Lady of Misrule (Marla Mason Book 8) (21 page)

“Uh,” Rondeau said. “There’s this big demon, see, and – “

Marla shook her head. “That’s all taken care of. The Pit Boss has agreed to pay you a fair rate for taking over your interest in the casino, and he’s giving you back the rest of your shit.”

Rondeau grinned. “Marla. Really? I’m rich again? I like being rich.”

“It’s occasionally useful for me to have a rich guy who owes me favors. You might not want to hang out in Las Vegas, though. Take your money from the Pit Boss and then go to San Francisco. Sanford Cole will set you up someplace. Try not to do anything apocalyptically stupid in his city, all right?”

“Yes ma’am.”

“Mrs. Mason,” Pelham said, “I would very much like to remain here to assist you. What Nicolette has done...” He winced, clearly skirting too close to the boundaries of his magical restrictions. “You might need all the help you can get.”

“I need you to keep Rondeau out of trouble, Pelly. Do a better job this time, all right? Perren, tell Beadle to pull over and let them out – they can make their way from here.”

“You’re the boss.” Perren’s tone was only mildly ironic.

“Damn right,” Marla said. “The once and future boss.”

Marzi in Conversation

After Marla and Bradley left, Marzi did her best to get right back to real life, but somehow washing dishes or doing laundry or setting up the Kickstarter campaign for the next print collection of her webcomic seemed less necessary or compelling than usual, what with all the world-saving she’d just done.

“Damn it.” She closed her laptop and went to the little round window, looking down at the street.

“What’s up?” Jonathan said from the bed, where he was sitting surrounded by books festooned with bookmarks. He was working on an essay for an art studies journal – he hadn’t entirely given up his academic side for the fast-paced world of café ownership.

“You remember after we defeated the Outlaw, how for a while afterward, everything seemed, I don’t know...”

“Drab, washed out, grayscale, or maybe sepia at best?”

She nodded.

“Yup,” he said. “Being flooded with adrenaline, having crazy focus, even magic I guess, it all makes for heightened reality, and after that goes away, everything seems a little bit flattened for a while. There’s probably a name for the phenomenon, but if you want to know what it is, you should’ve shacked up with a psychologist instead.” He rose and went to her, putting his arms around her waist and resting his head on her shoulder, so they were both looking out the little window at the dark street. “I’m sorry you had to go through all that alone today. If I’d had any idea, I would’ve stayed here. I wish I could’ve met this Marla character. She sounds like something else.”

“She’s that, all right,” Marzi said. “Well, it’s all over now.”

“Do you miss it?” he said. “You want to get back into monster-fighting? You said Marla gave you a number you could call, if you want to find out about... all that stuff. Frankly it scares the shit out of me even thinking about it, but you know I support you in whatever you want to do. If that means you want to become a wizard or something, well, okay. I’ve never made out with a wizard before. It’d be a new one for the life list.”

“I don’t know. It seems like making that call would be like dropping a bomb on my life, for maybe no good reason.” But if learning about magic could make her as self-assured and effortlessly badass as Marla, wouldn’t that be pretty amazing? Except she’d seen Marla as the Stranger, and the Stranger was not exactly a happy archetype. Being a brooding, damaged loner, at home nowhere in the world, always drifting – that went with the job, didn’t it? Was it better to have a
big
life that was full of potentially awful things as well as awesome ones, or a little life that was mostly good?

Usually her life didn’t feel too small for her. She had imaginary worlds in her head at all times, after all. But now the
real
world was starting to seem weirder than any fantasy realm, a sensation she hadn’t experienced in years. “I think I shouldn’t make any major decisions right after trapping an extradimensional monster in an imaginary desert behind a nonexistent door in the storage room of my café. Probably I’m not entirely in my right mind.”

“So how’s that different from any other day?” Jonathan said.

She elbowed him in the gut, and pretty soon, they went to bed, and a while after that, they went to sleep.

•

Her dreams, predictably, were terrible.

That sky-spanning serpent of shadow was back, but now it rippled over a desert landscape, gliding above pyramids and towers of silence and temples carved out of cliff rock.

The perspective shifted and Marzi was looking down through the shadow creature’s... not eyes, obviously, but some analogous sensory apparatus. She flew closer to the sand, where a scurrying rodent darted for safety, and then enveloped the animal, all the poor creature’s organic material broken down and transformed into a sort of delicious-to-inhale vapor. Feeling stronger, she flew on, devouring a hare, a snake, and even a cactus next. Flying faster, she spiraled up to the heights, looking down for juicier targets. A pride – no, a riddle – of sphinges crouched together, belying their solitary reputations, gnawing on what looked like severed human legs, complete with gold ankle bracelets, except the legs were covered with black hair like a dog’s.
The jackal-men
, Marzi thought distantly, but the tentative sort of body she was now inhabiting or riding-along with took no notice of her comment. At least she wasn’t sharing the thing’s
thoughts
, if it even had any.

She glided down to the sphinges, but they snarled and swiped and little whirlwinds of fire rose from the sand, making the shadow creature shy away. She moved on in search of easier prey, and eventually found a pack of jackal-men slouching toward one of their pyramids. She waited, watching, until one of them fell behind the others, distracted by a wounded foot – or paw, or whatever. Then the shadow dropped, and engulfed the jackal-man, the gold jewelry it wore tinkling to the sand when its tissues and bones and teeth were consumed. Then the shadow moved on, chasing after the others, feeling faster stronger better more
real
, adapted to this new place somehow now. The jackal-men raced into the pyramid and tried to roll a stone across the opening, but the shadow twisted and squeezed thread-thin and slithered through the gap, pursuing the howling jackal-men down torch-lit stone corridors. Hungering, satiated, hungering again, always chasing the next bite of reality –

Marzi sat up in bed, gasping, and Jonathan groaned and rolled over but didn’t wake. She glanced at the clock. Just past midnight – she’d been asleep for less than an hour. She got out of bed, shivering – the nights were getting cool, and like most houses in this part of California, her place didn’t have much in the way of insulation. That dream was just typical anxiety crap, right? It wasn’t necessarily what Bradley called “one of
those
dreams” –

NOOOOOOO

An anguished syllable tore through her head, and she dropped, gasping, to her knees. It was a cold, alien, but familiar voice – the voice of the scorpion oracle.

Something was wrong. She had to get to the door, the door that had disappeared, but which she instinctively knew had returned. She got to her feet, glanced at Jonathan, and decided not to wake him. He was wonderful, he was her rock, but this was not his territory. Like it or not, this was her problem to solve, and bringing him into it would just give her something else to worry about. She was, apparently, the goddamned sheriff in this town.

Marzi grabbed her cap pistol and put it in the pocket of her robe, then went down the outside stairs in her slippers, letting herself into the café through the back door under the stairs. She stepped into the Teatime Room, trying to use her magical senses to get some idea of what exactly was happening – when her perfectly ordinary senses alerted her to the fact that someone was sitting in her closed and dark café.

She flipped on the light switch, one hand in the pocket of her robe.

A man sat at one of the tables, smiling at her. He looked exactly like the sphinx Marla had killed, except he had curly black hair, and one of those ridiculous hipster mustaches, with the ends waxed into curved points. He was dressed like an Old West dandy, in a fine gray suit, and there was a felt John Bull top hat on the table beside him. “Evening, ma’am,” he said. “I hope you don’t mind my making myself comfortable.” He sounded like the sphinx, too. “Sit with me a while, would you?”

“We’re closed.” Marzi didn’t move.

“Sit with me, or I’ll eat you now,” he – no,
it
– said matter-of-factly.

“How did you get
out
?” she said.

“I’ll tell you, if you sit. I’m trying to learn to pass for human. Manners matter, don’t they? Shouldn’t
you
be more polite?”

Marzi moved toward it, though everything in her screamed that doing so was like walking toward a wild tiger. She pulled out a chair and lowered herself into the seat, never taking her eyes off the Outsider, or her hand out of the deep robe pocket that held her pistol. “Sure. I’ll be as nice as you are.”

“Isn’t this better? I just wanted to thank you – before I eat you – for sending me to that wonderful place. It was like a buffet. And the main course! That immense scorpion! I have
never
felt so real as I do now, even in my home universe.”

Marzi shook her head, not so much disbelief as
unwillingness
to believe. The scorpion oracle wasn’t exactly a friend, but she had certainly saved Marla’s life. “You... there’s no way you ate her. She’s a
god
.”

“She was, yes. And all the more delicious for it. Oh, she was too much for me to take on immediately, I admit. My teeth, if you like, were too weak – my jaws could not open wide enough to accommodate her. But there are little spirits beyond that door, and I devoured those first, you see. Then I ate bigger things, like the jackal-headed men. When I was strong enough, I ate the sphinxes, too.”

“Sphinges,” Marzi said automatically.

“Quite so.” The Outsider nodded as if she’d made a good point. “I learned a bit about manners from them, actually, even more than I did from the humans I ate before you showed me the way through the door. Sphinges are very sensitive to rudeness, did you know that? I have chosen to adopt that idiosyncrasy. Once I felt sufficiently strong, once I’d
grown
enough, I tracked that immense arachnid you call a god through her burrows and temples and tunnels. She altered reality in her attempts to escape me – the world over there is so much more
malleable
than this one. But I watched what she did, and I learned – I am always learning – and soon I could change things there as easily as she did. So I shrank her to something the size of a shrimp and picked her up and popped her into my mouth.” The Outsider leaned across the table and smiled. It had rows of fangs, now, like the sphinx they’d faced beyond the door. “I’ll eat you, of course – why wouldn’t I? But I confess, I won’t enjoy the taste as much as I would have a few days ago. I am a thing that eats gods, now. I have developed a taste for caviar, and you, my dear, are tuna salad at best. I want to eat
more
gods. I can feel them, out there in the world, like the magnet pulls to iron. I can smell their divinity, like roasting meat on the wind. I just wanted you to know, before I eat you, that you failed. I will eat all the gods of your world, until I become strong enough to eat the rest of you creatures in a single bite, every living thing on this planet. It’s too tedious to think of eating you one at a time – really, it would take
years
. You should be honored I’m attending to you so personally.” It opened its mouth, showing all those teeth, and its mouth seemed to
grow
, widening impossibly, and she knew it would soon be big enough to eat her in a gulp.

“My friends will stop you,” Marzi said, because when all else fails, fall back on bravado. She felt her mind flexing, holding the thing in its human form, making it from a devourer of worlds into something more ordinary – a riverboat gambler, maybe. A dandy. Turning it from an
it
into a
him
. His rows of fangs shimmered and became a mouthful of ordinary white teeth.

Yes. She could do this.

He closed his mouth, blinking, then reached up and touched his own teeth, clearly baffled.

Marzi took the revolver from her pocket and pointed it at the Dandy’s chest. “Actually, forget about my friends. Who needs them? I’ll stop you myself. Right here.”

“Oh,
please
–” he began, and she shot him in the heart, the cap gun snapping loud.

The Dandy looked down at himself, quizzical, and pressed his palm against the hole she’d blown in his perfect white shirt. Blood welled around the hand, dripping, and the Dandy hissed. His tongue flicked out, but it was the segmented tail of a scorpion instead of flesh. Her resolve wavered. This wasn’t a riverboat gambler – this was a monster from somewhere else. This was an Outsider. She stood, leaned over the table, shoved the barrel of the revolver into its open mouth, and pulled the trigger again.

Another loud pop, but the back of his head didn’t explode, which was what she’d been hoping for. The Outsider
did
fall backwards in his chair and scramble toward the door. It turned its head, and she was gratified to see one of its – no, one of
his
– eyes had turned to a puddle of blood.

She cocked the gun again to fire into his back – not very sporting, but he was a low-down dirty cheat, and this was less like murder and more like pest extermination. She could
feel
him trying to cast off his shape, to become an
it
again, nothing even remotely human, nothing that could bleed, and she clamped down as hard as she could to keep him in his place. He was
small
, a thug and a liar and a con artist, nothing majestic about him, nothing impressive, just another river rat preying on the ignorant and those of naive good will. A trickle of blood flowing started from her nose, and a spike of pain bloomed in the center of her forehead from the effort of making him stay human, but she ignored the pain. There was a job to do, and she was going to finish it.