Shark's Teeth (Marla Mason) (3 page)

‘‘Which is?’’ Rondeau said.

She hefted the magical shark’s-tooth club. ‘‘Simple. Tonight, he sleeps with the fishes.’’

#

‘‘You can’t do this to me,’’ greaseface said, struggling against Marla’s hold as she marched him toward the waterline. ‘‘It’s murder!’’
‘‘You’d know all about murder,’’ she said. ‘‘You know the old saying: if you can’t take the teeth, you shouldn’t swim with the sharks.’’ Marla threw him face-down into the sand. The moon was high in a cloudless sky, and the stretch of lonely beach was deserted.

‘‘Marla,’’ Rondeau said. ‘‘The water is full of sharks. Only... most of them aren’t really sharks. They’re ghosts shaped like sharks. Or... other things... that just sort of look like sharks from the angle of mortal perception.’’

‘‘Good,’’ Marla said, and knelt, and struck the whimpering would-be King of Hawai’i on the back with the shark’s-tooth club.

He transformed instantly into a shark. The bonds tying him fell away, since he no longer had limbs, and when he wriggled out of the feathered cloak to swim into the surf – toward probable, if not certain, death at the hands of the shark spirits – she saw he was only about five feet long.

‘‘Dogfish shark,’’ Ka’ohu said, emerging from nowhere in particular in that disconcerting way that gods have – even gods with a little of their magic stolen away. ‘‘Venomous. Fins covered in toxins.’’

‘‘Appropriate for him,’’ Marla said. ‘‘What kind of shark do you think I’d turn into? If I was the sort of person who let herself be turned into a shark?’’

‘‘Megalodon,’’ Ka’ohu said, without hesitation. ‘‘Sixty feet long. Seven-inch teeth. Ate whales. Extinct over a million years.’’

‘‘The good always die young,’’ Marla said. The water began to froth and churn, and she noticed that Rondeau was very deliberately gazing up at the moon, and not at the terror under the waves.

She held out the club. ‘‘I think this is yours.’’

Ka’ohu nodded. ‘‘I thank you for recovering this.’’ He took the weapon and began to pluck the teeth from around its edges. They sort of... disappeared into his hand... which was, on the whole, nicer than watching him shove them back into his gums, especially since he was in a human shape and his teeth weren’t. He crouched on the sand, picked up a pale pink curled shell, and held it out to Marla. ‘‘For you,’’ he said.

‘‘Magic?’’ she said, taking it.

He shrugged. ‘‘If you ever need me, and you hold it, and you call my name...’’ Another shrug. ‘‘I owe you a debt of honor.’’

‘‘Got it. If you want to discharge the debt, you can do me a favor. Tell your friends, and the other gods, and ghosts, and any sorcerers you know, that if they have a problem, and need some help, they can find me in an old bookstore in a pocket of folded space on Front Street.’’

‘‘I will do as you ask, but just talking to people... the task is too simple to cancel so great an obligation.’’

‘‘Good. I’m sure I’ll need bigger and better favors in the future.’’

Ka’ohu nodded and strolled into the waves, and when he got up to his knees in the water, transformed into a tiger shark nearly twenty feet long and swam off into the depths.

Marla picked up the feathered cloak from the sand and arranged it over her shoulders. She found it surprisingly comfortable. ‘‘What do you think?’’ she said, doing a little twirl in the sand. ‘‘Is it me?’’

Rondeau tilted his head and looked at her thoughtfully. ‘‘Depends. Are you some kind of crazy chicken-lady now?’’

‘‘I’ll save it for special occasions.’’ She linked arms with Rondeau and began walking away from the water, toward the rental car parked up on the shoulder.

‘‘So that thing you asked the shark god to do back there,’’ Rondeau said. ‘‘Spreading the word. Does that mean you’re going to open up an occult detective agency like I suggested?’’

‘‘I did luck into some primo office space, rent free,’’ Marla said. ‘‘It’d be a shame not to use it, and living over a bookstore would suit my temperament better than living in a hotel. My pride doesn’t like living off your bankroll, either. I’m not going to work for ordinaries – I don’t want random people asking me to track down runaways or spy on their cheating spouses – but if other sorcerers need help... Well. Sorcerers have
interesting
problems. And they can pay well, often with things better than money.’’

‘‘And you hope,’’ Rondeau said, ‘‘That if you go publicly freelance, eventually someone back home in our former fair city will have a major magical problem, and will have no choice but to hire you, and then you’ll be able to show them how stupid they were to get rid of you.’’

‘‘No fair being psychic at me,’’ Marla said.

‘‘That’s the kind of psychic that just comes from knowing you for years and years. Kind of a longshot though, isn’t it?’’

She shrugged, hoping she did so as expressively as Ka’ohu. ‘‘You know I like contingency plans. Take me back to my office, would you? I want to see if greaseface left any fun toys behind, and get a look at that book collection. And I guess we need to clean the dead shark off my new desk.’’

As Rondeau drove toward Lahaina, Marla looked out the window at the moon shining on the water.
It’s not the life I wanted
, she thought.
But at least it’s a living.

STORY NOTES

I’ve been writing for a while about sorcerer Marla Mason (six novels, lots of short stories), but this is the first story set after a sort of “reboot” in the series, following the catastrophic events of novel
Broken Mirrors
– Marla is now in exile, stripped of most of her resources, and pretty much at loose ends. “Shark’s Teeth” needed to introduce her new setting in the Hawai’ian islands, provide opportunities for punching and banter, set up for future adventures, and provide a satisfying standalone story in and of itself. I hope I succeeded. Special thanks to Cameron “Dawson” Panee for help with the Hawai’ian language and mythology. Anything I did right is to his credit, but anything wrong is my fault alone.

This story was originally sent out in the form of a chapbook as a fundraiser prize for readers who donated to my serialization of
Broken Mirrors
, and subsequently published in fine online magazine
Daily Science Fiction
.

If you’d like to find out more about Marla, try
www.marlamason.net
, which has linkes to the other novels and stories about her.

Table of Contents

Cover

Shark's Teeth

Story Notes