Queen of Nothing (Marla Mason Book 9)

by T. A. Pratt

  “I’m not giving up, because I’m not doing anything anyway, not personally. I have private investigators out looking, circulating Marla’s photo all over the country, and in a few other countries, too. Cole’s hooked into the sorcerous community. Bradley is doing the psychic thing every chance he gets. If Marla pops up anywhere, we’ll hear about it. In the meantime, I’m just sitting here, and while I like sitting around, I’d rather do it at home.”

  “I feel so helpless, Rondeau. I don’t know what to do.”

  “You say Marla’s alive,” Rondeau said. “Skully told Big B the same thing. Can you take comfort in that?”

  “What is she is in danger? What if she is in captivity, walled up in some terrible place?”

  “Then I feel bad for the terrible place, because Marla will tear it down to the foundations. There’s nobody tougher or more capable. You know that. Are you sure you won’t come home with me?”

  “Las Vegas is not my home. Mrs. Mason is my home.”

  Rondeau nodded. “Pretty much what I thought, and I get it. I’m going to miss you, buddy. Cole said you should come see him, if you’re looking to keep yourself occupied. He says a man of your talents could be, and I quote, ‘a great help to my great city.’ Like San Francisco’s so great. It’s cold in the summer and damp in the winter. Give me Vegas any day.”

  “I suppose it would be good to have some useful work, to occupy my mind,” Pelham said. “And being close to Mr. Cole means I would hear quickly if he receives any news about Mrs. Mason.”

  “There you go.” Rondeau picked up his suitcase. “Take care, Pelly. Everything will be all right. We’re talking about the unsinkable Marla Mason here, you know? And in the meantime... life goes on.”

  Rondeau made it all the way downstairs and into the back of the limo waiting to take him to the airport before he allowed himself to cry.

  “Ah, Marla,” he whispered into his cupped hands. “Ah, shit. Where did you go?” If she’d died, they could have had a funeral, or at least a wake. They could have toasted her, and recalled her great moments, without necessarily forgetting her less-than-great ones. They could have laughed, cried, cursed, emptied themselves out... and then let themselves get filled up by life again, in time. If Marla had decided to leave the Earth forever and fully take on the mantle of a goddess, that could have been softened by some ritual, too: Rondeau could have thrown the greatest imaginable Bon Voyage party, a masque to put the Red Death to shame. But instead, there was just this uncertainty, this unresolved chord, this somehow aggressive inaction.

  There are few words as heartless, and as entirely bereft of comfort, he thought, as “life goes on.”

  A Woman with a Past, Presumably

  “You don’t look much like a Mel.” The road-tripper made a big show of squinting at her name tag, though mostly he was staring at her tits. Some of the younger girls wore their uniform shirts too tight or partly unbuttoned to entice bigger tips, but thirty-something years into her bumpy life Mel was too old for that nonsense. Some guys plowed ahead without any encouragement at all, though.

  Still, she didn’t go straight to nasty. Her boss, Matt Lefkowitz, had asked her to tone it down a little. (“If this was a little tourist trap in some small town, having a mean-as-hell waitress could be a selling point, people would line up to get insulted. But we cater to the highway trade here, and what with online reviews and all, try to take it easy.”)

  “Huh.” She put the plate of scrambled-too-hard eggs and streaky bacon before him. “You’d better take it up with my mother. She’s the one who named me.” (The name on her driver’s license was actually Melody, but she didn’t like that. She was unsure of many things, but she knew she was not melodic.) She kept her voice bland and pleasant, even though she hated road-trippers. The truckers were fine (unless it was the late shift and they were hopped up on something), and the bikers were almost always polite as long as they were indoors, but people from California or New Mexico passing through on their way to somewhere else seemed to think the rest of the world was unreal, something on a sound stage, props in their exciting life story: or else they just figured they could be assholes because they’d never been here before and never would be again.

  “I’ve got your name already, so how about your number?”

  Mel raised an eyebrow and regarded him coolly. He was maybe twenty-five, with a stupid self-satisfied face and the kind of sideburns he’d clearly spent a lot of thought and time cultivating. “Sorry, son. Turn left on the way out and head for Nevada where the brothels are legal, they’ll take care of you.”

  She started to turn away, and he grabbed her wrist. A voice spoke in her mind, some piece of advice from who knows who or when—“If someone grabs you, hit them”—but punching this guy in the face for something so minor would probably get her fired; Matt liked her, but not enough to carry her through a battery charge. Instead she twisted her wrist and pulled away with enough strength to break the guy’s hold easily—one douche’s hand was no match for her body weight, especially when he was sitting and she was standing, with all the leverage in her favor. She said, “Grab me again and you’ll pull back a bleeding stump, kid,” and made sure to say it loud enough for the truckers at the counter to turn and look at them.

  She should have left it there—he probably would have just slunk out of the diner, embarrassed—but some imp of the perverse made her reach out and pat him on the head like he was a little kid. “Now eat up, you’re a growing boy.”

  That was too much. Nothing is more fragile than the ego of a healthy young white male in America. “You bitch,” he said, rising and reaching out to shove her.

  Something whispered in her mind—wait—and she let him push her, an awkward half-assed push since he was still rising from the booth. She stumbled back, more dramatically than the push warranted, then set her feet and delivered a straight punch to his face. She could have broken his nose, or possibly even his teeth, but she aimed for his cheek instead, and sent him sprawling back into the booth with a howl. She kept her fists up, waiting for a counterattack, but he just gaped at her. He’d probably never actually been punched before. She remembered vaguely that the first time was always something of a shock.

  Matt came out of the kitchen, a dishtowel draped over his shoulder, and a large knife in his hand. He was well over six feet tall but thin and storklike, somehow avoiding the rotund physique that should rightly come with endless access to the greasiest foodstuffs known to man. He glanced around. “That sure looked like self-defense to me. She warned the boy first and everything. You gentlemen agree?”

  The truckers at the counter chorused yeses.

  “Do we need to call the police?” Matt said.

  Mel shook her head. “No, I don’t want to press charges. Assuming he leaves a good tip, that is.”

  The guy got out of the booth, eyeing Mel warily, and started toward the door.

  Matt cleared his throat. “Son, we will send the police after you if you dine and dash.”

  The guy reached into this pocket, took out his wallet, and sullenly tossed bills on the table. Mel glanced down. More than enough. “You want change, honey?” Making her voice sweet as the whipped cream on a milkshake.

  He opened his mouth, probably to insult her, then thought better of it and fucked off out of the diner.

  “He’s gonna leave us a terrible review on the internet, Mel,” Matt said. He could make even good news sound doleful, and bad news always came out positively sepulchral.

  “Yeah, but the rest of these guys will leave good ones. ‘Come to Matt’s Hash House for dinner, stay for the unlicensed underground boxing matches.’”

  Matt chuckled. “Need any ice for your hand?”

  “Nah. Hitting someone once doesn’t really hurt if you do it right.”

  He grunted. “Where’d you learn to throw a punch like that anyway, Mel?”

  She tried hard to keep the bleak shadow that question summoned inside her from showing on her face. “Oh, you know. Y
ou pick things up, here and there.”

  “I bet you do. You need the afternoon off? Something like that can shake you up.”

  Mel knew he meant it sincerely. He was a good boss. She paused for a moment and examined how she felt. The result was... fine. Like that kind of violence barely rated on her personal scale for traumatic experiences. That was kind of alarming thought. “Nah, I’m all right.”

  “Best tend to your other tables, then. I bet they’re gonna be real polite now.”

  They were, and a couple of them even wanted to high-five her, which she tolerated. She refilled coffee cups and took orders and made chit-chat when necessary, but inside her head, Matt’s question kept rattling around: Where had she learned to throw a punch like that? Where had she learned how to do anything she knew how to do, apart from waitressing, which she’d mostly learned on the job? Mel had no idea.

  She didn’t have any memory of her life at all prior to a few months ago, when she’d awakened in a nearby motel room with nothing but the clothes on her back and a purse that contained an expired Arizona driver’s license that read “Melody Sendall,” a bent stick of gum, a cigarette lighter (but no cigarettes, and she didn’t crave them), and several grand in cash, some of the bills strangely water-stained.

  She’d used as little of the money as possible in case it was stolen and could somehow be traced, but whatever bad business she’d been involved in hadn’t come back to hurt her yet.

  Matt had hired her soon after she was “born,” and giving her a job without asking too many questions about her past was clearly his good deed for the year. She was paid just like the undocumented dishwasher: without an excess of paperwork. She was pretty sure Matt thought she was a battered wife on the run. Maybe he was right.

  She couldn’t remember a husband, but she had awakened with a small gold ring, hanging on a simple chain, around her neck. It could have been a wedding band, but it just as well could have been some kind of family heirloom. She had no idea.

  At first she’d been consumed with a desperate need to find out who she was, and where she’d come from, and what had happened to her, and she’d searched the web for her own name, checking out lists of missing persons, but all without success. She’d considered going to the hospital, telling some doctor her woes, but what if she was mixed up in bad trouble and the cops found out about her? Interacting with anything that left a record seemed like a bad idea.

  Then the dreams had started. Bad dreams, full of shadows and dark water and shouting and drowning.

  The first time she woke from one of those dreams, she decided the past was probably better left buried.

  Lady Luckless

  Three months after Marla failed to arrive as scheduled in Death Valley, Rondeau sat in the security room at his casino, watching the monitors. The guys on surveillance were more vigilant when the boss popped in at random moments to make sure they were doing the job right, a management trick he’d picked up from Marla during her days as chief sorcerer of Felport. Rondeau had originally been a much more hands-off investor, content to spend his days on sex and sloth, but recently he’d taken a greater interest in the day-to-day running of operations, because even the most elemental of pleasures paled when they became repetitious and uninterrupted. Now that he worked a little, the free hours were that much sweeter.

  In the bustle of the casino floor, the sudden cessation of movement drew the eye more than movement itself, so when a woman stopped dead in the middle of the carpet, looked up at the camera, and waved, Rondeau noticed. People mugged for the cameras, sometimes—and sometimes they even did it to distract from confederates who were doing more subtle things in the background—but in this case, Rondeau recognized the woman: bright red hair, white dress patterned with red diamonds, shark-eating smile.

  “Get eyes on that woman, and watch where she goes,” Rondeau said, and one of his security guards relayed the instructions to the employees on the floor. Rondeau hurried out of the security room, down the unglamorous corridors that supported the dream of glitter and loss in the public areas of the casino, and emerged through a door tucked away behind a potted plant near a double line of slot machines. He wished for a super-spy radio earpiece, but settled for calling the security room on his phone. They told him the woman had walked to one of the hotel’s restaurants, the cheap one that looked like a ‘50s diner, and taken a booth in the back. Rondeau walked calmly—running in a casino didn’t create a good impression—toward the diner, pushing in through the chromed door. The hostess and servers recognized him—he had a weakness for the mint chocolate milkshakes here and stopped by a couple times a week—and he gave an affable nod. Everybody tried to look busier now that the boss was present, which wasn’t hard, as they were plenty busy anyway. After you’d just lost a lot of money, settling into a red vinyl booth and digging into an order of cheese fries and imaginary nostalgia could be a great comfort.

  He went to the booth in the back, where the redhead sat stirring a spoon in a cup of coffee with the deliberation and focus of a monk spinning a prayer wheel. He slid into the booth across from her. “Haven’t seen you in a while,” he said.

  She took the spoon out of the coffee, put it in her mouth, looked him in the eyes, then drew the spoon out slowly and set it on the table beside her cup. “I got bored waiting for you all to do something. I get bored easily. It’s an occupational hazard. So I went and did some things myself, and came back, and found out you all did... nothing much at all while I was gone.”

  “Lady, who even are you? And what are you talking about? And why were you everywhere I looked a few months ago?”

  “I’m hurt you don’t remember me, I’m talking about finding your missing friend, and because I was watching you, dumb-dumb.” She leaned over and patted his cheek. “Sure, I had a different face the last time we met, and I’m sure my voice sounded different, but the hair was the same, more or less. This is my real look, by the way.” She made a face and stuck out her tongue. “Or, at least, the way I looked right before I stopped being human. The first time. My biography is a little complicated.”

  Rondeau stared, and something clicked in his mind, and he tried not to whimper. “You’re dead. Marla killed you.”

  The redhead sipped her coffee. “No, Marla killed the body I was inhabiting. And then she dispersed my disembodied consciousness into the sea, diluting me throughout a pretty large portion of the ocean. She neutralized me. I don’t die that easily.” She leaned forward, showing some freckled cleavage. “Go on. Say my name.”

  “You’re Elsie Jarrow.” Rondeau closed his eyes, but then he was sitting across from Elsie Jarrow with his eyes closed, which did not seem like a smart idea, so he opened them again. Jarrow was the most powerful and notorious chaos magician in recorded history. During her active years she’d been a cross between a fairy godmother and a wicked witch: you never knew if she’d curse you, kill you, or make your wishes come true. She was a creature of whim and whimsy, a bearer of black swans and bad tidings, a reverser of fortunes. She’d eventually become such a potent force of disorder that anyone who came near her developed cancer, their cells driven mad by her proximity, and then Jarrow’s own body succumbed to the emperor of maladies, and she left the flesh behind to become a creature of pure will, bodiless. Unfortunately, giving up your body had documented negative effects on the mind, and it hadn’t improved her disposition. It wasn’t so much that Jarrow was malevolent, any more than radiation was motivated by malice, but her very presence meant death, and being untethered from her body made her even more unpredictable than she had been before: and even then she’d been a sorcerer who took power from the unexpected, disorder, and disaster. Eventually Jarrow had been captured and imprisoned in a special cell at the Blackwing Institute, wrapped so tightly with spells of binding and order that she was barely even conscious most of the time... until Marla’s enemies made a bargain with her, providing her with a body that could stand up to the carcinogenic properties of her consciousness and setting her fre
e in exchange for killing Marla.

  The fact that Jarrow had failed to carry out the murder-for-hire was testament to Marla’s pure stubbornness and ingenuity, but the victory hadn’t been without cost. In order to stop Jarrow, Marla had been forced to make a bargain with Death himself, becoming a part-time goddess who spent half her year serving in the underworld as co-regent of Hell.

  Now, it seemed, the bargain had proven insufficient, because Jarrow was back.

  “What do you want?” Rondeau said.

  “I want you mopes to find Marla and restore her to her glory, such as it was,” Elsie said.

  Rondeau shook his head. “Okay. Why?”

  “Professional courtesy. There aren’t that many gods who started out as ordinary humans, so I figure we should stick together.”

  Rondeau leaned back in the booth. “You always had a high opinion of yourself, Elsie, but—a god?”

  “Oh, yes. I used to say I was like unto a god, and at my mortal peak I think I could have gone toe-to-toe with middling divinities like Reva and Ch’ang Hao, though probably not against Death or some of the other heavy hitters. But I’ve changed. I got upgraded. I’m a deity, now, all uplifted. My own nature used to be poisonous to me, my devotion to chaos destroyed my body and, I’ll admit it, thoroughly deranged my mind—but now I’m hooked into the superstructure of reality. Look: I made this body from memory, and I don’t have even one tiny tumor, not a speck of melanoma. Magic I could just barely do before, with all the power at my disposal, is now trivial. Oh, there are new constraints on me, sure—I can’t act against my nature, and if I make bargains I have to stick with them... or at least find clever loopholes to wriggle out of, which is more my style. But, all in all? Godhood agrees with me.”

  Rondeau licked his lips. “What are you a god of?” He was terribly afraid the answer was “cancer,” that she was seeding his marrow with little engines of death just by sitting there.