Little Better than a Beast (Marla Mason)

by Pratt, T. A.

  Malkin leaned forward, squinting. “Is this woman... a Spaniard?”

  “I’m black, dear,” she said. “Of West African descent, though my people are from Felport for many generations.”

  “This future is a peculiar place,” Malkin said, but he climbed into the limousine after Rondeau, settling himself down on the dark leather seats across from the Chamberlain and Marla. Despite his ragged appearance – and the fact that this was his first time in a car – he looked at ease. “Your carriage is... most pleasant.”

  “I understand you brought a monster to my community,” the Chamberlain said, smiling a smile that was not friendly at all.

  Malkin frowned. “I expected sorcerous techniques to improve in the intervening centuries, so the current rulers could defeat the beast with ease.”

  “Ah, I get it. Like people who die of brain cancer and have their heads frozen so they can be thawed out in the future when there’s a cure for tumors and decapitation,” Rondeau said, apparently trying to be helpful.

  Malkin just looked at him blankly and continued. “Instead I find unprepared women playing at sorcery, who let the beast escape.”

  “You might want to watch it with the sexist shit,” Marla said. “You’re kind of outnumbered here.”

  “Women can excel at erotic magic, and herbwifery, and certain nature magics, but the more intellectual rigors of advanced sorceries are not suitable for the weaker sex.” Malkin shrugged. “I mean no offense. These are merely facts.”

  “Are you sure we can’t send him back in time?” the Chamberlain said.

  “I don’t even know what he’s doing forward in time,” Marla said. “Your letter said you were setting a time-trap for the beast. Why the hell did you hitch a ride?”

  “The beast seized me,” Malkin said, shifting uncomfortably. “We struggled. The beast stepped into the circle of power. We were transported. I... did not intend to join him. I am surprised Felport survived with Corbin as chief sorcerer.”

  “Well, now you’re here, and so’s the beast, so tell us what we’re dealing with,” Marla said.

  “Obviously you don’t know how to stop it, but you can tell us what we’re dealing with,” the Chamberlain agreed.

  Malkin nodded. “The natives said the beast was a dark god, and had roamed the land since the beginning of time. The beast cannot be harmed by iron, or fire, or blades, or charms. Even my dagger of office, which can cut through all things, only scratched the beast, and the wound closed instantly.”

  Marla touched the dagger at her waist – it had been Malkin’s dagger, passed down from chief sorcerer to chief sorcerer over the centuries, and it was one of her most potent weapons, capable of slicing through everything from steel cables to ghosts.

  “Some magics worked,” Malkin said. “A spell to make it sleep for a thousand years succeeded in making it slumber for half a dozen seasons. Spells of disorientation made it wander, lost, for another year. But it fights, and once it overcomes a particular spell, the spell loses all efficacy. I do not know if it is a demon, a sorcerer from long ago who attained immortality, or, indeed, an ancient god.”

  “Okay, but what does it want?” Marla said.

  “Want? It is a beast. It wants to kill all who encroach on its territory. It wants to rend flesh. It prefers to sleep in the day, and emerge at night, wandering and howling. Its motives are no more comprehensible than those of any other beasts. I am sure it is disoriented by the changes here, and it will go to ground somewhere, hiding, and wait until dark to emerge. And then...” He shook his head. “The beast will not stop until the city is scoured to dirt. It is clever. It will set fires, build traps. Your people will die.”

  Setting arson and building booby traps didn’t sound very beast-like to Marla, but then, Malkin was from another time – he considered Marla and the Chamberlain and even Rondeau, who was Hispanic, basically beasts, too, didn’t he?

  “Call together a council,” Malkin said. “I will announce my return to the position of chief sorcerer, and formulate a strategy.”

  The Chamberlain looked at Marla, raising an eyebrow, and Marla sighed. “I’m not stepping down, Captain Retro. I’m still in charge here. We honor your past service and all that jazz, but you can’t just come back and –”

  “Silence, woman. Give me my dagger of office, and let me begin my work. Sorcery is no business for you. Despite your mannish affect you are not unattractive, so perhaps you can serve me in some other –”

  Marla punched him in the throat. Malkin gagged, grabbing at his windpipe – Marla hadn’t hit him hard enough to do permanent damage, but he wouldn’t be speaking any spells – and fished a sachet of sleep potion out of her pocket. The Chamberlain and Rondeau both grabbed their noses as Marla slapped the cloth pouch of lavender and stranger herbs into Malkin’s open mouth. He gagged, gasped, and then dropped into a deep supernatural slumber.

  “This guy,” Marla said. “This guy is going to be trouble. I don’t think I’ll be able to sucker-charm him again, either.”

  “He does need to confront certain new realities,” the Chamberlain said. “But, Marla, that’s Everett Malkin. He’s legendary.” The Chamberlain had a certain reverence for the past – much of her power came from her relationship with the ghosts of Felport’s founding families, including the persistent spirits of many former sorcerers from the early days.

  “I liked him better when he was just a legend,” Marla said. “He’ll be asleep for a while, you mind watching him for me?”

  “I – I suppose. And if he wakes up, he can speak with the ghosts, his apprentice Corbin is among the residents on my estate. But, Marla, what of the beast?”

  “Yeah,” Marla said. “The beast is another problem. I’m gonna have to go see a guy about that.”

  #

  Marla wore black, loose-fitting pants and a snug top that kept her arms free, and held a specially modified sniper rifle. Rondeau was dressed like an extra in a movie about a special forces operation, all black padded vest and a helmet and night-vision goggles (which he found more fun than Marla’s more practical magical night vision). He persistently referred to their operation as “playing dress-up,” which was annoying, but Marla knew she could rely on him in a pinch, and he had a backup rifle, albeit less fancy. They were on the dark balcony of a charming little pied-a-terre a few blocks from the place where the beast and Malkin had appeared. The apartment’s rightful residents were off in Aspen or something, wherever rich ordinaries spent early spring.

  “What if the dart doesn’t work?” Rondeau said. “We got a plan B?”

  “I throw you to the beast, and while he’s dismembering you, I sneak around and hit him on the back of the head with the rifle butt.”

  “That’s always your plan B.”

  They were watching another uninhabited apartment across the quiet upscale residential street. The Chamberlain’s diviners had tracked the beast to that location, where their best remote-viewer said it was sleeping heavily on a mound of blankets and the shredded remains of a mattress. The beast hadn’t torn the door off its hinges to get inside – it had unobtrusively jimmied a side door with its claws. Smart beast, laying low. Marla wondered if it would be possible to communicate with it... but communication wasn’t part of the plan.

  “Something moved there,” Rondeau said, pointing to the front window, where a shadow had shifted. “Poor thing must be scared to death. One minute you’re fighting your mortal enemy in the woods, and the next, poof, you’re in the future and there’s not a tree in sight.”

  “Let’s hope it’s still disoriented,” Marla said. She watched through the scope as the side door opened and the beast slouched out, its physiognomy still a mysterious jumble of apelike and boarlike and manlike and, well, beastlike.

  She pulled the trigger three times, and three darts flew through the air and struck the beast’s flesh. The darts were each charmed with a different armor-piercing and true-aim spell, and she hoped at least one of them would hit – worst case, all
three would hit, and the beast would overdose and die, and wait, that was kind of the best case, too.

  The beast lifted its shaggy head, looked straight at Marla, and rushed toward them, loping and leaping and snarling.

  “Oh this is fucked,” Rondeau said, and lifted his air rifle, firing another dart at the approaching furry projectile. The beast jumped for the balcony –

  – and bounced off the railing, landing on the street, sprawled on its back, unconscious. Maybe it was immune to Malkin’s sleep spells, but times had changed, and Marla had mixed up a potent cocktail of chemical and magical tranq-juice, concentrated enough to make a blue whale yawn. Still, who knew how much time they had to finish the plan?

  Rondeau was on his cell calling in Langford and the rest of the team while Marla looked down at the beast. Something about its shape made comprehending its form difficult, as if it had joints and limbs that weren’t entirely in this dimension. Whatever it was, demon or god or refugee from another plane of existence, it didn’t belong here. Maybe it had once, when Felport was just trees and dirt and hills, but this was a human place, now. The beast couldn’t stay, even if it had a prior claim on this land as a home.

  “Let’s get it on the truck,” Marla said. “And then go see Malkin.”

  #

  “You fool,” Malkin said, stalking into one of the Chamberlain’s many parlors. He was dressed in period finery doubtless dug out of mothballs in some deep basement in the Chamberlain’s estate, and he smelled faintly dusty. “You dare to attack me, and leave the city vulnerable to the beast’s –”

  “Gods, shut up, the beast is taken care of,” Marla said. “Come on, I’ll show you. You coming, Chamberlain?”

  “Oh, indeed,” she said brightly. “I haven’t begun to tire of Mr. Malkin’s company at all.”

  Malkin didn’t shut up. “You will be flogged in the town square,” he said, following Marla, Rondeau, and the Chamberlain out of the mansion, toward the truck parked in the driveway. “You will be stripped of whatever authority you think you have and banished. I am the chief sorcerer here, and I will not be –”

  Marla pulled open the back of the truck, and Malkin shut up when he saw the beast bound with ‘chanted chains in the back, watched over by the technomancer Langford, who had a tranquilizer pistol in one hand and an overcomplicated cell phone in the other.

  “So you rendered it unconscious,” Malkin said. “Very well, but what happens when it wakes?”

  “I don’t imagine it will wish to wake,” Langford said mildly. He beckoned, and the others climbed into the back of the truck. “Though I do wish I could be allowed to vivisect it. I’m not fond of mysteries, and this creature is unprecedented in my experience.”

  “I’ve got nothing against scientific curiosity,” Marla said, “But I’m a pragmatist, and studying it is too dangerous.”

  “Standing here while it slumbers is too dangerous,” Malkin snapped. “You are unfit to lead, and your folly is too great to be borne –”

  “The beast is harmless,” Langford said. He pointed to a silvery mesh net that covered the beast’s lumpy skull. “This device controls the electrical impulses within the beast’s brain. It’s a beautiful place, in there. If you’re a monster.”

  “I don’t understand,” Malkin said. “This... hat... does what?”

  “We couldn’t beat the thing,” Marla said. “You told us yourself, it’s immune to everything, and what it’s not immune to, it gets immune to. So, if we can’t defeat it, I figured, why not give it what it wants?”

  “Think of it like an illusion,” the Chamberlain said, having been briefed on the plan – the whole plan – in a phone call earlier. “The beast believes it is back in Felport in the early days, before there were settlers, alone in the woods.”

  “The simulation was easy enough to create,” Langford said. “There are geographical surveys, so reconstructing the landscape wasn’t difficult. Likewise the weather. Woodland creatures are simple to emulate, too, and there are hardly any humans, just the occasional native for the beast to dismember.”

  “The beast has been enchanted to believe it dwells in the past?” Malkin blinked, clearly wrongfooted by the whole situation.

  “Well, it’s at least a third technology,” Langford said. “Creating false experiences by manipulating electrical impulses in the brain is within the grasp of science, though outside the bounds of most ethical systems. I did use magic to bridge the impossible bits, admittedly.”

  “But the beast fights enchantments,” Malkin said. “And when it wakes –”

  “Why would it fight?” Marla said. “It’s got what it wants. If this thing is capable of being happy, it’s going to be happy. But don’t worry. We’re taking it to a little place outside the city, called the Blackwing Institute. It’s where we keep sorcerers who go crazy and pose a danger to themselves, and others, and the substance of reality.”

  “And the sorcerer who runs it, Dr. Husch, is totally hot,” Rondeau said.

  Marla rolled her eyes. “We’ll keep the beast in a cell deep in the basement, with every kind of technological and magical countermeasure we can think of, in case it ever wakes up. Don’t worry. It’s a secure site.”

  “We’re sure you’ll like it there,” Langford said, and shot Malkin with the tranquilizer pistol.

  #

  “We could have given Malkin a perfect fantasy life, too,” Langford said. “It would have to be far more complex than the one I created for the beast, but it’s certainly possible.”

  “Fuck that,” Marla said. “Why would I want to make him happy? He called me the weaker sex.”

  “Carry on, then,” Langford said, and waved as Rondeau drove the truck off into the night.

  #

  “His real name is Barry Schmidt,” Marla said, sitting with Dr. Husch before the security monitors. Malkin was on screen, sleeping on a bed in a pleasantly-appointed – but impenetrable – apartment in the Institute’s east wing. “An apprentice from out west. Poor bastard actually thinks he’s Everett Malkin, the first sorcerer of Felport, you believe that? He came to the city and started talking about how he was the rightful ruler, demanding I give him my dagger, crazy stuff like that.”

  “Hmm,” Husch said, a vertical worry line marring her smooth pale forehead.

  “And then he summoned the beast of Felport from, you know, the primordial whatever,” Rondeau chimed in. “So he’s got some magical chops, no doubt about that. Better to keep him in maximum super-isolation, we figure, with every magic-nullifying countermeasure you’ve got.”

  “Heck, keep him sedated forever,” Marla said. “That’d be fine with me.”

  “You know I believe in therapy, not mere containment,” Husch said. She looked at the Chamberlain. “Tell me, Chamberlain – do you think there’s any chance he is Everett Malkin? The beast of Felport is bound, dreaming peacefully, in my basement, and if one creature can come from the past, can’t another?”

  Marla tried not to tense up. The Chamberlain was the key here. Rondeau was trustworthy, and Langford was both uninterested and trustworthy, but the Chamberlain could change her mind. She had a potent connection to the early days of Felport through her relationship with the ghosts, and she didn’t really like Marla all that much. But, on the other hand, Malkin had ordered her around like a servant, and the Chamberlain said the ghosts who’d known Malkin – especially his apprentice Corbin – had really hated the guy, so maybe she’d stick to the plan.

  “Oh, no,” the Chamberlain said, smooth as her own silk gown. “That man is not Everett Malkin. I checked with the ghosts, and they say he’s nothing like Malkin was. He is merely a madman, I’m afraid, a troubled soul who read too many histories. But his delusion is very fixed. He’s clever, too – he might pretend to be cured, even if he isn’t. Be careful.”

  “The poor dear. It’s good you brought him to me. At the very least, I’ll make him comfortable.” Husch raised one perfect eyebrow. “He really demanded you relinquish your dagge
r of office, Marla, and said he was going to take over the city?”

  “He did.”

  “I suppose he’s lucky you left his head attached, then.”

  “Hey,” Marla said. “Don’t ever let anybody tell you I’m not a benevolent and enlightened ruler.”

  STORY NOTES

  The events of this story take place between the novels Poison Sleep and Dead Reign, books two and three of my Marla Mason series respectively. In Dead Reign I had Marla make an offhand comment about a few of the things she'd been forced to contend with over the summer: "In the past few weeks I've dealt with the return of the beast of Felport, a crazy blonde in a leather catsuit who thought she was a superhero, and a godsdamned attempted invasion by interdimensional hedonists."

  Dropping such offhand mentions is a good way to make the world of a novel series seem bigger, more lived-in, and generally more expansive, and I don't intend to flesh out every single one of them into a complete story... but I was interested in exploring what the Beast was like, so here we are. I stole the title from a line in Shakespeare, which is a long tradition among writers of all sorts.

  This story first appeared in an occult detective anthology called Those Who Fight Monsters, edited by Justin Gustainis and published by the good people at EDGE publishing in Canada. It's a fine anthology, and I urge you to seek it out.

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Little Better Than a Beast

  Story Notes