in front of them up a bit to provide more legroom. He sat in the aisle seat, so he didn’t look out the window, which might have freaked him out, Marla thought—he’d never flown before, of course, and knowing about flight in theory was different from looking down and seeing tiny cities below.

“This isn’t very glamorous, is it?” Pelham said about half an hour into the flight, and Marla grunted. She was reading one of those SkyMall catalogs and marveling, as always, at the fundamental idiocy of the human condition; people bought
stuff
to try to make themselves happy, when everyone with any sense knew you became happy by doing things, not having things.

“There’s not so much glamour in our business, Pelham. Well, there is in the sense of illusion, but not so much fanciness.”

“The Founders’ Ball would have been glamorous, I think.”

Marla closed her magazine and swore. “I forgot all about the ball. There were more pressing issues. Crap. It’s this weekend? Damn it. Last time the ghosts didn’t get their party, the Great Fire of Felport was the result. I’m hoping to wrap this business up soon, but hell, I don’t really know what we’re getting into. Maybe the Chamberlain will make some kind of other arrangements to keep the ghosts satisfied, if she’s not busy fighting with the incarnation of Death, but assuming we get back in a few days and the party hasn’t been worked on at all, how long will it take you to arrange something?”

“That varies a bit, Ms. Mason. The three-sided triangle of commerce applies—of fast, good, and cheap, you may choose any two. I could create a sad specimen of a party quickly and for relatively little money, though to create something more impressive for a modest outlay would take more time than we will have, I imagine—”

“Don’t worry about the money. Money, we got. So you could do something fast if we threw enough cash at it?”

“Of course,” Pelham said. “From your conversation with Dr. Husch, I assumed…never mind. It’s not my place.”

“What? You thought I was broke because Leda complains I don’t give her enough money? Listen, Pelham, the budget for the Blackwing Institute every year would easily fund a real hospital—the kind with hundreds of patients—with money left over to buy all the doctors gold rims for their car tires. Leda just wants
more
because when she has extra money, she pours it into research projects, paying shamanistic healers and biomancers and aura-manipulators to come work on her craziest, most dangerous inmates. She thinks she can rehabilitate Elsie Jarrow given enough time.” Marla shook her head. “I admire Leda’s dedication, don’t get me wrong, but giving her money is like chucking cash into a black hole, and I could beggar myself and tax the other sorcerers until they were ready to overthrow me, all without making her happy. So we make sure she has enough for basic operations, and a bit more for her research projects, and that’s it. But, no, we’re okay financially.”

“Ah,” Pelham said. “I misunderstood. Your office is in Rondeau’s apartment, and I understand your home is rather…unprepossessing, so I assumed you were under a financial strain.”

“I don’t live as extravagantly as the Chamberlain does, it’s true, but that’s just not the kind of life I come from, you know? I wouldn’t know what to do with myself in a big old mansion. I don’t look at the money stuff too closely, but being chief sorcerer of Felport is a sweet gig. It’s like being a crime boss and a feudal lord all rolled into one.”

At the “feudal lord” bit, Pelham’s eyes lit up, and Marla sighed and went back to her magazine.

Eventually they landed in Chicago, and that’s when Pelham started getting twitchy.

“Damn it, Pelly,
run
!” Marla said. They had a tight connection, and their flight was all the way across the airport, naturally. Chicago O’Hare was a huge complex of misery, absolutely thronged with people, and Pelham was trying to walk with care and dignity, apologizing to everyone he jostled.

“Surely they’ll hold the plane for us,” Pelham said, and then apologized to a fat businessman who ran over Pelham’s foot with a giant rolling suitcase.

“Surely they
won’t
!”

“Oh, dear. But…forgive me, I need to take a personal moment, ah…”

Marla stopped by the departures screen, glancing at their flight, which was on time, and, godsdamn it, already boarding. “What are you on about?”

Pelham blushed scarlet. “I need to adjourn to the gentlemen’s facilities, Ms. Mason.”

“Why didn’t you piss on the plane!” She shouted loud enough to make people edge out of her way.

“
I—I
did not realize there were facilities available, and—”

“Just go, then!” Marla started physically shoving him toward the nearby men’s room.

“I beg your pardon?” Pelham said. “I don’t mean to slow us down, but I’m unsure—”

“There! Where all those guys are going! With the little sign with a picture of a little guy on it! Go in there and piss, would you?”

“A public restroom?” he said, the way someone else might say, “A dead body?”

“Yes, damn it! What, you think they have special slow-ass valet bathrooms? Go! We need to run!”

Pelham gingerly stepped into the steady line of men going to the bathroom, and Marla tapped her foot, waiting. And waiting. And waiting.

Finally she couldn’t wait anymore, and she barged into the bathroom, where Pelham was muttering to himself and scrubbing his hands at the sink.

“Whoa, it must be ladies’ night!” a grungy guy with a giant backpack said. “The line for the girls’ room too long?” Men at the urinals glanced at her and made various rude or scandalized remarks. Pelham didn’t appear to notice.

“What the hell are you doing?” She grabbed his shoulder and spun him around. His eyes were wide and wild, his thin hair mussed, his lips twitching.

“He’s been washing his hands for, like, ever,” said the guy with the backpack. “He’s got that obsessive-compulsive disorder, I bet.”

“It’s so…filthy,” Pelham whispered. “A man urinated on the floor. I had to relieve myself into a basin fixed to the wall, and it flushed with a horrible loud sound as soon as I turned away.”

“Yeah, it’s a motion sensor,” backpack guy volunteered.

“And then the sink would not give sufficient water,” Pelham said. “There are no knobs, and it seems to spray forth capriciously, with no rhyme or reason—”

“Dude, the sinks have motion sensors, too,” backpack guy said, and Marla whirled on him, snarled, and he left with great speed. Marla reined in her anger and patted Pelham gently on the shoulder.

“Come on, Pelly. Stiff upper lip. We must carry on. Okay? We’ve got a plane to catch. Can you hurry for me?”

“But…my hands…the conditions here, so unhygienic, I fear—”

“It’ll be okay.” Marla leaned in close. “I’ll sterilize your hands with magic, okay? Whisper a little death word to kill every microbe. Okay?”

Pelham looked at her like a starving man at a doughnut. “Yes, Ms. Mason.”

Just then a security guard came in. “Lady, you have to—”

“We’re leaving,” she said, and started to go.

The guard stepped into her way, and Marla checked her desire to fling him against the wall. That would not help them catch their plane. “Look, miss, really—”

“This is my mentally challenged cousin,” Marla said. “Ask any of those idiots snickering by the urinals—he was in here freaking out over germs, and I just came to get him.”

“It’s true,” someone volunteered. “Dude was trippin’.”

“You really want to give this place a reputation for hassling retarded guys?” Marla said, and the guard frowned and stepped aside. “Thank you.” Marla pulled Pelham out after her.

Pelham didn’t speak, but he did sprint, so Marla was content. They got to the gate just as the attendant was closing the doors. “Two passengers here!” Marla bellowed.

The attendant turned on her with a frozen smile and shook her head. “Too late. I’m sorry,” she began, and Marla stepped up to her and grabbed her hands.

“Please,”
Marla said, and threw her mind at the attendant’s, an overriding plea, a request that didn’t appeal to the conscious mind at all but to some deeper, fundamentally human part.

“Ah, of course,” the attendant said, and made a call, and opened the gate.

Marla leaned on Pelham a little as they went down the jetway. “Shit,” she muttered. “Blunt-force mind control is a bitch.” She just barely made it to their seats. They had two together, miraculously, on a very full flight, and the overhead bins were all full, so it was a good thing they had no baggage besides her rolled-up cloak—she didn’t want to call attention to herself in an airport, and a woman in a black-and-silver cloak got noticed. She balled up the cloak into a makeshift pillow, strapped herself in, and passed out. She woke up three hours later with a pounding headache, to darkness outside the plane’s windows. She slurred “Water.” Pelham had gotten a bottle of water from somewhere, and he passed it to her. She chugged it noisily and moaned. “That sucked. I usually carry some little stones enchanted with one-shot compulsions—they don’t hit me so hard. But I don’t have any charms with me, and doing it direct mind-to-mind like that, oof, I don’t recommend it.”

“Ms. Mason, I can’t apologize enough,” Pelham said. “I lost control, and forced you to strain yourself. I am humiliated.”

“Well, yeah,” Marla said. “What happened to you back there?”

“Too many people,” Pelham said, shaking his head. “In the nightclub, it wasn’t so overwhelming. I had something to do, serving drinks, and I hardly stopped to notice the crowds, the sheer number of people—and when I did, I told myself it wasn’t many more than had attended the last Founders’ Ball, though it was, really. In the airport, surrounded by all those strangers, the press of people…” He shuddered. “I’d never seen so many people together all at once, going about their own business. I think, somehow, I didn’t realize there were so many people in the world. Oh, I know, there are six billion people on Earth, but that is only a number, and this…this was fact, and flesh.”

“Wow,” Marla said. “So you get anxiety attacks when there are too many people around. Kind of makes sense. No offense, Pelly, but you’ve led kind of a sheltered life. And you’ve had a bit of upheaval lately. Yesterday you were in the place you’d lived all your life, and today you’ve been banished from the whole city. No wonder you freaked a little. It’s okay. I hate crowds, too. I don’t ever like to be in a group that’s bigger than I can incapacitate single-handedly if they get possessed by a malign intelligence. You know. Contingencies.”

Pelham almost smiled. “Thank you, Ms. Mason, for being understanding.”

“Hell, I’m glad to know you have a weakness. You were getting a little spookily omnicompetent there for a while.”

“I try to give satisfaction.” He definitely smiled that time.

“What’s the movie?” Marla said, glancing at the pretty people on the tiny screen over their seat.

“Something about someone falling in love with someone, but they are currently angry at each other over a simple misunderstanding that could be solved with the briefest of explanations. I…do not watch many films. I fail to see the appeal here.”

“Wake me when we land,” Marla said, and went back to sleep.

“Death is at a brothel,” Beadle said, entering the back room of the Wolf Bay Café.

Rondeau whistled. “One of the Chamberlain’s fancy houses, or…?”

Beadle shook his head. “One of Ernesto’s clubs, not far from the old air force base.”

“Rough trade,” Rondeau said thoughtfully, and began flipping his butterfly knife open and closed and open again, thinking. “He’s secured the loyalty, however temporary, of every major sorcerer in the city, and now he’s off having
sex
?”

“For free,” Beadle said. “Naturally, as he is king of the sorcerers now. The girls don’t know who they work for, but they understand the meaning of ‘
VIP
.’”

“He’s probably the kind of guy who leaves dead hookers by the side of the road,” Rondeau said.

“I doubt that,” Langford said, looking up from his clipboard, which bulged with papers of various sizes. He was thin, bookish, intense, wearing a disturbingly stained white lab coat. “He was probably a virgin not long ago. I suspect he is only recently incarnated. Gods don’t normally wear flesh, you see, though sometimes the human mind chooses to see them in human forms, as comprehending their true nature is difficult. But if Death bled from Marla’s knife, it seems reasonable to assume he’s in a physical body, albeit a magically augmented one. There is some mythological precedent for Death coming to Earth in human form. I suspect that, having a body for the first time, he is attempting to explore the
joys
of that body. Pleasures of the flesh may divert him for a while.”

“Hmm,” Rondeau said. “So if he’s in a body, could we…blow him up?”

“Oh, yeah,” Partridge said from his table in the far corner. He kept to the shadows—he was scarred all over, and sensitive about it—burning matches and snuffing them between his callused fingertips, until the whole back room smelled of sulfur. “Let’s blow something up.”

“He could conceivably be damaged, if caught by surprise, though he would simply repair his body,” Langford said.