Grim Tides (Marla Mason) (3 page)

Rondeau sighed as he swung the car around a long curve. “You only love me for my vast psychic powers.”

“Who says I love you?”

They approached the Bellstone, a boulder of volcanic rock that, when struck in just the right spot, made a sound like clanging metal. When Rondeau didn’t even slow their pace as they passed the rock, Marla growled. “Seriously? There’s no oracle we can talk to in the Bellstone? A great big hunk of rock upchucked from the fiery guts of a volcano? Rings like a bell when you smack it? You’re telling me
that
doesn’t have any magic?”

“Doesn’t feel right,” Rondeau said. “Sorry.”

“You know, when Bradley wanted an oracle, he could find some ghost or demon or whatever in the first stinky dumpster or drain pipe or dark alley we passed.” She was happy about her old apprentice Bradley’s new gig as an immortal being who lived at the center of all possible realities, but it meant Marla didn’t have his help anymore, and she was stuck with the infinitely less experienced (and lazier) Rondeau, who’d inherited Bradley’s abilities, but not his skill at wielding them.

“I’m pretty new at this,” Rondeau said. “But I’m learning. In my defense, I think there’s a higher density of demons and dead people in a city. If you want me to turn around and go talk to the rock for a while and hope for the best, I can.”

Marla sighed. “No, carry on, you’re the one connected to the great grand mystical whatever. Something’s seriously out of whack when
you’re
the most spiritual person in the room. Or car. Whatever.”

They drove in silence for a while, until Rondeau said, “Over here.” He pulled the convertible onto a wide gravel patch on the shoulder of Highway 340. “There’s definitely some magical stuff crackling down this way, by the Olivine Pools.”

She frowned. “Isn’t this where our dead guy died?”

“Yeah. That’s convenient, isn’t it? Maybe he left behind a ghost we can talk to. Go right to the source.”

Marla grunted. She wasn’t a big fan of ghosts. They weren’t the souls or spirits or immortal residue of the dead, exactly – those went
elsewhere
, to whatever afterlife they expected to get, usually. Ghosts were more like... old photographs, or video loops, or echoes, or shit stains – psychic residue, persistent but slowly fading and degrading, and all pretty much crazy. But ghosts knew things, and they made reliable oracles, especially when you asked them about their own lives and deaths. Ghosts were pretty self-centered. Not every death resulted in wailing translucent psychotic ectoplasmic residue, but such manifestations were more likely in cases of violent death, so there was a chance some fragment of Ronin might still be hanging around, the magical-forensic equivalent of shed hairs or blood drops.

Marla and Rondeau picked their way down a steep, rock-scattered incline toward the Olivine Pools, a beautiful spot beloved of tourists and those locals who could abide the company of tourists: a group of lovely tidal pools, deep and clear, most big enough for swimming (though ideally you tried not to disturb the denizens of the pools), in an area scattered with the small greenish crystals called olivine. The pools were entirely deserted at the moment, though, and Rondeau wandered along the shore, pausing occasionally, squinting at nothing in particular, looking for ghost spoor. He eventually crouched down by one of the smaller pools. “Not a ghost.” His voice was strained, like he was trying to do higher math in his head while operating heavy machinery. “But there’s something... else. Something watery and dark and... . In here.” He pointed to the water, and Marla crouched with him.

One of Rondeau’s powers was oracle generation. Marla wasn’t sure whether he summoned existing supernatural creatures who possessed the power to answer questions, or whether the “oracles” were just external manifestations of his own abilities, a way for him to get answers out of his own powerfully psychic brain, like a crazy guy in a comic book who took orders from his own ventriloquist’s doll.

Either way, the process worked, so Marla peered into the water – and jerked back when a gargantuan white moray eel rose up from the suddenly bottomless depths of what should have been an ordinary tidepool. The eel’s eyes were the size of teacups, black and dead, its mouth a horrorshow of overlapping fangs. The water rippled as the eel spoke, but the voice that emerged was perfectly clear, a deep bass with no underwater qualities at all: “I am Koona, the death of sharks, the thief of fish. What do you seek?”

Rondeau cleared his throat. “A man called Ronin died near this spot two days ago. We want to know who murdered him.”

The eel swayed a bit, almost hypnotically. Its jaws were big enough to swallow a human head in a gulp. After a moment, it said, “That knowledge is closed to me. I see a figure, but it is shrouded in mist. The killer is a being of power.”

Marla sighed. Well, yeah. The guy had murdered a member of a badass hive of wave-mages, so the power was self-evident. “Thanks anyway,” she said.

“I
do
have knowledge that may interest you,” the eel said. “Glad tidings, and grim ones. Do you wish to know?”

“Uh, sure,” Rondeau said.

The eel opened its mouth. “You must pay.”

“I always pay,” Rondeau said. The oracles he summoned were transactional creatures. “What’s the price?”

“Blood.”

Rondeau sighed. Marlas passed him one of her many knives, this one more suited for slicing mangos than throats. He pressed the blade to his palm, winced, and made a fist over the water, drops falling in and turning to drifting streamers in the water. The eel closed its eyes for a moment, then spoke, gazing not at Rondeau, but at Marla. “An old friend will soon return to you, to gladden your hollowed heart. But others are coming, and they seek not to soothe your heart, but to tear it from your chest. One you once loved, whose love for you has soured. Old enemies returned. Strangers who shall become new enemies. They sharpen their knives for you, and gather their powers.”

“What friend?” Marla said. “And what enemies? Come on, give me names.” But the eel just sank down into the pool, vanishing into the blackness, which shimmered, and became just an ordinary tidepool again, with nothing more remarkable at the rocky bottom than anemones and a scuttling crab. She looked at Rondeau. “That oracle sucked.”

Rondeau wrapped his wounded hand in a handkerchief. “It sucked my blood, anyway. What now?”

“I guess we go back to the office, and try to find out who this ‘friend’ is.”

“You’re not more concerned about the enemies?”

“Enemies, I’m used to. I’ve got lots of those. I don’t have that many friends.”

“True,” Rondeau said. “And most of the ones you used to have don’t like you anymore.”

“Honestly, it makes me wonder why you still hang out with me.”

Rondeau shrugged. “What can I say? I have profoundly horrible judgment.”

There was no one at the bookshop, and no familiar faces lingering on the streets in Lahaina town, and Rondeau refused to call up another oracle just to satisfy Marla’s curiosity about this mystery friend – summonings like that gave him headaches and insomnia even at the best of times, and two in one day would give him nosebleeds and the kind of migraines that come with auras and last a for week. “Maybe your long-lost pal is at the hotel, kicking his heels in the lobby, wondering where the hell we are?”

Marla shrugged. “Sure. It’s as good an idea as any.” The resort was the closest thing she had to a forwarding address.

Rondeau lived in a two-bedroom suite at a hotel in Kaanapali, a stretch of gorgeous coastline dominated by giant resorts. It was a long way from the traditional Hawai’ian experience, but Rondea was an unapologetic tourist and hedonist. He let Marla stay in the suite’s extra room, at least when she didn’t sleep on the hideous brown couch in the bookshop. She knew she should find a place of her own. That would be a pain in the ass, but hotel life just wasn’t to her taste. Too many people had keys to their room. Back in Felport, she’d owned an entire apartment building and lived in it alone, with her personal effects scattered in the empty apartments around her own to create a cloud of psychic chaff if anyone tried to divine her precise location within the building. Oh, beautiful privacy. That kind of real estate was rather beyond her reach here on Maui, unless she asked Rondeau for a major loan, and she felt beholden enough to him already.

Rondeau drove up along Highway 30 from Lahaina, leisurely covering the short distance to the hotel. Marla was in the passenger seat, doing her habitual (if paranoid) scan of her surroundings. She peered into the side mirror. “Someone’s following us.”

Rondeau glanced up at the rearview. “Marla, that’s a taxi. People take taxis to the resorts, and this is the main road to the resorts from Kahalui airport. What makes you think they’re following
us
?”

“I’ve got a sense for these things. Besides, you’re going so slow that any taxi driver worth a damn would have passed you miles ago. Why put up with your pokey ass unless he’s following us?”

“You
told
me to slow down,” Rondeau said, outraged and aggrieved – or at least affecting to be. “You said I drove like a maniac, so I brought it down to the speed limit, just like you
asked
– ”

Marla pointed. “Pull over in the park there.”

Rondeau sighed, paused to await a break in the oncoming traffic, and turned left into the lot of Wahikuli Park. The long, narrow strip of public ground boasted a few picnic tables overlooking the ocean but little else, and didn’t have much going for it except all the scenery you could eat. Marla barely noticed the deep blue vistas of ocean and sky anymore. She wasn’t sure it was true that you could get used to
anything
, but you could certainly get used to beauty.

“Well, hell,” Rondeau said, as the taxi pulled in and parked next to them. “What do you think? Is this the world’s least subtle assassin? Or – ”

Marla was already getting out of the car, just as the taxi’s back door swing open. Friend, or enemy?

When the cab’s passenger climbed out, Marla stopped dead, then broke into the biggest, most genuine smile she’d worn in weeks, if not months.

Rondeau got out of the convertible, too, and bellowed “Pelly!” He raced around the car and picked up the short, middle-aged man who’d emerged from the cab. He spun Pelham around twice, then put him back down on his feet, where he wobbled a bit.

“A pleasure to see you, sir,” Pelham said, and then looked at Marla. “And you, too, Mrs. Mason.”

The cab driver emerged, leaning over the roof of the car, squinting. “You going to ride the rest of the way with your friends, pal?”

“I wouldn’t presume,” Pelham murmured, but Rondeau was already saying, “Yeah, we got this, pop the trunk.” Pelham reached into the cab and removed a battered-looking canvas backpack, and a gnarled black walkingstick that might have passed for a wizard’s staff. The cab driver helped Rondeau wrestle a familiar-looking trunk out of the cab, then accepted his fare and a generous tip from Rondeau before driving off.

While Rondea was wrangling luggage, Marla walked around the car and looked Pelham up and down. He still had his wispy hair, his mild eyes, his mostly-unlined face, his general air of affable harmlessness, but he’d changed some, too. “You got some sun on your travels, huh? I never even imagined you with a tan.”

“I did indeed, Mrs. Mason, in Africa, mostly,” Pelham said. “Though the snows in Nepal reflected a glare even brighter.”

“What are you doing
here
?” Marla said. “I told you to spend a couple of years on your, ah, mission, and it’s only been a few months.”

Pelham nodded. “I am still traveling. I landed this morning on the Big Island, as part of a journey through the Pacific. But I could
sense
you, nearby. I took a flight to Maui, and frustrated my cab driver immensely by refusing to tell him my final destination, guiding him instead in the direction where I felt your presence, and... Why are
you
here? Have you finally agreed to take a vacation?”

“I was going to send word to you,” Marla said, “Except I wasn’t sure
where
, since we warded you so well from divination, nobody could tell where you were, exactly. I left word for Hamil to pass along my contact info if you called in, but – ”

“Don’t mind me.” Rondeau heaved the steamer trunk into the convertible’s too-small trunk and fussed with bungee cords to tie it down. “I’ve got this.”

“My apologies.” Pelham stepped in with his customary competence, swiftly strapping his luggage in and tying the trunk lid partly closed with the bungees. He turned back to Marla. “Then... this isn’t a vacation? Oh dear. Does something here in the islands threaten the safety of Felport? Volcano gods with strange grudges? A tentacled creature of ancient lineage stirring on the sea floor?”

Before she could answer, Rondeau yelped, and jumped like someone had stabbed him in the ass with a pin. “Marla... something’s happening. Something’s
coming
.”

Marla had a knife in each hand before he finished speaking, and she put her back to the convertible, scanning the area. Unless the picnic tables were about to come to life like Japanese tsukumogami, she didn’t see any potential threats. “What is it?”

Rondeau shook his head. “How should I know? Call it bad vibes. Some kind of... I want to say... eruption? No, I shouldn’t use that word on a volcanic island, it’s not that kind of eruption. Something’s coming, or actually it’s already here, but it’s about to make itself known – ”

“Oh, dear.” Pelham chewed at his lower lip. “Not these again.” He pointed with his walkingstick toward the ground beneath a tree. The dirt was beginning to rise up in little cone-shapes, like molehills. “I’m terribly sorry, Mrs. Mason, I thought I’d gotten rid of them.”

Marla frowned. “Of what?”

“Should I be wishing I had a gun?” Rondeau said.

“I don’t think a gun would be much – ” Pelham began, but then a strange chittering emerged from the three mounds of black dirt, and at least a dozen cat-sized creatures poured out, like ants boiling up from a hill. The creatures moved fast enough that Marla couldn’t get a good look at them, but they seemed both insectile and mammalian, with hairy bodies and too many limbs and grinding mandibles and antennae and weirdly humanlike eyes.