Do Better: Marla Mason Stories

by T. A. Pratt

  Luckily, blowjobs were nice.

  “So you’re saying I’m an elf?” he said.

  The sorcerer shook his head. “No. Just a man, with a power. Some people can read minds, and some people have perfect pitch, and some people can dream the future. You make people love you. I’ve met four of your kind over the years. Three men, and only one woman, though the sample size is too small to draw any conclusions from that. My name is Carmichael. You should come work for me.”

  Joshua raised his eyebrows. “Should I? Why’s that?”

  “I will teach you about yourself, and I will pay you lavishly.”

  “I can get anything I want just by asking.”

  “Obviously not,” Carmichael said. “Or you would have the keys to my car. Besides, you might find earning money an interesting diversion. The lovetalkers I’ve known have shared a problem: boredom. Getting anything you want can be a trifle dull, can’t it?”

  “I guess so. I can’t remember the last time I played a game of pool or a video game with someone who didn’t let me win.” Joshua mused. “Okay, Carmichael. It’s a deal.” He leaned forward. “Do you know anything about, ah... exorcism? Ghostbusting?”

  “I do not,” he said. “But I have many contacts in the world of sorcerers. I may be able to find someone who can help you. Are you troubled by ghosts?”

  “Sort of,” Joshua said. “It’s pretty complicated.”

  “That’s all right,” Carmichael said gravely. “I am incredibly smart. Tell me.”

  X

  Turned out the world was full of sorcerers, a whole secret society living in the shadows of the regular world, doing inscrutable business and fighting private wars. There was all kinds of magic happening all around Joshua, and he’d never noticed. Made him wonder what else he’d missed in his life. Moreover, lovetalkers were rare, and pretty sought after—partly because they didn’t work unless they felt like it.

  Joshua did various jobs for Carmichael, mostly just chatting with people and getting them to agree to sell his boss various things at steep discounts, or sitting in a room and smiling affably while Carmichael talked, lending the presence of his personality to the cadaverous old wizard’s words. Carmichael was some kind of combination crime boss and supervillain running the sorcerous underworld of Indianapolis, and Joshua came to enjoy helping him execute his complicated plots.

  Carmichael’s immunity to his power made Joshua think, too, and he decided to become so charming that, if his powers suddenly evaporated, he’d still be able to make people do what he wanted. He didn’t need to, of course, and according to his boss most lovetalkers were slobs, but he’d always been vain about his appearance anyway, and it was interesting, the study of manipulation and social engineering. Sure, Joshua studying manipulation was a bit like a fish studying swimming—it just came naturally, and reducing it to theory was hard—but it provided an intellectual challenge. Carmichael was right, of course. Joshua had been getting bored.

  There wasn’t really anyone to practice his skills on, because Carmichael’s total lack of emotion made him immune to even non-sorcerous charm... but there was Naomi. Sitting in his gorgeous penthouse apartment one night, he tried out pick-up lines and patter and subtle conversational deflections on her ghost, while she sat smoking cigarettes and critiquing his delivery. She was dressing more sedately by then, mostly in business casual, and she kept her hair pulled back, like she’d gotten an office job in the afterlife. She was older, too, pushing thirty, with laugh lines starting to appear on her face. “Nice tricks, bro,” she said, after he went through a whole bar pick-up routine. “But what good are they?”

  “This power came to me unexpectedly. What if it disappears just as suddenly? Carmichael says it doesn’t work that way in his experience, but he also says there aren’t enough lovetalkers around to draw any definitive conclusions about us. I could become... ordinary. I mean, it’s possible.”

  She rolled her eyes. That, at least, hadn’t changed as she’d aged. “Horrors. You might have to work for a living.”

  “Oh, I’m working. For you. My boss has been asking around to see if anybody knows how to, ah... put you to rest,” Joshua said. “No luck yet. He’s never heard of a ghost aging in real-time. I’m pretty sure he thinks you’re a figment of my imagination.”

  “Tough to prove one way or the other,” she said. “Do you want to get rid of me?”

  “Every time I look at you, I think of the life you could have had. The life I cut short.”

  She tapped ash off the end of her cigarette—the ashes vanished before they landed on the fabric of her armchair—and looked at him patiently.

  “But I’d miss... having someone to talk to. Someone who actually talks to me. I mean, there’s Carmichael, but talking to him is like having conversation with an ant or a star or a waterfall or something. He’s not even human anymore. What do you want?”

  Naomi smoked furiously, frowning. Joshua realized he couldn’t smell the smoke from her cigarette. “I feel like I’m not moving on,” she said finally. “I’ve got no awareness, except in these moments when I’m with you, but I’m getting older, somehow. I mean, what happens if I get so old I die? When I’m already dead?” She looked at the cigarette in her hand. “What if I get, like, lung cancer? Will I start appearing to you in a hospital bed? With an oxygen tank?”

  Joshua stared at her. He’d never even considered... “Okay,” he said. “I don’t want that. I’ll try harder, I’ll make some calls... someone in the world must know how to help you move on.”

  “I’d miss you, brother,” she said. “But yeah. You started killing me a long time ago. Probably a good idea if you finish the job, huh?”

  XI

  “The time for spying is over,” the man named Gregor said, steepling his fingers together behind his almost pathologically clean desk. “Tonight, you kill Marla Mason.” Gregor’s executive office was all right angles, utterly spotless, devoid of personality or life. Joshua thought his mother would have diagnosed Gregor with obsessive compulsive disorder, among other things.

  “You should kill this other guy too,” Gregor’s assistant, Nicolette, said. She was pretty, in a birdlike, too-thin way, and he could tell she desperately wanted to sleep with him. But Joshua thought that would be approximately as wise as sleeping with a buzz saw. She had a multitude of braids and wore paint-stained white overalls, a strange contrast to Gregor’s sober corporate suit style. But sorcerers were strange people.

  “Which other guy?” he said politely. He could have belched and scratched himself—they weren’t immune to his powers—but he was still practicing his charms.

  “His name’s Ted,” Nicolette said. “He’s a nobody, Marla’s new assistant, but once the bitch is dead, we’ll need to deflect attention away from us. Assassinating the sitting chief sorcerer is a no-no, so we’re going to pin the job on Ted instead, say he died in his attempt to murder Marla, that he was an agent of another sorcerer, yadda yadda.”

  “You think anyone will believe that?” Joshua said.

  “We only need a reasonable amount of deniability,” Gregor said. “Enough to give the other sorcerers on the council an excuse to stop investigating. I know killing is beyond your usual skill-set, but no one else can get close enough to Marla. Are you unwilling?”

  “I... After I do this, Naomi will be set free?”

  “We have a necromancer standing by,” Gregor said. “He’s a... peculiar fellow... but very powerful, certainly capable of sending your sister to her just reward.”

  Joshua nodded glumly. When Carmichael put him in touch with these ruthless sorcerers in the city of Felport, with the promise that they could help Joshua if he helped them, he’d tried to cheat the system—of course. During their first meeting Joshua tried to convince Gregor to set his sister free without making him work for it, but he’d been prepared for dealing with a lovetalker. Gregor had a complex system involving intermediaries who would never meet Joshua, and sealed letters that wouldn’t be mailed until
Joshua had completed his work for him, and oaths of binding, and other safeguards to insure he couldn’t just charm the man into doing his bidding. Joshua didn’t have the kind of mind necessary to overcome Gregor’s fiendishly twisted sorcerous cunning; he just didn’t think around corners that way. He might have been able to overcome the obstacles in time, but it was easier just to do what Gregor wanted.

  At first, anyway. They’d wanted him to spy on a woman named Marla Mason, who was to Felport pretty much what Carmichael was to Indianapolis: magical crime boss, sorcerer-in-chief, whatever. Acting on Gregor’s orders, he met with Marla, pretending she was the first sorcerer he’d ever encountered, letting her believe she was introducing him to the world of magic, and seducing her, of course. She wasn’t too hard on the eyes, even if she was a bit older than the usual women he went for, and he even slept with her—Gregor had made it clear she was going to die anyway, so what did it matter if sleeping with Joshua ruined her for all other men?

  Marla was mean to him, too, which was a novelty. She was clearly overcompensating, putting on a harsh act because she knew he was a lovetalker and didn’t want to fall prey to his charms, but it was... interesting, to have someone disagree with him, argue with him, and show him the sharp side of her tongue instead of just the warm smooth side. Though she showed him that side, too.

  When Gregor explained that the professional assassin he’d hired had failed to kill Marla, and that Joshua was going to have to take over that murderous chore, Joshua had considered walking out.... but there was Naomi to consider. Carmichael said Gregor was the real deal, a true power, and if he said he could put Naomi’s ghost to rest, he could. Joshua would do whatever he had to in order to make that happen.

  The last few times he’d seen his sister, she’d seemed preoccupied, and this last time, she’d run into the bathroom and vomited—the vomit disappeared before it hit the toilet, which was almost more disturbing than normal puking. Joshua had asked her, somewhat nonsensically in retrospect, if she was sick.

  Naomi had shaken her head, once, and said: “Worse. Pregnant.” Then she turned on her heel and walked away, vanishing from his hotel room, leaving him to ponder the increasingly disturbing implications of those two little words.

  “All right,” Joshua said. “I’ll do it for Naomi.”

  “Here’s a knife,” Nicolette said, grinning. “It’s enchanted, the forensic magicians won’t be able to trace it back to you.”

  “One other thing,” Gregor said abruptly. “Marla Mason is in love with you. Before you kill her... break her heart. Be as vicious as you possibly can. Make her suffer. She deserves to suffer.”

  The last words rang some faint and distant bell inside Joshua—he couldn’t have said why, but they made him feel twisted up inside. “Is that really necessary?” he said.

  “No,” Gregor said. “It’s not. But I want it done anyway. So do it, please.”

  Joshua shrugged. A deal was a deal. He left. Gregor and Nicolette made his skin crawl. They wanted Marla’s job, but as far as he could tell, she was the better choice to run Felport—tough, and competent, and she hadn’t asked him to take part in any assassinations.

  Naomi appeared next to him in the back of the limo. He hadn’t seen her in a month, and she was now visibly pregnant, and visibly terrified. “Joshua, brother, if this baby is born... what will happen? Will I be carrying it around in my arms? Will it grow up, too, only aware of the world when it’s here with its uncle Joshua? Or will it just disappear? What if I stop being pregnant next time you see me? I’ll never know what happened to the baby. Joshua, brother, I’m scared—”

  “I know,” he said. “I know.” He reached out to touch her hand, but, of course, couldn’t feel it at all: he might as well have been touching empty air. “I’m going to set you free, Naomi. You won’t be stuck to me anymore.”

  She kissed his cheek—no sensation—and looked at him with tears in her eyes. “Please. I don’t know where I’m supposed to go from here... but it’s long past time I went there.”

  He nodded, and then looked away, because Naomi didn’t like to vanish while he was watching her. The driver dropped him off at the club where Marla kept her private office, and Joshua stepped into the wintry air, touching the knife in his coat. Going to do murder. Two murders, and cruel ones, at that.

  Maybe once Naomi is free, Joshua thought, I’ll free myself, too.

  He’d never really considered killing himself before, but after he did these things, would he be able to go on living with himself? And living without Naomi, forever? Truly alone, surrounded only by the adoring masses he so despised? Maybe he’d keep the knife when he was done with Marla and Ted. Maybe he could find a use for it.

  It turned out he didn’t need to kill himself. Murdering Ted went easily enough—just a stab—and then he faced Marla, who stared at Ted’s corpse, and at him. She was confused, of course. She knew there was a mole in her organization, someone giving information to her enemies, and she said, “Why did you do that? Was Ted the spy?”

  Make her suffer, Joshua thought, and took a deep breath. “No, you silly bitch,” he said. “I’m the spy.” He explained that he was working for Gregor, that he’d been using Marla all this time, and he twisted as many verbal knives as he could, mocking her, laughing at her. She actually admired him in that moment, his power was so vast—she was impressed by the depth of his treachery, impressed that he’d managed to fool a seasoned sorcerer like her, and Joshua—who had committed a thousand betrayals in his life before—felt lower than dogshit on a bootheel. Marla seemed to accept her fate: he was going to kill her, and it didn’t even look like she was going to resist.

  “One last kiss?” Marla said. “Before I go?”

  “Oh, why not?” Joshua said. Marla leaned in close. She took his face in her hands. She kissed him.

  Then she put one hand on his chin, one on his cheek, and jerked his head around, hard, snapping his neck. As all the lights went out for him, he saw Naomi standing in a corner of the office, staring at him, her hands pressed to her mouth in horror.

  XII

  “The woman you tried to kill,” Death said. “Marla. She is a friend of mine.”

  Joshua, in Hell, closed his eyes. “Of course she is,” he said. No surprise that a sorcerer like Marla would know people—beings—as powerful as this. Today Hell was a rather boring room, like any of a million hotel rooms he’d stayed in, except there were no doors leading to a hallway leading to a way out, and there were rather too many mirrors. Death was a smiling long-haired young man, wearing a suit of vaguely European cut, with rings on all ten of his fingers, and he was utterly immune to Joshua’s charms.

  “So will you be tormenting me extra, then?” Joshua asked, without opening his eyes. “I thought I saw Marla recently. I was back in her office, and my neck was broken, and I tried to tell her I was sorry, that I loved her...” He frowned. “Wait. Did that really happen?”

  Death crossed his legs and laced his fingers over one knee. “The afterlife is a strange place, Joshua. A thousand possible scenarios play out here. It’s a forest of regrets and missed chances. Well, sometimes it’s just a furnace full of chains and demons. It’s not even Hell, as you keep saying—it’s the underworld. Every afterlife is different, just as every life is different.”

  Joshua nodded, trying to understand that. “How did Marla kill me, anyway? I thought...”

  Death shrugged. “She loved you, but she knew her death would doom her city, the place she’d sworn to protect. She loved her city more than you. That’s all. And she’s a sorcerer. They have strong wills. Your powers were great, but... you pushed things a bit too far that time.”

  “Naomi always said I should know my limitations,” Joshua said. “I didn’t think I had any.”

  “You didn’t live long enough to hit them, that’s all,” Death said. “Except for the one. As to your earlier question—will I torture you more, because Marla is a friend of mine? It’s tempting. Most people down here torture t
hemselves, though, and, oddly enough, Marla herself taught me that I should mostly just let them get on with it. I came to see you for a different reason, though. I wanted to... get to know you a little better. Thank you for telling me the story of your life.”

  “Did I do that?” Joshua blinked. It did seem like he’d been here a long time, talking, but he couldn’t remember exactly what he’d said.

  Death patted him on the knee. “You did. You asked me about your sister, too—do you remember?”

  “I remember screaming her name,” Joshua said slowly. “In the wreckage of the car, but this time, I wasn’t a kid, I was the age I am now, and it was my neck that was broken, not hers...”

  “Yes. Like I said. The underworld is a land of possibilities. As your sister discovered, when she died.”

  “Is she all right?” Joshua said. “Is she... free?”

  “As free as anyone is, here,” Death said. “Which, actually, can be quite incredibly free. She’s no longer dragging herself back to Earth to haunt you periodically, and she’s no longer playacting the life she might have had.” He plucked a bit of lint from his trousers and stood up. “All right, Joshua. I’ll give you something you didn’t ask for, and possibly don’t deserve, and which Marla probably wouldn’t give you, either, because she holds a grudge, but: I forgive you.”

  Joshua stared up at him. “What... what does that mean?”

  “Not much, I suppose. You didn’t wrong me, after all. But practically speaking... it means I can take a little pity on you. I can show you a door.” He gestured, and there was a door now, a normal hotel room door with a chain and a deadbolt and a little diagram of the floor plan with the fire exits clearly marked.