Read Grim Tides (Marla Mason) Online

Authors: T.A. Pratt

Tags: #occult, #fantasy, #urban fantasy

Grim Tides (Marla Mason) (2 page)

BOOK: Grim Tides (Marla Mason)
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Someone knocked on the door. Marla looked up and whistled. There was a blurring enchantment on the glass window set in the door, making the shapes beyond into shimmering blobs. “Whoever that is didn’t trip my proximity alarms when they entered our fold in space. But they’re announcing themselves now, which means they aren’t outright hostile, or else, they’re pretty dumb. That’s... interesting. You get any psychic impression off of them?”

Rondeau’s psychic abilities were substantial, but he hadn’t possessed them for long, and was generally too lazy to work on developing them – after all, there were swims to take and massages to enjoy – so he just shrugged. “Something weird, not like a normal human mind, but if they found the shop, you already know they’re some kind of magic, so that doesn’t tell you much.”

“Brilliantly insightful as always. All right, show them in – maybe you’re a better greeter than a psychic.”

Rondeau opened the door with a flourish. “Hello gentlemen. And lady. Uh, ladies? Wow, there are a lot of you.” He stepped aside, ushering in five – no, six – or was it eight? – people, all young, tanned, and dressed in swimwear, from full wetsuits with reef shoes to barefoot and shirtless-with-trunks. They milled around, seeming to move in impossible ways, switching places with one another instantly in a bizarre series of interpositions, and sometimes their
bodies
stayed in the same place, but the
clothes
they were wearing switched, swifter than an eyeblink.

Marla gritted her teeth and closed her eyes. A certain god had gifted her with the power to see through illusions at will, and while the talent was useful, it was also disturbing. Sometimes it was a lot more pleasant to see the world as it
pretended
to be, not as it actually was, but since she combined an insatiable curiosity with a profoundly suspicious nature, she was reluctant to blind herself willingly. She couldn’t talk to a bunch of people flickering like a strobe light, though, so she stepped down her vision. When she opened her eyes, her illusion-piercing gaze was deactivated, and she saw nothing but half a dozen surfer-types, two women and four men, dripping seawater on her hardwood floor. They were all still very attractive, but no longer so... interchangeable. “What can I do for you? Anybody want a towel?”

One of them stepped forward. “We are. Ah. Names. Leis. Ryan. Josh. Mad Gary –”

Marla took pity on him. “I don't need the full roster, really. I won't remember them all anyway. What's your name?”

“You may call... this one... Glyph.” He was blond, square-jawed, blue-eyed, shirtless, and in the kind of shape only a very athletic twenty-something with unspeakably good genes could be. Rondeau was eyeing Glyph like the wolf looked at Little Red Riding Hood. (Rondeau’s powers allowed him see through illusions, too, but he seldom bothered – misconceptions and lack of perception made the world more beautiful, as he always reminded her.) “A... friend of ours... was murdered.” Something about Glyph’s affect was deeply weird, his eyes not quite focused on Marla, his head titled just slightly – as if talking to another human with actual words was a significant effort for him.

Marla nodded. “Okay. Why come to me? They have cops for that.”

Glyph shook his head. “Even if the police could help us... there is no body. Ronin was a devotee of the sea, and his remains returned to our mother ocean when he died – he became sea foam and salt, and washed away.”

“Nice trick,” Marla said. “Better hope organized crime doesn’t figure out how to do that. But, again, why
me
? You kids are obviously carrying some pretty heavy magic around. Why not cast a few divinations of your own to find the guilty party?”

“The killer... he must be more powerful than all of us combined. We cast a dozen divinations, but we could find no trace of him.”

Marla grunted. That was interesting, because she’d guess this group, combined, possessed rather a lot more magic than she did. Not that she’d ever let a little power imbalance stop her from getting into a fight. She’d kicked a hellhound across a room once, and outsmarted the god of Death, and imprisoned the king of nightmares, among other things, and those were all fights that, on paper, she should have lost. You didn’t always have to be more powerful. Sometimes you just had to refuse to lose.

Of course, it helped to have something worth fighting for, which she didn’t, not lately. The old cliché said “freedom” was just another word for “nothing left to lose,” but if this life in exile from her home city was freedom, she’d take the prison of responsibilities anytime.

But, whether she really gave a crap or not, these people needed help, so it was time to stop moping and start asking semi-intelligent questions. “It’s definitely murder, right? No chance it was an accident?”

Glyph nodded. “We saw him die. He... Ronin could not speak when we found him, his throat was cut, blood running into the sand and turning into seawater...” Glyph shivered, and all the other surfers behind him shivered an instant later – even draped in an illusion of normalcy, they couldn’t entirely hide their group affinity. “Can you help us?”

“Sure, I could.” Marla spoke with a certain amount of bland confidence. She’d recently defeated her own evil counterpart from a parallel dimension.
How hard could it be to find a murderer on an island that was only about 730 square miles all together?
“If you don’t mind me asking, though, how did you find me? I don’t exactly have a listing on Yelp or Craigslist.”

“A god told us you might be able to help.”

Marla nodded. “Shark god, right?”

Glyph shook his head. “No. He was not a god of the sea – or, not just the sea, anyway. We are unsure of his domain, or even his true name, but he is... not from around here. Not one of the Hawai’ian gods, we mean, who mostly slumber deeply now, anyway. He was friendly with Ronin, and when Ronin was killed, this god suggested you might be able to help. He spoke quite highly of you.”

Marla frowned. She didn’t know
that
many gods, nor did she want to. Apart from the shark god she’d helped soon after arriving in Hawai’i, there was just a snake god who’d pledged to kill her someday when he got around to it, and the god of Death, with whom she had a... complicated relationship. And there was her old apprentice Bradley Bowman, who was pretty busy maintaining the structural integrity of the multiverse since he’d ascended to a sort of meta-godhood. She didn’t think any of them would be recommending her services as a detective to a pod of hive-mind surf-sorcerers, as such business was way below their pay grades. So this bunch had inadvertently brought her
two
things to investigate – who’d killed their friend, and which god was dropping her name.

“You are an outsider,” Glyph went on, “and so we thought you might be more... objective? The kahunas here all have old alliances, grudges, and suspicions that could color their investigations if we sought their help. They look first to their own enemies, or those they have deemed undesirable, even if the evidence points elsewhere. You do not have any of their biases. We asked others about you, and were told... not good things, exactly, but things that make us think you can find out who murdered Ronin. Arachne said you knew your way around the dead.”

Marla nodded. Arachne had only come to Marla at all because she was between apprentices and too proud to ask any of the other local kahunas for help – she could hire a
haole
like Marla without anyone knowing she couldn’t handle the unquiet spirit on her own, though of course it had proven to be rather more complicated than an ordinary ghost. “Sure, I helped her out, but – ”

“We talked to Zufi as well,” Glyph said.

Ah. That made more sense. “The Bay Witch. That’s what we call her back home – back in the city I’m from, I mean. We worked together for a lot of years.”

“She used to ride the waves with us in the Pacific, before relocating to the Atlantic.” Glyph frowned. “Her choice never made sense to us. Why leave the whole to be alone? And the waves over there are
terrible
. The god said Zufi could provide a reference for you, and when we sent word, Zufi said you are tenacious and capable and not very nice, but if you are on our side, you will be not very nice to people we do not
want
to be very nice to, so it is okay.” He paused. “That is a direct quote. She also said to remind you that you still owe her a favor.”

“Yeah, that sounds like Zufi. Okay. I’ll take the case.”

The surfers exchanged glances. It was like watching a meticulously choreographed bit of stage business. “What do you charge for your services?”

Marla grinned. Once upon a time, before being chief sorcerer of Felport, and then being an exiled
ex
-chief sorcerer, she had been a mercenary. She’d never worked for money back then, choosing a life of poverty in favor of accruing power. So her rates now were the same as they’d been back then: “If I solve the case, you’ll have to tell me a secret I don’t already know, and teach me a trick I’ve never seen before.”

“That is acceptable,” Glyph said.

Rondeau cleared his throat and glared at her.

“Oh, right,” Marla said. “I charge a secret, and a trick – plus expenses.” Rondeau had been funding her entire life since her exile, and even though he had more money than some gods now, he’d insisted that if she got a job she should at least not
lose
money in the process. As chief sorcerer she’d never worried about cash – all the other sorcerers under her protection had kicked up a percentage of the profits from their various legal and illegal businesses to her, leaving her free to look out for the city’s well-being as a whole – but, as she kept discovering in new and annoying ways, this was a new world. If this kept up, she’d actually end up knowing how much a gallon of milk or a loaf of bread cost.

Glyph chewed his lip. “We do not have much in the way of actual money... what kind of expenses?”

That was a good question. “Like if I need to buy grave dust or a hand of glory or something, for a spell?”

He nodded. “May we pay you in black coral?”

Marla didn’t know what that was, but she looked at Rondeau, and he nodded vigorously, so she said, “Yeah, that works.”

“May we ask how you intend to proceed?”

“I should see the crime scene.”

Glyph frowned. “Ronin’s body melted, as we said, and we could find no trace magically – ”

“Look, it’s not that I don’t have faith in you. Except, in fact, I don’t know a damn thing about you, so I’m going to do everything you did all over again, just so I
know
. Okay?”

“You
do
work for us – ” Glyph began.

“Nope,” Marla said. “I work for
me
. On your behalf, yes, but not
for
you. I do this my way, and you don’t get to bitch unless I don’t get results. Understood?”

Glyph narrowed his eyes, glanced at his fellows, then nodded. “Understood. Just... find out who killed Ronin. He was our eldest, and the best of us, and he did not deserve to die that way.”

“Sure,” Marla said. “Give my assistant here the details about the crime scene, directions and all that. And it would be good if the directions were for traveling by
car
, and didn’t start, ‘Swim out half a mile east’ or something.”

“We can take you – ”

“I’d rather see it on my own, without having my observations influenced,” Marla said. “I’m going to go prepare my tools of the trade. Let Rondeau know how to get in touch with you, all right?” She stepped around the counter, shook Glyph’s hand – strong grip, kinda damp – and nodded at his fellow sorcerer-siblings, or multiamorous lovemates, or hive-buddies, or whatever they were. She slipped through a curtain behind the counter into the little back room office, which didn’t contain much but a chair, a smaller desk, a safe (unlocked and empty, except for a small silver bell), and a shelf on the wall holding a few books on Polynesian mythology and the Hawai’ian language. Marla didn’t really have any prepatations to make, or any tools to pack – she just didn’t want to deal with the logistics of shooing an anxious tribe of surfers out of her office. The prospect of a mystery to solve should have excited her, but she didn’t actually give a crap about Ronin or the surfers, so the thought of getting in a car and looking at some sand a guy had died on made her tired. She didn’t want to dwell on the negative, but... what if this whole occult detective thing didn’t work out? What would she do with herself then?

A CONVERSATION WITH KOONA

Once he’d gotten rid of the surfers, Rondeau stepped into the office. “’I don’t work for you, I work for me?’” He smiled. “You’ve been reading those Robert Parker novels about Spenser I gave you, haven’t you?”

She scowled. “I have to learn to be a detective somehow, don’t I?”

“Spenser
does
just wander around annoying people and getting in fights until he figures things out,” Rondeau said. “Instead of using deductive reasoning and measuring the depths of footprints and collecting cigar ash and shit like Sherlock Holmes does. So he’s probably a better model for your detecting style, if you can call it that.”

“Yes, fine, you’re hilarious.”

“If you’re Spenser, that makes me his buddy Hawk, right? A sexy, amoral badass?”

“One out of three ain’t bad,” Marla said. “So where are we going?”

Rondeau drove them north out of Lahaina in his little black convertible, past the West Maui airport, through the town of Kapalua, and along a route that curved gradually eastward along the northern edge of the island. The scenery along the coast road was absolutely gorgeous – great vistas of cliff and rock and sea – and Marla was sick to death of it. She liked to be in the shadow of old warehouses with the comfort of a vast continental plate beneath her, not out in the open under the sun on a speck of volcanic rock in the ocean.

“We both know I’m not going to learn a damn thing from looking at a spot where a guy died,” Marla said. “Unless the killer left a confession written in the sand, and even then, it would have blown away by now. So here’s what we’ll actually do. You’ll find an oracle, and ask it who killed our dead guy. Easy.”

BOOK: Grim Tides (Marla Mason)
8.32Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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