Queen of Nothing (Marla Mason Book 9)

by T. A. Pratt

  She laughed. “I’m a trickster god, Rondeau. There are lots of us, waxing and waning in power, but I have to say, I’m feeling pretty ascendant these days. Coyote and Kokopeli and Loki are all still around, but they’re shaped and tethered by some old ideas, and I’m the trickster of the moment. I’m the god of layoffs and winning lottery tickets, of finding your soulmate on an online dating site and getting murdered by internet trolls, of sentient algorithms and disruptive technologies. I’m the god of the singularity, the unevenly distributed future, climate change and private space flight. I’m the god of the edge, Rondeau, where everything teeters and everything bleeds.”

  “But—how?” Rondeau had known two other humans who became gods: Bradley, who was uplifted to fill a vacuum when the old overseer of the multiverse broke her own laws and ceased to exist, and Marla, who married into godhood. “Did you, like, kill and eat the old trickster god?”

  “Strangely enough, Marla helped me become what I am today—but how about we let her tell you that story. Your curiosity about my ascension will give you an extra incentive to find her.”

  “Last time you and Marla crossed paths, you were trying to murder each other. Why should I help you find her? How do I know you don’t just want to finish the job?”

  “You are the dumbest of all possible dumb-dumbs, sweetie. I don’t want to hurt Marla. I could say I feel gratitude to her, because of how she helped elevate me, but the truth is, the world is just more interesting with her in it, stomping around trying to fix everything and making stuff worse half the time in the process. Anyway, I already know where Marla is, and why she hasn’t reached out to you. I could just tell you... but that’s not very tricksterish, now, is it? I will give you a little hint, though. It won’t help you, but if you tell your friends, one of them might figure it out. Here’s how I found Marla, despite the new god of Death’s best attempts to hide her: first, I found Marla’s brother.” She drained her coffee cup and stood up. “I’ll see you soon.”

  “I can’t say I’m looking forward to it.”

  Elsie left the diner, and a few moments later, Rondeau followed. She was already out of sight, but he could see the path she’d followed, because every slot machine she’d passed was flashing jackpot lights and dumping torrents of coins. A little farther along he passed a blackjack table where everyone stared, dumbfounded, at their hands: every one of them had 21, including the dealer, which counted a win for the house, at least. Then his phone began to ring, and he had to run around dealing with the consequences of Elsie’s presence, and outraged or elated customers: a roulette wheel where only red numbers had come up for the past half hour, a poker table where four players had all been dealt pat royal flushes, a craps table where nothing but snake eyes appeared no matter how many fresh dice were broken out, and more.

  Rondeau smoothed feathers and talked people down, using a few persuasion spells when reason failed, and normal odds and order soon reasserted themselves. He briefly worried that he’d take a financial hit from the trickster’s passage, but in the final analysis, the outrageous and impossible wins had been balanced by staggering losses, and the accountants had informed him, dumbfounded, that the day was a perfect push: the house had lost exactly as much as it had won.

  “Right on the edge,” he muttered, and went to call Bradley.

  •

  Bradley was with with Cole, Marzi, and Marzi’s boyfriend Jonathan on the grass in Dolores Park, on a hill up above the children’s playground. Cole like the view of the city and the bay, and the vibrancy of the young people drinking, smoking, sunbathing, dancing, and making out in the grass, so he often took lunch here. They all sprawled on a big red-and-black checked blanket, eating from the enchanted wicker picnic basket Cole called his “cornucopia,” which held a seemingly inexhaustible supply of fruits, meats, cheeses, and assorted beers and wines, all at the perfect temperature. Bradley didn’t know if the basket connected to a pantry somewhere, or if it contained its own pocket dimension, but Cole assured him the food was real, and not just conjured; food produced my magic might taste delicious and make your belly feel full, but it was no more nutritious than eating lumps of salt clay.

  Cole delicately smeared pate on toasted slices of baguette while Marzi and Jonathan snuggled and murmured together in low voices. Bradley was thinking of giving Marzi the night off for some R&R; he’d noticed she was much easier to teach if she’d gotten laid recently, but then, that was probably true of almost everyone.

  His phone rang, and the screen said “Rondeau.” He grunted. He hadn’t heard from his friend since he headed home to Vegas. Had he gotten word from Marla? “Hey, man, what’s the word?”

  Rondeau was never the most linear thinker, and his account rambled a bit, but eventually Bradley got it all straight. After about three seconds of silence, during which Bradley tried to synthesize some pretty surprising facts, Rondeau said, “Well? What was Elsie talking about? Do you think Marla’s brother Jason knows where she is?”

  “I can’t imagine why he would. They’re not exactly close, what with all the murdering and scamming he’s done, right?”

  “Sure, but they made peace, sort of, when we were all in Hawaii—or at least decided to call things even and stop trying to kill each other. She said she might send him a Christmas card sometime, and I think they talked when their mom died. I know Marla had Pelham send flowers to her funeral, anyway. It’s worth a try, talking to him.”

  “I’ll see if I can track him down,” Bradley said.

  Through the Mirror

  “He doesn’t have a phone?” Marzi asked.

  Bradley shook his head, then adjusted the angle of the full-length folding triple mirror minutely. “Nope. Jason’s off the grid, and changing locations every day or two, doing his best to be a ghost. According to Cole’s divinations, tonight he’s in a derelict farmhouse in western Pennsylvania. The place doesn’t even have running water, as far as we can tell, or electricity, or any other amenities beyond a roof and walls, and those probably have holes in them. I’d fly in to find him, but there’s no reason to think he’ll be there even a few hours from now, and I’d rather not chase him all over the countryside. The direct approach is best. Besides, I’ve been wanting to try this for months.” He glanced toward the corner, where Pelham sat, hands folded in his lap, expression alert. The small man was dressed impeccably as always, in a suit with a waistcoat, and not a strand of his thinning hair was out of place, but Bradley was perceptive, and he could see Pelham was wound as tightly as the innards of his own antique pocketwatch.

  “I thought Jason was some kind of smooth operator?” Marzi arranged small white candles on the carpet, referring often to a diagram Cole had drawn. “Shouldn’t he be living in a penthouse and scamming old ladies?”

  “If I had to guess, I’d say he’s probably hiding out from the consequences of a recent job.”

  “He is no gentleman,” Pelham murmured.

  “Right. You guys think maybe he’s hiding out with Marla?” Marzi took a box of wooden fireplace matches, struck one, and began to light the candles.

  “The thought has crossed my mind. Hard to imagine the two of them being all buddy-buddy, but I have it on good authority that families are weird.” Bradley stepped back, cocked his head, and nodded in satisfaction. The candles, arranged in a complex asymmetrical pattern, were all reflected in the central mirror, and the mirrors on either side were angled to double, triple, and quadruple those lights in their own reflections, creating the illusion of an infinite series of corridors. An illusion that could be turned into reality, if he did this right.

  “You sure you don’t want me to go?” Marzi said.

  Bradley shook his head. “I don’t even want Pelham to go. Travel by mirror is so risky that even people brave enough to teleport tend to avoid it. If you’re unlucky with teleporting, you get maimed or you die. If you’re unlucky with travel by mirror, you just wish you were dead. And sometimes, the person who comes out of the mirror isn’t the person who
went in. Cole says my natural ability to see through illusions should keep me relatively safe, but for anybody else, it’s very easy to get... lost. You don’t need to come, Pelham, really—I can handle it.”

  “If there is a chance that Mrs. Mason is on the other side of that glass, then I am going.” Pelham was the definition of unflappable, so Bradley shrugged.

  “Okay then. Marzi, kill the lights. Keep the candles burning while we’re gone, all right? And Pelly, stay close to me.”

  Pelham rose and joined him, putting a hand on his right shoulder. Bradley stared into the mirrors, letting his eyes blur, looking past his own reflection and into the lighted depths: a sky full of stars, a sea full of luminous fish. He didn’t let himself blink, and as his eyes watered, the view before him softened further. Bradley took one deliberate step forward, and then another, and then another, until he passed the point where he should have crashed into the glass.

  As a little kid, he’d seen a cartoon about a little boy who walked through a mirror into a world on the other side. It wasn’t an adaptation of Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There—it had definitely involved a little boy, and not a girl, though Bradley couldn’t remember much else about it, certainly not what the world beyond the mirror had been like. Despite occasional attempts at research on the internet, he’d never been able to track down the name of the show, either because it was too obscure, or because his unreliable memory muddled the details too badly. The program had made a big impression on him, though, or at least one moment had: the boy, reaching out, hands touching the glass, which rippled like water, and let him pass through. Bradley had spent a lot of hours trying to push through the mirror hanging on the back of his mom’s bedroom door, always frustrated, desperate to discover a magic that eluded him. The failure of that mirror to yield was his earliest, purest memory of disappointment.

  And now, he was through the looking glass. There was no magical world on the other side, though. Just a hall of mirrors, the walls reflecting him and Pelham, and countless candle flames, though the actual candles were no longer in evidence. He looked behind him, and felt a flutter of panic, because there were just more mirrors and corridors back there: no sign of the hotel room, or Marzi, or anywhere else. The candles seemed to brighten, and he narrowed his eyes, growing lightheaded.

  “Mr. Bowman.” Pelham squeezed his shoulder, hard. “I believe we should proceed forward, and to the left.”

  “What?” Bradley blinked, and some of his reflections blinked too, though others laughed silently, and others snarled, and one pounded on the glass with bloody fists like a prisoner trying to escape a transparent cage.

  “I will show you.” Pelham stepped around Bradley, taking his hand, and leading him seemingly at random. His reflections all behaved themselves, merely mimicking his calm progress, though Bradley’s reflections continued to twist, writhe, cavort, and bellow voicelessly. Some of them bent to blow out candles, or snuffed the flames between fingertips, plunging whole infinite sections of the hall of mirrors into darkness. Somewhere in the distance came the crash and tinkle of breaking glass and falling shards, but Pelham continued plodding along, choosing corridors and crossings with barely any hesitation, moving them along.

  Something touched the back of Bradley’s neck, and he spun around, only to come face-to-face with himself—but this version of him smiled, showing teeth that were shards of broken mirror. The mirror-fanged Bradley reached out and closed his hands around Bradley’s throat, smiling as he throttled him—but then Pelham was there, reaching past Bradley to punch the mirror-monster in the face. The blow might have broken a human’s nose, but the monster’s face shattered, and where the creature had been, there was only a scattering of silvered glass on the dusty black floor.

  Pelham grabbed Bradley’s hand and pulled him, dragging him through the hall of mirrors, until they reached an open window set halfway up the wall, revealing a derelict bathroom beyond. “Go!” Pelham whispered, pushing him toward the window, and despite his fuzzy head, Bradley obeyed, clambering through the waist-high square and falling onto a filthy tile floor beside a cracked toilet. He looked up at the mirrored medicine cabinet he’d passed through, the glass miraculously intact.

  A moment later Pelham leapt through the mirror, landing inelegantly beside the clawfoot bathtub. Bradley staggered to his feet and looked at the medicine cabinet. Three versions of himself stood behind the glass, snarling with mirrored teeth, but then they shimmered, and it was only his own reflection, wide-eyed and dazed-looking.

  Pelham rose, took a handkerchief from his pocket, and began binding up his left hand.

  “Are you all right?” Bradley said.

  “One of them slashed me across the palm,” Pelham said. “But it is a minor wound, of no consequence.”

  “I don’t know what happened in there.” Bradley sat on the edge of the tub, still feeling shaky, but more lucid now. “Cole told me it was a place of illusions, and he thought my ability to see clearly would protect me, but I guess he was wrong.”

  “I believe Mr. Cole underestimated the other element of your power,” Pelham said. “You act as a catalyst, to intensify magic, isn’t that right? In your presence, ghosts sometimes gain material substance, and you can summon oracles to manifest even when they possess only the most tenuous of links to our reality.”

  “Shit. So those creatures of reflection behind the mirror became more than light and shadow in my presence—they became more real.”

  “I believe they wished to take your reality for their own, yes.”

  “How did you manage to lead us, though?”

  Pelham shrugged. “I was there when you discussed your plan to travel by mirror with Mr. Cole.” Pelham had been working as Cole’s private secretary, and was apparently so adept at his job that Cole already couldn’t imagine running San Francisco’s magical underworld without him. “He said the key was to remain focused on one’s destination, because there are many mirrors in the world, many reflections, and it is easy to become lost. I am... very good at remaining focused.”

  “I owe you, Pelly.” He looked around. “So this is where Jason’s holed up, huh?”

  Jason Mason stepped into the doorway, a pistol pointed at them. “That’s right. And it’s where I’m going to dig a hole to bury you two. Or, wait, maybe I’ll get you to dig the hole. Less work for me then.”

  Bradley sighed and stared hard at Jason, who blinked and swore, swinging the gun to and fro, looking around the room wildly. Bradley put a finger to his lips, then stood up and stepped to one side, preparing to slip around Jason’s flank.

  Pelham was faster, though, darting forward and grabbing Jason’s gun hand, twisting, and taking the gun from him. Jason grunted and tried to run, but Bradley tripped him up, and Jason fell in a heap. “God damn it,” he said. “I hate magic. Turning invisible? You fuckers don’t play fair.”

  Bradley released his pressure on Jason’s mind. “We weren’t invisible. I just made it so you couldn’t see us.” Tricks like that were almost useless against sorcerers—even the greenest apprentice knew how to shield her mind from such psychic attacks—but for all his formidable qualities, Jason had no defenses against magic.

  Pelham stood over him, gun held loosely at his side. “Mr. Mason. We’re looking for your sister.”

  Jason sat up. “Yeah, I figured. Mind if I stand?”

  “I think you’re good on the floor.”

  Jason grunted and leaned against the wall. He was as handsome as ever, if a bit wolfish, and his usual cocksure smirk was already reasserting itself, but he’d clearly been living rough: his shirt was stained, his jacket rumpled, his hair sticking up, his jaw blued by stubble. “You know, I was just about ready to come out of hiding?”

  “Your sister, Mr. Mason. Where is she?”

  “I don’t know, Pelham. You don’t still hold a grudge about that time I held you hostage, do you? I ask, because it seems like our roles are reversed now, and I’ll remind you, I was pretty good to y
ou.”

  “You did not treat me unkindly,” Pelham said. “I will give you the same courtesy, if you answer my questions. If not...”

  “Who knew tiny butlers could sound so threatening?” Jason said. “Look, it’s just like I told Elsie Jarrow when she came calling—I don’t have any idea where Marla is. I haven’t seen her since she came to visit mom in hospice, right before she died, and that was months ago. I thought you guys killed Elsie, Pelham. I nearly shit myself when she showed up on my doorstep. I was afraid she was going to drag me on another murder road trip or something, and I’ve been hiding ever since, afraid she’d find me again.”

  “You can’t hide from people like us,” Bradley said. “You just don’t have the resources.”

  “Yeah, well, it makes me feel better to try, all right? Now that you’ve found me, and been disappointed by my total lack of information, how about you get lost?”

  “Look, Jason, Elsie visited us, too. She said if we wanted to find Marla, we should find you first. Now you’re saying you haven’t seen her? You don’t know anything about her location? What did you tell Elsie?”

  Jason rolled his eyes. “I told her nothing, all right? Look: Elsie shows up a couple few months back. She tells me she wants to find Marla, I figure because she wants to finish the job she started in Hawaii, to kill her. I didn’t have any information, and believe me, I would have spilled if I did—being Elsie’s traveling companion once was enough. Me and Marla mended fences a little bit, but I’m not gonna die to protect her. Elsie says, what was it—she says, ‘It’s okay, blood always tells.’ Then she takes out this silver knife, like a scalpel, and I thought I was dead, but she just told me to hold out my hand. Said she could pluck a hair from my head or a breath from my mouth, but that blood was more traditional. She cuts my palm, and catches the blood in a little bowl, and then she just walks off. I packed up my stuff and started hiding after that.”

  “Hiding after Jarrow finds you is kind of a barn-door-post-horse-theft idea, Jason.”