Grim Tides (Marla Mason)

by Pratt, T. A.

  “A god told us you might be able to help.”

  Marla nodded. “Shark god, right?”

  Glyph shook his head. “No. He was not a god of the sea – or, not just the sea, anyway. We are unsure of his domain, or even his true name, but he is... not from around here. Not one of the Hawai’ian gods, we mean, who mostly slumber deeply now, anyway. He was friendly with Ronin, and when Ronin was killed, this god suggested you might be able to help. He spoke quite highly of you.”

  Marla frowned. She didn’t know that many gods, nor did she want to. Apart from the shark god she’d helped soon after arriving in Hawai’i, there was just a snake god who’d pledged to kill her someday when he got around to it, and the god of Death, with whom she had a... complicated relationship. And there was her old apprentice Bradley Bowman, who was pretty busy maintaining the structural integrity of the multiverse since he’d ascended to a sort of meta-godhood. She didn’t think any of them would be recommending her services as a detective to a pod of hive-mind surf-sorcerers, as such business was way below their pay grades. So this bunch had inadvertently brought her two things to investigate – who’d killed their friend, and which god was dropping her name.

  “You are an outsider,” Glyph went on, “and so we thought you might be more... objective? The kahunas here all have old alliances, grudges, and suspicions that could color their investigations if we sought their help. They look first to their own enemies, or those they have deemed undesirable, even if the evidence points elsewhere. You do not have any of their biases. We asked others about you, and were told... not good things, exactly, but things that make us think you can find out who murdered Ronin. Arachne said you knew your way around the dead.”

  Marla nodded. Arachne had only come to Marla at all because she was between apprentices and too proud to ask any of the other local kahunas for help – she could hire a haole like Marla without anyone knowing she couldn’t handle the unquiet spirit on her own, though of course it had proven to be rather more complicated than an ordinary ghost. “Sure, I helped her out, but – ”

  “We talked to Zufi as well,” Glyph said.

  Ah. That made more sense. “The Bay Witch. That’s what we call her back home – back in the city I’m from, I mean. We worked together for a lot of years.”

  “She used to ride the waves with us in the Pacific, before relocating to the Atlantic.” Glyph frowned. “Her choice never made sense to us. Why leave the whole to be alone? And the waves over there are terrible. The god said Zufi could provide a reference for you, and when we sent word, Zufi said you are tenacious and capable and not very nice, but if you are on our side, you will be not very nice to people we do not want to be very nice to, so it is okay.” He paused. “That is a direct quote. She also said to remind you that you still owe her a favor.”

  “Yeah, that sounds like Zufi. Okay. I’ll take the case.”

  The surfers exchanged glances. It was like watching a meticulously choreographed bit of stage business. “What do you charge for your services?”

  Marla grinned. Once upon a time, before being chief sorcerer of Felport, and then being an exiled ex-chief sorcerer, she had been a mercenary. She’d never worked for money back then, choosing a life of poverty in favor of accruing power. So her rates now were the same as they’d been back then: “If I solve the case, you’ll have to tell me a secret I don’t already know, and teach me a trick I’ve never seen before.”

  “That is acceptable,” Glyph said.

  Rondeau cleared his throat and glared at her.

  “Oh, right,” Marla said. “I charge a secret, and a trick – plus expenses.” Rondeau had been funding her entire life since her exile, and even though he had more money than some gods now, he’d insisted that if she got a job she should at least not lose money in the process. As chief sorcerer she’d never worried about cash – all the other sorcerers under her protection had kicked up a percentage of the profits from their various legal and illegal businesses to her, leaving her free to look out for the city’s well-being as a whole – but, as she kept discovering in new and annoying ways, this was a new world. If this kept up, she’d actually end up knowing how much a gallon of milk or a loaf of bread cost.

  Glyph chewed his lip. “We do not have much in the way of actual money... what kind of expenses?”

  That was a good question. “Like if I need to buy grave dust or a hand of glory or something, for a spell?”

  He nodded. “May we pay you in black coral?”

  Marla didn’t know what that was, but she looked at Rondeau, and he nodded vigorously, so she said, “Yeah, that works.”

  “May we ask how you intend to proceed?”

  “I should see the crime scene.”

  Glyph frowned. “Ronin’s body melted, as we said, and we could find no trace magically – ”

  “Look, it’s not that I don’t have faith in you. Except, in fact, I don’t know a damn thing about you, so I’m going to do everything you did all over again, just so I know. Okay?”

  “You do work for us – ” Glyph began.

  “Nope,” Marla said. “I work for me. On your behalf, yes, but not for you. I do this my way, and you don’t get to bitch unless I don’t get results. Understood?”

  Glyph narrowed his eyes, glanced at his fellows, then nodded. “Understood. Just... find out who killed Ronin. He was our eldest, and the best of us, and he did not deserve to die that way.”

  “Sure,” Marla said. “Give my assistant here the details about the crime scene, directions and all that. And it would be good if the directions were for traveling by car, and didn’t start, ‘Swim out half a mile east’ or something.”

  “We can take you – ”

  “I’d rather see it on my own, without having my observations influenced,” Marla said. “I’m going to go prepare my tools of the trade. Let Rondeau know how to get in touch with you, all right?” She stepped around the counter, shook Glyph’s hand – strong grip, kinda damp – and nodded at his fellow sorcerer-siblings, or multiamorous lovemates, or hive-buddies, or whatever they were. She slipped through a curtain behind the counter into the little back room office, which didn’t contain much but a chair, a smaller desk, a safe (unlocked and empty, except for a small silver bell), and a shelf on the wall holding a few books on Polynesian mythology and the Hawai’ian language. Marla didn’t really have any prepatations to make, or any tools to pack – she just didn’t want to deal with the logistics of shooing an anxious tribe of surfers out of her office. The prospect of a mystery to solve should have excited her, but she didn’t actually give a crap about Ronin or the surfers, so the thought of getting in a car and looking at some sand a guy had died on made her tired. She didn’t want to dwell on the negative, but... what if this whole occult detective thing didn’t work out? What would she do with herself then?

  A CONVERSATION WITH KOONA

  Once he’d gotten rid of the surfers, Rondeau stepped into the office. “’I don’t work for you, I work for me?’” He smiled. “You’ve been reading those Robert Parker novels about Spenser I gave you, haven’t you?”

  She scowled. “I have to learn to be a detective somehow, don’t I?”

  “Spenser does just wander around annoying people and getting in fights until he figures things out,” Rondeau said. “Instead of using deductive reasoning and measuring the depths of footprints and collecting cigar ash and shit like Sherlock Holmes does. So he’s probably a better model for your detecting style, if you can call it that.”

  “Yes, fine, you’re hilarious.”

  “If you’re Spenser, that makes me his buddy Hawk, right? A sexy, amoral badass?”

  “One out of three ain’t bad,” Marla said. “So where are we going?”

  Rondeau drove them north out of Lahaina in his little black convertible, past the West Maui airport, through the town of Kapalua, and along a route that curved gradually eastward along the northern edge of the island. The scenery along the coast road was absolutely gorgeous –
great vistas of cliff and rock and sea – and Marla was sick to death of it. She liked to be in the shadow of old warehouses with the comfort of a vast continental plate beneath her, not out in the open under the sun on a speck of volcanic rock in the ocean.

  “We both know I’m not going to learn a damn thing from looking at a spot where a guy died,” Marla said. “Unless the killer left a confession written in the sand, and even then, it would have blown away by now. So here’s what we’ll actually do. You’ll find an oracle, and ask it who killed our dead guy. Easy.”

  Rondeau sighed as he swung the car around a long curve. “You only love me for my vast psychic powers.”

  “Who says I love you?”

  They approached the Bellstone, a boulder of volcanic rock that, when struck in just the right spot, made a sound like clanging metal. When Rondeau didn’t even slow their pace as they passed the rock, Marla growled. “Seriously? There’s no oracle we can talk to in the Bellstone? A great big hunk of rock upchucked from the fiery guts of a volcano? Rings like a bell when you smack it? You’re telling me that doesn’t have any magic?”

  “Doesn’t feel right,” Rondeau said. “Sorry.”

  “You know, when Bradley wanted an oracle, he could find some ghost or demon or whatever in the first stinky dumpster or drain pipe or dark alley we passed.” She was happy about her old apprentice Bradley’s new gig as an immortal being who lived at the center of all possible realities, but it meant Marla didn’t have his help anymore, and she was stuck with the infinitely less experienced (and lazier) Rondeau, who’d inherited Bradley’s abilities, but not his skill at wielding them.

  “I’m pretty new at this,” Rondeau said. “But I’m learning. In my defense, I think there’s a higher density of demons and dead people in a city. If you want me to turn around and go talk to the rock for a while and hope for the best, I can.”

  Marla sighed. “No, carry on, you’re the one connected to the great grand mystical whatever. Something’s seriously out of whack when you’re the most spiritual person in the room. Or car. Whatever.”

  They drove in silence for a while, until Rondeau said, “Over here.” He pulled the convertible onto a wide gravel patch on the shoulder of Highway 340. “There’s definitely some magical stuff crackling down this way, by the Olivine Pools.”

  She frowned. “Isn’t this where our dead guy died?”

  “Yeah. That’s convenient, isn’t it? Maybe he left behind a ghost we can talk to. Go right to the source.”

  Marla grunted. She wasn’t a big fan of ghosts. They weren’t the souls or spirits or immortal residue of the dead, exactly – those went elsewhere, to whatever afterlife they expected to get, usually. Ghosts were more like... old photographs, or video loops, or echoes, or shit stains – psychic residue, persistent but slowly fading and degrading, and all pretty much crazy. But ghosts knew things, and they made reliable oracles, especially when you asked them about their own lives and deaths. Ghosts were pretty self-centered. Not every death resulted in wailing translucent psychotic ectoplasmic residue, but such manifestations were more likely in cases of violent death, so there was a chance some fragment of Ronin might still be hanging around, the magical-forensic equivalent of shed hairs or blood drops.

  Marla and Rondeau picked their way down a steep, rock-scattered incline toward the Olivine Pools, a beautiful spot beloved of tourists and those locals who could abide the company of tourists: a group of lovely tidal pools, deep and clear, most big enough for swimming (though ideally you tried not to disturb the denizens of the pools), in an area scattered with the small greenish crystals called olivine. The pools were entirely deserted at the moment, though, and Rondeau wandered along the shore, pausing occasionally, squinting at nothing in particular, looking for ghost spoor. He eventually crouched down by one of the smaller pools. “Not a ghost.” His voice was strained, like he was trying to do higher math in his head while operating heavy machinery. “But there’s something... else. Something watery and dark and... . In here.” He pointed to the water, and Marla crouched with him.

  One of Rondeau’s powers was oracle generation. Marla wasn’t sure whether he summoned existing supernatural creatures who possessed the power to answer questions, or whether the “oracles” were just external manifestations of his own abilities, a way for him to get answers out of his own powerfully psychic brain, like a crazy guy in a comic book who took orders from his own ventriloquist’s doll.

  Either way, the process worked, so Marla peered into the water – and jerked back when a gargantuan white moray eel rose up from the suddenly bottomless depths of what should have been an ordinary tidepool. The eel’s eyes were the size of teacups, black and dead, its mouth a horrorshow of overlapping fangs. The water rippled as the eel spoke, but the voice that emerged was perfectly clear, a deep bass with no underwater qualities at all: “I am Koona, the death of sharks, the thief of fish. What do you seek?”

  Rondeau cleared his throat. “A man called Ronin died near this spot two days ago. We want to know who murdered him.”

  The eel swayed a bit, almost hypnotically. Its jaws were big enough to swallow a human head in a gulp. After a moment, it said, “That knowledge is closed to me. I see a figure, but it is shrouded in mist. The killer is a being of power.”

  Marla sighed. Well, yeah. The guy had murdered a member of a badass hive of wave-mages, so the power was self-evident. “Thanks anyway,” she said.

  “I do have knowledge that may interest you,” the eel said. “Glad tidings, and grim ones. Do you wish to know?”

  “Uh, sure,” Rondeau said.

  The eel opened its mouth. “You must pay.”

  “I always pay,” Rondeau said. The oracles he summoned were transactional creatures. “What’s the price?”

  “Blood.”

  Rondeau sighed. Marlas passed him one of her many knives, this one more suited for slicing mangos than throats. He pressed the blade to his palm, winced, and made a fist over the water, drops falling in and turning to drifting streamers in the water. The eel closed its eyes for a moment, then spoke, gazing not at Rondeau, but at Marla. “An old friend will soon return to you, to gladden your hollowed heart. But others are coming, and they seek not to soothe your heart, but to tear it from your chest. One you once loved, whose love for you has soured. Old enemies returned. Strangers who shall become new enemies. They sharpen their knives for you, and gather their powers.”

  “What friend?” Marla said. “And what enemies? Come on, give me names.” But the eel just sank down into the pool, vanishing into the blackness, which shimmered, and became just an ordinary tidepool again, with nothing more remarkable at the rocky bottom than anemones and a scuttling crab. She looked at Rondeau. “That oracle sucked.”

  Rondeau wrapped his wounded hand in a handkerchief. “It sucked my blood, anyway. What now?”

  “I guess we go back to the office, and try to find out who this ‘friend’ is.”

  “You’re not more concerned about the enemies?”

  “Enemies, I’m used to. I’ve got lots of those. I don’t have that many friends.”

  “True,” Rondeau said. “And most of the ones you used to have don’t like you anymore.”

  “Honestly, it makes me wonder why you still hang out with me.”

  Rondeau shrugged. “What can I say? I have profoundly horrible judgment.”

  There was no one at the bookshop, and no familiar faces lingering on the streets in Lahaina town, and Rondeau refused to call up another oracle just to satisfy Marla’s curiosity about this mystery friend – summonings like that gave him headaches and insomnia even at the best of times, and two in one day would give him nosebleeds and the kind of migraines that come with auras and last a for week. “Maybe your long-lost pal is at the hotel, kicking his heels in the lobby, wondering where the hell we are?”

  Marla shrugged. “Sure. It’s as good an idea as any.” The resort was the closest thing she had to a forwarding address.

  Rondeau lived
in a two-bedroom suite at a hotel in Kaanapali, a stretch of gorgeous coastline dominated by giant resorts. It was a long way from the traditional Hawai’ian experience, but Rondea was an unapologetic tourist and hedonist. He let Marla stay in the suite’s extra room, at least when she didn’t sleep on the hideous brown couch in the bookshop. She knew she should find a place of her own. That would be a pain in the ass, but hotel life just wasn’t to her taste. Too many people had keys to their room. Back in Felport, she’d owned an entire apartment building and lived in it alone, with her personal effects scattered in the empty apartments around her own to create a cloud of psychic chaff if anyone tried to divine her precise location within the building. Oh, beautiful privacy. That kind of real estate was rather beyond her reach here on Maui, unless she asked Rondeau for a major loan, and she felt beholden enough to him already.

  Rondeau drove up along Highway 30 from Lahaina, leisurely covering the short distance to the hotel. Marla was in the passenger seat, doing her habitual (if paranoid) scan of her surroundings. She peered into the side mirror. “Someone’s following us.”

  Rondeau glanced up at the rearview. “Marla, that’s a taxi. People take taxis to the resorts, and this is the main road to the resorts from Kahalui airport. What makes you think they’re following us?”

  “I’ve got a sense for these things. Besides, you’re going so slow that any taxi driver worth a damn would have passed you miles ago. Why put up with your pokey ass unless he’s following us?”

  “You told me to slow down,” Rondeau said, outraged and aggrieved – or at least affecting to be. “You said I drove like a maniac, so I brought it down to the speed limit, just like you asked – ”