by T. A. Pratt
This is for Juliet, who started it.
Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds.
—William Shakespeare
Book One: The Wedding
Let No One Put Asunder
Marla Mason, god of Death, stood in the courtyard outside her palace of ice and metal flowers. A sea of primordial chaos, silvery and churning, lapped at the gritty gray shore a hundred yards distant. The sky above was actually the ceiling of an immense cavern, but nonetheless, there were stars there, or at least falling stars, streaks of color flickering past overhead: the souls of the dead, returning to the sea that birthed them to begin their afterlives, accompanied by psychopomps and valkyries and angels.
An audience sat arrayed on either side of a long petal-strewn aisle leading down to that sea. Marla wore a shimmering crown on her brow, and a fairly ridiculous dress; her friend and assistant Pelham had been so excited about the event, she’d let him choose her wardrobe. As a mortal, she never would have tolerated the corsetry, but since breathing was optional for gods, she didn’t mind. She looked over the audience and saw many familiar faces, both living and dead. Her old friend Rondeau was there, and the shades of Jenny Click, and Marla’s first love Danny, and her teacher Arturo, and colleague Ernesto... so many of the dead on day passes from their individual afterlives to share this moment with her. The afterlife was meant to be ruled by two regents, one wholly divine and one mortal. For too long, Marla had reigned alone as a god with no mortal consort, and her realm had suffered for it, as had the world above. Today, that would finally be corrected.
It would also be nice to get laid again.
The officiant standing next to Marla was the shade of her mentor Lao Tsung, who’d taught Marla her earliest lessons in how to turn the living into the dead. He wore a white silk shirt buttoned up to the neck, and his face was kindly and amused. “That’s quite a dress.”
“Shut up.”
“Never. Are you ready?”
“As ready as I’ll ever be.”
Lao Tsung nodded to the musicians—Rondeau had wanted the band that played the sinking of the Titanic, but Pelham had pointed out that that wasn’t quite the right tone to strike for an event like this, and had recruited distinguished but not legendary musicians from the vast talent pool of the afterlife. The players struck up Wagner’s “Bridal Chorus,” a choice so classic it made Marla want to roll her eyes, but Pelham was nothing if not a traditionalist. It didn’t really matter what music was played, after all: what mattered was who came walking down the aisle to join her. Of all the possible consorts Marla had considered, after everything she’d gone through, after all the death and destruction and mayhem leading up to this moment, it was still astonishing to her that she’d ended up with—
The crowd let out a collective ahhhh as they turned, and watched Marla’s soon-to-be spouse emerge from the silvery not-water of the primordial sea.
It took a lot of blood and pain and tragedy to get here, Marla thought, but here we are at last.
Book Two: But First
Sacred Rites and Dating Sites
“Do you do much dating, Cole?” Rondeau asked.
The chief sorcerer of San Francisco, a small and dapper man with white hair and whiskers, cocked his head to one side. “My interest in such things has ebbed in this latest century of my life, to be honest. I find the prospect of falling asleep more exciting than the prospect of doing anything else in bed. I miss my late wives very much, sometimes, but memories are enough for me now.”
“I could do without even the memories. Memories sting.” Marla sat slumped in a leather chair on the far side of the desk. Cole’s office was in the back of Singer’s Books, an antiquarian bookshop, in a little bubble of pinched-off reality shaped like a room barely ten feet square. The walls around them were the back sides of bookshelves, showing the fore edges—the opposite side from the spines—of hundreds of books. The space was dominated by Cole’s ancient desk of dark, strangely grained wood (supposedly made from a salvaged relic that had once belonged to that esoteric society of magical mercenaries and occult actuaries known as the Table), with hovering hurricane lamps at intervals in the air above them casting a warm and even light. The office was cozy and pleasant and as much a reflection of Cole himself as his tweeds and twinkling eyes.
Marla’s own office, down in the underworld, was usually decorated in a skull and ice and curving blade motif, which maybe said things about her she didn’t want to think about.
“I never had the chance to say how sorry I was for the loss of your husband,” Cole said. “Allow me now to extend my condolences. Speaking as one widowed person to another, I can tell you that the pain does not stop, precisely... but it becomes less acute.”
Marla nodded. “I’d like to spend a year or so grieving, but...” She shrugged. “I’m the god of Death. I have responsibilities. One of those responsibilities is finding a mortal consort. So... here I am.”
“The Sanford Cole Supernatural Dating Agency.” Rondeau grinned. “’Yentl to the gods.’ It’s got a nice ring to it, don’t you think?”
“I have never fancied myself much of a matchmaker,” Cole said. “But in this particular case, I am happy to assist. I have a few questions to help me guide the spells, if I may?”
Marla nodded.
Cole consulted a sheet of paper before him. “Do your prospective mates need to be magical initiates?”
Marla shook her head. “Explaining things would be easier if they knew about magic and gods and stuff, I guess, but we can always initiate the uninitiated.”
“In terms of personality type, you mentioned there might be a need for... a certain balance, or a degree of complementary compatibility?”
“I’m not going to say opposites attract, but the whole dualistic co-deity thing breaks down like this.” Marla interlocked her fingers and held them up. “On one side you’ve got blight, cancer, sinkholes full of fire, alligators in the bathtub—the black tongue, the belt of skulls, the sword, and the flail.” She wiggled half the fingers. “On the other side, you’ve got the first green shoots of spring, the melting snow, the newborn... foals or whatever, the crown of flowers, the sheaf of wheat for a scepter, that deal.” She wiggled the other fingers. “It’s a wheel that turns, a cycle of life and death and rebirth. We do the seasons. We do the tides, whatever those moon gods might claim. We do death and we do birth. Right now I’m doing both, I’m the axle for all the wheels, and the axle grease, too, and it’s wearing on me, wearing me down, and eventually I’m going to break. Then stuff gets weird. People stop dying. Snow falls upward. Puppies age in reverse.”
“Cats chase—” Rondeau began, but Marla shushed him.
“Cole hasn’t seen Ghostbusters, Rondeau. Not the original or the remake. But, I think he gets the gist. If I crumble, the sky falls, the graves yawn open, everything goes to hell... or, more accurately, hell goes to everything else. I can’t do this alone. I need someone to lighten my load.”
“Oh, so Hamilton references are okay?” Rondeau wiggled a finger in his ear. “Wait. Were you alive during the Revolutionary War, Cole?”
“Several of them.” Cole rarely glared, but when he did, it was all the more powerful for its rarity, and Rondeau shrank back and made an apologetic noise. The old man smiled beatifically at Marla. “Do go on, dear.”
“I am, in terms of experience and temperament, better suited to the death and destruction side of the equation. I can be the merciless bringer of winter. It’s the other stuff I’m... well, I won’t say I’m not good at it, because I’m good at anything I need to be good at, but... it doesn’t come naturally to me, and it doesn’t interest me much either.�
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“She needs a hippie.” Rondeau’s sheepishness had lasted for all of ten seconds, which Marla thought was probably a record. “A real patchouli-smelling Earth papa with shoes made of granola and underpants made of hemp. We should probably just stroll through the Haight while we’re in town.”
Marla sighed. “Ignore him. But if we’re looking at people who know about the supernatural, someone with a connection to nature magic would be good. Failing that... someone nurturing. Someone who believes in hope and the coming of spring and... renewable energy and stuff.”
“We’re looking for Mr. Pollyanna Pangloss, Esquire,” Rondeau said.
“Except they have to be not so annoying that I want to kill them. I have to work with this person for... well... I don’t know how long. Gods do weaken and flicker and die eventually, but it’s a geologic timescale sort of thing. We’re looking at centuries, maybe millennia, barring the unforeseen. So I need someone good, but not goody-goody.”
Cole nodded. “That’s quite helpful, actually. I believe I can establish some fruitful parameters for the spell.” He cleared his throat. “This next question is... somewhat delicate.”
Marla had been prepared for this, and she tried not to smirk as Cole’s cheeks grew red beneath his white whiskers. It wasn’t his fault: he’d gone into hibernation in the 1800s, when a flash of bare ankle was shocking, and a few years in the modern world wasn’t enough to undo all that conditioning. She wondered if anyone had told him about internet porn yet. “You know me: I’m a delicate person. Ask away.”
“How important is the matter of... interest in... physical... intimacy... that is to say, how large a factor is attraction?”
Marla nodded. “Strictly speaking, my co-regent and I don’t need to take the fast train to bone town at all.”
“’Bone Town’ would be a pretty great nickname for your palace in the underworld though,” Rondeau said.
They both ignored him.
“Ah, good,” Cole said. “That makes things simpler. I understand that in some mythic circumstances, consummation is a necessary part of the magic, and was unsure.”
She shook her head. “The ceremony—call it a wedding—in the underworld binds us together more firmly than a night of sweaty exertions ever could. I mean, look at the new god of Death I just defeated—I certainly wasn’t going to have sex with old skullface, even if he hadn’t had a skull for a face. That part doesn’t matter: spring still comes, and the seasons still turn.” She hesitated, then decided total honestly was best. For Cole to do his work most effectively, he needed all the information she could offer. “That said, there’s a definite magical benefit to at least occasional ritual sex. My late husband Death and I... enjoyed one another’s company... under any circumstances, but when we had sex on the cusp of spring, in either hemisphere, it ensured a more bountiful and lush growing season. Getting me a sexy consort would be a plus, but for me physical attraction tends to follow other kinds of attraction anyway—if I like someone a lot, I want to sleep with them more—so as long as we’re not talking about someone like Squat who’s literally supernaturally repulsive, it should work itself out. Anyway, we’re gods, so we’ve got some flexibility in how we choose to appear to one another. I imagine most physical preferences can be accommodated.”
“Does this ritual, ah, well.” Cole got even redder. “Are we limited to the biologically male for your prospective consorts? Because of the... necessary symbolism... of making the crops grow and so on?”
Marla snorted. “Nah. Boy-on-girl is more traditional, but it doesn’t have to be procreative sex between us anyway. It’s enough to ritually gesture in the direction of procreative sex. We’re talking about a fertility rite, not actual fertility. This one time with Death I bent him over and—” She paused. “Never mind. You don’t need details, and I don’t want Rondeau picturing that in his porno theater of a mind.”
“That ship has sailed,” Rondeau said. “That ship is at sea. That ship has crossed the international date line. That ship is damn near in the next port already.”
Cole scribbled a note with his fountain pen. “So we’ll open the divination up to men and women....”
Marla nodded. “Male, female, or intersex, plus any and all gender expressions or lack thereof, and any sexual orientation—see above regarding plasticity of appearance. I guess straight-up asexual would be tricky, but even that can be worked around. Like I said, the sex parts are pleasant and useful but ultimately optional. The more important thing, to me, is that it be someone I can stand to live with for potentially millennia, and vice versa, and who won’t misuse the power they’re going to gain.”
“It would have been a bit easier if I could have excluded half the population or so,” Cole said, “but never let it be said that I shrank from a challenge.”
Marla made a psht noise. “You can still rule lots of people out. Children. Child abusers. Teens. Hell, anyone under twenty-five or so, because, come on. If you can’t legally rent a car on your own, you can’t help run the underworld. Psychopaths. Mansplainers. Manspreaders. Gamergaters. People who order their steak well done. Anyone who calls Asian people ‘Orientals.’ People who think Ayn Rand had a lot of good ideas. Fascists. Men who wear fedoras. Men who say ‘it’s actually a trilby.’ Women who carry dogs in purses. People who unironically use the term ‘friendzone.’ Bullies. Truthers. Contrail enthusiasts. Westboro Baptists. People who confuse fondness for a particular commercial product with a personal identity. Anyone who doesn’t read. People who call pets ‘furbabies.’ Anyone who believes in the law of attraction. Men who say ‘m’lady.’ Women who criticize other women for not breastfeeding their kids long enough, and anyone who thinks women shouldn’t breastfeed in public at all. Subway gropers. People who cut in line. Linguistic prescriptivists. People who touch black women’s hair without asking, or pregnant women’s bellies.” She paused. “I could go on. I am largely composed of hates.”
Cole chuckled. “That does go some distance toward narrowing it down, yes. I may have more questions for you, narrowings and refinements, but I can begin putting together a spell. How will I reach you when I have a candidate?”
Marla reached into the folds of her black cloak and removed a silver bell, setting it on Cole’s desk. “Just ring that. I’ll hear.”
“He gets a bell?” Rondeau said. “Why does he get a bell, and I don’t?”
“The real question is, why don’t you get a bell anymore, and the answer is, because you rang it at three in the morning, drunk, to ask me if I wanted to get Chinese food.”
“That was good Chinese food.” Rondeau’s eyes went all faraway and happy. “I can’t handle the spicy so well anymore, because of my delicate constitution, but that crab rangoon was a revelation.”
Cole screwed what looked like a jeweler’s loupe into his eye and peered at the bell.
Marla elbowed Rondeau. “Anyway, I gave you an email address, you can reach me that way.”
“You didn’t check your email before you were a god.”
“Pelham checks it for me, and if there’s anything important, he lets me know.”
Rondeau nodded. “Hey. Tell Pelly I miss him, yeah? I... I just... yeah. I really miss him.”
Marla nodded. Pelham had once been her valet, and later her friend, and he’d died trying to help her reclaim her underworld after the insane skull-headed death god rose up to replace her murdered husband, the previous god of Death. Pelham had chosen to continue serving her in the afterlife, and his pride was unassailable now that he was private secretary to the god of Death herself. Pelham missed his friends in the world above as much as they missed him, though. From her vantage point of uncomfortable divinity, Marla had the cold comfort of knowing that Pelham wouldn’t be lonesome for long, really: all his friends would die, as everyone did, eventually, and he could see them then.
“It seems mundane, but when you look deeper—this bell is an artifact.” Cole removed the lens and shivered. “It’s magic, but it’s also a lit
tle bit alive. Wars have been fought among sorcerers for lesser items.”
“The gods have the good shit,” Marla said. “That bell was shaped by my hands from primordial chaos, and infused with the essence of a disobedient psychopomp. The naughty demon is doing penance by taking a break from shepherding dying souls to the afterlife in exchange for carrying messages for me. Believe me, it’s happy in the role. The alternative was being dissolved back into the soup of undifferentiated chaos where it came from.”
“Ah, of course, a psychopomp. A link between the living world and the dead....” Cole prodded the bell. “Is it dangerous?”
“I wouldn’t shoot a magical fireball at it or anything, but you can ring it without worry.”
Cole picked the bell up carefully and put it in a desk drawer. “I hope to have news for you soon, but a spell like this, searching the entire Earth for suitable candidates, it’s rather involved.”
Marla nodded. “I’ve got time. I’m not going to split in two or turn into a pillar of snakes in the next week. But it would be good to have a wedding before the next solstice, or winter is going to be hard. We’ve got a couple of months.”
“While we’re waiting for Cole to do his fancy man stuff, I made profiles for you on just about every dating site I could think of,” Rondeau said.
Marla raised an eyebrow. “What?”
Rondeau shrugged. “Those algorithms are sophisticated as hell. I’m on this one site, Kynk with a ‘y,’ right, and it is a taxonomic dreamland, I mean their fetishes have sub-fetishes, and it gets downright granular. That shit is fractal. I knew you’d never fill out any profiles on your own, so I took the personality tests and answered the questions like as if I were you, which isn’t too hard because I know you better than you know yourself, and—” His phone emitted a sound like a cracking whip. “Hold up, that’s a notification for one of the sites now.” He pulled out his phone, swiped once or twice with his finger, and said, “Here’s a nice looking guy, thirty-nine years old, he’s a 98 percent match, looks like he does, uh, patent law, and... oh. He wants to know if you’ll be his harsh mistress.”