Bride of Death (Marla Mason) (20 page)

“I want to say... human trafficking,” Squat said. “I saw a couple of trucks loaded up with drugged people, mostly runaways and stuff, and I heard the Eater’s name mentioned.”

“Cannibal?” I said.

“I’m talking, like, a dozen to twenty people, on three or four occasions, within a few months. If the Eater is literally eating people, dude has an
appetite
.”

“He could be eating their life-essence or something. You have any idea how Sarlat contacted him?”

Squat spread his hands. “Sorry. I was just a leg-breaker, with a sideline in other limbs. I could take you to his office and we could snoop around, check out his computer or whatever. Maybe we’ll find something. You planning to go after the Eater?”

“It’s a way to pass the time,” I said. “Beats wandering around looking for monsters to slay at random. Sure, let’s ransack Sarlat’s shit, see what we can find.” I glanced at Nicolette, who was still silent, and then covered her cage with the drop cloth. “But I need to get some sleep while there’s a little night left, and I need to take care of some other business tomorrow... Give me the address and we’ll meet there, not tomorrow morning, but the next day.”

“You’re the boss,” he said.

“Don’t get ahead of yourself. We’ll call this a probationary period.”

CRUSHES

Somewhere in there I found a motel room and slept.

The next morning my smartphone obligingly showed me the location of both a local truck-rental place and a nearby scrapyard. I’d always been resistant to technology, but I had to admit, having the world (or a digital analogue thereof) at my fingertips was more convenient than calling up Pelham and demanding he research everything for me.

I tried to talk to Nicolette as I motored toward the rental place, but she wasn’t talking back. Either she was sulking, or she was genuinely disturbed by what had happened with Sarlat. Having somebody shove their tongue into your disembodied head had to bring home a sense of powerlessness, and Nicolette didn’t like having no power. Sure, she’d killed the guy, but in a pretty ugly and brutal and personal way. It had to be rough on her. Moreover, she’d only been in a position to be assaulted that way because I’d
put
her there. She had to be filled with a powerful cocktail of anger, disgust, revulsion, and the realization of her own helplessness at my hands, all combining to make her the next best thing to catatonic. Or else plotting my downfall.

Nicolette aspired to be chaos embodied like her hero Elsie Jarrow, but she still had a core of reason and rationality, and was driven by her own personal interests. Jarrow might have killed me one moment and crowned me queen of the universe in another and ignored me entirely in another, but Nicolette just wanted me to suffer. She was a fairly powerful witch, probably my equal (goddess stuff notwithstanding), at least when she wasn’t reduced to a head in a cage, but she didn’t have the deep irrationality necessary to be a master chaos practitioner. She had too many axes to grind, too many grudges and aspirations for personal gain. She’d always had dreams of greatness, but instead of becoming one of the most deadly and powerful forces on the planet, Nicolette had been reduced to my magical bloodhound, radiation detector, and dowsing rod. She was good at fooling herself, spinning a narrative in her own mind, making herself the hero of her own story, sure... but the shit she’d gone through in Tolerance, being reduced to an abused prop in one of my plans, might have shaken her illusions a little.

I couldn’t fix Nicolette. I wasn’t even sure what “fixing her” would mean – if there was a decent person inside her somewhere, I’d never seen a sign. But maybe I could cheer her up, and give her a jolt of chaotic power, and at least give her back enough of her delusions that she’d continue being useful to me.

•

I rented a fourteen-foot truck, using one of my fake IDs and another wedge of cash. My pale horse rolled easily up a ramp into the back, leaving lots of room for all the other crap I needed to buy. I put Nicolette on the front seat next to me and said, “Want to go shopping?”

She did not reply, just dully stared at the dashboard, so I slipped the cover back over her cage and went for a drive. I was afraid I’d have to go all the way to Tucson to get what I needed, but there are plenty of antique shops and people selling stuff on Craigslist even in the small towns on the outskirts. I kept hoping Nicolette would take an interest, wonder where we were going, why I kept stopping, what I was loading into the back of the truck (often with attendant cursing and swearing and the assistance of shop employees or people happy I’d helped transform their family heirlooms into cash). She didn’t pay any attention at all.

It was creepy. She was also useless to me if she wouldn’t
talk
to me, but that wasn’t the only reason I wanted to snap her out of this. I really was trying to do what my stupid tattoo said.

It took half my remaining cash and damn near the whole day, but I was finally satisfied with my haul. When the last item was securely locked up in the truck, I got back in the cab. “Off to the main event,” I said, more chirpily than I’ve said anything ever, and Nicolette didn’t so much as grunt.

I followed my phone’s glowing dot and robotic verbal directions to a scrapyard south of Tucson, the most isolated one I’d been able to locate. I felt a twinge as I approached the place, which, like so many junkyards, resembled the citadel of a postapocalyptic road warrior: high fences made of scrap board and corrugated steel topped with barbed wire, huge metal buildings, and rows upon rows of junked cars. My old friend Ernesto had owned a junkyard, a literally magical place full of folded space and strange magics. He’d died because of something I did. One of the many fuck-ups I needed to atone for.

I drove my truck right through the open gate, parked near the office – an airstream trailer streaked with bird shit – and then climbed out, holding a plastic soda bottle full of reeking potion. I dribbled the fluid all around the gate, then screwed the lid back on and put the bottle away in the truck. The keep-away potion would give any potential customers who approached a sudden, strong desire to be elsewhere, giving me two or three hours to do my thing.

The manager came banging out of the trailer, shading his eyes from the late afternoon sun with one hand. “Help you?” he called. My friend Ernesto had usually worn a black tuxedo (the lapels stained with axle grease, for ritual purposes), but this guy was dressed in a practical gray jumpsuit, hair sticking up like the bits of hay that didn’t get mown down in a field.

“Yeah, I need the run of the place for a couple of hours.”

He cocked his head. “You want what?”

“I need to use the crusher. Don’t worry, I know how. Will five hundred bucks do?” That was all I had left. I should’ve looted the bodies in Tolerance for spare cash.

“Lady, are you
crazy
? I can’t let you run the crusher.”

I grunted. “Don’t worry, I’m not trying to dispose of a body or anything, I just need to turn some shit into splinters, you know?”

“No. I do not know.” He pointed to the gate. “You need to leave.”

“Okay then.” I started to turn away, then turned back, tossing something at him underhand.

I expected him to try and catch it – people tend to do that, instinctively – but he just stood there as the cloth-wrapped sachet smacked him in the chest, sending out a little puff of aromatic dust. It worked anyway, though: he smelled it, and his eyes closed, and he started to sway. I stepped in and caught him before he fell, then dragged him up the short steps into the trailer and dumped him on a couch that smelled like eight or ten cats had copulated, urinated, and died on it, possibly simultaneously. He’d be unconscious for the rest of the afternoon. Sleep charms are kind of annoying to make – it helps to be exhausted when you enchant them, but when you’re tired you tend to make sloppy mistakes, and I’d created a lot of cloth packets of lavender and other ingredients that didn’t do a damn thing except smell like the bedrooms of old grandmas. But such charms were handy, and a vital part of any solo running witch’s toolkit. They don’t have the nasty long-term effects that some other charms useful against ordinaries do – charms of compulsion and forgetting, especially – though I had some of those in my bag, too. Sometimes you have to balance the need for success against the chance of giving some innocent bystander brain damage.

I drove up and down the lanes to make sure there were no other customers lurking, but I was lucky, so I found the car crusher and parked near it.

Ernesto had taught me how to use the big junkyard machines, and even though this one wasn’t identical to the one I’d learned on, the general idea was the same. This was a hydraulic vertical press – a “pancake” crusher – basically a big-ass metal box the size of a garage, with a heavy plate that would descend and crush anything you put inside. The press was striped in yellow and black danger lines, and there was a shimmery scatter of shattered safety glass all around it, but no car inside at the moment. This kind of press was designed to flatten junked cars so they could be stacked more easily on trucks and hauled off for disposal. I was glad it was a pancaker. A baling press – the kind that first squashes a car flat, then squashes in from the sides, and reduces a car to an astonishingly compact cube – would have been too fucking scary for what I had in mind.

I moved stuff out of the van and got everything set up. Some of it was hard to move solo, but I’ve always been pretty good at inertial magics, so I managed to manhandle everything into place, though it turned me into a sweaty, sore-muscled wreck in the process.

Once I was satisfied with the set-up, I removed Nicolette from the cab of the truck, set her cage on the hood with a good view of the crusher, and removed her drop cloth. “Ta da!” I said.

I stood beside her and took in the scene. The car crusher looked like a diorama of a pleasant living room. An antique Persian rug covered most of the crusher’s floor, and there was a leather armchair, a beautiful carved-wood end table holding a Tiffany lamp, a dark mahogany sideboard bearing several old and lovely vases and an old-school phonograph, complete with the big horn. A curio cabinet stuffed with awful porcelain figurines, and a pie safe with a mismatched bunch of wedding china, depression glass, and Fiesta plates and bowls. The piece de resistance was an upright player piano, maybe a little too honky-tonk for the vibe as a whole, but in amazingly good shape for its age.

Nicolette made a little noise, almost just an exhale, but it was something.

“Pretty nice, huh?” I said. “I know you always got a kick out of destroying beautiful things. I feel bad your enjoyment of the giant massacre in Tolerance was spoiled. I realize you couldn’t really savor the chaos in the street because of, ah, all the... stuff... going on with Sarlat. So I thought –”

“Smashing up some antiques isn’t going to make me feel better, Marla,” she said, voice dull and monotone. “Not noticeably.”

“Ah, but the antiques, they’re really just the garnish,” I said. “You just watch and see.”

The controls were an issue I’d puzzled over a bit. It would have been useful to have an accomplice, again – it made me wish I had Rondeau with me, but I didn’t, for two good reasons: he wouldn’t want to do all this shit, and having him with me would make all this too much like
fun
, and I wasn’t convinced I was supposed to be having much fun. Maybe I should have brought an annoying-as-shit death cultist to act as general dogsbody. Or told Squat to come along on this errand. That was a pretty good solution, actually. His presence was
guaranteed
to be kind of unpleasant – the curse required it – so he’d contribute to my general misery. (Maybe it’s stupid to punish myself this way. But the thing is – I’m a part-time goddess. I’m unkillable. I deserve to be punished, to suffer a little for the suffering I’ve caused, but there’s no one else qualified to punish me – or capable of making it stick. Like always, if I want something done, I have to do it myself. I’ve never been good at forgiveness. Apparently not even when it comes to myself.)

Shit, introspective digression there, those are getting more frequent. Anyway, the controls: the crusher was run via levers and buttons on a panel at one end of the machine, and I didn’t have anyone to operate it. I realized I should have used a pebble of compulsion on the shop owner after all – then he could have pulled the levers and pushed the buttons, transformed from autonomous being with his own hopes and dreams into my own little remote control. Instead I had to do something far creepier.

I still had one of the polaroids from Tolerance, so I scrawled a rune across my own face, using blood from my index finger – a bit of my flesh to lend the simulacrum solidity – and then lit the photo on fire. (The telepresence illusions were re-usable, minimal magic, just bent light to create an image and displaced air waves for sound, but for something more substantial I had to let the components be consumed.)

After I tossed the burning image to the ground, smoke rose up, thick tendrils of gray, far more than a burning bit of plastic could have supplied through ordinary combustion. The smoke seemed to fill an invisible mold, forming a life-sized but not even remotely human-looking copy of me, wearing the leather coat and boots I’d left in the truck, all rendered in shades of dark gray. The edges of the figure swirled and eddied, but there was enough solidity at the core to run some heavy machinery –

And to run its mouth, apparently. “Are you sure you want to do this?” my smoke-golem said.

I frowned. “What the fuck? Since when do things like you talk?”

“You invested me with a piece of yourself,” it said, smoke flowing out and up as its mouth opened and closed.

“I’ve done this sort of thing before, and I never got any chatter in the old days.”

“You’re more full of life than you used to be. Your blood is more potent.”

Was this more goddess shit? Or a bizarre consequence of being unkillable? It made me wonder if
all
my blood-based magics would be more powerful now. “You’re just temporary though, right?”