Dead Reign (17 page)

“I know we can’t kill him, but if he goes someplace expecting a super awesome time and he gets exploded instead, that’ll put some piss in his peaches and cream, won’t it?” Rondeau said. “Nobody likes pain, and people who’ve basically never felt pain before
especially
hate it. So let’s say he heard there was a powerful sex magician around, maybe Mary Madeline Monroe, eager to show her devotion to the new boss…. I know for a fact she’s in Thailand right now, but that’s not common knowledge, so…”

“A decent-enough plan,” Beadle said. “I can put it into operation, send certain messages through certain untraceable channels. Death is vain, and an appeal to his vanity may work. I’ll try to set up a meeting for tomorrow, in a place we can…damage extensively…without harming any ordinaries in the process. But it would be more efficient if we can combine this with some other objective. After all, if we know where Death will be, we will have freer access to places where he
won’t
be.”

“Well,” Rondeau said. “I had this idea. Kind of crazy, but, well…You know Marla’s cloak. Maybe we could get that. And I could put it on.”

“Now
that’s
a way to do some damage,” Partridge said, in his smoke-shattered voice.

“I don’t like her cloak,” Langford said. “She allowed me to study it once. It…resists analysis. There is a certain logic to most magic, however hidden, but the cloak defies understanding.”

“It would be a great asset,” Beadle mused. “I calculate that its advantage to our cause would outweigh the dangers inherent in its use. It would give us the potential to strike directly at Death, and allow us to do more than merely annoy him.”

“The thing is, it’s in her apartment, in a heavily fortified wardrobe.”

“Hmm,” Beadle said. “There is an order to binding spells. Given time, I could undo them.”

“How much time?”

Beadle shrugged. “A couple of days, at a guess, though I’d have to see the spells to be sure.”

“So we grab the wardrobe and take it someplace secure,” Rondeau said. “And you crack it open. With luck, Mr. Death won’t even know something’s missing.”

Beadle nodded. “Shall I implement this plan?”

“Oh, yeah,” Rondeau said, thinking:
Being a leader is pretty sweet. You just say “Do this,” and motherfuckers
do
it.

Beadle got Langford and Partridge together and talked to them about building bombs, the more magically potent the better—like fragmentation weapons filled with charmed shrapnel, shit like that. Between Partridge’s skill for destruction and Langford’s technical know-how, Rondeau had hope they’d put together something good. He sat back, grinning. He had a good crew. They had a plan. This was going to work.

“That was fun. Now I’d like to see where Marla lives,” Death said, emerging from a shoddy room in Ernesto’s brothel. “I can’t believe she doesn’t have a throne somewhere.” Ayres sat out front with the madam. They’d been discussing the good old days when Felport was still an industrial juggernaut and there was a thriving air force base bringing in lots of business for the girls. Booth was pacing out front in the evening air, frustrated that he couldn’t have sex, that he didn’t even want to have sex, though he’d been quite the ladies’ man in life—he had an illusory human form, but underneath, he was all mummy.

“Of course,” Ayres said, stifling a yawn. Death didn’t sleep. “It’s near the waterfront. Though I doubt she has a throne, my lord.”

“Ah, well,” Death said, cheerful, his assignation having put him in a good mood. “Too bad. Maybe she has
something
good, though.”

B was waiting for them at the airport, standing beside a vintage roadster parked in the white zone. He looked scruffily handsome, as always, but a lot less tired than the last time Marla had seen him. Marla embraced him, and he hugged her hard.

Stepping back, she said, “B, this is Pelham; Pelham, this is Bradley Bowman.” She looked his car over. “Nice wheels.”

“It belongs to Cole,” B said. “I can’t believe it still runs, but that’s magic for you.” He glanced around. “Listen, we should probably get out of here and haul ass for the East Bay, okay? Susan Wellstone won’t be happy if she finds out you’re here.”

Marla snorted. Susan had been her biggest rival in Felport, before she came out west to take control of San Francisco. “My visit doesn’t have shit to do with her. Thinks the world revolves around her.”

“Yeah, well, nevertheless,” B said. “I know you like looking for trouble, but I get the feeling you must have trouble enough already, yeah?”

“I guess I’m pretty well stocked trouble-wise just now. Let’s ride.” Marla hopped in the passenger seat, and Pelham squeezed into the backseat, which was just about big enough for him.

“I’m gonna head south,” B said. “Then cut back across to the East Bay. It’s a longer trip, but it gets us out of the city faster.”

“San Francisco is hostile territory?” Pelham said. “Oh, dear.”

“Susan doesn’t have a compelling reason to assassinate me anymore,” Marla said, “but I imagine she might give it a try for old times’ sake. So, are we going straight to the train? I need to get moving.”

“We won’t make it tonight,” B said, driving away from the airport, past a vast dark expanse of water, onto a freeway with only sparse traffic.

“What the hell? You’ve got a timetable for the mystery train?”

“It came a little after midnight last time,” B said, shrugging. “After the train station was closed. I’ve got a feeling it’ll come at the same time tonight.”

“Local time is a bit after 12 A.M.,” Pelham said, and yawned, as if realizing how late it was made him tired.

“And we’re a long way out from the train station we need,” B said. “I mean, maybe any train station will work, maybe it’s about
who’s
waiting, and not where, but I figure our best shot is to replicate my last experience, right?”

“Right,” Marla said, leaning back. “Damn it. Twenty-four hours lost? I can’t afford that kind of time.”

“I kind of wanted to talk to you about Cole anyway,” B said. “And about me, for that matter.”

“Problems with Cole?” B’s teacher, Sanford Cole, was a legendary sorcerer who’d been present for the founding of San Francisco and served as court magician for the Emperor Norton in the late 1800s. He’d put himself into a state of suspended animation, vowing to return to consciousness only when San Francisco was threatened. Last year, when Marla was in town on unrelated business, San Francisco had very nearly been destroyed, and Cole had awakened and come to her for help in saving his city. He’d decided to stay awake afterward in order to teach B how to use his powers, and help him become a full-fledged sorcerer, instead of just a guy who had prophetic dreams and waking nightmares.

“Yeah. Cole’s spending a lot of time asleep. Like, days. And he’s pretty much narcoleptic. Right in the middle of a lesson, he’ll just drop. He’s a tough old guy, Marla, but whatever spell he cast on himself to sleep the decades away, I think it’s too strong for him to shake off as easily as he’d expected. It’s trying to pull him back under.”

“That’s rough. He’s only been teaching you a few months.”

“I’ve learned a lot, but mostly I’ve learned how much I have left to learn. And one of these days, Cole is going to fall asleep and just not wake up again—at least, not in my lifetime. I need to figure out what I’m going to do with myself then. Susan Wellstone won’t let me be part of her organization in San Francisco because I’m friends with you. Not that I’d want to join up with her, but she’s really the only game in town. There’s not much of a magical presence in Oakland—the big honcho there is a sex magician named Delanie, and once she realized I wasn’t into girls, she lost all interest in me. She doesn’t care if I hang around, but she won’t teach me or give me work. The sorcerers in Marin are all either snooty or hippies, and neither one appeals to me. The South Bay is all half-crazy technomancers living in gutted buildings that used to be dot-com headquarters before the crash. Not my scene.” He shook his head. “I considered Hollywood—I still know some people down there, but they’re all ordinaries, and as for the SoCal sorcerers, those guys are nuts. As Cole’s apprentice, I have some status, and some options—he still carries a lot of weight around here—but when he’s gone, I’ll be an outsider again.” He sounded frustrated, and Marla’s heart went out to him. When she’d found him, he’d known there were monsters in the world, but he hadn’t known there were also people like Marla, devoted to
fighting
monsters. She’d shown him a whole subculture, and helped him find a place in it. Now that place was in danger. Marla could sympathize.

“I’ll do whatever I can to help, B,” she said.

“Great. Because I was hoping I could come out to Felport and be
your
apprentice.”

Marla closed her eyes. Taking on an apprentice was an enormous responsibility, and she already had so many responsibilities that she sometimes felt them as a physical weight. She thought of all she had to do already, every day, and an image of that Rodin statue
Caryatid Who Has Fallen under Her Stone
appeared to her—a woman crushed beneath the weight of the stone she held. But this was B…. “Let me talk to Cole,” she said at last. “He’d damn well better wake up for me. I have ways of getting a guy’s attention that you don’t.” She paused, expecting Rondeau to make a dirty joke, but of course, Rondeau wasn’t here, and she had no idea how he was doing. She was suddenly very tired. “And we’ll see if I can even get back to Felport again. Things are bad, B. Really bad.”

“Marla—” he began.

“I can’t answer you yet. Please. I will, just as soon as I’m able, okay? I promise.”

“Understood.”

They crossed a long bridge, and Marla felt a stirring of longing for the much smaller bridges that spanned the Balsamo River in Felport. They rode into the East Bay, the hills a darker shade of night in the distance, over and under a tangle of freeway overpasses, down through a grimy downtown that reminded Marla painfully of her own city. B kept driving, finally going up into the hills, on dark and foggy roads, up and up, past redwoods and quiet dark houses, finally cresting a high ridge that gave a clear unobstructed view of the bay and San Francisco beyond. He parked the car on a little strip of gravel. “Cole doesn’t like Susan,” B explained, “so he didn’t want to stay in San Francisco. She kept bugging him constantly, even when he fled to Marin, sending him gifts, trying to get him to ‘advise’ her, which really meant telling her how great she was. He decided to come here to Oakland, but he wanted a spot with a good view of the city, and it took forever, because most of the hills are so built up. We finally got this place. Susan never bothers us now. People in San Francisco look down on Oakland. Did you know, during the 1906 earthquake and fire, when refugees had to leave San Francisco and come to the East Bay, some of them made signs that said ‘Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we go to Oakland’? Bastards. I like it over here.”

“Where’s the house?” Marla said.

“Oh, that’s the roof there.” B pointed at what Marla had assumed was some kind of observation deck. “There are stairs leading down. The house kind of clings to the side of the hill.”

“Gods,” Marla said. “Tempting fate much? This is earthquake country. Mudslide territory! What if the house falls off?”

B laughed. “Come on, Marla, Sanford Cole lives here. This house isn’t going anywhere as long as he’s in it.”

“All right. I guess he can make it safe. But the idiots who built this house need to be committed for their own safety.”

“Earthquakes?” Pelham said nervously. “Mudslides?”

“Also wildfires,” Marla said.

“There hasn’t been a serious wildfire here in the hills for years,” B said. “Though it is wildfire season now. So watch where you toss your matches.” He got out of the car, and they followed him down the stairs and into the house. The living room was big, lit by antique lamps that reflected warmly from the gleaming hardwood floors, and sliding doors in the floor-to-ceiling windows gave access to a redwood deck cantilevered out over the hillside, providing an even better view of the lights of the city across the bay.

Sanford Cole, white-whiskered and small, sat in a wooden rocking chair facing the view, head back, snoring.

“He’s been like that for two days,” B said. “I blew an air horn at him and it didn’t wake him.”

“I’ll make some tea.” Pelham bustled off toward the kitchen.

B watched him go, then turned to Marla. “What’s the story with him?”

“A long one,” Marla said. “But he’s a good guy, if a little shaky just now. Look, go ask him to fill you in on why I’m here, okay? Tell him to tell you about the Walking Death. I’m sick of even thinking about it, and I’d rather let Pelham bring you up to speed.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Wake up Cole.”

“How are you going to do that?”

She chewed her lip for a moment. “You don’t really want to know.”

B nodded. He knew her well enough not to press that particular line of inquiry any further.

Marla went over to Cole. She leaned forward, putting her face close to his. “Hey, old man, I need a hand.” She jostled his arm, and pinched his nostrils shut, and slapped his cheeks, and none of it had any impact. He’d slept in some barrow somewhere for decades at a time, and a few pokes from a visiting witch wasn’t likely to rouse him. She sighed. “You’re giving me no choice here, Cole.” Leaning even closer, she put her lips to his ear. “I’m going to destroy San Francisco,” she said. She thought about all her losses, her banishment, her misery, her worry, her fear, and she fed those thoughts into a flickering flame of hate, hate casting around for a target, and it settled on Susan Wellstone, her old nemesis—the last person who’d made her feel as helpless as Death was making her feel now. It wasn’t hard to get that hate burning fiercely again. Marla had spent her entire adult life trying to make sure that she was never powerless, and now she’d been pushed into this position of helplessness again, her only hope a mad scheme to invade the underworld, a plan that was less a plan and more a desperate sort of flailing. And Susan had made her feel the same way, out of her depth, desperate. Marla had been forced to make peace with Susan, to come to a compromise, to let her leave Felport and become the queen of San Francisco, and that never sat right with Marla, that such a cowardly scheming conniver should be
rewarded
for her treachery, for her plan to kill Marla. Gods, Susan deserved nothing but pain, and what better way to hurt her than to destroy San Francisco, to summon earthquake, wildfire, mudslide, tsunami, economic downfall, infrastructure collapse, riots,
annihilation.
It would hurt Susan, and it would help Marla let off a little steam, make her feel strong, make her feel potent, make her feel
anything
but helpless. Marla thought about destroying San Francisco. She thought about it seriously. She thought about it seriously
even harder.