Bride of Death (Marla Mason)

by T. A. Pratt

  “Sorry, Andrew.” I tucked the hatchet back into my coat and grabbed Nicolette’s cage. I headed back to the house, turning for a moment to watch as the creature loomed over the picnic table, appendages scrabbling across the yard toward the man on the makeshift altar. The beast’s tooth whorl unspooled from the dark, and something that might have been a tongue – or rather a cluster of tongues, like a cat-o-nine-tails – appeared and drooped down toward Andrew’s screaming face.

  Ah, well, fuck him, the kid-murdering piece of filth.

  I got inside and slammed the door, then dove for my bag. I dug out a bag of salt – well, mostly salt – and poured it on the floor in a big circle, enclosing Nicolette and myself.

  “Cowering in a warded circle,” Nicolette said. “You’re a strategic genius.”

  “I just need a minute to try something else,” I said, and that’s when the creature tore the roof off the house.

  GHOSTS WITH SHARP TEETH

  It was really quite impressive. A crack, a ripping sound, and then the roof was just gone, ripped cleanly away as if by a tornado. The creature’s limbs came over the top of the walls and began to tear those too, too, and in a moment we were sitting in an exposed ruin, with a full view of the backyard, and Andrew’s bloody remnants cooling on the picnic table. The appendages probed toward us, but stopped when they reached the salt, questing blindly off in other directions. We were invisible, inaudible, and invincible, more or less, while we were in the circle, but it was a temporary magic. A strong wind breaking the line could undo it.

  “What now?” Nicolette said.

  I reached into my coat and touched the shark’s teeth I’d found. I think I might have smiled. “Now, I do a little necromancy.”

  “What, are you going to resurrect Andrew to fight for us? That might work if his legs or arms were still attached. He’s not even intact enough to head butt the beast. Besides, I thought you hated necromancers?”

  “A compulsion to play with dead things for a living tends to indicate a pretty fucked-up personality,” I said. “But I’m a pragmatist.” I put the teeth on the ground in front of me, and dug through my bag for the standard components I’d need – a little cup made of bone, a silver dish, a bit of graveyard earth. I cut my palm with my dagger and dripped a little blood into the cup, then poured it into the dish and mixed it with the soil. Necromancy is powered by death. The bigger the effect you’re trying to achieve, the bigger the sacrifice you need – but there was a human sacrifice right in the back yard. I hadn’t killed him, but I’d bound him, which meant I bore some responsibility – and that meant I could use his death to fuel my magic. It seemed a shame to let his sacrifice be for nothing.

  I smeared my blood on the fossilized shark teeth, watching the blurry tangle of the beast sniff and quest its way all around us.

  “That’s ballsy,” Nicolette said. “They’re sharks. I’ve never heard of anyone calling up the ghost of a shark.”

  “I did a favor for a shark god not that long ago. He taught me a few things. Sacred words in a language older than humankind.” I muttered those words, and then I hurled the shark teeth toward the blurry mass at the center of the forest of writhing limbs.

  I’d hoped for a megalodon, the apex predators of the ancient oceans, sixty feet long with jaws that opened as wide as a garage door. But I didn’t get anything quite that good. Later on I did a little research, and I’m pretty sure the biggest shark that appeared was a Kaibabvenator swiftae, a good twenty feet long, lashing its spectral fins. Two other, smaller sharks were probably Neosaivodus flagstaffensis, not so big but vicious little killers all the same. The ghost sharks looked just like living sharks, except they were silvery-gray, and they swam through the waters of an ancient ocean that had receded long ago, gliding with surreal ease through the air above our heads.

  I don’t know how ghost sharks see the world, but when they saw the beast they saw lunch. Even though I’d only thrown three teeth, other ghosts began to precipitate out of the air, called by the feeding frenzy and their bone and tooth fragments in the soil. Soon there were a dozen prehistoric sharks converging on the monster, and they dragged it out of the dimensions where it was mostly hiding. The lower jaw curled and uncurled like a party noisemaker being blown on New Year’s eve, and the whips of its arms contracted before the sharks tore it to pieces.

  The sky brightened again, and in the late afternoon light, the ghost sharks became first translucent, then invisible, and at some point I realized they were gone. The ground was littered with bits of scale and armor and greenish blood – don’t squids have green blood, because their blood is copper-based, not iron-based like humans? – and unidentifiable fragments of the beast. The mouth-parts were still more-or-less intact, connected to a twitching mass that might have been a head. Either it wasn’t quite dead yet, or it was experiencing random nerve-twitchings, the way a freshly dead octopus on a plate will wriggle its tentacles if you pour salty soy sauce over it –

  A voice spoke in my head. The voice was cold, killingly so, vacuum-of-space cold: I will be avenged, it whispered. The Eater will get you.

  I had no idea if the creature could hear my thoughts, but I gave it a try anyway: With a name like ‘the Eater’ don’t you mean he’ll eat me? I mean, he’s not called ‘the Getter,’ right? But okay. Who or what is the Eater?

  The death of your future, it mind-whispered, pretty articulately for an ancient chthonic horror with a rolled-up buzz saw for a lower lip, but it had a history of manipulating humans, so maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised.

  The twitching stopped. Hello? I thought. You still there, Squidward? There was no response.

  “That’s one big mess of ugly,” Nicolette said. “What do you think that thing even was?”

  I had no idea. Ancient predator from prehistory, slumbering into modern times, or an alien astronaut stranded on a hostile planet, or an Outsider from another reality who’d wandered into our bubble of the multiverse and just tried to survive. Whatever it was, the beast had made at least one friend: something or someone called the Eater. Or maybe that was its deity or something, and threatening me with the Eater was the equivalent of a dying person telling his murderer that “God will judge you.”

  “Whatever it was, now it’s a dead one of whatever it is,” I said.

  I stood up, kicked the salt circle open, and picked up Nicolette’s cage again. “How about we try to get the fuck out of here?” I said. “I don’t much feel like bedding down in what’s left of Andrew’s place.”

  “Do whatever you like.” Nicolette belched, though the exact mechanics of how she belched, lacking pretty much all anatomy from the chin down, still escapes me. “I’m stuffed with chaos. I just want to nap.”

  We went back to the motorcycle and I got everything loaded, including strapping her cage down. Then I stopped. “Damn it,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Just wait here. Sleep. I’ll be back in a while.”

  “Where are you –” she began, but I covered up her cage and walked away.

  There was a shovel in a little shed in back of the house, and gloves. I found the place where Andrew had buried his family and neighbors, a little ways to the south – there were no grave markers, of course, but he’d piled up stones. I dug a hole in the hard earth, and put what was left of Andrew’s body in it, and covered it up again.

  I stood by his graveside and tried to decide if I was responsible for his death or not. I hadn’t killed him, but I’d caused him to be killed, thinking I could keep him alive, and failing. Hubris, again. Me and hubris are old friends.

  A door opened in the wall of the nearest house. It was a door that hadn’t been there a moment before, and after a man stepped out, and the door closed, the door went away without calling any attention to its departure. The man was tall, long-faced but handsome, with dark hair that fell past his shoulders, and he wore a dark blue sharkskin suit in what I assumed was a stylish cut. He was wearing rings on nine of his ten fingers. He used
to have ten rings, but one of them was on the ring finger of my left hand, now.

  “Hello, dear,” he said mildly, standing beside the grave, not quite close enough to touch me. “I sensed a death in your proximity, and I thought I’d come see how you were doing.”

  I shrugged. “I’ve been better. I killed a monster, which is always nice, but there were drawbacks.” I gestured at the churned-up earth.

  He nodded. “If you want me to leave, I can. I don’t mean to intrude on your, ah, mortal time.”

  “No, it’s fine.” Talking to someone other than Nicolette had its appeal. “It’s not like I’m sick of you or anything. We spent a month together in the underworld, but...” I tapped the side of my head. “Somebody poured the memories out of my head like a bucket full of dirty mop water.”

  He winced. “Quite. Not my idea, in case you were wondering.”

  “So it was my idea, then.” I wasn’t sure if I believed him. Not that Death is a notorious liar, but you can’t trust gods, and I say that as someone who’s a part-time god herself.

  He spread his hands. “I’m trying to stay out of it, honestly. True, leaving your memory totally intact would have been... disorienting... for you. There are things you knew as a goddess that a human brain and the associated sensory apparatus aren’t capable of processing, and you – goddess you, I mean – had some legitimate concerns about your health and well-being if you retained all the memories. It’s entirely possible that you’d spend your month on Earth in a state of essential schizophrenia, beset by visions and voices not your own. I argued for a more selective redaction of memories, but you felt strongly that your personal development as a mortal would benefit from a clean-slate approach.”

  I snorted. “My personal development. Right. I feel like I’m being nagged by a court-appointed therapist. Am I really such a mess, that I had to get ‘Do Better’ tattooed on my skin?”

  He stepped closer to me then, and wrapped his arms around me, and though I didn’t exactly melt in his arms, I didn’t pull away, either. I’ve never been a big fan of human contact, but screw it, he wasn’t really human. “I would argue that you aren’t so bad,” Death murmured into my hair. He drew back and took my face in his hands. “You aren’t exactly tactful, it’s true. And you’re stubborn, and impulsive, and arrogant, and you can be selfish, and you always think you know best –”

  “Stop, you’ll make me blush.”

  “ – but you’re not bad. No one can call you that, not really. You’re the sort of person who would literally tear holes in the fabric of reality to help a friend. Perhaps not the best idea in the world, and I admit the consequences were fairly dire, but it was hardly born from an evil impulse.”

  “I never claimed to be a demonic sociopath. I’ve got my good points. But intentions don’t count for shit – just results, and consequences. If I’m honest... I know I’ve got a lot to make up for. I can’t really make amends, or reparations, for the damage I’ve caused, and the people I’ve hurt, but I can try to balance some of the bad things I’ve done, and save others.”

  “I am pleased you have a purpose. If I can aid you at all in your work...”

  I shook my head. “It’s not really riding a bike if you use training wheels, hubs. I can’t stand on my own feet if I’ve got you propping me up. I’ve already got one unfair advantage. I got an axe to the head today – it should have been me showing up on your stygian shores in the sunless lands today, not Andrew Lin.”

  “We have an arrangement. You bargained hard, and as a result, you get to spend half the year alive in the mortal world and half in the underworld with me. Letting you die would break our arrangement – and I’m not about to renege a deal I made with you. I’d never live it down.”

  “I guess adding a ‘no pain’ rider to the deal would be asking too much?”

  He kissed my forehead. “Life is pain. Isn’t that what you told me once?”

  I pushed him away. Nobody kisses me on the forehead. “Are you getting along okay down there without me? I can only assume I’m the one who keeps the infernal trains running on time.”

  “We’re muddling along. There will be messes for you to clean up when you return in a few weeks, of course.”

  “Why am I not surprised? Okay, Mr. Mason. I’ve got wrongs to right and dragons to slay. I don’t much want to hang around Sunlight Shores here, so I’d better get on the road. And hey. Thanks for the motorcycle. It’s a pretty sweet ride.”

  “Only the best for my blushing bride.”

  “Ha. I can’t remember the last time I blushed.”

  “True enough. I do most of the blushing in our relationship. Give my best to Nicolette.”

  “Although it would be funny to look her straight in the eyes and say, ‘Death says hello,’ I think I’ll pass. In case you forget, we didn’t invite her to the wedding. She doesn’t know about our relationship.”

  “Consider my greeting rescinded, then. I never liked her anyway.”

  “See, that’s why our relationship works. We hate the same people.”

  Death strolled away, passing through another nonexistent door that vanished when it closed behind him, and I returned to my motorcycle and thumped the top of Nicolette’s cage. “Ready to go? Need a pee break first? Oh, that’s right, you don’t have a bladder. Or a urinary tract.”

  She belched again, loud and long. “I’ve got the metaphysical equivalent of a full belly, though. That was a chaos buffet. We literally brought down the house.”

  “’We.’ What we? You’re just a dowsing rod. I’m the one who dug the well.”

  “You can’t annoy me,” she said, eyes half-closed, a sickeningly satisfied expression on her face. “You have no idea how good this feels. I’m talking heroin orgasms here.”

  “I could have done without that mental image.” I covered her up, then drove away from Sunlight Shores as night began to fall, trying to decide if I should head for a freeway and look for a motel, or find a spot to camp out under the stars (which didn’t sound all that appealing). After riding for a few miles on dark country lanes, I saw the lights of a roadhouse, with a gravel parking lot jammed full of pickups and motorcycles.

  My stomach started grumbling instantly, and I realized I hadn’t had anything to eat in ages – chaos doesn’t do much to fill me up. I figured any decent beer-and-juke joint would probably offer up some burgers or onion rings or sausages or something, so I pulled into the lot. My plan was, get a meal, and if I was lucky, maybe some asshole would try to grope me, and then I’d get to have a bar fight. The ghost sharks had done the killing for me back there, and I was itching for more direct action.

  I got something so much more interesting than a fight, though. I got myself a war.

  HONKY TONK

  The place was called Danooli’s, and it was a seriously old-school roadhouse. Lots of exposed wood, not in a fancy reclaimed renovated antique lumber way, but just because nobody’d ever bothered to cover it up in the first place. Sawdust on the floor. Jukebox about the size of the refrigerator in my last apartment. Guy with scraggly gray hair in a tight-fitting muscle t-shirt drawing foamy beers at the bar for an assortment of bikers, farmhands, and miscellaneous drunks. Quite an array, apart from every one of them being white. I guess the Hispanic population got drunk elsewhere. I projected my best “Don’t hit on me unless you want to get hit” attitude and sauntered up to the bar, Nicolette’s cage dangling from my fingers. She seemed asleep – who knows if she really sleeps, maybe she just zones out – and I had hopes for a quiet meal and a drink. I’m not a drinker as a rule, since I like my reflexes fast and my inhibitions don’t need to be any weaker, but in a place like this, if you don’t get at least a beer, you draw too much attention.

  “You serve anything edible in this place?” I called to the bartender over the blare of trumpets. (You’d expect the juke to be playing some country shit, right, or classic rock at best? But it was some ‘90s pop-ska instead, at least at that moment.)

  The bartender smi
led wide, and if he hadn’t been missing a bicuspid on the left side it would’ve been a really enchanting smile – it kind of was anyway. I like people who don’t give a fuck how they look. “The pickled eggs are all right,” he said. “Burgers are hit or miss. Everything else comes so deep fried it don’t much matter how it started out.”

  “Give me a basket of the finest of whatever you dip in beer batter, then.”

  “Eating light, got it. Jalapenos and mushrooms coming up.”

  “Anything on tap that doesn’t taste like piss and rice water?”

  He raised an eyebrow at that. “An import or two, but you’re better off going with one of the local microbrews, if you’re picky –”

  Even in the dusty roadhouse department, things were getting fancy. “I’ll trust your judgment. Something light, though, I’ve been riding all day and I’m hot as hell.”

  “Oh, you don’t have to tell me that. I noticed.” He drew me a beer and slid it over. “You can grab a stool or take it to a booth if you’d rather, I’ll bring your food over.”

  “Much obliged.” I picked up my beer in one hand and the birdcage in the other and found the darkest deepest most distant booth available. I’m not normally so chatty with bartenders. Maybe I was starved for human contact of the non-headless, non-attempting-to-sacrifice-me-to-monsters variety. I folded over my coat and draped it over Nicolette’s birdcage in the seat beside me, then pulled out the paperback I was reading and squinted at the pages in the dimness. The bartender appeared a bit later and slid a plastic basket full of unidentifiable deep-fried blobs and a dish of ranch dressing across to me, and I grunted thanks without looking up from my book. I know, so suddenly antisocial. A little human contact goes a long way for me.

  A young guy came bursting in through the front door, dressed in dusty, broken-in riding leathers, but he didn’t have a hardass biker look, more the excitable demeanor of a kid who’s just discovered drinking and sex and can’t believe life is so amazingly good. There was a lull in the jukebox music and he shouted, “Hey! Who’s driving that sweet fuckin’ Vincent White Shadow out in the parking lot?”