Lady of Misrule (Marla Mason Book 8) (7 page)

“I remember reading about that. Was it, like, a dark magic thing?”

The Bammer shook his head. “Just an evil human thing. I was an apprentice back then. The chief sorcerer here was a wave mage. He was good when it came to surfing, but pretty crap when it came to anything else. I’m into nature magic myself, I don’t specialize quite as much as he did, but mostly what I’m good at is enchanting. When all that ugliness went down, my old boss, he realized he wasn’t up for the job anymore, you know? He couldn’t protect this place, or not well enough. I was the most qualified, the most talented, the best choice for a replacement, so I took the job, and he paddled off into the sunset, like literally, and nobody ever heard from him again. His failure... it’s never far from my mind.”

“Which explains why you’re so eager to deal with this new murder problem – oh, wait.”

“You’re judgmental,” The Bammer said. “Strange. Psychics are usually more forgiving of human foibles, because they know everybody’s got them.” He took another hit, and the breeze wafted sweet smoke Bradley’s way. He tried to concentrate on the smell of rotting kelp instead. “Anyway, the thing is, I know my
limitations
. A few years back we had a big nasty problem, this spirit of earthquake, wildfire, and mudslide came marching out of... a place beyond this world, where things are more malleable and unreal, where gods are born. The Dreamtime, the Medicine Lands, the crawlspace of the world. I knew
I
couldn’t stop something like that. So I appointed a champion. She did a great job.”

Bradley didn’t gape, but it was a near thing. “Marzi? You made her the city’s champion?”

“I gave her an enchanted toy pistol, but to be honest I think a stick shaped vaguely like a gun would have gotten the job done. She’s got some of the same kind of power I sense in you, that openness to dreams and visions – I don’t have that ability at all, I have to do rituals to see anything like you two see when your heads hit your pillows at night – but she’s got other powers, too. A touch of the reweaver’s gift, I think. Not enough to be dangerous, she’s not going to sneeze and accidentally transform a building into a giant watermelon or anything, but in a place where reality is
thin
anyway, or when dealing with supernatural creatures who can change their form, she can exert some control over them, even if it’s not totally conscious.”

“Uh huh. Right. Well, it’s definitely not totally conscious, because she has
no goddamn idea
you’ve made her the champion of Santa Cruz.”

He shuddered dramatically. “Of course not. What’s she ever done to me, that I’d put that kind of pressure on her? She just does what comes naturally, and she does fine. Word got
around
when she beat the Outlaw. People heard we had somebody here who turned a great big spirit of primal destruction into a damn near human little man obsessed with revenge, turned a small god into a guy who got stabbed in the back by a moron. All the big uglies started steering clear of Santa Cruz after that.”

“It’s not right.” Bradley remembered well his own years of confusion and misery, having prophetic dreams, seeing impossible monsters, with no one to teach him how to use his gifts, no one welcoming him into the community of sorcerers, at least not until first Marla Mason and later Sanford Cole embraced him. “She’s wandering in the wilderness! Why not apprentice her?”

“I ask you again – what’s she ever done to me to deserve such a thing? Marzi doesn’t
want
that life, as far as I can tell, and I’ve paid attention. You know what she wants to do? She wants to draw her comics. She wants to laze around on Sunday mornings with that man of hers. She wants to run the café – and I made sure she got the loan she needed to buy it, too, a few years ago, and put a little come-along spell on the front steps to encourage the passing trade, not that she needs it – she does fine on her own. You want me to throw a hand grenade into the middle of her life like that, show up and say, ‘Hey, there’s a whole secret society of sorcerers, mostly psychotics, assholes, or thieves – wanna join?’ You want me to apprentice her, and groom her to take over from me, line her up for the kind of worry and guilt
I
have to carry?” He shook his head. “No sir. She did her service. Her reward is a good life in this city as long as she wants it.”

“Except now you want her to fight this
new
monster,” Bradley said.

The Bammer scowled. “I do not. I’d just as soon leave her out of it. But the thing is drawn to the café, is all – there’s a thin place, there. A point of access to the crawlspace of the world, to an imaginary desert full of real scorpions. This shadow thing senses it, somehow. Maybe it thinks it’s a way to get back to whatever universe shat it out in the first place. Or maybe it’s just drawn there the way trees reach out for the sun, or, if you don’t mind me getting all cliché, moths to a flame. Nah, I don’t want Marzi to have to fight that thing.” He picked up the toy switchblade and threw it into the sand in front of Bradley. “There you go. You fight it instead. That’s what you’re here for, right?”

“Gods damn it,” Bradley said. “Yes. It is.” He picked up the switchblade, a cracked plastic hilt wrapped with black electrical tape, and a chipped, silver-painted plastic blade that popped out at the push of a button. He tested the edge with his thumb. Duller than pop music. “So what’s this thing do?”

“It’s a knife. You stab stuff with it.” The Bammer took another puff of his pipe, then knocked the ashes out onto the sand. “I don’t know if you can keep Marzi out of this mess entirely, though. I halfway chose her, and she halfway chose
herself
. She’s got a lot of hero in her, and she might want to get involved. You could do worse than her for a partner if this turns into a shooting war.”

“I’ll keep that in mind. But I was planning to bring in some heavier artillery anyway. I’m going to see a friend of mine in the morning, and bring her back with me.”

“Huh. Must be a tough friend, if she’s not scared of getting eaten by a monster made of shadows.”

“Scared of what? Death?” Bradley clicked the switchblade open, then pushed it close again. “No, she’s not scared of death. She married him.”

Rondeau in a Dirty RV Somewhere in Death Valley

“But we’re
motherfucking wizards
,” Rondeau said, some time after they’d been ousted from Las Vegas. “Right? There’s gotta be a way we can make some money.”

Pelham shrugged. “I am not especially adept at the magical arts. I have other skills, as you know. Certainly I am qualified to be an executive assistant, or butler, or valet, or even, dare I say, to provide personal security. But I have had only two employers. One of them, I am loath to trouble for a reference. The other is presently ruling the realm of death. I fear I would have difficulty obtaining such a position, even if I desired to undertake such work.”

“Yeah, I didn’t mean to suggest honest employment.” Rondeau rubbed his stubbly chin and peered through the dirt-smeared windshield of Pelham’s RV. They weren’t entirely broke. They’d been robbed and driven from Las Vegas, but the Pit Boss had left them a few grand so, he said, they could get established somewhere else. They’d tried to reach some friends in Felport, hoping for a loan, but hadn’t been able to reach Hamil or the Bay Witch or anyone else they knew – maybe the spontaneous decapitation business was keeping the grand high-and-mighties there occupied.

At a loss for how to proceed, they’d bought gas and food and trucked out to the desert to wait for Marla to wake up, hoping maybe more would-be cultists of the Bride of Death had drifted in – cultists were always eager to give up their worldly possessions to some high priest or another, and Rondeau figured, if the black robe fit, he’d wear it. But the place was deserted. Maybe word had gotten around in the lunatic community that serving a death god had a high mortality rate.

“When Mrs. Mason awakens in a few days, we will have direction again,” Pelham said. “She will show us the proper way forward.”

Rondeau snorted. “Marla was living off my generosity, you know. But you’re right – she’s a legit wizard, and she always says sorcerers don’t have to worry about money, because they have scarier things to worry about. She’s going to yell at us and call us idiots before she gets around to helping us, but I’ve been through that before, and it’ll do you good to get the rough side of her tongue for once, help toughen you up.”

“I am sorry that you deem me insufficiently tough –”

Someone knocked on the door of the RV. Rondeau frowned at Pelham. “Did you order pizza? No, wait. Thai?”

Pelham sighed. “Don’t be foolish, Rondeau. It is likely a park ranger coming to demand we leave the area. We have no magic at the moment to hide us from such attention.”

“Yeah. I just figured the RV being entirely covered in filth would work as desert camouflage. Shows what I know. Still, better safe. Got your sword cane?”

Pelham reached down for his stick and slid out an inch of steel.

The knock came again, harder. “Who is it?” Rondeau called.

“Me!” It was a man’s voice, but even muffled, there was something familiar about it.

“Me, who?” Rondeau said, and opened the door.

Someone hit him, hard, driving him down onto his back. The newcomer moved with a leap and a growl toward Pelham. Rondeau tried to turn his head to track the assault, but he was too stunned to make much progress. He’d had the wind knocked out of him, and the earth and fire too. He caught a glimpse of Pelham slashing out with his sword, but the intruder was too fast, and Pelly collapsed from a blow across the face.

The figure turned toward Rondeau. His face was familiar. Just about as familiar as a face could be. “Me,” he said, and grinned.

“You,” Rondeau agreed, and then the light ran out of the world and he sank into the gray.

Crapsey in a Cave

Crapsey stood in the cave, humming to himself and scratching obscene graffiti into the stone walls with a switchblade, his artistic efforts lit by camping lanterns. Pretty soon, he’d have the opportunity to deliver some bad news to a goddess, and he was really looking forward to it. He’d been spending his days and nights in Rondeau and Pelham’s stinky RV for too long, and it was good to be
doing
something again. Marla wouldn’t be happy to see him, and Crapsey was never happier than he was making other people unhappy. He realized that was probably indicative of some profound psychological problems, but what could you do? He was what he was.

It was funny – back when he’d been the dogsbody/factotum/confidential assistant/amanuensis/body man/personal slave of a world-conquering supervillain in another dimension, and later when he’d been part of a revenge squad run by a redheaded incarnation of devastation and chaos, he’d wanted nothing more than a quiet place to sit and read comic books, and his big dreams had included eating food that wasn’t raw and bloody or scooped from the inside of an expired aluminum can.

But once he got free of his assorted monstrous entanglements, with total liberty in this beautiful reality where you could buy fresh food and diverting literature just about anywhere, and getting money to buy said hamburgers and comic books was as easy as hitting a guy over the head in an alley and taking his wallet, he’d found himself yearning for some of the stuff he’d always thought he hated. Like stepping out of the shadows and giving a grin that made would-be revolutionaries shit themselves. Leaning against a wall in the background playing with a knife while an incredibly dangerous woman tortured victims in the foreground. Chasing guys down and unhinging his enchanted prosthetic jaw and threatening to literally bite their heads off if they didn’t behave. Making moves. Fucking shit up. Leaving his mark on the world, and if that mark was a metaphorical (or, often, literal) smear of blood, so what? Crapsey had reasons to want the world to bleed. He’d had a rough childhood, and it had only gotten worse when he’d stopped being a child.

So when his old comrade-in-arms Nicolette got in touch – projecting her image into the cracked mirror of the single-room-occupancy hotel in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district where he’d been living – to make him an offer, he’d jumped at the chance. The chance to hit his evil twin Rondeau – the version of Crapsey native to this reality, and a smug and coddled and conniving son of a bitch he was – over the head had been the most enticing part of the offer, of course, but he’d been looking forward to this part, too. Nicolette had promised him plenty of opportunities for organized mayhem once he got Marla back to Felport and into Nicolette’s clutches. Nicolette was well on her way to becoming a world-conquering supervillain herself, it seemed – or at least city-conquering one – and while Nicolette didn’t have the native power that Crapsey’s old boss the Mason had possessed, and she wasn’t half the chaos witch their mutual ex-employer Elsie Jarrow had been, she
was
good at breaking stuff, and he’d hang around until she inevitably fucked things up for herself. He tried not to think too far ahead. The future had never been too full of bright and shiny things for him. Better to live in the moment.

The bed of soft sand at the far end of the chamber began to stir. Crapsey grinned and picked up the chrome pump-action shotgun he’d taken from the trunk of a drug dealer in Oakland. He’d been informed that Marla Mason couldn’t be killed, that she’d become some kind of half-goddess, but he’d also been told she could still feel pain, and he was hoping for the opportunity to perform a little shotgun experiment.

A woman sat up in the sand, probably naked but so covered in dust and earth that it was hard to tell. She turned her head and spat brown muck onto the cavern floor. “This has to be the worst possible way to wake up.” She blinked at him and wiped dust from her eyes. Crapsey had arranged the lanterns to make himself a backlit shadow before her. Super dramatic.

“Rondeau, is that you?” she said. “Where’s Pelham? Any report on that monster that escaped from the chamber below? If that thing is still on the loose, at least we know what we’re doing today. I should take a shower first, so I hope the RV’s tank is full –”