Lady of Misrule (Marla Mason Book 8)

by T. A. Pratt

  “Thanks, man,” Crapsey said. “When the time comes, I’ll kill you last. Or first. Whichever seems more merciful at the time.”

  “That’s all I ask.” Bradley climbed back into the RV.

  They drove away, kicking up great plumes of dust into Crapsey’s face, and he began sawing through the ropes behind his back. It didn’t take long, even with the minimal serrations on the butter knife – the ropes were just thin camping lines, used for hanging food in a tree to keep bears away, shit like that. He rolled over, massaged his wrists, and then untied his ankles. His feet were all pins and needles, so he hopped and stomped until the blood started to flow again.

  Once he felt halfway human he took the phone from his inside pocket and called Nicolette.

  “How’d it go?” Nicolette said.

  “Pretty much like we expected. She got the drop on me and tied me up, but you were right, her curiosity got the best of her.”

  “That’s Marla all over. Refuses to come when summoned, and refuses to come when she’s threatened, but you can count at her to come yell at you for summoning or calling her. Any sense of her ETA?”

  “She’ll be along. She says she has to go save the world or something first, but I’d expect her at the club in a week or so.”

  “Saving the world?” Nicolette said. “God, her priorities are so fucking predictable. Come on back to Felport, I guess. If she doesn’t show up soon I’m taking it out on you, though.” She ended the call.

  I wonder what it’s like to have a normal job, with vacation time and sick days and shit like that, Crapsey thought. He started walking, stuck out his thumb, and hoped for a passing motorist stupid enough to stop for him and provide him with a vehicle. Marla’s admonition not to murder anybody weighed on his mind – she was a death god, so she’d probably know if he disobeyed – but she could hardly complain if he followed her example and left someone tied up on the side of the road.

  Bradley in Vegas

  “You ever been to Las Vegas before?” Marla said from the passenger seat as they went by the Welcome to Las Vegas sign, recognizable from scores of movies about people making terrible choices.

  Bradley chuckled. “I was in the movies. Vegas is the place where people like that go when Hollywood starts to feel too authentic and down-to-earth.”

  “I never spent a lot of time here, and I admit it’s not my kind of place, but Vegas always struck me as what Rondeau would be like if someone magically transformed him into a city.” She sighed. “Him getting kicked out like that, by his own supernatural offspring... it’s not right.”

  Bradley had filled her in on Rondeau’s conflict with Regina Queen and the subsequent bad luck with the oracle he’d summoned. Bradley had known Rondeau and Pelham were in trouble – he checked in with the home office occasionally, talking to himself in mirrors, and the Over-Bradley had filled him in – but tracking the Outsider had taken precedence, and he hadn’t known Nicolette was going to kidnap them. “I know you want to help Rondeau, but....”

  Marla kept staring out the window. “Oh, I know. We’ve got bigger monsters to kill. Regina Queen came to get revenge on me, though, so it’s my fault Rondeau’s been exiled from his favorite place. I have some familiarity with how that feels. I’m also trying hard to fix my mistakes these days, instead of just moving on to newer and bigger mistakes.” She scratched absently at the tattoo on her wrist – the words “Do Better,” a message from her goddess-self, etched on her skin. “I’ll put off helping Rondeau until after we’ve dealt with the Outsider, don’t worry. But then I’ll have a chat with this new Pit Boss about his treatment of his creator. I’ll admit I’m tempted to bust this demon’s head right now, since we’re in town, but I can keep my focus – we’ll get my dagger and the rest of my stuff, then head to Santa Cruz.”

  Bradley nodded. He’d helped Marla search, and her dagger wasn’t in the RV, and her motorcycle wasn’t hidden under the bed, either. There was about nine thousand dollars in cash wrapped in plastic hidden under the RV’s dashboard, so they could have bought new pants and a much crappier vehicle, but the dagger was irreplaceable, and it was the one weapon they could access with relative ease that would almost certainly hurt the Outsider. Her knife had been forged in Hell, and could cut through anything, including ghosts, iron, and memories.

  They arrived near Rondeau’s hotel, a medium-nice place off the Strip – now part-owned by the oracular demon who’d presumably established himself as the city’s new Pit Boss by now. They left the RV illegally parked on a side street, and Bradley waited while Marla drew a simple design on each side to keep cops and thieves from noticing the vehicle, dragging her finger through the Death Valley dust. “I’ve never seen that keep-away spell before,” Bradley said. “It’s not the one you taught me – way simpler and more elegant.”

  She grunted, looking over her handiwork. “There’s stuff in my head, now, I’m not always entirely sure how it got there. I’m not supposed to remember any of the stuff about being a goddess when I’m in my mortal form, but sometimes weird stuff bubbles up. Supernatural flotsam.”

  “I’m feeling pretty estranged from my cosmic wisdom too,” Bradley said. “For one thing, I forgot what it’s like to be hungry. I still eat sometimes, and I can eat anything that exists or can exist, which is cool, but it’s just for pleasure, not need. What I’m saying is, I’m starving – can we hit a buffet or something?”

  “After we get my motorcycle and my knife and my coat. Should all still be in my storage unit.”

  They went around to the back of the hotel, and Marla magicked open a locked service door and led the way down white-tiled corridors. They found a cargo elevator where she pressed some arcane combination of buttons, smiling at Bradley’s raised eyebrow. “There are sub-basements that aren’t obviously accessible. Not even wizard shit, I don’t think, just skullduggery with blueprints and construction. Old-school gangster shit.”

  The elevator doors opened on a concrete space broken up by tall metal shelves holding file boxes. They negotiated a few dark corridors until they reached an area filled with steel-doored storage rooms, where Bradley figured long-ago criminals had probably kept cocaine and dead bodies and stolen fur coats. Marla went straight to one door, its ordinary lock supplemented by a heavy padlock that looked like it could stand up to a direct shotgun blast. She hummed over the locks for a minute until the padlock fell open and the doorknob turned in her hand. “There’s a cargo elevator over there that leads up to the parking garage, so we can get out that way. We’ll make a lot better time going to Santa Cruz on the motorcycle.”

  “Just don’t drive like you’re immortal,” Bradley said. “I’m going to be clinging to your back, and I don’t think my over-mind can spare any extra bodies if this one gets all busted up.”

  “There are anti-crash charms. At least, I think so.” She pulled open the storage room door and swore. “Where. The fuck. Is my motorcycle.”

  A voice of dust and rattling chains said, “The Pit Boss wants to see yous.”

  “Did you just say ‘yous’?” Marla said. “For serious?”

  Bradley moved up beside her, looking into the space. No motorcycle in evidence. A suitcase lay sprawled open in the corner, with some of Marla’s clothing scattered all over the floor, including a nice long brown leather coat. A figure, who looked like an art student’s junk sculpture of a man constructed from wooden boards and bicycle chains and rusty pipes and small appliances, stood in the center of the room.

  “Don’t make no trouble,” the thing said, voice emerging from a mouth that might have started life as a hand-cranked coffee grinder. “The Boss just has a few questions for yous.”

  “Let me guess,” Marla said. “He wants to know why there’s a dagger on the shelf over there that nobody can pick up. How about you fuck off and tell him the answer: because it’s mine.”

  Bradley craned his neck, and there it was, Marla’s familiar dagger, forged in some fiery Hell, blade shining, hilt wrapped in purple and white
electrical tape.

  “This room belonged to some punk name of Rondeau, and everything that belonged to him belongs to the Pit Boss now. Come on.” The creature took a step toward her, its pipe-and-toaster feet ringing on the concrete.

  “Look, Bugsy, I’m on a tight schedule here,” Marla said. “Tell me where my motorcycle is, and I won’t cut you into pieces.”

  “Think you’re some kinda tough broad, huh?” For a golem, it had a lot of personality. “The Boss didn’t say you had to walk in on your own two legs. We can do this easy, or we can do this hard.”

  “Of, for fuck’s sake,” Marla said. “Who programmed your dialogue?”

  She whistled, and the dagger spun from the shelf toward her hand, incidentally passing through the golem’s head along the way, taking a chunk of its colander skull and one light bulb eye with it. The blade glittered in her hand, and she stepped forward, making two deft slashes, and sending the golem’s pipe-and-chain arms clattering to the floor.

  “There,” she said. “Did I make my point? I know you don’t have a ton of autonomy, being a walking junkheap, but surely you’ve got some kind of protocol for what to do when you’re hopelessly outmatched?”

  The golem rather gamely attempted to kick her to death, and once that was done failing spectacularly, there was a mess of broken machine parts on the floor. Marla picked up her long coat and pulled it on, instantly looking at least fifty percent more badass. She sorted through the clothes on the floor, finding a pair of red cowboy boots embroidered with skulls and scythes. “Shut up,” she muttered, pulling them on. “They’re comfortable.”

  He grinned. “I’m just impressed you’re showing any kind of fashion sense. Never expected that from you. It’s like a chicken that plays piano. You don’t expect the chicken to be good. It’s enough that it plays at all.”

  “Ha ha.” She swept the rest of her clothes into the suitcase and thrust it into Rondeau’s hands. “The silver axe is gone. This new Pit Boss might have it, or Squat might have taken it with him when he ran off with Nicolette. She always felt like it belonged to her, just because she was the person who stole it from the guy who originally stole it.”

  “Craziness. Obviously the proper claim is yours, since you stole it from her.”

  “Last theft wins,” Marla said. “I guess we’d better go see the Pit Boss after all.”

  Bradley sighed. “We got the knife, you know. And your coat, which I can see is bristling with nifty armor magics.”

  She shrugged. “Yeah, but I want my motorcycle. It was a gift. I can accept this Pit Boss stealing from Rondeau, or at least back-burner dealing with it, but if he steals from me? Don’t worry, it won’t take long.”

  Bradley nudged a bit of broken glass with his toe. “If we’re going to see the Pit Boss anyway, why chop this thing into pieces? Why not just go with it in the first place?”

  “I don’t go anywhere under duress. Hell, I’ll go to Felport to see Nicolette, assuming we can save the universe first, but I won’t go because Crapsey came and told me to. You’ve got to have standards, B. What do you have if you don’t have your principles?”

  “There is the small difficulty that we don’t know where this Pit Boss is,” Bradley said. “Which the garbage gangster there could have told us.”

  “True. It’s a good thing I travel with an immensely powerful psychic with access to arcane wisdom,” Marla said.

  Bradley sighed. “Okay. Let’s go upstairs. I’ll look for an oracle.”

  •

  A simple divination didn’t require big magic, and he knew for a fact that Marla could probably do it herself if she got her hands on some old coins and animal bones, but it was easy enough for him to amble along a couple of alleyways until he felt that psychic tug of a nearby oracle. He closed his eyes and concentrated for a moment, and when he looked again, a severed head with grievous gunshot wounds bobbed before him like the world’s ugliest balloon.

  “I am so sick of talking decapitations,” Marla muttered.

  “Uh, hi,” Bradley said. “I’m wondering where I can find the city’s Pit Boss?”

  The severed head looked at him for a moment, then said, “He has a secret casino under the city.” The head gave directions, which involved going down manholes and walking through sewer tunnels, naturally.

  “Thanks,” Bradley said. “What do I owe you?”

  “Go to the Flamingo Hotel and bet whatever you’ve got in your pockets on black 13,” the head said. “Give any money you make to the Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation.”

  One of the more weirdly specific requests he’d gotten for payment from an oracle, but easy enough to obey. “Consider it done.”

  The floating head shimmered and vanished.

  “Pretty sure that was Bugsy Siegel,” Marla said.

  “He was... a mob guy, yeah?”

  Marla nodded. “Basically the founder of modern Las Vegas. The Flamingo was his casino. Some of his mob buddies put a couple of bullets in his head because he was skimming money from the business. Who knew he had a charitable side?”

  “Funny how he wants to give money to a cancer fund. It’s not like he died of cancer.”

  “Sure, but there’s not a non-profit foundation dedicated to teaching psychopaths to be less greedy. Let’s go. We’ll stop by the Flamingo so you can fulfill your responsibilities. You don’t want the annoyed ghost of Ben Siegel floating around yammering at you because you didn’t stick to your bargain. We’ll grab a bite to eat, too. You don’t brace the Pit Boss in his lair on an empty stomach.”

  •

  They slipped down the appropriate manhole cover without drawing any unwanted attention, and didn’t have to spend much time in the darker and squishier bits of the city’s underside before they found a door hidden with camouflage magics. Bradley didn’t even notice the illusions making the door blend in with the bricks, because they were so transparent to his psychic senses; he only realized the door was disguised when Marla said, “Good eye, I didn’t even see that” after he pulled it open. There were no locks, presumably because the Pit Boss welcomed people to his secret casino, provided they were clued-in enough to find it in the first place.

  From there, the corridors were more sanitary and well-lit, concrete halls illuminated by the bright white LEDs stuck haphazardly on the walls and ceiling. They eventually reached a door that swung open automatically at their approach, allowing entrance to a plush carpeted lounge. The bartender – another junk golem, this one made mostly of bottles and silverware, so he was at least thematic – nodded something like a head toward them and gestured toward the booths and stools, then toward the wider room beyond, where a variety of gaming tables and apparatuses stood.

  The lounge area was entirely deserted, and there were only half a dozen people around the gaming tables. A mostly naked middle-aged man strapped to a huge wooden wheel sobbed quietly as he lazily spun, while four people dressed in everything from guttersnipe rags to fur coats raptly watched his rotations. A junk golem operator stood by the wheel counting stacks of chips. Two other men, wearing sopping tuxedoes, knelt with their hands bound behind their backs plunging their faces into washtubs full of opaque black liquid, emerging with writing, tentacled, clawed things in their teeth, which they spat into smaller buckets at their sides. A golem seemingly made of the remnants of a seafood buffet or aquarium disaster attended them, making occasional tick-marks on a clipboard to tally up... something.

  Bradley had no idea how either of those games were played, and no desire to find out either the rules or the stakes.

  Marla sidled up to the bar. “Looking for the Pit Boss,” she said.

  “Mr. Amparan is dead,” the bartender rasped through its lemon-zester throat.

  “Yeah, that’s fine. I’m happy to meet the new boss, different from the old boss. Does he have a name yet?”

  “Most people call me ‘Yes sir,’” a rumbling voice said. “Come to pay tribute to the new king?”

  Marla turned, leaning
casually back against the bar, and looked the newcomer up and down. Bradley looked, too, but he wasn’t quite as capable of keeping his cool as she was. He’d heard about what happened to Rondeau in the city, but he hadn’t seen it like the Over-Bradley had, so the molten demon that came strolling across the casino floor was something of a shock. His flesh was mostly black stone, but rivulets of lava flowed here and there on his body, and he stood at least eleven feet tall. Bradley wasn’t sure why the carpet didn’t burst into flame wherever he stepped, but it was probably just magic.

  “I met your predecessor once,” Marla said. “He liked to wear pin-striped suits. Diamond stickpin. Ruby pinky ring. Always chomping a cigar. I admired the guy, you know? I have respect for the classics. But... big naked demon guy? I dunno. Lacks subtlety.”

  “You should know I’m new to this job,” the demon said. The players in the casino looked at him nervously, but not as nervously as they should have, as far as Bradley was concerned. Then again, you probably had to be a pretty stone-cold type to come gamble in this place anyway. The boss crossed his immense arms over his chest. “Basically, I don’t have any sophisticated procedures or mechanisms or flowcharts in place. I just kind of kill people who annoy me. Are you going to annoy me?”

  “Oh, almost certainly. My name’s Marla Mason.”

  “Is that supposed to mean something to me?”

  “Wow,” Bradley said, because he wanted to contribute something. “You are new.”

  “You two would look good if you were reduced to piles of charred carbon, I think.” The Pit Boss tilted his head, regarding her like a decorator considering a new set of drapes.

  Marla yawned, rubbed the side of her nose, and said, “I’m going to need a couple of things from you. I’d say ‘favors,’ but that would imply they’re something I might have to repay someday, and that’s not happening. So maybe we’ll call them ‘boons.’ You’d like that, right? New king, big boss – granting boons is all part of the deal.”

  “Oh, I give people things,” the Pit Boss said. “They just have to wager for them, and win.”