by T. A. Pratt
“You’re not wrong. But Lauren just feels right.”
Cole bowed his head. “I defer, of course, to your judgment. It’s been a great pleasure to work with you, Marla.”
“Don’t be like that. Pelham is dead set on throwing me a wedding, and I think Lauren is into that, too. I’ll have you down—I’ll have everybody down—for the ceremony. It’ll be our last big party farewell hurrah. We’ll save our tearful goodbyes for that, okay? Not that I’ll cry, but you should feel free.”
“Of course,” Cole said. “I would be honored to attend.”
“I was actually, ah... I was sort of hoping you’d be part of the ceremony. I wanted to know if you’d walk me down the aisle.”
Cole opened his mouth, closed it, and then shook his head. “I... Marla, I don’t know what to say.”
“You’ve been more like a father to me than any other man in my life, Cole.”
“In that case, I say yes, and you should go now, before you do see an old man cry.”
She kissed his cheek, said “Heel, puppies,” and stepped through the shadows with her hellhounds at her back.
The Inimical
Jarrell lived in a rustic shack in the woods, naturally. Marla knocked on the door, which shuddered in the frame. The wind must blow through this thing like water through a sieve. Presumably he kept warm in there with magic. She’d reduced the size of her hounds to more ordinary proportions, but couldn’t quite bring herself to dispel them back into primordial chaos, as she had with the other sand-eating demons. Maybe Lauren thought dogs were cute....
The door opened, and Jarrell greeted her solemnly. “Marla. Please. Come in. Feel free to bring your dogs.” He yipped at them, then frowned. “That’s strange. I usually have an affinity with animals, especially canines.”
“Oh, they’re not real dogs. They’re demons. Not in, you know, a scary way. That’s just what we call the constructs I create out of primordial chaos. They’re handy.” She came inside and sat on a wooden bench made of a board resting on a couple of logs. Rustic as hell in here.
Jarrell sat in a straight-backed wooden chair, frowning at the dogs. “If I become your consort, will I have the power to conjure such things?”
“Yeah, you would, but—”
“Because I’ve been considering your offer.”
“We hadn’t quite gotten to the point of it being an offer. It was more something I wanted you to think about—”
“I have. Very deeply. I believe joining you in the underworld would be the best way for me to continue my stewardship over the natural world. I would be humbled by the opportunity to serve at your side.”
“Ah. Right.” She coughed. “This is kind of awkward, but... I asked someone else. You were absolutely my next choice, but I just clicked with this other person better—”
Jarrell stood up. “No. That’s... I’m clearly the right choice, Marla. I need to go to the underworld. It’s where I should be. I belong there.”
“I mean... give it time. You’ll die eventually, and I’ll make a special point of saying hello when you arrive—”
“You could at least break up with me in your true form, instead of this... puppet.” He gestured contemptuously. “This is like dumping someone via text message.”
Well, him being a dick was making this easier. “We weren’t dating, Jarrell. I was considering you for a job, and it didn’t work out, that’s all. Take it easy.”
He went from contempt to pleading in an instant. “Can you... just take me to the underworld once more? I didn’t get to appreciate it properly last time, I was too distracted. It would mean a lot to me, and I think it could have a powerful influence on my work. Surely you owe me that much for, for stringing me along, for getting my hopes up—”
“Jarrell, what is wrong with you? You’re not acting like yourself—” She stopped and stared at him. All that black sand in the forest. The wolves had been full of it, and the trees. If she’d missed any of the sand, if Jarrell had come into contact with it, all it took was one speck... If she were in her true form, she’d be able to sense whether his soul still resided in his body, but in this form, it was trickier. She should have kept one of Cole’s detectors. She stepped closer and looked into his eyes. “Why are you so eager to see the underworld again, Jarrell? You didn’t seem to like it much last time. It was too dead, you said.”
“Dead is okay.” Jarrell smiled at her, then opened his mouth and vomited a torrent of black sand directly into her face.
In the instant before she switched off this body’s pain receptors, the agony of having her eyes and nose and lips and teeth and tongue transformed into black sand was mind-obliterating. She tried to fight back, sending the chaos her body was made of against the sand, attempting to reconstruct herself, and when she got one eye back, she saw Jarrell was spraying sand everywhere, black motes climbing up the walls like swarms of ants and turning the shack into more of itself.
Her dogs responded to her mental command and flung themselves at Jarrell and the walls respectively. Bummer’s body melted, flowed, and overtook the sand converting the shack. Jarrell howled and tried to run away, but Lazarus jumped on his back and drove him to the ground, then turned liquid and oozed into Jarrell’s nose and mouth to fight the sand inside him. Jarrell’s body slumped and shifted as the sand converted his flesh to itself and her hellhounds converted the sand to chaos.
Marla transformed her own body into the sentient slurry of pure chaos, and encircled the shack, ringing around the sand, trapping and transforming it into dirt and snow and wood.
Between Marla and the hellhounds, none of the sand escaped.
But if Jarrell had been infected—if Cole’s detectors had missed him—then who else might be in danger?
“Cole!” Marla shouted, stepping out of the shadows into his office. The old man sat behind the desk, hands laced over his belly.
“Marla,” he said mildly. “You seem agitated.”
“I went to see Jarrell. He was infected with black sand.”
“You don’t say.” Cole didn’t seem too bothered by the revelation.
“I thought we got it all, Cole, that your detectors had swept the whole planet and didn’t find anything.”
“Yes, it seems I did shoddy work. I’m afraid in reality the detectors didn’t actually beep when they were close to black sand. They just beeped when they wanted to.”
“What the hell are you talking about, Cole?”
He sighed. “Imagine if you’d taken Jarrell to the underworld like you planned—like you told me you were going to. He could have discreetly dropped little grains of himself everywhere, and when you weren’t paying attention, they could have swarmed all over your world, and transformed your infinite wellspring of primordial chaos into a fount of black sand. And, of course, consumed you, the way the sand consumed your sword.” He sighed. “But you chose someone else instead. Too bad. It was a good plan. Now we’ll have to do it less elegantly.”
Marla looked at him, one of her most trusted, dearest friends, and whispered, “We?”
Cole nodded. “Your friend was making the detectors, like you asked, and that required working with the sand. But, oh, the sand is clever, and all it takes is one small mistake. Cole was tired, and old, and under pressure, and so... he accidentally touched a speck. Just one. It burrowed under his fingernail, crawled through his veins, made its way to his brain, and then.... Well. You know how these things go. Sanford Cole isn’t in here anymore, Marla. I consumed his mind and memories and mannerisms, and I speak in his voice, but I am... something else. You may call me the Inimical.”
“I will erase every speck of you from existence, you fucking upjumped dirt—”
“The Inimical is everywhere, Marla. We let you think you’d defeated us, that you’d captured all our human hosts, but we have spread far and wide. Those first hosts scattered sand wherever they went. We took over more humans. We clung to shoes, to tires, to airplanes, to boats. We traveled, and we left caches of ourse
lves all over this planet. By all means, yes, gather your little friends, run to and fro, try to track us down, but as long as a single grain remains, the Inimical will live again. You’ll never know all the places where we lurk, Marla. And I know you can’t fight us forever. Cole knew about your problems, you see.” He tapped the side of his head. “You have to go back to the underworld soon. You have to tend to your duties. We are a distraction, and eventually, you’ll have to move on. We can be patient. We can wait for years, decades if need be, and when you’ve forgotten us entirely, we’ll come boiling up out of our hiding places.”
“I don’t forget, and I’ll fight you wherever you appear.”
“I’m sure you will! And then we’ll hide, and return, and hide, and return. Every time, we will kill more of your people. We will take new hosts, and spread ourselves to new places. There are parts of the deep desert where no sentient creatures dwell. We grew in the sea for months before anyone noticed. There are lightless caves. We can turn all the aquifers to sand and make your people die of thirst. We can riddle this planet’s interior like a cancer, tumors of black sand growing unseen and unnoticed—wouldn’t that be something? Caverns full of teeming sand, waiting to burst up from the ground in a single, coordinated attack. We’ll kill everything that lives on this rock. We’ll make this ball of mud into an extension of ourself, and when there is no more life, god of Death, what will happen to you? Cole thought you would cease to exist.” He leaned forward. “That would be almost a shame, because you hurt us, and that makes us want you to suffer. Perhaps we’ll keep a few creatures alive, some fish or snails or bugs, so you don’t cease to exist until we want you to.”
“I’ve fought worse things than you,” Marla said, because bravado was free.
“No,” the Inimical said “You really haven’t.” He flung out his hand, throwing grains of sand into Marla’s face, and for the second time in too short a while her eyeballs were eaten by sand.
She threw herself, blind, at Cole, and then turned herself into chaos, filling his ears and nose and mouth, and destroying the sand that filled him.
Marla told herself she wasn’t killing her old friend. She was sparing his body the indignity of being used by a monster.
Cole had always had so much dignity.
Once she’d destroyed the sand in his office, she sat in Cole’s chair, staring into empty space, trying not to think of his body on the floor behind her, empty as a broken pot. How did you fight an enemy that could be anywhere? Even if they summoned another oracle and tracked down the location of all the sand, the Inimical could replicate itself, spread itself further, seed backups anywhere. Gods, the sand could be anywhere, it could be anyone—
She bolted upright. Fuck. Lauren. She’d told Cole she was going to choose Jarrell as her consort, and Jarrell had been infected by the black sand. Then she told Cole that she’d chosen Lauren instead—
Even if the Inimical gave up its plan to try to infect the underworld, it would want to keep Marla off balance and keep her distracted, and what better way to do that than to attack her fiancée?
Marla swirled up a body in Lauren’s bedroom, but she wasn’t there. Marla tore through the house, yanking open doors and shouting down hallways until she found Lauren, startled, in the living room. “Marla! What are you doing here?”
Marla looked at her closely, but the whole point was that those infected by black sand could pass for human. She’d grab Lauren, take her to a secure location in the underworld, and examine her there—in her divine form Marla would be able to tell at a glance if the woman’s soul was intact. “Lauren, come on, you have to get out of here, you’re in danger.” She grabbed Lauren’s arm.
Lauren took a step backward in obvious fear. “What are you talking about? You’re scaring me.”
The front door swung open, and an older couple came in, the woman like a taller, thinner version of Lauren, the man gray-haired and dignified. “Why, hello,” the woman said, clearly surprised, but sounding prepared to be pleasantly surprised. “And who are you?”
Lauren looked at Marla, and then at her parents, and then at the ceiling. She mouthed what looked like a prayer before smiling at her mother. “This is my friend, Marla. She’s just visiting.”
“Lauren, we really need to go.”
“You were going to have to meet my parents eventually,” Lauren said. “No time like the present. Mother, Father, I have something to tell you—”
Her father took a step forward and sucked in a deep breath.
“No!” Marla screamed, and flung herself between Lauren and her father. The spray of black sand that flew from the man’s mouth struck Marla in the chest and began consuming her clothing and her flesh—and trying to crawl toward Lauren, who’d backed away in abject horror. Marla gestured, and a shadow sprang up from the ground and enveloped Lauren, pulling her to safety.
She turned back to her fiancée’s parents. The father was clearly lost, but the mother was screaming as her husband melted into a heap of deadly sand, and motes were swarming along the walls and floor toward her. It was a good bet she wasn’t infected yet, then. Marla’s own body was half-consumed, so she couldn’t rush forward to save Lauren’s mother, her mother-in-law to be, without spreading the infection herself.
Marla had no choice. Extraordinary circumstances.
She stepped out of a shadow, in her true form, her terrible sword at the ready. Marla extended her hand and made the sand burn, fusing it to glass, and walked across the blackly shimmering surface toward Lauren’s mother. The woman held one of her hands out in front of her face, eyes wide in uncomprehending terror. Her fingers were gone, and part of her thumb, and half her palm, already transformed into sand.
“I’m sorry for this.” Marla swung her sword, cleanly severing the woman’s hand at the wrist. As the hand fell, the last of its flesh being converted to sand as it descended, Marla gestured and fused it into a solid lump of black glass.
Mrs. Dehart’s eyes rolled back in her head and she fell to the ground. Marla sat beside her, gripping her spurting wrist tightly. Marla was no doctor, but she was Death, and she would not let Mrs. Dehart die. She coaxed a measure of chaos into actuality, sending it to flow over the woman’s wrist, shutting off the flow of blood, and instructed the chaos to grow into a new hand.
There was nothing she could do about Mr. Dehart, though. He was as utterly lost as all the Inimical’s victims. Not even his soul remained.
And now Marla had to go tell his daughter that.
Sympathies
Lauren sat huddled in the corner of Marla’s wood-paneled office, her eyes red and swollen with tears. “But if he’s dead, that means he’s here. He was a Christian, a good man, he believed in heaven, and that means he found heaven, doesn’t it? Let me hold him in my hand, let me look into his world, let me see him!”
Marla sat beside Lauren, close, but not touching. “It’s not... I’m sorry. The... thing... that killed him, it didn’t just kill his body, it... destroyed his soul, too. He didn’t suffer, Lauren, you should know that. He just ceased to be, and—”
“Stop.” Lauren pressed her palms against her ears. “No, no, no. My mother. You said my mother is okay?”
“She’s in shock, but uninjured.” No need to mention that Marla had grown her a new hand. “I carried her through a shadow to a hospital and dropped her off. They’ll take care of her.” Assuming the touch of a god hadn’t done any other damage. It was always possible the random effects of Marla’s touch had done the woman good, instead... but that wasn’t the kind of day Marla seemed to be having.
“I need to be with her. She’ll be so scared!”
“It’s not safe for you up there, Lauren.”
Lauren shook her head. “If it’s not safe for me, it’s not safe for her!”
“The sand—it wasn’t after your parents, not really. It was after you.”
Lauren looked at her with an expression of flat hate, so ferocious Marla flinched away. “No, the sand was after you. It
wanted to use me to hurt you, because you dragged me into this fucking nightmare! You promised me magic, but this is horror. What kind of a god are you supposed to be? You couldn’t even save my father when he was right in front of you. This is your fault!”
“You’re right,” Marla said. “I thought the danger was past. I never would have knowingly put you, or your loved ones, in harm’s way. It was a terrible mistake, and—”
“Fuck off. Leave. If you want to keep me here as a prisoner, I can’t stop you, but I don’t have to look at you.”
“Lauren—”
The woman turned away and pressed her face into the wall. Marla stood up. “I’m going to stop the sand. Avenge your father.”
Lauren said nothing.
“If you need anything, Pelham will help you. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
“I’m sorry I ever met you,” Lauren said.
There was no answer for that. Marla would have felt the same way. She left the office, allowing herself a moment to stand in the hallway with her head bowed, and tears running down her cheeks.
Then she went to war.
“Wake up,” Marla said.
Bradley moaned. He was finally catching up on his sleep, buried in a heap of blankets with a pillow over his head, but when he sat up, he wasn’t in his bedroom anymore. Marla had transported his bed, with him in it, to her throne room. “Uh. What’s up?”
“We’re fucked is what’s up. Cole is dead. The sand got him.”
Bradley swung his legs over the edge of the bed. “No. That’s... no way, Marla. The guy’s like hundreds of years old, he’s gone toe-to-toe with gods, he’s saved the world, he—”
“He’s a pile of sand now, Bradley, or he would be, if I hadn’t swept it all up. The black sand tricked us. Cole got infected while trying to build the detectors. Those things never really worked, either—they were just supposed to trick us into thinking we’d won.”
Bradley tried to make his brain accept all this information, and his brain wasn’t having it. “So, wait, there’s still sand? Like... everywhere?”