by T. A. Pratt
I looked at Sarlat again. Most of the blood seemed to emanate from the vicinity of his mouth. “You tore out his tongue?”
“Aren’t you fucking perceptive. Get me a drink of water, right now, and fuck you.”
I just stood there, looking at Sarlat’s corpse, but Squat took the initiative and found Sarlat’s bag and took out a bottle of water. I shook off the horrified skin-crawlies and set Nicolette’s head up on the table. Squat gave her sips of water, which she spat out, twenty or thirty mouthfuls as the water went from bright red to pink to finally clear.
“Hey,” Squat said. “I’m Squat.”
“Did Marla enslave you, too?” Nicolette said.
“Uh....”
“Squat was cursed by Elsie Jarrow,” I said.
Jarrow was the woman who’d beheaded Nicolette, so I was thinking there could be some shared trauma bond thing there. Or that, being a chaos witch herself, Nicolette might find the nature of the curse interesting or instructive. But Nicolette was still a Jarrow fan, the way some twisted assholes revere serial killers, so instead she said, “Holy shit, did you know her? Like, were you a friend of hers, did you do her wrong, or...”
I walked outside. All the monsters were dead, except Squat, and killing him might require breaking his curse first, and it seemed like a shitty thing to do, breaking a guy’s curse and then murdering him. Like if, in Beauty and the Beast, Belle had shoved a knife in the Beast’s eyeball as soon as he turned into the handsome prince again. Maybe Squat was in the market for redemption, and we could work something out. I wasn’t exactly experienced in the rehabilitative arts, but it’s an article of faith for me that I can do anything.
I’d once overhead a guy in a comic shop trying to explain the difference between a superhero and an anti-hero to his young son. He said, “An anti-hero wants the bad guys to be dead. But a superhero wants the bad guys to turn into good guys.”
I didn’t have much hope of being a superhero, but maybe it was worth a try. Redemption over execution. All part of Doing Better.
Speaking of doing better, I knew I should figure out some way to make things up to Nicolette. She was supposed to just be a head on a mantelpiece, a prop in my plan, but instead she’d gotten monster-tongue in her mouth, and the legitimate fear of getting something worse. What she’d endured had gone way beyond the call of duty. The hard part was figuring out something I could do to make it up to her that wouldn’t constitute a crime against humanity.
•
But first I let Nicolette take it easy while Squat and I disposed of the bodies. There were about a hundred dead – hardly a massive battlefield, but way more than we could easily deal with. A fire would have been visible for miles, so we decided to go the mass-grave route instead. Squat didn’t know a damn thing about doing magic – he just was magic – so his job was picking up the strays and outliers and piling them up in the middle of the street. Me, I just concentrated on a bit of sympathetic magic. There were plenty of deep holes in the area, because of the old mines; I just needed to convince the dusty main street of Tolerance that it was actually a deep hole, too.
After Squat had heaped the bodies into a mass, I let the two thoughts held in opposition in my mind snap together, replacing over here with over there, and a sinkhole formed, the dead from Orias’s and Sarlat’s gangs tumbling down like sand disappearing into the lower chamber of an hourglass. Once all the dead were below the level of the ground, I gestured casually and a great wave of earth swept over the hole, burying the bodies and leaving no sign beyond a mass of churned-up dirt with shredded bits of scrub brush poking out haphazardly.
I looked at the covered hole for a moment, satisfied with myself, then I started blinking and twitching and shivering and had to sit down right there in the sand, my head between my knees, sucking in great gasps of breath.
I was freaking out because I shouldn’t have been able to do that, especially the last part. Covering a huge mass grave with a thought and a gesture was pretty big magic. Such mastery over earth was not one of my skills. I’ve never specialized as a sorcerer, as necromancers and pyromancers and technomancers and biomancers and so on do, preferring to be a utility player, or a “rag and bone shop sorcerer” as my old mentor called people like me. I was a jill of all trades, master of none; pretty good at a lot of things, not amazing at any of them. Insofar as I had a particular strength it was probably enchanting, because I had the strong will and stubbornness necessary to spend hours imbuing objects with magic to be released in a sudden torrent or flash as needed.
What I didn’t have was the power to be a human bulldozer. I could maybe fool myself into thinking I’d mastered sympathetic magic enough to make a hole spontaneously appear where there was no hole, but waving my hand and covering over the grave had been pure telekinesis or geomancy or, I don’t know, earth-bending.
“Uh, are you okay?” Squat said.
“This is part of my magical process,” I mumbled. “Go check on Nicolette, would you?”
Squat shrugged and wandered off. As far as he knew, I could move heaven and earth with a twitch of my fingers, so he wasn’t surprised by my grave-digging abilities.
I remembered something I’d read once, about people who suffered brain damage and lost the ability to form new memories. Some researchers had gotten such patients to play that old video game Tetris for hours, spinning colored blocks around on screen and forming them into lines. Every day, the patients were offered the chance to play Tetris again, and even though they didn’t remember playing it before, and acted as though they were encountering it for the first time every time, their game play improved. Their brains were forming new pathways and connections on levels far below consciousness. Some of the patients even reported dreams of colored shapes falling, just like they did on screen, though they had no idea why.
For a month, I’d been a chthonic goddess, co-regent of a metaphorical underworld, and even though my conscious mind had been stripped of the memories, and I assumed I’d lost all those goddess powers... maybe something was lurking underneath the thinking part of my brain. Not power I could access intentionally, but only in a casual, thoughtless act, with a distracted mind and a wave of my hand. World-class outfielders don’t think about catching pop fly balls – they don’t work out the angle of descent and lift their glove accordingly. They just do it, the same way I’d just unthinkingly moved a ton of dirt, by will alone.
Of course I wasted about ten minutes trying to make the earth move again, but thinking about it made it impossible. Like the old joke about a grasshopper asking a centipede how it managed to walk with all those legs, making the centipede so aware of its milling limbs that it promptly got tangled up in its own locomotion and fell over.
I stood up, glared at the hole, and wondered whether I should call Death, to demand an explanation. I felt like yelling at him, though there was no reason to, really. My response to being annoyed and confused is often to spread that annoyance and confusion around, which was probably one of those things I need to Do Better about. So instead of pitching a fit, I took a deep breath and decided to get on with my life on Earth.
•
I retrieved my bike and all my stuff from the undisclosed location, and got Nicolette settled in her cage on the rear seat again. Her illusion was fading, Orias’s face sloughing away like mascara running in the rain. She’d gone all quiet, which worried me. A constantly bitching Nicolette was something I knew how to cope with, but a silent and unsleeping Nicolette was weird and creepy.
“I don’t think there’s room on this bike for you to ride bitch, Squat,” I said. “You’re going to have to make your own way home.”
He snorted. “I’ll take one of the twenty trucks left parked outside of town.”
I swore. “Damn it. I buried the bodies but left the vehicles. I didn’t even think about that.”
“Eh, most of the cars were stolen anyway,” Squat said. “I wouldn’t worry too much.”
“Where are you headed after this?” I
asked.
Squat shook his head. “Fuck if I know. Sarlat’s operation is all but wiped out, and the few guys left aren’t too fond of me. When they hear I’m the only survivor, that’s not going to make them like me any better. I seem to be unemployed and basically fucked.” He looked at me expectantly.
“What do you want me to do about it? I spared your life. That’s a pretty good favor you owe me already.”
“You couldn’t kill me anyway.” He sighed. “Look, do you need some muscle? I know you managed to wipe out about a hundred people pretty much solo, but I work cheap, and when I don’t have work to do, I tend to get myself in trouble.”
“Hmm. I don’t much need a thug. I’m pretty good at thuggery myself. But maybe... What do you know about the Eater?”
He blinked his eyes, which were the most human part of him, and actually kind of pretty in isolation, a sort of greenish-blue –
As I looked at him, his eyes changed, pupils elongating into goat-like slits, irises clouding and becoming a sort of bruise-purple color I found especially repellent. I flinched away from him, entirely involuntarily.
He grunted. “You had to like my eyes, didn’t you? One part of me that hadn’t changed much since I was human. Fucking curse.” He sighed. “The Eater? I’ve heard the name, sure. Sarlat had dealings with him, though I never met him. If it is a him. Could be a her, or an it, or something else.”
“Any idea what kind of dealings Sarlat had with him-her-it?”
“I want to say... human trafficking,” Squat said. “I saw a couple of trucks loaded up with drugged people, mostly runaways and stuff, and I heard the Eater’s name mentioned.”
“Cannibal?” I said.
“I’m talking, like, a dozen to twenty people, on three or four occasions, within a few months. If the Eater is literally eating people, dude has an appetite.”
“He could be eating their life-essence or something. You have any idea how Sarlat contacted him?”
Squat spread his hands. “Sorry. I was just a leg-breaker, with a sideline in other limbs. I could take you to his office and we could snoop around, check out his computer or whatever. Maybe we’ll find something. You planning to go after the Eater?”
“It’s a way to pass the time,” I said. “Beats wandering around looking for monsters to slay at random. Sure, let’s ransack Sarlat’s shit, see what we can find.” I glanced at Nicolette, who was still silent, and then covered her cage with the drop cloth. “But I need to get some sleep while there’s a little night left, and I need to take care of some other business tomorrow... Give me the address and we’ll meet there, not tomorrow morning, but the next day.”
“You’re the boss,” he said.
“Don’t get ahead of yourself. We’ll call this a probationary period.”
CRUSHES
Somewhere in there I found a motel room and slept.
The next morning my smartphone obligingly showed me the location of both a local truck-rental place and a nearby scrapyard. I’d always been resistant to technology, but I had to admit, having the world (or a digital analogue thereof) at my fingertips was more convenient than calling up Pelham and demanding he research everything for me.
I tried to talk to Nicolette as I motored toward the rental place, but she wasn’t talking back. Either she was sulking, or she was genuinely disturbed by what had happened with Sarlat. Having somebody shove their tongue into your disembodied head had to bring home a sense of powerlessness, and Nicolette didn’t like having no power. Sure, she’d killed the guy, but in a pretty ugly and brutal and personal way. It had to be rough on her. Moreover, she’d only been in a position to be assaulted that way because I’d put her there. She had to be filled with a powerful cocktail of anger, disgust, revulsion, and the realization of her own helplessness at my hands, all combining to make her the next best thing to catatonic. Or else plotting my downfall.
Nicolette aspired to be chaos embodied like her hero Elsie Jarrow, but she still had a core of reason and rationality, and was driven by her own personal interests. Jarrow might have killed me one moment and crowned me queen of the universe in another and ignored me entirely in another, but Nicolette just wanted me to suffer. She was a fairly powerful witch, probably my equal (goddess stuff notwithstanding), at least when she wasn’t reduced to a head in a cage, but she didn’t have the deep irrationality necessary to be a master chaos practitioner. She had too many axes to grind, too many grudges and aspirations for personal gain. She’d always had dreams of greatness, but instead of becoming one of the most deadly and powerful forces on the planet, Nicolette had been reduced to my magical bloodhound, radiation detector, and dowsing rod. She was good at fooling herself, spinning a narrative in her own mind, making herself the hero of her own story, sure... but the shit she’d gone through in Tolerance, being reduced to an abused prop in one of my plans, might have shaken her illusions a little.
I couldn’t fix Nicolette. I wasn’t even sure what “fixing her” would mean – if there was a decent person inside her somewhere, I’d never seen a sign. But maybe I could cheer her up, and give her a jolt of chaotic power, and at least give her back enough of her delusions that she’d continue being useful to me.
•
I rented a fourteen-foot truck, using one of my fake IDs and another wedge of cash. My pale horse rolled easily up a ramp into the back, leaving lots of room for all the other crap I needed to buy. I put Nicolette on the front seat next to me and said, “Want to go shopping?”
She did not reply, just dully stared at the dashboard, so I slipped the cover back over her cage and went for a drive. I was afraid I’d have to go all the way to Tucson to get what I needed, but there are plenty of antique shops and people selling stuff on Craigslist even in the small towns on the outskirts. I kept hoping Nicolette would take an interest, wonder where we were going, why I kept stopping, what I was loading into the back of the truck (often with attendant cursing and swearing and the assistance of shop employees or people happy I’d helped transform their family heirlooms into cash). She didn’t pay any attention at all.
It was creepy. She was also useless to me if she wouldn’t talk to me, but that wasn’t the only reason I wanted to snap her out of this. I really was trying to do what my stupid tattoo said.
It took half my remaining cash and damn near the whole day, but I was finally satisfied with my haul. When the last item was securely locked up in the truck, I got back in the cab. “Off to the main event,” I said, more chirpily than I’ve said anything ever, and Nicolette didn’t so much as grunt.
I followed my phone’s glowing dot and robotic verbal directions to a scrapyard south of Tucson, the most isolated one I’d been able to locate. I felt a twinge as I approached the place, which, like so many junkyards, resembled the citadel of a postapocalyptic road warrior: high fences made of scrap board and corrugated steel topped with barbed wire, huge metal buildings, and rows upon rows of junked cars. My old friend Ernesto had owned a junkyard, a literally magical place full of folded space and strange magics. He’d died because of something I did. One of the many fuck-ups I needed to atone for.
I drove my truck right through the open gate, parked near the office – an airstream trailer streaked with bird shit – and then climbed out, holding a plastic soda bottle full of reeking potion. I dribbled the fluid all around the gate, then screwed the lid back on and put the bottle away in the truck. The keep-away potion would give any potential customers who approached a sudden, strong desire to be elsewhere, giving me two or three hours to do my thing.
The manager came banging out of the trailer, shading his eyes from the late afternoon sun with one hand. “Help you?” he called. My friend Ernesto had usually worn a black tuxedo (the lapels stained with axle grease, for ritual purposes), but this guy was dressed in a practical gray jumpsuit, hair sticking up like the bits of hay that didn’t get mown down in a field.
“Yeah, I need the run of the place for a couple of hours.”
He cocked
his head. “You want what?”
“I need to use the crusher. Don’t worry, I know how. Will five hundred bucks do?” That was all I had left. I should’ve looted the bodies in Tolerance for spare cash.
“Lady, are you crazy? I can’t let you run the crusher.”
I grunted. “Don’t worry, I’m not trying to dispose of a body or anything, I just need to turn some shit into splinters, you know?”
“No. I do not know.” He pointed to the gate. “You need to leave.”
“Okay then.” I started to turn away, then turned back, tossing something at him underhand.
I expected him to try and catch it – people tend to do that, instinctively – but he just stood there as the cloth-wrapped sachet smacked him in the chest, sending out a little puff of aromatic dust. It worked anyway, though: he smelled it, and his eyes closed, and he started to sway. I stepped in and caught him before he fell, then dragged him up the short steps into the trailer and dumped him on a couch that smelled like eight or ten cats had copulated, urinated, and died on it, possibly simultaneously. He’d be unconscious for the rest of the afternoon. Sleep charms are kind of annoying to make – it helps to be exhausted when you enchant them, but when you’re tired you tend to make sloppy mistakes, and I’d created a lot of cloth packets of lavender and other ingredients that didn’t do a damn thing except smell like the bedrooms of old grandmas. But such charms were handy, and a vital part of any solo running witch’s toolkit. They don’t have the nasty long-term effects that some other charms useful against ordinaries do – charms of compulsion and forgetting, especially – though I had some of those in my bag, too. Sometimes you have to balance the need for success against the chance of giving some innocent bystander brain damage.