by T. A. Pratt
“My friends will stop you,” Marzi said, because when all else fails, fall back on bravado. She felt her mind flexing, holding the thing in its human form, making it from a devourer of worlds into something more ordinary – a riverboat gambler, maybe. A dandy. Turning it from an it into a him. His rows of fangs shimmered and became a mouthful of ordinary white teeth.
Yes. She could do this.
He closed his mouth, blinking, then reached up and touched his own teeth, clearly baffled.
Marzi took the revolver from her pocket and pointed it at the Dandy’s chest. “Actually, forget about my friends. Who needs them? I’ll stop you myself. Right here.”
“Oh, please –” he began, and she shot him in the heart, the cap gun snapping loud.
The Dandy looked down at himself, quizzical, and pressed his palm against the hole she’d blown in his perfect white shirt. Blood welled around the hand, dripping, and the Dandy hissed. His tongue flicked out, but it was the segmented tail of a scorpion instead of flesh. Her resolve wavered. This wasn’t a riverboat gambler – this was a monster from somewhere else. This was an Outsider. She stood, leaned over the table, shoved the barrel of the revolver into its open mouth, and pulled the trigger again.
Another loud pop, but the back of his head didn’t explode, which was what she’d been hoping for. The Outsider did fall backwards in his chair and scramble toward the door. It turned its head, and she was gratified to see one of its – no, one of his – eyes had turned to a puddle of blood.
She cocked the gun again to fire into his back – not very sporting, but he was a low-down dirty cheat, and this was less like murder and more like pest extermination. She could feel him trying to cast off his shape, to become an it again, nothing even remotely human, nothing that could bleed, and she clamped down as hard as she could to keep him in his place. He was small, a thug and a liar and a con artist, nothing majestic about him, nothing impressive, just another river rat preying on the ignorant and those of naive good will. A trickle of blood flowing started from her nose, and a spike of pain bloomed in the center of her forehead from the effort of making him stay human, but she ignored the pain. There was a job to do, and she was going to finish it.
The Dandy limped through the front door before she could get off a shot, and she followed him on unsteady legs. She might have to gun him down in the street. He might keep on looking like a man once she’d killed him, and if that happened, she might go to prison, though she’d like to see the prosecution make a case that she’d killed a man with an antique toy revolver for the murder weapon. She stepped through the door, lifting the gun and sighting between the shoulders of the Outsider – no, the Dandy – as he started to limp down the steps toward the street.
“Marzi, what happened, I thought I heard a gunshot –”
“Jonathan, run!” she shouted. He’d come down the exterior stairs from the apartment, and now he was on the deck, off to one side.
The Dandy moved with a speed that belied the grievous injuries she’d inflicted, and in a flash he was behind Jonathan, an arm around his throat. “Drop the gun, law dog,” he grated. Half his face was curtained with blood.
Jonathan threw an elbow back into the Dandy’s guts, but it didn’t faze the monster at all. The Dandy tightened his grip and leaned backward, lifting Jonathan off his feet, making him gurgle as the tension on his throat increased. “Drop it now!” the Outsider said.
Marzi gritted her teeth and tossed the pistol behind her. “Let him go,” she said. “Get out of here.”
“Or maybe I’ll just eat you both, and get my strength back,” it said, and opened its fang-filled mouth.
You’re dying, Marzi thought, as hard as she could. Your heart isn’t pumping blood anymore, and every organ you have is starved of oxygen. You’ve got a bullet in your head, and all this talking, all this moving, is just the last spasms of a dying brain. You will fall and you will die and you will rot –
The Dandy cried out and stumbled back, releasing Jonathan and clutching his chest, then gave her a last murderous glare and hurled himself over the railing of the deck, to the sidewalk beyond, then ran into the street and off, away, into the darkness.
Marzi started after him. She couldn’t let him get away, she had to keep him within her sphere of influence, imposing her worldview on him, keeping him mortal until he bled out and died.
She took a step, and a second step, tasting blood, and then the world went blurry and swimmy and then entirely away.
Nicolette in Control
Nicolette was using her hottest body, because it wasn’t enough to be better than Marla Mason – she wanted to look better than her, too. This body had belonged to a tattooed twenty-three-year-old bartender/grad student with big boobs and a hot ass and the combination of youth, a lucky metabolism, and an active lifestyle that kept everything else all taut and smooth. Nicolette wasn’t especially into girls, but when she put her head on these shoulders, she spent a little longer than necessary admiring herself in the wall of mirrors in her room, touching herself all over and adjusting to the body’s particular rhythms, calibrating all the senses and such. Nicolette’s head didn’t look exactly right on this body, being so pale, since the body had belonged to some kind of Latina, but fuck it, everyone would just be looking at her tits anyway.
Nicolette dressed for her audience in a black tank-top that showed off the ink on her arms and shoulders (mostly thorns, vines, and flowers, with a sort of Mexican art vibe), and a pair of tight black jeans, and black motorcycle boots. She had a throne of dark carved wood set up in the middle of the dance floor in Rondeau’s old night club, which had become her de facto headquarters, with various thugs and loyal retainers loitering around ready to fetch and carry and generally attend to her every whim. Being in charge was even better than she’d ever imagined. Shit finally ran right.
She snapped her fingers, and one of the attendants scurried off and then scurried back with a glass of red wine that was supposed to be exquisite and tasted pretty great to Nicolette, who’d never cultivated much knowledge about the stuff. The attendant was eager to please and worried she was failing, so Nicolette gave her a smile after she took a sip, and felt the girl’s rush of reassurance and delight flow through their connection.
Nicolette shifted around, trying to decide on the perfect pose, and settled on sitting almost sideways in the throne, one leg hooked over the arm, trying to look like a louche goblin king. She held her dagger of office in her other hand, tilting it back and forth, watching the blade shimmer in the house lights. As near as she could tell, this dagger was an exact duplicate of the knife Marla Mason still carried, which she figured meant Marla had pulled a switcheroo, and that this dagger was actually from another universe, and had probably belonged to the world-conquering supervillain known as the Mason. Nicolette didn’t mind. The blade still had a hell of a pedigree, even if it wasn’t Felport’s real original dagger of office. Her silver hand-axe, sacred to some forgotten moon goddess and with a nasty magical edge of its own, hung in a sheath dangling on a belt hooked over the back of the throne, within easy reach. There was probably literally nothing on Earth Nicolette couldn’t kill with this dagger in one hand and the hatchet in the other.
But she wasn’t here for killing today. She was here for something so much better.
“They’re here!” one of the underlings called from near the front door.
Nicolette gestured lazily, not letting her excitement show. A moment later, the woman herself appeared, Marla Mason, still wearing that stupid full-length buffalo leather duster. Pelham and Rondeau weren’t with her. They’d probably been left somewhere safe. Good. That meant Marla was being cautious about her. Why let her lost puppies into Nicolette’s clutches again? Maybe she wouldn’t let them go next time.
Why did I let them go? she thought. Why hadn’t she boiled them in lead or something? It just... hadn’t seemed very important. Rondeau and Pelham were a way to get Marla to the city, and once Marla was on her way, there w
as no need to keep her allies locked up. They weren’t a threat, and anything that was useful once might be useful again. Destroying them would be... silly.
Nicolette was not overly given to self-reflection, so she stopped, and focused her attention on Marla – and on the guy with her.
“Shit, is that Bradley Bowman?” she said. “What are you, a zombie, brought back from the dead like me? Marla needs to have some dead person following her around all the time?”
“He’s very much alive.” Marla stopped a few feet from the throne and looked at Nicolette. The throne was on a raised dais, so Marla had to tilt her head back, which did Nicolette’s heart good. “He’s just visiting from out of town. You, though, are out of your cage. I put you there for a reason, Nicolette. I wanted you to stay in it. But you had to get all flyaway and – is that Squat back there?”
Nicolette glanced over, and Squat stepped out of the shadows, all bundled in the heavy layers of coats and scarves that hid his grotesque physiognomy from casual view. Poor guy. She was working on treatment options for his condition, but there was still a lot of nasty stuck to him.
Crapsey came along with Squat, making every step a saunter. The two of them got along surprisingly well. Squat repulsed everyone – was cursed to repulse everyone, in fact – but Crapsey didn’t find the guy off-putting at all. Probably because he was so self-absorbed. It had never occurred to Nicolette before, but Squat and Crapsey were sort of reflections of Pelham and Rondeau. Almost literally so for Crapsey – he was a much more psychopathic version of Rondeau from another branch of the multiverse. Squat had much of the same calm omnicompetence that Pelham displayed, though his talents were rather more crude. He wouldn’t be as much good serving as a footman at a formal dinner, say, but they had other things in common.
Marla regarded Crapsey and Squat for a moment, then clucked her tongue. “So that’s the brawn. Which means, unfortunately, that Nicolette is the brains, which means you guys brought some idiots to a genius fight.” She pointed a finger at Nicolette. “What’s to stop me from just letting death take you? The only reason you’re not rotting is because I asked the god of the underworld for a favor. And keep that in mind, too, Nicolette – I’m the kind of person the god of death does favors for.”
“Only because you let him fuck you, Mrs. Death,” Nicolette said. “I can’t imagine why anyone would want to get naked and wrestle with you, I’d rather put my dick in a food processor – well, when I have a dick – but whatever.” She spun the dagger around in her fingers, and pointed the tip in Marla’s direction. “This is hilarious. You’re totally fucked, and you don’t even know it.” It was finally here, the moment of triumph, the unveiling of her grand design that would humble and humiliate and best of all annoy Marla Mason, Nicolette’s unwilling but unambiguous nemesis. “Do you want to know why you’re totally fucked?”
“Oh, yes, please, Nicolette, enlighten me. I’ll give you two whole minutes before I wave my hand and send that raggedy remnant you call a soul plunging to a very unpleasant part of the underworld.”
“No, you won’t, because you’re totally fucked. And the reason you’re totally fucked is because I went full Fisher King up in this bitch.”
Marla massaged her temples with both hands for a moment before looking back at Nicolette. “As usual, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Felport, c’est moi,” Nicolette said. “Didn’t you say that once or twice? But I am the city in a way you never were.” She turned and leaned forward in her throne, still reveling at having a body again and being able to make appropriately dramatic gestures. “I’ve established a sympathetic magical link connecting my personal health and well-being to that of every single person living in Felport. Just like the Fisher King, my health is the health of the people. When I prosper, the city prospers. And if I don’t prosper....”
Marla cocked her head. “So if I let you die, everybody in Felport dies too?”
Nicolette nodded. “Elegant, huh? Almost like something you would do. The ultimate dead man’s switch.” She grinned. “Pelham saw me talking about it, spying on me through a magic mirror, just yesterday. I was afraid he’d spoil the reveal, so I stuffed a magical gag in the mouth of his brain. I have to say, though, I was expecting more stamping and screaming and hollering from you. You never fail to disappoint, do you?”
“B?” Marla said. “You have any insight into this bullshit?”
“It’s true.” Bradley stared fixedly at Nicolette, gazing into some metaphysical dimension. “She’s got all these threads, little silvery lines, thousands and thousands of them, rising from her head and leading off into the air. A few of them are connected to people in this room, but most of them just disappear through the walls. I wasn’t sure what the threads were before, but the kind of sympathetic link she’s talking about... that fits.”
“Don’t go thinking about severing those threads with your magical knife, either,” Nicolette said. “You could do it, but the shock would vibrate down every line and kill the people connected to them instantly, just as quickly as they’d die if I did.”
“Pretty shitty governorship,” Marla said. “If you slip and fall in the shower or choke on a chicken bone, everybody in the city dies? You’re not impressing me with your leadership.”
“Oh, I’m not too worried about mundane threats,” Nicolette said. “For one thing, you gave me immortality – thanks, by the way. We did consider the possibility that I might get so crushed or vaporized that I might as well be dead, even if I technically kept living, so we addressed that, too. Turns out when you link yourself magically to all the people in a city, including its most potent magic-users, they get really heavily invested in making sure you stay safe. I’ve got so many anti-injury magics wrapped around me that a direct strike from a dinosaur-killer asteroid wouldn’t bruise me. There’s a whole lodge of order mages who do nothing all day but make sure my defenses are maintained. The only thing they can’t guard against is you, the death goddess who gave me this eternal life, but that’s okay – your conscience is all the defense I need against that.”
“Mmm.” Marla’s face was perfectly neutral.
Nicolette had expected more – some rage, some outrage – but Marla liked defying expectations. Nicolette decided to twist the knife a little harder, to see if she could get Marla to wince. “At first, I tried to handle the sympathetic links on my own,” Nicolette said. “I figured I could make a link with one person, and then make the connection contagious, right? Chaos magic has a pretty good handle on how pandemics work, spreading infections through random contact, and I figured I’d have the city pretty well blanketed within a couple of weeks. After that, I’d just have to track down the shut-ins and loners and hook them into the network. Good idea, right?”
“Mmm,” Marla said again. “So why didn’t it work?”
Nicolette managed not to grind her teeth. “I misjudged how powerful the sympathetic link was, basically. Seems like my magic got amped up after the whole touched-by-a-goddess treatment. There were some mishaps.”
“There were, in fact, spontaneous decapitations.” Hamil rode into the room on one of those little powered scooters like you see at a grocery store. The work Nicolette had – let’s say encouraged – him to do had taken a lot out of him, and he’d lost a lot of weight, was still sleeping most of the day, and had trouble getting around. He smiled wanly at Marla, and Nicolette watched her old enemy for some sign that Marla was feeling a gut-punch of betrayal right then, but there was no reaction on her face at all. Hamil had betrayed her before, after all, when he’d voted to strip her of her title as protector of Felport and exile her from the city, but Nicolette was hoping this latest turn would hurt Marla more personally, seeing her old ally standing with her greatest enemy.
“Pretty lousy way to begin a reign, making people’s heads fall off,” Marla said.
“We were all quite baffled.” Hamil steered his little scooter over beside Nicolette, almost running over Crapsey’s foot unt
il he scowled and stepped out of the way. Hamil parked beside the throne and regarded Marla for a moment before speaking. “People would simply walk along, minding their own business, and then...” He drew a shaky finger across his throat. “Their heads would fall off as if severed by an invisible sword. The condition seemed to be contagious, too. We lost half a dozen in a day.”
“My magic was just too heavy,” Nicolette said. “But Hamil here fixed the problem for me, and made the connection work right.”
“Did he now.” Marla’s tone was flat, but flat in that barely contained, pissed-off way Nicolette had heard so many times before. Oh, how gratifying it was, to make her take that tone.
“I had no choice.” Hamil’s voice was calm, too, all “just the facts.” “Nicolette’s consolidation of power was swift and expert. Her friend Squat was a great help in her campaign. None of us were prepared to deal with... something like him.”
On Nicolette’s right, Squat preened, which pleased her. Poor guy didn’t get much in the way of compliments, because of his magical medical condition.
Hamil went on. “When Nicolette came to me with her problem, I was outmatched, and helping her seemed better than the alternative. It was quite an interesting challenge, too. The force of the sympathetic connection was so immense that when cast on just one person it was overwhelming – they essentially became Nicolette, magically speaking, at least for the few moments before their heads fell off.”
“The failed experiments became my spare bodies,” Nicolette said. “I’ve got ‘em, enchanted to stay fresh, in a walk-in closet with the rest of my wardrobe. This one’s nice, huh? There’s no issue with my brain running their bodies, no organ rejection or anything, because like Hamil said, they pretty much are me, now.”