by Pratt, T. A.
“Uh, okay.” Crapsey took another step back. Much farther and he’d be back in the driveway. “We can talk out here. Or we can just... go. Probably it was a mistake to come here – ”
Nicolette interrupted. “The divinations don’t lie, Doc. I did three different readings, with entrails and dice and butterflies, and they all told me – you’re the one we need.”
“And what were you trying to find with this divination? Someone to lock you both up for your own good?”
“Nah.” Nicolette leaned in close, not quite crossing the threshold. “We were looking for somebody else who wanted Marla Mason dead bad enough to do something about it.”
The veil and the hat made reading expressions impossible, so it took a moment for Crapsey to realize that Dr. Husch was shaking with silent laughter, which finally bubbled forth in a harsh little series of caws. “Oh, dear,” she said. “Well, yes, divination doesn’t lie, assuming an augur skilled enough to read the signs correctly, but there’s nothing to stop a witch from asking entirely the wrong question.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Nicolette demanded.
“You should have asked, ‘Who would help us kill Marla Mason?’ Because my name would not have appeared in a list of answers to that query. I do mean Marla Mason harm. Her selfishness unleashed the Mason on the world, and that led directly to me becoming... this.” She drew out the last word in a hiss, and Crapsey steeled himself for a dramatic raising of the veil to reveal the horror beneath, but Dr. Husch settled for shuddering and hugging herself. “And Marla doesn’t care. She didn’t even come to see me after her exile, even though my hospital is outside the borders of Felport, and open to her. If she’d come... if she’d apologized... Well. I don’t know that it would have mattered, really. But she didn’t. Exile is far from sufficient punishment for her transgressions, and her selfishness. So, yes, I do mean her harm – but why on Earth do you think I’d need help from you two idiots to kill her?”
“No offense,” Nicolette said, “but every time one of the more dangerous loonies in this bin of yours got loose, you always went crying to Marla, and before her, you went crying to Sauvage, and I’m sure before that, you went crying to whoever was chief sorcerer before him. You’re a healer, right, and a jailer, and when it comes to fixing broken things and locking up the things that can’t be fixed, you’re pretty badass, and I’m full of respect for that. But killing Marla Mason? Doc, you just don’t have the chops. Neither do I, and neither does Crapsey, not alone. But together? Striking now, when she’s weak and friendless? We can all get revenge. Crapsey for getting stranded in this stupid universe he hates, all his powers stolen, his boss sent away to another universe. And me? She locked me up here. Before that she backed me into a corner so tight I had no choice but to kill my own mentor Gregor just to stay alive myself. Hell, indirectly, she’s the reason I lost my arm. What do you say? You, me, Crapsey, maybe we round up a few others, and go all legion of supervillains on her ass?”
“Not really legion of supervillains.” Crapsey flinched away when they both swiveled their heads toward him. He couldn’t help it – he’d read a lot of comic books in his home universe, and he wanted to get the metaphor right. “More like the... Marla Mason Revenge Squad. “
“I am well aware of my limitations,” Dr. Husch said. “I do not intend to attack Marla personally. But as you pointed out, I am a jailer. This is the foremost magical containment facility on the East Coast, and I have in my care some of the most lethal sorcerers to ever grace this continent. Norma Nilson, the nihilomancer. Gustavus Lupo, the skinshifter. Roderick Barrow, who rules a dark realm of his own imagination, and yearns to loose his armies into this reality. Roger Vaughn – both Roger Vaughns, the original and his young reincarnation – and their terrible oceanic magics. The nameless madman who calls himself Everett Malkin, and claims to be Felport’s first chief sorcerer, displaced in time. The immortal Beast of Felport itself. And, of course, I have your hero, Nicolette, locked in the most potent cell I possess, at the center of a cube wrapped in bindings of order – the witch Elsie Jarrow. You would be amazed at what some of these people are willing to do when you dangle the prospect of freedom before them. So, no – I won’t be needing your services. Good luck with the rest of your miserable, pointless lives.” The doctor started to close the door.
Nicolette stuck a boot in the way, and Dr. Husch made a noise of distaste and opened it again. “Do you want to lose a foot along with your arm, woman?”
“We want in,” Nicolette said. “If nothing else, we can help wrangle the crazies. Besides, don’t bullshit me, there’s no way you can let Elsie Jarrow out, you’d never be able to control her, she’s too – ”
“I am well aware of her condition – indeed, as her doctor, I know far more about her situation than you do. As I said, your services will not be needed. Why hire Vasari when you can work with Michelangelo?”
“I’m going to assume that’s an insult,” Nicolette said. “Like ‘why listen to Rush when you can listen to Led Zeppelin?’ But I don’t mind – I’m not fit to touch the hem of Elsie Jarrow’s garment. But that just means I’m even more eager to lend a hand. Let us join in. What could it hurt?”
“My chances of success,” Dr. Husch said.
Nicolette laughed. “Not bad, Doc. Being disfigured has given you a sense of humor. But what’ll really hurt your chances of success is me going to Marla and telling her what you have planned. And sending word to a few of the reigning sorcerers – I don’t think the Chamberlain or Hamil would be happy to hear you’ve decided to switch your patients from art therapy to murder-for-hire. That’s the kind of thing that could seriously impact your funding at the next meeting of the council, don’t you think? Or maybe you want to get locked up in one of your own cells?”
“You would help Marla? Protect her from me? Even though you want her dead?”
“Doc,” Crapsey said. “This is Nicolette. You can’t trust her to do anything. Messy unexpected stuff just makes her more powerful. She’s got a roulette wheel instead of a soul, you know?”
“Hmm. What makes you think you can escape the grounds of this estate?”
Nicolette drew a small hatchet with a curved blade the color of the moon from behind her back, and held it up to catch the light. “I did a little looting while I was running around with Crapsey and the Mason. I found this beauty in one of Viscarro’s vaults. It’s sacred to some moon god, I forget his name, but the point is – it is awesome. All those years I was jealous of Marla’s cloak, and her dagger of office, and now I’ve got an artifact of my own, and Marla doesn’t have any. Anyway, sure, sic your orderlies on me, whatever – if you feel like getting chopped into fucking little bits again.”
Dr. Husch didn’t move. You could have cut the tension with a knife. Or a really terrifying axe.
“Look, we want the same thing,” Crapsey said, holding up his hands in a gesture he hoped was soothing. “There’s no reason for us to fight. Just let us help. We can lend a hand.”
“Three hands, even,” Nicolette said.
To Crapsey’s surprise, Dr. Husch snorted with laughter. “Fine. I can see you won’t go away. I suppose I could use people to carry boxes and fetch coffee. But you take orders from me, understood?” She turned and started into the Institute, then paused, and called back over her shoulder, “You can come inside now.”
“No trying to lock us up, Doc,” Nicolette said, stepping in.
“I wouldn’t worry,” Dr. Husch said. “Haven’t you heard? Nowadays, it’s fashionable to let the inmates run the asylum.”
A MOTHER’S LOVE
“I can’t wait.” Death smelled of cut lemons and tarnished metal. “We can finally start our afterlife together – ”
Marla resisted the urge to knee Death in the crotch, but she did disentangle herself from his embrace and push him away. “We’ve been over this. I’m not eager to shuffle off this mortal coil yet, and like you always say, the rest of my long and natural life is just a dro
p in the bucket of eternity, and all that – you promised you wouldn’t rush me into an early grave.”
He held up his hands, rings twinkling in the light from the brass chandeliers. “I’m not! I have no hand in this at all, darling. But there are forces gathering against you, and, well... while there are no certain futures, there are certainly likely ones, and it doesn’t look like you’ll live to see the new year here in the upper world.”
“Huh.” Rondeau turned to Pelham. “So, if your mistress dies, what happens to you? Do you, like, crawl onto the funeral pyre? Or serve her in the afterlife like an unlucky Egyptian servant?”
“The bond is broken by death.” Pelham wrung his hands. “But – but surely – ”
“Surely for sure.” Marla crossed her arms. “Who’s coming after me, Death?”
He sighed. “I’m not certain. I can tell when someone is going to die – or when they’re likely to die, though the possibilities have always proliferated rather wildly for you – and gradually those lines of probability narrow into certainties. Your death is... increasingly likely. I know some other people who will almost certainly die with you, in the same place, around the same time. Perhaps that might give you a hint?”
“Shoot,” she said.
“A witch named Nicolette,” Death said. “And, ah... your brother, Jason.”
Marla whistled. “Both of them? They don’t even know each other.”
Death shrugged. “Perhaps not yet, but they will probably die within half-a-dozen yards and a few minutes of one another, and your odds of lasting long beyond their demise are quite slim.”
Marla nodded. “But now I know about the threat. That changes the equation, right? Forewarned is forearmed and all that.”
Death spread his hands, and gazed down at the rings. The gems glowed faintly in various colors, from sky-blue to the red of strawberry wine to a necrotic pulsing black. He slowly shook his head. “Here, in this physical form, I have only limited access to my full powers, but from what I can see... . No, sorry. Your knowledge doesn’t change things substantially. Oh, the place and time, those have shifted, but death is still rushing toward you. None of this is written, nothing is ordained, but... you don’t need to believe in fate to know a dropped billiard ball is going to hit the floor. It’s simple physics. Objects are in motion, and it is possible to chart the trajectories of those objects, barring outside interference.”
“Like someone kicking the billiard ball through a window.” Marla rounded on Rondeau. “You! You’re supposed to be my seer. Haven’t you been having any crazy prophetic dreams? Bradley used to have visions if I was about to stub my toe!”
“Bullshit,” Rondeau said. “Anyway, I take way more opiates than Bradley did. I’ve had a few of those dreams, the prophetic ones, and they’re cryptic as fuck and scary as hell. I don’t like them much. Is it any surprise I pop some downers before bedtime?”
Marla sat down on the padded stool behind the counter, happy to put a slab of oak between herself and the Walking Death. She stared at the rippled windows of the bookshop, and after a moment, she smiled. “All right. Okay. What’s my timeline looking like?”
Death reached into his vest pocket and tugged on a chain. Marla expected a pocketwatch, but instead, he pulled out a small hourglass, filled with white sand, and held it up to the light. Marla rolled her eyes. “An hourglass? Really?”
“There’s nothing wrong with tradition. I should show you my scythe sometime. I’d say you have... three days? Perhaps a week? It varies, there’s some slippage, so it could be a bit more, or a bit less.”
“Around Hallowe’en, then?” Marla said. “Isn’t that a little, I dunno, over-the-top?”
“For a witch’s duel? Someone has a taste for the classics, anyway.”
Marla cracked her knuckles methodically. “All right, then. I get the general idea. Nicolette and Jason both have reasons to want me dead. I figure this is a revenge thing, kick me when I’m down, then keep kicking me until my insides come out. I don’t know how they got together, or will get together, or whatever, but I’ll roll with it. I can make plans.”
“Mrs. Mason,” Pelham said. He glanced at Death. “Or, er... Mrs. Death?”
“I believe my wife would prefer to keep her own name,” Death said.
“She would. What is it, Pelham?”
“Forgive me for saying so, but... you seem almost pleased at the prospect of your imminent demise.”
“Nah,” Rondeau said. “She’s pleased at the prospect of a fight. Aren’t you?”
She reached under the counter and took out a Samoan war club, three feet of intricately carved black wood curved at the end like a blunt hockeystick, the whole thing heavy as a sledgehammer. “Beautiful, isn’t it? A kahuna over on the Hana side asked me to help out with a ghost problem, and gave me this as payment. I haven’t had a chance to hit anybody with it yet. I don’t know that I could bring myself to use it on Jason, despite everything he’s done... but I could sure as shit split Nicolette’s skull with this.”
Death sighed. “I hate it when you get all bloodthirsty. It’s unbecoming in a queen of the dead.”
“I’m not dead yet, loverboy.” She put the war club away. “Thanks for the heads-up about my imminent demise. But while I’m alive, I’ve got a job to do, which is why I called you here in the first place. There was a wave-mage named Ronin. Somebody cut his throat and let him bleed out into the waves. His cohort want to know who did the deed. Divinations don’t turn up anything, and Rondeau even summoned an oracle that couldn’t help us. The killer has whipped up some kind of big obfuscating magic – but I figure you can just pop in on the dead guy’s private hell or heaven and ask him who cut his throat, right?”
“I’ll do almost anything for you.” Death leaned across the counter, bringing his face close to Marla’s. “But the price is a kiss.”
“What would she have to pay to get you to kill Nicolette and Jason before they come after us?” Rondeau said, and just grinned when Marla glared. “What? It’s worth asking.”
“We have an agreement,” Death said, glancing at Rondeau. “I will do nothing to hasten Marla’s demise... but I will not intervene to delay it. This life of hers is important, of course, but from my point of view, it’s all just... prelude.” He looked back at Marla. “The underworld is dull without you. The place could use – ”
“If you say ‘a woman’s touch,’ this is one woman you’ll never touch,” Marla warned. Death chuckled, and Marla leaned in and planted a quick kiss on his lips.
“Would it be so bad, spending eternity with me?” Death murmured.
“I’ll be honest,” Marla said. “It’s not the thought of being dead that bothers me. It’s the thought of being beaten.” She shook her head. “You wouldn’t want to spend eternity with me if Nicolette manages to kill me. That’s one bad mood that would never end. Hell would become a genuinely unpleasant place with me in charge.”
“You’ll be a good queen.” Death stepped away from the counter. “It’s a shame the qualities that make you worthy to stand beside me also serve to delay the time until you do. All right. I’ll check on this – Ronin, was it? I’ll be in touch when I find out something.” He ambled across the room, opened a door in the corner, and stepped through, shutting the door after him, whereupon it turned into nothing more than a slanted shadow.
Marla grinned at Rondeau “There. That’s a detective-type thing to do, right? Working informants, using sources, all that stuff? I rule at this.”
“I can’t believe you married Death,” Rondeau said. “How do you not mention that?”
“Probably because it leads to conversations like this one? So what do we do with the rest of the afternoon? I can’t do much about this investigation until I hear back from, ah – ”
“Your DH?” Rondeau said. “That’s what the happy homemaker types call it on the internet – ‘dear husband.’ Or ‘dead husband’ I guess in this case.”
“Go swim in a shark tank.” Marla looked up
at the ceiling. “I should prepare for the attack that’s coming, too, but... well. Back in Felport I’d call the seers and sibyls, I’d tailor the pattern recognition sensors on the border guardians to look for Jason and Nicolette, I’d put all the snitches and street kids on alert... but what the hell do I do here?”
“Well,” Rondeau said. “Death says your brother is coming. So maybe, I don’t know... call him?”
Marla snorted. “You want me to reach out to Jason? Are you forgetting he shot you?”
“He did worse than that – he used me, said he’d teach me to be a con artist, said I’d be part of his crew, and then tried to kill me as soon as I got a little bit inconvenient.” Rondeau shook his head. “But he’s still your family. If nothing else, calling him up is an unpredictable thing to do, right? An unlikely thing? Some of that, what do you call it, lateral thinking, it might shake up some of the paths of probability your DH was talking about.”
“It’s not like I even have Jason’s number. He had a cell in Felport but it was a burner, he tossed it – ”
Pelham cleared his throat. “Mrs. Mason, if I may... there is an intermediate connection you might exploit.”
“Who? I don’t know anybody who knows Jason. Nobody alive, anyway. Cam-Cam is dead, Danny Two Saints is dead – ”
“Mrs. Mason,” Pelham interrupted. “I meant that you could call your mother.”
Marla put her head down on the counter and brought out some of her choicest curse words, the ones she saved for special occasions.
When they'd reunited after their long estrangement, Marla's brother Jason had told her their mother was dead, passed on years ago from cirrhosis of the liver, leaving behind an inheritance of exactly jack-shit. He'd used that news to both guilt-trip Marla into some family bonding and as a way to scam his way into becoming the beneficiary of Marla's own last will and testament, acting on the mistaken impression that she was a rich crime boss. After Jason's treachery was revealed, Marla realized nothing he said could be trusted, including the potential life-or-death of her mother, so she'd made some discreet inquiries. It turned out Gloria Mason still lived in the same shitty trailer in the same shitty Indiana town she always had.