Grim Tides

Pelham rolled across a one-lane bridge on the winding, narrow, gloriously scenic road to Hana, then adroitly squeezed the black convertible onto the minuscule shoulder to let an impatient local in a mud-stained Jeep swoop around them and speed away.

“I was worried this drive would stress you out,” Marla said. They were only travelling about fifty miles, but it was going to take between two and three hours, because the Hana Highway was as twisty as a grifter’s wit, following the coastline through tropical rainforest on a route that included something like sixty bridges, many of them one-lane, plus an effective infinity of blind curves. The trip was stressing Marla out, because two parts of her nature were in conflict: she hated driving, but she was also a control freak. At least with Pelham she was in good hands. When Rondeau had driven this way, they’d nearly died about 125 times, by Marla’s count. This wasn’t a trip to take when you were in a hurry… but unless you had a helicopter or a boat handy (or were willing to brave the risks inherent in teleportation), there was no other way to reach the eastern side of the island.

“Oh, no, this is lovely,” Pelham said. “I suppose it might have made me anxious when I first left Felport… but since then I’ve driven the road of death in Bolivia, and the Deosai National Park Trail in Pakistan – after driving across a wood-and-rope bridge suspended over a chasm, a few blind curves and one-lane stretches are nothing to get worked up about.”

“Ha. I guess not. I’m going to have to get used to the new you, Pelham – I’m still thinking of you as the guy who never left Felport, who’d barely been off the Chamberlain’s estate.”

“The past few months have been most instructive, Mrs. Mason. During our time together I gained some inkling of the divide between my theoretical knowledge and the practical application of that knowledge.” He had a faraway look in his eyes – a trifle worrisome in a man driving along the edge of a cliff towering over the ocean. “I have experienced so much since then. Great kindness and casual cruelty. Amazing food and filthy rooms. Learning a language from books and tapes is quite different from speaking the language with people. I was groomed for service, but the world is so much larger than I ever realized. Thank you for that – for sending me out.”

Marla had been a few places over the years, but always for business, and she’d never explored like Pelham had – had never wanted to, with all her attention focused on Felport’s well-being. “You don’t have to stay here now,” Marla said. “With me, I mean. We can be – bonded, or whatever – without you having to live in a little room under the stairs emptying my chamber pot and cooking me rashers of bacon.”

“With your permission, I may go traveling again,” Pelham said. “But for now, you are in danger, and you are my friend as well as my mistress, and I would prefer to stay and assist in whatever way I can.”

“Ha. ‘Mistress.’ Careful calling me that in public, all right? But I’m glad to have you. I could use the help.”

He glanced at her sidelong. “Mrs. Mason. You’ve changed, too, if you don’t mind me saying. I can scarcely remember you ever admitting to needing help before.”

She sighed, gazing out the window as they passed the burned-out hulk of an old pickup truck someone had shoved into the trees on the side of the road. “I don’t claim to be the smartest person in the world, but if there’s one lesson I’ve learned this past year, it’s that there are some things you can’t do on your own. Being self-reliant is still important to me, don’t get me wrong… but losing almost all my friends and allies has given me a new appreciation for the ones I have left. You included.”

“Aren’t we on our way to see another of your friends now?”

Marla snorted. “I wouldn’t go that far. She’s a kahuna named Arachne, though she’s not as… spidery as the name would imply. She’s into the weaving thing, though, mostly magics of binding and separating. She weaves together nets and rugs and whatever else as part of her ritual. Arachne’s native Hawai’ian, pretty much a nature magician – you know how much I love those – and I helped her out with a ghost not long ago. She wasn’t too grateful, though. I think she was pissed off that she needed help at all – and, yes, I know, I can relate to that. Seeing me again will probably annoy her – but apart from the surfers who hired me, she’s literally the only sorcerer on the island I’m on speaking terms with. The local kahunas aren’t big fans of haole sorcerers from the mainland. Hard to blame them, since the last haole magus to show up on Maui was an asshole of a guy who turned rival sorcerers into sharks. But you’ve already heard that sob story, and I don’t feel like telling it – we’ve got a long drive ahead of us. Tell me what you’ve been up to.”

Pelham recited the list of places he’d visited – Malaysia, South America, bits of Eastern Europe, a lot of Southeast Asia, none for more than a few days at a time – and some of the difficulties he’d encountered. Apart from the Nuno, he’d also had run-ins with the iron-toothed Abaasy of Turkey, a Tokoloshe in South Africa, and a Colo Colo in Argentina. The glamour Marla had placed on the steamer trunk had proven an irresistible attractant for minor magical beings, something she hadn’t anticipated – there weren’t a lot of loose supernatural creatures in the streets of Felport, and she hadn’t realized quite how wild some of the remaining wild places in the world could be.

“Did you see anything nice?” Marla said. “I’ll feel like crap if it was all monsters, all the time.”

“Oh, no, it wasn’t all being chased by terrifying or bewildering creatures,” Pelham said. “And, given my extensive studies in magic, I generally knew what I was dealing with, and how to banish them, or at least avoid being harmed. There were many beautiful things. A forgotten temple in Indonesia, still intact, and more ancient than some civilizations. The Hang Son Doong cavern in Vietnam, where holes in the ground above admit water and light sufficient for a small forest to grow over the centuries, creating what is essentially a jungle under the earth – that was like something out of an Edgar Rice Burroughs novel. The Metéora monasteries in Greece, built atop towering pillars of rock, almost literally castles in the air.” He smiled, his expression going all soft and faraway. “I even met a woman. Nothing serious, of course, just a fellow traveler, but… . Yes. There were beautiful things.”

“Good for you, Pelham. I’m glad to hear it.”

Pelham blushed, adjusted the convertible’s mirrors in a completely unnecessary way, and continued briskly. “I went to Lake Paasselkä in Finland, thinking it might be a good place to sink the glamoured trunk – the lake was formed by a meteor impact, and there are strange magnetic anomalies associated with the place, along with other purportedly supernatural qualities. I decided the magics on the trunk and in the lake might interact badly, alas, but before I left, I saw the Paasselkä devil – a ball of light that seems to move almost consciously. Eerie, and beautiful, and despite the fierce name, I did not find it frightening at all.”

“What is it? The devil thing, I mean.”

Pelham smiled. “I have no idea. Isn’t it wonderful? The world is so big, Mrs. Mason. So full of mysteries, vistas, experiences. At home on the estate, growing up, I thought the world was very small – after all, I could see the whole thing on a globe, or a map. I read books, and believed the whole world could be contained in those books, and in a sense, I suppose they can. But the guidebook is not the experience. Knowledge received cannot compare to knowledge directly perceived.”

“Damn, Pelham,” Marla said. “You’ve managed to make me feel positively provincial, which is a pretty good trick for a guy who didn’t leave the grounds of a mansion for the first few decades of his life.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that. There is something to be said for the intense knowledge you have about Felport as well. My experiences were wonderful, but in many ways they were shallow. Spending only a few days, or sometimes only a few hours in a place, I could take away only surface impressions – startling and moving impressions, often, but not deep ones. To truly know a place takes a long stay, and the sort of devotion you gave to Felport. When, in my youth, I expressed dissatisfaction with the constraints of living on the estate, the Chamberlain told me that the world was small, but the gardens were vast – meaning, or so I understood her, that close attention could make a place seem to expand, containing multitudes. In my perfect world, I would spend a few months, perhaps a year, living in a place, thereby going a level or two deeper than the average tourist does, before moving on. Combining breadth and depth of experience, and trying to achieve some sort of balance.”

“But wouldn’t you feel, I don’t know, adrift? Not having a proper home?”

“I think home is where you make it, Mrs. Mason. Even if you make it in the inside of your own head.”

“Huh. I – oh, wait, this is close enough.” Marla directed Pelham to pull over into the big gravel parking lot, still half full of cars even this early in the day, surrounded by verdant hills. “Arachne likes to hang out in the woods around here. If I wander around a bit she’ll notice me soon enough.”

“We’re near the Seven Sacred Pools, aren’t we?”

“Yeah, that’s right, you read guidebooks. It’s a pretty place – waterfalls feeding pools, tropical birds, all that. Rondeau likes it over here, except for the drive being a pain in the ass, and all the walking you have to do to see everything. He’d be happier if they’d move the whole park closer to the hotel so he could wander over after his morning Bloody Mary.”

“The effort to get here is surely some of the appeal, though,” Pelham said. “If it were easy, wouldn’t it be less satisfying?”

“Huh. If you say so. I’ve always been more results- and destination-oriented myself. Look, I’m going to head up that hill over there, and try not to kill myself scrambling around on the lava rocks. Arachne doesn’t hang out on the hiking trails with the tourists. But if you want to go hike around, feel free.”

“Shouldn’t I accompany you?”

Marla shook her head. “Not yet. Arachne can be… prickly about outsiders. She pretty much sits in the woods and broods about tourists from Japan and the mainland US all day, as far as I can tell. The ghost we had to banish was some haole who jumped down a waterfall, landed badly, drowned, and ended up haunting the area. She doesn’t mind the ghosts of locals, but haoles like you and me… We’re all invasive species as far as she’s concerned. She probably hates the surfers, too, which is why I think she might be able to give me some nasty gossip about them. I figure nasty gossip is a good thing to hear in a murder investigation.”

“I can find no fault in your methodology,” Pelham said. “I have my phone if you need me. I suppose it might be pleasant to walk. And if you get in any trouble, I should sense it.”

“Arachne doesn’t scare me. Nobody’s managed to kill me with withering scorn yet, and I doubt she’ll be the first.” Marla got out of the convertible, tightened the laces on her boots, and gave Pelham a wave before going up the hill.

It was great to have Pelly back… but he was different. Probably he was just changed from having his horizons expanded and everything, but he seemed preoccupied, too, like there was something weighing on his mind. Pelham wasn’t the sort to share his troubles – having been trained all his life to ease trouble for others – but if he wanted to suffer in silence, that was his business. He did say he’d met a woman on his travels – maybe that was it. Nothing could mess with you like romance, in Marla’s experience, which was why she avoided it as much as possible.

A long green frond brushed her cheek as she tromped up the slope among the greenery. Nature. She’d never even liked going to the park back in Felport, and now she lived on an island that was half jungle. She liked to say that all of civilization was based on the effort to get away from nature, but talking to Pelham had made her reconsider certain of her bedrock assumptions. Maybe her dislike for wild places was just part of her need for control, and her distrust of things she couldn’t control. But she’d believed herself in complete control of Felport, and look how that had turned out.

The surfers who’d hired her were wave-mages, like the Bay Witch, and that meant they didn’t try to dominate the waves: they just worked with them, and chose the right one to get them where they wanted to go. Maybe they had a point. And maybe, damn it, she was kind of provincial.

Marla was so deep in thought that she walked right into a spider web. She wiped the threads from her face, scowling. Life had been a lot easier when she was absolutely dead certain about everything.

#

Pelham carefully locked up the car, adjusted his broad-brimmed hat – he’d gotten a terrible sunburn on his scalp in South Africa, and didn’t want to repeat the experience – and started toward the nearest trailhead. While he would never be able to dress down to the level of, say, Rondeau – those Aloha shirts! – he’d realized early in his travels that his preferred garb of waistcoats and cravats and perfectly-creased slacks and mirror-shined black dress shoes was impractical, regrettably anachronistic, and tended to draw attention. He had adjusted. Life was about adjustment.

Today he wore a white linen shirt, a tropical-weight sports coat in pale tan, and khakis, with (of all things) hiking boots. He’d felt a bit disloyal dressing down to such a degree while once more in his mistress’s direct employ, but Marla hadn’t commented, and he knew intellectually that she didn’t care what he wore. Overcoming decades of training on the proper attire and behavior of a valet was difficult… but he’d come a long way.

A Hawai’ian man, wearing a blue rashguard and long black shorts, fell into step behind him as Pelham walked along the trail winding through the trees. “Aloha,” the man said.

“Good morning,” Pelham said politely, still walking.

“How’s Marla doing?”

Pelham stopped, scrutinized the man, and shook his head. “I am afraid I do not know you, sir.”

“You do, though. We met in Nepal. I was a little shorter then.” The man paused. “And female. And, you know. More Nepalese. You were feeling awfully homesick, and I made you feel better.”

Pelham exhaled. “Of course. Ms. – Mr. – Reva. I should have realized your… demeanor would be different, here.”

The god shrugged. “Not ‘Mr. Reva,’ please, just ‘Reva.’ You and me, after how close we’ve been, it’s kind of silly to be formal.” He leaned close, put his hands on Pelham’s shoulders, and gazed into his eyes. “Let’s talk.”

Pelham took a step back, clearing his throat. “Ah, can we talk without… such intimacy? I mean no disrespect, and I realize our past history might cause confusion, but I confess I find it disconcerting now that you are in a different body – ”

Reva frowned. “Now that is weird as hell, Pelham.”

“What is, sir?”

“You didn’t – look.” He called out to a middle-aged man trudging past on the trail with a grim expression on his face. “Hey!” Reva shouted. “Come here for a minute. I want to talk to you.”

The man walked over, a strange, faraway look in his eyes, and stopped in front of Reva.

“Where’s your home?” Reva asked.

“Hot Springs, Arkansas,” the man said.

“Beautiful little town,” Reva said. “There’s a swimming hole near there, deep and still, in an old quarry, as nice as any tropical lagoon, isn’t it?”

“Sure is,” the man said, eyes locked on something far off, perhaps in the past. “Went there with my wife on our first date, if you could even call it a date – we were both about sixteen. We swam out to the float in the middle, and she kissed me, and…” He sighed.

“Tell me what troubles you, friend.” Reva rested a hand on the man’s shoulder.

“This is supposed to be our second honeymoon. Our first honeymoon was just a hotel room in Little Rock, nothing special, so we thought for our twentieth anniversary we’d do it up right, but my wife got a stomach bug from some bad fish I guess. I was moping around the room all morning, and she was moaning in the bed, and finally she yelled at me to go do something so we wouldn’t both waste the whole day, and here I am, did that whole long drive by myself, and now I’m just walking in the jungle, and what’s the point, when she’s not here?”

“Head on back,” Reva said. “When you get there, she’ll be feeling better, and she’ll be sitting out by the pool, wearing that new swimsuit she bought, and she’ll be just as pretty to you as she was when you were both sixteen. Go into the pool with her, slip back behind that little fake waterfall they have, and believe me, you won’t regret it.” He paused. “And you’ll get a free upgrade to first class on the flight back home, how’s that?”

“That sounds good,” the man said, and Reva took his hand off his shoulder. The man shook his head, eyes focusing, and looked around. “Ah. I should get back to the hotel and check on my wife.”

“Safe travels, my friend,” Reva said, and the man gave a wave and hurried down the hill.

“Magic,” Pelham said. “And a rather kind sort of magic, too. But what was that meant to show me?”

Reva looked around, then sat on a big rock by the trail. Pelham eased down beside him. The god said, “When I meet somebody who’s not in the place they consider home – one of my people, whether they’re a traveler, an exile, or just a tourist – I can sort of… cut through the bullshit. I talk to their deepdown parts. They can’t lie to me then. They tell me their true feelings. And I help them when I can. Since I’m a god… I usually can. I talked to you the same way in Nepal, at first.”

Pelham frowned. “I have no memory of that. But I suppose I wouldn’t, would I? I don’t think I’m comfortable with you having direct access to my secret thoughts, to the levers and axles of my mind. Especially considering what happened between us later – ”

Reva shook his head. “No, Pelham, there was no coercion – that’s not how I do things. I can’t make you do anything you don’t want to. I did get a sense of your loneliness from our talk, and in that body, with that brain, I thought you were cute, and one thing led to another… but everything that happened was consenting adult stuff. Don’t worry, you don’t do much for me now, this body is pretty firmly heterosexual.”

“Even so,” Pelham said. “To be laid bare that way, to have no choice but to answer your questions… .” He shuddered. “You are not human. You cannot understand why your actions trouble me. It is important for me to remember that.”

Reva sighed. “I guess you could see it as an invasion of privacy. And you’d be right. I am an invader of privacy. It’s just how I get things done, right or wrong – it saves time, and gives me confidence that I have all my facts straight. You can disapprove. I don’t mind – all I can tell you is, I try to use my power to give people better lives. Anyway, I thought I’d talk to you the same way here, but… it doesn’t work. Which is weird, because Hawai’i isn’t your home, and if someone’s away from home, my power always works – ”

Pelham shook his head. “But I am home. I am back with Mrs. Mason. Wherever she is – that is my home.”

Reva clapped his hands together, delighted. “Right! I’ve seen that before, in some lovers, but never in a case like this. But you and Marla have a magical connection, a supernatural bond… it makes sense. She’s your home, but you’re not hers.” He winced. “No offense, I’m sure you’re important to her – ”

Pelham shrugged. “It is the nature of our relationship. It does not trouble me. Unlike non-consensual hypnosis and seduction by a god.” His shuddered at the thought. No wonder he’d felt so instantly comfortable with Reva in his – her – previous form; the god had known just what to say to him, just how to behave, to win Pelham’s trust and affection. It was horrible, but perhaps no relationship between a mortal and a god could ever be truly consensual – there was always going to be a fundamental imbalance of power in the god’s favor. Something withered deep in his heart. A beautiful memory had been made ugly forever.

Reva winced. “Look, I promise not to try to shortcut around your conscious mind again, okay?”

“How noble of you to promise not to do something you are no longer able to do, immediately after trying and failing to do that very thing.”

“Look, we have to move on from this, all right? We’ve got other things to talk about, and anyway, I’m glad you’ve found your home again. So how’s our plan working?”

Pelham closed his eyes. He was involved with this creature now, and he believed Reva did mean well when it came to Marla, so he tried to suppress his revulsion. He said, “Marla seems interested in finding out the murderer’s identity. You were right, I think, that having a difficult project would help take her mind off her exile. But she is still not quite herself. She has renewed her connection with her consort, the god of Death, which may prove beneficial to her outlook, but I am unsure. She seems… uncomfortable in her relationship with him. He did bring another distraction, though – he says her death is imminent. Her enemies are coming for her.”

“My powers aren’t much good when it comes to looking into the future – I’m a here-and-now sort of god – but I’ve gotten a sense of forces gathering, too. From everything I’ve observed, Marla’s tough. The future’s not fixed. Don’t give up hope.”

“I have not.” Pelham was offended at the suggestion. “She has faced terrible foes before, and triumphed. I just worry… she does not have as much to fight for, now. Her city is lost to her. Death is trying to woo her with tales of how wonderful her afterlife will be, in his company. I do not believe she would willingly let her enemies kill her, but what if she lacks the fire, the passion, that has always given her an edge? What if, at the crucial moment, she cannot muster the will to stop her foes from killing her?”

“That’s why she has friends like you.” Reva clapped him on the shoulder. Pelham remembered the god’s touch, using different hands, and shuddered. “And friends like me, though she doesn’t seem to appreciate it. And you say her husband is trying to convince her to choose death? I might have to go have a talk with him.”

“Are the two of you acquainted?”

“Nah, he doesn’t even know I exist. On the scale of gods, Death is like a crowned head of Europe, and I’m chief of an island village so tiny it doesn’t even have a name. Compared to a mortal, or even a sorcerer, I’ve got a lot of power – but compared to Death, I’m an insect.”

“Then what does that make mortals, or sorcerers, to Death? Microbes? Parasites?”

“Exactly,” Reva said. “That’s why things like him shouldn’t be giving mortals advice about their life choices. Which is something I might point out to him.”

“It is brave of you to confront him,” Pelham said carefully

Reva sighed. “You’re thinking things like me shouldn’t be giving advice to mortals, too, aren’t you?”

“The thought had occurred to me.”

Reva nodded. “You have a point, but I do know what it’s like to be human, unike Death. When I instantiate like this, take on a local form, I become a person, with the drives and limitations of a person… mostly. Anyway, talking to Death isn’t all that brave. When you can’t die, Death is a lot less intimidating. I doubt talking to him will do me any good, but I can try. Marla may be his wife… but she’s one of my people. Her home is lost, but if we can help her find a new home, or at least realize that she might someday find a new home, she’ll be okay. Keeping her busy is a good first step.”

“Trying to find a murderer, and prevent yourself from being murdered, is certainly one way to keep occupied. Tell me, Mr. – ah, Reva. Do you know who killed this man, Ronin?”

Reva nodded. “I do.”

“Will Marla’s investigation lead her to ask you?”

The god of exiles stroked his chin. “Hmm. It’s possible, sure. I already introduced myself to her. She knows I know the surfers. She might get around to interrogating me.”

“Will you help her, if she questions you?”

“Depends on whether or not she can figure out the right questions. Just keep an eye on her. I’ll be around.”

“I don’t like deceiving her,” Pelham said. “I had a hard time telling her I just happened to come to Hawai’i, when you are the one who told me she’d been exiled, told me she might need help. And now, having met you again, to keep that fact from her as well – ”

Reva hmmmed. “I think it’s better if she doesn’t know we’re trying to guide her life – she strikes me as the contrary type, one who’d say ‘no’ just because we asked her to say ‘yes.’ But if you feel like it’s a betrayal to keep the conversations we’ve had a secret, do what you must.”

“I was taught to be utterly trustworthy. But I was also taught that there are things one’s master or mistress need not know, things they shouldn’t be bothered with, things they would not benefit from knowing, that might trouble them, and that can therefore be concealed… but it is so hard to know whether this qualifies.”

“You’ll do the right thing, Pelham. Whatever that turns out to be.”

“Mrs. Mason will be most unhappy if she finds you’ve been meddling in her life.”

“I’m a god. Meddling is what I do. It’s what she does, too – I’m just trying to find new things for her to meddle with. Take care, Pelham. Enjoy the scenery. And remember, we’re not conspiring against Marla – we’re conspiring for her.”

“I an unconvinced Mrs. Mason would appreciate the distinction,” Pelham said.

“You can’t be serious.” Nicolette stared at the immense cube of granite, twenty feet to a side, decorated with inlaid gold in eye-watering patterns and etched with strange runes that seemed to shift and writhe without every losing their essential symmetry. “You’re really going to let her out? I thought you were just screwing with me.”

Dr. Husch walked around the cube, her long black dress rustling. Crapsey wasn’t sure what was going on, but from the way Nicolette was acting, it was pretty major. They stood in a large gray room in the basement of the Blackwing Institute, lit by harsh white overhead lights, looking at the world’s most boring sculpture, as far as he could tell. They were attended by at least a dozen orderlies – a whole harmony of human-looking homunculi – arrayed and waiting in the room’s shadowy corners.

“You don’t think I should release her?” Dr. Husch said.

“No, I think you definitely should. I just can’t believe you will.”

Oh, Crapsey thought. It’s a box. “Who’s in the box? Or, what?”

“Her name is Elsie Jarrow,” Dr. Husch said. “She is easily my most troubled patient.”

Nicolette gave a long raspberry, spraying spittle. “Please. She’s so far beyond ordinary notions of sanity that calling her ‘troubled’ is like calling cancer psychopathic.”

“If cancer were sentient,” Dr. Husch said, “it would be psychopathic. Speaking of cancer… I’m not sure if you’re aware, but Jarrow’s body died some months ago. She was absolutely riddled with tumors – she had been more cancer than clean flesh for years, of course, but her own mastery of chaos magic kept her physical form in more-or-less working order. Unfortunately… she tried to escape, as I think you know, this past winter, and she expended the last reserves of her power when she attempted to break through the wards on the Institute’s walls. She had precious little strength left for life support, and couldn’t control her own decay. I was unable save her physical form.”

Nicolette whistled. “She transcended completely? I mean, I knew she could leave her body behind to cause trouble in disembodied form, but she doesn’t even have a home base made of skin and bone and meat anymore? She must be like a wind made of fire now.”

“The death of her physical form doesn’t seem to have diminished her presence at all, no,” Dr. Husch said. “She had been experimenting with astral projection anyway – she tried to get out of the Institute via the phone lines once, and it almost worked. She’s still trapped in the cube, now, though the bed and the chairs and tables inside don’t do her much good anymore. She is wholly bodiless, and… she doesn’t like it much. She says the pain of the cancer made her crazy, and now that she has no body, and thus no pain, she’s thinking more clearly. It could even be true, I suppose – she was never capable of a ruse before, being far too irrational for deception. But she seems lucid, and wants a new body, and she’s willing to do almost anything if I can get her one.”

“What, you want an organ donation? And my whole body’s the organ? Elsie’s my hero, but I’m not willing to die so that she might live.” She glanced at Crapsey, who swallowed hard.

Shit. How many bodies had he stolen over the years, at the Mason’s orders, or – be honest – at his own whim? How many souls had he consigned to infinite oblivion, how many bodies had he used like puppets? Letting Elsie have his body would probably count as justice. “Fuck that,” he said. “Nobody’s taking my body, you got it?”

“Both your vessels are too weak.” Husch stood staring at a spiral of gold twelve feet high. “When she was free, in those last days before her capture, anyone who came within a dozen yards of her developed tumors. She was chaos walking, and cancer is nothing but cells who have lost all sense of order – she became a living carcinogen, and that poisonous aura was a side effect of her power that she couldn’t turn off. She caused bone marrow cancer, mostly. That’s why some people called her Marrowbones.” Dr. Husch paused. “That, and because in a moment of… I won’t call it clarity, but, maybe, misguided compassion? She had the idea that she could save the people she’d poisoned with her presence by magically removing all their diseased marrow.”

“Human osso bucco,” Nicolette said. “Yum.”

Husch’s dress rustled as she turned toward Crapsey, though with the veil it was impossible to tell if she were really looking at him. “Do you know what happens to a person when all the marrow in their bones instantly vanishes?”

“Uh. No.”

“Bone marrow produces red blood cells, platelets, and white blood cells, and regulates the lymphatic system. Let’s just say the people she ‘cured’ would have preferred the cancer. They at least had a chance of short-term survival with treatment.”

Crapsey furrowed his brow. “So she’s a, what… disease sorcerer? A cancer-mancer?”

“Cancer-mancer!” Nicolette said, and guffawed, actually bending over and slapping her knees. “That’s a little rhymey-wimey, there, Crapsey-wapsey.”

“What would it be called?” Dr. Husch mused. “An… oncomancer? No, ‘mancer’ is Greek and ‘onco’ is Latin, not that a little thing like that ever stopped people from talking about ‘polyamory’ or ‘genocide’ – ”

“Okay, professor boring,” Nicolette said. She turned to Crapsey. “Nah, cancer’s not Elsie’s thing. I mean, it’s one of her things, but it’s just a side effect. The purpose of a tea kettle isn’t to whistle, that’s just something it does in addition to its purpose. See, Elsie Jarrow is just like me.”

“Elsie Jarrow is to you as the sun is to a forty-watt lightbulb,” Dr. Husch said. “She is a force of unstoppable entropy with a will. But, yes, she is a chaos magician. She gets her power from disorder, and she is excellent at generating disorder as well. So powerful that, after she lost her mind and her self-control, her mere proximity was enough to drive cell division mad in the bodies of any creatures unlucky enough to come within range. And her mortal form was never much good at containing such a force of disaster.”

“Huh,” Crapsey said. “So she’s basically a tsunami made of tumors, but she’s on our side. Okay. What’s the plan?”

“We have to find a body that can withstand the stresses of having a woman who is essentially the living incarnation of chaos bound inside it.”

Nicolette snorted. “What, like a robot body? Sounds like anything fleshy would turn into tumor soup in a few seconds.”

“Elsie is very… sensual. She wants flesh.”

“Flesh is weak, lady,” Nicolette said. “Take it from the chick with one arm. Flesh is grass.”

Crapsey whistled. “Wait. You’re… you’re going to use her, aren’t you? The… the host?”

“Very good.” Dr. Husch might have been praising a bright student. “My orderlies are bringing her down right now.”

“What?” Nicolette was annoyed, and when Nicolette was annoyed, things tended to get broken. “What are you talking about? Crapsey’s not even from this reality, how the hell does he know anybody who could withstand – oh.” The chaos witch blinked, and a smile crept across her face. “No shit. That’s wicked. I like it.”

“I’m so glad you approve.” Dr. Husch spoke with enough condescension to wither even the mightiest egomaniac, though it didn’t dent Nicolette’s sudden good humor.

A few moments later, a pair of orderlies appeared, one pushing a wheelchair that held a slumped, apparently catatonic woman, the other holding a shotgun with the barrel wrapped in copper wire and plastic flowers – some kind of magical ordnance, Crapsey figured. The woman in the chair hardly seemed like a threat, but it was definitely better to be safe. She had once been a destroyer of worlds, an unstoppable conqueror – or, at least, the host for one.

“Evil mirror-universe Marla,” Nicolette said, walking around the chair and shaking her head. “She doesn’t look so scary now.”

“The cloak was the scary thing,” Dr. Husch said. “This poor child was just the host the cloak chose.” She knelt before Beta-Marla, lifting up her chin with two fingers, and looking into her blank-staring eyes. “She’s spoken a few times during her stay here, but just whimpers, really, and mostly, she’s been like this. I don’t think she’s ever going to recover.”

Crapsey just stared at the woman in the wheelchair, awash in memories. This was the Marla Mason from his home universe – the version of Marla that put on the white-and-purple cloak and then never taken it off again, her mind utterly dominated by the cloak’s malevolent intelligence, reduced to a puppet for an alien master. She still looked about twenty, smooth-faced and with the beauty of youth, because the Mason hadn’t seen any incentive in aging, and had woven her defensive magics strongly. The Mason was unmatched as a sorcerer, and claimed it was because magic in her home universe was denser than magic here – she could brush aside spells in this world as easily as a man brushes away cobwebs. But she needed a human host to operate in this reality – said it was like a scuba diver’s air tanks, or an astronaut’s space suit. The Marla from this universe had managed to trick the Mason into temporarily separating from her host, and defeated her that way – but it had left the host an almost-empty shell, with Beta-Marla’s long-dominated mind tattered and shredded and almost entirely gone.

“I just hope she’ll be strong enough to survive possession by Jarrow,” Dr. Husch said. “She looks so frail…”

“Let’s find out.” Nicolette drew her glittering silver hatchet.

“No!” Dr. Husch shouted, but Nicolette stepped past her and swung the weapon down in a smooth, swift arc toward Beta-Marla’s skull.

The blade just barely touched the skull, shearing away a few strands of hair, before rebounding hard enough to rock Nicolette back on her feet. Beta-Marla didn’t react at all.

“Damn,” Nicolette said. “You know, when I stole this hatchet, I thought I might be able to use it to kill the Mason. Guess that wouldn’t have worked.”

“The Mason told me it’s an impressive weapon,” Crapsey said. “But she said unless it was wielded by a god, it wouldn’t be able to hurt her, not really.”

“Huh. Well, apotheosis is on my to-do list anyway.”

“Please refrain from swinging axes at my patients,” Dr. Husch said wearily.

Nicolette shrugged, a strange-looking gesture from a one-armed, hatchet-wielding woman. “Whatever. If this axe had hurt her, there wouldn’t be much point in giving her body to Elsie anyway. I don’t really understand why she’s still invincible though – the cloak is gone, Marla sent it off to a whole other universe, supposedly. This thing in the chair is just a husk.”

“The host body was soaked in the Mason’s magic for over a decade,” Crapsey said. “Marinated in it. Irradiated. Whatever. And the Mason wrapped that body in every kind of protective spell she knew – and she knew a lot. You could drop an atom bomb on this body and it would come walking out again without a scratch – assuming it has a mind to tell it to walk.”

“So it’s safe to say she would be immune to cancer? And… other stresses?” Dr. Husch said. “I have speculated, but…”

“I’m not a doctor, or even really a sorcerer, but, shit, yeah. The Mason thought bodies were disgusting, so she made this flesh as unchanging and impregnable as possible.”

“Then let’s give Jarrow her new vessel,” Husch said.

“Uh.” Nicolette cleared her throat. “I’m all for unleashing devastating horrors on the world, but… Elsie’s just gonna eat us, then take this body, and leave. This is Marrowbones we’re talking about. She’s not trustworthy.”

“Nicolette, shut up, please. I have access to objects of power that make your little hatchet look like a fingernail clipper. Precautions have been taken. If Jarrow doesn’t do what I want, she’ll be back in this cube in moments. I do not need your advice on how to contain my patients. I am a professional.”

Professionals don’t let dangerous prisoners loose on murder-for-hire gigs, Crapsey thought, but didn’t figure that was a productive line of argument, so he kept his mouth shut.

“Now then,” Husch said. “Let’s crack open the seals.” One of the orderlies handed her a hammer and chisel, and Nicolette took out her hatchet again.

Beta-Marla moaned, and whispered something. Crapsey knelt down beside her, and her vague eyes seemed to fix on him. He should look familiar to her, at least, assuming she’d had some degree of consciousness during her long years of being dominated by the Mason. “What is it, sweetie?” he said, though looking at her face reminded him of his old boss and tormentor.

“Kill me,” she whispered, eyes fixed on his.

“What did she say?” Dr. Husch demanded.

“She wants us to kill her,” Crapsey said.

Dr. Husch clucked her tongue. “Can’t be done, dear. I’m sorry. But this should be oblivion, which is the next best thing.” She placed the chisel at a seemingly arbitrary point on the face of the cube, and struck it with the hammer.

The face of the cube split open, dividing one of the spirals of inlaid gold into asymmetrical not-quite-halves. White light poured from the inside, which was furnished like a rather Spartan dorm room or an upscale prison cell – single bed, sink, toilet, shower stall, desk, chair, polished steel plate for a mirror. There was nobody inside, but there was a sort of disturbance in the air, something like a heat shimmer, but streaked with colors… the most beautiful colors –

“Avert your eyes,” Dr. Husch said, and Crapsey wrenched his gaze away to stare at his feet. “There’s a force field preventing her from getting out, but it’s permeable from this direction – there’s nothing to stop you from going inside if you’re entranced. As homunculi, my staff and I are immune to her charms, but the two of you aren’t, probably. Orderlies, wheel in the new vessel.”

Beta-Marla reached out as if to clutch Crapsey’s sleeve when the orderlies pushed her wheelchair toward the cube, but she either didn’t have the strength, or didn’t have the strength of will. Poor thing. She’d just escaped from hosting one malevolent parasitic entity, and here she was, about to be enslaved by another. The kid never had a chance.

Then again, if she hadn’t been possessed by the cloak, she probably would have turned out a lot like the Marla Mason from this universe, and she was pretty much a total bitch, so whatever.

Crapsey risked a glance at the cube. The orderlies pushed the chair inside and stepped back, but they couldn’t get out, of course, because of the force field – theirs was a suicide mission. Good thing they were mindless man-things and not actual people. That close to Jarrow’s essence, the orderlies slumped like melting snowmen in hospital scrubs, their flesh liquefying into a slurry that stank like rising bread mingled with melted plastic.

“Does the vessel suit you?” Dr. Husch called.

The shimmer in the air vanished, and then Beta-Marla began to glow, a bright green aura enveloping her, and sparks started to fly up in the air.

“Shit,” Dr. Husch said, and Crapsey was actually surprised to hear such a basic profanity from her. “I was afraid the Mason might have made her host impregnable to possession.” Crapsey nodded, because the one time he’d tried to take control of the Mason’s body himself, he’d bounced off her protective barriers like a handball hitting a stone wall –

The green shimmer vanished, and Beta-Marla stood up from the chair, her back to Dr. Husch and the others. She stretched her hands up in the air, rolled her head around on her neck, then did a few toe-touches and deep knee bends before turning to face them.

Crapsey was astonished. He was used to seeing this woman’s face, of course, but while in the Mason’s control, it had almost always been blank and expressionless, more masklike than animated flesh. As the semi-catatonic Beta-Marla, her face had been slack and empty of everything but flashes of despair. But this –

This woman looked happy. More than happy. Joyful, all twinkling eyes and dazzling smiles.

“I like it!” she shouted, and did a little pirouette, twirling on one foot. “Wowza! This body is cherry, Dr. Jigsaw, truly fine, damnfine, really fine. I had a little trouble getting in, I couldn’t pop the locks with any finesse, so I had to break a window with a brick, more or less, but that’s okay, I didn’t mess up any of the optional extras.” She pressed her hands against the invisible barrier keeping her inside the cube and grinned, so widely it looked like her face might split apart. “Knock, knock? Who’s there? Let me. Let me who? Let me OUT!”

“You have… control of yourself?” Dr. Husch said. “You know if I suffer injury, or lose consciousness, you’ll be snatched out of that body and back into the cube – ”

Elsie Jarrow rolled her eyes, then flopped onto her back on the floor dramatically. “It’s okay, Doctor Mom, I know, if I melt you I’m totally grounded, the deal is done, lemme free, lemme free!”

Dr. Husch made a series of arcane gestures – she looked like a guy on a runway waving in three or four planes at once – and Elsie did a little somersaulting roll out of the cube, springing to her feet. “New friends!” she shouted at Crapsey and Nicolette, then whirled toward Dr. Husch. “First thing’s first! Give me the stuff! The stuff the stuff the stuff!”

Dr. Husch summoned another orderly who’d been lurking in the shadows, and he came forward carrying a bottle of dark red fluid.

“Is that blood?” Crapsey said. “Is this some blood magic thing?”

“Ha,” Elsie Jarrow said. “You ever try dyeing your hair with blood? It’s total crap! Gets all crusty and when it dries it ends up looking brown.”

“It’s hair dye,” Dr. Husch said as Elsie snatched the bottle and a proffered comb and went back into the cube, to the sink.

“If I can’t be a redhead, I’d rather be dead,” Elsie said. “Help a girl out, would you, baldie?”

Nicolette, who’d been uncharacteristically speechless during this whole exchange, smirked, then stepped over a melted orderly to help the most deadly chaos magician in the world dye her hair.

“Is she for real?” Crapsey said. “She’s, like… not what I expected. I mean, she’s not… all supervillainous and everything.”

“She’s always tended toward the manic,” Dr. Husch said. “It would not be correct to call her bipolar – she is monopolar. Elsie Jarrow can be warm, and vivacious, and even fun… but she’s responsible for rivers of blood. Half the time she doesn’t even mean to cause the damage she does. The other half of the time… she does mean it. And it’s a lot worse when she means it.” She sighed. “This is going to take a while. We’d best make ourselves comfortable.” She summoned an orderly, who carried over a couple of plastic lawn chairs.

After nearly an hour of hair ministrations, Elsie declared herself satisfied with the dye and stripped off the red-stained shirt she’d been wearing, dropping it on the floor. Crapsey found himself getting a little aroused at the sight of her in just a bra, even if it was boring hospital-issue underwear – hell, it wasn’t like he’d had much experience with fancy lingerie in the nightmarish dystopian world he’d called home. A girl with no festering sores on her body had been a big treat over there, and he hadn’t exactly been rolling in willing scantily-clad women since he crossed over to this universe.

“Husch. Lipstick me. I know you like to wear that red red red. Or you did before your lips got torn into little pieces. Which means you don’t need it anymore. Give.”

Husch handed her a tube, and Elsie lavished her lips in scarlet, then took the hem of Husch’s veil and used it to blot. “Perfecto.” She turned to Crapsey and gave him a dazzling smile. “You. Want to have sex with me right here on this concrete floor? I’ve got this body! Gotta use it!”

Crapsey winced. “I would, I mean, but that body used to belong to my monster-boss – ”

“Okay, too much talking, you missed your window, big boy.” She turned to Nicolette. “You? And me? And the floor? I like the one-armed thing, I bet only having five fingers makes you work a lot harder, am I right?”

“I’m not into girls, and I hate both the people you look like in that body, but you are Elsie Jarrow, and I will so absolutely fuck you,” Nicolette said.

“Stop!” Dr. Husch said. “We have work to do, things to discuss, plans to make.”

“Dr. Jigsaw is a buzzkill,” Elsie Jarrow said. “Lift that veil, pretty lady. ”

“I am not sleeping with you.”

“Oh, don’t worry, I’m not in the mood anymore, but you’re pretty prudish for a sexbot, even one with a PhD.” She glanced at Nicolette. “The doctor here was invented as a sex homunculus for her creator, did you guys know that? He gave her all those smarts so she could read the Kama Sutra or recite lyric poetry while she gave him handjobs or whatever, and then she goes to college and gets advanced degrees, just like she’s people. Her maker wouldn’t like banging her now, though, she’s all damaged. The veil. Up.”

Husch backed away, arms crossed, the faint blot of scarlet lipstick on her veil reminding Crapsey of a spreading bloodstain. “You don’t give me orders – ”

“I’ll kill Marla for you, okay? And anybody else who annoys you. Don’t get all unyielding, it makes me cranky. Just. Lift. The. Veil. Let me get a look at what they did to you.”

With trembling hands, Dr. Husch raised the black netting and revealed her face. She was worse than Crapsey had expected. He hadn’t been the one to cut her up, but only because she brained him with a blunt object before he could carry out his boss’s orders. The Mason had done the deed, tearing her into pieces. She’d been stitched back together… but her face was a nightmare of bright red lines, a map of scars so pronounced they looked drawn on with red Sharpie. Her face was like a photo shredded and taped back together, with none of the edges quite lining up anymore.

“They sure did a number on you, didn’t they?” Elsie said. “These hands, right here, they ripped you up, didn’t they?” She wiggled her fingers. “Well, let me fix you up, then.”

Husch tried to jerk away when Elsie reached out for her, but some magic snared her, and the chaos witch pressed her palms against the doctor’s face. Husch twitched and writhed and moaned for a moment, battering uselessly at Elsie, then tore free and fell to her knees. The doctor looked up.

“Uh,” Crapsey said. “Doc. Maybe look in that mirror over there?”

“What have you done to me?” Dr. Husch said, her voice no longer rough and shredded. She rushed to the mirror, and looked at herself – at her smooth face, restored to its original classical perfection.

“Fixed you.” Elsie sat down in the middle of the floor, pulled one of her feet up close to her face, and sniffed her own toes. “Not just your face, either. The whole caboodle. Boobies and nethers and all. Did you guys know she’s hairless as a hypoallergenic cat from the neck down? Her maker was a perv.”

Husch paid no attention, just staring at her own face, touching her cheeks with her fingertips. “The biomancer, Langford, he said there was no hope, that my skin couldn’t heal like a human’s, that it lacked the elasticity – ”

“Eh, all true, but broken things are my whole, um. Thing. I can increase disorder, but you know how double-edged magic is, I can run the progression back the other way, too, and create order. There, poof, you’re pretty again, yay.” Elsie seemed bored with the whole situation now – she was chewing on her big toenail – and Crapsey got a sense of just how unsettling it could be to work with her. She was changeable as the moon, as the sea, as…

Well, the whim of a lunatic devoted to chaos.

“No offense, but what the fuck?” Nicolette said. “You fixed something? Increased order? That just… isn’t something I’d expect the great Elsie Jarrow to do.”

“That’s exactly the point.” Elsie spat out a toenail. “Half my power comes from doing the unexpected. A lot of the time even I don’t know what I’m going to do. That approach has worked out for me so far. Except for killing everyone I ever knew and loved or even liked, and being imprisoned for all those years, and everything. Otherwise it’s been a rock-solid strategy. Besides, I don’t mind creating order. I like it! Build those towers high! The more complex you make something, the bigger the mess it makes when it collapses.”

Crapsey was mulling that over when Dr. Husch’s cell phone rang. She looked at the screen and said, “What in the world…” She put the phone to her ear. “I didn’t expect to hear from you,” she said, walking toward a corner of the basement, presumably for privacy.

“We’re gonna have fun,” Elsie said, standing up, and walking toward Crapsey and Nicolette with her arms outstretched. “I’m in the mood again. What do you say? Three-way, right now? We’ve only five hands among us, but we can make do, right?”

Rondeau had, remarkably, never needed to make small talk with a god before. “What do you do for a living?” and “Which kind of massage do you like better, hot stone or shiatsu?” seemed like fruitless lines of inquiry. But Pelham was off looking for Marla – it was weird that the god hadn’t managed to show up where Marla actually was, but presumably Death didn’t need to be omniscient about anything except maybe actuarial tables – leaving Rondeau here alone with one of the more powerful personifications of an impersonal force in the universe. Probably better to keep mum, but Rondeau had a pathological aversion to silence, so he had to say something. He settled for, “So, did you find that dead guy? The one who got murdered?”

“Mmm? Yes, I spoke to Ronin.” Death sat in a soft, red leather armchair beneath a light-filled window. He looked like something from a Renaissance painting (specifically the sort of portrait commissioned by wealthy and amoral merchants). Death must have brought the chair with him, or conjured it into existence, as the chairs that normally furnished the bookshop were straight-backed and wooden. Rondeau hadn’t actually seen the chair appear, but that was Death’s whole modus operandi. He insinuated himself. By the time you started wondering where he’d come from, he was already in place.

“Ronin,” Rondeau said, leaning against a bookshelf. “Something about that name has been bugging me, it sounds familiar. It’s Japanese, right? Wasn’t there a movie called Ronin?”

“I wouldn’t know. But yes, the man was born in Japan, though that is not his given name – he chose it.”

“Right. I don’t know much about Japanese mythology. Ancestor worship and stuff, right? What kind of hell, or heaven, or whatever, do they favor?”

“Once upon a time, Japan had some interesting visions of the afterlife. The ten judges of Hell, and the old hag Datsueba, who would rip the clothes from your back as you passed by – and if you weren’t wearing clothes, she would rip off your skin.” Death took an art book featuring pictures of the moon from the shelf and began flipping through it idly as he spoke. “Many Japanese are quite secular now. The religious ones tend to be Buddhist or Shinto, and Shintoism eschews the issue of death almost entirely – they leave that for the Buddhists. But neither faith is known for its rich and complex visions of the afterlife. Nirvana for some, or the purgatory of the bardo, followed by reincarnation – which does happen, sometimes, it’s very strange, and I don’t entirely understand it, but I usually don’t interfere. Nothing of the original personality seems to remain when a soul is reincarnated and returns to Earth. It’s more like… recycling a plastic bottle into a plastic bag. The raw material is the same, but the end product is quite different. When those people die again, and come back to me, they’re like a wholly different soul.”

“Huh. So is this Ronin in the reincarnation queue?”

“Oh, no. His spiritual inclinations lay in a different direction, and his afterlife is… rather more unique. I never cease to be amazed by the heavens and hells people conjure for themselves. Ronin made himself into a sentient ocean on a watery planet. I had to create a boat of reeds and papyrus and ply his waters for a while before he noticed me, and even then, it took a while before he consented to talk to me. I could have made myself into an asteroid and smashed into his surface, and really gotten his attention, but… he was so beautiful. Blue and vast. I couldn’t bring myself to do something so crass. Besides, there was no hurry. Time in the eternal realms functions differently from time in this world. Things are much slower down there.” He sighed. “That’s part of why waiting for Marla to die is so tedious – ”

“Wait,” Rondeau said, standing up straighter. The moment he spoke he realized he’d just interrupted Death, but, shit, too late now. “So you’re telling me everybody gets to create their own afterlife?”

Death shrugged, closing the moon book on his lap. “People get what they expect, mostly, or what they think they deserve. Very few realize they’re the ones creating the afterlife they live in – shaping the raw magic of my realm into appropriate shapes.”

“Huh. So the bad guys come to bad ends because deep down they know they deserve it? But there are plenty of evil people who don’t think they’re evil.”

“Yes.”

“So, what, they just get to cavort in the corpse gardens of Pedophile Island or whatever, happy and depraved for eternity?”

Death shrugged. “Sometimes. And why not? It’s not as if rehabilitation or punishment really matter – occasional reincarnation notwithstanding, eternity is eternal. It doesn’t matter if the souls are reformed, or tormented. They can’t hurt anyone while they’re locked in the palaces of their own imaginings – every figure they conjure is an aspect of their own selves. Anyway, when freed from the pressures of the flesh, and the poison of bad brain chemistry, people can be remarkably different, and some very nasty folk have felt profound remorse for their actions in life. Still, as someone who once dabbled in cruelty and later saw the error of my ways, I… occasionally intervene, and try to bring a certain amount of moral clarity to the truly repellent souls. But you’d be surprised how seldom it’s necessary. Most people realize, on some level, when they’ve done unforgivable things.”

“But if I ever manage to die, you’ll totally hook me up, right?” Rondeau said. “I mean, I assume I’m an immortal psychic parasite who wears human bodies like you wear pants, but I’m not a hundred percent sure. You can’t know the unknowable and all that. I could die someday.”

“I doubt you’ll have any trouble in the underworld.” Death leaned forward. “Although, if you’d like to make sure, I’d be open to making an arrangement. Not just limited to the pleasures of the afterlife, either – I can make sure your days on Earth are pleasant beyond your imagining.”

Rondeau frowned. “I’m… pretty rich, and just as bone idle as I’d like to be already.”

Death snorted. “You can afford to live well on a nice island, Rondeau. But I could give you the wealth to buy your own islands, and the influence to rule them, and the power to shape them to your whim.”

Rondeau licked his lips. He knew, instinctively, that he wasn’t the kind of person who should be trusted with reality-altering powers. But he was exactly the kind of person who found them very tempting. So: why was Death trying to tempt him? “I’m guessing this would be more in the nature of a transaction than a gift?”

“I wouldn’t ask for much,” Death said. “Only, if there comes a time when you could do something and save Marla Mason’s life, or do nothing and let her die, I’d ask you… to choose nothing.”

Rondeau whistled. “You want me to betray my best friend?”

“I suppose you could put it that way,” Death said. “But you’re free to say no. The fact that you’re almost certainly immortal is one of the reasons I’m willing to ask you this – there’s no implied threat, you see, since I can’t take your life. Still, I hope you consider the option. Marla would never know, after all – your failing to act in time to save her would hardly strike her as unbelievable. You often fail to act in a timely fashion, don’t you? It’s not as if dying would be the end of Marla – she’d ascend to her goddesshood, and begin her truly important work.” Death sniffed. “Not that investigating murders isn’t important, I suppose, but from my point of view, one more dead person is hardly anything to get worked up about.”

“Thanks for the offer, really, but I think I have to pass.” Rondeau wanted to go crawl behind the counter and hide. This was Death; he wasn’t human. He didn’t get humans. If you wanted to be technical, Rondeau wasn’t a human, either, but he’d lived as one long enough to get a pretty good handle on the subtleties.

“No, no, don’t decide now, mull it over. Dream about the kind of power I could give you. I’m not asking you to raise a hand against Marla, I’d never ask you that – but not raising a hand? Just… standing by? All I’m asking you to do is… nothing at all, at the right time, if the situation arises.”

“Seriously, I – ”

“Do not answer.” Death’s voice was like an ice gale, freezing Rondeau’s words in his throat. “Just… act, or do not act, as the circumstances warrant.”

“Okay,” he croaked.

Death rose and strode over to Rondeau, putting a hand on his shoulder. It was like being touched by a marble statue: heavy and cold. “I’d appreciate it if you kept this conversation between us. I want what’s best for Marla, that’s all, but I don’t think she would understand. If you saw someone you loved wasting their life on trivialities, when you knew they could be doing much greater things, wouldn’t you want to steer them toward greatness?” His face was long, pale, and earnest; his eyes lively and bright; but all Rondeau could imagine was a void behind those eyes, an everlasting blackness. Eternity was eternity. As far as Death was concerned, everything before eternity was just a waste of time.

“I’m, uh, a pretty big fan of trivialities.” Rondeau resisted the urge to squirm away from Death’s touch. “String together enough trivialities, and you’re talking about something pretty substantial.”

“Disappointing.” Death let go of Rondeau and spun around just as the door to the bookshop opened. “Marla, darling! I come bearing news from the worlds below.”

“Anything useful?” Marla entered, followed by Pelham, and she sat right down in the chair Death had vacated. She looked worried, and thoughtful, which was a nice change from the way she’d mostly looked lately – namely, bored and pissed-off.

“Alas, I have little to report.” Death sat on the arm of the chair, putting his hand on Marla’s shoulder, prompting her to roll her eyes. “Ronin declined to tell me who’d murdered him.”

“What, he doesn’t know?”

“He knows – he just doesn’t want to say. He informed me it was none of my business.”

“But you’re Death,” Rondeau said. “It seems like his murder would fall under your jurisdiction.”

“He disagreed, and politely asked me to leave him to his eternity. So I did.”

“Don’t you have some kind of kill-o-vision you can access to see the dirty deed done?” Marla said. “I thought you were present at the moment of every death.”

“I am present for every death the way a bank is present for every credit card transaction, my love. In a highly-distributed, extremely abstract, and basically impersonal fashion. Oh, I sometimes make a personal appearance, if the deceased interests me particularly, but that’s a rarity. Don’t pout, Marla.”

She shruggled his hand off her shoulder. “I don’t pout. I’m not pouting. I’m fuming. You’re telling me there’s no way you can find out who murdered Ronin?”

“Marla, I’m Death. Of course I could find out, if I expended the effort. But Ronin asked me not to do so, and I am granting his request.”

“You’d favor some dead guy over your own wife?”

“I’m not just the god of Death, Marla – I’m the god of the dead. One of my subjects made a reasonable request, and I see no reason to deny it.”

“You want me to have to do this the hard way, don’t you?”

“It is lovely to see you interested in something again, I admit. Be honest. Did you take this case because you have a burning desire to see justice done, or because you thought investigating a supernatural murder would be interesting?”

“You know me well enough to know the answer to that one.”

Death spread his hands. “Then where’s the fun if I just tell you who killed Ronin?”

“What, it’ll mean more to me if I earn it? That what you’re trying to say?”

“Hmm. I suppose so.”

Marla sighed. “I prefer to be the one teaching people lessons, Mr. Mason. You’d do well to remember that in the future. But, fine, point taken. If you’re not going to help me, beat it. I’ll see you at my funeral. Which won’t be for a long time, so don’t get excited.”

Death stood. “Before I go, I wanted to give you this.” He slipped the silver ring off his right hand and held it up. “You lost your cloak – and good riddance to the vile thing – but I hate to think of you with only one artifact in your possession.”

Marla grunted. She still had a magical dagger that could cut through anything physical and many things that weren’t, including ghosts and astral bodies; it was an exact replica of the dagger of office she’d had as chief sorcerer of Felport, and it was also a gift from Death. Being married to a god had advantages, Rondeau had to admit.

“What is it?”

“A wedding band.”

“Well, yeah. What’s it do?”

“Again – where’s the fun if I just tell you?”

Marla actually smiled. “Ha. Fine. I never read instruction manuals anyway. It won’t kill anyone it touches, will it? Give me that much of a heads-up.”

“No touch of death,” he said. “I have to reserve some of my powers for myself.” He kissed Marla on the forehead – if Rondeau had ever tried doing that, Marla would have kicked his balls up through his ribcage – and then left, this time walking out the actual front door.

Marla squinted at the ring, shrugged, and slipped it into her pocket.

“Are you going to wear that?” Rondeau said.

“I put on a wearable artifact once before without knowing what the hell it did,” Marla said. “And that cloak eventually dumped an ocean of shit on my head. That’s not a mistake I’m going to make again.” She shook her head. “Never get married, gentlemen. It’s a peculiar institution.”

“So what now, Poirot?” Rondeau said. “Since the shortcuts failed us, what? We take the long way around?”

“I guess we go investigate.” She began pacing up and down the room and talking to herself while Rondeau lounged and Pelham worked on reorganizing the bookshelves according to some arcane system of his own. “So,” she said. “Let’s look at the evidence. I haven’t made plaster casts of any footprints or taken any fingerprints, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have any clues. The murderer is someone powerful enough to deploy supernatural forensic countermeasures, to shroud their identity even from one of Rondeau’s oracles. Ronin doesn’t want to give up the killer, which maybe means it’s someone he wants to protect, for whatever reason. So what’s that tell us?”

“You need a violin to play or some cocaine to inject or something,” Rondeau said. “Your pacing around is making me tired.”

“It’s obviously someone in the magical community,” Pelham said, without looking away from his work. Rondeau wanted to ask if he was sorting by the Dewey Decimal or the Library of Congress system, but since he didn’t actually know what the difference was, he didn’t bother. “Any murder investigation would start with the victim’s closest associates, wouldn’t it? If a woman dies, you look at the husband. If a child dies, consider the parents.”

“You mean he might have been killed by one of the other surfers? Huh, maybe, but I get the feeling they’re pretty closely bound-up together – it’s hard to imagine one of them could do the dirty deed without the others finding out. Still, it’s worth looking into.”

“We could see if there are any ex-surfers, too,” Rondeau said, getting into it now. “After all, where there’s a group, there’s usually an outcast.”

“Ha.” Marla paused for a moment, then tromped on, up and down. She was going to wear a groove in the hardwood if she made a habit out of this. “Speaking as an outcast, I can sympathize with murderous impulses. So that’s a good idea. We’ll ask our clients a few questions. Not that I can necessarily believe anything they say – for all I know they’re a cult worshipping dark sea gods and practicing human sacrifice…” She snapped her fingers. “Rondeau. Get in touch with the Bay Witch, would you? Call Hamil, he can reach her. She knows these guys, but she’s not of them anymore, so maybe she’ll have some insight.”

“Insight? From Zufi? Maybe if her brain worked even remotely like a normal person’s…”

“It can’t hurt to ask,” Marla said. “Come on, we’re working our contacts here, this is good. Probably worth asking some of the other magic types in the area about Ronin and the rest of the wave-mages, too – try to get an objective sense of the group.”

“Do you know many people in the local magical community?” Pelham asked. “Is there a chief sorcerer here?”

Marla shook her head. “I don’t know if they were ever all that hierarchical, but things are extra messy around here now – we told you about that lunatic hunting and killing other sorcerers not too long ago, turning them into sharks and letting them drown in the air? He left a lot of holes in the local scene, or so I understand. I only really know one of the kahunas.” She sighed. “Guess we’d better go see her. Arachne. She lives way the hell on the other side of the island, just off the road to Hana. I’m not up for that shit tonight. What do you say, Pelham – how about tomorrow morning we go for a drive?”

Pelham, of course, felt like doing whatever Marla wanted – and people thought Rondeau let Marla push him around. At least he wasn’t, like, genetically engineered to be enthusiastically obedient. “That’s enough work for one day,” Marla said. “I’m going to take Pelham to get some seafood, Rondeau. You coming?”

“I’ll catch up with you,” Rondeau said. “I should call Hamil about the Bay Witch before it gets too late in Felport.” After they left, Rondeau went into the office and sat down behind the desk. He took out his phone and dialed Hamil, Marla’s old consigliere back in Felport, and asked him to pass on a message to Zufi.

Hamil agreed without asking too many questions, then said, “How’s Marla doing?” in his bass rumble.

“She’s staying alive,” Rondeau said. He asked after a few of his acquaintances in Felport, trying to sound casual, hoping Hamil wouldn’t realize there was only one name on the list he really cared about. After he hung up, he sat for a few minutes looking at the scythe-shaped letter opener on Marla’s desk, sighed, and then dialed another number. It rang half-a-dozen times before being picked up.

The voice said, “I didn’t expect to hear from you.”

“Yeah,” Rondeau said. “Hamil told me you were, you know, all recovered. After everything that happened.”

A chuckle. “I’m good as new.”

“I’m glad to hear it. The reason I called is… you know that counseling you gave me when I was all broken up after Bradley Bowman died? You really helped me out a lot, gave me some great advice. Some pretty heavy shit is going on here, and I don’t really have anyone I can talk to about it, so I was wondering… does that doctor-patient confidentiality thing we had still apply?”

“Of course, Rondeau,” Dr. Husch replied. “Tell me your troubles.”

“I can’t wait.” Death smelled of cut lemons and tarnished metal. “We can finally start our afterlife together – ”

Marla resisted the urge to knee Death in the crotch, but she did disentangle herself from his embrace and push him away. “We’ve been over this. I’m not eager to shuffle off this mortal coil yet, and like you always say, the rest of my long and natural life is just a drop in the bucket of eternity, and all that – you promised you wouldn’t rush me into an early grave.”

He held up his hands, rings twinkling in the light from the brass chandeliers. “I’m not! I have no hand in this at all, darling. But there are forces gathering against you, and, well… while there are no certain futures, there are certainly likely ones, and it doesn’t look like you’ll live to see the new year here in the upper world.”

“Huh.” Rondeau turned to Pelham. “So, if your mistress dies, what happens to you? Do you, like, crawl onto the funeral pyre? Or serve her in the afterlife like an unlucky Egyptian servant?”

“The bond is broken by death.” Pelham wrung his hands. “But – but surely – ”

“Surely for sure.” Marla crossed her arms. “Who’s coming after me, Death?”

He sighed. “I’m not certain. I can tell when someone is going to die – or when they’re likely to die, though the possibilities have always proliferated rather wildly for you – and gradually those lines of probability narrow into certainties. Your death is… increasingly likely. I know some other people who will almost certainly die with you, in the same place, around the same time. Perhaps that might give you a hint?”

“Shoot,” she said.

“A witch named Nicolette,” Death said. “And, ah… your brother, Jason.”

Marla whistled. “Both of them? They don’t even know each other.”

Death shrugged. “Perhaps not yet, but they will probably die within half-a-dozen yards and a few minutes of one another, and your odds of lasting long beyond their demise are quite slim.”

Marla nodded. “But now I know about the threat. That changes the equation, right? Forewarned is forearmed and all that.”

Death spread his hands, and gazed down at the rings. The gems glowed faintly in various colors, from sky-blue to the red of strawberry wine to a necrotic pulsing black. He slowly shook his head. “Here, in this physical form, I have only limited access to my full powers, but from what I can see… . No, sorry. Your knowledge doesn’t change things substantially. Oh, the place and time, those have shifted, but death is still rushing toward you. None of this is written, nothing is ordained, but… you don’t need to believe in fate to know a dropped billiard ball is going to hit the floor. It’s simple physics. Objects are in motion, and it is possible to chart the trajectories of those objects, barring outside interference.”
“Like someone kicking the billiard ball through a window.” Marla rounded on Rondeau. “You! You’re supposed to be my seer. Haven’t you been having any crazy prophetic dreams? Bradley used to have visions if I was about to stub my toe!”

“Bullshit,” Rondeau said. “Anyway, I take way more opiates than Bradley did. I’ve had a few of those dreams, the prophetic ones, and they’re cryptic as fuck and scary as hell. I don’t like them much. Is it any surprise I pop some downers before bedtime?”

Marla sat down on the padded stool behind the counter, happy to put a slab of oak between herself and the Walking Death. She stared at the rippled windows of the bookshop, and after a moment, she smiled. “All right. Okay. What’s my timeline looking like?”

Death reached into his vest pocket and tugged on a chain. Marla expected a pocketwatch, but instead, he pulled out a small hourglass, filled with white sand, and held it up to the light. Marla rolled her eyes. “An hourglass? Really?”

“There’s nothing wrong with tradition. I should show you my scythe sometime. I’d say you have… three days? Perhaps a week? It varies, there’s some slippage, so it could be a bit more, or a bit less.”

“Around Hallowe’en, then?” Marla said. “Isn’t that a little, I dunno, over-the-top?”

“For a witch’s duel? Someone has a taste for the classics, anyway.”

Marla cracked her knuckles methodically. “All right, then. I get the general idea. Nicolette and Jason both have reasons to want me dead. I figure this is a revenge thing, kick me when I’m down, then keep kicking me until my insides come out. I don’t know how they got together, or will get together, or whatever, but I’ll roll with it. I can make plans.”

“Mrs. Mason,” Pelham said. He glanced at Death. “Or, er… Mrs. Death?”

“I believe my wife would prefer to keep her own name,” Death said.

“She would. What is it, Pelham?”

“Forgive me for saying so, but… you seem almost pleased at the prospect of your imminent demise.”

“Nah,” Rondeau said. “She’s pleased at the prospect of a fight. Aren’t you?”

She reached under the counter and took out a Samoan war club, three feet of intricately carved black wood curved at the end like a blunt hockeystick, the whole thing heavy as a sledgehammer. “Beautiful, isn’t it? A kahuna over on the Hana side asked me to help out with a ghost problem, and gave me this as payment. I haven’t had a chance to hit anybody with it yet. I don’t know that I could bring myself to use it on Jason, despite everything he’s done… but I could sure as shit split Nicolette’s skull with this.”

Death sighed. “I hate it when you get all bloodthirsty. It’s unbecoming in a queen of the dead.”

“I’m not dead yet, loverboy.” She put the war club away. “Thanks for the heads-up about my imminent demise. But while I’m alive, I’ve got a job to do, which is why I called you here in the first place. There was a wave-mage named Ronin. Somebody cut his throat and let him bleed out into the waves. His cohort want to know who did the deed. Divinations don’t turn up anything, and Rondeau even summoned an oracle that couldn’t help us. The killer has whipped up some kind of big obfuscating magic – but I figure you can just pop in on the dead guy’s private hell or heaven and ask him who cut his throat, right?”

“I’ll do almost anything for you.” Death leaned across the counter, bringing his face close to Marla’s. “But the price is a kiss.”

“What would she have to pay to get you to kill Nicolette and Jason before they come after us?” Rondeau said, and just grinned when Marla glared. “What? It’s worth asking.”

“We have an agreement,” Death said, glancing at Rondeau. “I will do nothing to hasten Marla’s demise… but I will not intervene to delay it. This life of hers is important, of course, but from my point of view, it’s all just… prelude.” He looked back at Marla. “The underworld is dull without you. The place could use – ”

“If you say ‘a woman’s touch,’ this is one woman you’ll never touch,” Marla warned. Death chuckled, and Marla leaned in and planted a quick kiss on his lips.

“Would it be so bad, spending eternity with me?” Death murmured.

“I’ll be honest,” Marla said. “It’s not the thought of being dead that bothers me. It’s the thought of being beaten.” She shook her head. “You wouldn’t want to spend eternity with me if Nicolette manages to kill me. That’s one bad mood that would never end. Hell would become a genuinely unpleasant place with me in charge.”

“You’ll be a good queen.” Death stepped away from the counter. “It’s a shame the qualities that make you worthy to stand beside me also serve to delay the time until you do. All right. I’ll check on this – Ronin, was it? I’ll be in touch when I find out something.” He ambled across the room, opened a door in the corner, and stepped through, shutting the door after him, whereupon it turned into nothing more than a slanted shadow.

Marla grinned at Rondeau “There. That’s a detective-type thing to do, right? Working informants, using sources, all that stuff? I rule at this.”

“I can’t believe you married Death,” Rondeau said. “How do you not mention that?”

“Probably because it leads to conversations like this one? So what do we do with the rest of the afternoon? I can’t do much about this investigation until I hear back from, ah – ”

“Your DH?” Rondeau said. “That’s what the happy homemaker types call it on the internet – ‘dear husband.’ Or ‘dead husband’ I guess in this case.”

“Go swim in a shark tank.” Marla looked up at the ceiling. “I should prepare for the attack that’s coming, too, but… well. Back in Felport I’d call the seers and sibyls, I’d tailor the pattern recognition sensors on the border guardians to look for Jason and Nicolette, I’d put all the snitches and street kids on alert… but what the hell do I do here?”

“Well,” Rondeau said. “Death says your brother is coming. So maybe, I don’t know… call him?”

Marla snorted. “You want me to reach out to Jason? Are you forgetting he shot you?”

“He did worse than that – he used me, said he’d teach me to be a con artist, said I’d be part of his crew, and then tried to kill me as soon as I got a little bit inconvenient.” Rondeau shook his head. “But he’s still your family. If nothing else, calling him up is an unpredictable thing to do, right? An unlikely thing? Some of that, what do you call it, lateral thinking, it might shake up some of the paths of probability your DH was talking about.”

“It’s not like I even have Jason’s number. He had a cell in Felport but it was a burner, he tossed it – ”

Pelham cleared his throat. “Mrs. Mason, if I may… there is an intermediate connection you might exploit.”

“Who? I don’t know anybody who knows Jason. Nobody alive, anyway. Cam-Cam is dead, Danny Two Saints is dead – ”

“Mrs. Mason,” Pelham interrupted. “I meant that you could call your mother.”

Marla put her head down on the counter and brought out some of her choicest curse words, the ones she saved for special occasions.

#

When they’d reunited after their long estrangement, Marla’s brother Jason had told her their mother was dead, passed on years ago from cirrhosis of the liver, leaving behind an inheritance of exactly jack-shit. He’d used that news to both guilt-trip Marla into some family bonding and as a way to scam his way into becoming the beneficiary of Marla’s own last will and testament, acting on the mistaken impression that she was a rich crime boss. After Jason’s treachery was revealed, Marla realized nothing he said could be trusted, including the potential life-or-death of her mother, so she’d made some discreet inquiries. It turned out Gloria Mason still lived in the same shitty trailer in the same shitty Indiana town she always had.

Marla remembered her childhood phone number just fine. The voice that answered was smoke-roughened and way too old, but it had an aggrieved and peevish tone she recognized instantly: “What?”

“Nice to talk to you too, Mom,” Marla said.

“You got a wrong number, girl.”

“Don’t hang up!” Marla shouted, glad she’d sent Rondeau and Pelham out of the shop. Making this call was hard enough. “It’s me, mom. It’s Marla.”

A long silence, and then an inhalation that probably involved a cigarette. “Well, well. What kind of trouble are you in?”

Marla gritted her teeth. Her relationship with her mother wasn’t the only reason she’d run away from home before turning sixteen, but it had been in the top five. Gloria Mason had been a roadhouse beauty with a string of drunken boyfriends, and as soon as Marla hit puberty, her mother started to view her with a combination of distrust, suspicion, jealousy, and entirely unhealthy competition. “No trouble at all. Just… thought it was time I got in touch.”

“After nearly twenty years? Isn’t that sweet of you, to remember the woman who gave birth to you and kept you clothed and fed. I just naturally assumed you were dead, murdered by some psychopath the first night after you ran away. Nice of you to call and set my mind at ease.”

“I sent money,” Marla said. “A few times.”

A laugh. “Did you now? Jason told me he was the one who sent it.”

Of course he did. “He ran away too, you know”

Her mother’s voice was patient, and as condescending as a god talking to a wayward worshipper. “No, dear. He told me he was leaving. He kissed my cheek and gave me an address where I could reach him. He moved away. That’s not the same thing. I guess all this time you’ve just been confused about the difference. So now you know you should feel bad. I’m sure you’ll get right on that.”

Marla leaned forward in the chair, resting her forehead on the smooth wooden surface of the desk. She’d rather kick a hellhound than do this, any day. “You’re right. I’m sorry. I was young, and stupid, and ungrateful.” And you were an evil bitch who was either willfully blind to the way your boyfriends groped me, or who thought I deserved it, or who thought I wanted it. But saying that wouldn’t get her what she wanted, so she didn’t. “Listen. I ran into Jason a few months ago. That’s why I’m calling – I’ve been thinking about family.”

“Blood isn’t much, but I guess it’s something. So this is just a call to catch up? Let me know whether or not I have any grandbabies?”

“No babies here.”

“Learned to keep your legs closed, did you?”

Marla had to literally bite her tongue to keep from saying something nasty – I was a virgin when I left home, no thanks to the efforts of your thousand asshole boyfriends. She almost hung up the phone, and her hands started to shake, but she took a deep breath and powered through. “I… we should talk. Try to get past this… all this time and distance between us.”

“You abandoned this family.” Gloria’s voice was cool and poisonous. “Now you think you can make one phone call and get back on the Christmas card list?”

“I have to start somewhere, don’t I? And like I said, I saw Jason. We were supposed to get together again recently, but I got sidetracked and couldn’t make it, and now the number I had for him doesn’t work. Do you have a way to reach him?”

A long silence. “I see. This is about money, isn’t it? Jason always was a soft touch, he’ll probably even give you some, the fool boy.”

“It’s not about money,” Marla said. “It’s… more a matter of life and death.”

Another harsh laugh. “His, or yours? I can tell you which one I’d favor. Never mind, never mind. Give me your number. I’ll call Jason and tell him you’re trying to reach him.”

Marla rattled off Rondeau’s cell number – no way she was giving her mom one of her numbers, and they could always throw Rondeau’s phone in the ocean later. After performing an exorcism. “Thank you. I know I wasn’t the easiest daughter in the world, and this means a lot.”

“You were plenty easy, and don’t think I didn’t notice. I’m glad this means something to you. It doesn’t to me.” There was a click as she hung up the phone.

“That went well,” Marla said to the empty office.

#

Marla was crap at waiting, and she had nothing to do but wait – for Death to get back in touch, and for Jason to call her back, assuming her mother even tried to pass on the message. So she locked up the bookshop and went out out onto Front Street. She walked down a couple of blocks, then crossed to the ocean side, going down a short flight of steps next to a mediocre cheeseburger restaurant with spectacular views. Just like that, she was on the beach, and what a beach: pale sand, views of the sea, sailboats, and the island of Lanai, that last partially obscured by clouds. A far cry from the bay of Felport, with its iron-gray water fizzing and sloshing with pollution by the shore, and the scraggly wooded islands farther out. Marla would never admit to liking this view better than the one in her old city – but she could grudgingly admit it was lovely enough in its way, even if she was sick of looking at it by now.

She took off her boots and stood in the surf, gazing at the leaning mast of a dead sailboat that had been reefed a few score yards out and abandoned years before. “I know how you feel,” she told the boat.

“And how’s that?” The voice was cheerful enough, but so unexpected that Marla reached for a knife before turning her head.

A shirtless, athletic Hawai’ian man wearing knee-length blue shorts and rubber sandals sat down in the sand next to her feet. A long black ponytail, bound with colorful elastics along its length, hung down between his shoulderblades, straight as a plumb line. He was somewhere north of twenty and south of fifty, but Marla had trouble pinning his age down any more precisely than that – his face was young, but something about his calm dark eyes suggested they’d seen a lot of things over a lot of years. He looked up at her, smiling. “Will you sit and talk with me?”

Marla sat. “Have we met?”

“We have now. My name is Reva.” He offered his hand.

She didn’t take it. “I’m Marla.” She didn’t get any whiff of bad crazy off him, or any intimation of power, either – which meant he was either an ordinary man, or strong enough in magic to hide every trace of the uncanny.

“Oh, I know. I told Glyph and the others of his tribe about you. How’s the job going, by the way?”

“I shouldn’t discuss an ongoing investigation.” She looked him over. “Glyph told me a god recommended me.”

“Yes.” Still calm. But crazy could be very calm under certain circumstances.

“Reva’s your name? Can’t say it rings a bell. I’ve heard of Pele, and Lono, and Uli, and – ”

“Oh, they’re all much greater than I am. I’m the sort of god only a hipster could love – so obscure, almost nobody’s ever heard of me.”

“I always thought the big gods were sellouts anyway. So what exactly are you supposed to be the god of?”

“I was the god of a little island in the Pacific, far from here – far from anywhere, really. Not many people lived there, but there were enough inhabitants to kindle me into specificity, to expect the local power to have a mind and a personality, and so draw me into being. I lived a simple life of storms, and fishing, and births, and deaths. But, alas… my island sank.”

“Wait, what? You mean sank? Like Atlantis?”

“Atlantis was a great city. My island was little more than a village and some trees. But, yes. It sank. That happens sometimes. Volcanic activity. Earthquakes. Land rises, land falls.”

“Huh. So all your worshippers died?”

“Oh, not that many. Most just left. Islands don’t sink overnight. They departed, and left me behind. I found myself a genius loci with no loci, or no worshippers anyway.”

“Isn’t that a death sentence for a god?”

“Eh. Not necessarily. Belief is a factor in the birth of gods – some gods, anyway, sometimes. Others seem to exist because the universe needs them to exist. Those gods were around before there were people, though they’ve come to resemble people more and more over the years, at least in some of their aspects. I mean the big gods – sea gods, storm gods, like that.”

“The god of death.”

Reva nodded. “That’s another one. But smaller gods, yes, we emerge from raw magical power, taking on specific forms based on the beliefs and expectations of our worshippers. But that belief just starts us going, like crumpled up newspapers are used to start a fire. After it’s started, the fire can continue burning long after the original source of fuel is gone – as long as it can find something else to keep it going. So, with my home and original purpose gone, I had to find another niche.”

“And more worshippers to consume, oh burning bush?”

“All right, the fire metaphor was ill-chosen. I do not consume my followers. Nor do I look for sacrifices. Since I became a wandering, displaced god, I became the god of wanderers and the displaced. Exiles, and the homesick, and the expatriate. I’m the god of people who aren’t from around here – wherever ‘here’ might be.”

“Uh-huh. No offense, but I don’t get a real godly vibe off you.” Marla squinted, letting Death’s gift of true seeing fill her. The man before her wore no illusions – he was just what he appeared to be.

Reva nodded. “Good. That means it’s working. When I come to a place, I like to take on a shape that conforms to local norms – this body is perfectly human and quite unremarkable here, as it should be, even though I made it from dust and sand and dead animals and sea salt. Everything is just atoms, after all, and it’s trivial to assemble the atoms this particular way. Just be glad I didn’t appear as a loudmouthed middle-aged sports fisherman instead. That shape would fit better on the Big Island anyway.”

“Yeah, okay, whatever. I’m not in the market for a new god, anyway, so you can take your pitch elsewhere.”

“Oh, Marla Mason. You’ve lost heart, haven’t you? Lost your purpose, along with your home. A man once told me, ‘a person needs a purpose like a car needs a driver.’” Reva rose, brushing sand from the seat of his shorts. “I’m already your god, Marla – because you are an exile, and far from home. I’m not asking for worship or tax-deductible donations. Just know that, when I can, I help my people.”

“What makes you think I want your help?”

“I know you don’t want it.” Reva began to walk south along the shoreline, and called after him: “But I also know you need it.”

Marla watched him until he was just a speck in the distance, then flopped back on the sand to look at the sky and the clouds. Maybe he really was a god. She’d met enough of them, more than most people ever did – maybe some god-stink had rubbed off on her, attracting others.

Someone cleared his throat discreetly, and a flash of anger rushed through Marla. Godsdamnit, couldn’t she have a few minutes alone to contemplate her mortality and think about who she might have to kill to stay alive? And what she’d do with herself if she did manage to survive? And if it was even worth bothering to survive?

“What is it, Pelham?” she said, calm as calm.

“Your husband appeared in the grocery store where Rondeau and I were shopping. He is now waiting at the bookshop.” Her valet paused. “He told me to let you know he has bad news.”

“Of course he does. Why ruin a perfect streak?”

Let’s leave Marla and her friends for now, and take a few moments to talk about Dr. Leda Husch.

You don’t know her? There’s no reason you should; she’s not alive, exactly, and will never die, though she often wishes she had. For many years now Dr. Husch has run the Blackwing Institute, a hospital of sorts for mentally ill sorcerers, located a bit outside the city of Felport, Marla Mason’s old holdfast. Marla and Dr. Husch have had their disagreements, but they were essentially allies, and business associates, and occasionally even friends — as two strong women with difficult jobs, they had certain things in common, after all. But shortly before Marla’s exile, something very bad happened to Dr. Husch. Her assailant was a woman from another universe — a woman who was only in this universe because of something Marla did, a certain selfish act that ripped a hole in the fabric of reality and let bad things cross over, specifically a bad thing called the Mason. But you know about her. She sent a lot of people your way, didn’t she?

The Mason did a great deal of damage on her rampage through this reality before Marla stopped her, but the only damage that concerns us just now is what happened to Dr. Husch:

The Mason tore her to pieces. Literally. Small pieces. Hundreds of them.

For most people, being dismembered so thoroughly is fatal, but as I mentioned, Dr. Husch isn’t exactly alive — she’s a fully sentient and self-aware homunculus, created long ago by a powerful sorcerer, and as such, she cannot die. Though she was ripped to shreds, she retained awareness throughout her ordeal and the aftermath. She was later reassembled by a biomancer named Langford, and she — oh, but listen to me, going on and on. Better to show you.

While Marla is investigating a murder in Maui, back on the mainland a pair of people are on their way to meet Dr. Husch, and they should suffice for our introduction to the other side of this story. These two people were never friends of Marla: the first is a one-armed chaos witch named Nicolette, who holds a longstanding grudge against Marla, and the other is Crapsey, the Mason’s old lackey and the dark doppelganger to Rondeau. Crapsey was stranded in this world when Marla killed his mistress the Mason, and after that he began clinging to Nicolette’s coattails, because some people are only happy when they’re being told what to do. Let’s see how things look through Crapsey’s eyes…

#

“Aren’t you even a little bit afraid Dr. Husch is going to throw you in a cell again?” Crapsey said. “The Mason and I just broke you out of this place not so long ago.”

“I’ve got you to protect me, big boy.” Nicolette kicked at the massive oak doors of the Blackwing Institute, her boot thumping with the regularity of a metronome.

Crapsey winced. “Dr. Husch isn’t going to be too happy to see me, either — I was just following orders, but I did some not-so-nice stuff to her myself, the morning she got all torn up.”

“The divinations say this is the place to begin our campaign,” Nicolette said. “My dice and mouse bones and toad stones don’t lie.”

“I still say we could’ve just done some recruiting,” Crapsey said. “We should be looking for Marla’s enemies, not her allies.”

“There aren’t that many enemies left, ugly. Even though she doesn’t usually kill them herself, Marla’s rivals have pretty lousy life expectancies. There’s me, and there’s you, and maybe her brother, but even though he’s a hell of a con man, he’s not much of a fighter. Mutex is dead, Todd Sweeney is dead, Ayres is dead, Joshua Kindler is dead, Reave might as well be dead. The Mason was exiled from this reality, and you two idiots killed Susan Wellstone and Viscarro on your little cross-country rampage. My old boss Gregor is dead, Bulliard and Marla reached an understanding, I don’t exactly have a phone number for the so-called King of the Fairies, and — ”

“All right, all right!” Crapsey touched the butterfly knife in his pocket. It had seemed so simple, when Nicolette first brought up the idea — Marla was in exile, stripped of her powers, all but friendless. What better time to try and kill her? They’d join forces with some other people who hated Marla, fly down to Hawai’i, and unleash murder most foul. Except they’d had trouble finding anybody to fill out their team, which led Nicolette to cast a divination spell to suggest a course of action, and now, here they were, on the doorstep of one of Marla’s old allies. Maybe not a suicide mission, but probably an imprisonment mission, which was better, but not by much.

The door swung open, and Nicolette squinted inside. “What are you, a beekeeper in mourning now? Part of a Goth hazmat squad?”

The figure in the foyer wore a broad-brimmed black hat with a long black veil, the cloth thick enough to obscure her features entirely. She also wore a floor-length black dress of severe cut, and leather gloves to match. Not an inch of skin showed.

“Nicolette.” The voice that emerged from beneath the veil was cracked, broken, and jagged, but comprehensible. “Have you come to commit yourself?”

“Why, Doc? Do you miss me that much?”

“You never really belonged here.” Dr. Husch sounded somehow placid despite her shredded voice. Almost peaceful, Crapsey thought, even though she’d been cut to pieces. “I never believed you were mentally ill. You are vile, contemptible, and selfish, but sane. No, you were a political prisoner, kept here because of your repeated treasons against Marla Mason.” The doctor shrugged. “But Marla isn’t in charge anymore, and our new chief sorcerer has no particular interest in you. You’re lucky — you have a chance to start over. You’re just fortunate that Marla chose not to kill you. I used to share her compassion, but no more.” The hat and veil shifted, and Crapsey knew the doctor was looking at him. “And you. The last time you came to my door, I… suffered. I do not like suffering. I abhor it.”

Crapsey took a step back. “Doc, it wasn’t my idea, the Mason made me go after you. I kinda liked you, honestly, and anyway I didn’t catch you, you smacked me on the head — ”

“I know,” Dr. Husch said. “You are a lackey. And I understand your more… promiscuous tendencies… have been curtailed, making you a harmless lackey as well.”

Crapsey winced. Once upon a time, he’d had the power to leave his flesh and take over the bodies of others, overwriting the consciousnesses of the original owners, and tossing their souls into the darkness of oblivion without hope of resurrection or afterlife. He’d murdered hundreds that way, on the Mason’s orders, and changed bodies the way most people changed their shirts… but Marla had cast a spell that trapped his mind in this body, like a fly buzzing around in a glass jar. Worst of all, when this body died, there was no reason to think his consciousness would die too — he might just be trapped in his own rotting corpse forever, awake and aware. Probably justifiable punishment for his crimes, he could see that, but still: fucking harsh, to go from immortality to… well, an entirely more horrible form of immortality.

“Yeah, he’s been neutered,” Nicolette said. “He’s totally housebroken now. I don’t even know why I keep him around. He’s a born lickspittle, and as you can see, I’m in greater-than-usual need of a right-hand man.” She grinned and twitched her stump.

“Yes, I noticed your lack of limb. You should have stayed in the Institute. You had both arms when you were under my care.”

Nicolette ran her remaining hand over her scalp. While she was captive, Crapsey knew, they’d kept her head shaved — Nicolette used to have dreadlocks, with wicked charms woven into the locks. She was letting her hair grow back in, but all she had now was a pale duck-fuzz, which looked even dumber than a bare skull. “Not that I don’t miss your tender ministrations,” Nicolette said, “but I’m here about something else. A certain mutual enemy. Mind if we come inside and talk?”

“If that crosses my threshold — ” she pointed at Crapsey ” — it will be confined, forever, in the blackest cell I have. The one in the basement. The one I used to be too enlightened to keep anyone in. And you aren’t welcome through this door, either, chaos witch.”

“Uh, okay.” Crapsey took another step back. Much farther and he’d be back in the driveway. “We can talk out here. Or we can just… go. Probably it was a mistake to come here — ”

Nicolette interrupted. “The divinations don’t lie, Doc. I did three different readings, with entrails and dice and butterflies, and they all told me — you’re the one we need.”

“And what were you trying to find with this divination? Someone to lock you both up for your own good?”

“Nah.” Nicolette leaned in close, not quite crossing the threshold. “We were looking for somebody else who wanted Marla Mason dead bad enough to do something about it.”

The veil and the hat made reading expressions impossible, so it took a moment for Crapsey to realize that Dr. Husch was shaking with silent laughter, which finally bubbled forth in a harsh little series of caws. “Oh, dear,” she said. “Well, yes, divination doesn’t lie, assuming an augur skilled enough to read the signs correctly, but there’s nothing to stop a witch from asking entirely the wrong question.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Nicolette demanded.

“You should have asked, ‘Who would help us kill Marla Mason?’ Because my name would not have appeared in a list of answers to that query. I do mean Marla Mason harm. Her selfishness unleashed the Mason on the world, and that led directly to me becoming… this.” She drew out the last word in a hiss, and Crapsey steeled himself for a dramatic raising of the veil to reveal the horror beneath, but Dr. Husch settled for shuddering and hugging herself. “And Marla doesn’t care. She didn’t even come to see me after her exile, even though my hospital is outside the borders of Felport, and open to her. If she’d come… if she’d apologized… Well. I don’t know that it would have mattered, really. But she didn’t. Exile is far from sufficient punishment for her transgressions, and her selfishness. So, yes, I do mean her harm — but why on Earth do you think I’d need help from you two idiots to kill her?”

“No offense,” Nicolette said, “but every time one of the more dangerous loonies in this bin of yours got loose, you always went crying to Marla, and before her, you went crying to Sauvage, and I’m sure before that, you went crying to whoever was chief sorcerer before him. You’re a healer, right, and a jailer, and when it comes to fixing broken things and locking up the things that can’t be fixed, you’re pretty badass, and I’m full of respect for that. But killing Marla Mason? Doc, you just don’t have the chops. Neither do I, and neither does Crapsey, not alone. But together? Striking now, when she’s weak and friendless? We can all get revenge. Crapsey for getting stranded in this stupid universe he hates, all his powers stolen, his boss sent away to another universe. And me? She locked me up here. Before that she backed me into a corner so tight I had no choice but to kill my own mentor Gregor just to stay alive myself. Hell, indirectly, she’s the reason I lost my arm. What do you say? You, me, Crapsey, maybe we round up a few others, and go all legion of supervillains on her ass?”

“Not really legion of supervillains.” Crapsey flinched away when they both swiveled their heads toward him. He couldn’t help it — he’d read a lot of comic books in his home universe, and he wanted to get the metaphor right. “More like the… Marla Mason Revenge Squad. ”

“I am well aware of my limitations,” Dr. Husch said. “I do not intend to attack Marla personally. But as you pointed out, I am a jailer. This is the foremost magical containment facility on the East Coast, and I have in my care some of the most lethal sorcerers to ever grace this continent. Norma Nilson, the nihilomancer. Gustavus Lupo, the skinshifter. Roderick Barrow, who rules a dark realm of his own imagination, and yearns to loose his armies into this reality. Roger Vaughn — both Roger Vaughns, the original and his young reincarnation — and their terrible oceanic magics. The nameless madman who calls himself Everett Malkin, and claims to be Felport’s first chief sorcerer, displaced in time. The immortal Beast of Felport itself. And, of course, I have your hero, Nicolette, locked in the most potent cell I possess, at the center of a cube wrapped in bindings of order — the witch Elsie Jarrow. You would be amazed at what some of these people are willing to do when you dangle the prospect of freedom before them. So, no — I won’t be needing your services. Good luck with the rest of your miserable, pointless lives.” The doctor started to close the door.

Nicolette stuck a boot in the way, and Dr. Husch made a noise of distaste and opened it again. “Do you want to lose a foot along with your arm, woman?”

“We want in,” Nicolette said. “If nothing else, we can help wrangle the crazies. Besides, don’t bullshit me, there’s no way you can let Elsie Jarrow out, you’d never be able to control her, she’s too — ”

“I am well aware of her condition — indeed, as her doctor, I know far more about her situation than you do. As I said, your services will not be needed. Why hire Vasari when you can work with Michelangelo?”

“I’m going to assume that’s an insult,” Nicolette said. “Like ‘why listen to Rush when you can listen to Led Zeppelin?’ But I don’t mind — I’m not fit to touch the hem of Elsie Jarrow’s garment. But that just means I’m even more eager to lend a hand. Let us join in. What could it hurt?”

“My chances of success,” Dr. Husch said.

Nicolette laughed. “Not bad, Doc. Being disfigured has given you a sense of humor. But what’ll really hurt your chances of success is me going to Marla and telling her what you have planned. And sending word to a few of the reigning sorcerers — I don’t think the Chamberlain or Hamil would be happy to hear you’ve decided to switch your patients from art therapy to murder-for-hire. That’s the kind of thing that could seriously impact your funding at the next meeting of the council, don’t you think? Or maybe you want to get locked up in one of your own cells?”

“You would help Marla? Protect her from me? Even though you want her dead?”

“Doc,” Crapsey said. “This is Nicolette. You can’t trust her to do anything. Messy unexpected stuff just makes her more powerful. She’s got a roulette wheel instead of a soul, you know?”

“Hmm. What makes you think you can escape the grounds of this estate?”

Nicolette drew a small hatchet with a curved blade the color of the moon from behind her back, and held it up to catch the light. “I did a little looting while I was running around with Crapsey and the Mason. I found this beauty in one of Viscarro’s vaults. It’s sacred to some moon god, I forget his name, but the point is — it is awesome. All those years I was jealous of Marla’s cloak, and her dagger of office, and now I’ve got an artifact of my own, and Marla doesn’t have any. Anyway, sure, sic your orderlies on me, whatever — if you feel like getting chopped into fucking little bits again.”

Dr. Husch didn’t move. You could have cut the tension with a knife. Or a really terrifying axe.

“Look, we want the same thing,” Crapsey said, holding up his hands in a gesture he hoped was soothing. “There’s no reason for us to fight. Just let us help. We can lend a hand.”
“Three hands, even,” Nicolette said.

To Crapsey’s surprise, Dr. Husch snorted with laughter. “Fine. I can see you won’t go away. I suppose I could use people to carry boxes and fetch coffee. But you take orders from me, understood?” She turned and started into the Institute, then paused, and called back over her shoulder, “You can come inside now.”

“No trying to lock us up, Doc,” Nicolette said, stepping in.

“I wouldn’t worry,” Dr. Husch said. “Haven’t you heard? Nowadays, it’s fashionable to let the inmates run the asylum.”

“The first two things you need to know,” Rondeau said as he pulled out of the parking lot, “are that I’m crazy rich now, and Marla’s been exiled from Felport.”

Pelham turned around in the passenger seat and looked at Marla, his eyes owlish and wide, and she nodded, then looked away, concentrating on staring out the window.

On the ride back to the hotel, Rondeau gave Pelham the rundown on everything that had happened since he left Felport to go on his world tour. The recitation was enough to make Marla exhausted all over again. Rondeau told the valet about Marla’s run-in with her con artist brother Jason, about Bradley Bowman’s murder at Jason’s hands, about Marla’s ill-conceived (or, if you were feeling charitable, daring) plan to bring Bradley back to life. And, finally, about the horrible consequences of her meddling in such cosmic affairs, including a rip in the fabric of space/time and the subsequent emergence of her villainous counterpart from a parallel universe, the Mason. “She looked just like Marla,” Rondeau said, gesturing animatedly with one hand as he drove with the other. “Well, Marla when she was twenty, maybe, because the Mason didn’t age after that. Only… well, you know Marla’s white-and-purple cloak?”

“I am familiar with the cloak.” Pelham sounded thoughtful, but not especially freaked out. This was probably a lot for the guy to take in — but then again, he’d once literally traveled to Hell with Marla, and lately he’d been battling a repeated infestation by Malaysian ant-monsters, so he was used to rolling with the punches. And the kicks. “Indeed, I think of the cloak often. I find its very existence rather disturbing.”

“Don’t we all,” Marla muttered. When she was twenty, she’d found a magical cloak hanging in a thrift store, and she’d felt compelled to buy it, sensing it was an item of magic. The cloak was more than merely magical, though — it was an artifact, a conscious object of uncertain origin and mysterious motivation. The cloak had granted Marla profound powers, both healing magics and viciously destructive battle prowess… but the latter came at a terrible psychic cost. Every time she used the cloak for violence, its alien intellect tried to subjugate her mind and possess her body for its own destructive ends. Essentially, it was a parasite, and Marla was the host, though it had taken her a long time to realize that. Marla’s will had been strong enough to resist the cloak’s attempts to possess her, but she’d never been comfortable wearing it, not once she was old and wise enough to realize how dangerous it could be. She’d eventually discovered it wasn’t a cloak at all, but a malevolent entity from another universe that chose to look like a cloak, and that in its true form, it was so scary it even frightened gods. When she finally glimpsed the cloak’s true form — something like a many-eyed devil ray with extra tentacles and fishhook fangs — she’d been horrified and vowed to never wear it again. The thing couldn’t be destroyed, though, and she’d dispatched Pelham on his world tour, with the mission to hide the cloak somewhere deep and obscure, someplace no one, even Marla, could ever find it. Except –

“The Mason made Marla look like Miss Congeniality,” Rondeau was saying, so Marla swatted him on the back of the head. He went on, unperturbed. “Imagine a version of Marla who put on the cloak at twenty, didn’t bother to fight the cloak’s influence at all, and just let herself get possessed by the evil alien mind inside it. That version of Marla, over in that hell of a universe next door, pretty much literally conquered the world. And then… we fucked up, trying to save Bradley, and tore a hole in the fabric of space-time. That set the Mason loose over here, and she went on the warpath. Shit got ugly. A lot of people in Felport died before Marla managed to outsmart the Mason. Viscarro, and Ernesto, and Granger… .” He shook his head. “Don’t worry, the Chamberlain’s okay, and all your friends on her estate are fine too, the Mason didn’t go near her place.”

“I am relieved.” The Chamberlain had been Pelham’s… employer, sort of? Or maybe foster mother? Pelham came from a long line of professional servants, pledged (and magically bonded) to serve prominent sorcerers. Marla hadn’t wanted a valet, even a supernaturally savvy one, but the Chamberlain had insisted that, as chief sorcerer, Marla required such help, and she’d “given” Pelham to her. Pelham had turned out to be amazingly competent, and soon became a friend, but Marla wasn’t happy with the notion of servants, especially supernaturally-bound ones. Which was one of the real reasons she’d sent him on his world tour –

“Oh, and check it out,” Rondeau said. “The Mason had a sidekick who was like an evil version of me, called Crapsey, with a creepy wooden jaw and a nasty trick where he could jump into people’s bodies, shove their souls into the void, and walk around in their skins — ”

“Get to the exile part,” Marla snapped. Rondeau was breezily reciting events that had left some pretty brutal wounds on her, psychically if not physically.

“Right.” Rondeau coughed. “The, uh, sorcerers in Felport who survived the Mason’s attacks blamed the whole interdimensional invasion thing on Marla, and… they kicked her out of the chief sorcerer job. Exiled her here. Well, not here specifically, they just forbid her to ever set foot in the city again. I didn’t see the point in staying in Felport with Marla gone, so I sold my nightclub and decided to retire in style. Marla didn’t have anything better to do, so I asked her to come along, and… here we are.”

“Mrs. Mason.” Pelham twisted around in his seat again, and this time, put his hand on her knee. “I am profoundly sorry for your loss. For all your losses.”

“Me, too,” Marla said. “Look, Pelham, the Chamberlain is actually the chief sorcerer of Felport now, and me… I’m nobody. If you want to go to Felport, I’m sure the Chamberlain would be happy to take you in — ”

“I am bonded to you, Mrs. Mason.” Pelham voice was gentle, his eyes placid and sure. “I could not break that bond if I wanted to, and I do not want to. Even if I did care about status, well, you are greater than any mortal nobility — ”

“Shush,” Marla said sharply. Pelham knew a secret about her that no one else in the world besides Marla herself did. It was bad enough he kept calling her “Mrs.” — that would be a giveaway to anyone more attentive than Rondeau.

“Shush what?” Rondeau said.

“He was going to say something about my amazing natural gifts,” Marla said. “And you know I hate being complimented.”

“Whatever,” Rondeau said. “Now that Pelham’s back, he can keep you company at the bookshop. That’ll really open up my afternoons for spa visits.”

“I am pleased to serve in any capacity you wish,” Pelham said. “Shall I stay here, Mrs. Mason, or do you wish me to continue my travels?”

“Did you, ah, dispose of that thing yet?” Marla said. “The thing in the trunk?”

“Do you mean the bedsheet you glamoured to look like your cursed cloak?” Pelham said politely. “No, ma’am. That is still wrapped in bindings and wards in the steamer trunk.”

Marla groaned, and Rondeau whistled. “I was trying to figure out how she was going to break that to you,” Rondeau said. “Sending you off on a mission to get rid of a fake cloak.”

“Pelham, listen, I wasn’t trying to screw with you, I wanted people to think the cloak was gone from the city,” Marla said. “There were powerful people who wanted it, and I was afraid of what would happen if it fell into their hands. But at the same time, the cloak was so powerful, I couldn’t bring myself to really get rid of it. I wanted to keep it in reserve, just in case I needed it, like… a nuclear weapon or a vial of super-flu. And I didn’t let you in on the secret because I wanted you to — ”

“I understand,” Pelham said. “Truly. You wanted me to experience the real world. Before I joined your service, I’d never even left the grounds of the Chamberlain’s estate. Though I was educated, and learned to serve at a formal dining table, repair cars, and cause permanent nerve damage with a well-aimed strike of the fist, I was provincial and unworldly. You wanted to expand my horizons.”

“Yes,” Marla said. “I mean, pretty much. I thought it would do you good, I guess.”

“You are also profoundly uncomfortable with the very idea of having a lady’s personal gentleman in your employ.” Pelham sniffed. “I am confident you will overcome that reticence in time. May I stay with you now, then, or do you prefer me to continue the pantomime of looking for a safe place to hide your cloak?”

“No need for pretense anymore. The cloak is really gone now. Once I met the Mason, and saw what the cloak wanted to do to the world, what it hoped to use me for, what it had used me for in another dimension… I didn’t have any qualms about getting rid of it, permanently, even if it did mean giving up my best weapon.”

“I hope you buried it deeply,” Pelham said. “Such things have a way of rising to the surface.”

“Ha,” Rondeau said. “Remember Bradley Bowman? How trying to bring him back to life caused all this trouble? Well, he didn’t come back to life, exactly, but he ended up ascending beyond the mortal plane and whatnot. Now he’s, like… the guy in charge of maintaining the structural integrity of the multiverse. Immortal, and existing simultaneously in every possible reality and in none of them, which is a nifty trick. We gave him the cloaks, both Marla’s and the Mason’s, and he put them both at the North Pole in a parallel universe where life never even developed on Earth. They are gone.”

Pelham exhaled. “That is a relief. Then… may I stay here?”

Marla reached out and touched his shoulder. “Of course. It’s good to have you back, Pelham. You’ll be a great help.”

“Marla’s a detective now,” Rondeau said. “Solving mysteries. Or, ah, failing to solve mysteries, mostly, but it’s a start.”

“A… detective?” Pelham said, in the tone of voice someone else might say, “A… rat turd?” “Is such an occupation truly suitable for your station?”

“What station is that?” Rondeau said. “Poverty stricken ex-chief-sorcerer? No offense, you know I love Marla to pieces, but she’s not exactly an aristo, Pelly.”

“Mrs. Mason.” Pelham’s voice was stern. “How can you expect Rondeau to give you the respect you deserve if he does not know you are due such respect?”

“Why do you keep calling her ‘Mrs.’?” Rondeau said. “You always used to call her ‘Miss Mason,’ and even that was weird, but — ”

Marla closed her eyes, covered her face with her hands, and groaned. “I hate you both. Take me back to the hotel.”

#

“You got married,” Rondeau said for the third time, sipping a rum-and-pineapple juice on his balcony. They had a great view of the ocean up here, but Rondeau was staring at her instead.

Marla sank down further in the padded chaise longue, looking up at the underside of the balcony attached to the room above them. “Okay, yes, but see — ”

“To a god,” Rondeau said. “To the god of Death. You’re the bride of Death. You’re a goddess.”

“Only by marriage. And it’s not like it was a love match. Pelham and I were in the underworld, and, well… it was a marriage of convenience. I needed to use the god of Death’s sword, and in order to do that, I had to take certain aspects of his power as my own — had to become a member of the family, a god by association. Don’t think of it as a marriage, it was just… a ritual.”

“So you’re saying you didn’t consummate?” Rondeau waggled his eyebrows.

Marla made a face. “That incarnation of Death was pretty much falling apart when I met him, hanging on way past the end of his natural span. He was a wreck, and he should have made way for the new incarnation of Death years before. He wasn’t exactly alluring. He couldn’t even stand up from his divine throne — he was holding onto his office by pure force of will and butt-in-chairness.”

“You missed out on throne sex?” Rondeau said. “I bet that thing was all encrusted with jewels, too.” He paused. “And I’m not talking about the chair.”

“Mrs. Mason was widowed soon after the wedding.” Pelham appeared with a silver tray and placed a drink — more juice than rum — on the small round table beside Marla. Where had he found that tray? Did he have some kind of emergency valet-kit in his backpack? “When the old god of Death was replaced by his newer incarnation.”

“Oh, I remember him,” Rondeau said. “The Walking Death. Now he was yummy, even if he was kind of a dick. Shame you couldn’t have married him instead of his dad. Or predecessor. Or whatever.”

“A little of both,” Marla said. In reality, she was still married to Death — it turned out the marriage ceremony had wedded her to the office of the god of Death, not to any particular incarnation, and the being known as the Walking Death was now her husband. Which was sort of like marrying a father, getting widowed, and marrying his son, but, hell, mythology was full of weirder sorts of incest. She hadn’t consummated her marriage to the Walking Death, either, though the idea wasn’t entirely unappealing, and he certainly wanted to. Her wifely duties — ha — were supposed to wait until after she died, when she’d take up the mantle of her goddesshood and sit on her own throne deep under the ground. (Well, metaphorically, and metaphysically. You couldn’t actually dig a hole and get to the underworld, but it definitely had a subterranean quality.) She wouldn’t really be the bride of Death until her own death… unless she figured out a way to wriggle out of the obligation first. Not that spending her afterlife as a terrifying goddess sounded so bad, but she was opposed to destiny in principle.

“It is a shame,” Pelham mused. “If your husband still existed, you could simply ask him who murdered this Ronin person. Solving murders would be much simpler with the god of Death at your beck and call.”

Marla stared at him. The idea had never occurred to her. She pretty much hated to ask for assistance with anything, but it wasn’t like she’d be asking the Walking Death to fight her battles for her — she’d just ask him to answer a question. Surely that wouldn’t shift the balance of power in their relationship too much? Though worrying about that was probably asinine. He was a god, tasked with overseeing the end-of-life and afterlife of every living thing in the universe. The “person” called the Walking Death that she interacted with occasionally was just an insignificant splinter of the god’s true vastness, an externalized physical presence created to interact with humans and other lesser beings. He probably had all the power in the relationship anyway, by definition. Still, no reason to give him more. But maybe if she spun it the right way…

She cleared her throat. “Um. Maybe I’m not so widowed after all. See…”

#

Rondeau insisted on accompanying her back to the bookstore, and Pelham murmured that he’d be happy to join them, if she had no objection, so she just gave in. They were both giving her a lot of crap about how she shouldn’t have lied to them, Rondeau gleefully, Pelham morosely. But, damn it, a woman’s marriage to a chthonic deity was nobody’s business but her own, and she refused to apologize.

In the back room of the bookshop, she opened up her safe, revealing the silver bell inside. It was a perfectly ordinary bell, not magical in the slightest… but Death was always listening for it.

She rang the bell.

The Walking Death never appeared before her in a puff of black smoke, or descended from the heavens like a sinking balloon. True to his name, he always just walked in, though strictly speaking, it wasn’t always clear where he walked in from.

He walked in now, emerging from a black door in the exterior wall (which was, usually, utterly doorless.) The Walking Death stood well over six feet tall, his long brown hair falling just past the shoulders of his impeccably tailored midnight blue suit, no tie. Marla knew next to nothing about menswear, but his dress always struck her as vaguely European and timelessly fashionable. His face was pale, narrow, and aristocratic-looking, his lips curved almost perpetually into the hint of a smirk. The look should have been maddening, and it was, a little, but it was also cute. He had rings on each of his fingers, as usual, eight glittering gemstones in different colors — but, no, now he had an extra ring on the third finger of each hand, just simple silver bands.

“Darling.” He kissed Marla on the cheek and took her hand in his own — cold, no surprise — before turning to look at Pelham and Rondeau. “The servant and the sidekick. How pleasant to see you both.” They stared at him, apparently more overawed by the company of a god than Marla was… or at least more than she allowed herself to appear to be.

Marla pulled her hand away from his. “Sorry to call you here. I was hoping you could help me out with this… murder investigation I’m doing.”

He raised one elegantly arched eyebrow. “Really? I’m to be your informant, am I? I suppose that makes a certain amount of sense. I do have access to the material witnesses in any suspicious death. I am not unwilling to assist you, if you choose to indulge in such trivialities. But I was actually planning to come see you anyway. I have something to tell you. It’s wonderful news, actually.”

She frowned. “What’s that?”

“A number of your enemies are conspiring to kill you.” The Walking Death broke into a wide smile, and swept Marla into a tight embrace. “Isn’t it wonderful?” he breathed into her ear. “You’ll be dead soon, my darling!”

Once he’d gotten rid of the surfers, Rondeau stepped into the office. “‘I don’t work for you, I work for me?’” He smiled. “You’ve been reading those Robert Parker novels about Spenser I gave you, haven’t you?”

She scowled. “I have to learn to be a detective somehow, don’t I?”

“Spenser does just wander around annoying people and getting in fights until he figures things out,” Rondeau said. “Instead of using deductive reasoning and measuring the depths of footprints and collecting cigar ash and shit like Sherlock Holmes does. So he’s probably a better model for your detecting style, if you can call it that.”

“Yes, fine, you’re hilarious.”

“If you’re Spenser, that makes me his buddy Hawk, right? A sexy, amoral badass?”

“One out of three ain’t bad,” Marla said. “So where are we going?”

#

Rondeau drove them north out of Lahaina in his little black convertible, past the West Maui airport, through the town of Kapalua, and along a route that curved gradually eastward along the northern edge of the island. The scenery along the coast road was absolutely gorgeous — great vistas of cliff and rock and sea — and Marla was sick to death of it. She liked to be in the shadow of old warehouses with the comfort of a vast continental plate beneath her, not out in the open under the sun on a speck of volcanic rock in the ocean.

“We both know I’m not going to learn a damn thing from looking at a spot where a guy died,” Marla said. “Unless the killer left a confession written in the sand, and even then, it would have blown away by now. So here’s what we’ll actually do. You’ll find an oracle, and ask it who killed our dead guy. Easy.”

Rondeau sighed as he swung the car around a long curve. “You only love me for my vast psychic powers.”

“Who says I love you?”

They approached the Bellstone, a boulder of volcanic rock that, when struck in just the right spot, made a sound like clanging metal. When Rondeau didn’t even slow their pace as they passed the rock, Marla growled. “Seriously? There’s no oracle we can talk to in the Bellstone? A great big hunk of rock upchucked from the fiery guts of a volcano? Rings like a bell when you smack it? You’re telling me that doesn’t have any magic?”

“Doesn’t feel right,” Rondeau said. “Sorry.”

“You know, when Bradley wanted an oracle, he could find some ghost or demon or whatever in the first stinky dumpster or drain pipe or dark alley we passed.” She was happy about her old apprentice Bradley’s new gig as an immortal being who lived at the center of all possible realities, but it meant Marla didn’t have his help anymore, and she was stuck with the infinitely less experienced (and lazier) Rondeau, who’d inherited Bradley’s abilities, but not his skill at wielding them.

“I’m pretty new at this,” Rondeau said. “But I’m learning. In my defense, I think there’s a higher density of demons and dead people in a city. If you want me to turn around and go talk to the rock for a while and hope for the best, I can.”

Marla sighed. “No, carry on, you’re the one connected to the great grand mystical whatever. Something’s seriously out of whack when you’re the most spiritual person in the room. Or car. Whatever.”

They drove in silence for a while, until Rondeau said, “Over here.” He pulled the convertible onto a wide gravel patch on the shoulder of Highway 340. “There’s definitely some magical stuff crackling down this way, by the Olivine Pools.”

She frowned. “Isn’t this where our dead guy died?”

“Yeah. That’s convenient, isn’t it? Maybe he left behind a ghost we can talk to. Go right to the source.”

Marla grunted. She wasn’t a big fan of ghosts. They weren’t the souls or spirits or immortal residue of the dead, exactly — those went elsewhere, to whatever afterlife they expected to get, usually. Ghosts were more like… old photographs, or video loops, or echoes, or shit stains — psychic residue, persistent but slowly fading and degrading, and all pretty much crazy. But ghosts knew things, and they made reliable oracles, especially when you asked them about their own lives and deaths. Ghosts were pretty self-centered. Not every death resulted in wailing translucent psychotic ectoplasmic residue, but such manifestations were more likely in cases of violent death, so there was a chance some fragment of Ronin might still be hanging around, the magical-forensic equivalent of shed hairs or blood drops.

Marla and Rondeau picked their way down a steep, rock-scattered incline toward the Olivine Pools, a beautiful spot beloved of tourists and those locals who could abide the company of tourists: a group of lovely tidal pools, deep and clear, most big enough for swimming (though ideally you tried not to disturb the denizens of the pools), in an area scattered with the small greenish crystals called olivine. The pools were entirely deserted at the moment, though, and Rondeau wandered along the shore, pausing occasionally, squinting at nothing in particular, looking for ghost spoor. He eventually crouched down by one of the smaller pools. “Not a ghost.” His voice was strained, like he was trying to do higher math in his head while operating heavy machinery. “But there’s something… else. Something watery and dark and… . In here.” He pointed to the water, and Marla crouched with him.

One of Rondeau’s powers was oracle generation. Marla wasn’t sure whether he summoned existing supernatural creatures who possessed the power to answer questions, or whether the “oracles” were just external manifestations of his own abilities, a way for him to get answers out of his own powerfully psychic brain, like a crazy guy in a comic book who took orders from his own ventriloquist’s doll.

Either way, the process worked, so Marla peered into the water — and jerked back when a gargantuan white moray eel rose up from the suddenly bottomless depths of what should have been an ordinary tidepool. The eel’s eyes were the size of teacups, black and dead, its mouth a horrorshow of overlapping fangs. The water rippled as the eel spoke, but the voice that emerged was perfectly clear, a deep bass with no underwater qualities at all: “I am Koona, the death of sharks, the thief of fish. What do you seek?”

Rondeau cleared his throat. “A man called Ronin died near this spot two days ago. We want to know who murdered him.”

The eel swayed a bit, almost hypnotically. Its jaws were big enough to swallow a human head in a gulp. After a moment, it said, “That knowledge is closed to me. I see a figure, but it is shrouded in mist. The killer is a being of power.”

Marla sighed. Well, yeah. The guy had murdered a member of a badass hive of wave-mages, so the power was self-evident. “Thanks anyway,” she said.

“I do have knowledge that may interest you,” the eel said. “Glad tidings, and grim ones. Do you wish to know?”

“Uh, sure,” Rondeau said.

The eel opened its mouth. “You must pay.”

“I always pay,” Rondeau said. The oracles he summoned were transactional creatures. “What’s the price?”

“Blood.”

Rondeau sighed. Marlas passed him one of her many knives, this one more suited for slicing mangos than throats. He pressed the blade to his palm, winced, and made a fist over the water, drops falling in and turning to drifting streamers in the water. The eel closed its eyes for a moment, then spoke, gazing not at Rondeau, but at Marla. “An old friend will soon return to you, to gladden your hollowed heart. But others are coming, and they seek not to soothe your heart, but to tear it from your chest. One you once loved, whose love for you has soured. Old enemies returned. Strangers who shall become new enemies. They sharpen their knives for you, and gather their powers.”

“What friend?” Marla said. “And what enemies? Come on, give me names.” But the eel just sank down into the pool, vanishing into the blackness, which shimmered, and became just an ordinary tidepool again, with nothing more remarkable at the rocky bottom than anemones and a scuttling crab. She looked at Rondeau. “That oracle sucked.”

Rondeau wrapped his wounded hand in a handkerchief. “It sucked my blood, anyway. What now?”

“I guess we go back to the office, and try to find out who this ‘friend’ is.”

“You’re not more concerned about the enemies?”

“Enemies, I’m used to. I’ve got lots of those. I don’t have that many friends.”

“True,” Rondeau said. “And most of the ones you used to have don’t like you anymore.”

“Honestly, it makes me wonder why you still hang out with me.”

Rondeau shrugged. “What can I say? I have profoundly horrible judgment.”

#

There was no one at the bookshop, and no familiar faces lingering on the streets in Lahaina town, and Rondeau refused to call up another oracle just to satisfy Marla’s curiosity about this mystery friend — summonings like that gave him headaches and insomnia even at the best of times, and two in one day would give him nosebleeds and the kind of migraines that come with auras and last a for week. “Maybe your long-lost pal is at the hotel, kicking his heels in the lobby, wondering where the hell we are?”

Marla shrugged. “Sure. It’s as good an idea as any.” The resort was the closest thing she had to a forwarding address.

Rondeau lived in a two-bedroom suite at a hotel in Kaanapali, a stretch of gorgeous coastline dominated by giant resorts. It was a long way from the traditional Hawai’ian experience, but Rondea was an unapologetic tourist and hedonist. He let Marla stay in the suite’s extra room, at least when she didn’t sleep on the hideous brown couch in the bookshop. She knew she should find a place of her own. That would be a pain in the ass, but hotel life just wasn’t to her taste. Too many people had keys to their room. Back in Felport, she’d owned an entire apartment building and lived in it alone, with her personal effects scattered in the empty apartments around her own to create a cloud of psychic chaff if anyone tried to divine her precise location within the building. Oh, beautiful privacy. That kind of real estate was rather beyond her reach here on Maui, unless she asked Rondeau for a major loan, and she felt beholden enough to him already.

Rondeau drove up along Highway 30 from Lahaina, leisurely covering the short distance to the hotel. Marla was in the passenger seat, doing her habitual (if paranoid) scan of her surroundings. She peered into the side mirror. “Someone’s following us.”

Rondeau glanced up at the rearview. “Marla, that’s a taxi. People take taxis to the resorts, and this is the main road to the resorts from Kahalui airport. What makes you think they’re following us?”

“I’ve got a sense for these things. Besides, you’re going so slow that any taxi driver worth a damn would have passed you miles ago. Why put up with your pokey ass unless he’s following us?”

“You told me to slow down,” Rondeau said, outraged and aggrieved — or at least affecting to be. “You said I drove like a maniac, so I brought it down to the speed limit, just like you asked — ”

Marla pointed. “Pull over in the park there.”

Rondeau sighed, paused to await a break in the oncoming traffic, and turned left into the lot of Wahikuli Park. The long, narrow strip of public ground boasted a few picnic tables overlooking the ocean but little else, and didn’t have much going for it except all the scenery you could eat. Marla barely noticed the deep blue vistas of ocean and sky anymore. She wasn’t sure it was true that you could get used to anything, but you could certainly get used to beauty.

“Well, hell,” Rondeau said, as the taxi pulled in and parked next to them. “What do you think? Is this the world’s least subtle assassin? Or — ”

Marla was already getting out of the car, just as the taxi’s back door swing open. Friend, or enemy?

When the cab’s passenger climbed out, Marla stopped dead, then broke into the biggest, most genuine smile she’d worn in weeks, if not months.

Rondeau got out of the convertible, too, and bellowed “Pelly!” He raced around the car and picked up the short, middle-aged man who’d emerged from the cab. He spun Pelham around twice, then put him back down on his feet, where he wobbled a bit.

“A pleasure to see you, sir,” Pelham said, and then looked at Marla. “And you, too, Mrs. Mason.”

The cab driver emerged, leaning over the roof of the car, squinting. “You going to ride the rest of the way with your friends, pal?”

“I wouldn’t presume,” Pelham murmured, but Rondeau was already saying, “Yeah, we got this, pop the trunk.” Pelham reached into the cab and removed a battered-looking canvas backpack, and a gnarled black walkingstick that might have passed for a wizard’s staff. The cab driver helped Rondeau wrestle a familiar-looking trunk out of the cab, then accepted his fare and a generous tip from Rondeau before driving off.

While Rondea was wrangling luggage, Marla walked around the car and looked Pelham up and down. He still had his wispy hair, his mild eyes, his mostly-unlined face, his general air of affable harmlessness, but he’d changed some, too. “You got some sun on your travels, huh? I never even imagined you with a tan.”

“I did indeed, Mrs. Mason, in Africa, mostly,” Pelham said. “Though the snows in Nepal reflected a glare even brighter.”

“What are you doing here?” Marla said. “I told you to spend a couple of years on your, ah, mission, and it’s only been a few months.”

Pelham nodded. “I am still traveling. I landed this morning on the Big Island, as part of a journey through the Pacific. But I could sense you, nearby. I took a flight to Maui, and frustrated my cab driver immensely by refusing to tell him my final destination, guiding him instead in the direction where I felt your presence, and… Why are you here? Have you finally agreed to take a vacation?”

“I was going to send word to you,” Marla said, “Except I wasn’t sure where, since we warded you so well from divination, nobody could tell where you were, exactly. I left word for Hamil to pass along my contact info if you called in, but — ”

“Don’t mind me.” Rondeau heaved the steamer trunk into the convertible’s too-small trunk and fussed with bungee cords to tie it down. “I’ve got this.”

“My apologies.” Pelham stepped in with his customary competence, swiftly strapping his luggage in and tying the trunk lid partly closed with the bungees. He turned back to Marla. “Then… this isn’t a vacation? Oh dear. Does something here in the islands threaten the safety of Felport? Volcano gods with strange grudges? A tentacled creature of ancient lineage stirring on the sea floor?”

Before she could answer, Rondeau yelped, and jumped like someone had stabbed him in the ass with a pin. “Marla… something’s happening. Something’s coming.”

Marla had a knife in each hand before he finished speaking, and she put her back to the convertible, scanning the area. Unless the picnic tables were about to come to life like Japanese tsukumogami, she didn’t see any potential threats. “What is it?”

Rondeau shook his head. “How should I know? Call it bad vibes. Some kind of… I want to say… eruption? No, I shouldn’t use that word on a volcanic island, it’s not that kind of eruption. Something’s coming, or actually it’s already here, but it’s about to make itself known — ”

“Oh, dear.” Pelham chewed at his lower lip. “Not these again.” He pointed with his walkingstick toward the ground beneath a tree. The dirt was beginning to rise up in little cone-shapes, like molehills. “I’m terribly sorry, Mrs. Mason, I thought I’d gotten rid of them.”

Marla frowned. “Of what?”

“Should I be wishing I had a gun?” Rondeau said.

“I don’t think a gun would be much — ” Pelham began, but then a strange chittering emerged from the three mounds of black dirt, and at least a dozen cat-sized creatures poured out, like ants boiling up from a hill. The creatures moved fast enough that Marla couldn’t get a good look at them, but they seemed both insectile and mammalian, with hairy bodies and too many limbs and grinding mandibles and antennae and weirdly humanlike eyes.

Knives were not ideal for fighting off a swarm of rat-bug-people, and she was stepping to the side so she could unleash a fire spell without catching her friends in the spray when Pelham stepped forward and began to spin his stick in a blur. He caught the first of the creatures with a blow hard enough to send it sailing right out of the park and into the sea, and flattened half a dozen more in seconds using his stick and his feet, spinning with a fluidity and grace that Marla couldn’t quite wrap her head around — after all, Pelham looked like the manager of a small branch bank, or a longtime certified public accountant, but now he was become death; or if not death, then at least grievous bodily harm. “If I might ask you to destroy the mounds?” Pelham shouted, as more of the creatures came scrambling out of the dirt. Marla caught Rondeau’s eye, shrugged, and moved with him toward the source of the invasion.

She considered just stomping, but she didn’t like the idea of one of these things climbing up her leg, so she knelt, scooped up a handful of sand from the ground into a little heap, took a deep breath, and believed the mound she’d made was the same as the mounds the creatures were coming through.

Then she stomped on her little mound, and the other three flattened, smashed by the weight of Marla’s sympathetic magic. Rondeau watched the collapsed mounds warily, then nudged one with the toe of his foot. Nothing came out. “There’s not even a hole under here. What the hell?”

Pelham had finished bashing the little monsters, and those that survived burrowed into the ground, dragging their dead after them, and soon they’d all vanished from view, seemingly pulling their holes in after them, leaving the ground unmarked and unmarred. Pelham mopped his brow. “I am so very sorry. The creatures have not troubled me in weeks, and I had assumed they were gone forever. They are deucedly persistent beasts.”

“What the fuck are they?” Marla said.

“Nuno sa Punso,” Pelham said. “Frightful things, but really just a nuisance, incapable of doing real harm. I… picked them up during my time in the Phillipines.”

“Pelly,” Rondeau said. “Tell me these things aren’t some kind of supernatural STD you picked up in a Filipino cathouse. Or, better yet, tell me they are, because that would be hilarious.”

Pelham bowed slightly. “Loath as I am to disappoint you, the origin of this infestation is less lascivious. I spent a week in the Malay archipelago, studying the martial art known as Silat. I have long been proficient in Bartitsu, which incorporates elements of Malaysian stick-fighting, and I thought to refine my technique by studying at the source.”

“You seem to have gotten the hang of it,” Marla said. “You could have played eighteen holes using those little Nuno things as golf balls.”

“Yes. Thank you. Alas, that is not the first time I have needed to forcibly dispel the creatures. While I was out walking in the countryside in the Phillipines, I inadvertently disturbed an ant hill, or perhaps a termite mound, with my stick. I expected insects to emerge, but instead — out came several Nuno. They looked more human, then, though they were still very small, appearing as tiny men with long ragged beards. They are local spirits, called ‘ancestors of the ant hills,’ though I think they are more closely aligned to imps than to true ancestral spirits. By which I mean, their resemblance to humanity is superficial and conditional.”

“Lots of supernatural creatures start to look more like humans when they have more contact with humans,” Marla said. “Or else people just perceive them that way. I looked at them in their true forms, and they weren’t much like people at all, apart from the eyes.”

Pelham nodded. “The Nuno are mostly used as a story by the locals, to keep children away from ant hills. If you disturb their homes, the Nuno can curse you — either trivially, to cause pain in the foot that kicked their hill, or more seriously, to… ah… this is indelicate… to urinate a viscous black fluid, or vomit blood. Most people never encounter the creatures, and only the superstitious believe they exist. I suspect they were attracted by the magical spells on my luggage.” He gestured toward the convertible’s trunk “Or perhaps I simply stumbled onto the one mound where they actually live. The Nuno have chosen to punish me more creatively than usual, it seems. They appear occasionally and attack me, wherever I am. I attempted to dispel them in Malaysia, paying an alularyo to perform a tawas ceremony. She poured molten wax into a bowl of water, interpreted certain signs beyond my understanding, and said I must make offerings of fruit at the site of the hill I’d destroyed, and beg for forgiveness. Unfortunately, I had difficulty finding the precise location again, and though I did make offerings… .” He shrugged. “I may have gotten the location wrong. Or perhaps the alularyo was a fraud. I did not realize the ritual had failed until I was a thousand miles away, when the creatures attacked me in an outdoor market. They are easily defeated, but terribly persistent, appearing days or even weeks apart. Though I lack your ability to pierce illusions, Mrs. Mason, they seem less and less humanoid to me with each appearance, as I’ve gone farther and farther from their home. Perhaps familiarity is enabling to see me more as they actually are.”

“They look pretty much like pissed-off garden gnomes to me,” Rondeau said, helpful as always. “I didn’t bother to try and see their true forms. Stuff pretty much never looks better that way.”

“I send you on a trip around the world,” Marla said, “and you come back with a case of supernatural fleas. Well, curses can be lifted. We’ll see what we can do.”

“I would appreciate that,” Pelham said. “The Nuno are most unseemly. But I do not mean to burden you with my problems, Mrs. Mason. Please, tell me, how are you? Why are you here?”

“You ride up front with Rondeau.” Marla climbed into the convertible’s comically undersized back seat. “He’ll tell you how I am, and what I’m doing in Hawai’i.”

[Author's note: Because the first chapter is rather short, I decided to start with the first two chapters. Extra Bonus Grim Tides!]

Grim Tides

by T.A. Pratt

For Anne, who knows Marla even better than I do

1. Let Me Tell You a Story

Thanks ever so much for seeing me. We may as well get started, don’t you think?

Let’s scroll through the mortal timeline and look in on Marla Mason, exiled sorcerer-queen, driven from her beloved city of Felport as punishment for her considerable sins and sent to languish in a tropical paradise, specifically Maui, second largest of the islands in Hawai’i.

We’ll take as our focus one particular afternoon when she sat barefoot in the sand near the surf, behind the vast resort hotel where she lived in rather more luxury than she felt comfortable with, courtesy of her best (and almost only) friend, Rondeau.

#

He sprawled beside her on a towel printed with pictures of jolly green carnivorous plants, watching her wiggle her toes in the sand. Rondeau grunted. “You took your boots off. I didn’t realize they came off. I thought they were permanently fused to your footmeat.”

“I can kick your ass just fine barefoot,” she said, but absently, her eyes on the waves, her mind even farther beyond.

“Feeling homesick?” Rondeau turned his head and slurped from a straw plunged into a plastic tumbler jammed in the sand, drinking a concoction that was mostly fruit juice but not inconsiderably rum. He didn’t have the stomach for booze and drugs he once had, having inherited both a slew of psychic powers and a nervous constitution recently, but he imbibed as much as his body would allow.

Marla dug her feet deeper into the warm sand. “I live in Maui, in the kind of hotel where if you call room service at three a.m. and demand a well-done bison burger and a bucket of champagne, they bring it in fifteen minutes. My bills are paid by my rich best friend, so I never have to worry about how to pay for the buffalo and bubbly. I get to tell people, with a straight face, that I’m an occult detective. I have an office in an old bookshop that I’m increasingly sure is actually magical. Nobody’s tried to kill me in two months. I have absolutely no cares or responsibilities. The hardest choice I have to make on any given day is whether to spend the afternoon napping or swimming. My life is objectively wonderful, the sort of existence most people dream of. What do you think?”

“You really hate it here, huh?”

“Of course.” Marla flopped back into the sand, exchanging a view of the endless expanse of blue-green water for the endless expanse of blue sky. “I know I’m ungrateful, but fuck it. I was sent away from the city I loved, where I had useful work to do, and now… I don’t even know why I get out of bed in the morning. I mean, I’m sure Elba was nice too, but exile sucks.”

Rondeau nodded. “Elba? You mean that black British actor? Yum. Is he staying at the hotel?”

“I love having you around. I never even finished high school, but you make me feel educated. Elba’s the island where Napoleon was exiled, the first time. In the Mediterranean. He stayed there for about a year, then escaped and regained his empire.”

“Ha. Are you getting ideas? I don’t think I’d make much of an invasion force, but I’m up for it if you are.”

“Napoloen got his throne back, but he only got to sit on it for about three months. Then he got beat down again at Waterloo. His enemies stuck him on a much uglier island after that, and he died there. So, no, Napoleon’s not the model I want to follow. At least they made him king of Elba. What am I? I might as well be one of those tentacley things clinging to a coral reef, slurping microorganisms out of the passing waves.”

“Aw, come on, like you said, you’re an occult detective now — ”

“I’ve had two clients, Rondeau. Two.”

“Sure, but one of them was a shark god.”

“I’m not saying they weren’t quality clients. But helping a shark god recover his stolen teeth, and giving a snooty kahuna a hand dispelling a ghost? They don’t exactly qualify as a life’s work. I used to do stuff that mattered. I saved California from a frog god and a jaguar god, beat up the king of nightmares, and sent Death himself back to hell with his head hung low. And that was just this year. ”

Rondeau took another slurp. “Business will pick up. You’re still new here, and I get the sense the native Hawai’ian sorcerers don’t like outsiders from the mainland much. Probably that whole history of invasion and subjugation and overthrow. But word will get around — you’ll have more cases than you can handle. I’m sure at some point a squid god or a sentient volcano or a malevolent animate tiki statue will get out of control, and boom, you’ll get the call.”

“Promises, promises.” Marla looked up at the perfect blue sky, a few fat clouds floating past in stately procession. A beautiful day, but every day here was beautiful, and what she wanted more than anything was to feel that autumnal bite in the air, like she would back home. It was October already, and back in Felport, the sidewalks would soon be covered in crisp, crackling leaves, people would be breaking out their scarves and coats, and in a month or so the first snowfall would begin. In a month or two here… things would be pretty much exactly the same as they were now. She’d have to take a trip to the east side of the island if she even wanted a reliable chance of seeing rain. “I don’t even know if I’m cut out to be a detective. A protector, a guardian, sure — I can handle duty to a place, or even an ideal, in a pinch. But if you’re a detective, you have to work for people, and you know I don’t get along with those. Do you think it’s a good idea for me to be working with the public?”

“I think you’re good at helping people,” Rondeau said. “Which is funny, since you mostly don’t like them. But when you were the protector of Felport, what were you protecting, anyway? A bunch of buildings? Or the people who lived in them? Would you have stayed on as chief sorcerer if nobody lived there?”

Marla sighed. “Yes, fine, point taken. Mostly I just like getting in fights, and helping people out can make that happen. If you don’t have enough enemies of your own handy, volunteer to take on somebody else’s. But nobody’s even asking for my help right now. What’s the point?”

“Your whole life changed.” Rondeau slurped the last dregs of his rum. “It’s going to take some getting used to. But look: life is chaos. We both know that. If you don’t like how things are going? That’s okay. Things will change.”

“Everything except the weather.” Marla rose and walked off by herself, though Rondeau got the last word, or at least, the last long-suffering sigh. She couldn’t blame him. Even Marla wasn’t enjoying her own company lately.

She walked barefoot, letting the warm water lap at her feet. Sometimes she thought about walking the entire perimeter of the island, a journey of some 120 miles. The island was shaped something like a barbell, or the number eight, or an infinity symbol, and a better sorcerer could probably come up with some ritual purpose for such a walk, sketching out a symbol of power footstep by footstep… but Marla only considered the journey because it would be complicated and annoying and full of treacherous cliffs, and it would give her something to do. But doing that would be too much like a tiger pacing back and forth inside a cage, and when she finished the circuit, she’d just be back where she started. It was absurd to feel trapped, she knew.

She wasn’t actually confined to Maui — she could go anywhere in the world, except for Felport, where she was forbidden to enter by magic. Why did that sting so much? There were billions of people on Earth who’d never go to Felport. Who’d never even heard of Felport.

But there was nowhere else in the world she’d ever felt needed, and nowhere else she wanted to be, and nowhere else she wanted to go.

Sad, isn’t it? A woman of action, with no particular actions to undertake.

Clearly, something needed to be done.

2. Murder by the Sea

We’ll skip ahead a bit and settle on the morning when Marla finally got her third case.

She sat on a stool behind the counter in her office on yet another fine autumn morning, sipping occasionally from a cup of coffee that had gone cold half an hour before, looking at a newspaper full of local news that didn’t interest her. The office was actually an antiquarian bookshop in Lahaina, not far from the resort where she spent her nights. As a bookshop it was a failure, since it was situated in a bit of hidden space invisible to the eyes of passing tourists and local ordinaries. She’d inherited — or stolen, or maybe looted — the office from its previous occupant, a deranged sorcerer who’d made the mistake of antagonizing a local shark god — Marla’s first case as a detective had ended with that man being transformed into a shark by his own magic and dumped into the sea, to contend with the furious spirits of those he’d wronged.

Because Marla had no interest in the traditional occupations of ordinary private detectives — outing cheating husbands, or doing background checks, or acting as stalker-by-proxy for jealous boyfriends — the bookshop acted as a useful barrier to entry. The first qualification she required of a client was the ability to find her in this hidden space, which required a certain amount of magical acumen.

Unfortunately, no one was looking for her, as far as she could tell. She’d hoped helping that kahuna on the Hana side of the island get rid of a ghost would lead to some word-of-mouth business, but Arachne had seemed profoundly annoyed to have to ask for assistance, and probably hadn’t told anyone.

So on this morning, like so many others, Marla sat pretending to go through the motions of a morning at work while secretly brooding over the closed-down avenues of her life. Rondeau perused the shelves and tried to keep her spirits up. “I swear, there are new books here,” he said. “Look at this one — a bound volume of old National Geographics, heavy on pictures of tribal men wearing penis-sheaths and not much else. I know I would have noticed this one before.”

Marla spun her scythe-shaped letter opener around on the wooden counter. Not that she had any letters to open. She’d sent postcards to everyone she knew on this mortal plane when she first moved to Hawai’i, vicious bitchy missives for the most part, but no one had written back, not even her onetime closest allies. She gestured around the room, with its twelve-foot-high oak bookshelves, its rippled windows of old glass, its dangling brass light fixtures. “There’s magic in this place, beyond the concealment spells. I haven’t figured out exactly what yet. Something to do with small-scale matter transportation, some attractant associated with empty spaces on the shelves. I think the bookshop transports forgotten books here, maybe based on how long it’s been since a human touched a particular volume. There are tons of ancient-ass books from all over the world here, and I think they’ve been snatched from libraries and garage sales and charity shops, most of them total junk, I’d guess — old medical textbooks, Reader’s Digest condensed books, potboiler novels from the 1940s.”

Rondeau laughed. He was wearing an aloha shirt patterned with sailboats in an eye-watering combination of reds and pinks and purples and blues. Back in Felport he’d favored whatever hideous things he could unearth from the back shelves of vintage clothing stores, and he’d adapted his fashion sense to life in the tropics admirably “So, what, the bookshop is magically looking for rare books by the dragnet method? Scoop up enough forgotten shit and you’re bound to get a first edition of, I dunno, The Hobbit?”

“Or Ulysses. That’s worth more.” When Rondeau looked at her with a raised eyebrow, she shrugged. “I’ve got a bookshop now, so I looked it up, all right? I don’t think there’s a book in here that’s even in the top one hundred most valuable first editions, though.”

“Good thing I’m filthy rich. Especially since you’ve never had any customers, or sold a single book. Working in an invisible shop really cuts down on your walk-in trade. You could sell books on the internet, I guess, though that would require the ability to use a mouse, which I know you’ve never quite mastered.” Rondeau had made a healthy sum when he’d sold his night club — a Felport institution that came with certain magical amenities, making it attractive to powerful sorcerers — before joining Marla in exile. Though in truth it was more that she’d joined him. She had no particular interest in Maui, or anywhere else, apart from Felport — the one place she was forbidden to ever return, upon pain of painful death. When Rondeau had asked her if she’d like to tag along with him to paradise, she’d shrugged and said “sure.” This was as good a place as any to molder.

“You could advertise, you know,” Rondeau went on. “Not for the bookshop, for the other job. I know you asked that shark god to tell all his friends you were open for business, but what kind of friends does a shark god have? Manta rays? Jellyfish? We need the kind of people who actually come up on land — ”

Someone knocked on the door. Marla whistled. “Whoever that is didn’t trip my proximity alarms when they entered our fold in space. But they’re announcing themselves now, which means they aren’t outright hostile, or else, they’re pretty dumb. That’s… interesting. You get any psychic impression off of them?”

Rondeau’s psychic abilities were substantial, but he hadn’t possessed them for long, and was generally too lazy to work on developing them — after all, there were swims to take and massages to enjoy — so he just shrugged. “Something weird, not like a normal human mind, but if they found the shop, you already know they’re some kind of magic, so that doesn’t tell you much.”

“Brilliantly insightful as always. All right, show them in — maybe you’re a better greeter than a psychic.”

Rondeau opened the door with a flourish. “Hello gentlemen. And lady. Uh, ladies? Wow, there are a lot of you.” He stepped aside, ushering in five — no, six — or was it eight? — people, all young, tanned, and dressed in swimwear, from full wetsuits with reef shoes to barefoot and shirtless-with-trunks. They milled around, seeming to move in impossible ways, switching places with one another instantly in a bizarre series of interpositions, and sometimes their bodies stayed in the same place, but the clothes they were wearing switched, swifter than an eyeblink.

Marla gritted her teeth and closed her eyes. A certain god had gifted her with the power to see through illusions at will, and while the talent was useful, it was also disturbing. Sometimes it was a lot more pleasant to see the world as it pretended to be, not as it actually was, but since she combined an insatiable curiosity with a profoundly suspicious nature, she was reluctant to blind herself willingly. She couldn’t talk to a bunch of people flickering like a strobe light, though, so she stepped down her vision. When she opened her eyes, her illusion-piercing gaze was deactivated, and she saw nothing but half a dozen surfer-types, two women and four men, dripping seawater on her hardwood floor. They were all still very attractive, but no longer so… interchangeable. “What can I do for you? Anybody want a towel?”

One of them stepped forward. “We are. Ah. Names. Leis. Ryan. Josh. Mad Gary –”

Marla took pity on him. “I don’t need the full roster, really. I won’t remember them all anyway. What’s your name?”

“You may call… this one… Glyph.” He was blond, square-jawed, blue-eyed, shirtless, and in the kind of shape only a very athletic twenty-something with unspeakably good genes could be. Rondeau was eyeing Glyph like the wolf looked at Little Red Riding Hood. (Rondeau’s powers allowed him see through illusions, too, but he seldom bothered — misconceptions and lack of perception made the world more beautiful, as he always reminded her.) “A… friend of ours… was murdered.” Something about Glyph’s affect was deeply weird, his eyes not quite focused on Marla, his head titled just slightly — as if talking to another human with actual words was a significant effort for him.

Marla nodded. “Okay. Why come to me? They have cops for that.”

Glyph shook his head. “Even if the police could help us… there is no body. Ronin was a devotee of the sea, and his remains returned to our mother ocean when he died — he became sea foam and salt, and washed away.”

“Nice trick,” Marla said. “Better hope organized crime doesn’t figure out how to do that. But, again, why me? You kids are obviously carrying some pretty heavy magic around. Why not cast a few divinations of your own to find the guilty party?”

“The killer… he must be more powerful than all of us combined. We cast a dozen divinations, but we could find no trace of him.”

Marla grunted. That was interesting, because she’d guess this group, combined, possessed rather a lot more magic than she did. Not that she’d ever let a little power imbalance stop her from getting into a fight. She’d kicked a hellhound across a room once, and outsmarted the god of Death, and imprisoned the king of nightmares, among other things, and those were all fights that, on paper, she should have lost. You didn’t always have to be more powerful. Sometimes you just had to refuse to lose.

Of course, it helped to have something worth fighting for, which she didn’t, not lately. The old cliché said “freedom” was just another word for “nothing left to lose,” but if this life in exile from her home city was freedom, she’d take the prison of responsibilities anytime.

But, whether she really gave a crap or not, these people needed help, so it was time to stop moping and start asking semi-intelligent questions. “It’s definitely murder, right? No chance it was an accident?”

Glyph nodded. “We saw him die. He… Ronin could not speak when we found him, his throat was cut, blood running into the sand and turning into seawater…” Glyph shivered, and all the other surfers behind him shivered an instant later — even draped in an illusion of normalcy, they couldn’t entirely hide their group affinity. “Can you help us?”

“Sure, I could.” Marla spoke with a certain amount of bland confidence. She’d recently defeated her own evil counterpart from a parallel dimension. How hard could it be to find a murderer on an island that was only about 730 square miles all together? “If you don’t mind me asking, though, how did you find me? I don’t exactly have a listing on Yelp or Craigslist.”

“A god told us you might be able to help.”

Marla nodded. “Shark god, right?”

Glyph shook his head. “No. He was not a god of the sea — or, not just the sea, anyway. We are unsure of his domain, or even his true name, but he is… not from around here. Not one of the Hawai’ian gods, we mean, who mostly slumber deeply now, anyway. He was friendly with Ronin, and when Ronin was killed, this god suggested you might be able to help. He spoke quite highly of you.”

Marla frowned. She didn’t know that many gods, nor did she want to. Apart from the shark god she’d helped soon after arriving in Hawai’i, there was just a snake god who’d pledged to kill her someday when he got around to it, and the god of Death, with whom she had a… complicated relationship. And there was her old apprentice Bradley Bowman, who was pretty busy maintaining the structural integrity of the multiverse since he’d ascended to a sort of meta-godhood. She didn’t think any of them would be recommending her services as a detective to a pod of hive-mind surf-sorcerers, as such business was way below their pay grades. So this bunch had inadvertently brought her two things to investigate — who’d killed their friend, and which god was dropping her name.

“You are an outsider,” Glyph went on, “and so we thought you might be more… objective? The kahunas here all have old alliances, grudges, and suspicions that could color their investigations if we sought their help. They look first to their own enemies, or those they have deemed undesirable, even if the evidence points elsewhere. You do not have any of their biases. We asked others about you, and were told… not good things, exactly, but things that make us think you can find out who murdered Ronin. Arachne said you knew your way around the dead.”

Marla nodded. Arachne had only come to Marla at all because she was between apprentices and too proud to ask any of the other local kahunas for help — she could hire a haole like Marla without anyone knowing she couldn’t handle the unquiet spirit on her own, though of course it had proven to be rather more complicated than an ordinary ghost. “Sure, I helped her out, but — ”

“We talked to Zufi as well,” Glyph said.

Ah. That made more sense. “The Bay Witch. That’s what we call her back home — back in the city I’m from, I mean. We worked together for a lot of years.”

“She used to ride the waves with us in the Pacific, before relocating to the Atlantic.” Glyph frowned. “Her choice never made sense to us. Why leave the whole to be alone? And the waves over there are terrible. The god said Zufi could provide a reference for you, and when we sent word, Zufi said you are tenacious and capable and not very nice, but if you are on our side, you will be not very nice to people we do not want to be very nice to, so it is okay.” He paused. “That is a direct quote. She also said to remind you that you still owe her a favor.”

“Yeah, that sounds like Zufi. Okay. I’ll take the case.”

The surfers exchanged glances. It was like watching a meticulously choreographed bit of stage business. “What do you charge for your services?”

Marla grinned. Once upon a time, before being chief sorcerer of Felport, and then being an exiled ex-chief sorcerer, she had been a mercenary. She’d never worked for money back then, choosing a life of poverty in favor of accruing power. So her rates now were the same as they’d been back then: “If I solve the case, you’ll have to tell me a secret I don’t already know, and teach me a trick I’ve never seen before.”

“That is acceptable,” Glyph said.

Rondeau cleared his throat and glared at her.

“Oh, right,” Marla said. “I charge a secret, and a trick — plus expenses.” Rondeau had been funding her entire life since her exile, and even though he had more money than some gods now, he’d insisted that if she got a job she should at least not lose money in the process. As chief sorcerer she’d never worried about cash — all the other sorcerers under her protection had kicked up a percentage of the profits from their various legal and illegal businesses to her, leaving her free to look out for the city’s well-being as a whole — but, as she kept discovering in new and annoying ways, this was a new world. If this kept up, she’d actually end up knowing how much a gallon of milk or a loaf of bread cost.

Glyph chewed his lip. “We do not have much in the way of actual money… what kind of expenses?”

That was a good question. “Like if I need to buy grave dust or a hand of glory or something, for a spell?”

He nodded. “May we pay you in black coral?”

Marla didn’t know what that was, but she looked at Rondeau, and he nodded vigorously, so she said, “Yeah, that works.”

“May we ask how you intend to proceed?”

“I should see the crime scene.”

Glyph frowned. “Ronin’s body melted, as we said, and we could find no trace magically — ”

“Look, it’s not that I don’t have faith in you. Except, in fact, I don’t know a damn thing about you, so I’m going to do everything you did all over again, just so I know. Okay?”

“You do work for us — ” Glyph began.

“Nope,” Marla said. “I work for me. On your behalf, yes, but not for you. I do this my way, and you don’t get to bitch unless I don’t get results. Understood?”

Glyph narrowed his eyes, glanced at his fellows, then nodded. “Understood. Just… find out who killed Ronin. He was our eldest, and the best of us, and he did not deserve to die that way.”

“Sure,” Marla said. “Give my assistant here the details about the crime scene, directions and all that. And it would be good if the directions were for traveling by car, and didn’t start, ‘Swim out half a mile east’ or something.”

“We can take you — ”

“I’d rather see it on my own, without having my observations influenced,” Marla said. “I’m going to go prepare my tools of the trade. Let Rondeau know how to get in touch with you, all right?” She stepped around the counter, shook Glyph’s hand — strong grip, kinda damp — and nodded at his fellow sorcerer-siblings, or multiamorous lovemates, or hive-buddies, or whatever they were. She slipped through a curtain behind the counter into the little back room office, which didn’t contain much but a chair, a smaller desk, a safe (unlocked and empty, except for a small silver bell), and a shelf on the wall holding a few books on Polynesian mythology and the Hawai’ian language. Marla didn’t really have any prepatations to make, or any tools to pack — she just didn’t want to deal with the logistics of shooing an anxious tribe of surfers out of her office. The prospect of a mystery to solve should have excited her, but she didn’t actually give a crap about Ronin or the surfers, so the thought of getting in a car and looking at some sand a guy had died on made her tired. She didn’t want to dwell on the negative, but… what if this whole occult detective thing didn’t work out? What would she do with herself then?