Queen of Nothing (Marla Mason Book 9) (25 page)

They reached the rickety wooden stairs she’d created, and Jenny made them explode into splinters. They floated down to the metal doors, which were still broken, something that heartened Marla. They strode into the anteroom, and the coat-check woman said, “Here, now, you aren’t welcome –”

Jenny gestured, and the woman burst into flame, white-hot, and in moments, only vapor remained. “Oh,” she said. “Was I supposed to do that?”

“Doesn’t bother me. She was just a chaos robot anyway.” Marla knelt by the broken bits of lapis lazuli, and gathered them in her hands, where they melted into her body. Her vision doubled, then somehow
re
-doubled, and she felt more power suffuse her. Deep in her mind something vast
turned over
, like a giant disturbed in its slumber. The Bride was still there, the spark of divinity burning more brightly now, but Marla wasn’t ready to let her wake up fully yet.

“Jenny, open up that door,” Marla said.

The burning girl pointed, and the wooden door glowed with heat, then dimmed, but still stood, unbroken and unharmed.

“That much heat would have melted the
moon
,” Jenny said.

Marla sighed, walked up, and rapped on the door sharply with her knuckles. “Elsie! Open the door. You’re in a closed system in there, very stable, it’s not good for you. Come on. Add a few variables. Who
knows
what might happen?”

From beyond the door, there came a chuckle, and the door unlocked itself with a quiet
click
.

The three of them rushed in, and did battle.

•

After about half an hour, Marla lay gasping on her back, Jenny crouched beside her, burning like a bonfire. Daniel had his hands up, moving them around like a puppeteer manipulating invisible marionettes. “She’s... getting... loose,” he said, gritting his teeth with effort.

Marla groaned and sat up. The dragon Elsie Jarrow was suspended upside down, wrapped up in the roots of the world tree—or whatever the hell kind of tree Elsie had conjured, if there even
was
a tree up there, and not just roots for the look of the thing. Daniel had caused the roots to grow and slither and bind their enemy, but Elsie was gamely gnawing on them.

The dragon and Jenny had traded fire for a while, but they might as well have been throwing buckets of confetti back and forth, for all the damage it did either of them. Daniel had tried to suck out all of Elsie’s life force, but she was somehow tapped into the raw stuff of chaos, and replenished her power endlessly. He set up a nice feedback loop, though, linking all their life forces so Elsie couldn’t harm him
or
Marla without inflicting even more damage on herself, which had cut down on the direct attacks.

“This is stupid.” Marla stood up and brushed soot off her knees. “Elsie! Don’t you think? This is stupid?”

The dragon stopped chewing on the roots and let her head flop backward, looking at Marla upside-down. “It was fun at first,” she admitted. “But, yes. Now it’s stupid. We’re fighting a real battle in an imaginary place. We’re all good at hurling bits of the impossible at each other, but we’re not really
getting
anywhere. I figure, we’ll just keep battling until your month of divinity is up, Marla, and the law of the universe will drag you back to the mortal world. Without your divine spark lending these two strength and providing them with a day pass out of their respective afterlives, I’ll be able to eat them. It’s going to be slow, and
boring
, and I hate it more than I hate brussels sprouts, but that seems to be what we’re doing. Oh well.”

“Huh,” Marla said. “Did you want to take a break and drink some tea or something?”

•

They conjured a little table and a pot of tea and a few cups. Jenny boiled the water, then went flying around in the cavern, throwing fireballs at stalactites. She’d never been much of one for sitting down. Elsie stopped being a dragon, and took on a human form. Marla had never seen the woman in her original body, and wondered if this was a facsimile. She was petite, with a mouth that was a bit too wide to be pretty, and bright red lipstick that matched her hair.

“Why didn’t you just change into a smaller form to escape the roots when I made them grab you?” Daniel said.

“Oh, I could have, but you were trying so hard. I didn’t want to disappoint you.”

Elsie, Daniel, and Marla sat sipping green tea and staring at each other. Finally, Daniel raised a tentative hand. “So, I have a question. Is there some reason Elsie
shouldn’t
become a god?”

“Only logistical ones,” the chaos witch said.

“And ethical ones,” Marla said. “She’s a murderer.”

“Says the god of
Death
,” Elsie retorted. “How many did you kill, even before that was your job?”

“Also, she’s insane,” Marla said. “The phrase ‘insane god’ is not a comfortable one.”

“I was insane, yes. But only because I didn’t have a body, and being a human mind without a body is confusing and very stressful. Also, everywhere I went, people died all the time, even if I didn’t want them to. That sort of thing will put some cracks in your composure, Marla. If I were a god, I wouldn’t need a body, or I could
make
a body, and I’d only be toxic if I
wanted
to be.” She leaned forward, smiling at Marla, eyes twinkling . “Come on. I’d be a
wonderful
trickster god. The world would be a much more interesting place with me in it. It’s not like I’m evil. I’m just... vivacious.”

“Even if I thought you’d make a non-terrible god, it’s not like it’s up to me.” Marla scowled. “I don’t have a magic wand I can wave and say—‘Poof, you’re a god.’”

“I do,” Daniel said. “Well, not a wand. But magic? Sure.”

Elsie looked at him. “You are very handsome and smart. I can see why Marla likes you.”

“What are you talking about?” Marla said.

Daniel reached out and touched Marla with his fingertip, right between her breasts. “There’s a spark of divinity in you. I can see it, glowing, so much brighter than your ordinary life force. You know my power: I move energy around. I could take a bit of your spark and move it over to Elsie. It’s no harder than draining life from one person and using it to strengthen another.”

“Sure, but that would
diminish
me,” Marla said.

Jenny landed beside them. “It’s a spark, you said? It’s a fire?” She shrugged, flames shimmering around her shoulders. “So... it’s easy to make a fire bigger. You just feed it.”

“Feed it
what
?” Marla said.

“Feed it primordial chaos.” Elsie slapped the table. “That’s where gods came from in the first place, anyway. This stuff, swirling all around us... it’s basically the stem cells of creation, right? It can be whatever we
need
. Even divinity.”

“I do not like this idea.” Marla crossed her arms.

“Oh, that’s just because you’re locked into this win/lose paradigm, Marla sweetie.” Elsie reached over and patted her hand. “But this way, you win by letting
me
win.”

“That first part, about me winning, that’s okay. It’s that
other
part....” Marla drummed her fingers on the table. Her eyes caught the tattoo on her wrist: the words “Do Better,” inscribed on her flesh by her god-self as an admonition, an encouragement... and mission.
Was
Marla just being stubborn and vindictive? Think about it. So Elsie became a god. What was the harm? Oh, sure, it could go terribly wrong, but really, before the woman had gone insane, she hadn’t been famed as a slavering monster. She’d been known in the sorcerous community for her sometimes terrifying whimsy, her twisted sense of justice (which overlapped with her twisted sense of humor), and, yes, for being
fun
, in a certain wild bacchanalian sort of way. Unpredictable, dangerous, afflicting the comfortable, but no, never what you’d call evil, not until her power destroyed her body and she lost her mind.

“If you become a god, are you going to just murder a bunch of people?”

Elsie shook her head. “Dead people are boring, anyway. No offense, Daniel and Jenny. Alive people can
do
things. I like it when people do things.”

“No causing plane crashes for kicks, either, understood?” Marla said. “Or ferry disasters, bus crashes, earthquakes... that kind of stuff is my purview. I realize I can’t tell you not to
mess
with people, but don’t mess with
lots
of people all at once.”

“I can work with that. The personal touch is more my style anyway.”

“Hmm. No doing damage to the structure of reality, either. You can’t turn cities into, I don’t know, giant mushrooms, or anything.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it. And if I do, I won’t act on it.” Elsie bounced up and down a little in her chair. “I get to be a god? Really truly a god? I’ve always
wanted
to be a god.”

“If you’re sure you won’t be an
evil
god.”

“Hmm, well, evil depends a lot on your viewpoint, but I don’t have the patience to be an effective sadist, so I wouldn’t worry about it.”

Marla put her face in her hands. Do Better. “I can’t believe I’m even
considering
this,” she said.

“Should I do it?” Daniel said.

“I... Yeah. Okay. But listen. After you move some of my divine spark into her, I want you to fan the flames of
my
godhood first. Give me back the fullness of my power, and then do Elsie. I don’t want her to be the only full-blown god in the room, not even for a second.”

“Very prudent,” Elsie said. “I can’t be trusted. Which is why I’ll be such a good trickster god. I wonder if Coyote is real. Or Hermes. Ooh, or Kokopelli. They’re going to love me.”

Marla leaned across to Daniel, and kissed him on the lips rather more chastely than she wanted to. “When you, ah, turn my divinity back up to full power, I might... change.”

Daniel nodded. “I understand. Getting to see you at all, to fight with you again... that’s more than I ever expected anyway.”

Marla turned to Jenny. “Did you have fun?”

“I thought of lots of interesting new things I can set on fire when I get back home,” she said.

“I’m, uh, sorry. That you died,” Marla said.

“I was pretty bad at being alive,” Jenny said. “This is better, for me.”

Marla took a breath, exhaled, and nodded. “Okay then. Let’s do a god transfusion.”

Daniel took Elsie’s hand, and then Marla’s, and closed his eyes. Marla felt something inside her shift and then bleed away, passing through Daniel. Elsie’s eyes widened, and she gasped, then trembled in entirely too erotic a fashion.

Daniel squeezed Marla’s hand, and suddenly
torrents
of power flooded into her, the fire at the center of her going from spark to fire to bonfire to inferno to sun –

Marla closed her eyes.

The Bride opened them. She looked around, and what she saw displeased her, but an agreement had been made, and when gods made promises, those promises were kept, even if a stupid mortal part of the god had done the promising.

She released the hand of the dead boy beside her, wiping her palm on her pants. The red-haired woman—no, the red-haired
god
, now—stood and stretched, great prismatic wings unfurling from her back. She leapt into the air.

The Bride grabbed her foot and pulled her back down. “No you don’t. We agreed to terms in principle, but we’re going to hammer out some details now.”

Elsie laughed. “We’re both gods, you can’t hold me here. I have a whole world to play in! A whole universe!”

“You fool,” the Bride said. “We are both gods, but you are in my realm, and while there are many ways to enter the land of the dead, no one leaves this place without my permission. If you want to go play in that world of yours, we need to have a talk first.”

Elsie sighed. “You’re no fun.” She fluttered back down to the ground.

“Marla?” the dead boy said, and the Bride waved a hand, banishing him and the burning girl back to their respective afterlives, and also from her mind.

“Your sharp teeth are so
pretty
,” Elsie said cheerfully.

•

“So she’s a trickster god now.” Death sipped a brandy with cocaine dissolved in it—he’d read about the drink in some book, apparently. “Do you think
that
was a good idea?”

The Bride sighed. “I told Elsie if she got up to anything too destructive, we’d come down on her hard. There are two of us: we’re twice the god she is. She says she’s going to wander around being a fairy godmother, and occasionally a
reverse
fairy godmother. Giving people epiphanies, and ripping away the veil, and other nonsense. She might spawn some new religions, but I can’t imagine any of them will last long. I don’t think she’s interested in conquering the world or anything. She just wants to make the world more interesting, and now she won’t give people cancer just by walking past them, so what do I care? I escorted her to a passage back to the world above, and barred her from entering here again.”

Death nodded. “Still. I’m surprised you didn’t fight her to the bitter end instead, even if it
would
have required asking me for help. Defeating your enemy by giving her what she wants—that’s an unusual approach for you.”

The Bride bared her sharpened teeth. “I don’t like it. Don’t blame
me
. It was my mortal self’s idea. True, I wanted Marla to change, to become a better person, to be less selfish, less rash, less short-sighted and pig-headed, but I didn’t expect her to develop all this pointless
mercy
. The one thing she always did that I approved of was implacably fighting her enemies.”

“Mmm. Are you going to let your mortal self keep the memories of this experience?”

The Bride shuddered. “Of course not. If I let her know it’s possible to keep her own mind, with a measure of my powers, in
this
place? You know she’d try to find a way to keep her continuity of personality during the monthly transition, and remain entirely herself during her time in the underworld. That would be a disaster. She’d lose all objectivity, and would meddle in all sorts of trivial personal matters, here
and
on Earth. Just look at what she did this time, recruiting her dead friends to help her face Elsie, instead of turning to you for help! Stubborn, but at the same time sentimental. No, she doesn’t have the right mindset to be a god. She takes things too personally. The... distance, the objectivity... I have in this form is what makes it possible for me to do my
work
. She can’t have those memories. It’s too dangerous.”